Propaganda of the deed
Propaganda of the deed is specific political action meant to be exemplary to others and serve as a catalyst for revolution. It is associated with acts of violence perpetrated by proponents of insurrectionary anarchism in the late 19th and early 20th century, including bombings and assassinations aimed at the ruling class, but had non-violent applications; these "deeds" were to ignite the "spirit of revolt" in the people by demonstrating the state was not omnipotent and by offering hope to the downtrodden, to expand support for anarchist movements as the state grew more repressive in its response. In 1881, the International Anarchist Congress of London gave the tactic its approval. One of the first individuals to conceptualise propaganda by the deed was the Italian revolutionary Carlo Pisacane, who wrote in his "Political Testament" that "ideas spring from deeds and not the other way around." Mikhail Bakunin, in his "Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis" stated that "we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, the most irresistible form of propaganda."
The concept, in a broader setting, has a rich heritage, as the words of Francis of Assisi reveal: "Let them show their love by the works they do for each other, according as the Apostle says:'let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.'" Some anarchists, such as Johann Most, advocated publicizing violent acts of retaliation against counter-revolutionaries because "we preach not only action in and for itself, but action as propaganda." It was not advocacy for mass murder, but a call for targeted killings of the representatives of capitalism and government at a time when such action might garner sympathy from the population, such as during periods of government repression or labor conflicts, although Most himself once boasted that "the existing system will be quickest and most radically overthrown by the annihilation of its exponents. Therefore, massacres of the enemies of the people must be set in motion." In 1885, he published The Science of Revolutionary Warfare, a technical manual for acquiring and detonating explosives based on the knowledge he acquired by working at an explosives factory in New Jersey.
Most was an early influence on American anarchists Emma Alexander Berkman. Berkman attempted propaganda by the deed when he tried in 1892 to kill industrialist Henry Clay Frick following the deaths by shooting of several striking workers. Beverly Gage, professor of U. S. history at Yale University, elaborates on what the concept meant to outsiders and those within the anarchist movement: To outsiders, the talk of bombing and assassination that pulsed through revolutionary circles in the late 1870s sounded like little more than an indiscriminate call to violence. To Most and others within the anarchist movement, by contrast, the idea of propaganda by deed, or the attentat, had a specific logic. Among anarchism's founding premises was the idea that capitalist society was a place of constant violence: every law, every church, every paycheck was based on force. In such a world, to do nothing, to stand idly by while millions suffered, was itself to commit an act of violence; the question was not whether violence per se might be justified, but how violence might be maximally effective for, in Most's words, annihilating the "beast of property" that "makes mankind miserable, gains in cruelty and voracity with the progress of our so called civilization."
By the 1880s, the slogan "propaganda of the deed" had begun to be used both within and outside of the anarchist movement to refer to individual bombings and tyrannicides. In 1881, "propaganda by the deed" was formally adopted as a strategy by the anarchist London Congress. In 1886, French anarchist Clément Duval achieved a form of propaganda of the deed, stealing 15,000 francs from the mansion of a Parisian socialite, before accidentally setting the house on fire. Caught two weeks he was dragged from the court crying "Long live anarchy!", condemned to death. Duval's sentence was commuted to hard labor on Devil's Island, French Guiana. In the anarchist paper Révolte, Duval famously declared that, "Theft exists only through the exploitation of man by man... when Society refuses you the right to exist, you must take it... the policeman arrested me in the name of the Law, I struck him in the name of Liberty". As early as 1887, a few important figures in the anarchist movement had begun to distance themselves from individual acts of violence.
Peter Kropotkin thus wrote that year in Le Révolté that "a structure based on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of dynamite". A variety of anarchists advocated the abandonment of these sorts of tactics in favor of collective revolutionary action, for example through the trade union movement; the anarcho-syndicalist, Fernand Pelloutier, argued in 1895 for renewed anarchist involvement in the labor movement on the basis that anarchism could do well without "the individual dynamiter."State repression of the anarchist and labor movements following the few successful bombings and assassinations may have contributed to the abandonment of these kinds of tactics, although reciprocally state repression, in the first place, may have played a role in these isolated acts. The dismemberment of the French socialist movement, into many groups and, following the suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune, the execution and exile of many communards to penal colonies, favored individualist political expression and acts.
