In political science, the term class conflict, or class struggle, refers to the political tension and economic antagonism that exist among the social classes of society, because of socioeconomic competition for resources among the social classes, between the rich and the poor. In the political and economic philosophies of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin, class struggle is a central tenet and a practical means for effecting radical sociopolitical changes for the social majority, the working class. It is a central concept within conflict theories of sociology and political philosophy.
The Pyramid of Capitalist System visualizes and explains class conflict.
Truck drivers fight the police in the course of the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934
Heads of aristocrats on pikes at the storming of the Bastille
Farmer confronting landlord during China's Land Reform Movement
A social class or social stratum is a grouping of people into a set of hierarchical social categories, the most common being the working class, middle class, and upper class. Membership of a social class can for example be dependent on education, wealth, occupation, income, and belonging to a particular subculture or social network.
Slave beating in ancient Egypt
Burmese nobles and servants
Nigerian warriors armed with spears in the retinue of a mounted war chief. The Earth and Its Inhabitants, 1892
A symbolic image of three orders of feudal society in Europe prior to the French Revolution, which shows the rural third estate carrying the clergy and the nobility
