Class struggle
Class struggle is class conflict looked at from a Marxist perspective. In Marxist theory, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle" (Karl Marx, the Communist Manifesto, 1848).
It should be noted that Marx's notion of class has nothing to do with heredity caste. Nor is it exactly social class in a sociological sense ie. upper, middle and lower.
In an age of Capitalism, it is an economic class. Membership of a class is defined by relations to the means of production. Marx talks mainly about two classes:
- Labor (or proletariat) is anyone who earns their money by selling their labor power and being paid a wage for their labor time.
- Capital (or bourgeoisie) is anyone who makes their money by the surplus labor value they expropriate from the workers who create wealth.
What Marx points out is that members of both classes have interests in common, but these interests lead to conflict with members of the other class.
An example of this would be a factory producing a commodity, let's say a factory that manufactures widgets. Some of the money gotten from selling widgets will be spent on things like raw materials (constant capital) in order to build more widgets. Once this is done, there is a pile of money left over to be divided up amongst the workers and the capitalists. It would be in the workers interest to have as much of that money as possible go to them, and as little as possible to the capitalist. It would be in the capitalists' interests to have as much of that money go to them, and as little as possible go to the workers.
Marx felt that this was an irreconcible conflict that would last as long as capitalism. He thought it would inevitably cause an extreme polarization of the classes, leading eventually to the revolution that would destroy capitalism itself.
The revolution would lead to a Socialist society in which the proletariat controlled the state, that is, "the dictatorship of the proletariat" (the original meaning of the term was a workers' democracy, not a dictatorship in the modern sense of the word). The two classes would still struggle, but eventually the struggle would receed and the classes dissolve. As class boundaries broke down, the state apparatus would wither away. According to Marx, the main task of the state apparatus is to uphold the power of the ruling class; but without any classes there would be no need for a state. That would lead to the classless, stateless Communist society.
Marx noted that other classes existed, but said that as time (and Capitalism) moved forward, these other classes would disappear, and things would become stratified between until only two classes remained, which would become more and more polarized as time went on. Other classes are:
- the self-employed — these are people who own their own means of production, and thus work for themself. Marx saw these people swept away by the march of capitalism - such as family farms being replaced by agribusiness, or many small stores run by the owner being replaced by Wal-Mart, and so forth.
- managers and security officers — managers and policemen are intermediaries between capitalists and proletariat. Since they are paid a wage, technically they are workers, but they represent the capitalists interest, so in that sense they are unlike the proletariat. Interestingly enough, in the United States the Republican Congress made it illegal for managers and security guards to join workers industrial unions. This is seen as being done because the managers and guards, although workers, are there to represent the capitalist.
- the lumpenproletariat — those with at most a tenuous connection to production. Since Marx, many states have tried to compensate for the difficulties experienced by workers due to cyclic unemployment. Unfortunately there is also a growing
