The aristocracy (from Greekἀριστοκρατίαaristokratía, "rule of the best"; Latin: aristocratia) is historically associated with a "hereditary" or a "ruling" social class. In many states, the aristocracy included the upper class with hereditary rank and titles. They are usually below only the monarch of a country or nation in its social hierarchy.
The term aristocracy derives from the Greekἀριστοκρατία (aristokratia from ἄριστος (aristos) 'excellent' and κράτος (kratos) 'power'). In most cases, aristocratic titles were and are hereditary.
The term aristokratia was first used in Athens with reference to young citizens (the men of the ruling class) who led armies at the front line. Aristokratia roughly translates to "rule of the best born". Due to martial bravery being highly regarded as a virtue in ancient Greece, it was assumed that the armies were being led by "the best". This virtue was called arete (ἀρετή). Etymologically, as the word developed, it also produced a more political term: aristoi (ἄριστοι). The term aristocracy is a compound word stemming from the singular of aristoi, aristos (ἄριστος), and the Greek word for power, kratos (κράτος).
From the ancient Greeks, the term passed to the European Middle Ages for a similar hereditary class of military leaders, often referred to as the nobility.
As in Greece, this was a class of privileged men and women whose
familial connections to the regional armies allowed them to present
themselves as the most "noble" or "best" of society.
In some societies, such as ancient Greece, ancient Rome, or ancient and medieval India, aristocratic status came from belonging to a military class. It has also been common, notably in African and Southeast Asian societies, for aristocrats to belong to priestly dynasties. Aristocratic status can involve feudal or legal privileges.
While family background and wealth could enhance one’s
suitability for public office, they were not definitive. Prominent
families could produce unworthy heirs, while talented newcomers might
possess the qualities necessary for political leadership. This notion of
social status clashed with the medieval system, which divided society into three estates and defined aristocrats primarily as warriors, gradually making aristocracy more rigidly tied to noble birth.
Across Europe, the aristocracy wielded immense economic, political, and social influence. In England,
a small high aristocracy—about two hundred families—controlled roughly a
quarter of the kingdom’s land, while in seventeenth-century Bohemia,
an even smaller noble class owned two-thirds of the land. This
dominance extended beyond landownership, as aristocrats and gentry often
monopolized high-ranking positions in the church, military, and
administration. Before the French Revolution, aristocratic privilege was deeply embedded in Europe’s social order, shaping both governance and ideology.
The centralization of royal courts
in early modern Europe reshaped aristocratic power, shifting influence
from regional noble domains to the monarchy’s court. This transition
reflected a broader shift across European aristocracies, where status
and influence became increasingly tied to proximity to the sovereign,
court patronage, and administrative roles, rather than independent
territorial rule.
Modern aristocracy
Despite their decline in the 19th and 20th centuries, aristocrats and gentry remained influential, adapting to modernization as industrialization and democracy
eroded traditional claims to privilege. Their response to these changes
played a crucial role in shaping the broader transformation of European
society.
In modern European societies, the aristocracy has often coincided with the nobility, a specific class that arose in the Middle Ages, but the term "aristocracy" is sometimes also applied to other elites, and is used as a more general term when describing earlier and non-European societies. Aristocracy may be abolished within a country as the result of a revolution against them, such as the French Revolution.
Revolutionary leaders, aiming to dismantle hierarchical structures,
labeled even non-noble opponents as "aristocrats" in their push for a
society without inherited privilege.
The Modern French word bourgeois is derived from the Old Frenchborgeis or borjois ('town dweller'), which derived from bourg ('market town'), from the Old Frankishburg ('town'); in other European languages, related etymologic derivations include the Middle Englishburgeis, the Middle Dutchburgher, the German Bürger, the Modern Englishburgess, the Spanish burgués, the Catalan burgès, the Portuguese burguês, and the Polish burżuazja, which occasionally is synonymous with the intelligentsia.
