PROLETARIAT (proletarian): The "lower" or "working" classes, the members of which must under capitalism sell their labor in order to earn a living. Since the members of the proletariat do not own the products of their labor and do not have free access to the means of production or to the means of communication, they are alienated both from the products they produce and from each other. Note that some post-Marxists (for example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantalle Mouffe) have argued that the working classes are, in fact, much more striated than acknowledged by traditional Marxists, with the differences between skilled labor and unskilled labor being as significant as the difference between the lower and middle classes.