“Proles is a term used in several well-known fiction books to refer to the working class, i.e. proletariat. The term always implies the degraded and oppressed state of this social class in the society described.”

In Oceania – the society in Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” the proles “were given little education, worked tough physical jobs, lived in poverty (but qualitatively richer than the Outer Party members with regard to certain freedoms inhierant to their relative anonymity), had plenty of children, and usually died by the age of sixty.”

and the meaning…

“One of the recurring themes in the novel is if proles revolted they could establish something like a utopia. It’s a struggle between a wild hope carried by Winston Smith, the main character, and his realization that proles were incapable of such an act. Winston admired proles because as he said, “Proles remained human.” That means that they preserved emotions which Party members had to avoid because they were in constant surveillance of telescreens. Any “non-patriotic” emotion expressed, even involuntarily, by a Party member resulted in “vaporisation” (i.e., total deletion from all the records – such people, for all intents and purposes, never existed). Thus Winston believed that if there were any hope, it lay with proles. Proles preserved the essence of life, human emotions, and even the English language (Oldspeak) and the Party could not control it. “

I wonder whether Goldstein’s book could be a fraud by Big Brother and the Party. It is Marxist in interpreting History as a class struggle between the High, the Middle and the Low. So it appeals to rebels without challenging the basic asssumptions of the ruling power’s propaganda.

Orwell was a ‘Democratic Socialist’ and a patriot, so he might not agree with that.