"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.
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.
the bourgeoisie are a revolutionary class, just a different revolution.
Lumpen drug runners aren't gunna' help us do communism, dude.
What, you're just going to take a weekend class and learn how to make quiet running stealth submarines that can evade 21st century navies all by yourself? Better figure out how to get those drug runners on team, comrade. They hold vital technological knowledge and skills we badly need.
age of cell phones and heavily armed maoist prostitutes
I don't really know that I'd agree we live in an age of Maoist prostitutes, much less heavily armed ones, or what cellphones have to do with the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat
I don't really know what I think about the concept of the lumpenproletariat, but I don't think this is a very compelling critique of it either
Sex workers are woke and people with cellphones can access vast amounts of information, including revolutionary theory, that were not available to poor people in prior eras. That's pretty much it. In so far as "lumpen" was a valid category it reflected those people's relationship to information as much as it did their relation to capital. The notion of hopelessly ignorant trash and wastrels preying on the margins of society is not reflected in the technological and informational reality of the 21st century. We can actually reach and educate every single person on the planet with infinitely reproducible digital information now and that changes the math of revolution right down to it's foundations.
I think the problem is that the LP is a meta class. Like how the working classes are not a monolithic bloc but include the proletariat, the peseantry, the artisans, the lowest strata of the PB etc, all with their own class relations.
The Lumpens are everyone from a beggar to someone who steals to live to the mafia to an opera singer or artist who relies on bourgeois donations rather than wages. Heck, there's an argument to be made that someone who runs an NGO is a kind of "Lumpenbourgoise"
All of these have the sense that the existence of the strata is dependant on the stability of the capitalist system and instability hurts them, but they have wildly different revolutionary potential
Opera singers are lumpen?
It was, up to the mid 20th century common to label Actors of all types lumpen. Because their industry is reliant on the rich to exist due to the economic costs of the form. Only some of this is the traditional associations of acting with sex work.
Most Opera Singers are iterant contract workers, who work for organisations that themselves are entirely reliant on donations from the rich, and sometimes governments. The rest have a wealthy patron or are already independent financially.
There are very few of the mid century repertory companies left, mostly state funded low grade German houses. Opera Companies make negligible money from ticket sales. Not only is it not profitable, it cannot be made so.
If the capitalist system goes down and the new socialist government doesn't pick up the slack then they lose not just their current jobs but the entire industry. They'll be collectivised like in AES high art companies or cease to exist.
Is this a bit?
You don’t know what you’re talking about + there will be no prostitution under communism + lumpenprole isn’t an insult or moral indictment
there will be no prostitution under communism
Unless you have a fairly specific definition of prostitution, some people will always be willing to exchange goods or labour for sex regardless of economic or political system.
Prostitution isn’t the presence of negotiated sexual activity any more than capitalism is the presence of market activity. Exploitation is a defining characteristic of both.
Edit: Alexandra Kollantai already thoroughly explored this topic in 1921.
Also I thought that the concept of lumpenproletariate was standard ML ideology. Again, I'm not disagreeing with you as I've spend no time looking into this.
I'm curious about this.
I'd first heard it in a Burkinabé context. I don't remember coming across it in Marx or Lenin?
What's the history of the concept? We need to get to the bottom of this. (I'm too busy to read right now, maybe in 12 hours.)
It was coined by Marx. See glossary on marxists.org.
There can be a reactionary usage of the word, but there is also theoretical utility in distinguishing proletarians with different relations of production. Based on the glossary here it sounds like Marx used the specific word lumpe satirically against Stirner, but idk the details of that.
It's literally in the Manifesto.
I think if you asked 20 internet Marxists for their definition of "lumpenprole" you would probably get 20 different answers, ngl. Poorly defined term that has been used and misused in many ways historically, and tbh, a lot of people here have never actually come into contact with any parts of the "lumpenproletariat" and would probably feel well out of their comfort zone if they did.
