I have not read every document the two wrote regarding the subject, so I may be misunderstanding; but the ProleWiki makes it sound like Marx and Lenin–and therefore Marxist-Leninists would–disregard the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat. It seems like sex workers and homeless folks and disabled people are all spat on by the bourgeoisie and would be glad to help take them down? I’m disabled and mostly unable to work (I do work a little, but not even enough to be part-time) and I consider myself an ML.
The wiki describes the lumpen as exploitable by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, but we’ve seen in the West that the proletariat as a whole is susceptible to these forces. See Zohran run one of the most radical campaigns we’ve seen in a while and then put on Zionist officials and advocate for changing the system from the inside. The working class is content to sit down and wait for someone else to make change for them. Most disabled people I know, on the other hand, are ready to tear the system down with their own hands. So are we supposed to just gloss over a group of people who’ve been pressure cooking this whole time? If so, why?
I think what people are missing is that the primary problem within the lumpenproletariat isn’t that they aren’t dissatisfied or alienated, it is that they do not possess the means through which to replicate themselves as a dominant class.
The reason the proletariat is necessarily the class that must overthrow the bourgeois in order for society to have social progression is that they have the knowledge and means to not only replicate society, but demonstratively alter it’s material composition.
The lumpenproletariat, scabs, drug dealers, prostitutes, homeless, etc, the army of reserve labor, do not inherently possess revolutionary potential is because they, for the most part, predate the proletariat in existence, and are not directly connected to the way of shaping the world through material goods. It is the same reason why say, an email job does not produce an inherently revolutionary subject. It’s not a moral calculus, it’s a relationship to the means of production.
That said, it is not outside the bounds of a communist party to attempt to proletarianize the lumpen, in fact, that should be the goal.
To add to what everyone else here has said, the lumpenproletariat is less of “non-workers” and more “scabs and strike breakers”. A class of proles that specifically work counter to the interests of their own class due to financial incentive from a controlling class.
Those who find a living outside productive labor are always going to be heavily vulnerable to financial exploitation. Not because they’re bad, but because their position in the reserve labor army makes them now dependent on money from profit extraction.
Remember this concept was come up with well before anything even resembling a modern welfare system existed. In fact it was this relationship specifically that drove the Soviets and future revolutionary movements to immediately build welfare systems to prevent exploitation of lumpen/labor reserve.
Responding to a comment you made here, it is critical to think of Marxism as not being a moral philosophy. We can talk about moral motivations for one’s activism and moral tones in the writing, but the philosophy itself is not grounded in moral assumptions and that is a core feature to what it is. The (imo somewhat unfair) dismissal of lumpen people is not about them being bad people but because another important element of Marxism is the way thay the specific relations of production in society creates a revolutionary class, and in this case that is a relation the lumpenproletariat is mostly alienated from.
But still a third vital element of ML philosophy is that neither Marx nor Lenin were prophets, and being a Marxist-Leninist does not mean following whatever they said, but instead using their basic framework, which one may decide leads them in some respects to different conclusions. It’s a common ML stance that the past judgements about the lumpenproletariat were too limited and short-sighted, though their seperation from the rest of the proletariat does also represent a real difficulty in terms of organizing.
I don’t know the specifics about Lenin’s take on the subject
But Marx was simply making observations about the dynamics taking place in British and western European slums in the middle of the 19th century
He wasn’t making a universalist condemnation of lumpen segments throughout all time and space and he certainly wasn’t talking about the global ghettos of the later 20th and early 21st centuries
The world Marx was exaimning was the world of Dickens, important observations at the time but not really relevant (in terms of this specific subject) 150 years later
The mechanisms that create, police and exploit slums have changed in significant ways since the time of Marx (hell they’ve changed multiple times) a decent Marxist examination of modern lumpen conditions can be found in Vijay Prashad’s work on Indian communists and their struggles to organize the slums, it’s a common thruline in all his lectures on Indian communism
I need to read much, much more about the lumpen but the term feels so extremely reductive, especially given today’s conditions. Like I feel like there is a lot of potential within prison populations to build political consciousness, and other groups like sex workers and disabled folks, too. It’s already happening within these populations anyway.
Agreed. I am currently working to understand this as well because I need to bridge the gap of what is the lumpen today and what it was when Marx wrote his work.
The people we work with clearly aren’t exactly lumpen the way Marx framed it, but theu aren’t exactly proletarians either. They definitely are the reserve army of labor though. And often the most aware of the conditions, far more so than anyone with access to waged work.
The modern lumpen is also very much a source of surplus extraction, but it happens indirectlt via services etc. There’s a form of commodification going on there.
The welfare state was erected to suppress communism. The way this has worked is made concrete in the transformation of the reserve army of labor.
Yes, I apprexiate this analysis! I think that the lumpen in the US is probably more similar to Marx’s conception, but their conditions and they way that they operate have changed because the bourgeoisie decided to try to extract value from them
The modern lumpen is also very much a source of surplus extraction, but it happens indirectlt via services etc.
I was thinking this. Prison labor, the drug market… The underground economy directly benefits the bourgeoisie.
While not exactly the same, I was reading an article written by a black/trans/disabled sex worker, and they said that the only way they could organize around issues they cared about was BECAUSE of sex work and the time it afforded them. Having no time because we need to devote 3/4th of our lives to working, commuting, getting ready for work and sleeping probably plays a role in how weak the movement is here in the US, too.
The closest to lumpen I can see are the homeless, but even then there are a lot more that are employed than people think.
