PROLETARIAT. — Proletarians or capite censi were, in ancient Rome, those who were registered in the census only for their person and not for their possessions (capite censi), or insofar as they had or could have offspring (proletarii: cf. Cicero, De republica, II, 22, 40).
The proletarii stood in opposition to the adidui (those who had a sedes), that is, landowners (Tab., I, 4). When later the census was carried out on the basis of movable wealth, capite census, or proletarian, was one who paid no tax because he did not possess as much as 1,500 asses. Later still, with regard to military service, proletarii were those who possessed more than 375 asses but less than 1,500 (and were liable for military service); capite censi were those who did not even reach 375 and were therefore not called up for military service (Gellius, Noct. Att., XVI, 9, 10).
The term “proletarian” was taken up by Saint-Simon after the Lyon uprisings of 1830 to designate the fourth estate (workers), which was to be separated from the third estate (the bourgeoisie); it became official in Marx and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848, and since then has designated the worker without capital, who earns his wage daily and is unable to save (v. PAUPERISM; WAGE and WAGE-RELATED, REGIME).
At present, anyone who sides
against exploitative capitalism is considered a proletarian: nevertheless, the true p. comprises a large part of wage earners, nearly all of them living in very difficult material and moral conditions. Social progress is manifested precisely in the gradual reduction of the number of proletarians, through the spread of small property ownership, the encouragement and protection of saving, the making of work more secure, and the provision of care, assistance and social security for workers and their families; finally, by raising their general education and, in particular, their vocational education.
Against this logical criterion, social progress in the Marxist sense, through a strange reversal, instead of working for the disappearance of the p. by transforming proletarians into proprietors, proposes its preservation and generalization, promising protection from all exploitation, to be secured first through the dictatorship of the p., and then through the disappearance of all other social classes. In reality, this hope, paid for in advance by the loss of the most jealously guarded freedoms and by the lowering of the general standard of living, serves only to facilitate the proletarians’ renunciation of every form of independence, thereby making the individual extremely weak and defenseless, and the p. more easily subject to the central power, which in fact exercises the dictatorship. The inflexible severity of a cruel social discipline, and the systematic distortion of truth, logic and morality, vainly concealed by fervent ideological fanaticism, constitute the gravest crime against humanity and the gravest affront against the p. It is the material effort to break with tradition and create a new race of men, who will then have to begin anew the labor of their own spiritual and rational refinement; it is the confession of the impossibility of imposing the new ideas by the natural and legitimate paths of reason, feeling and demonstrable self-interest.
The facts, moreover, broadly disprove the Marxist axiom according to which the p. arises from fatal confinement within a given class situation, without being able to escape it through his own merits, hence the necessity of the class struggle with its inevitable revolutionary outcome. The movement of proletarians into the property-owning and entrepreneurial classes has always been considerable, and can be increased by the return of proletarians and leaders to those virtues of honesty and charity whose abandonment gave rise to the idea of a constitutional antagonism between the classes. Above all, it appears necessary and urgent that the educated and governing classes make amends for their past negligence regarding the problems of the p., as well as for the unfortunate examples they have set before the humble and uneducated classes: returning to be the guide and support of their spiritual and economic advancement (v. BOLSHEVISM; COMMUNISM; INTERNATIONAL; MARX; HISTORICAL MATERIALISM, etc).
BIBLI: K. Marx - F. Engels, Manifesto del Partito comunista; Th. Mommsen, Das röm. Stadtrecht, Lipsia 1887; F. Turgeon, Origines économ. et tendances sociales du matérialisme histor., Rennes 1912; G. Sorel, Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat, Parigi 1929; Pio XII, Radiomessaggio di Natale 1942; I. Giordani, Le sociell. sociali dei Pontefici, Roma 1944; A. Dandoy, Le prolétariat et ses problèmes, Tournai 1947. Mario Baronci