Marxism and Capitalist Possession

This paper evaluates marxist attempts to identify a ‘class of possessors’ under capitalism. It suggests that such attempts are unsuccessful for three reasons. Firstly, marxism wrongly equates the agent of possession with the human individual. Secondly, its conception of the capitalist economy rests upon teleological assumptions. Thirdly, it wrongly asserts the priority of capitalist relations of production over and above their legal conditions of existence, causing it to mis-recognise corporate forms of possession. After considering marxist attempts to theorise possession through the analysis of management and monopoly we consider a more fundamental question: whether it is possible to analyse possession/separation in conventional marxist class terms at all.