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The Future of the Proletariat

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2024

Extract

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Professor Toynbee's definition of the proletariat is an unusual one. To him, ‘proletarianism is a state of feeling rather than a matter of outward circumstance.’ Still more allusively, a proletariat is ‘any social clement or group which in some way is “in” but not “of” any given society at any given stage of such society's history’. Marx defined the word to mean the urban wage workers in modern society. To Professor Toynbee, Marx's definition is what a mathematician would call ‘a special case’; and although it is perhaps the largest, it is by no means the sole constituent of the proletariat by Professor Toynbee's definition. It is also possible on Professor Toynbee's definition—this is an essential aspect of the matter which he has not followed up and which is one of the principal subjects of the following article—that a man may be an urban wage worker without being a proletarian.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1953 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 It is perhaps appropriate to quote the old English verse—They put in jail the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common-But let the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose.

2 Anderson and Davidson, Occupational Mobility in an American Community. Stanford Univer sity : Stanford University Press, 1936.