“Lumpenproletariat” is exactly the kind of idea an educated German theorist would come up with in the wreckage of the industrial revolution and it’s ridiculous to try to carry that notion forward to the age of cell phones and heavily armed maoist prostitutes and if anyone can’t understand that you should throw grass at them until they stop being dorks because they’re too far gone to touch it themselves.
Like ffs read even one anthro text about black market and grey market economies and stop treating The Man’s legal system like anything but a criminal organization.
I have no idea where you’re getting this from. Saying someone is a Lumpenprole isn’t a moral judgement, just an economic one. Someone who grows rice and the bandits that steal it have different relations to the means of production. They are not just proles who break the law.
it’s ridiculous to try to carry that notion forward to the age of cell phones and heavily armed maoist prostitutes
Engels was largely revolutionary but he was also bourgeoisie, that does not mean that the bourgeoisie as a class are revolutionary. Also, many ML theorists argue that Lumpenproles do have revolutionary potential while not denying they exist as a class.
So you think it’s an invalid concept because of a moral judgement of the Bourgeois state’s legal system? Does not your invokation of the ‘black market’ belie your point? That the criminal has an objectively different relation to production than the proletariate?
Also you know what concept could only be thought up by some educated German theorist? That the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. What postmodern nonsense!
Beyond the particulars I think you need to go back to the very basics. What’s class? Proletariate? What makes the proletariate a revolutionary class? What’s meant by it having ‘radical chains’? Finally, what’s Marxism? Is it just a perscriptive lens?
Anemia of theory will be the death of us all…
Can anyone give me a sensible definition of lumpenprole?
I thought they were an impoverished poor people, kept in a similar, if not worse position to that of the proletariat, who happens to not include themselves in, as regular, sanctioned working wage labor of capitalism e.t.c, such as people of no houses and its resulting petty criminals and prostitutes?
Now it includes the mafia and opera singers?
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat
Don’t take seriously people who refuse to read theory and instead reinvent new definitions for terms based on posting and vibes. English language social media is not actually the bleeding edge of development for proletarian revolutionary theory.
Homeless people, sex workers, unemployed people, petty drug dealers, and disabled people are a passively rotting mass with no class consciousness and no revolutionary potential.
Listen to yourself. Read your own definition out loud and listen to yourself.
It’s the twenty first century. Falling back on the form of a scientific theory as it existed over a century ago and either dismissing or never even considering the vast amount of additional data we have avilable and the drastically different nature of the experiment is silly. The whole point of marxism as a scientific discipline is that if available evidence changes the theory can be brought up to date to better model the observable world. The social sciences have undergone enormous development since the 1960s and that development has given us tools to better understand the economic relationship of traditionally dismissed and reviled groups within the working class to capital. Marx was writing in a period where the tools of the social sciences were very crude to the point of near uselessness and his theory, and personal beliefs, reflect that. Dogmatically throwing up a definition of class developed in the 1860s using the very crudest tools of sociology and anthropology, in the face of 160 years of further development that has completely overthrown the notion of a depoliticized mess of dirty, icky undesirables, is the height of sillyness. Dalits are organizing. Burakumin are organizing. The role of unemployed tramps given ax handles and a shot of whisky and told to go crush a strike has been replaced by professional police, military, and intelligence agencies. Drug cartels and such organized crime as still exists are deeply integrated in to the state and often constitute quasi-states in their own right.
Where is this passively rotting mass in 2024? Show me this class of people who do not relate to productive capital, who are cast out from the proletariat, who have no revolutionary potential? I demand to see proof of their existence.
lots of great comments here already. I think it’s true that some of the old masters were very dismissive of the lumpenproletariat and its potential revolutionary role, and a lot of the time it was essentially deployed as a moral judgement. it was often rooted in misogyny (even Connolly called women in the Magdalene laundries “lost women”).
that said, I think it’s a fairly standard part of the modern ML line that it’s not a useless category as it does delineate distinct relationships to production, but we obviously recognise that the moral judgement and dismissiveness was regressive and can now be discarded. also I don’t think the “criminal” aspect is inherent, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong but I think any disabled person claiming welfare essentially is in the category? along with masses of sex workers? which today encompasses a fuckload of queer people who obviously have a revolutionary role to play.
Even the so called criminal element isn’t properly considered in the traditional view of lumpen. At least from what I’ve seen, there is almost always a failure to understand that large swathes of the lumpenproletariat are simply parts of the proletariat that had no economic recourse, lacking even the ability to survive by legally selling their labor, and became lumpen by necessity. Consider redlined ethnic minorities who are denied even bare minimum legal employment and resort to drug dealing as the only means of survival. Many of them put the money they make directly back into their destitute communities. They absolutely have revolutionary potential and some of them have class consciousness on a level far beyond that of the vast majority of legal working proletariat.
I’m shocked that drug dealing is coming up here as an example of criminality in so many comments. It’s very literally only criminal behavior because the us made it criminal behavior to crush poor people, radicals, and minorities, and most people know that. And it’s an example of the entirely arbitrary nature of boug law; drug dealing is only sometimes illegal, as you can legally peddle alcohol and tobacco, the most dangetrous drugs by far, with a state license, and you can dispense oxy and speed to your heart’s content with another license.
When the opioid epidemic was directly, intentionally created by a conspiracy of boug drug merchants, causing a million direct deaths, what is the use or purpose in defining the millions of working people who switched to heroin or fent when the feds shut down the oxy dealers as criminals?
I’m shocked that drug dealing is coming up here as an example of criminality in so many comments. It’s very literally only criminal behavior because the us made it criminal behavior to crush poor people, radicals, and minorities, and most people know that
I’m hoping that most people here understand that and are using it as an example of criminality only as a way to talk about lumpen as a class that relates to the means of production differently than most of the rest of the proletariat (but I don’t know, I also wouldn’t have thought there would be so many leftists who seem to think that sex work isn’t work or that no forms of it could possibly exist under communism). But either way, what I do find shocking about it is how many people here think that they have less revolutionary potential than the rest of the US proletariat which is extremely right wing. Like the comment “drug runners aren’t gonna help us do communism dude.” Well, they’re hell of a lot more likely to than all the reactionary regular proletarians who are Trump and Biden law and order supporters.
