I am asking a honest question.
Most people when they speak about proletarians refer to an economic social group.
is that fair to lump all of the working class that would normally be labeled this under the term proletarian simply due to their class status or has the term proletarian become more than that and defines a thought process?
Great question.
I think completely think in terms of the adjective,
bourgeois. Although the bourgeoisie certainly exist (and our more pronounced than ever, see chart below), I think, in this instance, its more important to capture that segment of the population which believes adamantly that economic rationality should govern every aspect of human life. This is what it means to be
bourgeois and certainly in our own historic time those who are
bourgeois far, far outnumber those who are actually
bourgeoisie. As an aside the petty bourgeoisie is all but extinct.
Is the proletariat the "working class" especially in our own historic time where people relate less and less to their occupations? Or is it everyone, basically, who does not consider economic rationality as the supreme force in human life? Much more difficult to answer.
For my money, nothing evokes that state of being, that firm and unyielding belief that economic rationality belongs upon that golden pedestal than
bourgeois. It evokes images of the latifundio, the slaveowners, the industrialist and their demonic mills and mines, the bankers. It is a perfect word.
Proletariat, not so sure. Much more difficult in our own historic time. Even Marx redefined it, when he suddenly discovered, WAIT, the peasantry might form a revolutionary kind of proletariat. And, actually, that's exactly what history demonstrated. Fortunately, Marx got this in Eighteenth Brumaire before the Russian and Chinese revolutions.