In the 18th century, before the French Revolution (1789–1799), in the French Ancien Régime, the masculine and feminine terms bourgeois and bourgeoise identified the relatively rich men and women who were members of the urban and ruralThird Estate – the common people of the French realm, who violently deposed the absolute monarchy of the Bourbon King Louis XVI (r. 1774–1791), his clergy, and his aristocrats in the French Revolution of 1789–1799. Hence, since the 19th century, the term bourgeoisie usually is politically and sociologicallysynonymous with the ruling upper class of a capitalist society. In English, the word bourgeoisie, as a term referring to French history, refers to a social class oriented to economic materialism and hedonism, and to upholding the political and economic interests of the capitalist ruling-class.
Historically, the medieval French word bourgeois denoted the inhabitants of the bourgs (walled market-towns), the craftsmen, artisans, merchants,
and others, who constituted "the bourgeoisie". They were the
socio-economic class between the peasants and the landlords, between the
workers and the owners of the means of production, the feudalnobility. As the economic managers of the (raw) materials, the goods, and the services, and thus the capital (money) produced by the feudal economy, the term bourgeoisie
evolved to also denote the middle class – the businessmen who
accumulated, administered, and controlled the capital that made possible
the development of the bourgs into cities.
Contemporarily, the terms bourgeoisie and bourgeois (noun) identify the ruling class in capitalist societies, as a social stratum, while bourgeois (adjective or noun modifier) describes the Weltanschauung (worldview) of men and women whose way of thinking is socially and culturally determined by their economic materialism and philistinism, a social identity famously mocked in Molière's comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), which satirizes buying the trappings of a noble-birth identity as the means of climbing the social ladder.The 18th century saw a partial rehabilitation of bourgeois values in genres such as the drame bourgeois (bourgeois drama) and "bourgeois tragedy".
Emerging in the 1970s, the shortened term bougie became slang, referring to things or attitudes which are middle class, pretentious and suburban. In 2016, hip-hop group Migos produced a song "Bad and Boujee", featuring an intentional misspelling of the word as boujee – a term which has particularly been used by African Americans in reference to African Americans. The term refers to a person of lower or middle class doing pretentious activities or virtue signalling as an affectation of the upper-class.
The 16th-century German banker Jakob Fugger
and his principal accountant, M. Schwarz, registering an entry to a
ledger. The background shows a file cabinet indicating the European
cities where the Fugger bank conducts business (1517).
The bourgeoisie emerged as a historical and political phenomenon in the 11th century when the bourgs
of Central and Western Europe developed into cities dedicated to
commerce and crafts. This urban expansion was possible thanks to
economic concentration due to the appearance of protective
self-organization into guilds. Guilds arose when individual businessmen (such as craftsmen, artisans and merchants) conflicted with their rent-seeking feudal landlords who demanded greater rents than previously agreed.
In the event, by the end of the Middle Ages (c. AD 1500),
under regimes of the early national monarchies of Western Europe, the
bourgeoisie acted in self-interest, and politically supported the king
or queen against legal and financial disorder caused by the greed of the feudal lords.[citation needed]
In the late-16th and early 17th centuries, the bourgeoisies of England
and the Netherlands had become the financial – thus political – forces
that deposed the feudal order; economic power had vanquished military power in the realm of politics.
The English Civil War (1642–1651), the American War of Independence (1775–1783), and French Revolution
(1789–1799) were partly motivated by the desire of the bourgeoisie to
rid themselves of the feudal and royal encroachments on their personal
liberty, commercial prospects, and the ownership of property. In the 19th century, the bourgeoisie propounded liberalism, and gained political rights, religious rights, and civil liberties
for themselves and the lower social classes; thus the bourgeoisie was a
progressive philosophic and political force in Western societies.
After the Industrial Revolution (1750–1850), by the mid-19th century the great expansion of the bourgeoisie social class caused its stratification – by business activity and by economic function – into the haute bourgeoisie (bankers and industrialists) and the petite bourgeoisie (tradesmen and white-collar workers). Moreover, by the end of the 19th century, the capitalists (the original
bourgeoisie) had ascended to the upper class, while the developments of
technology and technical occupations allowed the rise of working-class men and women to the lower strata of the bourgeoisie; yet the social progress was incidental.
