Marx’s Conception of the Proletariat

Originally written: 15.09.2020.

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Hello everyone, this is part one of a project I have been working on, attempting to understand “how” and “what” Marx thought about class, with the eventual goal of revisiting the class-based analytical categories of materialist theory.

The origin of the term “Proletariat” goes back to Ancient Rome (around the sixth century BCE), where it was an administrative category. The Roman authorities conducted a census periodically, gathering info on the population to determine their duties as citizens. The ‘proletarius/proletarii’ (‘proletarian/proletarians’) referred to ‘a relatively large, but not well-defined, group of free, poor citizens’ whose only contribution to the state was through their children, their proles (offspring): proletarian meant ‘producer of offspring’, so literally someone whose only value was their ability and role to make children. The citizen’s proles (or ‘progeny’, ‘progéniture’ in French) could then serve the empire as soldiers. In other words, the offspring of the Roman proletarian was registered as their (only) wealth/property, which is certainly an interesting detail if we are to revisit the Marxist definition of the ‘proletariat’ under capitalism.[1]

The word ‘proletariat’ came back in late eighteenth-early nineteenth-century Europe. Initially, this category designated the estate of people without property, considered by the upper classes as ‘beyond honor’. At this point this referred to an amorphous mass comprised not only of workers, but also what was described – somewhat repeating bourgeois prejudices acritically – by Hal Draper as “adventitious, unsettled, irregular, and disreputable elements, including itinerant workers and vagrants shading into malefactors.” [2] As Marcel van der Linden describes,

Gradually a differentiation was made that could have one of two outcomes: either the workers declared that they were not proletarians, but a separate class or estate, or they identified with the proletariat and started to see the other groups, who had previously also been considered as proletarians, to be ‘less’ and ‘different’. The German communist workers in London, with whom Marx and Engels were associated, favoured the second outcome. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, which Marx and Engels were instructed to write for these workers on the basis of common discussions, ‘the modern working class – the proletarians’ were seen as a unity. The thieves, beggars, and prostitutes were now devaluated as a lower stratum, the lumpenproletariat [3]

Let’s now go through Marx’s own descriptions and thoughts about the proletariat.

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Marx’s Writings

Marx identified early on the proletariat as the only revolutionary force capable of bringing about the transcendence of capitalism, i.e., communism. In other words, under the capitalist mode of production, the proletariat is identified as the central revolutionary social class, just as the ‘young’ (pre-capitalist) bourgeoisie had the historical role of overthrowing the feudal social order.

And Marx then arrives at his conclusion about the revolutionary character of the proletariat in bourgeois society,

So where is the real possibility of a German emancipation? We answer: in the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetrated against it. This class can no longer lay claim to a historical status, but only to a human one. It is not in a one-sided opposition to the consequences of the German political regime, it is in total opposition to its presuppositions. It is, finally, a sphere that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating these other spheres themselves. In a word, it is the complete redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat. [4]

I’m adding here the last paragraphs of this introduction because it’s also about the proletariat (it’s right after the quote above),

The proletariat is beginning to appear in Germany as a result of the rising industrial movement. For, it is not the naturally arising poor but the artificially impoverished, not the human masses mechanically oppressed by the gravity of society, but the masses resulting from the drastic dissolution of society, mainly of the middle estate, that form the proletariat, although, as is easily understood, the naturally arising poor and the Christian-Germanic serfs gradually join its ranks. By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order, the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has raised to the rank of its principle, what is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society without its own participation. The proletarian then finds himself possessing the same right in regard to the world which is coming into being as the German king in regard to the world which has come into being when he calls the people his people, as he calls the horse his horse. By declaring the people his private property, the king merely proclaims that the owner of property is king. As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy. And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people, the emancipation of the Germans into men will be accomplished. Let us sum up the result: The only liberation of Germany which is practically possible is liberation from the point of view of that theory which declares man to be the supreme being for man. Germany can emancipate itself from the Middle Ages only if it emancipates itself at the same time from the partial victories over the Middle Ages. In Germany, no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage. Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy. When all the inner conditions are met, the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the cock of Gaul.

Marx was deeply impressed by the rebellion of Silesian weavers, in which, as he wrote in his article ‘Critical Notes on the Article: “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian” ‘,

the proletariat at once, in a striking, sharp, unrestrained and powerful manner, proclaims its opposition to the society of private property. The Silesian rebellion begins precisely with what the French and English workers’ uprisings end, with consciousness of the nature of the proletariat. The action itself bears the stamp of this superior character. Not only were machines, these rivals of the workers, destroyed, but also ledgers, the titles to property. And while all other movements were aimed primarily only against the owner of the industrial enterprise, the visible enemy, this movement is at the same time directed against the banker, the hidden enemy.

