By David Fields
Humans are accustomed to assuming that the essence of power lies within the structural violence of political authority. Yet, as they come into continuous contact with each other in all spheres of social life, an unfolding process of socialization, they undergo a moral internalization of rules. What ensues is a a state of human perplexity due to an ever present tension of guilt associated with appropriately conforming to a mode of human behavior that obeys these rules. An endogenous mechanism of internal authority thus evolves. In this sense, the manifestation of power lies in formation of a human conscience that constitutes an individual struggle of acting accordingly. As such, when investigating the nature of class conflict it is pertinent to assess the degree to which this is either contradictory or complementary to the aforementioned perception of power as specifically structural.