Historically, Marxologists are world champions in saying that some section of society has no potential for revolutionary action before being proven decisively wrong by the course of history, so I wouldn't be surprised if we find out that the "lumpenproletariat" is going to be essential to the coming world socialist revolution too.
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...
Depends, there are piss poor people out there, especially in rural uneducated areas, that are drawn to fascism like moths to light and hate communism without having ever understood what the hell they're talking about.
They usually can't be reasoned with at all, they are proles but will never realize who are their allies and who will betray them as soon as they get in power. They will even actively work for fascists, if that isn't lumpenproletariat I don't know what else to describe them as.
There's a big defining difference between them and the petty bourgeoisie who have actual material benefits from fascism.
They need to attain some sort of social means first, these are people so bad off they fully know the futility of their situation a lot of time, in such straits with 0 framework, and what little knowledge they have and cherish (because that's the only knowledge they are allowed to attain, and they know this) paints their very own liberation as the worst thing possible but not apocalyptic, they're going to hope it all burns down, even if it takes them. They're opportunistic and will work for whoever gives them some means of survival or hope of that, fascists have been playing carrot and stick with lumpen for a while, even illusionary carrots they'll sadly fall for. There is little left in the core and even an afterschool babysitting or meal program which would super appeal to them is hosed. In some super poor places gangs are the defacto police and are unofficial deputies of whatever official law enforcement there is.
Gotta do for above all else to appeal lumpen unless its strong fasc vibe words they were told all their lives to trust by their limited big bourgeois approved education (its better to feel better for 3s), it reminds me in some ways of the actual bourgeois mindset where one must say the prettiest words, give off the most aesthetic vibes and do little meaningful to appeal to, though they like token gesture, lost causes and the likes quite a lot. They're also both opportunist factors to be regarded quite cautiously, a serious movement will work to proletarianize the lumpen since that will be some material improvement generally, while the bourgeois are taking large economic loss of interests, something more dangerous I'd say.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but J Sakai wrote a book on the lumpenproletariate that I really want to read. Tbh, I don't know enough to have an informed opinion either way.
Oh yea i love this contradiction cuz its never really drawn upon in the common communist discourse but it represents something interesting to me.
So im not a scholar and have only done my best, but i am not sure ive found an instance where Marx actually calls prostitutes lumpen proletariat. Marx at one point refers to Stirner's idealist conception of lumpen proletariat in the German Ideology but is clearly making fun of Stirner's vibes based analysis of class. Marx even cites pimps in particular as lumpenproletariat but not prostitutes in the 18th Brumaire.
As lumpe means rag the lumpen is supposed to be on an aesthetic external and superficial analysis that section of the working class so undignified under the capitalist system that they are now the outcasts of society.
Marxist classes are definitionally useful for the sole reason that they play a definite and objective role in class struggle in a historical materialist framework. Classes can therefore be defined through the lens of dialectical materialism as a definite mass of people in society who share a means of life, psychological character, and collective interest. The lumpenproletariat therefore in what i can tell are the fraction of the working class so debased as to then possess a material interest distinct from the proletariat and can even come into conflict with the proletariat. Petty thieves, robbers, beggars, drug dealers, and pimps sustain themselves on economic exploitation of other classes, which can include the proletariat.
The class interest of the lumpen pretariat can only ever politically manifest itself in what is essentially gangs. During times of revolutionary crises, the lumpenproletariat heavily benefits from the crisis of legitimacy of the state and can then more freely extort the other classes which has historically been represented in gangs that are either paid off by the bourgeois against other classes or independently of the bourgeois extort other classes whether by exacting tolls and taxes or other means. You can see the exact same thing playing out in Haiti today as Marx noted in the 18th Brumaire. Simply put, you can not "unionize" the lumpenproletariat - as a lumpenproletariat union is essentially manifest in gangs which even on a superficial level clearly represent their political interests as a class.