The proletariat is here identified as the active agent of the revolt. Still in 1844, Marx and Engels co-wrote The Holy Family, in which Marx continued the thread of the argument,

When socialist writers ascribe this historic role to the proletariat, it is not, as Critical Criticism pretends to think, because they consider the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete in the full- grown proletariat; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in all their inhuman acuity; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need—that practical ex- pression of necessity—is driven directly to revolt against that inhumanity; it follows that the proletariat can and must free itself. But it cannot free itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. The question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of the proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is irrevocably and obviously demonstrated in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today. There is no need to dwell here upon the fact that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity. [5]

Now let’s quickly look into The German Ideology, written in 1845-6. In this famous text, Marx (among many other comments and observations) says that abolishing ‘alienation’ (or, as Bertell Ollman calls it, the condition of man in capitalist society) requires in part, that the latter “ have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless” “, which likely refers to the process of proletarianization (right?). In other words, overthrowing capitalist alienation would require that a great majority of the population be subjected to it, i.e., becomes proletarian, if I understood this correctly…  Here is another passage about the proletariat, addressing the social condition of proletarians and why their self-emancipation can only assert itself through overthrowing the State:

For the proletarians, on the other hand, the condition of their existence, labour, and with it all the conditions of existence governing modern society, have become something accidental, something over which they, as separate individuals, have no control, and over which no social organisation can give them control. The contradiction between the individuality of each separate proletarian and labour, the condition of life forced upon him, becomes evident to him himself, for he is sacrificed from youth upwards and, within his own class, has no chance of arriving at the conditions which would place him in the other class. Thus, while the refugee serfs only wished to be free to develop and assert those conditions of existence which were already there, and hence, in the end, only arrived at free labour, the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State.

And most importantly, as apparent in the above quotes from the German Ideology, Marx posits that abolishing bourgeois society requires the collective appropriation of all productive forces and that this can only occur through the revolutionary emancipation (led by) of the proletariat.

Only the proletarians of the present day, who are completely shut off from all self-activity, are in a position to achieve a complete and no longer restricted self-activity, which consists in the appropriation of a totality of productive forces and in the thus postulated development of a totality of capacities. All earlier revolutionary appropriations were restricted; individuals, whose self-activity was restricted by a crude instrument of production and a limited intercourse, appropriated this crude instrument of production, and hence merely achieved a new state of limitation. Their instrument of production became their property, but they themselves remained subordinate to the division of labour and their own instrument of production. In all expropriations up to now, a mass of individuals remained subservient to a single instrument of production; in the appropriation by the proletarians, a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all. Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals, therefore, only when controlled by all.

In other words, emancipation from capitalism (i.e., abolishing it) can only come about through

a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, which are required to accomplish the appropriation, and the proletariat moreover rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.

By 1847, when he wrote The Poverty of Philosophy, van der Linden points out, Marx came to call the proletariat specifically a ‘class’, as opposed to an ‘estate’ as in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (as can be seen in the quote above).

In the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, for example, the proletariat was still called an ‘estate’. But this confusion did not last long. In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) the proletariat had already become a ‘class’. In this text, he says that the proletariat was what has since been termed (as far as I know, it isn’t in Marx’s text but it flows quite naturally from what his line of argument), a ‘class in itself’, a class in the objective sense. The ‘[economic] conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers’, making it ‘a class as against capital, but not yet for itself.’ That is, this mass of people had yet to constitute itself as such (as a ‘class for itself’), so that the ‘interests it defends become class interests.’

The condition for the emancipation of the proletariat as a class, and simultaneously of society from the capitalist mode of production, requires the definitive abolition of class domination, a very important dimension of Marx’s conception of class-based emancipation:

Does this mean that after the fall of the old society there will be a new class domination culminating in a new political power? No. The condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of every class, just as the condition for the liberation of the third estate of the bourgeois order, was the abolition of all estates and all orders. The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society. Meanwhile the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the opposition of classes should culminate in brutal contradiction, the shock of body against body, as its final denouement? Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement which is not at the same time social. It is only in an order ofthings in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions. Till then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be: Le combat ou la mort; la lutte sanguinaire ou le niant. C’est ainsi que la question est invinciblement posée.

Now on to the Manifesto of the Communist Party [6]. Right at the beginning, Marx identifies the proletariat as one of the two big antagonistic classes of capitalist society, in opposition to the bourgeoisie. A major hypothesis in this text is that in this ‘epoch’, class antagonisms are gradually ‘simplified’ into the fundamental conflict between these two opposing classes. Thus Marx says that,

[of] all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry.

