Class Warfare: Economic Interests, Money, and Tax Codes

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• published: 05 Jul 2012
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Class conflict, frequently referred to as class warfare or class struggle, is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests between people of different classes. Class conflict can take many different forms: direct violence, such as wars fought for resources and cheap labor; indirect violence, such as deaths from poverty, starvation, illness or unsafe working conditions; coercion, such as the threat of losing a job or pulling an important investment; or ideology, either intentionally (as with books and articles promoting capitalism) or unintentionally (as with the promotion of consumerism through advertising). Additionally, political forms of class conflict exist; legally or illegally lobbying or bribing government leaders for passage of partisan desirable legislation including labor laws, tax codes, consumer laws, acts of congress or other sanction, injunction or tariff. The conflict can be open, as with a lockout aimed at destroying a labor union, or hidden, as with an informal slowdown in production protesting low wages or unfair labor practices. In the past the term Class conflict was a term used mostly by socialists, who define a class by its relationship to the means of production — such as factories, land and machinery. From this point of view, the social control of production and labor is a contest between classes, and the division of these resources necessarily involves conflict and inflicts harm. (Marx, 1848) However, in more contemporary times this term is striking chords and finding new definition amongst capitalistic societies in the United States and other Westernized countries. Marxists argue that class conflict plays a pivotal role in the history of class-based hierarchical systems such as capitalism and feudalism. Marxists refer to its overt manifestations as class war, a struggle whose resolution in favor of the working class is viewed by them as inevitable under plutocratic capitalism. Societies wherein, more often than not, the rich rule. Where societies are socially divided based on status, wealth, or control of social production and distribution, conflict arises. This conflict is both everyday, such as the common medieval insistence on the right of lords to control access to grain mills and baking ovens, or it can be exceptional such as the Roman Conflict of the Orders, the uprising of Spartacus, or the various popular uprisings in late medieval Europe. One of the earliest analysis of these conflicts is Friedrich Engels' German Peasants War. One of the earliest analyses of the development of class as the development of conflicts between emergent classes is available in Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid. In this work, Kropotkin analyzes the disposal of goods after death in pre-class societies, and how inheritance produces early class divisions and conflict. Predicated on the proposed tax legislation aimed at the wealthy in the USA, conservative news hosts and talk-show commentators are bringing pejorative application to the term "class warfare". Perhaps an ad hominem attack on the man who reintroduced the term to main-stream America, Warren Buffett, the term in its classic sense, is now being used to describe President Obama's efforts to create the Buffett Rule. The rule would set a minimum effective tax rate of 30% for those individuals making over $1 million USD annually. FOX News Business Network anchor and investor Eric Bolling, Fox News commentator Steve Moore, political and legal analyst for Fox News Channel Andrew Napolitano, and former speech writer for President George W. Bush, Marc Thiessen have all used the words "class warfare" to describe the tax initiative. In response fellow billionaire and friend to Warren Buffett, George Soros addresses the pejorative use of the term by the conservative-right by stating, "Speaking as a person who would be most hurt by this, I think my fellow hedge fund managers call this class warfare because they don't like to pay more taxes."