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Saturday, September 7, 2019

On Karl Marx's Proletariat and the Proles

When Karl Marx talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat, he didn’t mean the entire proletariat. His view of the proletariat was limited to the industrial proletariat. He had contempt for the peasants in the rural areas and the unemployed in the urban areas. He believed that only the industrial proletariat have a revolutionary potential and that they will one day arise in a revolution which will establish a communist utopia by wiping out the capitalist bourgeoisie class. In the Marxist worldview, the peasants and the unemployed have no historical role to play—they are like the proles that Orwell has described in his novel 1984.

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