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What are the main points of Karl Marx's class conflict theory?

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Karl Marx's class conflict theory posits that society is divided into two main classes: the bourgeoisie (capitalists) and the proletariat (workers). The bourgeoisie own the means of production and wield significant power, while the proletariat must sell their labor to survive. Marx argued that class conflict is inevitable due to economic structures, leading to a revolution where the proletariat will overthrow the bourgeoisie, resulting in a classless, communist society.

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In simplest form in Marxist theory, the following is held to be true:

There are two basic classes in society: the owners of the means of production, called the capitalists or the bourgeoisie, and the workers, called the proletariat. The bourgeoisie is a very small group of people, but they have an immense amount of power. Today we would probably call them the "one percent" or the "one-tenth of the one percent." They own the big industries, the banks, and the factories. They are, needless to say, very wealthy. On their fringes is anyone who lives on interest, rents, or other unearned income. The other class is the workers: anyone who is dependent on a job to earn a paycheck is a member of the working class, the proletariat. In Marx's time, that was mostly factory workers, called the lumpenproletariat.

These two classes are locked in inevitable...

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conflict. This is the law of history. Anyone who says the two classes can get along in mutual harmony for mutual benefit is living in a strange fantasyland, according to Marx. It is absolutely certain that the bourgeoisie will do everything in their power to crush the last micron of profit out of the proletariat.

This conflict will inevitably break out into violent revolution. The lower class will eventually become conscious that it doesn't have to be oppressed any longer, will shed it chains, and will rise up to destroy the upper classes. The proletariat will win the conflict; that is historically inevitable. It might not work the first time, but the workers will win.

The proletariat will then nationalize the banks and the industries that the bourgeoisie once owned, and the profits will be shared by all the people.

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Marx thought that the way a society was organized was determined by economic factors, i.e., division of labor and control of the means of economic production. Class conflict was a recurring fact in Marx's philosophy, and it originated when changes in the economic base occurred that changed the relationship of social classes to the means of production. The advent of capitalism had led to the bifurcation of social classes into what Marx called the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The proletariat were those who were alienated from control of the means of production, and they had to sell their labor as a commodity in order to survive. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, had supplanted the landed feudal nobility as the class that controlled the means of production. As Marx and his colleague Frederich Engles described it in their Communist Manifesto: 

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

But Marx also argued that the very logic of capitalism would lead to the destruction of the bourgeoisie. The brutal competition that characterized capitalism meant that the bourgeoisie had to introduce new technology, techniques, and modes of social relations that would not only alienate workers even more from the value of what they produced, but would drive more and more middle class people into the ranks of the proletariat. Much of Das Kapital was spent illustrating exactly how Marx thought that would happen. Eventually, Marx thought, the proletariat would become so large, and so alienated and impoverished, that it would rise up to destroy the bourgeoisie and seize control of the means of production. The result, he suggested, would be communism, a classless society. This is an extreme oversimplification of Marx's understanding of class, which has been very influential in Western thought. But the essential thing is that Marx perceived capitalism to have ushered in the bourgeoisie and a new, revolutionary class, the proletariat.

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