Socialist thinkers such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin argue that economic class, rather than nationality, race, or culture, is the main force which divides people in society, and that nationalist ideology is a propaganda tool of a society's dominant economic class. From this perspective, it is in the ruling class' interest to promote nationalism in order to hide the inherent class conflicts at play within a given society (such as the exploitation of workers by capitalists for profit). Therefore, socialists see nationalism as a form of ideological control arising from a society's given mode of economic production (see dominant ideology).