So from this analysis we can see that there is no "inherent revolutionary character" of the lumpenproletariat, rather only a dialectical character represented in its identity and material interest distinct from other classes. Even Marx in his own words says that the lumpenproletariat are capable of the highest forms of heroism, and the most debauched forms of hedonism. Particularly what Mao and the BPP noted is that there is a possibility to in essence develop a mass base in the lumpenproletariat and to cause a revolutionary development by the proletarianization of the people in this mass base.
In any case i hope this provides some clarity, and i hope i can be corrected on points where i am mistaken!
Classes can therefore be defined through the lens of dialectical materialism as a definite mass of people in society who share a means of life, psychological character, and collective interest.
Kinda off topic but this made me realize why and how China has billionaires but doesn't allow them to become a class. Was reading a paper on them the other day and I read something like that.
Everyone's always talking about the Lumpenproletariat, but what about the Lumpy Proletariat? What about those guys huh?
Theyre lumpy because they can't afford to see a dermatologist and get the lumps checked out
wasn't lumpenproletariat the purple cloud girl who talked funny from adventure time?
hard agree, i've had people insist to me that criminalized peoples, who are usually minorities as any knowledgeable person knows (as capitalism uses bias in order to harm a group and allow for super exploitation), are lumpen and thus non-proles.
while we're on the topic of class, i had some honest to god Kautskyites insist to me that peasants are both inherently reactionary and no longer exist. they insist they are 'agrarian proles' but also when wanting to be mean they're peasants???? is there any veracity to this idea because I honestly don't know how to deal with freaks that identify with the second internationale in the year of our lord 2024
I mean who cares if they’re non proles lol. Being one doesn’t make you a good person. Even the revolutionaries who believed in their potential differentiated them as they have different circumstances. It’s just a class distinction.
again agreed
I think a lot of the people who are scoffing and telling me to read theory have some very formal (and 19th century and irrelevant) idea of what Lumpen means which isn't related to how it's actually used in 21st century discourse. Like imagine legitimately believing that just because someone has felony convictions for shoplifting or selling weed they can't participate in revolutionary work? It's ridiculous on it's face. Or saying "homeless people are lumpen" when half of homeless people in the use have a wage labor job? It's just silly. It's an outdated, irrelevant concept that doesn't apply to the 21st century paradigm of crime, labor, and class consciousness.
so "The Man" is a criminal organization but criminal organizations are good, Maoist and based ???
The Three Main Rules of Discipline And Eight Points for Attention for the Red Army
Obey orders in all your actions.(一切行动听指挥) Do not steal from the workers and peasants.(不拿群众一针一线) Turn in everything captured.(一切缴获要归公) Speak politely.(说话和气) Pay fairly for what you buy.(买卖公平) Return everything you borrow.(借东西要还) Pay for anything you damage.(损坏东西要赔) Do not hit or swear at people.(不打人骂人) Do not damage crops.(不损坏庄稼) Do not take liberties with women.(不调戏妇女) Do not ill-treat captives.(不虐待俘虏)criminal organizations like the mafia, yakuza and triad are very reactionary, the USA has always used these orgs to attack the Left. When the PRC was established, the triad were driven out and they fled to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia. During Deng's reforms, the Triad made their way back into the PRC and are thriving again.
Those who are "criminal" according to the bourgeois state, are completely different from those who are criminal according to the proletarian state
The difference is far from complete. Homelessness wouldn't be criminal in a proletarian state, for example, but burglarizing a home or robbing someone at gunpoint still would be.
your profile says you've been here for years, so clearly you REFUSE to do the actual reading
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.
It’s a good example that no one - not even Marx - is free from biases. Marx still has some of his middle class sensibilities around him when he talks about the lumpenproletariat. And I do not buy the argument some make that when Marx calls them “the dangerous classes”, he means they are dangerous to capital; I think he just means he thinks they are dangerous.
And that’s ok. Not every word Marx wrote should be taken as gospel. Nor does that mean the concept of a lumpenproletariat doesn’t have any analytic value.
