Word.ws English Dictionary

semiproletariat

semiproletariat noun: the class of marginalized workers who lack regular employment, such as working peasants, pedlars, small handicrafts makers, and the underemployed.

Noun

semiproletariat (countable and uncountable, plural semiproletariats)

  1. The class of marginalized workers who lack regular employment, such as working peasants, pedlars, small handicrafts makers, and the underemployed.
    • To obtain such a cost differential they must either be able to hold back the proletariat's demands for real wage increases, using segments of the semiproletariat as 'strike breakers', or if they transfer a portion of the advantage to the proletariat they must obtain the asisistance of this group to...1979, Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy, →ISBN, page 107
    • This is because the rural semiproletariat are not so stubborn in clinging to the system of private ownership of the means of production [vested] is small[-scale] peasant holdings, and they are people who will accept socialist transformation more easily.1992, Mao Zedong, Michael Y. M. Kau, John K. Leung, The Writings of Mao Zedong, 1949–1976, →ISBN, page 730

Examples of semiproletariat in a sentence

  • The semiproletariat consisted of those who did manual labor for one or more masters and who surrendered their surplus product either as rent or as surplus value to their employers.2008, Kathleen Gough, Rural Society in Southeast India, →ISBN, page 260:
  • In this contradictory process, the class balances within the nationalist alliance would also begin to shift against the semiproletariat.2015, Arif Dirlik, Alexander Woodside, Global Capitalism and the Future of Agrarian Society, →ISBN, page 241:

Forms of semiproletariat

pluralsemiproletariats
alternative formsemi-proletariat

Origin of semiproletariat

From semi- + proletariat.

Questions about semiproletariat

What does semiproletariat mean?
Semiproletariat means the class of marginalized workers who lack regular employment, such as working peasants, pedlars, small handicrafts makers, and the underemployed.
How do you use semiproletariat in a sentence?
The semiproletariat consisted of those who did manual labor for one or more masters and who surrendered their surplus product either as rent or as surplus value to their employers.
What part of speech is semiproletariat?
Semiproletariat is a noun.
What is the plural of semiproletariat?
The plural of semiproletariat is semiproletariats.

Words near semiproletariat in the dictionary

  1. semiprojection
  2. semiprojections
  3. semiprojective
  4. semiprojectivity
  5. semiproletarianized
  6. semiproletariat
  7. semiproletariats
  8. semipronated
  9. semipronation
  10. semiprone
  11. semipronominal

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: semiproletariat (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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