: Joe is a proletarian as he does not own any of the means of production. SDF: We're already off on the wrong foot here. Proletarians are the class-conscious working class, by definition, period. Peasants, serfs, slaves, babies, the "lumpenproletariat" etc. do not own the means of production either, but neither are they the proletariat. And in his critique of Proudhon, Marx deals with the possibility that the proletariat could in fact be owners of capital. So proletarianism can't be defined as exclusion from the ownership of capital. (The fact that Marx tried to incite revolution by posing the working classes and the owning classes as opposing sides in a struggle was Marx's legacy to the art of propaganda, not economic theory.)
: So, he goes to work for a capitalist who pays him $10 per hour. If he were to work without this individual's capital he would only produce goods priced at $2 per hour.
SDF: Since the source of all capital is the labor of the working classes, without which it wouldn't exist, the idea of "this individual's capital" itself implies a prior act of "theft" of labor by a capitalist. That is, if you believe in the morality implied in the word "theft," which Marx didn't. Marx would have used the word "alienation."
