The word “class” derives from the Latin classis, which was used in ancient Rome to separate citizens according to their wealth. It was introduced into French in the 14th century and into English in the 16th century. An English dictionary published in 1656 defines class as a concept that explains “an order or distribution of people according to their several degrees”.

The emergence of the word “proletarian” can also be traced back to ancient Rome. The term used to describe those who, while initially a laboring class, were pushed away from worklife and social life, who were forced to extreme poverty and lived off providing prospective soldiers for the imperial army. Derived from the Latin proles (offspring), a proletarian was a mere bearer of offspring, who owned nothing other than their reproductive force.

In the context of capitalist relations and in tandem with its etymological roots, “proletariat” can be defined as follows: The proletariat is the class who is deprived of means of production, who is obliged to sell its labor force in order to survive, whose entire productive activity is controlled and exploited by capital, who “belongs to capital even before it sells itself to the capitalist”.¹

Putting aside more categorical definitions and analyses, looking at the etymological roots and the above definition, one could argue that the “working class” and the larger “proletariat” are social concepts already and therefore one could question the need for a new term like “social proletariat”.

I would like to address this question on the basis of Marxist class theory and with a perspective that highlights the concrete setting of labor, production and reproduction processes in today’s capitalism. I’ll use a method that is simultaneously retrospective and prospective.

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The foundations of Marxist class theory were set with the category of “universal class” – an approach that is more philosophical than political economic.

Marx started using the concept of “universal class” in the 1840s when we was still bound to Hegelian categories while dissatisfied with them. Analyzing the objective status and the historical role of the working class, the main statement Marx reached and maintained through his studies was as follows: The partial interests of a sector of the society are never above the integral, general, universal interests.

Hegel thought universal interest was represented by the state bureaucracy which was assumed to stand above narrow class/sectorial interests. In contrast to Hegel’s definition loaded with the mission of protecting the state and the status quo, Marx equipped universal class with a revolutionary function: that of overthrowing the status quo. According to Marx’s definition, the universal class is that whose class interests coincide with the “society’s universal rights” in specific historical conditions.² In the 1789 French revolution, this class was the bourgeoisie. In Germany, however, no class in civil society had the willingness and capacity for universal emancipation.³ The universal class could only be the one who had to fight to change its conditions of existence and can only achieve it by abolishing itself together with all other classes: in other words, the proletariat.⁴

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The second important step in the construction of the Marxist class theory is the concept of alienation. In 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx developed the “universal class” concept, using the framework of “alienation”, “alienated labor” and “human emancipation”, and laid the philosophical foundations of the Marxist theory of classes.

The next step in the theorical construction was taken in German Ideology. In this work, Marx and Engels wrote that alienation was not a cognitive delusion but instead arose from a material basis of divisions in society. Therefore, an end to alienation could not be achieved by philosophy but instead through critical-practical human activity. In German Ideology, they reintroduced the thought of proletariat as universal class through material relationships and structures. On the most important propositions in this work is that classes were formed historically and through struggle.

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Later, the Communist Manifesto, a declaration full of enthusiasm and optimism, came out at a time when the Industrial Revolution was fermenting a proletarian movement in all of Europe running up to the 1848 European revolutionary attempt. One of the main observations in the Manifesto was that modern industry created proletariat in mass scale, united it at the stage of history as a class in struggle.

The 150 years that passed between the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and the end of 20^th century verified this proposition.

In that long century, the waged industrial worker in the capitalist core (Europe and North America) became one of the two main poles of political struggle as an organized and action-taking class. The proletariat took hold of power after the Paris Commune in 1870 for seventy days, and after the October Revolution of 1917 for seventy-five years. In the Soviet Union, an experience was made to transition to a classless society. Europe has shaken with proletariant revolutionary attempts and insurrections, with revolutions and counter-revolutions. The institution of people’s democracies in Eastern Europe after 1945, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Cuban Revolution in 1959, they all took place in a global political climate where workers’ states and class struggles in the capitalist world were determinant factors.