Denotations
Marxist theory
Karl Marx
According to Karl Marx, the bourgeois during the Middle Ages usually was a self-employed businessman – such as a merchant, banker, or entrepreneur – whose economic role in society was being the financial intermediary to the feudallandlord and the peasant who worked the fief, the land of the lord. Yet, by the 18th century, the time of the Industrial Revolution (1750–1850) and of industrial capitalism, the bourgeoisie had become the economic ruling class who owned the means of production (capital and land), and who controlled the means of coercion (armed forces and legal system, police forces and prison system). Friedrich Engels
defined the bourgeois as, "...the class of modern capitalists, owners
of the means of social production, and employers of wage labour."
In such a society, the bourgeoisie's ownership of the means of
production allowed them to employ and exploit the wage-earning working
class (urban and rural), people whose only economic means is labor; and
the bourgeois control of the means of coercion suppressed the
sociopolitical challenges by the lower classes, and so preserved the
economic status quo; workers remained workers, and employers remained
employers.
In the 19th century, Marx distinguished two types of bourgeois capitalist:
the functional capitalists, who are business administrators of the means of production;
rentier capitalists whose livelihoods derive either from the rent of property or from the interest-income produced by finance capital, or from both.
In the course of economic relations, the working class and the bourgeoisie continually engage in class struggle, where the capitalists exploit
the workers, while the workers resist their economic exploitation,
which occurs because the worker owns no means of production, and, to
earn a living, seeks employment from the bourgeois capitalist; the
worker produces goods and services that are property of the employer,
who sells them for a price.
Besides describing the social class who owns the means of production, the Marxist use of the term "bourgeois" also describes the consumerist style of life derived from the ownership of capital and real property.
Marx acknowledged the bourgeois industriousness that created wealth,
but criticised the moral hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie when they ignored
the alleged origins of their wealth: the exploitation of the
proletariat, the urban and rural workers. Further sense denotations of
"bourgeois" describe ideological concepts such as "bourgeois freedom",
which is thought to be opposed to substantive forms of freedom;
"bourgeois independence"; "bourgeois personal individuality"; the
"bourgeois family"; etc., all derived from owning capital and property
(see The Communist Manifesto, 1848).
France and Francophone countries
In English, the term bourgeoisie is often used to denote the middle classes. In fact, the French term encompasses both the upper and middle economic classes, a misunderstanding which has occurred in other languages as well. The
bourgeoisie in France and many French-speaking countries consists of
five evolving social layers: petite bourgeoisie, moyenne bourgeoisie, grande bourgeoisie, haute bourgeoisie and ancienne bourgeoisie.
The petite bourgeoisie
is the equivalent of the modern-day middle class, or refers to "a
social class between the middle class and the lower class: the lower
middle class".
Nazism
Nazism rejected the Marxist concept of proletarian internationalism and class struggle,
and supported the "class struggle between nations", and sought to
resolve internal class struggle in the nation while it identified
Germany as a proletariat nation fighting against plutocratic nations. The Nazi Party had many working-class supporters and members, and a strong appeal to the middle class. The financial collapse of the white collar middle-class of the 1920s figures much in their strong support of Nazism. In the poor country that was the Weimar Republic
of the early 1930s, the Nazi Party realised their social policies with
food and shelter for the unemployed and the homeless—who were later
recruited into the Brownshirt Sturmabteilung (SA – Storm Detachments).
Adolf Hitler was impressed by the populistantisemitism and the anti-liberal bourgeois agitation of Karl Lueger,
who as the mayor of Vienna during Hitler's time in the city, used a
rabble-rousing style of oratory that appealed to the wider masses. When asked whether he supported the "bourgeois right-wing", Hitler claimed that Nazism was not exclusively for any class, and he also indicated that it favored neither the left nor the right,
but preserved "pure" elements from both "camps", stating: "From the
camp of bourgeois tradition, it takes national resolve, and from the
materialism of the Marxist dogma, living, creative Socialism."
