🎶 The stars look down upon our struggle / The stars look down and know the past / The stars look down and see a future bright at last / When we'll stand as one, beneath the sun 🎵
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
— Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party
One of the most common conflicts that has appeared in stories from the 1800s onward is that between different economic classes — the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and the powerless.
An economic 'class' here is essentially defined by how much capital one possesses; generally speaking, in a healthy economic system there's the working class that provides the labor that keeps the system running, the middle class that oversees this, and the ruling class that gets the most benefits. However, if the system worked this way, we wouldn't have stories that focused so heavily on the economic divide.
From the 1980s onwards in the Western world, the middle class has shrunk, with wages stagnating and the ruling class getting richer; perhaps not coincidentally, from the 1990s onwards is when a semi-renaissance in Class Struggle narratives began, even if it was allegorical.
There are several structures a Class Struggle narrative can take; older stories or Period Pieces might focus on the system of slave labor that once supported the economy of the American South or the Feudal system's treatment of serfs. Works set in the late 1800s or early 1900s could use early Labor Union activity and the resistance that the government and business owners put up against everything from safe working conditions to actually paying their workers in tangible currency. More modern works might focus on the role a Pivotal Business plays in the local economy, and how several jobs in the modern era have naturally evolved into an Abusive Workplace, between long hours, low pay, and managers who believe they're somehow inherently superior to the workers they're in charge of.
Related to Inter Class Friendship, which can be split in the event of a Class Struggle popping up. Rich Sibling, Poor Sibling and Intrafamilial Class Conflict may sometimes take the form of a class struggle when the root of the conflict is caused by the fact that they have opposite economic interests between each side. Uptown Girl is not necessarily a class struggle unless the conflict is related to the economic interests of the opposing sides. Many Layered Metropolis stories involve Class Struggle, and in less realistic settings overlap with Extreme Speculative Stratification. Hoarding the Profits is a common trope in these stories. The Rich Kid Turned Social Activist, if their intentions are genuine, may be considered a "class traitor" if this trope is in play, but so can strikebreakers or other workers glad to assist the ruling class.
If not resolved peacefully, there is a good chance a Class Struggle will turn into a full-on Civil War. The Revolution Will Not Be Villified or Civilized, depending on the author's views. Expect there to be Chummy Commies or Dirty Communists in some capacity, along with a Working-Class Hero, typically. A Full-Circle Revolution may result if the overthrowing party turns out to be just as corrupt and amoral as the previous ruling party, which in turn results in another one of these forming.
Nothing to do with academic conflicts by and large, such as when a character struggles to pass a class.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Mobile Suit Gundam: While not explicitly part of the reasoning behind the One Year War, Char Aznable tells Sayla Mass that the elites of the Federation have basically used the Spacenoids to enrich themselves and enforce the living conditions they live in. Indeed, in Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ, they're actually keen on letting Haman perform a Colony Drop on Dublin, Ireland as it would mean less mouths to feed and are happily paid off by Char in Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack under the guise of disarming the Newborn Neo Zeon for Axis.
- Moriarty the Patriot: The main premise is that the Moriarty brothers and their allies fight to end the class war by killing the corrupt nobles. This is brought by William and Louis' childhood where they were abused by the privileged folk before they were adopted into the Moriarty family, who, except Albert, are rich assholes. Then, it was revealed that William Moriarty's true plan was to make himself the villain that would have both the rich and poor unite against one common enemy so that British society could reform.
- One Piece: A good amount of screentime is dedicated to showing just how despicable the ruling class of the World Government, known as the 'Celestial Dragons', are. They keep slaves, abuse those below them, and believe they are too good to even breathe the same air as other people, wearing bubble-like helmets around their heads. The inciting incident during the Sabaody Archipielago arc, which results in the Straw Hats being separated from each other for two years both In-Universe and in Real Life, involves Luffy punching out a Celestial Dragon who had shot one of his allies.
Comic Books
- Spider-Man: A recurring theme throughout Spider-Man's adventures is how he's typically working-class, if that, often living paycheck-to-paycheck, often harassed by creditors and landlords. Several Spider-Man stories have started with him having to get money now in order to pay off rent, getting evicted, having to figure out how to support himself and whoever his romantic partner is at the time on the budget of a freelancer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of Spider-Man's most iconic villains, the Green Goblin, is a Corrupt Corporate Executive in his civilian life.
- The Simpsons: One comic has the workers at the Springfield nuclear power plant go on strike for a five-cent wage increase. Mr. Burns is unwilling to meet their demands, even though this would only cost him an extra $250 a year, and after it becomes clear that the workers won't back down, he fires them all and spends $250 million developing an experimental cloning machine so he can replace them with an army of Smithers clones.
- The Transformers (IDW): The Decepticon uprising that leads to the Autobot-Decepticon war is eventually revealed to have shades of this. Megatron's original intent was to do away with Functionism, where the respect and status of a Cybertronian depended on how rare their alternate mode was, and certain jobs were only meant for certain alt modes (e.g., a flier had to become part of the military). While Functionism eventually lost power, many of the ones who benefited from it still stayed on top of society thanks to their accumulated wealth. Many of his original Decepticon recruits came from the disenfranchised and downtrodden, and even some of those same "upper-class" Cybertronians like Starscream decide to join him because they liked the world he intended to create. The Decepticons take a certain amount of pleasure in massacring the members of the Senate who represent the ruling class, and Starscream later makes it a point to bomb a pleasure cruiser carrying a number of upper-crust folk, sending them screaming to their fiery deaths far below while Soundwave inflicts a Karmic Transformation on Senator Ratbat, turning him from a powerful figure with a jet altmode to a bat with a data device altmode (under Functionism, data devices were the lowest caste of all Cybertronians and beast-modes were considered actual animals). It's telling that Orion Pax, the future Optimus Prime, actually agreed with their ideals, but their actions went so far that Megatron no longer seemed to care about his original goals that he felt obligated to stand against them.
