<P> Class conflict can take many different forms: direct violence, such as wars fought for resources and cheap labor; indirect violence, such as deaths from poverty, starvation, illness or unsafe working conditions; coercion, such as the threat of losing a job or the pulling of an important investment; or ideologically, such as with books and articles . Additionally, political forms of class conflict exist; legally or illegally lobbying or bribing government leaders for passage of desirable partisan legislation including labor laws, tax codes, consumer laws, acts of congress or other sanction, injunction or tariff . The conflict can be direct, as with a lockout aimed at destroying a labor union, or indirect, as with an informal slowdown in production protesting low wages by workers or unfair labor practices by capital . </P> <P> In the past the term Class conflict was a term used mostly by socialists, who define a class by its relationship to the means of production--such as factories, land and machinery . From this point of view, the social control of production and labor is a contest between classes, and the division of these resources necessarily involves conflict and inflicts harm . It can involve ongoing low - level clashes, escalate into massive confrontations, and in some cases, lead to the overall defeat of one of the contending classes . However, in more contemporary times this term is striking chords and finding new definition amongst capitalistic societies in the United States and other Westernized countries . </P> <P> The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin argued that the class struggle of the working class, peasantry and poor had the potential to lead to a social revolution involving the overthrow of ruling elites, and the creation of libertarian socialism . This was only a potential, and class struggle was, he argued, not always the only or decisive factor in society, but it was central . By contrast, Marxists argue that class conflict always plays the decisive and pivotal role in the history of class - based hierarchical systems such as capitalism and feudalism . Marxists refer to its overt manifestations as class war, a struggle whose resolution in favor of the working class is viewed by them as inevitable under plutocratic capitalism . </P> <P> Where societies are socially divided based on status, wealth, or control of social production and distribution, class structures arise and are thus coeval with civilization itself . It is well documented since at least European Classical Antiquity (Conflict of the Orders, Spartacus, etc .) and the various popular uprisings in late medieval Europe and elsewhere . </P>

Who argued that class struggles were what led to historical progress and development