Hitler distrusted capitalism for being unreliable due to its egotism, and he preferred a state-directed economy that is subordinated to the interests of the Volk. Hitler told a party leader in 1934, "The economic system of our day is the creation of the Jews." Hitler said to Benito Mussolini that capitalism had "run its course". Hitler also said that the business bourgeoisie "know nothing except their profit. 'Fatherland' is only a word for them." Hitler was personally disgusted with the ruling bourgeois elites of
Germany during the period of the Weimar Republic, whom he referred to as
"cowardly shits".
Fascist Italy
Because of their ascribed cultural excellence as a social class, the Italian fascist régime (1922–45) of Prime Minister Benito Mussolini regarded the bourgeoisie as an obstacle to modernism. Nonetheless, the Fascist state ideologically exploited the Italian
bourgeoisie and their materialistic, middle-class spirit, for the more
efficient cultural manipulation of the upper (aristocratic) and the
lower (working) classes of Italy.
In 1938, Prime Minister Mussolini gave a speech wherein he
established a clear ideological distinction between capitalism (the
social function of the bourgeoisie) and the bourgeoisie (as a social
class), whom he dehumanized by reducing them into high-level
abstractions: a moral category and a state of mind. Culturally and philosophically, Mussolini isolated the bourgeoisie from
Italian society by portraying them as social parasites upon the fascist
Italian state and "The People"; as a social class who drained the human
potential of Italian society, in general, and of the working class, in
particular; as exploiters who victimized the Italian nation with an
approach to life characterized by hedonism and materialism. Nevertheless, despite the slogan The Fascist Man Disdains the "Comfortable" Life,
which epitomized the anti-bourgeois principle, in its final years of
power, for mutual benefit and profit, the Mussolini fascist régime
transcended ideology to merge the political and financial interests of
Prime Minister Benito Mussolini with the political and financial
interests of the bourgeoisie, the Catholic social circles who
constituted the ruling class of Italy.
Philosophically, as a materialist creature, the bourgeois man was stereotyped as irreligious; thus, to establish an existential distinction between the supernatural faith of the Roman Catholic Church and the materialist faith of temporal religion; in The Autarchy of Culture: Intellectuals and Fascism in the 1930s, the priest Giuseppe Marino said that:
Christianity is essentially
anti-bourgeois. ... A Christian, a true Christian, and thus a Catholic,
is the opposite of a bourgeois.
Culturally, the bourgeois man may be considered effeminate, infantile, or acting in a pretentious manner; describing his philistinism in Bonifica antiborghese (1939), Roberto Paravese comments on the:
Middle class, middle man, incapable
of great virtue or great vice: and there would be nothing wrong with
that, if only he would be willing to remain as such; but, when his
child-like or feminine tendency to camouflage pushes him to dream of
grandeur, honours, and thus riches, which he cannot achieve honestly
with his own "second-rate" powers, then the average man compensates with
cunning, schemes, and mischief; he kicks out ethics, and becomes a
bourgeois.
The bourgeois is the average man who does not accept to remain such, and
who, lacking the strength sufficient for the conquest of essential
values—those of the spirit—opts for material ones, for appearances.
The economic security, financial freedom, and social mobility of the bourgeoisie threatened the philosophic integrity of Italian fascism, the ideological monolith that was the régime of Prime Minister Benito Mussolini. Any assumption of legitimate political power (government and rule) by the bourgeoisie represented a fascist loss of totalitarian
state power for social control through political unity—one people, one
nation, and one leader. Sociologically, to the fascist man, to become a
bourgeois was a character flaw inherent to the masculine mystique;
therefore, the ideology of Italian fascism scornfully defined the
bourgeois man as "spiritually castrated".
Bourgeois culture
Cultural hegemony
Karl Marx said that the culture of a society is dominated by the mores of the ruling-class, wherein their superimposed value system
is abided by each social class (the upper, the middle, the lower)
regardless of the socio-economic results it yields to them. In that
sense, contemporary societies are bourgeois to the degree that they
practice the mores of the small-business "shop culture" of early modern France; which the writer Émile Zola (1840–1902) naturalistically presented, analyzed, and ridiculed in the twenty-two-novel series (1871–1893) about Les Rougon-Macquart
family; the thematic thrust is the necessity for social progress, by
subordinating the economic sphere to the social sphere of life.