Fan Works
- Alicorn: Despite being a colossal Jerkass, Captain Tristar is surprisingly class conscious and lays out that Equestria is a class-divided society, with unicorns serving as nobility who control everything (down to simple tools like scissors and doorknobs, which are made for unicorns and very difficult for other ponies to use) and everyone else just having to eke out a living beneath them. This also forms the basis for his dislike of Twilight, whom he sees as a spoiled noble brat with no awareness of her own privilege, and Rainbow Dash, whom he paradoxically looks down on for being a lower-class bastard, and resents for being the noble-born daughter of Celestia, and thus a good example of nobility getting everything with no work.
- A Difference in the Family: The Snape Chronicles: Harry Evans was a supervisor in the mill where Tobias Snape worked. As a result, when—years after the mill closed—their respective children, Lily and Severus, become friends due to being the only students in school with the ability to do magic, they need to keep the friendship a secret.
- The Morrigan:
- Nika Nanaura-Fardin, head of the Dawn of Fold, makes it clear that despite appearing to be a war between Earth and Space, the Three Witches' War is at its heart a class conflict, between any of the poor and destitute whose labor and lives are exploited for wealth, and the wealthy aristocracy who exploit them, not just on Earth but everywhere in the solar system. Dawn of Fold is perfectly willing to welcome Spacian lower classes who share their struggle despite being born on the "right" side of the conflict, and Nika makes it clear that the DOF's true enemies are the wealthy bastards who run the system of exploitation that has caused so much suffering.
- The class disparity in especially blatant in one conversation between Norea du Noc, an orphan from Earth who was forced to be a Child Soldier from a young age just to survive, and Suletta Mercury, who's upbringing was not much happier but she at least grew up in relative wealth as the daughter of a CEO and later married the president. Norea is both shocked and angered when Suletta admits that she has no real investment in the politics of the war and just fights for the side she happened to be on, because for Norea, those politics have been a constant matter of life or death her entire life.
- A Wizard's Guide to 'Banking' explores the prevalent systematic discrimination against Muggleborns and Half-breeds in Britain's wizarding society, and how it heightens to the point of behind-the-scenes rebellion as a result of Voldemort's Blood War. The aforementioned demographics are never given positions of power, while oft being driven to the fringes because of the blatant bias favoring purebloods. Minister Gramp's post-war oppressive bills provoke a mass exodus... right to Rebel Leader Graham's open arms, who plans to create a surplus of "muggleborns" (actually, half-bloods) through in-vitro insemination. He'll force Wizarding Britain to change its laws through sheer numbers alone; all the while providing the unemployed, marginalized demographics with jobs.
Film — Live-Action
- This is one of the primary themes of the Alien films. Throughout the series, Weyland-Yutani and its wealthy executives seek to use the Xenomorphs as bio-weapons for even further profit, and consistently sacrifice lower-class people to do so. The first film has them willingly send a working-class crew to die just to capture a Xenomorph, and in the second do the same with a group of soldiers. And while they don't set up the events of the third film, they're perfectly willing to let the working-class prison guards and prisoners die if it serves them.
Ripley: You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.
- Bodies Bodies Bodies is largely from the point of view of Fish Out of Water Bee, a poor college dropout dating the rich but cut-off Sophie, who takes her to a weekend party at her rich childhood friend David's mansion. Once people start dying during a hurricane that cuts off cell reception, and Bee also ends up killing another guest, her outsider status makes her a prime suspect and is even thrown out into the storm. One of the other guests, Sophie's ex-girlfriend Jordan, is also called out for trying to pass herself off as a Rags to Riches story when her parents "Are! Upper! Middle! Class!".
- Django Unchained: The titular character is an escaped slave trying to fight against slave-catchers and slave owners. When Django and Dr. King-Schultz arrive at Candyland Ranch, they encounter slaves who are being punished after trying to escape.
- Glass Onion: Much like its predecessor Knives Out below, one of the major undercurrents of the film is a class struggle. The two sides are embodied by Miles Braun, a CEO with an ungodly amount of wealth, and Andi, his former business partner and a working-class woman who actually developed all of the ideas for their company; when Miles invites Andi to a get-together of his "disruptors" (wealthy and influential friends), she makes it very clear that she despises Miles and all of his crew for being money-hungry, power-grubbing jerks. A twist in the middle of the movie hammers the point home even further: "Andi" is actually Helen, Andi's twin sister and an elementary school teacher struggling to make ends meet. As it turns out, Andi was murdered by one of the disruptors, and Helen goes to Benoit Blanc for help in figuring out what happened to her, with Blanc suggesting a Dead Person Impersonation to spook the killer. Ultimately, it's Helen who comes out victorious, with Miles's fortune and empire left in a flaming ruin.
- Leo the Last: The main conflict is between Prince Leo's entourage and the inhabitants of the slum surrounding their mansion, who are kept in poverty by the exorbitant rent and by local criminals who are in league with Leo's household manager. Leo himself is very passive at first but gradually starts to side with the poor people, especially after he learns that he technically owns every building in the neighbourhood. The movie ends with the crowd burning Leo's mansion, with his approval.
- Metropolis: Metropolis, ruled by Joh Fredersen, is divided between an upper class owning all the machines and an impoverished and exploited lower class, whose leader is Maria. Only a Mediator, or heart, can unite the Head (those who rule the city) and the Hands (those who toil). The movie ends with Fredersen and Grot (the foreman of the Heart Machine) shaking ends, with Freder as the Mediator.
- Modern Times: The Tramp accidentally involves himself with a labour strike and gets sent to jail for it.
- Newsies: The story concerns a group of 19th-century newsboys who form a youth-led union and go on a citywide strike when the newspaper companies refuse to give them a fair wage adjustment. Truth in Television, interestingly enough.
