Dispossession, not alienation

Dispossession is the separation of producers from ownership or control of the means of production, leaving them without independent means to sustain themselves. It’s a key concept in political economy because it describes how the proletariat comes into existence. All things are things in motion, and the quantity of dispossession eventually hits a point of quality, where, the proletarian exists. A rich kid who loses their part time gig, is technically separated from the means of production, but this does not a proletarian make. A rich kid who loses access to their families assets and has to maintain themselves permanently by selling their labour-power, now we are seeking something resembling a proletarian.

In capitalism, this constitutes the proletariat as a class: formally free from personal dependence, yet compelled to sell their labour-power because it possesses no productive property beyond that labour-power.

Dispossession therefore precedes and makes possible wage-labour and exploitation.

In the imperialist centres, we all are experiencing, (and many of us personally experiencing) dispossession. Where once we could have found a decent paying job, and begun to save some money for a rainy day, now those jobs are being eradicated, slowly yet consistently by the rise of artificial intelligence. This is not a new process, just ask the peasantry of England that were forced to abandon their plows, and be tied to a shift on a factory floor. Many of us, are thrown out into the ranks of the reserve army of labour now, the excess population, who’s labour-power is no use to the capitalists. Are we still proletarian? This is a real open question that needs to be answered by proletarian revolutionaries in these situations. Since dispossession is an ongoing process: capitalist accumulation continually destroys economic independence, displaces workers through technological development, and casts people into poverty. From this vantage point, dispossession isn’t just the experience poverty or exploitation, but a dynamic process of proletarianisation through which people are separated from the means of production and subjected to the movements of capital. We are all, as proletarians, in a consistent process of becoming more and more proletarianised. The longer one spends in the ranks of the working class, the more and more impossible it seems for us to be able to rise out of our class. Where once there was a mirage of “the middle class” that we could aspire to join, now our greatest aspiration remains the thrill of payday at the end of the month.

The reason for this clarification is that dispossession, not alienation is the scientific concept that we can use to measure the process of proletarianisation that is happening in people’s lives. A humanist form of Marxism, common in the imperialist centres relies on alienation as the key concept to understand the proletariat. Crudely, in common parlance, this became all the people that feel sad at their jobs and don’t like it. We don’t have the luxury of relying on these Hegelian ideas anymore. The consequences of allowing the rejection of scientific socialism, and the advocacy of a humanistic, moralistic, borderline religious Marxism had sent our movement down detours that have left us with very little to show for ourselves over the past few decades.

So, to return to the concept of dispossession, to measure the misery of capitalist society, and to examine for whom is the central concern of the politics of socialism places us in a standpoint in which to begin to relearn how to make political interventions in our class. If the proletariat is in a consistent state of becoming-proletarian, of proletarianisation, the most revolutionary sections, the ones who truly have nothing to lose but their chains, are the ones who are the most dispossessed.

Ask yourself, dear comrades – where are the masses who have been dispossessed recently where you live? Where are the people with nothing to loose but their chains? Where are the lowest, deepest sections of our class? I’ll leave it up to you to figure out the answer to that question.