How to Use proletariat in a Sentence

proletariat

noun
  • To enter the city meant joining the world’s first proletariat.
    Jedediah Purdy, New Republic, 1 Nov. 2017
  • The Chevrolet Bolt, the proletariat machine that beat his nascent Model 3 to market by the better part of a year, is, well, not bolting at all.
    Kyle Stock, Bloomberg.com, 1 June 2017
  • If the proletariat sitting in steerage pays for air services, so should a CEO flying across the country for lunch.
    The Editorial Board, WSJ, 11 Oct. 2017
  • Flake poisoned his own image with the Trumpen proletariat with his book, did the same with everyone else with his support for the GOP’s health-care bill.
    Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, 25 Oct. 2017
  • Fraser knows that in the 21st century the nature of work is changing and the term proletariat may no longer be relevant.
    Steve Fraser, Philly.com, 18 Mar. 2018
  • There were also workers buying one stock at a time and railing against the powers that be in the chatrooms, with the voice of the proletariat, as Orwell might say, in their mouths.
    Anonymous, The New Republic, 1 Feb. 2021
  • If Rubchinskiy and Gvasalia are dressing us as members of the proletariat, Sergeenko’s clothes are an odd conflation of peasants and princesses — the garb of the former with the price tags of the latter.
    Alexander Fury, New York Times, 18 Apr. 2017
  • The rest of us proletariat losers are disposable, easily replaced, and do not merit the type of attention as the cool kids.
    Mac Engel, star-telegram, 21 Feb. 2018
  • Red Army troops beat and starved the proletariat into submission.
    Terry Hartle, The Christian Science Monitor, 1 June 2017
  • He’s there to take down Mike Pence and all of the people orbiting around Trump, whereas my movie showed the humanitarian nature of the proletariat.
    Rebecca Alter, Vulture, 26 Mar. 2021
  • Later on, in the 19th century, a factory would include an office for the bourgeoisie to oversee the proletariat.
    Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, 6 July 2022
  • Productive in so many ways, America has let Mr. Fraser down by failing to produce a true proletariat, one that would carry on the class struggle that is the true name of his desire.
    Joseph Epstein, WSJ, 22 Mar. 2018
  • Lenin did not willingly endure the sufferings of his proletariat, nor Washington of his troops, nor Dickens of his London poor.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald, Esquire, 7 Mar. 2017
  • In some ways this affluent proletariat viewed itself as a kind of modern yeomanry — willing to serve the country in war, but anxious to live self-sufficiently and among equals.
    Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, 16 Aug. 2019
  • What would the man who called for the violent overthrow of the capitalist system via a revolution of the proletariat have made of his life being remembered through useless tchotchkes?
    Griff Witte, Washington Post, 5 May 2018
  • The fall from grace is embodied in capitalism; man is redeemed as the proletariat rises up against its exploiters and creates a communist utopia.
    The Economist, 3 May 2018
  • No trust in and no support of the new government; Kerensky is especially suspect; arming of the proletariat is the only guarantee.
    Carolyn Harris, Smithsonian, 13 Apr. 2017
  • Enclosure, Marx argued, is what produced the landless wage workers who became the proletariat.
    Eula Biss, The New Yorker, 8 June 2022
  • This whole idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat really makes no sense whatsoever.
    Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, 6 Oct. 2019
  • Surely no dictatorship of the proletariat could improve on that.
    Timothy Noah, The New Republic, 21 July 2021
  • In place of a restive industrial proletariat, Tsarist Russia had a long tradition of peasant revolt.
    David Sessions, New Republic, 20 Sep. 2017
  • Hernandez also wants to stir the proletariat to like him — finally — and not be angry with the Giants for keeping him around at the expense of prospect Steven Duggar, who might spend the entire summer in Sacramento honing his bat.
    Henry Schulman, San Francisco Chronicle, 7 June 2018
  • In this Marxist conception of the middle class that was somewhat clarifying to me, the middle class is subject to the control and power of the capitalists, but also has control and power over the proletariat.
    Kristin Iversen, refinery29.com, 2 Sep. 2020
  • The scuffling between the disadvantaged proletariat below decks and preening nobs above?
    New York Times, 1 Feb. 2022
  • In Chinese, da means big, and long means dragon, a sacred symbol of the emperor, alluding to Chengdu’s imperious sense of itself as a place of cultural refinement, and to its scorn for Chongqing’s salt-of-the-earth proletariat.
    Jiayang Fan, The New Yorker, 25 May 2018
  • Change was supposed to come via the industrial proletariat, which would realize it was being exploited, revolt, and set society on the road to communism.
    Ian Johnson, The New York Review of Books, 15 June 2021
  • While the Soviet Union was — at least in theory — a dictatorship of the proletariat, Putin’s Russia is truly a spin doctor dictatorship.
    Leonid Ragozin, Time, 10 Sep. 2019
  • This is far more than an angry mob shouting in keystrokes, but the proto-proletariat of a feudalizing post-industrial society . . .
    Andrew Stuttaford, National Review, 1 Apr. 2022
  • The dyadic version has no nefarious third party, just an us-and-them world where a corrupt capitalist political caste has betrayed the proletariat for its own benefit.
    The Economist, 3 Feb. 2018
  • It’s the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie, executives versus front-line team members, management versus union, Jedi versus the Sith.
    Dan Pontefract, Forbes, 26 Oct. 2021

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'proletariat.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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