In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx quotes this and comments (in part)

The bourgeoisie is here conceived as a revolutionary class — as the bearer of large-scale industry — relative to the feudal lords and the lower middle class, who desire to maintain all social positions that are the creation of obsolete modes of production. thus, they do not form together with the bourgeoisie “only one reactionary mass”. On the other hand, the proletariat is revolutionary relative to the bourgeoisie because, having itself grown up on the basis of large-scale industry, it strives to strip off from production the capitalist character that the bourgeoisie seeks to perpetuate.

In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx famously portrays the working class as the revolutionary “gravediggers” of the bourgeoisie:

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as  within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

On the political  development of the proletariat, i.e., on the one hand the ‘organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party’, and simultaneously, the intra- and inter-class battles leading to the growth of the ‘ranks’ of the proletariat by various sections of other social groups “joining it” (hence why I highlighted that this is primarily political ):

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried. Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie. Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress. Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of oldsociety, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Before moving on, let us mention an example of Marx’s view of the radical political agency of the working class:

It is well known that the working class, so preponderant a part of a society that within living memory has no longer possessed a peasantry, is not represented in Parliament. Nevertheless, it is not without political influence. No important innovation, no decisive measure has ever been carried out in this country without pressure from without. . . . By pressure from without the Englishman understands large, extra-parliamentary people’s demonstrations, which naturally cannot be staged without the lively participation of the working class. . . . The Catholic Emancipation, the Reform Bill, the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Ten Hours Bill, the war against Russia, the rejection of Palmerston’s Conspiracy Bill,17 all were the fruit of stormy extra-parliamentary demonstrations, in which the working class, sometimes artificially incited, sometimes acting spontaneously, played the main role or—depending on circumstances—the role of spectator, now as persona dramatis, now as chorus. So much the more striking is the stance of the English working class toward the American Civil War. (153)

[“A London Workers’ Meeting” (Die Presse, February 2, 1862). Quoted in K.B.Anderson (2010), p.95.]

In his analyses of French society and politics focused on the eventful period of 1848 to 1852 [The Class Struggle in France, 1848-1850 (1850), and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)], Marx expressed his vision of the proletariat as revolutionary agent from a more political (and almost ‘empirical’, in a sense), and less abstract and theoretical, perspective, similar to what he had done in the Manifesto, but with much more details about class politics (which I won’t get into here). His viewpoint is summarized by Durand:

[The working class,] which was employed by the industrial bourgeoisie, led jointly with her the revolution of February 1848. Because it lacked political organization, its representatives were kept away from state power in June 1848 by the republican bourgeoisie, in the name of fraternity, i.e., the denial of class struggle According to Marx, the industrial proletariat is developed only as the industrial bourgeoisie is developed. It is only against this bourgeoisie that the proletariat asserts itself and elevates its revolution to the scale of a national revolution. Only by provoking a powerful counter-revolution and fighting against it does the proletariat constitutes itself into a truly revolutionary party. [7]

A kind of short summary of Marx’s political analysis of the role of the proletariat is that, “just as in the party of order the financial aristocracy necessarily came to be the head, so the proletariat came to be the head in the party of “anarchy.” “ In a nutshell, the class coalition in the February revolution was headed by the industrial bourgeoisie, but in the subsequent struggles the proletariat became the leading force: “This was a general coalition against the upper bourgeoisie and the government, just as in February. But this time the proletariat was the head of the revolutionary league.”

In these writings, we see most clearly, in direct political-analytical terms, how the proletariat is conceived by Marx as the unifying and truly (actually) radical revolutionary force that leads the broader social movements (which is a heterogenous mix of different sections of differents classes and social groups) through the ups and downs of social change in capitalist society. This radical role isn’t given, but built historically through the various manifestations of the (early, in Marx’s case) capitalist class struggle. And that’s one of the takeaways from these works: Marx’s analysis is an attempt to outline the (pretty chaotic) complex evolution of intra- and inter-class alliances and conflicts in the sphere of political struggles, and what these entail for the horizon of proletarian revolution.

Let’s take a look at some relevant passages in The Class Struggle in France, 1848-1850. The historical unfolding of class struggle makes it possible to have seemingly paradoxical occurrences of collaboration between bourgeois and proletarians, which implies that the uneven political relations between classes must be described (and eventually,  explained) in their actual ‘empirical’ complexity. The following extract describes the dialectical dynamic of class-qua-political struggle:

The struggle against capital in its developed and modern form, in its essential point, the struggle of the industrial wage worker against the industrial bourgeois, is in France but a partial fact, which, after the days of February, could all the less form the national content of the revolution, since the struggle against the minor methods of capitalist exploitation, that of the peasants against mortgage sharks, of the petty trader against the wholesaler, banker and manufacturer, against bankruptcy in other words, was still veiled in the general insurrection against the financial aristocracy. Nothing more plausible therefore than that the Paris proletariat sought to enforce its interests side by side with those of the bourgeoisie; that it let fall the Red Flag before the Tricolor, instead of bringing them to the fore as the revolutionary interest of society itself. The French workers could not advance a step, could not turn a hair of the bourgeois order, before the course of the revolution had aroused the mass of the nation standing between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the peasants and petty bourgeoisie, against this order and against the rule of capital, and had forced them to attach themselves to the proletariat as the leader in the fight. Only through the overwhelming defeat in June could the workers purchase this victory.

