The proletariat is the characteristic working class of the capitalist mode of production. Because of its place in it -producing surplus value through its collective labor- it is at the same time an exploited, universal and revolutionary class.
The proletariat, universal class
The proletariat is a universal class in two senses:
- It exists all over the world, as the product of a capitalism that long ago conquered the whole planet, and what defines it as such -being a product of the capital-labor relationship- is identical everywhere; that is why it has one single set of interests all over the planet.
- When it fights as a class it does not claim any particular privilege that would prepare a new form of exploitation; it claims universal, human and generic needs, anticipating a society, communism, in which production becomes a conscious and collective activity oriented not by capital and its logic of accumulation but by the satisfaction of those very needs.
The proletariat as a revolutionary class
Because it is a universal class, the communist perspective is present in each of its expressions of struggle, whether or not that perspective is developed. That is why it is the revolutionary class of the capitalist mode of production, regardless of the ebbs and flows of its class consciousness.
It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society today.
Marx and Engels. The Holy Family, 1844
The process of constitution as a class
Historically the class appeared as a class "in relation to capital", that is, as an exploited mass producing surplus value. It was the first struggles that went beyond the factory or the local demand -the 8-hour day, for example- that for the first time made the proletariat leap to a class for itself, a class capable of understanding itself, expressing itself and fighting as such above the divisions imposed by production or by the ideological apparatus of the system. The proletariat then constitutes itself "into a class, and consequently into a political party", as the Communist Manifesto would describe it, insofar as its struggle turns it into a political subject of its own, independent of any faction of the bourgeoisie.
This movement of affirmation through class struggle took place in parallel with the emergence of the first political and programmatic expressions of the workers. Minorities such as the "Icarian communists" in France or the "League of the Just" in Germany, which evolved from 1847 onwards to distill a communist perspective on materialist foundations and a systematic demolition of ideology: Marxism.
From that moment it became clear that the proletariat needs to constitute itself as the ruling class of society by seizing political power, in order to put an end to the capital-labor relationship and de-commodify society.
In other words, the process of constitution of the proletariat begins with its sociological existence as a class for capital, develops with its appearance as a political subject and culminates, after the revolution, with its conversion into the ruling class of society as a whole, which undertakes the worldwide destruction of the wage system and the affirmation of a productive metabolism directed by human needs, fed from each according to their abilities and giving to each according to their needs.
Class consciousness
This process of constitution as a class until it becomes the ruling class, in order to put an end to the very material basis of the existence of social divisions, is in reality a process of gaining consciousness. The class consciousness of the proletariat is nothing other than the consciousness of the necessity and the possibility of communism.
As an exploited class, the proletariat is deprived of the means of production, including the means of intellectual production. So this class consciousness is not expressed as a "state of opinion", but as the affirmation of the needs that arise in and for the development of struggles. The process is resolved by the constitution of the class as the leading party of society and its attack, from the very first moment, on capitalist relations, thus becoming a process of negation of capitalism and affirmation of a society directed by and for the universal satisfaction of human needs.
The class is defined by its relationship to the future
What defines the class at each moment of its development, then, is its relationship to the future, Communism, in the present.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
Marx and Engels. The German Ideology, 1846