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Workers, Proletarians, and Intellectuals
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
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The term proletariat became ambiguous when it no longer denoted industrial workers alone.
In the writings of Marx himself, one can trace the origin of a distinction between the working class and the proletariat, between factory workers as such and the total dehumanization which the term proletariat suggests. This distinction remains a virtual one for Marx and Marxists, because neither the prophet nor his disciples questioned, officially, the coincidence of these two definitions: it is the industrial workers who possess, par excellence, the proletarian characteristics of exclusion from the community and of disintegration of all special traits. And so one does not feel the need to separate the concrete group to which the term applies from the social condition or the state of mind that it evokes.
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- Copyright © 1955 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1. A. Toynbee, L'Histoire, ed. Gallimard, p. 416, Eng. ed. (London, Oxford, 1934).
2. The word proletariat is placed within quotation marks when it is used to convey the Toynbee interpretation.
I do not believe that "a state of mind" is the best interpretation of the word proletariat. It results in ambiguities that I point out in the following pages. The state ofmind ofexiled French Huguenots, of industrial workers or of South African negroes can exhibit certain similarities. The objective situation of each ofthese is extremely different. But the matter of definition does not affect the facts and the ideas that I feel it is important to stress. Industrial workers are not the only ones who are excluded from the community. In many countries this is less and less true, while victims of racial and political persecution are increasingly penalized in that way. Other groups, intellectuals, for example, genuinely experience the alienation which the doc trine of the proletariat deals with.
3. And eventually about Russian workers of the second or third generation who are established in cities.
4. "The Future of the Proletarian," Diogenes, No. 2.
5. Recent Trends in Occupational Mobility (Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1953).
6. "Social Mobility and Occupational Career Pattern," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 57. pp. 366-74.
7. These figures are taken from a book published by D. Glass, Social Mobility in Britain (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954).
8. Communist Manifesto.
9. Ibid.
10. Cf., in particular, A Study of History (London, Oxford, 1934), IX, pp. 583-84, 620-21.
11. The question of ownership of the land is a decisive one for the peasants.
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