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Nevertheless, world history did not walk in the direction of Marx and Engels’ predictions resulting in proletarian revolutions in the developed capitalist countries. The October Revolution could not expand into a European revolution. More importantly, the proletariat, defined as the leader of social revolution and the founder of classless society, did not fulfil its historical mission in the experiences of Europe or Russia.

The proletariat could not be the revolutionary subject leading the struggle for social revolution and socialism in the capitalist core. In these countries, the working class showed a praxis of a class fighting for better living and working conditions rather than ending capitalism. The communist subjects could not develop the political perspectives, strategies and tools to change this situation. While one can debate about which of these two statements is the cause and which the effect, the historical result is clear: In the countries of the capitalist core, the working class movement did not have a dominant revolutionary political tendency. The expected proletarian revolutions have not come.

The Russian proletariat seized power with an authentic yet proletarian revolution; however it couldn’t play the role of the revolutionary, leading, founding class of the transition from capitalism to communism. The dissolution of the Soviet Union wrote down this conclusion into history’s record and into human consciousness.

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From the viewpoint of class theory, the more important issue is the following: starting from the really important role of waged laborers in a specific period of time, the concept of proletariat was narrowed down from its initial social content into a stricter meaning of industrial workers.

The usage of “social proletariat” is relatively recent, yet the class reality it signifies is ontological. Proletariat describes a “societal” existence, not a class defined by narrow economic interests. To state clearly: equating the proletariat with the workers who are actively generating surplus-value (the “wage laborer”) is incorrect theoretically, historically as well as in today’s reality.

David Graeber (1961-2020) wrote: “Even in the days of Karl Marx or Charles Dickens, working-class neighborhoods housed far more maids, bootblacks, dustmen, cooks, nurses, cabbies, schoolteachers, prostitutes and costermongers than employees in coal mines, textile mills or iron foundries. All the more so today.”⁵

In the first volume of The Capital, Marx would rely on the census of 1861 in England and Wales to verify Graeber’s statement years in advance:

“The extraordinary productiveness of modern industry… allows of the unproductive employment of a larger and larger part of the working class, and the consequent reproduction, on a constantly extending scale, of the ancient domestic slaves under the name of the ‘servant class’ including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys, &c …”⁶

In the following paragraphs, Marx continued refering to the demographical data to state that “modern house slaves” outnumbered the laborers in the textile factories, mines and the metal industry.

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Now the gap has widened and particularly in the capitalist core the service sector workers, the precarious, the informal workers and the unemployed (with all its variants) have increased both in number and as percentage among the proletariat.

And the problem is not limited to the quantity or qualification of the service work. The period following the industrial revolution saw a series of transformations which led to ontological debates on proletariat. In this period, capitalist relations expanded unequally to the world. As a result of internal contradictions of the capitalist system as well as due to class struggles, capital accummulation faced dead-ends, discontinuities and crises. In order to overcome them, changes in the capital accumulation regime became inevitable. Labor productivity (the source of relative surplus value as well as the motor of capitalist mode of production) increased steadily. As a result, the innovations and leaps in science and technology brought about a cumulative and stable growth of forces of production, major changes in labor and productive processes, and flexible production and property relations.

Among global labor force, the proportion of industrial workers diminished while service sector workers increased in size and proportion. The proportion of live labor, and the proportion of manual labor within live labor, and consequently the socially necessary labor time all decreased. Conversely, in today’s production and labor processes, the proportion commanded by machines increased and within live labor the part of mental labor increased. The combination of the developments in information technologies and the accummulation regime based on flexible production under intensive exploitation resulted in production becoming space-specific. First observed globally and then in individual countries, the big “workplace” (as symbolized by the factory) lost its specific weight in capitalism. With that, workplace unionization, strikes and general strikes as forms of activating the proletariat’s “power coming from production” diminished.

