0:00 intro
1:31 from ancient Rome to the French Revolution
8:48 the working classes of the 19th century
29:47 the proletariat at the beginnings of socialism
58:36 the proletariat in Marx and Engels
1:35:14 the proletariat in the 21st century
references/full page bibliography of the script – https://anarchopac.com/2024/05/10/what-is-the-proletariat/
Footnote 1: According to Draper, Marx believes that only propertyless wage earners who produce surplus value and thus generate profits for a capitalist are proletarians (Draper 1978: 34). Wage workers without property who do not produce surplus value are therefore not proletarians, like teachers employed in state-funded schools or road construction workers hired directly by the state. The best evidence I have found to support this view is a single sentence from the Communist Manifesto which states that "the proletariat" is "the class of modern workers who live only as long as they find work, and who do not find work only as long as their work increases capital” (Marx and Engels 1996: 7). For Marx, only productive labor, in the sense of work that produces surplus value, increases capital (Marx 1990: 644). This sentence from the Communist Manifesto could be interpreted as a generalization rather than as an attempt to establish the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for being proletarian. After all, the brochure is full of generalizations. Unfortunately, Marx's other statements on the subject are vague and could be interpreted either as saying that the proletariat includes only productive workers, or that all propertyless wage earners who sell their labor power to an employer (rather than selling a labor service directly to a client) are proletarian, whether or not they produce surplus value (MECW 34, 444-45). In Volume 3 of Capital, Marx states that “the wage laborers employed by the merchant capitalist…. . . do not directly produce added value", but ultimately allow their employer to generate a profit. In a footnote, Engels refers to these workers as the “commercial proletariat” (Marx 1991, 406-407, 414-15). In the absence of definitive evidence, I am agnostic on the matter, but I could have missed an important source or failed to see an important detail while reading.
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