Im doing a history assignment and having a hard time understanding what proletarianization is.
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It refers to the shift away from skilled craftsmen to unskilled factory work that occurred during the industrial revolution.
For example, instead of 100 master weavers scattered throughout the countryside turning raw wool or cotton into fabric, you have 100 unskilled workers operating machines in a factory that produces as much cloth as 200 weavers.
Proletarians are workers who own nothing of any value, and so their only asset they can sell is their labor.
Historically, many workers owned the tools and machines they used for work. The craft guilds of medieval Europe, for example.
But over the course of the Industrial Revolution, capital became more concentrated, ownership of the tools and machines became more concentrated in a smaller number of people, known as the *capitalist* class. And the workers were more and more shifted to the status of *proletarians*, workers who own nothing but their labor. This process is called proletarianization.
It also refers to the process where former rural peasants were uprooted from the land and had to move to the cities to look for work.
The ‘skilled/unskilled’ distinction mentioned above doesn’t figure so importantly into proletarianization IMO, as how industrialization largely meant that workers, at all levels of skill, were no longer just producing goods and selling them for themselves. By and large they were now working with tools and equipment much bigger and more expensive than they could afford to own, and this meant the economy, for workers, started more and more to revolve around employer-employee relationships, where the owner of the workplace/equipment would be the one to buy the raw materials and the workers’ labour, and sell the end product of those resources, and pocket the difference as profits.
It could’ve worked some other way. For instance the norm could’ve been that factory workers paid rent on their factories and machines to the owners, in exchange for getting to keep or sell the stuff they made there. The factory owner would then be paid a competitive market rate for access to their facilities, instead of the workers being paid a competitive market rate for their time and effort. The risk of commerce would be theirs instead, as would the reward.
But with a rapidly growing economy, the rewards *greatly* outweighed the risks, and so people who could afford to own things like factories, saw it was to their advantage to capture all this business for themselves.
The core of proletarianization, is that a worker’s livelihood was no no longer made on the end results of their labour, but instead depended more and more on finding an employer – a middleman who would buy the labour and sell the product. It was the shift from the worker selling *stuff,* to selling labour itself.
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