Conspicuous consumption
Clothing worn by ladies belonging to the bourgeoisie of Żywiec, Poland, 19th century (collection of the Żywiec City Museum)
The critical analyses of the bourgeois mentality by the German intellectual Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) indicated that the shop culture of the petite bourgeoisie
established the sitting room as the center of personal and family life;
as such, the English bourgeois culture is, he alleges, a sitting-room
culture of prestige through conspicuous consumption. The material culture of the bourgeoisie concentrated on mass-produced luxury goods of high quality; between generations, the only variance was the materials with which the goods were manufactured.
In the early part of the 19th century, the bourgeois house
contained a home that first was stocked and decorated with hand-painted porcelain, machine-printed cotton fabrics, machine-printed wallpaper, and Sheffield steel (crucible and stainless). The utility
of these things was inherent in their practical functions. By the
latter part of the 19th century, the bourgeois house contained a home
that had been remodeled by conspicuous consumption. Here, Benjamin
argues, the goods were bought to display wealth (discretionary income),
rather than for their practical utility. The bourgeoisie had transposed
the wares of the shop window to the sitting room, where the clutter of
display signaled bourgeois success (see Culture and Anarchy, 1869).
Two spatial constructs manifest the bourgeois mentality: (i) the
shop-window display, and (ii) the sitting room. In English, the term
"sitting-room culture" is synonymous for "bourgeois mentality", a "philistine" cultural perspective from the Victorian Era
(1837–1901), especially characterized by the repression of emotion and
of sexual desire; and by the construction of a regulated social-space
where "propriety" is the key personality trait desired in men and women.
Nonetheless, from such a psychologically constricted worldview,
regarding the rearing of children, contemporary sociologists claim to
have identified "progressive" middle-class values, such as respect for
non-conformity, self-direction, autonomy, gender equality,
and the encouragement of innovation; as in the Victorian Era, the
transposition to the US of the bourgeois system of social values has
been identified as a requisite for employment success in the
professions.
Bourgeois values are dependent on rationalism, which began with the economic sphere and moves into every sphere of life which is formulated by Max Weber. The beginning of rationalism is commonly called the Age of Reason.
Much like the Marxist critics of that period, Weber was concerned with
the growing ability of large corporations and nations to increase their
power and reach throughout the world.
Satire and criticism in art
Beyond the intellectual realms of political economy, history, and political science that discuss, describe, and analyze the bourgeoisie as a social class, the colloquial usage of the sociological terms bourgeois and bourgeoise describe the social stereotypes of the old money and of the nouveau riche, who is a politically timid conformist satisfied with a wealthy, consumerist style of life characterized by conspicuous consumption and the continual striving for prestige. This being the case, the cultures of the world describe the philistinism
of the middle-class personality, produced by the excessively rich life
of the bourgeoisie, is examined and analyzed in comedic and dramatic
plays, novels, and films (see Authenticity).
The 17th-century French playwright Molière (1622–73) catalogued the social-climbing essence of the bourgeoisie in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670).
The term bourgeoisie has been used as a pejorative and a term of
abuse since the 19th century, particularly by intellectuals and artists.
Theater
Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-be Gentleman, 1670) by Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), is a comedy-ballet that satirises Monsieur Jourdain, the prototypical nouveau riche
man who buys his way up the social-class scale, to realise his
aspirations of becoming a gentleman, to which end he studies dancing,
fencing, and philosophy, the trappings and accomplishments of a
gentleman, to be able to pose as a man of noble birth,
someone who, in 17th-century France, was a man to the manner born;
Jourdain's self-transformation also requires managing the private life
of his daughter, so that her marriage can also assist his social ascent.
Literature
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) portrayed the moral, intellectual, and physical decadence of the German upper bourgeoisie in the novel Buddenbrooks (1926).
Buddenbrooks (1901), by Thomas Mann (1875–1955), chronicles the moral, intellectual, and physical decay of a rich family through its declines, material and spiritual, in the course of four generations, beginning with the patriarch
Johann Buddenbrook Sr. and his son, Johann Buddenbrook Jr., who are
typically successful German businessmen; each is a reasonable man of
solid character.
