Proletariat in AP World History: Modern

Who counted as proletarian in an industrial city

Proletarians were the people working in the factories, mines, mills, and railyards of industrializing states like Britain, Germany, and the United States. Many had moved from the countryside, where earlier work had been tied to farming or small-scale crafts. In the city, they owned nothing that produced wealth, so wages were their only income.

That's the line that defines the class. The means of production (factories, machines, raw materials, land) belonged to someone else. Workers sold their time and labor, often for 12 or more hours a day, in unsafe conditions, alongside child labor, and they went home to crowded, unhealthy housing.

The word itself is older than industrialization. It comes from Latin, where Rome's proletarii were the poorest citizens. Marx and other nineteenth-century socialists used the term for wage workers and made it central to their accounts of industrial capitalism. That modern meaning, the industrial wage-earning class, is the one AP World uses.

Marx's two-class model and the bourgeoisie swap

Karl Marx, writing with Friedrich Engels, laid out his argument in The Communist Manifesto (1848). In their view, history was driven by conflict between classes, and industrial capitalism had boiled society down to two opposed groups. The bourgeoisie owned the means of production, and the proletariat did the work.

Marx argued that owners profited by paying workers less than the value their labor created. He predicted that the proletariat would grow larger and more aware of its shared interests, then rise up, take control of the means of production, and eventually build a classless communist society.

The mix-up to watch for is switching the two classes. The bourgeoisie are the owners and capitalists, and the proletariat are the workers. A quick check is to ask who owns the factory. If the group owns it, they're bourgeois. If they only work in it for a wage, they're proletarian.

Explaining what workers' discontent caused, 1750-1900

Long hours, low pay, and unsafe factories gave wage workers plenty of reasons to demand change, and that's the story of Topic 5.8: Reactions to Industrialization, 1750 to 1900 in Unit 5: Revolutions (1750-1900). The topic asks you to explain what caused calls for reform in industrial societies and what those calls produced. The proletariat is the group whose conditions created many of those demands.

The cause-and-effect chain the course expects runs like this:

• Industrial capitalism created a large class of wage workers with no property.
• Harsh conditions, long hours, and low pay produced discontent.
• Workers organized labor unions to push for safer conditions, shorter hours, and higher wages.
• Workers' movements and political parties promoted other models of society, including socialism and Marx's communism.

A multiple-choice question could use a passage from the Manifesto, a description of factory life, or a union document to test this concept. Be prepared to connect Marx's ideas to the effects of industrial capitalism, like urban poverty and factory exploitation, and to connect workers' support for reform to industrialization. Short-answer question 2 (Primary source) can use the same kinds of texts. For the document-based question or the long essay on the effects of industrialization, naming the proletariat and connecting it to a specific response, like union organizing or the growth of socialist parties, is stronger evidence than saying "workers were unhappy."

Two other errors show up. First, proletarians aren't serfs or peasants. Serfs were legally bound to the land, while proletarians were free wage earners in industrial settings. Second, Marx predicted a proletarian revolution, but none succeeded before 1900. The Russian Revolution of 1917 falls outside this topic's time frame, so don't use it as evidence for a 1750-1900 prompt.