Saoirse

On this day, 16 June 1531, English king Henry VIII modified the vagrancy laws he brought in the previous year, which were key in creating the working class. People kicked off communal land who were not in wage labour were designated as vagabonds, and on their first offence were to be whipped, then on the second whipped with half an ear sliced off and upon a third offence they were to be executed. This and similar laws enacted across Europe, backed up by intense state violence, created a class of people forced to sell their labour to survive: the working class. Karl Marx described these legal mechanisms in volume 1 of his work, Capital: "Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system." This expropriation was extended across the globe by violent colonialism. Rather than being a natural state of affairs as it is often portrayed, the creation of the working class was fiercely resisted for hundreds of years, and indeed still is to this day in some areas. Learn more about the expropriation of common lands in this book: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/products/stop-thief-the-commons-enclosures-and-resistance Pictured: illustration of punishment of a Tudor vagrant