Yet, in the children of Buddenbrook Jr., the materially
comfortable style of life provided by the dedication to solid,
middle-class values
elicits decadence: The fickle daughter, Toni, lacks and does not seek a
purpose in life; son Christian is honestly decadent, and lives the life
of a ne'er-do-well; and the businessman son, Thomas, who assumes
command of the Buddenbrook family fortune, occasionally falters from
middle-class solidity by being interested in art and philosophy, the
impractical life of the mind, which, to the bourgeoisie, is the epitome of social, moral, and material decadence.
Babbitt (1922), by Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951), satirizes the American bourgeois George Follansbee Babbitt, a middle-aged realtor, booster,
and joiner in the Midwestern city of Zenith, who – despite being
unimaginative, self-important, and hopelessly conformist and
middle-class – is aware that there must be more to life than money and
the consumption of the best things that money can buy. Nevertheless, he fears being excluded from the mainstream of society more than he does living for himself, by being true to himself – his heart-felt flirtations with independence (dabbling in liberal politics and a love affair with a pretty widow) come to naught because he is existentially afraid.
Yet, George F. Babbitt sublimates his desire for self-respect,
and encourages his son to rebel against the conformity that results from
bourgeois prosperity, by recommending that he be true to himself:
Don't be scared of the family. No, nor all of Zenith. Nor of yourself, the way I've been.
Films
Many of the satirical films by the Spanish film director Luis Buñuel
(1900–1983) examine the mental and moral effects of the bourgeois
mentality, its culture, and the stylish way of life it provides for its
practitioners.
The Spanish cinéast Luis Buñuel (1900–1983) depicted the tortuous mentality and self-destructive hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie.
L'Âge d'or (The Golden Age, 1930) illustrates the madness and self-destructive hypocrisy of bourgeois society.
Belle de Jour (Beauty of the day, 1967) tells the story of a bourgeois wife who is bored with her marriage and decides to prostitute herself.
Secessio plebis, a form of protest in ancient Rome where the plebeians would leave the city, causing the economy to collapse
The proletarii constituted a social class of Roman citizens who owned little or no property. The name presumably originated with the census,
which Roman authorities conducted every five years to produce a
register of citizens and their property, which determined their military
duties and voting privileges. Those who owned 11,000 assēs (coins) or fewer fell below the lowest category for military service, and their children—prōlēs (offspring)—were listed instead of property; hence the name proletarius (producer of offspring). Roman citizen-soldiers paid for their own horses and arms, and fought without payment for the commonwealth, but the only military contribution of a proletarius
was his children, the future Roman citizens who could colonize
conquered territories. Officially, propertyless citizens were called capite censi
because they were "persons registered not as to their property...but
simply as to their existence as living individuals, primarily as heads (caput) of a family."
Although explicitly included by name in the Comitia Centuriata (Centuriate Assembly), proletarii were the lowest class, largely deprived of voting rights. Not only did proletarii
have less voting "weight" in the various elections, but since voting
ran hierarchically starting with the highest social ranks, a majority
could be reached early and their votes never even taken. Late Roman
historians such as Livy vaguely described the Comitia Centuriata as a popular assembly of early Rome composed of centuriae, voting units representing classes of citizens according to wealth. This assembly, which usually met on the Campus Martius to discuss public policy, designated the military duties of Roman citizens. One of the reconstructions of the Comitia Centuriata features 18 centuriae of cavalry, and 170 centuriae of infantry divided into five classes by wealth, plus 5 centuriae of support personnel called adsidui, one of which represented the proletarii.
In battle, the cavalry brought their horses and arms, the top infantry
class full arms and armour, the next two classes less, the fourth class
only spears, the fifth slings, while the assisting adsidui held no weapons. If unanimous, the cavalry and top infantry class were enough to decide an issue. A deeper reconstruction incorporating social backgrounds found that
the senators, the knights, and the first class held 88 out of 193 centuriae, the two lowest propertied classes held only 30 centuriae, but the proletarii held only 1. Musicians, by way of comparison, had more voting power despite far fewer citizens, with 2 centuriae. "[F]or the voting to reach the proletarii a very profound split in the elite and the higher classes was required."