- In Time: In a retro-future when the aging gene has been switched off, people must pay to stay alive; though everybody stops aging at 25, stamped on their arm is a clock showing how long they have left to live, a year, which starts ticking the instant they reach 25 years of age. To avoid overpopulation, time has become the currency and the way people pay for luxuries and necessities.
- Kingsman: The Secret Service: A big theme of the movie is class division, approached in a relatively complex way. Eggsy comes from a working-class background and lives in a tough environment with very little in the way of opportunity. He gets offered a spot as a Kingsman candidate, working with old-money snobs who isolate and bully him as he's the poorest person there. As a result, he has a chip on his shoulder that he carries for most of the film, easily driven to anger if he feels he's being treated unfairly. Meanwhile, Valentine's goal is to cull the world population to save the planet, with a select few being saved from the intended genocide — specifically, the rich and powerful, while people like Eggsy's family are directly targeted with Valentine's evil sim cards being free. However, the movie also makes sure to show that it's not all black and white; Eggsy befriends multiple rich characters, such as Harry, Roxy, and Tilde, who are all sympathetic and driven to do good in the world, while people like his stepfather Dean are classic Lower Class Louts that even he admits are the exception to his rant about inequality. By the end, Eggsy has become a proper Kingsman agent and thus gets the money to match his new role, while following in Harry's footsteps as a shining example of how to be a true gentleman, using his wealth and power for good as the Kingsman agency aims to do.
- Knives Out: Benoit Blanc investigates the mysterious death of author Harlan Thrombey, with the help of Harlan's nurse assistant Marta, whom the author had also disinherited his children in favor of. We also see Harlan's kids range from kinda obnoxious to awful and murderous, with even the more sympathetic granddaughter also turning on Marta to try to preserve her spot at a prestigious university.
- Parasite (2019): The Kim family gets into a serious economic-based conflict with the Park family, their employers, when the Kims' basement floods and they have to move to a gymnasium and, because of the way the capitalist system is set-up, the Parks are not compelled to aid the Kims; this triggers the class-struggle fueled anger of Kim-taek causing the gory events in the ending.
- The Purge Universe: The titular event was designed by the rich and powerful to purge the poor and working-class as a form of population control. How exactly this works is subject to the MST3K Mantra, as in Real Life, a population of poor and working class is necessary to support the rich.
- Zig-Zagged|Trope in Saltburn where Oliver befriends idle aristocratic kid Felix Catton, finding a way to get invited to the family's titular manor for the summer. Oliver tells Felix that he's a son of a junkie mother and a dad that left years ago, and is deliberately put on the spot about money by Felix's friend Farleigh, but it is later revealed that Oliver comes from a stable middle class home. Meanwhile, Farleigh is aristocratic by birth, but is actually in a very precarious situation due to his mother's fall on hard times.
- The Talented Mr. Ripley centers on Tom Ripley, a working-class con man who pretends to be from an upper-class background to schmooze with Dickie Greenleaf, a wealthy young playboy he both has an unrequited love for and desires to literally become out of envy and longing for his carefree lifestyle. However, Dickie grows increasingly abusive towards him and Ripley murders him in a fit of rage, subsequently taking over his identity. It ends tragically.
- Class is a recurring theme in the works of famed horror director Wes Craven.
- The Hills Have Eyes (1977) centers around an upper-middle-class family battling a Cannibal Clan in the isolated desert after their RV breaks down. Craven and many critics have stated it's allegorical for the class divide, and while the Clan is cruel, they're only trying to survive in a harsh environment where most people have been forced out. Meanwhile, the "heroic" family is racist, oblivious, and varying degrees of disdainful to the poor.
- The People Under the Stairs comments on this and racism. The film centers around a poor black boy who tries to burgle the house of the white slumlords who own the ghetto he lives in, only to find they're serial killers who literally feed on the poor. Further feeding the class critique, it's revealed the slumlords kidnap poor white children to make into their own children, only to mutilate them and trap them in the basement once they prove "imperfect", metaphorically representing the relationship between Corrupt Corporate Executives such as themselves and the poor they exploit and view themselves as above.
Literature
- Borderlands: Debt or Alive: Eden-5 is a planet controlled by the pristine Elites, who live in fancy mansions and enjoy endless amenities. Of course, those amenities depend on the workers from Rustville, who the Elites keep in endless debt (which is kept track of thanks to the use of "debt cuffs", actual, physical, heavy pieces of metal). The main conflict of the story revolves around the war between the two classes.
- Later in the story, it's revealed that much like Real Life, Eden-5 used to have a middle class between the Elites and Rusters. Keyword, used. Turns out Countess Holloway destroyed them with her laser, turning what was the middle into the ruins of Tetanus Wilds.
- The Cautious Traveller's Guide To The Wastelands: After the train loses the majority of its water a quarter of the way through the novel, the Crows of the Company demand that First Class is prioritized in the water rationing, while they hoard no less than six jugs of water for themselves.
- Averted towards the end, when the hyphae fully overtakes the train and creates a sort of Hive Mind, combined with what's implied to be some members of the crew and the passengers tripping on mushrooms, everyone starts dancing together, forgetting the class divide.
- In The Expanse, corporations on Earth (and even Mars) make big bucks by sending people to space beyond Mars's orbit — or hiring people already born there, commonly called Belters — to extract minerals from asteroids. Unsurprisingly, these corpos do whatever they can to prevent something like concern for their workers from cutting into their juicy profits, which creates a lot of friction throughout the series.
- In Leviathan Wakes, a corrupt pharmaceutical firm sets up a fake Distress Call whose victim ends up being one of the few freighters supplying water to a colony on Ceres, igniting an interplanetary war that draws everyone's attention away from said firm's horrific experiments involving infecting everyone on a backwater colony on Eros with a mysterious nanomachine. The broadcast of that experiment's results prompts a Belter militia to launch an enthusiastic assault on a small station made to crunch numbers from it to deliver vigilante justice.
