Proletariat

I started to read the Communist Manifesto while here in North Carolina since I finished the other book I brought. Now this might make me sound stupid but I had never really known what proletariat meant. Let me clarify-I might have known at one time but have forgotten and always assumed it had a complicated meaning and never bothered to look it up because I thought I would just forget the meaning anyway if it was long and involved. So I never have. But because I was going to read the Communist Manifesto, I figured now would be the time to look it up so that I would understand what I was reading. So I looked it up and it means: The working class. That’s pretty much it. Really? Man, I feel stupid now that I never bothered before. I mean, there can be more specifics, like usually it refers to workers who do manual labor or who work in industry as opposed to other areas of work. And it can also be even more specific than that and can refer to the absolute poorest class and/or people that don’t own any property and have to sell their labor to survive. But more or less, it just means working class. From now on, I guess I’ll always look up words that I’m not quite sure of the meaning.

What I learned: Proletariat refers simply to the working class.