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Notes -
Marxist definition has a big 19th century assumption that the proletariat actually produces the material goods keeping the society alive and can threaten the existence of the entire system if they simply stopped.
This largely doesn’t hold anymore since most of the manufacturing is shipped to a myriad of third world countries who are willing to use extreme coercion on their workers (which was common in turn of century western countries as well and eventually got an ideological banner under European fascism) to keep the production going. If the workers of a manufacturing country somehow gets the upper hand, the country is cut out of the international trade system and replaced by one of 50 other willing nations.
Western proletariat in this system still technically fit the Marxist definition but not really. They are by and large service workers who don’t hold such power because usually they don’t make anything really crucial to the functioning of the economy. Their role is not to produce but to manage some steps of the production happening abroad, and to serve the wealthy few who got rich from being adjacent to offshoring. Their strikes can hardly cause a nuisance and are easily broken.
Labour immigration acting as inverse offshoring also has a strong effect here. Many lower level jobs are held by foreigners who don’t even have citizenship rights and are glad for the opportunity. They will gladly act as strike breakers.
So no, this isn’t really what the word proletariat was meant to apply to.
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