Proletariat comes from the proletarian entry and this from the Latin "proletarius" which means "belonging to the children". The dictionary of the real Spanish academy defines the word proletariat as "social class constituted by the proletarians." Proletariat refers to that lower social class, existing during the modern age, which is forced to provide services to the bourgeoisie in exchange for remuneration for lacking the means of production. And it should be noted that each of the members who belong to this class is called a proletarian.
During Imperial Rome the proletariat was made up of citizens who shared the lowest class, whose properties were non-existent, and they only had the possibility of providing children or, as they were then called "proles", in order to increase the armies of the existing empire.
On the other hand, differentiating itself from the proletariat, the bourgeoisie was the one that had the means of production, constituting the upper social class. And the population that classified itself socially below the proletariat, thus constituting the last of the social strata, which was also considered to lack class consciousness, were called the lumpenproletariat.
It was then the German philosopher and communist militant Karl Marx, who approached the term again when he studied Roman Law at the University of Berlin, with the purpose of identifying the lower class or working class, who did not have resources and who could only have children and work, to differentiate proletariat and lumpenproletariat, placing it as an antagonistic group to the bourgeois or capitalist class.
