ical and fictional texts that focus on social practicesand emphasize human
agency.
Afirst indication of underlying conceptual tensions,“proletarian”and“pro-
letariat”in Marxist discourse maybeprimarily identified with processes of em-
powerment,but bothterms alsoappear frequentlyinrelation to the phenomena
of downward mobilityknown as proletarization. As diagnosed since the late
nineteenth century,the experience of proletarization can refer to the artisan
who becomesafactory worker and the rural laborer who is forced to join the
urban underclass.Relatedto the older concept of pauperization and often descri-
bed in the languageoffeminization, this neologism acknowledgesthe impover-
ishment of large parts of the population but does no longer come with the at-
tendant demands for charity by the churches or protection through poverty
laws thatreduce the pauper to an almost natural state of destitution. The perva-
sive sense of disrespect,displacement,and disorientation associatedwith prole-
tarization is even more pronounced in anotherterm, namelyPlebs(plebeian),
which likewise denotesacondition ofabjection. The ways in which the language
of contempt reproduces existing social hierarchies and often translates them into
moral and aestheticregisters is alsoevident in the less class-specific and more
situation-basedPöbel(mob)that hallucinates all crowds, masses, and multi-
tudes as uncontrolled, uneducated, and uncivilized–that is, as fundamentally
different from propermiddle-class cultureand society.In1903,GeorgHirth, pub-
lisher of the turn-of-the-centuryjournalJugend,captures the prevailing senti-
ment when he describes the typical prole asachurlish man,“an ordinary
man, crude, not capable of anynoble sentiments,arepulsiveintruder into de-
cent society whose background, attire, and money playnorole at all.”⁶However,
when the sameProlet(prole) is appropriated asafigure of self-identification by
the workers and used asagesture of defiance in agitational speeches, songs, and
poems, he overcomes his identification withaposition of abjection and chal-
lenges thevery hierarchies,includinglinguistic ones, that relegated him toapo-
sition on the outside of bourgeois society.
The discursivefunction of“proletarian”in nineteenth-century socialist writ-
ingscan be further clarified throughabrief comparison to the moregeneral term
Arbeiter(worker,laborer), which usuallyrefers to skilled craftsmen as well un-
skilled workers,factory workers as well as farm laborers.⁷Historically,“worker”
GeorgWirth,“Proletund Proletarier,”Jugend: Münchner IllustrierteWochenschriftfürKunst
und Leben8(1903): 774. In current German slang, adjectivessuch asprollig,prol,orproloper-
petuatesuch patterns of exclusioninthe registers of bad taste.
Foragood summary of the discursiveformations that gave riseto the concept of the worker,
see Manfred Scharrer,Arbeiter und die Idee von den Arbeitern 1848 bis 1869(Cologne: Bund,
Proletarian Dreams: From Marx to Marxism 53