Weber, like Marx, saw class conflict to be an endemic feature of a capitalist society. This view is apparent from his early writings on East Prussia. In these, Weber examined the decline of patriarchal agricultural relations consequent upon the rise of capitalism on the land and in manufacture. The end of a common interest of workers and landowners in the success of the harvest meant the beginning of unavoidable conflict between classes whose only relations were those of the market. The Eastern landowners allied themselves with the nascent capitalist manufacturers and "joined with them in common struggle against the demands of labour".¹ In his lectures of 1919–20 on economic history, Weber similarly remarked that under the capitalist conditions of the free sale of labour, workers "actually under the compulsion of the whip of hunger, offer themselves".²