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
  • All that loot pumped out of the Armenian proletariat, says the gaur, and for what.
    — Sean Williams, Harpers Magazine, 27 Jan. 2026
  • Red Army troops beat and starved the proletariat into submission.
    — Terry Hartle, The Christian Science Monitor, 1 June 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
  • Surely no dictatorship of the proletariat could improve on that.
    — Timothy Noah, The New Republic, 21 July 2021
  • 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
  • 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
  • This whole idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat really makes no sense whatsoever.
    — Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, 6 Oct. 2019
  • The scuffling between the disadvantaged proletariat below decks and preening nobs above?
    — New York Times, 1 Feb. 2022
  • Enclosure, Marx argued, is what produced the landless wage workers who became the proletariat.
    — Eula Biss, The New Yorker, 8 June 2022
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • In place of a restive industrial proletariat, Tsarist Russia had a long tradition of peasant revolt.
    — David Sessions, New Republic, 20 Sep. 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • More critically, the claim that our current crisis has economic roots does not rest on psychoanalyzing the Trumpen proletariat.
    — Eric Levitz, Daily Intelligencer, 23 May 2018
  • The numerically ascending service proletariat is frankly irrelevant in setting the terms of debate in our polity.
    — Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 20 Jan. 2013
  • What corporate or political leader wouldn't want a happy, chipped workforce and happily chipped citizens, so proletariats might be more productive in their daily lives?
    — John Kass, Alaska Dispatch News, 1 Aug. 2017
  • What corporate or political leader wouldn't want a happy, chipped workforce and happily chipped citizens, so proletariats might be more productive in their daily lives?
    — John Kass, chicagotribune.com, 26 July 2017
  • Merridale writes, but to undermine the provisional government and establish a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat.
    — Joshua Rubenstein, New York Times, 9 June 2017
  • 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
  • Marx claimed to have shown that history was a process of continual conflict moving toward a final redemption, when the proletariat would cast off its chains and the exploitation of humanity would disappear.
    — Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker, 23 Sep. 2019
  • While Beijing can quell sporadic workers’ protests by buying people off, close links between intellectuals and the proletariat can make for an empowered opposition.
    — Diana Fu, Washington Post, 27 July 2017

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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