Why do classes come into conflict, according to Marx?

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Concept understanding — Class Conflict Theory

Marx's theory of class conflict begins from a very specific way of classifying people into social groups: not by religion, language or nationality, but by their shared position within the process of production -- essentially, whether they own the means of production or must sell their labour to survive. People who occupy the same position in this process, Marx argued, come to share the same underlying interests and objectives, whether or not they are yet aware of this. Classes are not eternal or natural categories; they are formed historically, as changes in the technology and social organisation of production (the mode of production) generate conflict with classes that already existed under an earlier arrangement. Marx's key illustration is the birth of the modern working class under capitalism: as the feudal agricultural system broke down, serfs and small peasants lost the land they had depended on, were pushed into cities, and -- driven by economic necessity and reinforced by law and policing -- were absorbed into the new factory system as propertyless wage labourers. Their shared position, owning nothing but their own capacity to work, is precisely what made them into a class: the proletariat, standing opposite the bourgeoisie, who owned the capital, land, machinery and factories. Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto opens with the sweeping claim that 'the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle', tracing a sequence of opposed classes through each historical era -- freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, and now bourgeoisie and proletariat -- locked in 'now hidden, now open' conflict. But Marx is careful on one crucial point: two classes can be objectively opposed in their interests without that opposition automatically producing open conflict. For real conflict -- potentially culminating in revolution, the overthrow of a dominant class by a previously subordinate one -- a class must first become subje …

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According to Marx, classes come into conflict because the changing mode of production repeatedly creates groups whose economic interests are directly opposed, and whose position within the production process gives them no real way to avoid that opposition. Classes, in Marx's view, are defined by shared position in the production process -- essentially, whether a group owns the means of production or must sell its labour to survive -- and as the technology and social organisation of production change over time, new classes are generated in conflict with older ones. The rise of capitalism illustrates this clearly: the breakdown of feudalism displaced serfs and small peasants from the land, forcing them into cities and eventually into factory work as propertyless wage labourers -- creating the modern working class, whose shared, propertyless position stands directly opposed to the bourgeoisie, who own the capital, land and machinery. Because the bourgeoisie's wealth and power depend on extracting value from workers' labour, while workers depend on selling that labour merely to survive, the two classes' basic economic interests are structurally incompatible: what benefits one class's position (lower wages, longer hours, greater control over production) tends to come at the other's expense. However, Marx is careful to note that this objective opposition of interests does not by itself guarantee open conflict -- a class must also become subjectively conscious of its shared interests and of its opposition to the other class befo …

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Q.Why do classes come into conflict, according to Marx?

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