pro·le·tar·i·at
| \ ˌprō-lə-ˈter-ē-ət
, -ē-ˌat \
, -ē-ˌat \
Definition of proletariat
1
: the laboring class
especially
: the class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labor to live
2
: the lowest social or economic class of a community
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Synonyms & Antonyms for proletariat
Synonyms
- rabble,
- rabblement,
- ragtag and bobtail,
- riffraff,
- rout,
- scum,
- tag, rag, and bobtail
- (or tagrag and bobtail),
- trash,
- unwashed
Antonyms
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Examples of proletariat in a Sentence
the Bolsheviks believed that Russia's discontented proletariat made that nation ripe for revolution
Recent Examples on the Web
He’s there to take down Mike Pence and all of the people orbiting around Trump, whereas my movie showed the humanitarian nature of the proletariat.
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Rebecca Alter, Vulture, "Eric Andre Couldn’t Have Made Bad Trip Without Meg Ryan," 26 Mar. 2021
Even in its earliest periods, hand knitting had a sociopolitical bent, as the proletariat toiled to make luxury garments for European royalty.
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Carrie Battan, The New Yorker, "How Politics Tested Ravelry and the Crafting Community," 22 Mar. 2021
There were also workers buying one stock at a time and railing against the powers that be in the chatrooms, with the voice of the proletariat, as Orwell might say, in their mouths.
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Anonymous, The New Republic, "I Bought Tens of Thousands of Dollars of GameStop Stock. And I Have No Regrets.," 1 Feb. 2021
Under Stalin, and for years after his death in 1953, officially sanctioned artwork emphasized a Socialist Realist glorification of the heroic proletariat.
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Emily Langer, Washington Post, "Irina Antonova, grande dame of Russian cultural life, dies at 98," 4 Dec. 2020
As a veteran reader of Soviet fiction, I was tempted to conclude that we are meant to condemn Sun Hee as someone motivated simply by a bourgeois desire for social status, denigrating the noble work of an unsung hero of the proletariat.
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Sophie Pinkham, The New York Review of Books, "‘Something Resembling Normal Life’," 17 Nov. 2020
The proletariat visionaries here are literal prisoners, whose incarceration saves them from the rampaging sickness outside.
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Pasha Malla, The New Yorker, "“I Burn Paris” and the Temptation of Newly Topical Fiction," 30 Oct. 2020
In this Marxist conception of the middle class that was somewhat clarifying to me, the middle class is subject to the control and power of the capitalists, but also has control and power over the proletariat.
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Kristin Iversen, refinery29.com, "We Tell Ourselves Lies In Order To Buy Things: Eula Biss On Capitalism, Art, & White Women," 2 Sep. 2020
Marxism in its origins primarily focused on the industrial proletariat, but Mao’s model, unlike the one that guided Lenin and the Russian revolutionaries to victory, suggested that the peasantry could become the revolutionary social class.
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Julian Gewirtz, Harper's Magazine, "To Rebel Is Justified," 30 Mar. 2020
See MoreThese example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'proletariat.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
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Last Updated
7 Apr 2021
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Cite this Entry
“Proletariat.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proletariat. Accessed 11 May. 2021.
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Time Traveler for proletariat
The first known use of proletariat was in 1847
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