How does Marx view social conflict as an essential element in social change? (2020)
For most nineteenth-century thinkers conflict was a pathology to be managed. Karl Marx reversed the judgement: conflict is the normal condition of class societies and the only means by which one social order becomes another. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (The Communist Manifesto, with Friedrich Engels, 1848) is not rhetoric but a statement of method — change is explained by locating the antagonism built into production itself.
Conflict is structural, not accidental
- Every society rests on a mode of production, the combination of forces of production (technology, skills, resources) and relations of production (property relations). The forces develop; the relations, defended by those who profit from them, do not. The resulting contradiction is the source of change (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Preface, 1859).
- Because the surplus is appropriated by non-producers — surplus value under capitalism (Capital, Vol. I, 1867) — the interests of owners and producers are objectively opposed. Conflict is therefore given by the structure, whether or not anyone feels aggrieved.
- Alienation (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 1844) is how this contradiction is lived: the worker is estranged from product, labour process, species-being and fellow workers.
How conflict converts contradiction into change
- Structural antagonism must become organised struggle. A class-in-itself, defined merely by its position, becomes a class-for-itself when concentration in factories and towns, shared conditions and political organisation generate class consciousness and dissolve the false consciousness sustained by dominant ideology.
- The struggle is then fought out in law, politics and ideology, so that the superstructure is transformed after the base. Revolution is the moment when new productive forces burst the old property shell: “force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one”.
- This is why conflict is essential rather than merely frequent. Contradiction alone produces stagnation, since no ruling class concedes voluntarily; only collective struggle turns a structural possibility into a historical transition — from slavery to feudalism to capitalism, and, Marx predicted, beyond it.
An Indian illustration
A. R. Desai (Social Background of Indian Nationalism, 1948) explained nationalism itself as the political expression of classes created by colonial capitalism. The pattern continues in India’s platform economy: a workforce that NITI Aayog projected would grow from about 77 lakh in 2020-21 to 2.35 crore by 2029-30 has organised strikes and unions, and the resulting pressure produced the Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act, 2025, with a welfare fee on platform transactions — promptly challenged in the High Court by the aggregators. Conflict, not consensus, is visibly producing the new legal order.
Limits
Ralf Dahrendorf relocated conflict from property to authority in imperatively coordinated associations; Max Weber added status and party as independent bases of struggle; Lewis A. Coser (The Functions of Social Conflict, 1956) showed conflict can integrate a group rather than transform society. In India caste, religion and gender cut across class and often blunt it.
Conclusion
Marx’s prophecy failed, but his premise endures: societies change because they are internally divided, and the analyst’s task is to identify who gains from present arrangements and which contradictions are straining them.