Modern use
Classic liberal view
Jean-François Millet – The man with the hoe
In the early 19th century, many Western European liberal scholars—who
dealt with social sciences and economics—pointed out the socio-economic
similarities of the modern rapidly growing industrial worker class and
the classic proletarians. One of the earliest analogies can be found in
the 1807 paper of French philosopher and political scientist Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais. Later it was translated to English with the title "Modern Slavery".
Swiss liberal economist and historian Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi
was the first to apply the proletariat term to the working class
created under capitalism, and whose writings were frequently cited by Karl Marx. Marx most likely encountered the term while studying the works of Sismondi.
Marxist theory
Adolph Menzel – Iron rolling mill (1872–1875)
Marx, who studied Roman law at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, used the term proletariat in his socio-political theory (Marxism) to describe a progressive working class untainted by private property and capable of revolutionary action to topple capitalism and abolish social classes, leading society to ever higher levels of prosperity and justice. With reference to such expectations, Andreas Dorschel, alluding to Sigmund Freud's
notion of "super-ego" ("Über-Ich"), calls Marx's proletariat a
"super-we" ("Über-Wir") installed above any actual workers' movement.
Marx himself defined the proletariat as the social class having no significant ownership of the means of production
(factories, machines, land, mines, buildings, vehicles) and whose only
means of subsistence is to sell their labour power for a wage or salary. Borders between the proletariat and adjacent social classes have been
defined only vaguely in Marxist theory. In the socially superior, less
progressive direction are the lower petty bourgeoisie,
such as small shopkeepers, who rely primarily on self-employment at an
income comparable to an ordinary wage. Intermediate positions are
possible, where wage-labor for an employer combines with
self-employment. In another direction, the lumpenproletariat or "rag-proletariat", which Marx considers a retrograde class, live in the informal economy
outside of legal employment: the poorest outcasts of society such as
beggars, tricksters, entertainers, buskers, criminals and prostitutes. Socialist
parties have often argued over whether they should organize and
represent all the lower classes, or only the wage-earning proletariat.
A 1911 Industrial Worker publication advocating industrial unionism based on a critique of capitalism. The proletariat "work for all" and "feed all".
According to Marxism, capitalism is based on the exploitation of the proletariat
by the bourgeoisie: the workers, who own no means of production, must
use the property of others to produce goods and services and to earn
their living. Workers cannot rent the means of production (e.g. a
factory or department store) to produce on their own account; rather,
capitalists hire workers, and the goods or services produced become the
property of the capitalist, who sells them at the market.
Part of the net selling price pays the workers' wages (variable
costs); a second part renews the means of production (constant costs,
capital investment); while the third part is consumed by the capitalist
class, split between the capitalist's personal profit and fees to other
owners (rents, taxes, interest on loans, etc.). The struggle over the
first part (wage rates) puts the proletariat and bourgeoisie into irreconcilable conflict, as market competition pushes wages inexorably to the minimum necessary
for the workers to survive and continue working. The second part,
called capitalized surplus value, is used to renew or increase the means
of production (capital), either in quantity or quality. The second and third parts are known as surplus value, the difference between the wealth the proletariat produce and the wealth they consume.
Marxists argue that new wealth is created through labor applied to natural resources. The commodities that proletarians produce and capitalists sell are valued not for their usefulness, but for the amount of labour
embodied in them: for example, air is essential but requires no labor
to produce, and is therefore free; while a diamond is much less useful,
but requires hundreds of hours of mining and cutting, and is therefore
expensive. The same goes for the workers' labor power: it is valued not
for the amount of wealth it produces, but for the amount of labor
necessary to keep the workers fed, housed, sufficiently trained, and
able to raise children as new workers. On the other hand, capitalists
earn their wealth not as a function of their personal labor, which may
even be null, but by the juridical relation of their property to the
means of production (e.g. owning a factory or farmland).