Despite this historical state of affairs in which the working class hasn’t reached the level of independent political consciousness and organization (when the actual and direct confrontation between capital and labour can occur), it is already in a sociological  (i.e. class dynamics) sense, the so-called ‘vanguard’ [8] of the revolution. Marx calls the proletariat ‘the grand dignitary of revolutionary interests’, around which other revolutionary forces attach themselves during political battles:

As against the coalesced counter-revolutionary bourgeois class, the already revolutionized portions of the petty bourgeoisie and of the peasants necessarily had to attach themselves to the grand dignitary of revolutionaryinterests, the revolutionary proletariat. We have seen how the democratic spokesmen of the petty bourgeoisie in the Parliament, that is, the Montagne, by the parliamentary defeats that it suffered, was driven toward the Socialist spokesmen of the proletariat; and how the real petty bourgeoisie, outside of Parliament, through the concordats à l’amiable, through the brutal assertion of bourgeois interests, and through its own bankruptcy was driven toward the real proletarians. On January 27, the Montagne and the Socialists had celebrated their reconciliation; at the great February banquet, in 1849, they repeated their act of union. The social and the democratic, the party of the workers and that of the petty bourgeoisie, united as the Social Democratic, that is, as the Red party.

Similarly, he describes it as ‘the decisive revolutionary power’

Little by little we saw how peasants, petty bourgeoisie, the middle layers generally, lined up with the proletariat, driven into open opposition against the official republic, and treated by it as opponents. Opposition to the bourgeois dictatorship, desire for a social change, holding fast to democratic-republican institutions as their organs of motion, grouping around the proletariat as the decisive revolutionary power—these are the common characteristics of the so-called party of the social democracy, the party of the red republic.

So what we see here is that the proletariat, and its status as the only ‘really revolutionary class’ (as quoted above, from the Manifesto), isn’t solely as the harbinger of socialism, but of social change in a more general sense. The socio-economic interests that motivate the drive for social change and political emancipation (in a very general and vague sense), tend to rally around the (industrial) working class. The proletariat, and the political horizon ascribed to it by Marx, i.e., socialism, represent the focal point of contemporary political struggles in general, not restricted to the ‘ultimate’ face-to-face battle between workers and capitalists [9]. I’m gonna quote a pretty long passage, both because it’s just brilliant literature, and because it offers a detailed picture of Marx’s conception of the political and historical manifestations (concrete) of class struggle (more abstract level, theoretical).