- The short story "The Butcher of Anderson Station" expands on Fred Johnson's backstory briefly mentioned in Leviathan Wakes. Someone on the eponymous station murders the administrator from Earth for doing nothing to address the locals' horrible living conditions except telling them to work harder so they will earn more. United Nations retaliate by sending a marine squad led by Fred Johnson to massacre unruly locals. Fred Johnson resigns in disgust when he finds out the command has lied to him by jamming the locals' surrender message so he could make an example out of them, and eventually becomes one of the leaders in the Outer Planets Alliance.
- Cibola Burn focuses on a conflict between two groups of settlers on a resource-rich extrasolar planet. The first group consists of War Refugees from the Ganymede conflict that drifted from port to port —denied entry at each one— until deciding in an act of desperation to beeline towards a newly opened ring leading to a planet they've called Ilus. The other group consists of Royal Charter Energy-backed scientists who want to study that planet carefully (calling it New Terra) and aren't exactly keen on the first settlers already muddling the local biosphere. Neither are the first settlers keen on some distant corporation once again trying to piggyback on their hard work, leading to some of them sabotaging a landing zone for an RCE's shuttle. The (unintentionally) catastrophic results cause tensions to eventually escalate into RCE's chief security officer establishing martial law, which Holden and Amos suspect he's always wanted to do.
- In Nemesis Games, a Belter extremist organisation Free Navy sees many Belters joining over fears of plentiful resources in Earthlike environments provided by extrasolar planets giving corporations no reason to support Belters and their medical complications caused by living in precarious space habitats. Unfortunately for them, Free Navy is led by Marco Inaros, an antisocial narcissist who doesn't give a shit about his fellow Belters' plight as he instead uses them to bring about a tragedy Joe Miller predicted way back in Leviathan Wakes: Bombarding Earth with asteroids. Over the course of Babylon's Ashes, Marco proves to be no better than the "Inners" as he ruthlessly excludes anyone who inconveniences him from his circle of "true Belters" who can enjoy Free Navy's spoils of war.
- Germinal: Étienne Lantier leads the coal miners of Montsou into a strike against their low wages. Notably, Lantier has read Marx, quotes several of his theories and has contacts with the International Workingmen's Association
.
- Invitation to The Game: Working people openly resent the Unemployed who live off of their tax money. Citizens are even debating if the unemployed should be sterilized to cut down on overcrowding since there's so many of them. Meanwhile Unemployed are at the lowest rung; while they don't pay for housing and get monthly credits to buy food and cleaning, everything else has to be scrounged for and much of it is denied them, even such things as newspapers, real coffee, high-quality food, and actual meat. Plus they can't leave their area without permission, the only thing resembling a job they can take is making trinkets such as paintings or toys for the working rich, and can't wear anything resembling worker's clothing. (If they're caught trying to hop onto trains without permission or leave their area, they're likely to be swiftly captured by the thought police and have their brains scrambled.) They're not even allowed to vote. There's hints of underground protest groups who feel the Unemployed should have jobs and the Government is corrupt, but it's only mentioned in passing by some fliers kicked up in the dust of a copter. The somewhat-skilled Unemployed are also, once they prove capable as a group in The Game, shipped off en masse to other planets to settle permanently without being asked. However, they're also written off by the Government as "dead" in part because workers would likely be furious to learn their money was going both to support the Unemployed and to ship them out through space, even if it's a one-way trip.
- Harry Potter:
- Part of the rivalry between Ron and Draco is due to the fact that the Weasley family, up until the third book, is relatively poor, while the Malfoys have prestige and the money to back it up; Draco immediately identifies Ron by having a hand-me-down robe in the first book, in addition to him being a ginger. Even when the Weasley family wins a contest in the third book, Malfoy still finds other reasons to pick on Ron, showing he sees him as inferior, still.
- When Hermione learns about the conditions of the (slaves) house-elves working in the Hogwarts kitchens, she creates the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare.
- Heavenly Tyrant: After Wu Zetain became Empress, her next goal was to overthrow the capitalist oligarchs that have not only enslaved women but oppressed the lower classes for their greed. With Qin Zheng's help, their revolution became bloody and violent as they executed the elites.
- The Hunger Games: Every district produces things to maintain those in the Capitol. Even though the excuse for the revolution was the treatment of the tributes, the underlying reason for civil unrest was the unjust state of affairs where the districts produced for the Capitol and were left almost starving.
- Night Watch (Discworld): Zig-Zagged. The story (outside of the Time Travel) is a Whole-Plot Reference Les Misérables, so there is a populist revolution in Ankh-Morpork against the ruling class of the city, but it turns out to be a Staged Populist Uprising, meant to distract from the assassination of Lord Winder in order to install Mad Lord Snapcase as Patrician of the city.
Live-Action TV
- 3rd Rock from the Sun: In the episode "Dick Strikes Out," Dick comes up with the idea of the teachers going on strike to protest changes that are being made by the new chancellor, but then he doesn't join the strike himself. Hilariously, Dick believes that he personally invented the concept of a strike and doesn't realize that It's Been Done.
- Babylon 5: The A-plot of season one's "By Any Means Necessary" revolves around a major labor dispute with B5's dockworkers' union following a major accident. Commander Sinclair is sympathetic but is forced into a confrontation by the Senate's strikebreaker, who makes a token attempt at negotiating an end (read: threatening the strikers to back down) before invoking the Rush Act, which commands Sinclair to end it "by any means necessary". Sinclair uses this authority to give in to the strikers' demands, remarking to the Senate's man, "You should never hand someone a gun unless you're sure where they'll point it."
- The Expanse: Belters are frequently depicted as being treated like disposable working class by corporations on Earth and Mars; just about every conflict Belters have with the latter two groups stems from the historic oppression, both real and perceived, that Belters have endured at their hands.
- Frasier: The episode "Sleeping with the Enemy" involves the radio crew going on strike after they don't get their annual raise. Frasier convinces the on-air talent to hold a sympathy strike to strengthen the crew's position. He eventually takes over negotiations with the station manager... and ends up making out with her while arguing over the size of the pay raise.
