a) The class of industrial wage earners who, possessing neither capital nor the means of production, must sell their labour in order to earn their living b) The poorest class of working people
The class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live The working class See also the Marxism FAQ Part 7 - excerpts from Engels' Principles of Communism
Commonalty (See Proletaire ) Italy has a clerical aristocracy, rich, idle, and corrupt; and a clerical proletariat, needy and grossly ignorant - The Times Prometheus (3 syl ) made men of clay, and stole fire from heaven to animate them For this he was chained by Zeus to Mount Caucasus, where an eagle preyed on his liver daily The word means Forethought, and one of his brothers was Epimetheus or Afterthought Faster bound to Aaron's charming eyes Than is Prometheus tied to Caucasus Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus, ii 1 Promethean Capable of producing fire; pertaining to Prometheus (q v )
Defined by Karl Marx (1818-1883) as the working class whose members do not own the means of production, who must sell their labor to subsist, and who are alienated from society See Alienation
The proletariat is a term used to refer to workers without high status, especially industrial workers. a struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. = working class. the proletariat the class of workers who own no property and work for wages, especially in factories, building things etc - used in socialist writings (prolétariat, from proletarius; PROLETARIAN). The lowest, or one among the lowest, economic and social classes in a society. In ancient Rome, the proletariat were poor landless freemen who, crowded out of the labour market by the extension of slavery, became parasites on the economy. Karl Marx used the term to refer to the class of wage earners engaged in industrial production only (the broader term working class included all those obliged to work for a living). Another of Marx's categories, the lumpenproletariat (lumpen meaning "rags"), comprised marginal and unemployable workers, paupers, beggars, and criminals. Marxian theory predicted a transitional phase between the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of communism during which a "dictatorship of the proletariat" would suppress resistance to the socialist revolution by the bourgeoisie, destroy the social relations of production underlying the class system, and create a new, classless society