Anarchist historian Max Nettlau provided a more complex concept of propaganda when he sa
Collectivist anarchism
Collectivist anarchism is a revolutionary anarchist doctrine that advocates the abolition of both the state and private ownership of the means of production as it instead envisions the means of production being owned collectively and controlled and managed by the producers themselves. For the collectivization of the means of production, it was envisaged that workers will revolt and forcibly collectivize the means of production. Once collectivization takes place, money would be abolished to be replaced with labour notes and workers' salaries would be determined in democratic organizations of voluntary membership based on job difficulty and the amount of time they contributed to production; these salaries would be used to purchase goods in a communal market. This contrasts with anarcho-communism, where wages would be abolished and where individuals would take from a storehouse of goods "to each according to his need". Notwithstanding the title, Mikhail Bakunin's collectivist anarchism is seen as a blend of individualism and collectivism.
Collectivist anarchism is most associated with Bakunin, the anti-authoritarian sections of the International Workingmen's Association and the early Spanish anarchist movement. Giuseppe Fanelli met Bakunin at Ischia in 1866. In October 1868, Bakunin sponsored Fanelli to travel to Barcelona to share his libertarian visions and recruit revolutionists to the International. Fanelli's trip and the meeting he organised during his travels provided the catalyst for the Spanish exiles, the largest workers' and peasants' movement in modern Spain and the largest anarchist movement in modern Europe. Fanelli's tour took him first to Barcelona, where he stayed with Elie Recluse. Recluse and Fanelli were at odds over Recluse's friendships with Spanish republicans and Fanelli soon left Barcelona for Madrid. Fanelli stayed in Madrid until the end of January 1869, conducting meetings to introduce Spanish workers, including Anselmo Lorenzo, to the First National. In February 1869, Fanelli left journeying home via Barcelona.
While there, he met with painter Josep Lluís Pellicer and his cousin Rafael Farga i Pellicer along with others who were to play an important role establishing the International in Barcelona as well as the Alliance section. In 1870, Bakunin led a failed uprising in Lyon on the principles exemplified by the Paris Commune, calling for a general uprising in response to the collapse of the French government during the Franco-Prussian War, seeking to transform an imperialist conflict into social revolution, or what Vladimir Lenin termed revolutionary defeatism. In his Letters to A Frenchman on the Present Crisis, Bakunin argued for a revolutionary alliance between the working class and the peasantry, advocated a system of militias with elected officers as part of a system of self-governing communes and workplaces and argued the time was ripe for revolutionary action, saying that "we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, the most irresistible form of propaganda.
These ideas and corresponded strikingly with the program of the Paris Commune in 1871, much of, developed by followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as Marxists were entirely absent from the Commune. Bakunin was a strong supporter of the Paris Commune, brutally suppressed by the French government, he saw the Paris Commune as above all a "rebellion against the State" and commended the Communards for rejecting not only the state, but revolutionary dictatorship. In a series of powerful pamphlets, he defended the Paris Commune and the International against the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, thereby winning over many Italian republicans to the International and the cause of revolutionary socialism; the collectivist anarchists at first used the term collectivism to distinguish themselves from the mutualism of the followers of Proudhon and the state socialists associated with Karl Marx. In his 1867 essay "Federalism and Anti-Theologism", Bakunin wrote that "we shall always protest against anything that may in any way resemble communism or state socialism", which Bakunin regarded as fundamentally authoritarian.
Bakunin's disagreements with Marx which led to the attempt by the Marx party to expel him at the Hague Congress in 1872 illustrated the growing divergence between the anti-authoritarian sections of the International, which advocated the direct revolutionary action and organization of the workers and peasants in order to abolish the state and capitalism. Bakunin was "Marx's flamboyant chief opponent" and "presciently warned against the emergence of a communist authoritarianism that would take power over working people"; the anti-authoritarian majority which included most sections of the International created their own International at the St. Imier Congress, adopted a revolutionary anarchist program and repudiated the Hague resolutions, rescinding Bakunin's alleged expulsion. Although Bakunin accepted elements of Marx's class analysis and theories regarding capitalism, acknowledging "Marx's genius", he thought Marx's analysis was one-sided and that Marx's methods would compromise the social revolution.
