Proletariat
The proletariat[a] is the working class of capitalist society. A member of the proletariat is known as a proletarian.
While proletarians are, unlike slaves and peasants, not bound to any particular master, they also do not have any significant property of their own, and therefore tend to lack significant means of production. Therefore, the proletarians can only subsist by selling their ability to labour as a commodity on the market for purchase by the owners of the means of production, or bourgeoisie. The resulting relation of production is called wage labour. The price of their labouring power is called wages and is determined by the cost of reproduction of the class of labourers as a whole; that is, the average wage at which the necessary number of workers can continue to survive and fulfil their needs.
In the early 19th century, the progressive political economist Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi coined the term proletariat to refer to the new class of labourers which had begun to expand in developed Europe. As early as the 1840s, Karl Marx adopted Sismondi's term and predicted that the proletariat would continue to expand as a class at the expense of the middle class and the peasantry. Marx argued that as capitalist society continued to polarise itself into owners of huge means of production and propertyless, unbound labourers, the unavoidable resolution of this contradiction was a social revolution in which the labouring proletariat would collectively seize the means of production and bring about a society which lacked the class distinctions created by the existence of private property—a communist society.
Conditions
Under capitalism
Under industrial capitalism, proletarians are subjected to increasingly exploitative treatment by the capitalist owners. Although phenomenon the introduction of machines in the workplace makes production much more effective, this is very rarely to the material benefit of the proletariat and, on the contrary, incentivizes the bourgeoisie to continually lower the wages of the workers and otherwise reduce their quality of life down to the bare minimum for subsistence. Workers constantly are at risk of poverty simply due to the constant fluctuation and downturns in the economy.[1]
Composition
Substrata
Lumpenproletariat
The lumpenproletariat is composed of proletarians who are made outcasts and criminals in capitalist society. They are lacking in proletarian class consciousness and are often recruited by reactionary movements, although elements of them can be incorporated into the proletarian movement.
Labor aristocracy
The labor aristocracy refers to the particularly well-paid and privileged elements of the proletariat. In imperialist countries, the bourgeoisie provides a section of the working class with a certain amount of superprofits extracted from imperialized countries for the purposes of slowing the development of class consciousness. Members of the labor aristocracy includes major parts of highly-skilled artisans, intelligentsia, and bureaucrats who work within the bourgeois state machine.[2]
See also
- Dictatorship of the proletariat, a state ruled by the proletariat
References
- ↑ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1847). The Principles of Communism at the Marxists Internet Archive.
- ↑ Vladimir Lenin (September 11, 1913). Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 19, p. 369-371. Available on the Marxists Internet Archive.
"This aristocracy of labour, which at that time earned tolerably good wages, boxed itself up in narrow, self-interested craft unions, and isolated itself from the mass of the proletariat, while in politics it supported the liberal bourgeoisie. And to this very day perhaps nowhere in the world are there so many liberals among the advanced workers as in Britain."
Notes
- ↑ Ultimately from Latin prōlēs, translating to "offspring".
Classes | ||
|---|---|---|
 | Slavery | |
| Feudalism | ||
| Capitalism | ||
| Related | ||