Women Potters Tending Fire
By proletariat, [is meant] 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. [Engels, 1888 English edition]
(Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, 1848.) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor [power] and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; . . . whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor—hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. . . .
(F. Engels, Principles of Communism, 1847.)
In the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the new rising and developing class of workers, created and formed on the basis of the industrial revolution, was the industrial working class, the industrial proletariat. The word proletariat is a property designation, while the word “worker” and “laborer” are designations of placement in the social division of labor. The slave laborer of antiquity was a worker but not a proletariat. The serf laborer of medievalism was a worker but not a proletariat. The modern proletarians are proletarian precisely because they do not own their means of production and must sell their labor power for wages.
Just as the original Roman proletariat became fallen laborers shut out of production by slave labor, the new proletariat is also fallen, shut out of production by robotic slaves. It can be said to be a fallen proletariat, reduce to producing children for Empire. Here is the ultimate femalizing of the world proletariat.
Good statement. The early proletariat of England, at the end of the manufacturing period of capitalism, and with the beginning of industrial capitalism, was horribly dispossessed and deprived of work. Dickens describes some of this. There were the poor – the working poor. There were people who were “piss-poor”. This terms comes down to us because leather was highly important and had to be tanned to be soft. This required soaking it in human piss. So you could sell your piss if you were piss poor. But then, below this strata, were the people who “didn’t have a pot to piss in”.
Today capitalists don’t even need to buy piss.