<P> Social commentators, historians and socialist theorists had commented on class struggle for some time before Marx, as well as the connection between class struggle, property, and law: Augustin Thierry, François Guizot, François - Auguste Mignet and Adolphe Thiers . The Physiocrats, David Ricardo, and after Marx, Henry George noted the inelastic supply of land and argued that this created certain privileges (economic rent) for landowners . According to the historian Arnold Toynbee, stratification along lines of class appears only within civilizations, and furthermore only appears during the process of a civilization's decline while not characterizing the growth phase of a civilization . </P> <P> Proudhon, in What is Property? (1840) states that "certain classes do not relish investigation into the pretended titles to property, and its fabulous and perhaps scandalous history ." While Proudhon saw the solution as the lower classes forming an alternative, solidarity economy centered on cooperatives and self - managed workplaces, which would slowly undermine and replace capitalist class society, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin while influenced by Proudhon, insisted that a massive class struggle, by the working class, peasantry and poor, was essential to the creation of libertarian socialism . This would require a (final) showdown in the form of a social revolution . </P> <P> Fascists have often opposed class struggle and instead have attempted to appeal to the working class while promising to preserve the existing social classes and have proposed an alternative concept known as class collaboration . </P> <P> Consistent with its internationalist perspective, Orthodox Marxism, and most left tendencies, reject racism, sexism, etc. as struggles within the capitalist order which are distractions from class struggle, the real conflict, which prevent the purported antagonists from acting in their common class interest . </P>

Who believed that the engine of human history is class conflict