Re: [Marxism] Class and Social Conflict Theory

["andypollack@xxxxxxxx" <andypollack@xxxxxxxx>]

Interesting coincidence. Just last night I was reading the part in Deutscher's 
Trotsky trilogy (second volume, "Not by Politics Alone" chapter) where he 
describes Trotsky's view on social conflict after classes are eliminated -- 
where, for instance, "parties" are formed with different opinions about how to 
organize a communist society -- its art and architecture, its families, its 
neighborhoods, on and on. Now obviously in the decades in-between the 
expropriation of the capitalists in advanced countries and the stage just 
described, the legacy of class and other social conflicts will interact with 
each other in progressively less antagonistic ways, in a process of fits and 
starts with lags in their resolution.

Just think of how that would play out with race and class in the US.  Certainly 
makes concrete the silliness of bourgeois celebrations of "diversity," i.e. an 
attempt at a conflict-free resolution. But for just that reason in those 
intervening decades after a revolution we could afford even less such a 
superficial approach to tackling these overlapping problems stage by stage.
-- "Calvin Broadbent" <calvinbroadbent@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,

Thanks for your reply Jurriaan. Without wishing to reduce all social
conflict to *direct* conflict of economic interest, is there not a real
sense in which conflict in society around religion, ethnicity, or gender is
not only exacerbated by, but grounded in class society? Were there no, or
relatively less, conflicts around issues of distribution and production to
meet human need, and generalised human happiness was made possible by
rewarding and fulfilling socialist labour relations, would *all* forms of
oppression and exploitation not become superfluous or at least more
nugatory? It is in this sense that the phrase 'all social conflict is a
result of class oppression' is meant.



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