Proletarianization

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Theoretical works
Part of a series on Marxism

The Communist Manifesto Das Kapital The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon On The Jewish Question Grundrisse The German Ideology Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Theses on Feuerbach
Sociology and anthropology
Alienation · Bourgeoisie Class consciousness Commodity fetishism Communism Cultural hegemony Exploitation · Human nature Ideology · Proletariat Reification · Socialism Relations of production
Economics
Labour power · Law of value Means of production Mode of production Productive forces Surplus labour · Surplus value Transformation problem Wage labour
History
Anarchism and Marxism Capitalist production Class struggle Dictatorship of the proletariat Primitive capital accumulation Proletarian revolution Proletarian internationalism World Revolution
Philosophy
Historical materialism Dialectical materialism Analytical Marxism Marxist autonomism Marxist feminism Marxist humanism Marxist geography Structural Marxism Western Marxism Libertarian Marxism Young Marx
Prominent figures
Karl Marx · Friedrich Engels Karl Kautsky · Georgi Plekhanov Rosa Luxemburg Antonie Pannekoek Vladimir Lenin · Leon Trotsky Georg Lukács · Guy Debord Antonio Gramsci · Karl Korsch Che Guevara · Frankfurt School Jean-Paul Sartre Louis Althusser
Criticism
Criticisms of Marxism
All categorised articles
Communism Portal
This box: view • talk • edit

Proletarianization is a concept in Marxism and Marxist sociology. It refers to the social process whereby people move from being either an employer, self-employed or unemployed to being employed as wage labor by an employer. In some cases, this would mean downward social mobility but in other cases an improvement of social position, insofar as the income from wage labor was better than from self-employment or unemployment.

1 Marx's concept
2 In modern capitalism
3 See also
4 References

[edit] Marx's concept

For Marx, the process of proletarianization was the other side of capital accumulation. The growth of capital meant the growth of the working class. The expansion of capitalist markets involved processes of primitive accumulation and privatisation, which transferred more and more assets into capitalist private property, and concentrated wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Therefore, an increasing mass of the population was reduced to dependence on wage labour for income, i.e. they had to sell their labour power to an employer for a wage or salary because they lacked assets or other sources of income. The materially-based contradictions within capitalist society would foster revolution. Marx believed the proletariat would eventually overthrow the bourgeoisie as the 'last class in history'.

[edit] In modern capitalism

Many intellectuals have described proletarianization in advanced capitalism as "the extension of the logic of factory labor to a large sector of services and intellectual professions."^[1] The classic historical study of proletarianization is E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963), in which the author portrays the meanings, struggles and conditions of an emerging proletariat.

Geographically, the process of proletarianization is closely related to urbanization because it frequently involves the migration of a property-less rural population from the countryside to the cities and towns, in search of work and income.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Karl Marx, Das Kapital.
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Vol 2: The Politics of Social Classes. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Ernest Mandel, Workers under Neo-capitalism

http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/19xx/xx/neocap.htm