- The Gilded Age: Mr. Russel, a very wealthy Nouveau Riche owner of steel mills, railroads, and other big industry businesses, has a class conflict with Mr. Henderson, a Union Leader at one of Mr. Russel’s factories.
- Class resentment is a recurring theme throughout Homicide: Life on the Street.
- Detectives from working-class backgrounds would frequently snark about upper-class suspects' wealth and compare it to their own upbringings. It also was used for various character conflicts; for instance, Lewis and Pembleton - implicitly from a middle to upper-middle-class background - butt heads multiple times over the latter's tendency to suspect lower class, often black people to be guilty despite being black himself.
- In "The True Test", Lewis and Bayliss try to prove the guilt of a wealthy, sociopathic teenager who murdered a scholarship student at his prep school. Bayliss expressed a particular desire to expose the teenager because he recognized that he killed his victim because the teenager felt the student didn't belong because of his class. Despite being from an upper-middle-class background, Bayliss noted his cousin was rejected from the same school because their family was only a generation away from the working class.
- Downplayed in "See No Evil". Felton admits he wasn't able to see his childhood friend Chuckie's father was abusive because he was poor and naively thought Chuckie's life had to be perfect because of his wealth.
- Leverage: Downplayed. The thieves that make up Team Leverage are affluent themselves— in part because their primary income stream is shorting the stock of the companies that they publicly ruin— but are mostly hired by working-class people to go after people who have had a direct hand in ruining their lives and livelihoods. Targets of the Leverage team typically include Corrupt Corporate Executives, other con artists, or people running criminal operations that the law can't or refuses to touch. As Nate says in the intro from Seasons 2-4:
"The rich and powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you."
- In the Communist Quiz sketch in Monty Python's Flying Circus, genial host Eric Idle asks an easy introductory question to contestant Karl Marx:
The struggle of class against class is a what struggle?
- The Nanny: In "The Strike", Fran refuses to cross a picket line of striking busboys at the party for Maxwell's newest play, a stage adaptation of Norma Rae, a story about a strike, fittingly enough. And when Maxwell tries to force Fran through the picket line, it turns into a tabloid scandal.
- Scrubs: The nurses try to go on strike for better working conditions and a pay raise. However, Dr. Kelso points out that their union contract forbids them from striking. So the nurses start to create a slowdown of their paperwork that when Dr. Kelson returns later, he sees everyone moving slowly. However, this only applies to the paperwork; the patients still receive their full care.
- Snowpiercer: The main theme of the series is the struggle for status and resources, whether between classes of passengers or between passengers and "taillies", who boarded the train without tickets. A general strike by Third Class passengers occurs after the First Class scion who murdered one of them is pardoned while Wilford takes over the train by fanning inter-class tensions.
- Star Trek: The Original Series: "The Cloud Minders" has the Enterprise get caught up in a conflict on a world whose society is so stratified, one class of people live in floating cities, while the other toils in caves, being exposed to elements that cause cognitive deficiencies.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: "Bar Association" has Rom unionize the other workers at Quark's bar, demanding better pay and working conditions, which attracts unpleasant attention from the anti-union Ferengi authorities.
- Superstore: The first season finale has the Cloud 9 employees go on strike to protest Glenn's firing and the store's lax medical compensation. (These are related. Glenn was fired after he suspended Cheyenne with pay in a thinly veiled attempt to give her the maternity leave she was entitled to.) The strike gets resolved in the second season premiere with no real change.
- Taxi: The cabbies go on strike to protest working conditions.
- Veronica Mars: The show takes place in the fictional town of Neptune, California, which is fairly evenly-divided between working-class and ultra-wealthy residents, and the tension between these two groups is a frequent source of conflict in the first two seasons.
- The Wire deals with class divide both between different strata of Baltimore society, and within those strata.
- While the main conflict is between the police and the drug dealers, the police have their own internal politics between the rank and file and the brass, and the dealers have their own class of high-up dealers and disposable corner boys, and further still, the dealers see the junkies as the lowest of lower class.
- Season two's plot involves the Longshoremen's union and their struggle with the effects of de-industrialization and death of traditional working-class communities, and while investigating the death of 13 women who were being brought over for debt-peonage sex work, port police Beadie remarks "what they need is a union".
- Season four demonstrates the class differences inside the more impoverished community, with Namond Brice being a spoiled rich kid of Wee-Bay, the Barksdale enforcer seen in season 1, Randy being an entrepreneurial kid with a stable but still lower middle class foster mom, Michael being an already hardered, self-reliant de facto caretaker to his little brother living with their addict mother, and Dukie is already near-homeless. At the end of the season, retired major Colvin takes a shine to Namond, and adopts him as a way to save him from having to survive in the drug trade he's unsuited for, while Lieutenant Carver tries his best to help Randy after her foster mother's home is fire bombed but is unable to help due to lack of resources both from his end and Randy's background, while Michael and Dukie end up having to fend for themselves.
Music
- The opening lines of Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" has an unemployed man named Tommy facing tough times after he loses his job at the docks when the union went on strike, and had to pawn his guitar for extra money, while his girlfriend Gina becomes the breadwinner and has to work overtime at the diner to make ends meet.
- Bear Ghost's song "Big Town Banky Blaine's Rockabilly BBQ" uses a cannibalistic barbecue restaurant that forces people to fight for entertainment and eats the loser as a metaphor for class struggle. In the song's bridge, the singer is shot dead after declaring his intent to unionize and try to change the system.
- Merle Travis wrote the song "Sixteen Tons" in 1946, about the conditions coal miners work under. Its most famous version is a cover by Tennessee Ernie Ford.
Philosophy
- Adam Smith believed that the accumulation of property in the hands of a minority caused chaos because of the inequalities, and that only government was able to prevent the lower classes from overtaking the wealth of the upper classes and the upper classes from oppressing the lower classes.
For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate, that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security.
