Class conflict

Class conflict can reveal itself through: In the economic sphere, class conflict is sometimes expressed overtly, such as owner lockouts of their employees in an effort to weaken the bargaining power of the employees' union; or covertly, such as a worker slowdown of production or the widespread, simultaneous use of sick leave (e.g., "blue flu") to protest unfair labor practices, low wages, poor work conditions, or a perceived injustice to a fellow worker.

Near the climax of the struggle, "the oligarchs in full rout, fearing that the victorious commons might assault and carry the arsenal and put them to the sword, fired the houses round the market-place and the lodging-houses, in order to bar their advance.

"[11] The historian Tacitus would later recount a similar class conflict in the city of Seleucia, in which disharmony between the oligarchs and the commoners would typically lead to each side calling on outside help to defeat the other.

"[13] In the Politics, Aristotle describes the basic dimensions of class conflict: "Again, because the rich are generally few in number, while the poor are many, they appear to be antagonistic, and as the one or the other prevails they form the government.".

In his book Parallel Lives, Plutarch wrote of two Spartan kings, Agis and Cleomenes, who "being desirous to raise the people, and to restore the noble and just form of government, now long fallen into disuse, [they] incurred the hatred of the rich and powerful, who could not endure to be deprived of the selfish enjoyment to which they were accustomed.

This process, he felt, exacerbated pre-existing class tensions with the plebs, and eventually culminated in a civil war between the patrician Sulla and the populist reformer Marius.

[30]Tiberius Gracchus weakened the power of the Senate by changing the law so that judges were chosen from the ranks of the knights, instead of their social superiors in the senatorial class.

[32] Publishers Weekly said "Parenti [...] narrates a provocative history of the late republic in Rome (100–33 BC) to demonstrate that Caesar's death was the culmination of growing class conflict, economic disparity and political corruption.

"[33] Kirkus Reviews wrote: "Populist historian Parenti... views ancient Rome's most famous assassination not as a tyrannicide but as a sanguinary scene in the never-ending drama of class warfare.

Montesquieu recounts how Coriolanus castigated the tribunes for trying a patrician, when in his mind no one but a consul had that right, although a law had been passed stipulating that all appeals affecting the life of a citizen had to be brought before the plebs.

[35] In the first scene of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, a crowd of angry plebs gathers in Rome to denounce Coriolanus as the "chief enemy to the people" and "a very dog to the commonalty" while the leader of the mob speaks out against the patricians thusly: They ne'er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain the poor.

In the third volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he relates the origins of the struggle:[T]he plebeians of Rome [...] had been oppressed from the earliest times by the weight of debt and usury; and the husbandman, during the term of his military service, was obliged to abandon the cultivation of his farm.

The lands of Italy which had been originally divided among the families of free and indigent proprietors, were insensibly purchased or usurped by the avarice of the nobles; and in the age which preceded the fall of the republic, it was computed that only two thousand citizens were possessed of an independent substance.Hegel similarly states that the 'severity of the patricians their creditors, the debts due to whom they had to discharge by slave-work, drove the plebs to revolts.

[40] Writing in pre-capitalist Europe, the Swiss philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Federalist statesman James Madison across the Atlantic Ocean made significant remarks on the dynamics of class struggle.

[41]Rousseau argued that the most important task of any government is to fight in class warfare on the side of workmen against their masters, who he said engage in exploitation under the pretence of serving society.

10, James Madison revealed an emphatic concern with the conflict between rich and poor, commenting that "the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.

[47] Hegel believed that, especially in a liberal country such as contemporary England, the poorest will politicise their situation, channelling their frustrations against the rich:Against nature man can claim no right, but once society is established, poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one class by another.

Like Rousseau, the classical liberal Adam Smith believed that the amassing of property in the hands of a minority naturally resulted in a disharmonious state of affairs.

It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate, that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security.

The inhabitants of cities and burghs, considered as single individuals, had no power to defend themselves; but by entering into a league of mutual defence with their neighbours, they were capable of making no contemptible resistance.

He concludes the chapter:Our merchants and master manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price [of commodities], and thereby lessening the sale of their goods, both at home and abroad.

Marxist analysis of society identifies two main social groups: Not all class struggle is radical, violent or aggressive, as in the case of strikes, lockouts and workplace sabotage.

On the employers' side, lobbying for anti-union laws and against minimum wage increases, and hiring union-busting legal firms are expressions of class antagonism.

[59] Later in the book, he argues that an important function of truly representative government is to provide a relatively equal balance of power between workmen and masters, in order to prevent threats to the good of the whole of society.

[63] Other class struggle commentators include Henri de Saint-Simon,[64] Augustin Thierry,[65] François Guizot,[64] François-Auguste Mignet and Adolphe Thiers.

The Physiocrats, David Ricardo, and after Marx, Henry George noted the inelastic supply of land and argued that this created certain privileges (economic rent) for landowners.

In this work, Kropotkin analyzes the disposal of goods after death in pre-class or hunter-gatherer societies, and how inheritance produces early class divisions and conflict.

"[82] Historian Steve Fraser, author of The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, asserted in 2014 that class conflict is an inevitability if current political and economic conditions continue, noting that "people are increasingly fed up [...] their voices are not being heard.

The catalysts for the revolts in all Northern African and Persian Gulf countries have been the concentration of wealth in the hands of autocrats in power for decades, insufficient transparency of its redistribution, corruption, and especially the refusal of the youth to accept the status quo.

Patricia Hill Collins writes: "Du Bois saw race, class, and nation not primarily as personal identity categories but as social hierarchies that shaped African-American access to status, poverty, and power.