Proletariat Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The term proletariat refers to a political, social, and historical idea used to describe the class of people who do not own any means of production, and who sell their labor power to capitalists—or the bourgeoisie—in order to earn enough money to provide for their families’ immediate material needs. Although the term itself predates the work of the German communist Karl Marx, communists and socialists have used it predominantly since Marx’s time to describe the industrial working class in modern capitalism.

Proletarians’ lack of productive property requires them to sell their labor power in the marketplace to the capitalists who control the means of production. While Marxists recognize that proletarians have existed throughout much of human history under different modes of production, it is only under modern capitalism that the proletariat emerges as the main productive class in society; their labor creates the foundation for all social wealth.

According to Marxist theory, the bourgeoisie’s exploitation of the proletariat’s labor power is the source of the profit, or surplus value, capitalists earn. In this sense, the bourgeoisie is a parasitic class that adds nothing to social production itself and lives off the labor of the proletariat. The proletariat’s position as both a productive and an exploited class gives it a special historical role to play in leading humanity beyond the divisions of class society and toward a new socialist or communist future. Because the bourgeoisie has no choice but to exploit the proletariat in order to maintain its profits, the proletariat is necessarily in an antagonistic opposition to capitalist society itself. The proletariat is thus a revolutionary class with a material interest in transcending capitalism. The proletariat’s role as a productive class means that it has no incentive in developing new exploitive class relationships to its own benefit and therefore is in a unique position of being able to lead humanity toward the classless society of the future.

The historical accuracy of the Marxist conception of the proletariat and its historical mission remains the subject of intense controversy and dispute among social scientists. Most historians recognize that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an organized workers movement led by unions, socialists, and communists did constitute the most important challenge to capitalist society. Moreover, in the early twentieth century, spontaneous revolutions led by the working class broke out in several European countries in the aftermath of World War I (1914–1918), leading to the establishment of ostensibly socialist or communist governments in several countries.

However, in most instances, socialist and communist parties led these movements and their precise relationship to the working class remains unclear. Many historians argue that the most important of these revolutions—the Russian Revolution of 1917—was in fact a coup led not by the spontaneous action of workers, but by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Party, an elite group of revolutionaries—many of whom were not proletarians.

More recently, the importance of the proletariat within Marxist theory itself has also been challenged. In the 1960s, German political theorist Herbert Marcuse argued that the proletariat had been recuperated by capitalism’s consumer society and was no longer a revolutionary class. More recently, others have argued that capitalist restructuring has led to a decline in importance of the industrial working class and the rise of a new white-collar proletariat, who—while still property less laborers—have a managerial mentality and are thus unable to distinguish themselves from the capitalists who exploit them.

Still others have claimed that in the new era of global capitalism, the proletariat has been replaced as the proper agent of historical change by a new global class of impoverished and marginalized people who may or may not be proletarians in the sociological sense of the term.

Bibliography:

Engles, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. New York:Verso, 2001.
Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Essays in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972.
Mallet, Serge. Essays on the New Working Class. New York:Telos Press, 1975.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies. New York: Beacon Press, 1991.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Penguin Books, 1968.
Perkins, Stephen. Marxism and the Proletariat: A Lukacsian Perspective. New York: Pluto Press, 1991.

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