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Class conflict

Class conflict is both the friction that accompanies social relationships between members or groups of different social classesand the underlying tensions or antagonisms which exist in society. Class conflict is thought to play a pivotal role in historyof class societies (such as capitalismand feudalism) by Marxistswho refer to its overt manifestations as class struggle. Regardless of the truth or utility of that theory, conflict between classes exists and is expressed both in daily life and politics.

Sometimes class conflict results in violent struggles, either episodic, such as the Johnson County Warin Wyomingin the 19th century, or chronic, such as the atmosphere that prevailed in pre-revolutionaryRussia. It can be open, as with a business lockoutaimed at destroying a labor union, or it can be hidden, as with an informal slowdown in production that protests low wages or an excessively fast or dangerous work process.

"Representing a political group of working people with a common interest" , Labour unionsand labor-oriented political partieshave revolutionised health and safety standards in industrial economies, either directly (by making government policy) or indirectly (by pressuring incumbent politicians).

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1 Classes under capitalism
2 Class in the Soviet Union and similar societies
3 See also
4 Further reading

Classes under capitalism

Class warfare is a term long-used by many socialists(including Marxists and communists, but also anarchists, democratic socialists, etc.) to describe social and political conflicts between classes (groups of people with a different relationship to the means of production, and to each other).

In this view, capitalismconsists of two social classes: the wage-workers (the proletariat) and the business owners or capitalists (the bourgeoisie). The wage-workers do not own or have control over the means of production, and must sell their labor-powerto the capitalists in order to survive. The capitalists own and control the means of production, and subsist by exploitingthe workers.

Therefore, a socio-political imbalance is said to exist between individuals of extreme wealth or power and those with little or no wealth. This imbalance was probably first recognized by Adam Smith:

"The masters [i.e., employers], being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long-run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him, but the necessity is not so immediate." (The Wealth of Nations, volume I, ch. 8, paragraph 12)

Going beyond Smith, the interests of the wealthy are seen to conflict (often dramatically and violently) with the interests and needs of classes without power.

Corporationsare seen to function as a vehicle for combination of individual capitals, transcending the bounds of mortalityand liabilitythat accompany an individual-owned enterprise. Arguably, there is little fundamental difference between the class warfare that existed between the Victorian era monarchyand the common public, and a modern corporation and its workers.

In any class society, each of the two main classes has its own divisions, so that neither is monolithic. Concerning capitalism, Marxist theory argues that the working class has both an "objective" class interest as a collective group, and a large number of individual interests of workers. Class interest may thus differ from "trade union consciousness", economism, and the like. Similarly, the capitalist class may be driven by the difference between the long-term collective interest of the class and the profit-seeking of individual capitalists. In a revolutionary situation, convergence of individual interests and class interests is expected; this might be seen as a polarization of society.

The empirical manifestation of class antagonisms depends on the specific (concrete) historical situation in which they operate. For example, other social divisions -- concerning issues of nationality, ethnicity, religion, language, and gender -- can interact with, confuse, and/or mute class tensions. Sometimes class can be simultaneously moderated by ethnic issues (as between white proletarians and capitalists in apartheid-era South Africa) and intensified by them (as between blacks and whites there).

Class in the Soviet Union and similar societies

Some argue that in a system such as that which existed in the Soviet Union, the leaders of the ruling political partyform a powerful bureaucraticstratum-- sometimes termed a "new class" -- that controls the means of production. This type of system is referred to by its detractors as state capitalism.

To counter this, Trotskyistspropose solutions that include what they claim would be a democratic state, putting state power(and thus, also the control of the means of production) in the hands of the people. They reject the idea of "socialism in one country" as a solution; in their view, a truly grassrootssocialist system would have to be world-wide in order to work. They also maintain that to avoid establishing new single-person or small-group (as opposed to class) dictatorships, all revolutionswould have to come from popular forces rather than being imposed from above, or from outside, a country.

Anti-Revisionistcritics of state capitalism reject the idea of "Permanent Revolution" and counter that Trotskyhimself had at one time thought it acceptable that socialism would come to be in a single country alone as long as that country was industrialized, but that in regards to Russia, he considered the country too backward to achieve what it later in fact did achieve ? mostly through his archenemy Stalin's Five Year Plans. In their own right, anti-revisionists also acknowledge that the Soviet Union contained a "new class" or "red bourgeoisie, but they generally place the real beginning of the formation of that class on [[Nikita Khruschev] and his successors. Therefore, in anti-revisionist circles, there is very little talk of class conflict in the Soviet Union before 1956, except when talking about specific contexts such as the Russian Civil War(when some agents of the former feudalruling classtried to retake state power from the Bolsheviks) and World War II(fought in that country and elsewhere between, in their view, communistsand fascists, the latter of which Marxistsconsider to be one of the more developed or "in crisis" forms of capitalism).

Other socialist critics of Soviet-style societies, such as the libertarian socialistsand the syndicalists, argue that the solution is for factories and offices to be run by the workers who work in them. In this view, merely changing who controls the stateis insufficient; the nature of the work process itself must also be changed. In the syndicalist and anarchist views, in fact, there is generally no state apparatus at all, but rather a network of councils coordinated by informal larger gatherings at which policies for the wider societyare collectivelydecided.

Class conflict

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Classes under capitalism

Class in the Soviet Union and similar societies

See also

Further reading