Emergence of conflict theory; Marx on class conflict and alienation

1. Emergence of conflict theories

The conflict perspective holds that society is held together less by shared values than by power, and that groups with unequal access to scarce resources (wealth, power, prestige) are in continuous struggle. Conflict is normal and is the main source of change.

Classical roots

• Karl Marx (1818–1883): history as class struggle.
• Max Weber (1864–1920): class, status and party as separate dimensions of inequality; domination and legitimate authority.
• Georg Simmel (1858–1918): conflict as a form of sociation that can unite as well as divide.
• Earlier still, Ibn Khaldun, Machiavelli and Hobbes on power, and the Social Darwinists (Gumplowicz, Ratzenhofer) on struggle between groups.

The modern revival (1950s–1970s)

When Parsonian functionalism dominated, critics argued it could not explain conflict, power and change. The reaction produced a body of conflict theory:

• C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956): power concentrated in a corporate, military and political elite.
• Lewis Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (1956): reworking Simmel.
• Ralf Dahrendorf, “Out of Utopia” (1958) and Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959): authority, not property, as the basis of conflict.
• David Lockwood, “Some Remarks on The Social System” (1956), and John Rex, Key Problems of Sociological Theory (1961).
• Randall Collins, Conflict Sociology (1975): a Weberian conflict theory from micro-interaction upward.

The social background matters: the civil rights movement, protests against the Vietnam war, student movements of 1968 and decolonisation made a theory of consensus look unrealistic.

2. Marx’s theory of class conflict

Key texts: The Communist Manifesto (1848, with Engels), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859, whose Preface states the materialist conception of history) and Capital, Volume I (1867).

Historical materialism

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Manifesto). Production is the basic human activity. The forces of production (tools, technology, labour) and the relations of production (ownership and control) together form the economic base. On it rests a superstructure: law, state, religion, ideology. When the forces of production outgrow the relations, a revolutionary epoch begins.

Marx traced a sequence of modes of production: primitive communism, ancient (slave), feudal, capitalist, and the coming socialist and communist stage. Each class society has two main classes: slave and master, serf and lord, proletariat and bourgeoisie.

Class and class conflict under capitalism

• Class is defined by relation to the means of production. The bourgeoisie own them; the proletariat own only their labour power.
• Surplus value: the worker produces more value than is paid in wages; the capitalist appropriates the difference. Exploitation is built into the wage relation.
• Class in itself and class for itself: a class becomes a political actor only when its members develop consciousness of their common interests (The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847).
• False consciousness: the ruling ideas of every age are the ideas of the ruling class (The German Ideology).
• Polarisation and pauperisation: the intermediate strata sink into the proletariat; crises sharpen; workers concentrated in factories organise.
• Revolution: the proletariat overthrows the bourgeoisie, establishes the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally a classless, stateless communist society.

3. Alienation

The theory is set out in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (published 1932). Labour should be the expression of human creativity, what Marx called our species-being. Under capitalism the worker is estranged in four ways:

1. From the product: what he makes belongs to another and confronts him as an alien power.
2. From the process (activity) of labour: work is forced, not voluntary; a means to live rather than life itself. He “feels himself” only outside work.
3. From his species-being: free, conscious, creative activity, the mark of being human, is reduced to a means of physical survival.
4. From other men: relations between people become relations between buyers and sellers of labour; worker is set against capitalist and against fellow worker.

In Capital the idea reappears as commodity fetishism: social relations between people take the form of relations between things. Later sociologists made alienation measurable: Melvin Seeman (1959) listed powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation and self-estrangement; Robert Blauner (Alienation and Freedom, 1964) found it highest on the assembly line.

4. Critique of Marxian theory

• Polarisation did not happen. A large salaried middle class of managers, professionals and clerks grew instead.
• Separation of ownership and control in joint-stock companies (Dahrendorf): managers control without owning; property is not the only base of power.
• Revolutions occurred in agrarian societies (Russia 1917, China 1949), not in the advanced industrial ones he predicted.
• The welfare state, trade unions and collective bargaining institutionalised class conflict and raised working-class living standards.
• Economic determinism: Weber showed that ideas (the Protestant ethic) can shape economic life; status and party are independent of class.
• Neglect of other lines of division: gender, race, ethnicity, religion and in India caste cut across class.
• Prediction and falsifiability: Karl Popper argued Marxism was reinterpreted to fit every outcome and so ceased to be testable.

In defence: Marx’s analysis of exploitation, commodification and the global reach of capital remains influential, and neo-Marxists (Gramsci on hegemony, the Frankfurt School, Poulantzas, Wright) have revised the theory to meet these criticisms.

How this is examined

“Explain the conflict theory of Karl Marx” (10 marks, August 2024) needs historical materialism, class, surplus value, class consciousness, revolution, and a paragraph of critique. “Alienation” (August 2024) and “Marx’s theory of alienation” (April 2022) are short notes: the 1844 Manuscripts and the four forms. “Origin and development of conflict theory” (October 2023, April 2022): classical roots, the 1950s revival with names and dates, and the social background. “Marxian theory” (October 2023) as a short note: base and superstructure, class struggle, revolution in a page.