The Rise of the Proletariat in the 21st Century

How lack of political will and social myopia are leading to a realization of Karl Marx’s vision

In Marxist theory the proletariat is the name given to the social class that “does not have ownership of the means of production and whose only means of subsistence is to sell their labor power for a wage or salary.”

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered a period of respite from the seemingly endless struggle between East and West and seemingly made capitalism the victor both as a system of social governance and an ideology.

On the surface of it, it would appear that the challenges we face today are ones of fine-tuning a system that works in order to make it more sustainable and efficient.

Yet the ‘proletariat’ did not go away with the dissolution of the Soviet Union nor was that particular role ascribed only to people who had been living behind the Iron Curtain. The persistence of poverty in western societies, despite the apparent accumulation of wealth, the divide between the educated and those who aren’t and the failure of most western systems of governance to acknowledge the disenfranchisement of large sections of their home populations, has led to a paradox that becomes apparent only in hindsight.