Contrast of interests between capital and labor

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The conflict of interests between capital and labor is a formulation that describes the social relationship between employers and employees in academic literature, particularly of Marxist and socialist provenance .

With Marx

For Karl Marx , the conflict of interests constitutes a class antagonism that takes the form of the class struggle . Its basis is the "wage employment relationship". This consists in the fact that the dispossessed worker, in order to make a living, is compelled to sell his commodity labor power to the capitalist ; the capitalist entrepreneur pays the worker according to his reproduction costs and at the same time appropriates the surplus value generated by him , which Marx characterized as exploitation .

In the present

In contemporary work- sociological literature, there is often talk of a conflict of interests between capital and labor, which, however, lacks the potential for class struggle due to various social and collective bargaining measures and which has historically been converted into a socially acceptable practice. As early as 1949, the sociologist Theodor Geiger spoke of an “institutionalization of class antagonism”.

Currently, in political and scientific discourse, the relationships between the actors of capital and labor are largely referred to using the term social partnership , or alternatively also using the concept of conflict partnership .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Theodor Geiger : The class society in the melting pot . Kiepenheuer, Cologne and Hagen 1949, p. 182.
  2. ^ Horst Sanmann : Social partners . In: Concise Dictionary of Economics , Volume 7. Stuttgart 1977, p. 52.
  3. ^ Walther Müller-Jentsch : conflict partnership. Actors and institutions of industrial relations. 3. Edition. Hampp, Munich and Mering 1999, pp. 8-10.

literature

  • Karl Marx: wage labor and capital . In: Marx / Engels Werke (MEW), Volume 6. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1982, pp. 397-423.
  • Theodor Geiger: The class society in the melting pot . Kiepenheuer Cologne and Hagen 1949, p. 182 ff.