Class Warfare and Middle Class Decline in America

Abstract

Modern ideas about class war come primarily from the writings of Karl Marx. One key idea in Marxism is that of the class struggle between two classes. Notions of class and class struggle never took root in the United States in the same way it did in Europe. Inequities in wealth and income distribution, however, have developed over the past decades, and subtly promoted a different kind of class conflict, but one confirmed largely to the labor-dependant group. The battlegrounds for intra-class conflict in America is the federal government and the private marketplace, the key institutions which determine the distribution of income and wealth. Political and economic power are the instruments of class welfare. The paper addresses the question of what needs to be done to reverse the drift toward more inequality in the distribution of income and wealth.