More Bakunin criticized authoritarian socialism which he associated with Marxism and the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat which he adamantly refused. Indeed, Bakunin's maxim was that "f you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself; the anti-authoritarian sections of the International proclaimed at the St. Imier Congress that "the aspirations of the proletariat can have no purpose o
Black bloc
A black bloc is a tactic used by groups of protesters who wear black clothing, sunglasses, ski masks, motorcycle helmets with padding, or other face-concealing and face-protecting items. The clothing is used to conceal wearers' identities and hinder criminal prosecution by making it difficult to distinguish between participants, it is used to protect their faces and eyes from pepper spray, used by law enforcement during protests or civil unrest. The tactic allows the group to appear as one large unified mass. Black bloc participants are associated with anarchism, anti-globalization movement or antifascism; the tactic was developed in the 1980s in the European autonomist movement's protests against squatter evictions, nuclear power, restrictions on abortion, as well as other influences. Black blocs gained broader media attention outside Europe during the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, when a black bloc damaged property of Gap, Old Navy, other multinational retail locations in downtown Seattle; this tactic was developed in response to increased use of police force following the 1977 Brokdorf demonstration.
On 1 May 1987, demonstrators in Berlin-Kreuzberg were confronted by West German police. After this, thousands of people attacked the police with rocks and Molotov cocktails; the riots at the May Day in Kreuzberg became famous after the police had to pull out of the "SO 36" neighborhood in Kreuzberg for several hours, rioters looted shops together with residents. When Ronald Reagan came to Berlin in June 1987, he was met by around 50,000 demonstrators protesting against his Cold War policies; this included a black bloc of 3,000 people. In November 1987, the residents were joined by thousands of other protesters and fortified their squat, built barricades in the streets and defended themselves against the police for nearly 24 hours. After this the city authorities legalised the squatters residence. On 1 May 1988, radical left groups organised a May Day demonstration through Berlin-Kreuzberg, ending in riots heavier than the year before; the police were attacked with steel balls fired by slingshots, stones and Molotov cocktails.
On 2 May, headline of the Berlin newspaper BZ was "Beirut?? Nein, das ist Berlin!". The riots became a tradition in Berlin-Kreuzberg and have recurred every 1 May since, but never as fatally as in the first two years; when the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund met in Berlin in 1988, the autonomen hosted an international gathering of anti-capitalist activists. Numbering around 80,000, the protesters outnumbered the police. Officials tried to maintain control by banning all demonstrations and attacking public assemblies. There were riots and upmarket shopping areas were destroyed. In the period after the Berlin Wall, the German black bloc movement continued traditional riots such as May Day in Berlin-Kreuzberg, but with decreasing intensity, their main focus became the struggle against the recurring popularity of Neo-Nazism in Germany. The "turn" came in June 2007, during the 33rd G8 summit. A black bloc of 2,000 people built barricades, set cars alight and attacked the police during a mass demonstration in Rostock.
400 police officers were injured, about 500 demonstrators and activists. According to the German Verfassungsschutz, the weeks of organisation before the demonstration and the riots themselves amounted to a revival for the militant left in Germany. Since the "Battle of Rostock", traditional "May Day Riots" after demonstrations every 1 May in Berlin, since 2008 in Hamburg, became more intense, violence of the autonomen against police officers and political enemies at demonstrations of radical left groups have increased; the first recorded use of the tactic in United States of America occurred at the Pentagon, in Washington, D. C. on 17 October 1988. Over one thousand demonstrators—a small number consisting of a black bloc—called for the end to U. S. support for the right wing death squads in El Salvador. A black bloc caused damage to property of GAP, Old Navy, other retail locations in downtown Seattle during the 1999 anti-WTO demonstrations, they were a common feature of subsequent anti-globalization protests.