On the other hand, one of the most important novelties of the information age is that the non-industrial proletarians increased in number and proportion, while this massive, heterogenous, multilayered class started manifesting itself in ways radically different than that of the organization and action we saw in the era of industrial capitalism.

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There are three more reasons for us to qualify proletarian with the “social” prefix.

Firstly, in today’s capitalist societies, “social reproduction” and with it the “forces of reproduction” have an increased weight in class formation and class struggles, as Stefania Barca shows in her book Forces of Reproduction. Barca designates reproductive labor as kinds of work that maintain life by satisfying material and non-material needs, such as subsistence agriculture, fishing, gathering, housework, gardening, teaching, caring for kids, caring for the elderly, caring for the sick, collecting waste and making it socially useful etc. After explaining that life itself is the product of reproductive work and that capitalism turns reproductive work into a form of capital accumulation by commodifying it, Barca concludes:

“Women must be recognized as comprising the vast majority of the global reproductive and caregiving class, both historically and at present. … Women form the large majority of the global proletariat (i.e. of the dispossessed and exploited of the world) – a class of labourers whose bodies and productive capacities have been appropriated by capital and capitalist institutions. From this perspective, women’s environmental agency can be understood as that of political subjects who reclaim control over the means (and conditions) of re/production: their bodies and the non-human environment.”⁷ I would like to add that women’s labor should be seen as an ontological element of social proletariat and an active subject of class struggle.

Secondly, the “secondary exploitation” are coming to the fore in the proletarians’ daily lives as never before. The seeds of the idea of secondary exploitation can be seen in the Communist Manifesto:

“No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer so far at an end that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.”⁸

A profound analysis of secondary exploitation would exceed the scope of this text. We will give a brief overview. Secondary exploitation takes the forms of withdrawal of the acquired rights of the working class, elimination of social rights and conquests, increasing the prices of products and services, increasing the share of the tax burden carried by the working class. Currently, the real incomes of wage laborers are almost completely disconnected from the improvements in labor productivity. Real wages and purchasing power are in decline. Following the privatization and dismantlement of public services and public enterprises, the historical gains of the working class such as affordable housing, affordable electricity, affordable transport, afforable food, universal access to education and healthcare (as part of “social payments” to the class) are being taken away. Increased cost of living for the proletarians (through rents, bills and indirect taxes) is a form of secondary exploitation. This situation implies that “consumption” and taxes as part of the measurement of the value of labor force will play a more central role in class struggle.

Thirdly, the ecological destruction and the climate crisis together with the increasing risk of nuclear war, all of which having capitalism as their lead actor, put an existential threat on human life on earth.

We should also mention the developments in informatics, genetics, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, which under capitalism are deconstructing human, community and politics and replacing them with a promise of a distopic future. These all add up to the role and scope of the universal class.

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In today’s world, proletariat is “social” especially because of its capacity to encompass the entire society. We are now living in a world where the direct class exploitation in the production process and the indirect class exploitation in the distribution process are integrated. Today, human beings are subject to exploitation not only at the sale of their labor force but also in all social relations like culture, leisure, illness, education, sexuality and even death. Production must be understood not only as an econominc phenomenon but more broadly as social production; therefore it should include not only material commodities but also communication, relations and ways of living. While capitalist production marches forward toward integrating production into the highest form of socialization, the society is disintegrating.

In this sense, capitalism is not social anymore. Social responsibility and initiative are historically at the hands of social proletariat.

For the social proletariat to fulfil its historical/societal role as universal emancipatory subject, it seems to be necessary for it to elevate itself into political proletariat.

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Haluk Yurtsever has been involved in the revolutionary movements in Turkey, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, France and Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, as member of the Turkish Communist Party. He is the author of dozens of books in Turkish, including Sınıf ve Parti (Class and Party),  Kapitalizmin Sınırları ve Toplumsal Proletarya (Limits of Capitalism and Social Proletariat) and Uygarlık Dönemeci (Civilizational Crossroads). He lives in Izmir, Turkey, and studies and writes about history, philosophy and politics.