Class conflict

Class conflict is both the friction that accompanies social relationships between members or groups of different social classes and the underlying tensions or antagonisms which exist in society due to conflicting interests that arise from different social positions.

There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning. ~ Warren Buffet

While there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. ~ Eugene V. Debs

Unions break down political divides, bringing workers of all political persuasions together to fight a common oligarchic and corporate foe. Once workers begin to exert power and extract demands from the ruling class, the struggle educates communities about the real configurations of power and mitigates the feelings of powerlessness that have driven many into the arms of the neofascists. - Chris Hedges

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

B

• There’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
  • Attributed to Warren Buffet by Ben Stein in In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning (November 26, 2006), The New York Times. Buffett made a similar statement in an interview with Lou Dobbs on CNN, 25 May 2005: "It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be."

C

• When questions of “class” interests are eliminated from public controversy a victory is thereby gained for the possessing, conservative class, whose only hope of security lies in such elimination.
  • James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (1919), p. 15

• The law itself is the instrument of the ruling class; hence it is a logical impossibility for another class to assume power legally.
  • Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948), p. 164

D

• Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind then that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
  • Eugene V. Debs, Statement to the Federal Court, Cleveland, Ohio, upon being convicted of violating the Sedition Act (18 September 1918)

H

• Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this right. The sooner we realize that we are locked in deadly warfare with our ruling, corporate elite, the sooner we will realize that these elites must be overthrown. The corporate oligarchs have now seized all institutional systems of power in the United States. Electoral politics, internal security, the judiciary, our universities, the arts and finance, along with nearly all forms of communication, are in corporate hands. Our democracy, with faux debates between two corporate parties, is meaningless political theater. There is no way within the system to defy the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry or war profiteers. The only route left to us, as Aristotle knew, is revolt.
  • Chris Hedges, "Let's Get This Class War Started", Truthdig (October 21, 2013)

• The class warfare is global. Not until workers in sweatshops in China, Mexico, Cambodia, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh are lifted out of poverty will the American working class be lifted out of poverty. This class war is the real fight, which corporate-owned media platforms and bankrupt liberals refuse to discuss.
  • Chris Hedges, Papering Over the Rot. Scheerpost, February 1, 2021

• Unions break down political divides, bringing workers of all political persuasions together to fight a common oligarchic and corporate foe. Once workers begin to exert power and extract demands from the ruling class, the struggle educates communities about the real configurations of power and mitigates the feelings of powerlessness that have driven many into the arms of the neofascists.
  • Chris Hedges, America’s New Class War Scheerpost, January 18, 2022

• All the openings in our democracy were the result of prolonged popular struggle. Hundreds of workers were murdered, thousands were wounded, tens of thousands were blacklisted in our labor wars, the bloodiest of any industrialized country. Abolitionists, suffragists, unionists, crusading journalists and those in the anti-war and civil rights movements opened our democratic space. These radical movements were repressed and ruthlessly dismantled in the early 20th century in the name of anti-communism. They were again targeted by the corporate elites following the rise of new mass movements in the 1930s. These popular movements, which rose again in the 1960s, moved us, inch by bloody inch, towards equality and social justice. Most of these gains made in the 1960s have been rolled back under the onslaught of neoliberalism, deregulation, and a corrupt campaign finance system, legalized by court rulings such as Citizens United, which allow the rich and corporations to bankroll elections to select political leaders and impose legislation. The modern incarnation of 19th-century robber barons, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, each worth some $200 billion, summon us to our radical roots.
  • Chris Hedges, America’s New Class War Scheerpost, January 18, 2022

• Class struggle is inextricably bound to the struggle to end racism.
  • bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, p. 3.

I

• The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
  • Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World

J

• Prestige stands between the masses and a revolt against their class enemy. The aura of magic, glamour, luster and splendid permanence covers the fascists like a protective layer of fat. The slimy scales of majesty shield and conceal the dilapidation of the old bourgeois reign of terror.
  • George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 47

• Prestige bars any serious attack on power. Do people attack a thing they consider with awe?
  • George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1971), p. 50

• Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.
  • Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 16 January, 1787

• Empire has manufactured a discontinuity in popular struggle, while maintaining continuity in its own growth and consolidation. One of the empire’s principal tools and weapons has been its prisons.
  • Kevin Rashid Johnson, Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin Rashid Johnson (2010)

• Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.
  • Epistle of James, 5:1-5 (NIV)

L

• To paraphrase Chuck Palahniuk, the first rule of American class warfare is this: It is always waged upward, never downward. That's because it's an all-purpose rhetorical cudgel favored among conservatives any time public debate threatens to oscillate outside the approved range of questions such as "Tax Cuts: Super Awesome, or Merely Awesome?"
  • Chris Lehmann, Rich People Things: Real-Life Secrets of the Predator Class (2011), p. 53

• The proletariat should not ignore peaceful methods of struggle — they serve its ordinary, day-to-day interests, they are necessary in periods of preparation for revolution — but it must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.
  • Vladimir Lenin, “Lessons of the Commune”, in Zagranichnaya Gazeta, No. 2 (23 March 1908), as translated by Bernard Isaacs, Collected Works, Vol. 13, p. 478.

M

• Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.
  • Chico Mendes, quoted in Full Circle Power, Hope and the Return of Nature.

• This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.
  • H. L. Mencken, Introduction to The Antichrist

• The revolution of the proletariat - the war of the poor against the rich, is the only way from oppression to deliverance.
  • Johann Most, The Beast of Property (1884)

• Anything that can tear up the side of a mountain should definitely be effective against a high society party attended by royalty or capitalist exploiters (monopolists).
  • Johann Most, Science of Revolutionary Warfare (1976)

O

• War is a class conflict, too. The rich and powerful who open war escape the consequences of their decisions. It’s not their children sent into the jaws of violence. It is often the vulnerable, the poor, & working people -who had little to no say in conflict - who pay the price.
  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Twitter post (3 January 2020)

P

• Seizing upon anything but class, U.S. leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all.
  • Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (1997), p. 151

• It is real-life class struggle, informed no doubt by ideas, that ultimately determines which way the world will move.
  • Prabhat Patnaik, The World At Crossroads, 29 May 2020, NewsClick

• Once class struggle, for changing the system in its present form, acquires momentum, its outcome would depend on praxis and may not necessarily remain bounded within the system itself.
  • Prabhat Patnaik, The World At Crossroads, 29 May 2020, NewsClick

W

• Every highly privileged group develops the myth of its natural, especially its blood, superiority. Under conditions of stable distribution of power and, consequently, of status order, that myth is accepted by the negatively privileged strata. Such a situation exists as long as the masses continue in that natural state of theirs in which thought about the order of domination remains but little developed, which means, as long as no urgent needs render the state of affairs “problematical.” But in times in which the class situation has become unambiguously and openly visible to everyone as the factor determining every man’s individual fate, that very myth of the highly privileged about everyone having deserved his particular lot has often become one of the most passionately hated objects of attack.
  • Max Weber, Economy and Society (1922), p. 953

Y

• The state's fear of its citizenry is rooted in a deeper knowledge of systemic fissures in our country; fissures produced by the disgraceful treatment of an underclass — including women, children, dissenters, religious minorities, labour, prisoners, and more — often by state institutions themselves.
  • Huma Yusuf, Missing rights (4 May, 2020), Dawn

See also

• American middle class
• Capitalism
• Economic inequality
• Social class
• Wage slavery