This party of anarchy, as it was designated by its foes, is no less a coalition of different interests than the party of order. From the smallest reform of the old social disorder up to the transformation of the old social order, from bourgeois liberalism to revolutionary terrorism, so far apart lie the extremes which form the point of inception and the point of fulfillment of the party of “anarchy.”  Abolition of protective tariffs?—that is Socialism, because it attacks the monopoly of the industrial faction of the party of order. Regulation of the State budget?—that too is Socialism, because it attacks the monopoly of the financial faction of the party of order. Free importation of foreign meat and grains?—Socialism again, because that attacks the monopoly of the third faction of the party of order, the large landowners. The demands of the Free Trade party, the most advanced British bourgeois party, appear in France like so many Socialist demands. Voltarianism?—that also is Socialism, because it attacks a fourth faction of the party of order, the Catholic one. Free press, right of association, general popular school instruction—Socialism! Socialism! All of these attack the collective monopoly of the party of order. So swiftly had the course of the revolution ripened conditions, that the friends of reform of all shades, and even the most modest aspirations of the middle classes, were forced to group themselves about the banner of the most extreme party of revolution, about the Red Flag. However diverse the Socialism of the different large groups of the party of anarchy might be, varying according to economic conditions and the joint revolutionary requirements of each class or class faction flowing therefrom, in one point all agreed: to proclaim themselves as the means of emancipation of the proletariat and to announce that emancipation as their aim; intentional deception on the part of some, self-deception on the part of others; to present a world remodeled according to their requirements as the best world for all, as the realization of all revolutionary aspirations and the abolition of all revolutionary collisions. Below the rather consonant general socialistic phrases of the “party of anarchy,” there is hidden the Socialism of the National, of the Presse, and of the Siècle, which aims more or less consistently at overthrowing the rule of the financial aristocracy, and wants to free industry and commerce from the fetters that bind them. This is the Socialism of industry, of commerce and of agriculture, the regents of which deny these interests in the party of order in so far as they do no longer correspond with their private monopolies. From this bourgeois Socialism which, quite naturally, like every other variant of Socialism, rallies a part of the workers and petty bourgeoisie, the real petty bourgeois Socialism, the Socialism par excellence, differentiates itself. Capital harasses this class chiefly in the role of creditor, hence it demands credit institutions; it crushes it through competition, hence the demand for associations subsidized by the State; it overwhelms it through concentration, hence the call for progressive taxes, inheritance restrictions, the taking over of large enterprises by the State, and other measures that are to retard the expansion of capital. Since this class dreams of the peaceful introduction of its Socialism—barring, perhaps, a brief second February revolution—the oncoming historic process naturally appears to it as the application of systems which the thinkers of society, working either in groups or as individual inventors, have evolved or are going to evolve. Thus these become the eclectics or adepts of the existing socialistic systems of doctrinaire Socialism, which remained as the theoretic expression of the proletariat only so long as the latter had not yet developed its free historic Movement. Thus, while utopia, the doctrinaire Socialism, which would subordinate the collective movement to one of its moments, and which puts in place of the cooperative social production the ratiocination of individual pedants, and, above all, removes by sheer fancy the revolutionary struggle of the classes with its requirements by means of petty tricks or large sentimentalities—while this doctrinaire Socialism, which, in the last analysis, only idealizes present society, takes a shadowless picture of it, and seeks to put through its ideal against the reality, while this Socialism is ceded by the proletariat to the petty bourgeoisie, while the struggle of the different Socialist chiefs among themselves reveals each of the so-called systems as a pretentious adherence to one of the transition points of the social transformation as against another—while all this goes on, the proletariat groups itself more and more around the revolutionary Socialism, around Communism, for which the bourgeoisie itself has invented the name Blanqui. This Socialism is the declaration in permanency of the revolution, the class dictation of the revolution, the class dictation of the proletariat as the needful transition point toward the abolition of class divisions as such, toward the abolition of all the conditions of production upon which they rest, toward the abolition of all the social relations conforming to these conditions of production, toward the transformation of all ideas that proceed from these social relations. The space for this presentation does not permit entering more fully upon this matter. [emphasis added]

As mentioned above, while the bougeoisie headed the revolutionary camp during the February revolution, the political conflict that followed it led the proletariat to be the ‘head of the revolutionary league’

While the different classes bound together in one revolutionary league grouped themselves around the proletariat, while the departements became ever more unreliable and the Legislative Assembly itself grew ever more surly against the pretensions of the French Souloque, there approached the long postponed and deferred elections to fill the vacancies caused by the proscription of the Montagnards of June 13. (…) Undeterred by the provocations of the government, which only added to the general irritation against existing conditions, the election committee, entirely under the influence of the workers, set up three candidates for Paris: Deflotte, Vidal and Carnot. Deflotte was a deported June insurgent, amnestied by one of the popularization whims of Bonaparte, a friend of Blanqui, and he had participated in the attack of May 15. Vidal was a Communist writer, known through his book About the Distribution of Wealth, and a former secretary of Louis Blanc in the commission of the Luxembourg. Carnot, son of the Carnot of the Convention who had organized the victory, was the least compromised member of the National party, Minister of Education in the Provisional Government, and, because of his democratic bill aiming at popular instruction, a living protest against the educational law of the Jesuits. These three candidates represented the three associated classes; at the head the June insurgent, representative of the revolutionary proletariat; beside him the doctrinaire Socialist, representative of the socialistic petty bourgeoisie; the third, representative of the republican bourgeois party, whose democratic formulas, as against the party of order, had attained a socialistic sense, having long ago lost their own. This was a general coalition against the upper bourgeoisie and the government, just as in February. But this time the proletariat was the head of the revolutionary league.

There isn’t a whole lot of interesting material about the proletariat in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. It seems to me that this second look at the events in France, from the viewpoint of trying to make sense of the endpoint in Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’État, is more pessimistic and somewhat less euphoric (but obviously not abandoning the views outlined thus far) with regards to the revolutionary mission of the proletariat. A few years later, he even called the 1848 revolutions ‘poor incidents’ [10].  Nonetheless, the following passage from this book [18 Brumaire] is another significant statement of his understanding of the political manifestations of class struggle, and the role of the proletariat therein:

The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic; that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule in the name of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. To this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself. More than three thousand insurgents were butchered after the victory, and fifteen thousand were deported without trial. With this defeat the proletariat passes into the background on the revolutionary stage. It attempts to press forward again on every occasion, as soon as the movement appears to make a fresh start, but with ever decreased expenditure of strength and always slighter results. As soon as one of the social strata above it gets into revolutionary ferment, the proletariat enters into an alliance with it and so shares all the defeats that the different parties suffer, one after another. But these subsequent blows become the weaker, the greater the surface of society over which they are distributed. The more important leaders of the proletariat in the Assembly and in the press successively fall victim to the courts, and ever more equivocal figures come to head it. In part it throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers’ associations, hence into a movement in which it renounces the revolutionizing of the old world by means of the latter’s own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its salvation behind society’s back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily suffers shipwreck. It seems to be unable either to rediscover revolutionary greatness in itself or to win new energy from the connections newly entered into, until all classes with which it contended in June themselves lie prostrate beside it. But at least it succumbs with the honors of the great, world-historic struggle; not only France, but all Europe trembles at the June earthquake, while the ensuing defeats of the upper classes are so cheaply bought that they require barefaced exaggeration by the victorious party to be able to pass for events at all, and become the more ignominious the further the defeated party is removed from the proletarian party.

As a result of the Paris Commune, Marx calls the French working class “the advanced guard of the modern proletariat”, in The Civil War in France. And he also wrote the following, again on the political role and situation of the proletariat:

The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par décret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistably tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen’s gentlemen with pen and inkhorn, and at the didactic patronage of well-wishing bourgeois-doctrinaires, pouring forth their ignorant platitudes and sectarian crotchets in the oracular tone of scientific infallibility.

According to Marcel van der Linden, Marx’s critique of political economy was ‘partly an attempt to circumscribe as precisely as possible the historical nature and social boundaries of the proletariat’ [11]. Eventually, in Capital, volume I, Marx famously characterizes the ‘pure’ proletarian as a doubly-free worker, who ‘as a free man can dispose of his labour power as his own commodity’, and ‘on the other hand has no other commodity for sale.’ The process of capital accumulation implies the parallel growth in numbers of the proletariat: capitalist production ‘reproduces to an ever increasing extent the class of wage labourers, into whom it transforms the vast majority of direct producers’ [12]. In his critique of political economy, the proletarian is mostly considered as a ‘personnification’ of labour (economic category), just as the capitalist is the ‘personnfication’ of capital. We can already see this conception in earlier writings, indicating a certain continuity in Marx’s view:

Labour was not always a commodity. Labour was not always wage labour, that is, free labour. The slave did not sell his labour to the slave owner, any more than the ox sells its services to the peasant. The slave, together with his labour, is sold once and for all to his owner. He is a commodity which can pass from the hand of one owner to that of another. He is himself a commodity, but the labour is not his commodity. The serf sells only a part of his labour. He does not receive a wage from the owner of the land; rather the owner of the land receives a tribute from him. The serf belongs to the land and turns over to the owner of the land the fruits thereof. The free labourer, on the other hand, sells himself and, indeed, sells himself piecemeal. He sells at auction eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his life, day after day, to the highest bidder, to the owner of the raw materials, instruments of labour and means of subsistence, that is, to the capitalist. The worker belongs neither to an owner nor to the land, but eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his daily life belong to him who buys them. The worker leaves the capitalist to whom he hires himself whenever he likes, and the capitalist discharges him whenever he thinks fit, as soon as he no longer gets any profit out of him, or not the anticipated profit. But the worker, whose sole source of livelihood is the sale of his labour, cannot leave the whole class of purchasers, that is, the capitalist class, without renouncing his existence. He belongs not to this or that bourgeois, but to the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois class, and it is his business to dispose of himself, that is to find a purchaser within this bourgeois class.

[Wage Labour and Capital]

Bue Rübner Hansen provides a useful summary of Marx’s conception of the proletariat:

Marx always gave a dual definition of the proletariat: in terms of the problem of the contingency of their reproduction, their existence as “virtual paupers,” and in terms of their exploitation as workers. In other words, the proletariat is defined by its separation from the means of reproduction, and its compulsion to reproduce itself by reproducing capital. The reproduction of the proletariat (the value of its labor-power) is kept in line with the reproduction of capital through the “normal” working of the law of value: if wages rise too high, capital will hire less workers, thus creating a reserve army exerting a downward pressure on wages. The point here is that as long as the employed and unemployed do not combine, wages will always fall back in line with the requirements of capital accumulation.

Some concepts referred to here will be reviewed in a later installment of this series, on Marx’s notion of relative surplus population. By referring to the notion of ‘virtual pauper’, Hansen is here mentioning the only direct definition of the proletariat by Marx in Capital I, which appears in a single footnote:

“Proletarian” must be understood to mean, economi­cally speaking, nothing other than “wage-laborer,” the man who produces and valorizes “capital,” and is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous to the need for valorization.