The Wealth of Nations
- John Stuart Mill argued in Considerations on Representative Government that a representative government has to provide a relatively equal balance of power between workmen and masters.
- Karl Marx was a proponent of historical materialism according to which history mostly moves according to economic and material factors. One of the consequences of this view is that the possession of the distribution of the production surplus is the main subject of struggle between the upper and the lower classes across all modes of production, whether in slavery, feudalism or capitalism. Because Communism is a society where social classes have been abolished, class struggle ceases to exist as well.
Podcasts
- The Magnus Archives: Two of the Dread Powers, the Vast and the Buried, are thematic opposites when it comes to class struggle. The Vast is a manifestation of the fear of incomprehensible scale and insignificance, and several of its Avatars are affluent and well-off. The Buried, the manifestation of suffocation, choking, and being Buried Alive, has several thematic connections to debt and financial struggle, with its last attempt at a ritual occurring in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis.
Tabletop Games
- Blades in the Dark: While class struggle has already been suggested in the base game, with the Coalridge Ironworks labor trying to unionize, while their foremen hire thugs to bust their efforts, this topic is much more prominent in the Deep Cuts expansion, where the Rail Jacks (railroad workers) join the Ironworks labor in demanding a union, while the Dockers (dock workers), an ostensible guild that has been effectively functioning as a union, faces increased scrutiny by the union-busting City Council as a result of the above. Meanwhile, the Council has also forced the Brigade (professional firefighters) to stand by idly when a union building in Coalridge burned down, involving them in the fight against their will.
- Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory is a 2023 Political Strategy Board Game, where each player controls an entire social class in an abstract modern Western society and must improve their material conditions to win. In the two-player mode, only the capitalist and the working class are available, who are joined by the middle class in the three-player mode and the state, in the four-player mode. The game's design makes sure that different classes have to rely on each other to advance their agenda, but simultaneously, improving the material conditions of one class necessarily cuts into the well-being of another.
Theatre
- The Cherry Orchard tells a story of class struggle in Russia at the turn of the 20th century. The upper class is represented by the Ranevskaya family, who are rapidly running out of money because matriarch Lyubov keeps acting as if her financial problems will be miraculously solved by virtue of her being a former aristocrat. The lower class is represented by the family's servants (one of whom, Firs the Old Retainer, laments that things were better when they were owned by the rich), and the idealistic student and would-be revolutionary Trofimov, who romances Lyubov's daughter Anya and lectures her about the inhumanity of serfdom. Interestingly, The Cherry Orchard also has Yermolai Lopakhin, who represents the rarely-seen middle class: he was born into abject poverty as the son of a serf but worked his tail off to gain wealth and respect, although the Ranevskayas still see him as little more than a peasant because that's the class he was born into. Ultimately, Lopakhin is the one who comes out on top, as he buys the Ranevskaya estate and plans to subdivide its land into summer cottages for his fellow members of the middle class to enjoy.
Video Games
- BioShock: Rapture is founded on objectivist ideals, which essentially allows capitalism and rationalism to run rampant; while on paper, everyone in Rapture is equal, as Frank Fontaine puts it in an audio log, "[people] come to Rapture thinking they're gonna be captains of industry, but they all forget that somebody's gotta scrub the toilets". After Fontaine ends up getting killed for trying to foment a revolt against Andrew Ryan and the rest of Rapture's leadership, and the mysterious, working-class revolutionary 'Atlas' successfully leads one...but then it turns out that Fontaine faked his death, and is Atlas, and has been using the player character to take control of Rapture.
- BioShock Infinite: The flying city of Columbia, a New Eden led by the prophet Comstock, at first glance looks like a clean and shining Gilded Age utopia, but is actually a racist theocracy heavily dependent on glorified slave labor (because naturally, Comstocks flock of God-fearing WASPS couldn't be expected to actually work in their little paradise) using black and ethnic workers brought up from the surface to toil for almost nothing. This soon led to the creation of the Vox Populi, a La Résistance of working-class rebels that go from small-scale terrorism to open civil war as the game progresses.
- Disco Elysium: It depicts a strike by the Debardeur's Union (the dockworkers) as a backdrop. However, the strike itself quickly takes center stage as it becomes clear that a militant arm of the union killed a man. And one of the man's colleagues, a heavily-armed, armored and borderline psychotic super soldier, is riling up some scabs outside the docks to try to foment unrest and get revenge through violence. The more you dig into the strike, though, the more ridiculous it seems: the dockworkers aren't striking for better pay or more benefits, which they already enjoy. They're striking to make "every dockworker a board member", a patently ridiculous demand and union leader Evrart knows it. He's using the strike for his own personal gain.
- Dynasty Warriors: Origins: The Yellow Turban Rebellion has shades of this, as it is a populist uprising led by Zhang Jiao against the increasingly corrupt Han Empire. The opening cinematic depicts a group of corrupt Han soldiers seizing goods from the peasantry, going so far as to attack a child until the protagonist intervenes. As the story progresses, it's made clear that the root cause is a group of eunuchs known as the Ten Attendants, whose corrosive influence has infested the imperial government as a whole to the point that the Yellow Turbans find plenty of recruits from peasants eager to strike back at their oppressors. Unfortunately, despite Zhang Jiao's efforts, some of the Yellow Turbans decide to take advantage of the chaos to enrich themselves...
- A good chunk of the conflict in Final Fantasy Tactics stems from the highborn looking down on the lowborn and treating them with disdain. After the Fifty Years War, a lot of the soldiers that fought in it were turned away from their highborn masters and were made to live in squalor. This eventually causes a group of lowborn to band together and form the Corpse Brigade where they aim to take down the nobility so that the poor can reclaim what they feel is rightfully theirs. The conflict between the haves and have-nots affect Ramza (noble) and his friend Delita (commoner) in different ways, which is brought out in the open after Delita's sister is killed by their former team member who is a highborn and has a very low opinion on commoners; Ramza distances himself from his nobility and becomes a mercenary while Delita aims to fight the corrupt class system from within.
