What is the working class? A relatively simple question, but not one with a simple answer. These days most Marxists would emphasize “relationship to the means of production,” defining class in terms of extraction of surplus value and the wage relation. This isn’t wrong — surplus value and the wage relation are central to class and class struggle — but this approach tends to telescope the entirety of the meaning and making of class and class struggle into the workplace. A closer reading of Marx suggests that a wider, and more relevant, vision can be recovered.

For Marx, capitalism and class began as dispossession. In his debate with orthodox political economy, Marx insisted that the secret of the origins of capitalism, as a class system, lay in an initial accumulation of capital that rested upon “the complete separation of the labourers from all property in the means by which they can realise their labour.” The robbery of masses of humanity — be they serfs or sailors, artisans or Aboriginal peoples — of their productive capacities and guarantees of existence was central to class formation. Expropriation was written “in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”

The proletariat is not, therefore, defined by the wage relation itself. It is defined by dispossession — the brutal process by which producers are forced to depend on the wage for survival.