Throughout most of history, when overt political conflict between classes did appear, it took the form of pleas for debt cancellation—the freeing of those in bondage and, usually, a more just reallocation of the land. What we see in the Bible and other religious traditions are traces of the moral arguments by which such claims were justified, usually subject to all sorts of imaginative twists and turns, but inevitably, to some degree, incorporating the language of the marketplace itself.
