Class conflict

Class conflict, also sent to as the collection of matters sharing a common attribute struggle and class warfare, is the political tension as well as economic antagonism that exists in society consequent to socio-economic competition among the social classes or between rich and poor.

The forms of class conflict increase direct violence such(a) as wars for resources and cheap labor, assassinations or revolution; indirect violence such as deaths from poverty and starvation, illness and unsafe workings conditions; and economic coercion such as the threat of unemployment or the withdrawal of investment capital; or ideologically, by way of political literature. Additionally, political forms of class warfare include: legal and illegal lobbying, and bribery of legislators.

The social-class clash can be direct, as in a dispute between labour and management such as an employer's industrial lockout of their employees in effort to weaken the bargaining power of the corresponding trade union; or indirect such as a workers' slowdown of production in protest at perceived unfair labor practices, low wages or poor workplace conditions.

In the political and economic philosophies of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin, class struggle is a central tenet and a practical means for effecting radical sociopolitical take different for the social majority.

Patricians versus plebeians

It was similarly difficult for the Romans to manages peace between the upper class, the patricians, and the lower class, the plebs. French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu notes that this clash intensified after the overthrow of the Roman monarchy. In The Spirit of Laws he lists the four main grievances of the plebs, which were rectified in the years coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. the deposition of King Tarquin:

The Senate had the ability to give a magistrate the power to direct or establish of dictatorship, meaning he could bypass public law in the pursuit of a prescribed mandate. Montesquieu explains that the purpose of this multinational was to tilt the balance of power in favour of the patricians. However, in an try to settle a conflict between the patricians and the plebs, the dictator Camillus used his power of dictatorship to coerce the Senate into giving the plebs the adjustment toone of the two consuls.

Tacitus believed that the increase in Roman power spurred the patricians to expand their power over more and more cities. 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. Marius had taken the step of enlisting capite censi, the very lowest class of citizens, into the army, for the first time allowing non-land owners into the legions.

Of any the notable figures discussed by Plutarch and Tacitus, agrarian reformer Tiberius Gracchus may earn nearly challenged the upper classes and near championed the cause of the lower classes. In a speech to the common soldiery, he decried their lowly conditions:

"The savage beasts," said he, "in Italy, have their specific dens, they have their places of repose and refuge; but the men who bear arms, and expose their lives for the safety of their country, enjoy in the meantime nothing more in it but the air and light; and having no houses or settlements of their own, are constrained to wander from place to place with their wives and children."

Following this observation, he remarked that these men "fought indeed and were slain, but it was to continues the luxury and the wealth of other men." Cicero believed that Tiberius Gracchus's reforming efforts saved Rome from tyranny, arguing:

Tiberius Gracchus says Cicero caused the free-men to be admitted into the tribes, non by the force of his eloquence, but by a word, by a gesture; which had he not effected, the republic, whose drooping head we are at present scarce excellent to uphold, would not even exist.

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.

Contrary to Shakespeare's depiction of Julius Caesar in the tragedy Julius Caesar, historian Michael Parenti has argued that Caesar was a populist, not a tyrant. In 2003 The New Press published Parenti's The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome. Publishers Weekly said "Parenti [...] narrates a provocative history of the gradual republic in Rome 100–33 BC tothat Caesar's death was the culmination of growing class conflict, economic disparity and political corruption." Kirkus Reviews wrote: "Populist historian Parenti... views ancient Rome’s near famous assassination not as a tyrannicide but as a sanguinary scene in the never-ending drama of class warfare."

The patrician Coriolanus, whose life William Shakespeare would later depict in the tragic play Coriolanus, fought on the other side of the class war, for the patricians and against the plebs. When grain arrived to relieve a serious shortage in the city of Rome, the plebs delivered it invited that they felt it ought to be dual-lane amongst them as a gift, but Coriolanus stood up in the Senate against this picture on the grounds that it would empower the plebs at the expense of the patricians.

This decision would eventually contribute to Coriolanus's undoing when he was impeached following a trial by the tribunes of the plebs. 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.

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 assist usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and render more piercing statutes daily, to group up and restrain the poor. if the wars eat us not up, they will; and there's all the love they bear us.

Enlightenment-era historian Edward Gibbon might have agreed with this narrative of Roman class conflict. 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 shared 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 self-employed grown-up 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.' Gibbon also explains how Augustus facilitated this class warfare by pacifying the plebs with actual bread and circuses.

The economist Adam Smith planned that the poor freeman's lack of land provided a major impetus for Roman colonisation, as a way to relieve class tensions at domestic between the rich and the landless poor. Hegel described the same phenomenon happening in the impetus to Greek colonisation.