In the years after the end of the Vietnam War, protest in the US came to assume more legalistic, orderly forms, was dominated by the middle-class. This corresponded with the rise of a effective police strategy of crowd control called "negotiated management." Many social scientists have noted the "institutionalization of movements" in this period. These currents constrained disruptive protest until 1999. In an unprecedented success for post-Vietnam era civil disobedience, the WTO Ministerial Conference opening ceremonies were shut down host city Seattle declared a state of emergency for nearly a week, multilateral trade negotiations between the wealthy and developing nations collapsed, all of this was done without fatalities; this occurred in the midst of mass rioting, set off by militant anarchists, some of them in a black bloc formation. In the lead up to the shutdown, local group Seattle Anarchist Response had circulated Ward Churchill's text Pacifism as Pathology among protesters. SAR promoted among the rank-and-file of the Direct Action Network and criticized NGO hegemony of the protests.
They found an enthusiastic response. The call for the Seattle protest had come from Peoples' Global Action which supported diversity of tactics and a flexible definition of nonviolence. In the aftermath of the shutdown, various NGO spokespeople associated with Seattle DAN claimed that the riotous aspect of
Anarchy
Anarchy refers to a society, group of people, or a single person that rejects hierarchy. The word meant leaderlessness, but Pierre-Joseph Proudhon adopted the term in his 1840 treatise What Is Property? to refer to anarchism, a new political philosophy which advocates stateless societies based on voluntary associations. In practical terms, anarchy can refer to the curtailment or abolition of traditional forms of government and institutions, it can designate a nation—or anywhere on earth, inhabited—that has no system of government or central rule. Anarchy is advocated by individual anarchists who propose replacing government with voluntary institutions; the word anarchy comes from the ancient Greek ἀναρχία which combines ἀ, "not, without" and ἀρχή, "ruler, authority". Thus, the term refers to the state of a society being without authorities or an authoritative governing body. Anarchism as a political philosophy advocates self-governed societies based on voluntary institutions; these are described as stateless societies, although several authors have defined them more as institutions based on non-hierarchical free associations.
Anarchism holds the state to be unnecessary, or harmful. While anti-statism is central, anarchism entails opposing authority or hierarchical organisation in the conduct of all human relations, including yet not limited to the state system. There are many traditions of anarchism, not all of which are mutually exclusive. Anarchist schools of thought can differ fundamentally, supporting anything from extreme individualism to complete collectivism. Strains of anarchism have been divided into the categories of social and individualist anarchism or similar dual classifications. Anarchism is considered to be a radical left-wing ideology and much of anarchist economics and anarchist legal philosophy reflect anti-statist interpretations of communism, syndicalism, or participatory economics; some individualist anarchists are socialists or communists while some anarcho-communists are individualists or egoists. Anarchism as a social movement has endured fluctuations in popularity; the central tendency of anarchism as a mass social movement has been represented by anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism, with individualist anarchism being a literary phenomenon which did influence the bigger currents and individualists participated in large anarchist organizations.
Some anarchists oppose all forms of aggression and support self-defense or non-violence while others have supported the use of militant measures, including revolution and propaganda of the deed, on the path to an anarchist society. Since the 1890s, the term libertarianism has been used as a synonym for anarchism and was used exclusively in this sense until the 1950s in the United States. At this time, classical liberals in the United States began to describe themselves as libertarians and it has since become necessary to distinguish their individualist and capitalist philosophy from socialist anarchism. Thus, the former is referred to as right-wing libertarianism or right-libertarianism whereas the latter is described by the terms libertarian socialism, socialist libertarianism, left-libertarianism and left-anarchism. Right-libertarians voluntarists. Outside the English-speaking world, libertarianism retains its association with left-wing anarchism; the German philosopher Immanuel Kant treated anarchy in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View as consisting of "Law and Freedom without Force".
For Kant, anarchy falls short of being a true civil state because the law is only an "empty recommendation" if force is not included to make this law efficacious. For there to be such a state, force must be included while law and freedom are maintained, a state which Kant calls a republic. Kant identified four kinds of government: Law and freedom without force Law and force without freedom Force without freedom and law Force with freedom and law Although most known societies are characterized by the presence of hierarchy or the state, anthropologists have studied many egalitarian stateless societies, including most nomadic hunter-gatherer societies and horticultural societies such as the Semai and the Piaroa. Many of these societies can be considered to be anarchic in the sense that they explicitly reject the idea of centralized political authority; the egalitarianism typical of human hunter-gatherers is interesting when viewed in an evolutionary context. One of humanity's two closest primate relatives, the chimpanzee, is anything but egalitarian, forming hierarchies that are dominated by alpha males.
