Proletariat, a term popularized but not invented by Marx, refers to the propertyless working class in a capitalist society, those at the bottom of the power and wealth distribution and exploited by the bourgeoisie. The origin is from ancient Rome where the unpropertied mass, the ‘proles’ (literally ‘offspring’), sent their children for military service to the state in lieu of taxes. This element of service is taken up in Marxism which has the proletariat’s labour as their only economic asset. In Marxist theory the proletariat will be the last class in history, because the revolution they will raise, under the leadership of the vanguard of the proletariat (as which communist parties traditionally identified themselves) will neither wish nor be able to exploit anyone.
There is, in Marxism, an exact technical definition of the proletariat, as those who neither own nor control the means of production. More loosely, though, it is used simply to mean the poor, and often with the implication that it is the urban or industrial poor, because those employed in agriculture are seldom seen as being part of the proletariat. One often finds the adjectival form ‘proletarian’ used by those on the left as a very general commendatory modifier, not infrequently in usages that are mildly ludicrous as in ‘proletarian theatre’. In such cases it is neither that the theatre is run by, nor attended by, actual members of the industrial working class, but that it enshrines values the Marxist intelligentsia believe are in the interest of the proletariat (see dictatorship of the proletariat).
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