Proletariat

PROLETARIAT. - In ancient Rome, proletarians or capite censi were those who were registered in the census only for their person and not for their property (capite censi), or insofar as they had or could have offspring (proletarii: cf. Cicero, De republica, II, 22, 40).

The proletarii stood in contrast to the adidui (those who have a sedes), that is, to landowners (Tab., I, 4). When later the census was carried out on the basis of movable wealth, a capite census or proletarian was one who paid no tribute, because he did not come to possess 1,500 asses. Still later, with regard to military service, proletarii were those who possessed more than 375 asses but less than 1,500 (liable to military service); capite censi were those who did not even reach 375 and who were therefore not called to military service (Gellius, Noct. Att., XVI, 9, 10).

The term "proletarian" was taken up again by Saint-Simon after the Lyons riots of 1830 to designate the fourth estate (workers), which was to be separated from the third estate (bourgeoisie): it became official in the Manifesto of the Communist Party of Marx and Engels in 1848, and since then it designates the worker devoid of capital, who earns his wages daily and is unable to save (v. PAUPERISMO; SALARIO e SALARIALE, REGIME).

At present anyone who takes his stand against exploitative capitalism passes for a proletarian: nevertheless, the true p. comprises a great part of wage-earners, almost all of them in very straitened material and moral conditions. Social progress is manifested precisely in the gradual reduction of the number of proletarians, through the diffusion of small property, the encouragement and protection of savings, making work more secure, and surrounding workers and their families with care, assistance and welfare provisions: raising at last their culture in general and their professional culture in particular.

Against this logical criterion, social progress in the Marxist sense, with a strange inversion, instead of working for the disappearance of the p. by transforming proletarians into owners, proposes its preservation and generalization, promising the guarantee of protection from every exploitation to be obtained through the dictatorship of the p. first, and then the disappearance of all the other social classes. In reality this hope, which is paid for in advance with the loss of the most jealously guarded freedoms and with the lowering of the general tone of life, serves solely to facilitate the renunciation by proletarians of every independence, so as to render the individual extremely weak and defenceless, and the p. more easily dominated by the central power, the one that effectively exercises the dictatorship. The inflexible severity of a cruel social discipline, and the systematic deformation of truth, logic and morality, vainly covered by an ardent ideological fanaticism, constitute the gravest crime of lèse-humanité and the gravest affront against the p. It is the material effort to break with tradition and to create a new race of men that must then begin again the toil of its own spiritual and rational advancement: it is the confession of the impossibility of imposing the new ideas by the natural and lawful ways of reason, of sentiment and of demonstrable self-interest.

Facts largely belie, moreover, the Marxist axiom according to which the p. would originate from a fatal confinement in a given class situation, without being able to escape it by its own merit, whence the necessity of the class struggle with a fatal revolutionary outcome. The passage of proletarians into the propertied and entrepreneurial classes has always been considerable, and can be accentuated by the return of proletarians and of those who lead them to those virtues of honesty and charity, from whose abandonment the idea of a constitutional antagonism between the classes was born. It appears above all necessary and urgent that the educated and leading classes make amends for their past negligence regarding the problems of the p., as well as for the unhappy examples given to the humble and needy classes: returning to be the guide and support of their spiritual and economic ascent (v. also BOLSCEVISMO; COMUNISMO; INTERNAZIONALE; MARX; MATERIALISMO STORICO, etc.).

Mario Baronci