Marx believed the proletariat would eventually overthrow the bourgeoisie as the 'last class in history'.
Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963), in which the author portrays the meanings, struggles and conditions of an emerging proletariat.
Geographically and historically, the process of proletarianization is closely associated with urbanization because it has often involved the migration of people from rural areas where they engaged in subsistence farming, family farming and sharecropping to the cities and towns, in search of waged work and income in an office or factory (see rural flight).
[citation needed] A rather different explanation of proletarianization is that given by the historian Arnold J. Toynbee in his A Study of History[2] Toynbee regards proletarianization as the tendency of elite or dominant groups in societies in crisis to gradually abandon their own cultural traditions and adopt those of their own dominated proletariats as well as their external foes.
Some well-known instances include the indulgence of Roman emperors such as Nero, Commodus, and Caracalla in popular displays or habits abominated by the elite historians who recorded them.