Another thing, too, is that while people may not have their labor to withhold, they can still contribute to the revolution by other means IMO. They can stand in solidarity at picket lines, for example. Some are much more willing to be militant, too. Like instead of the peasant class, the proletariat should be aligning with the lumpen here in the US
I’m going to hazard a guess that it comes down to political leverage. If the lumpen are those not engaged in productive labor, then they have little leverage on the system. Organizing and withholding labor is fundamental to class warfare.
I guess this makes sense. I guess I may have interpreted a moral judgement when it was more of a practical analysis.
I think this really is it. A sex worker (to use one example )can become part of a mass movement, but if they do so outside of literal armed conflict their participation doesn’t actively compromise the system. They can, by joining an organization, perhaps participate in solidarity and eventually acts of praxis and violence, but opposed to workers shutting down factories it really is night and day.
If every sex worker were organized it would be a better world. But compared to organizing every McDonald’s worker (where their mass withholding of labor would be noticeable at scale and strike terror in the heart of the average burger lander), it’s less potent organizing when you’re talking about destroying the system.
I should be clear - this is not to be the Taylor Lorenz straw man about disabled people. Instead, it’s a recognition that to capitalism, the disabled (when without work) are not “worth” what a productive worker is. They can provide visibility, solidarity, and participate in violence, but they don’t ever have the potential to threaten the system the way an organized working class can. If every disabled person marched tomorrow there might be headlines, but absent solidarity from labor nothing would fundamentally change
I think it’s at least partially because you can’t openly support criminal elements of society without alienating yourself from workers that want to see those elements of society eliminated (not the people themselves, the elements).
So you choose. Do you want to be the vanguard of the lumpenproletariat or the proletariat? If you can not be both then you must pick one.
Whether or not you can be both is probably determined by the level of consciousness and care for these people that exists within the proletariat, this will differ in various national conditions. The problem I notice is that the closer to revolutionary conditions a country tends to be, the less the proletariat tend to be sympathetic to the lumpenproletariat, usually because they are negatively affected by the lumpenproletariat’s actions quite regularly. So while you might be able to get a very large number of society in somewhere like Norway to be supportive of the lumpen, that seems to also coincide with the fact the country is very far away from revolutionary conditions.
The industrial proletariat is organized by the very nature of factory production and holds power over the productive forces, which allows it to develop class consiousness and be revolutionary. The lumpenproletariat is very individualistic due to fierce internal competition, doesn’t control any of vital functions of the society, has zero class consiousness and can be easily bought, which means, that while some of its members will side with proletariat, lumpenproletariat as a class will find itself on the side of the bourgeoisie.
Well, it’s more a historical observation that still holds true today.
Thieves, pimps, general folks with high material struggles, these are all people that can be outright bought with money to do anyone’s bidding.
They can be hired to kill or snitch or generally go against the interests of the proletariat.
There is no way the masses can satisfy the material needs of the lumpenproletariat in the same way that the bourgeoisie can, and so, the lumpenproletariat is much more easily swayed in favor of counter revolution.
Apart from all these other classes, there is the fairly large lumpenproletariat, made up of peasants who have lost their land and handicraftsmen who cannot get work. They lead the most precarious existence of all . . . .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. (“Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society”).
Maybe if Westerners could get over their disgust of poor people stuck in desperate times we wouldn’t be losing so badly, on so many fronts.
Further:
There is nothing automatic or certain about the relation between the present insurgencies and the working class. On the contrary, there is an extreme danger that the contradiction between the lumpenproletariat and the working class may become antagonistic (particularly if many workers were to listen to the bourgeois press or PL), The lumpenproletariat is, after all, a parasitic class that lives off the labor of the working class. Workers may perceive anarchic rebellion as a threat to the marginal security they have been able to win from the ruling class. On its side, that part of the lumpenproletariat consisting of students who have dropped out of petit bourgeois, professional, and bourgeois families has been filled with the most virulent anti-working-class ideas. And particular situations may sharpen the contradiction. (Students and street people occupy a housing development from which working-class people have been evicted, and then demand that this be a free People’s Pad, while workers in the surrounding neighborhood cannot afford their rent. Or the same situation may be turned into unified struggle. Out of the People’s Pad project has come intensive organizing for a rent strike in the surrounding community. So the task of first linking and then uniting the struggles of the lumpenproletariat and the working class is not only essential, but needs the work of conscious revolutionaries.
Among Third World people, there is a less clear demarcation between lumpenproletariat and working class than there is between street people and the white working class. Black and brown workers are the last hired and the first fired, so that a large percentage knows what it is to be among the unemployed. Many Black and brown women are on welfare or employed in part-time “domestic” (i.e., servile) positions. The Black Panther Party has shown the way to unite lumpenproletariat with working class – by constantly developing practical programs to Serve the People in areas where the oppression of the lumpen proletariat is an extreme form of oppression suffered by Black working people. Beginning with a base almost entirely within the lumpenproletariat and committed to defending the people against police brutality, the Panthers now have wide support among Black workers, and thanks to the Breakfast for Children program, throughout the Black community. What has been central to this success has been the Panthers’ refusal to take the opportunistic course of organizing around lumpenproletarian demands per se, but rather organizing through the lumpenproletariat as the most victimized members of the Black nation and therefore as ones capable of raising demands for the people as a whole. Although now and again contradictions have intensified between lumpenproletariat and working class within Third World communities, it now seems certain that revolutionary leadership, national oppression, and the intensifying crisis of imperialism will combine to forge revolutionary unity. (This is from Bay Area Revolutionary Union - Red Papers 2 you should read all of it)
I guess. I can see some people for whom that’d hold true, and this is an observation of the whole lumpenproletariat and not of each individual. But even people with great material wealth sell out, changing their entire political stance to align with the person with the most money. I just don’t quite understand who this is a specifically lumpen issue.
