Prole Academy aims to be exactly what it says it is: a place of study for the proles, starting with me. I’m a prole. I hated not having this place – by which I mean, I felt its absence in my life without knowing it could exist.
Over the years since I left school, I tried very, very hard to distract myself from that feeling. I’d almost say that got me nowhere – but that’s not right, because when the dam eventually broke, the water carried me here.
What is a Prole? (source: Encylopedia Brittanica)
In Ancient Rome, the proles were the landless underclass. The only folks lower on the social ladder than proles were slaves which in Rome, as in any empire, were numerous. Some of them were artisans or performed trades – bakers, potters, and the like – but many had no opportunity for meaningful work, and had little role in deciding who in Rome held power.
Karl Marx would say a prole is a member of the proletariat – simply put, the workers in a society. Proles are the folks that earn a wage, historically those who worked in shops, warehouses, factories and the like. Marx usually thought of farming, white-collar, and service workers as working class. To him, all proles are working class, but not all working class people are proles. Marx’s radical idea was to transform the relationship of the prole[atariat] to the levers of economic and political power. We’ll get to that.
In George Orwell’s novel 1984, proles are once again the folks without any power. They don’t learn, they don’t rule. Proles are meant to live in poverty, do the dirty jobs, and reproduce. In their time off they watch TV, drink, and get laid, but they don’t have a voice in the way their nation is run. The ruling Party means to distract them with idle bullshit, and they’re very successful at it. They do this because proles are 85% of the population, and if all the proles would set their minds to it one day, the ruling Party would be gone the next.
Am I a Prole?
In every case, a prole is someone who doesn’t have real political or economic power. In every case, they are not at the top of the social ladder. They may be skilled or even successful, but they lack control over the means of production – in other words, they don’t own the factories, the shops, the companies they work in. Granted, in today’s America, not every prole works in a shop or factory. Our proles also work the registers at gas stations, deliver Uber Eats, and make telemarketing calls. Proles are the many. The value they create tends to go to the few.
Some folks are going to object here and say that this is class division. It is, sure, but I’m not the one doing the dividing by calling it out. Nor was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he called out “socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor.” Nor was the great Dolly Parton when she said in the song “9 to 5”, “Want to move ahead / But the boss won’t seem to let me / I swear sometimes that man is out to get me”.
So are you a Prole? Who is and who isn’t is an answer that has shifted more than once over the ages. In the end you’re going to have to answer that question – but things will only get clearer to you when you figure out if you are or not. That’s part of what class consciousness means.
Do you have political power?
I’m a white U.S. citizen in his early thirties who identifies as a straight cis-male. I have no criminal history, so I get to vote. I live in a swing-state, for Sheetz’ sake. Just by those metrics, I’ve got more power than plenty of people. But I’m also looking to interrogate why I get that power and why others are excluded from that, and what can be done about it. I’m also willing to bet that most of us feel regardless of our background that our views aren’t adequately represented in government policy. We feel like we don’t count, and we feel like there’s something about this system – or many things – that aren’t working as advertised.
In fact, maybe you feel like the bones that make up America keep cracking while we go in circles over the same fights, and nothing seems to ever get fixed. Maybe you’ll agree that you and I alike don’t have much power here, and it’d be nice if someone did. We can investigate that together.
Do you have economic power?
We encourage voting upon schoolchildren and teach them, from an early age, that this is how to exercise power. We teach consent, we teach sharing, and we teach fairness. We also teach that people shouldn’t take what isn’t theirs. The problem with that is once you get older, the question of who is “taking” what is or isn’t “theirs” gets awful complicated, even if it seems simple to you at first.
Time and money have a complicated, creepily recursive relationship with one another. Time is money, but money can buy time, too.
We’re taught to put a lot of faith in free markets to pay people what they’re worth, and we’re told that some invisible hand will use our money to properly reward the people with good ideas and punish the people with bad ones.
But you and I know plenty of good people, with good work ethic, who had good ideas that didn’t work out. You and I both know plenty of scoundrels who got lucky, some of them at birth. We know people that could and should be working in great professions but never got the money, or the time, to develop their talents.
We know people who took a wrong step, made a poor financial decision, but see few opportunities to fix that or make amends. A bunch of us are in debt up to our eyeballs, so we try to rationalize it as the best of our crappy options. Then, we try not to think too much about it. Some of us daisy-chain three jobs together and barely have time to breathe. So I ask you this – Do you feel powerful?
What is in your way?
Maybe you’re broke. Maybe you’re suffering from a mental illness that makes it hard to learn or difficult to concentrate. Some of us, I know, are suffering from an illness that makes life chronically painful, or puts you in uncomfortable hospital stays. Suppose that between the demands of work, family, basic adult responsibility and the innate human need to occasionally rest, you just don’t have the time to read up on the theories and histories that make up the substance of what all these well-read people know. Perhaps someone just told you, over and over, in subtle little ways throughout your life, that you shouldn’t bother yourself with it.
Maybe you just don’t know where to get started. All I can say is that whatever it is, I get it, or I will try to.
But I can take the “where to start” question off your hands. I’ll start somewhere, and then we’ll say we both have started, okay? Check that off the list. It’ll feel good, I promise.
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