Proletarianization

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.

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'.

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. 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.

See also

• proletariat
• working class
• capital accumulation
• primitive accumulation
• surplus labour
• Workerism

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

• Barbrook, Richard (2006). The Class of the New. paperback, London: OpenMute. 0-9550664-7-6.