The concept of the virtual pauper appears in the Grundrisse:

‘It is already contained in the concept of the free labourer, that he is a pauper: a virtual pauper … If the capitalist has no use for his surplus labour, then the worker may not perform his necessary labour’.

Finally, we must point out that the individual proletarian or worker are by no means restricted to the industrial labourer, as some may have claimed. Marx gives some important indications about this question in Chapter 16 of Capital 1:

In considering the labour-process, we began (see Chapter VII.) by treating it in the abstract, apart from its historical forms, as a process between man and Nature. We there stated, “If we examine the whole labour-process, from the point of view of its result, it is plain that both the instruments and the subject of labour are means of production, and that the labour itself is productive labour.” And in Note 2, same page, we further added: “This method of determining, from the standpoint of the labour-process alone, what is productive labour, is by no means directly applicable to the case of the capitalist process of production.” We now proceed to the further development of this subject. So far as the labour-process is purely individual, one and the same labourer unites in himself all the functions, that later on become separated. When an individual appropriates natural objects for his livelihood, no one controls him but himself. Afterwards he is controlled by others. A single man cannot operate upon Nature without calling his own muscles into play under the control of his own brain. As in the natural body head and hand wait upon each other, so the labour-process unites the labour of the hand with that of the head. Later on they part company and even become deadly foes. The product ceases to be the direct product of the individual, and becomes a social product, produced in common by a collective labourer, i.e., by a combination of workmen, each of whom takes only a part, greater or less, in the manipulation of the subject of their labour. As the co-operative character of the labour-process becomes more and more marked, so, as a necessary consequence, does our notion of productive labour, and of its agent the productive labourer, become extended. In order to labour productively, it is no longer necessary for you to do manual work yourself; enough, if you are an organ of the collective labourer, and perform one of its subordinate functions. The first definition given above of productive labour, a definition deduced from the very nature of the production of material objects, still remains correct for the collective labourer, considered as a whole. But it no longer holds good for each member taken individually. On the other hand, however, our notion of productive labour becomes narrowed. Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus-value. The labourer produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that he should simply produce. He must produce surplus-value. That labourer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation. Hence the notion of a productive labourer implies not merely a relation between work and useful effect, between labourer and product of labour, but also a specific, social relation of production, a relation that has sprung up historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of creating surplus-value. To be a productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.

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Analysis and Summary

After this long overview of the the content of Marx’s use of the category ‘proletariat’ in his writings, let us finally turn to a more analytical overview of his conception and/or definition of the proletariat. What did he meant by it? Which parts of society does this concept include? Instead of describing Marx’s use of class, here’s an attempt at explaining it.

Ollman on the proletariat:

Are farm laborers, for instance, proletarians or peasants? The inclusion of rural wage workers as proletariat is required to give validity to Marx’s claim that the proletariat contains the vast majority of people in capitalist society. [Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, trans. R. Pascal (London, 1942), p. 69; Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value I, ed. S. Ryazanskaya, trans. Emile Burns (Moscow, 1969), p. 166. He also refers to the proletariat as “the mass of the people,” in Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value II< ed. S. Ryanzanskaya (Moscow, 1968), p. 115.] Marx quotes figures which show that factory workers were not a majority in England, and he must have been aware that this was even more true for Germany and France at the time. [Theories of Surplus Value I, p. 201; for the relevant statistics on Germany, see Edward Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, trans. Edith Harvey (London, 1909), p. 106.] On at least one occasion, Marx states explicitly that farm laborers are proletarians; yet, the whole weight of his treatment of the proletariat as workers in industry argues against this [Marx says, “The capitalist tenant has ousted the peasant, and the real tiller of the soil is just as much a proletarian, a wage worker, as is the urban worker” (H. Meyer, “Marx on Bakunin: A Neglected Text,” Etudes de Marxologie, ed. M. Rubel (October, 1959), p. 109]. And, whenever Marx particularizes, it is of industrial workers that he speaks. Beyond this, there is an indication that Marx sometimes extends the class of proletarians to include small-holding peasants as well, as when he states, “The owning peasant does not belong to the proletariat, and there where he does belong to it by his position, he does not believe that he belongs to it” [Ibid., p. 108]. Marx’s point is that because of his indebtedness to various capitalists, the mortgage on his property, etc., the peasant does not really own his plot of land, and is actually working for someone else. Bringing the peasantry into the proletariat may help account for Marx’s division of capitalist society into two main classes; the landowners and the petty bourgeoisie, we can assume, have been swept under the rug of “capitalism.” Most often in his writings, however, the peasants are referred to as a separate class whose distinctive qualities are aptly summed up in the phrase, “class of barbarians” [Marx, Capital, III, p. 793]. He says of the proletariat for example, “Thus the mass is already a class in opposition to capital, but not yet a class for itself” [Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow, n.d.), p. 195]. The missing ingredient is class consciousness, the proletariat’s comprehension of their life situation and their acceptance of the interests and enemies which accrue to it. Elsewhere, Marx suggests the proletariat are not a class, because they lack a class wide political organization. In a letter to Kugelmann, Marx speaks of his program for the Geneva Conference of the First International as helping “the organization of the workers into a class” [Marx, Letters to Dr. Kugelmann (London, n.d.), p. 19]. In the Communist Manifesto, he specifically links this up with the formation of a political party [Communist Manifesto, p 26]. Insofar as class consciousness remains the achievement of a few, and before such a party exists, the proletariat, even in the most advanced capitalistic societies, lack two major qualifications for constituting a class [These deficiencies are closely related. Increased class consciousness advances the cause of political organization by creating greater interest in it, while organizational activity heightens class consciousness through the propaganda it makes possible]. Both deficiencies disappear with the further development of the capitalist mode of production: Marx says, “The organization of revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all productive forces which could be engendered in the bosom of the old society” (Poverty of Philosophy, p. 196).] Depending on his purpose, Marx may mean by the “proletariat” all wage earners or “those who work,” the simplest and largest net of all [Theories of Surplus Value III, p. 63.] [13]. Or he may mean those who pass one of any few of the income, cultural, political, and social tests that have been listed. With the shift in criteria, there is a shift, often of huge proportions, in the number of people referred to. This explains, of course, why some groups—peasants, rural workers, intellectuals, and shopkeepers being the prize examples—are sometimes found in one class and sometimes in another. This objection might have proved fatal for those wishing to comprehend Marx’s views about his contemporaries if certain trends were not apparent in his use of class labels. Generally, Marx’s comments on the proletariat only apply to industrial wage earners, and his descriptions of capitalists are usually meant for large merchants and bankers as well as for the owners of the means of production. These are the chief characters in Marx’s realistic drama, Capital. [14]