So great is the contrast with human hunter-gatherers that it is argued by palaeoanthropologists that resistance to being dominated was a key factor driving the development of human consciousness, language and social organization. In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, anarchist anthropologist David Graeber attempts to outline areas of research that intellectuals might explore in creating a cohesive body of anarchist social theory. Graeber posits that anthropology is "particularly well positioned" as an academic discipline that can look at the gamut of human societies and organizations to study and catalog alternative social and economic structures around the world, most present these alternatives to the world. In Society Against the State, Pierre Clastres examines stateless societies where certain cultural practices and attitudes avert the development of hierarchy and the state. He
Anarcho-naturism
Anarcho-naturism appeared in the late 19th century as the union of anarchist and naturist philosophies. In many of the alternative communities established in Britain in the early 1900s, "nudism, anarchism and free love were accepted as part of a politically radical way of life". In the 1920s, the inhabitants of the anarchist community at Whiteway, near Stroud in Gloucestershire, "shocked the conservative residents of the area with their shameless nudity", it had importance within individualist anarchist circles in Spain, France and Cuba. Anarcho-naturism advocates vegetarianism, free love, hiking and an ecological world view within anarchist groups and outside them. Anarcho-naturism promotes an ecological worldview, small ecovillages, most prominently nudism as a way to avoid the artificiality of the industrial mass society of modernity. Naturist individualist anarchists see the individual in their biological and psychological aspects and try to eliminate social determinations. An important early influence on anarchist naturism was the thought of Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy and Élisée Reclus.
Thoreau was an American author, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, historian and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state, his thought is an early influence on green anarchism, but with an emphasis on the individual experience of the natural world, influencing naturist currents. Simple living as a rejection of a materialist lifestyle and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's goals, the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy. "Many have seen in Thoreau one of the precursors of ecologism and anarcho-primitivism represented today in John Zerzan. For George Woodcock this attitude can be motivated by certain idea of resistance to progress and of rejection of the growing materialism, the nature of American society in the mid-19th century." John Zerzan himself included the text "Excursions" by Thoreau in his edited compilation of anti-civilization writings called Against civilization: Readings and reflections from 1999.
For the influential French anarchist Élisée Reclus, naturism "was at the same time a physical means of revitalization, a rapport with the body different from the hypocrisy and taboos which prevailed at the time, a more convivial way to see life in society, an incentive to respect the planet. Thus naturism develops in France, in particular under the influence of Élizée Reclus, at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century among anarchistic communities resulting from utopian socialism."In France important propagandists of anarcho-naturism include Henri Zisly and Émile Gravelle who collaborated in La Nouvelle Humanité, Le Naturien, Le Sauvage, L'Ordre Naturel, La Vie Naturelle. Their ideas were important in individualist anarchist circles in France as well as Spain, where Federico Urales promoted the ideas of Gravelle and Zisly in La Revista Blanca. Zisly's political activity, "primarily aimed at supporting a return to'natural life' through writing and practical involvement, stimulated lively confrontations within and outside the anarchist environment.
Zisly vividly criticized progress and civilization, which he regarded as'absurd and filthy.' He opposed industrialization, arguing that machines were inherently authoritarian, defended nudism, advocated a non-dogmatic and non-religious adherence to the'laws of nature,' recommended a lifestyle based on limited needs and self-sufficiency, disagreed with vegetarianism, which he considered'anti-scientific.'"Richard D. Sonn comments on the influence of naturist views in the wider French anarchist movement: In her memoir of her anarchist years, serialized in Le Matin in 1913, Rirette Maîtrejean made much of the strange food regimens of some of the compagnons, she described the "tragic bandits" of the Bonnot gang as refusing to eat meat or drink wine, preferring plain water. Her humorous comments reflected the practices of the "naturist" wing of individualist anarchists who favored a simpler, more "natural" lifestyle centered on a vegetarian diet. In the 1920s, this wing was expressed by the journal Le Néo-Naturien, Revue des Idées Philosophiques et Naturiennes.