Marx argues that history is made by man and not destiny. The
instruments of production and the working class that use the tools in
order to produce are referred to as the moving forces of society. Over
time, this developed into the levels of social class where the owners of
resources joined to squeeze productivity out of the individuals who
depended on their labor power. Marx argues that these relations between
the exploiters and exploited results in different modes of production
and the successive stages in history. These modes of production in which
mankind gains power over nature is distinguished into five different
systems: the Primitive Community, Slave State, Feudal State, Capitalist
System, and finally the Socialist Society. The transition between these
systems were all due to an increase in civil unrest among those who felt
oppressed by a higher social class.
The contention with feudalism began once the merchants and guild
artisans grew in numbers and power. Once they organized themselves, they
began opposing the fees imposed on them by the nobles and clergy. This
development led to new ideas and eventually established the Bourgeoisie
class which Marx opposes. Commerce began to change the form of
production and markets began to shift in order to support larger
production and profits. This change led to a series of revolutions by
the bourgeois which resulted in capitalism. Marx argues that this same
model can and should be applied to the fight for the proletariat.
Forming unions similar to how the merchants and artisans did will
establish enough power to enact change. Ultimately, Marx's theory of the
proletarian's struggle would eventually lead to the fall of capitalism
and the emergence of a new mode of production, socialism.
Marx argued that the proletariat would inevitably displace the capitalist system with the dictatorship of the proletariat,
abolishing the social relationships underpinning the class system and
then developing into a communist society in which "the free development
of each is the condition for the free development of all".
During the Chinese Communist Revolution, the concept of the proletariat emphasized having a proletarian class consciousness, rather than having proletarian social attributes (such as being an industrial worker).
In this way of defining the proletariat, a proletarian class
consciousness could be developed through a subjective standpoint with
political education supplied by the Chinese Communist Party.
This conception of the proletariat allowed for a Marxist theoretical
framing under which the revolution could address the relative weakness
of industrial working classes in China.Exactly what constituted a proper proletarian class consciousness was subject to intellectual and political debate.
Some have argued that this assessment has become outdated with the advent of
mass education, mass communication and globalization. According to this
argument, the working-class culture
of capitalist countries tend to experience "prole drift" (proletarian
drift), in which everything inexorably becomes commonplace and
commodified. Examples include best-seller lists, films, music made to
appeal to the masses, and shopping malls.
Through a rereading of the Grundrisse, the philosopher Bernard Stiegler expands the concept of proletariat. According to him,
The proletariat is defined by Engels and Marx in The Communist Manifesto
not by impoverishment, but by the loss of knowledge (of which
impoverishment is a consequence), and which, they write, will ultimately
affect "all strata of the population".
Simondon
offers a new perspective on the question of proletarianization: he
frames it as a process of de-individuation that results in a loss of
knowledge through its externalization into machines and devices."
affects
all tasks: domestic, educational, recreational, as well as those
carried out by research, design, production, and logistics units, etc.
More broadly, these skills might include cooking, educating, residing in a place, living together, counting or measuring, etc.
Examples
Stiegler considers the renowned economist Alan Greenspan, who served as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve during the subprime crisis, to be a proletarian. Indeed, Greenspan admitted during the congressional hearing that he did
not understand the complex financial products he had popularized and,
furthermore, that no one understood them.
Chatbots, such as ChatGPT, are a proletarianizing technology because users delegate their ability to think.
Deproletarianization
The process of proletarianization can be reversed through what Stiegler
calls "deproletarianization", that is, the reappropriation of knowledge. He cites the example of collaborative practices, such as those found in the open-source software community, fab labs, and Wikipedia, which he places at the center of his theory of the contributory economy. All of these practices contribute to the recreation of the commons (including digital commons). For Stiegler, contributors invest themselves
because they want to expand their knowledge and skills. Such a thirst for knowledge is a desire to become deproletarianized.
Deproletarianization goes through a "de-automation". However, Stiegler emphasizes that this does not have to be done in opposition to machines. He cites the example of Wikipedia contributors - of whom he is one - who are assisted by bots for tedious and repetitive tasks.
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