- Final Fantasy XIV:
- A recurring source of conflict in Ul'dah is the wealth gap between its richest and poorest citizens. Despite being the wealthiest of the Eorzean city-states, a handful of oligarchs in Ul'dah's ruling body, the Syndicate, hoard most of the wealth while the poor scrape by in shantytowns if they're unable to find lodging inside the city. Sultana Nanamo Ul Namo wishes to institute welfare policies to bridge this gap, but is constantly overruled by the Syndicate, which is willing to send assassins after young entrepreneurs who seek to unseat them.
- In Ishgard, there is a system of haves and have-nots due to the tenets of the Enchiridion, the city-state's holiest religious texts. According to legends of the nation's founding, the Four High Houses are descended from the comrades of the founder King Thordan I who survived their battle with the fell wyrm Nidhogg. These houses and their relatives make up the rich nobility, while the lowborn live in crumbling infrastructure that struggles to guard them against the eternal winter that Bahamut's rampage trapped Coerthas in. This system is upended when testimony from the heroes, Hraesvelgr, and Midgardsormr reveal the truth of the Dragonsong War and Ishgard's founding, namely that Thordan was not a hero-king but a betrayer who murdered the great wyrm Ratatoskr out of fear and paranoia. There are several questlines afterward devoted to Ishgard's struggles to transition away from a thousand years of tradition into a new reality where there are no real differences between highborn and lowborn.
- The Ilsabardian city-state of Bozja has a Fantastic Caste System where an oligarchy holds most of the wealth while the lowborn starve. The wealth gap is even more severe than Ul'dah's, as 7 out of 10 people live below the poverty line. This class divide was so severe that the Garlean Empire's occupation of the city-state improved conditions by instituting greater access to education and healthcare. This leads to tension within the Resistance and the IVth Legion, as there are nobles in the Resistance who want to restore the old system while members of the IVth Legion are taken in by promises of a better nation than what came before it. Misjia acts as The Mole for Gabranth specifically because she knows the Awful Truth of the nation's legendary god-queen and refuses to go back to living in squalor.
- Hardspace: Shipbreaker: The player is effectively a slave owned by the Lynx Corporation from the moment they're first cloned. They're expected to perform dangerous work to pay off an exorbitant debt, all while basic needs (like air, or equipment that actually works) are sold at a premium. Also, they're outright forbidden from participating in any sort of collective action against this oppression. The final story level, called "Industrial Action", sees the player and their fellow shipbreakers step up and fight by opting to destroy the current ships they're working on, in order to force Lynx to come to the bargaining table.
- The backdrop of Night in the Woods is the almost total economic failure of Possum Springs, a Dying Town somewhere in the Rust Belt that, due to the coal mine shutting down, has had a glut of businesses abandoning the city with basically everyone still in town living at or below the poverty line, with very high unemployment. A cult dedicated to something that may or may not exist in the old mines has risen up and is sacrificing troublemakers to this entity in an attempt to keep the town afloat... but it's clearly not working.
- Octopath Traveler II: A recurring theme of the game is class struggle, though more heavy-handedly in some characters' stories than others.
- Partitio Yellowil's story has him, his father, and his fellow miners be trodden on by a mysterious distant landlord and that landlord's goons, taking all their hard-earned value from Oresrush's silver mining and leaving them dry. Partitio helps stage an uprising and eventually takes his case all the way to the landowner himself, Roque Brillante, who had been a partner in the mining endeavor but had deceived Partitio's father to make off with the profits. This shapes Partitio's view of money as a tool to help those around him, and he sets out with the goal to use technology and his wealth to eradicate poverty.
- Hikari Ku's second chapter sees the rich folk of the town of Montwise holding an illegal underground fighting arena, which they feed by recruiting the best fighters around the world or just pulling in the downtrodden whenever they can, and then enriching themselves by gambling on the fights or investing in certain fighters. Their poor conditions, including mandatory deaths, eventually led to an uprising, spurred on by Hikari's ally Kazan, who had been working to topple the establishment for years while pretending to be nothing more than a bad-luck gambler.
- Agnea Bristarni's idol Dulcinea came from poverty but wants to smother that part of her past so she would not be looked down on as street rabble, and she wants to be the most well-known idol in the land of Solista. After she bought the deed to her hometown, she sends her goons to drive out the residents so she can build a theme park on top of it, not caring that they don't have anywhere to go. Agnea puts a stop to it on behalf of the townsfolk.
- Pentiment: While the whole game has a backdrop of the peasantry and townsfolk living under the increasingly exploitive rule of the local Abbey, the second act in particular takes place in the midst of the German Peasants' War, with the local firebrand Otto Zimmerman leading the peasants and townsfolk in demanding an end to the increasingly harsh restrictions placed upon them by their feudal lord.
- The Sinking City: The only parts of Oakmont that aren't flooded is the upper-class district of Reed Heights in the far north of the city, where, other than the constant rainfall, life is largely normal. The further south one gets, the further underwater— both literally and figuratively— the citizens of Oakmont get, with the majority of the refugees from Innsmouth forced to seek shelter in the run-down portions of the city near the docks. Several choices in the game involve how the protagonist, Charles Reed, helps or hurts the less fortunate in Oakmont; for instance, the Esoteric Order of Dagon is providing food and aid to the citizens of Oakmont while pretending to be a charity... but that aid is genuine, and if Reed chooses to sabotage it, there's mention of citizens getting sick from tainted fish later in the game.
- Warframe:
- In the game's backstory, the Orokin ruled over the entire Origin System. One of their lesser crimes was finding particularly good-looking members of the lower classes and inflicting 'continuity' upon them— feeding them Kuva that allowed the Orokin to transfer their consciousnesses from their current bodies into the new one they selected, therefore allowing immortality by way of possessing the bodies of younger, more healthy individuals. It's implied that the Orokin are descended from the rich and powerful who managed to survive at least eighteen nuclear wars on Earth by hiding in private bunkers.