Contributors condemned the fashion of smoking cigarettes by young women. Others distinguished between vegetarians, who foreswore the eating of meat, from the stricter "vegetalians," who ate nothing but vegetables. An anarchist named G. Butaud, who made this distinction, opened a restaurant called the Foyer Végétalien in the nineteenth arrondissement in 1923. Other issues of the journal included vegetarian recipes. In 1925, when the young anarchist and future detective novelist Léo Malet arrived in Paris from Montpellier, he lodged with anarchists who operated another vegetarian restaurant that served only vegetables, with neither fish nor eggs. Nutritional concerns coincided with other means of encouraging health bodies, such as nudism and gymnastics. For a while in the 1920s, after they were released from jail for antiwar and birth-control activities and Eugène Humbert retreated to the relative safety of the "integral living" movement that promoted nude sunbathing and physical fitness, which were seen as integral aspects of health in the Greek sense of gymnos, meaning nude.
This back-to-nature, primitivist current was not a monopoly of the left.
Class conflict
Class conflict is the political tension and economic antagonism that exists in society consequent to socio-economic competition among the social classes. As a means of effecting radical social and political changes for the social majority, class struggle is a central tenet of the philosophic works of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin. Class conflict can take many different forms: direct violence, such as wars fought for resources and cheap labor. Additionally, political forms of class conflict exist; the conflict can be direct, as with a lockout aimed at destroying a labor union, or indirect, as with an informal slowdown in production protesting low wages by workers or unfair labor practices by capital. In the past the term class conflict was a term used by socialists and Marxists, who define a class by its relationship to the means of production—such as factories and machinery. From this point of view, the social control of production and labor is a contest between classes, the division of these resources involves conflict and inflicts harm.
It can involve ongoing low-level clashes, escalate into massive confrontations, in some cases, lead to the overall defeat of one of the contending classes. 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; the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin argued that the class struggle of the working class and poor had the potential to lead a social revolution involving the overthrow of ruling elites, the creation of libertarian socialism. This was only a potential, class struggle was, he argued, not always the only or decisive factor in society, but it was central. By contrast, Marxists argue that class conflict always plays the decisive and 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.
Where societies are divided based on status, wealth, or control of social production and distribution, class structures arise and are thus coeval with civilization itself. It is well documented since at least European Classical Antiquity and the various popular uprisings in late medieval Europe and elsewhere. One of the earliest analysis of these conflicts is Friedrich Engels' The Peasant War in Germany. 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 or hunter-gatherer societies, how inheritance produces early class divisions and conflict. Bill Moyers, for example, gave a speech at Brennan Center for Justice in December 2013, titled "The Great American Class War," referring to the current struggle between democracy and plutocracy in the U. S. Chris Hedges wrote a column for Truthdig called "Let's Get This Class War Started,", a play on Pink's song "Let's Get This Party Started."Historian Steve Fraser, author of The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, asserts that class conflict is an inevitability if current political and economic conditions continue, noting that “people are fed up… their voices are not being heard.
And I think that can only go on for so long without there being more and more outbreaks of what used to be called class struggle, class warfare.” The typical example of class conflict described is class conflict within capitalism. This class conflict is seen to occur between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, takes the form of conflict over hours of work, value of wages, division of profits, cost of consumer goods, the culture at work, control over parliament or bureaucracy, economic inequality; the particular implementation of government programs which may seem purely humanitarian, such as disaster relief, can be a form of class conflict. In the USA class conflict is noted in labor/management disputes; as far back as 1933 representative Edward Hamilton of ALPA, the Airline Pilot's Association, used the term "class warfare" to describe airline management's opposition at the National Labor Board hearings in October of that year. Apart from these day-to-day forms of class conflict, during periods of crisis or revolution class conflict takes on a violent nature and involves repression, restriction of civil liberties, murderous violence such as assassinations or death squads.
Although Thomas Jefferson led the United States as president from 1801–1809 and is considered one of the founding fathers, he died with immense amounts of debt. Regarding the interaction between social classes, he wrote, I am convinced that those societies which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law, & restrains morals as powerfully as laws did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretence of governing they have divided their nations i
