Class conflict
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Class struggle is the active expression of class conflict looked at from any kind of socialist perspective. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, leading ideologists of communism, wrote "The [written] history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle".
Marx's notion of class has nothing to do with hereditary caste, nor is it exactly social class in the sociological sense of upper, middle and lower classes (which are often defined in terms of quantitative income or wealth). Instead, in an age of capitalism, Marx describes an economic class. Membership of a class is defined by one's relationship to the means of production, i.e., one's position in the social structure that characterizes capitalism. Marx talks mainly about two classes that include the vast majority of the population, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Other classes such as the petty bourgeoisie share characteristics of both of these main classes.
See also
- Class consciousness
- Classism
- Classless society
- Conflict of the Orders
- Deformed workers state
- Degenerated workers state
- Economic inequality
- Economic stratification
- Exploitation
- Johnson County War
- Labor union
- No War But The Class War
- Popular revolt in late medieval Europe
- Revolution
- Sharecropping
- Slave rebellion
- Social class
- Socialist Harmonious Society
- Taxation