- The faction of the Corpus cult that operates on Venus keeps an entire culture of colonists, known as the Solaris, in permanent indentured servitude ('debt-slavery' as the game puts it) that they accrue seemingly from birth. Two rebel factions of the Solaris exist in order to mitigate the damage the Corpus can do— Solaris United, which is dedicated to more traditional labor actions such as strikes and protecting workers rights, and Vox Solaris, which is responsible for more direct action, such as sabotaging the Orb Mothers that operate on Venus's surface.
Web Animation
- The Debbie and Carrie Show: Coming from a working class background, Sandy Smith as a lawyer and politician acts as a champion for the common people against corrupt political and business leaders who are taking advantage of abusive practices in a community to enrich themselves. For that she is called a "Communist".
- Helluva Boss: Imps were created for the express purpose of being subservient to the Goetia and the Seven Deadly Sins. This causes some chafing between Blitzo and Stolas, as they start off with transactional sex and that's all Blitzo thinks it is, and Stolas remains blind to the issues caused by such a power dynamic. Eventually, things come to a head when Andrealphus exploits this to try and have Blitzo executed for supposedly defying Goetia law as bait to drag Stolas into the mix and have him banished. This causes the imps' existential subservience to be explicitly stated on TV broadcasts all throughout hell, which causes the imps to start viewing the Goetia and Seven Deadly Sins as outright enemies.
Web Original
- SCP Foundation: SCP-4716, 'The Plutovore's Cookbook' (Pluto meaning 'Rich', 'vora' meaning 'consume') has the ability to generate recipes based on affluent and successful people which, when prepared and consumed, have detrimental effects on that person. The creator of it In-Universe, Gerard Hopworth, eventually uses it to kill a sect of Neo-Sarkics, leaving behind a copy of The Communist Manifesto just to emphasize the point.
Western Animation
- Arcane: The central conflict of the first season boils down to the disparity between Piltover, a shining city on a hill full of wealth, beauty, and where almost every character is a member of a noble house, and Zaun, a slum where characters are barely able to eke out a living by stealing or doing extremely dangerous work that benefits Piltover. On Piltover's side, the existence of Zaun is barely acknowledged, and only when they feel that the Zaunites are getting dangerous (and they never seem to acknowledge why Zaun might be angry at Piltover), while on the Zaun side the class disparity is a constant presence in their lives, with the main conflict being between Vander, who believes in appeasement and doesn't want to risk causing a stir, and Silco, who wants to win Zaun's independence by force.
- Ed, Edd n Eddy: In "Will Work for Ed", Eddy strikes on Ed's behalf when Rolf keeps deducting his pay while he's his "nincompoop".
- Futurama: Bender becomes a scab at a bending plant in "Bendless Love".
- Hey Arnold!: In the episode "Teacher's Strike", the teachers of Arnold's school go on strike because of inadequate funding. At first, Arnold and his friends are on cloud nine, but they start running into the teachers doing part-time jobs and find out that every lost school day will be taken from their summer vacation. Initially the teachers and Principal Wartz absolutely refuse to compromise, though when the students put their collective foot down and explain they just want to go back to school, both sides hear them and come to a compromise for the sake of the kids.
- KaBlam!: The wraparounds of "Year Round Fun" involve the show's writers going on strike, and Henry and June trying to run the show by themselves.
- The Legend of Korra: Season One sees the Equalists, led by Amon, revolt on behalf of common citizens against the domination of the Bender aristocracy.
- Miraculous Ladybug: The first five seasons of the series feature Marinette Dupain-Cheng, the daughter of a baker, becoming the superheroine Ladybug and protecting Paris from the machinations of Hawk Moth, who is secretly Gabriel Agreste, one of the city's wealthiest private citizens. While the class aspect of their conflict is mostly in the background for the first four seasons, it becomes more prominent in the fifth season, when Gabriel's son Adrien falls in love with Marinette, and Gabriel uses every lever afforded by his class to try and stop her from being with his son, not wanting the boy to end up with a mere baker girl. He even threatens to use his contacts as a prominent fashion designer to prevent her dreams of entering the business, which would almost certainly trap her in the working class.
- Rugrats: In "Angelica's Last Stand", Angelica starts a lemonade stand and hires the babies to be her helpers. However, she keeps all the money they make for herself by tricking the babies into thinking that her family needs it more because they're poor. When the babies explain the situation to Susie, she suspects that Angelica has been lying to them so she could keep all the money for herself and encourages the babies to go on strike unless she pays them for their services. Angelica tries to run her lemonade stand by herself, but without the babies' help, it goes out of business.
- The Simpsons:
- "Last Exit To Springfield" focuses on Burns's attempts to screw over the union at the power plant by removing their dental plan; Homer steps up to become the union president after Lisa's dentist says she needs braces, and he doesn't want to pay the out-of-pocket costs for them.
- In "Homer's Enemy", part of the reason Frank Grimes detests Homer is that Homer can afford a lobster dinner and to provide for a wife and three children on a salary at a nuclear plant, while Grimes has struggled his whole life and has nothing to show for it.
- Like the Hey Arnold! example, "The PTA Disbands" initially plays with this trope when the teachers are finally fed up with Principal Skinner's ridiculous budget cuts, which have gotten to the point that the school is nearly unable to function. However, it's actually a subversion - Springfield Elementary is on a shoe-string budget which that has been cut down to the bone by the state government and the towns blank refusal against any sort of raised taxes, meaning that Skinner isn't being greedy, he literally has almost nothing to work with. By the end of the episode, the school solves its current budget woes by renting out the classroom coat rooms as prison cells for the overcrowded prison system, forcing the kids to share space with hardened criminals.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In the episode “Squid On Strike”, Squidward encourages SpongeBob to join him in a strike against Mr. Krabs because of all the petty deductions he makes on their salaries.
