Voluntary Proletarianization
Origin: Repurposed use of the Stieglerian concept of proletarianization
Definition
Voluntary proletarianization designates the conscious movement by which one deliberately externalizes a portion of one’s know-how into a technical system, accepting it as the condition of another form of efficiency or practice. It stands in direct opposition to imposed proletarianization, where dispossession occurs without being perceived or chosen.
The distinction is not merely moral or psychological. In imposed proletarianization, the individual loses control over what they delegate and the conditions of that delegation. In voluntary proletarianization, they retain mastery over the criteria, the structure, and the scope of the delegation.
In my writings
This notion emerges from my own practice. The creation of skills constitutes a form of voluntary proletarianization in the Stieglerian sense: I accept grammatizing a portion of my legal know-how to make it actionable in a different way. I voluntarily externalize argumentative schemas, reasoning structures, and analytical criteria.
But this externalization is deliberate, and I try to control it: I decide what goes into the skill, according to which criteria, with which limits. I retain the ability to modify it, to contradict it, to refine it. It is in this sense that the proletarianization is voluntary — not that the dispossession is nonexistent, but that it is chosen and reversible.
Voluntary proletarianization delineates the space of possible resistance between two extremes: total imposed proletarianization (delegating everything without seeing it) and the refusal of all delegation (an untenable position in a transformed professional milieu).