"Lumpenproletariat" is a silly idea and if people are still using it after Maoism and black radicalism and all the rest you should mock them and throw things at them.
"Lumpenproletariat" is a silly idea and if people are still using it after Maoism and black radicalism and all the rest you should mock them and throw things at them.
"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.
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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.
Idk if people get that when Marx and Lenin were writing, and to a lesser extent Mao, "Criminals" were still believed by many to be people who had some inherit flaw that made them bad people. Weird skull phrenology shit. When they're talking about criminals they're working from a different theory of crime, justice, society, and biology than we are. Idk what marx or lenin or anyone back in the day believed, but back then criminal was something you are, a fixed trait. In contrast to "crime" being the breaking of arbitrary bougie laws including things like shoplifting, skateboarding, selling weed, fraud, and all the rest that everyone does and aren't necessarily a reflection on the individual person but rather a relfection of where they are in socity.e