Commentary from the liberterrain…
Karl Marx lived in a rigidly class-conscious European society. A person born into wealth would likely remain wealthy forever while the offspring of a scullery maid might have little choice but to become a scullery maid herself.
In simplest terms, Marx saw a capitalist class exploiting a working class, took the side of the workers and declared "class warfare."
The sole idea of class warfare, like any warfare, is for one side to defeat the other. This leads to a never-ending struggle, dividing society and benefiting only the side that wins, or at least dominates.
It's an enormous waste of human time and effort that could be expended in far greater productive and meaningful accomplishments.
The idea of America was to reject the whole idea of class war by rejecting the idea of "class" itself. In a classless society a worker can rise to become an owner while an owner can lose it all and end up as a worker.
Today's American version of a scullery maid – a highschooler who flips burgers and bricks the griddle at McWendyKing – is a bottom 99-percenter making (according to a Dallas Morning News article) $14,677 a year in Dallas or a mere $14,433 in Fort Worth.
Yet ten years later she could be a top one-percenter raking in $425,060 with her own multi-store burger franchise in Big D (or $399,131 in Cowtown).
So where does that leave the 99-percenters, first accepting her as one of their own but hating her once she's successful?
Since America has millions of owner-workers it should be obvious that the real class war isn't between owner and worker, it's between government and everyone else.
Marx's original definition of "capitalism" was a system in which ruling class elitists used government coercion to grant monopoly powers to their politically connected cronies.
That kind of capitalism survives today in America in the form of statism, in which big government, big business and big labor collude to control all of society.
A true classless society can exist only in the libertarian definition of capitalism, the laissez-faire free market system where the interventionist coercion of the statist/corporatist/unionist ruling class is absolutely forbidden to intrude.
Without recognizing that government is the enemy, without recognizing that both the 1% and the 99% are composed of honest earners and politically connected takers, the 1% vs. 99% class war is just simplistic goofiness.
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