End Notes & References:

1. Marcel van der Linden, “Proletariat”, in Musto, M. (Ed.). The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, p.72-73. This essay is a major source; van der Linden is a historian focused on ‘Global Labor History’.
2. Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 2: The Politics of Social Classes, p. 453-554. Most 20th century marxists (and doubtless lots today still), even such a non-conventional figure as Hal Draper (in that, he strongly fought against the Soviet authoritarian version of marxist orthodoxy), kept using dehumanizing and pejorative and moralistic descriptions of a pretty significant section of the lower classes, which we would recognize today as migrant workers, sex workers, homeless and chronically unemployed people, “beggars”, etc…, i.e., the most downtrodden stratum of the lower layers of society. We will see in the part on the lumpenproletariat that this goes back to Marx himself
3. Marcel van der Linden, “Proletariat”, op. cit., p. 73.
4. Here I took the translation from MIA, with the detail of “class in society” replacing MIA’s “class of society”, a correction taken from Marcel van der Linden, p.70.
5. It is a section written by Marx, as indicated in the table of contents in MIA: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ .
6. For a definition of the proletariat, an example is Engels’ footnote to the 1888 English edition: Proletariat = “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.”
7. Jean-Pierre Durand, La sociologie de Marx. La Découverte, « Repères », 2018, p. 62.
8. I’m not aware of Marx ever using ‘vanguard’ in the context of the proletariat’s revolutionary role, much less in the sense of a dictatorial minority substituting itself for the proletariat as this ‘vanguard’, as in Leninism and Maoism (at least in practice it is how things unfolded, whatever Lenin and others might have written, which is not my concern right now…).
9. For an interesting study on the effect of social composition on the ‘democratizing’ (or not) effects of protests, see Dahlum, Sirianne & Knutsen, Carl & Wig, Tore, “Who Revolts? Empirically Revisiting the Social Origins of Democracy”, The Journal of Politics, 2017. Their finding is that social movements dominated by industrial workers and urban middle classes are linked to democratization.
10. ‘Speech at the anniversary of the People’s Paper,’ 1856. In this short text, he also mentions the historical role of the proletariat in this cool quote: “History is the judge — its executioner, the proletarian.” https://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1856/04/14.htm
11. Marcel van der Linden, “Proletariat”, op. cit., p. 75.
12. Marx, Capital, volume II, MECW, vol. 36, p. 40. (Quoted by van der Linden)
13. In checking the quotes from Theories of Surplus Value on my own (Ollman uses pretty old editions which I didn’t find online, so I just searched in the pdfs that are available), I found Marx saying “the largest part of society, that is to say the working class”, and equating the working class with “the productive class”. My guess is that it’s (at least similar, but maybe alternative translations) what Ollman is referring to here. In The Civil War in France, Marx also refers to the working clas as the “immense working majority”.
14. Michael Denning, “Wageless Life”, New Left Review, 66, 2010.