Genuinely though, it's hard for me to imagine even a petit bourgeois Marx thinking that sex workers are literally dangerous.
Just based off that I tend to think that he didn't mean physically dangerous but socially dangerous. I just don't get it otherwise.
People's brain worms about sex work runs so deep it often seems like the foundation on which they've built everything else. Some of it can be explained as physical danger: sex workers were viewed with some justification as the primary vector of transmission for stis. Back in the day that was a very serious public health problem as illnesses that are treatable today caused enormous harm back then. But that's a public health concern. It has an economic dimension, but the actual labor of sex workers cannot be set apart from that of anyone else who works with their body on the criteria that they were often sti vectors.
There is a social concern that sex workers "break up families", and if that is taken seriously it privileges christian moralism and the boug's legally enforced nuclear family, as some kind of actually existing economic force instead of a flimsy legal fiction that acts as a means to discipline and control workers and enforce social reproduction of labor.
In the final analysis the loathing of sex workers, and their dissmissal as passively victimized minors (in the legal sense of a person who is not legally considered to have agency and responsibility) with no awareness, no agency, and no potential, who can only be patronizingly destroyed for their own good by their moral and intellectual betters, reflects a rank and basal hatred of women and the sexuality which is inherent to them.
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?
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I think there's a meaningful distinction between workers who earn their wages in the formal economy and workers who earn their wages in the informal economy. It sure is more substantial than the so-called PMCTM, where the original authors lumped teachers, accountants, and nurses together with middle managers.
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Lumpenbourgeoisie are definitely a thing. What else would you call a mob boss or a drug lord? They aren't really bourgeois because they lack legal legitimacy. If nothing else, the lumpenbourgeoisie is a strata of the bourgeoisie that the bourgeois state is at least nominally opposed to.
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The home of cell phones and heavily armed maoist prostitutes should be a tagline
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.
From the Mao link on that page:
Apart from all these, there is the fairly large lumpen-proletariat, made up of peasants who have lost their land and handicraftsmen who cannot get work. They lead the most precarious existence of all. In every part of the country they have their secret societies, which were originally their mutual-aid organizations for political and economic struggle, for instance, the Triad Society in Fukien and Kwangtung, the Society of Brothers in Hunan, Hupeh, Kweichow and Szechuan, the Big Sword Society in Anhwei, Honan and Shantung, the Rational Life Society in Chihli and the three northeastern provinces, and the Green Band in Shanghai and elsewhere. One of China's difficult problems is how to handle these people. Brave fighters but apt to be destructive, they can become a revolutionary force if given proper guidance.
This is more optimistic about their revolutionary potential than Marx, but it still has significant reservations ("but apt to be destructive"). A footnote from the editor adds:
Through these organizations the lumpen-proletarians sought to help each other socially and economically, and sometimes fought the bureaucrats and landlords who oppressed them. Of course, such backward organizations could not provide a way out for the peasants and handicraftsmen. Furthermore, they could easily be controlled and utilized by the landlords and local tyrants and, because of this and of their blind destructiveness, come turned into reactionary forces. In his counter-revolutionary coup d'etat of 1927 Chiang Kai-shek made use of them to disrupt the unity of the labouring people and destroy the revolution.
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.
Hmm, already seeing some classism rear it's ugly head. Gonna keep an eye on this post to see how mask-off people go with that
Absolutely
In the west, the working proletariat are labor aristocrats and have no revolutionary potential and are our enemies
Those who want to exclude the "undesireables" from the revolution are nazis and should be thrown in a pit
Frank channeling BMF something fierce.
At least we can agree that lumpenbourgeois exist.
Doesn't "lumpen" just mean someone without class consciousness?
You obviously have no idea what lumpenproletariat means. What form of liberalism is it to insist that others read while refusing to do so yourself?
Oh god.
As a leftist, I now truly understand why people hate leftists.
