“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.
Idealistic bourgeois dissidents idealised the proletariat as entirely made of pure, gentle manly men and brave women. When confronted with the reality that capitalist misery + hetero patriarchy created alcoholic domestic abusers they dismissed them as not true proletariat,
hence the term lumpen.How can I begin to describe how unserious this is
Edit : Apparently I misunderstood or I had a bad source, turns out the term was actually coined by Marx and Engels. Idealisation of the proletariat is still a real thing but it’s not the origin of the lumpen term
Wasn’t it coined by Marx and Engels on the basis of differing relations of production? The differences in material conditions between working and non-working proletarians has theoretical significance.
The question of revolutionary potential is, I think, the main distinguishing feature between communism and so-called utopian socialism. Communism is a proletarian movement and sees the proletariat as the revolutionary class.
But does that mean that the proletariat is uniformly revolutionary?
Marx and Engels thought the struggle between workers and capitalists was the essential contradiction that would lead to revolution. Later Marxists like Mao and the Black Panthers thought non-working proletarians could be instrumental too. But the basic theoretical question I think is valid.
For feudal society, Marx identified the bourgeoisie as the revolutionary class, not because of its moral standing, but due to the specific contradictions that intensified between the old feudal rulers and a rising merchant/bourgeois class. The peasants were also exploited in feudal society, but that alone didn’t make them the class with most revolutionary potential.
Marx did refine this view over time. In 1882, a year before his death, he and Engels wrote this preface to the communist manifesto:
1882 preface to the Russian edition of the manifesto
The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.
Alright sorry I edited
You’re right, though. When people in 21st century discourse use the term lumpen they’re not using it in it’s formal definition and it’s 19th century context. They’re just being whorphobic jerks. 19th century labor relations don’t exist in many parts of the world now. Drug dealers are just normal folks. Most criminals aren’t really doing anything immoral or wrong. Sex workers are just normal ass self-employed service industry workers. Trying to dogmatically cling to this never especially useful or well founded notion of a lump class is silly. Whatever dangers might have once been posed by “lumpen”, those roles are now taken by cops, soldiers, and intelligence agencies that just flat out didn’t exist in the 19th century the way they do in the 21st. The capitalists don’t need to hire homeless beggars to beat up strikers with ax handles, they have well equipped cops and soldiers for that. Homeless people have wage labor jobs now.
I mean look how the “read theory” scoffers have to go back to Marx and Engels to discuss this. That’s 19th century stuff. They’re talking about the past, not modern material conditions where sex workers and disabled people are often organized and have strong class consciousness. And it’s silly ableist shit, too. Like 19th century cruel dismissal of disabled people as useless and socially worthless. We have computer and phones and shit. Disabled people can do many important jobs within a revolutionary movement. Dismissing them as a class because they can’t work on a 19th century factory floor, which is what the perpetuation of Lumpen as a concept does, is just… weird. Just bizarre.