The term "Lumpenproletariat"

[Comrade B]

I am re-reading the Communist Manifesto and thought I would see what this word exactly means. Marx writes "The 'dangerous class," the Lumpenproletariat, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue."

It seems like at Marx's time, this would be the incredibly poor population which would see the military as a way out of the slums. This also seems as though it could be interpreted as simply criminals (as they have been "thrown off by the lowest layers of old society").

I see this idea now as much more of the group of the population who is happy in the oppressed society. Those who have been utterly convinced that the bourgeois have the people's interests in heart, the Tea Baggers and fanatical supporters of Obama.
They are the most likely to side against the revolutionary classes and with their oppressors, as were the incredibly poor of the 19th century.

Am I correct in the above/ do you disagree with my modern definition?

[Robocommie]

I've often thought the classical interpretation of the Lumpenproletariat to be very judgemental and condescending, so I don't really like it much.

You should check out Frantz Fanon, he wrote some very interesting things about the Lumpen, and a lot of his stuff has been a major influence on certain Palestinian groups, the Black Panther Party, a lot of South African people's movements. Very interesting stuff.

[Comrade B]

Are there any smaller works of his or a good place to get a quick summary of it? I am a student right now, which doesn't leave too much time for my own readings

[Robocommie]

Are there any smaller works of his or a good place to get a quick summary of it? I am a student right now, which doesn't leave too much time for my own readings

I totally sympathize, I'm in the same boat. Offhand I can't think of anything that would be a real quick read, but I always find Wikipedia to be a pretty handy starting point.

Tell you what, let me ask a friend of mine, who's more familiar with Fanon than I am, see if he has any recomendations.

[Kléber]

The lumpen ("rags") proletariat are people who are not just temporarily unemployed but have totally fallen through the cracks, who are alienated from the productive economy and no longer have a stake in it. They might have had a normal life once but capitalism has destroyed that, they are no longer tied to a neighborhood, workplace or family and therefore, they have nothing to look out for except themselves. Thus, they are just as easy for a fascist movement, or a church, to recruit as for a communist party, because they have been severed from the rest of the working class.

We should always appeal to the poorest elements and try to bring them into the broader workers' movement, but basing ourselves on lumpen elements would be a very bad mistake. The Black Panthers and the Brown Berets in the US focused centrally on the lumpenproletariat and assumed their poverty would make them the most revolutionary, but this turned out to be an avenue for criminals, wreckers, and FBI agents to pour into those organizations and destroy them from the inside.

In Germany, the lumpenproletariat was divided between the Communist and Nazi militias, both of whom tried to build paramilitary armies. The Nazi Stormtroopers were largely unemployed workers whom the NSDAP gave a sense of belonging and community they had never had before. In Cambodia, the anti-working-class, anti-city ideology of the Khmer Rouge found fertile ground in the agricultural lumpenproletariat and the poor peasants, who eagerly took part in the mass butchery of the proletariat and intelligentsia.

That said, Marx's un-PC words about the lumpenproletariat have also been used by revisionists to justify harsh repression of the working class. In the USSR during the 1930's,the poorest elements were targeted for execution and forced labor under the "Law of Misappropriation of Socialist Property" and "Law of Spikelets (Gleaning)." Today, whenever the Chinese Communist Party government puts down a militant strike or protest, it blames "lumpen elements" for starting the trouble.


I see this idea now as much more of the group of the population who is happy in the oppressed society. Those who have been utterly convinced that the bourgeois have the people's interests in heart, the Tea Baggers and fanatical supporters of Obama.
They are the most likely to side against the revolutionary classes and with their oppressors, as were the incredibly poor of the 19th century.
The middle class are not lumpenproletarian. They do, however, due to their economic isolation, behave similar politically (can be won over by the left or right, jump back and forth, are targeted for recruitment by fascists, etc.).

[jake williams]

I see this idea now as much more of the group of the population who is happy in the oppressed society. Those who have been utterly convinced that the bourgeois have the people's interests in heart, the Tea Baggers and fanatical supporters of Obama.
They are the most likely to side against the revolutionary classes and with their oppressors, as were the incredibly poor of the 19th century.

Am I correct in the above/ do you disagree with my modern definition?
I insist you don't take this personally, because I think it's a valuable discussion, but I find myself getting really frustrated a lot of the time when people purport to have found some part of Marx which is outdated and needs some sort of modern rethinking. Part of the frustration is from the fact that there are undoubtedly anachronisms, errors, inaccuracies etc. that need to be corrected. But much of what ends up proposed is, I think, not really an accurate correction, which is especially problematic if the original Marx (or whomever) is actually really an important analysis of some specific phenomenon.

The lumpenproletariat is basically the same class it's always been for the whole history of capitalism, which is one of those things that is unusual; it's unusual even for geniuses like Marx to make statements about society that have such longevity. The LP is that class of people which is excluded from capitalist production - they're not workers, either because they choose not to be or because they don't have the option, but they also don't own any capital. They get their subsistence, basically, from three places: the charity of the working class, crime, and in certain circumstances, they are paid by the bourgeoisie to do certain things. It is also, like every other class, transitional at the edges: lots of people will be workers at some point or points in their lives, and members of the LP at others.


I've often thought the classical interpretation of the Lumpenproletariat to be very judgemental and condescending, so I don't really like it much.
To an extent, yeah. The LP aren't "bad people". The LP are people who don't participate in capitalist production. This means that they're not generally (generally a key concept here) subject to the positive effects on the consciousness of workers that happens in socialized capitalist production, and can often become very individualized. Marx saw this in 19th century Europe; I see it all the time today, with a lot of anarchist street kids, friends and friends of friends, who in a lot of cases can't work, either because they won't be hired, or because they refuse to work in what we all agree are the abominable conditions of capitalist production. And in the process of this they can acquire a certain contempt for the "general public", "normal people" (ie. the working class). The reasons of this can be explained in individualized terms, but it's actually one of the clearer examples of class phenomena.

The Tea Party folks are a different phenomenon entirely. The Tea Party people fall on a spectrum from, in their mainstream, conservative to anti-authoritarian. In terms of class, again in their mainstream, it's mostly workers, although there are important petty bourgeois elements. At the borders there are fascist elements; and it's within these where one finds, along with petty-bourgeois and proletarian elements, lumpenproletarian elements. But this is really marginal.

For the most part, the Tea Party phenomenon is a spontaneous reaction by the working class against a shitty society, where they have no control. Things are instead controlled by a capitalist class which includes both the liberal bankers, who form an important part of the executive branch of the state and whom the Tea Partiers are right to criticize, and the more right-wing segment of the bourgeoisie, who often owns the only media (culturally, geographically, or in terms of affordability) available, and thus has a huge capacity to lie and propagandize. While the Tea Party sentiments were natural and understandable, if mistaken, this was almost instantly co-opted by various segments of the American bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. This happened at several different levels, from the Friedmanite thinktank types to the American Nazi Party. These forces are extremely different, and it's a serious error to conflate them. It's pretty fucking significant, for example, that some small segments are openly pro-fascist, while others see their primary commitment as being a very sincere anti-fascism.

And at any rate, there's very little participation here of the lumpenproletariat.

The Tea Partiers are not at all happy in the present society, either today or or five or fifteen or thirty years ago. Again, it's mostly working class people and the economically stressed petty bourgeoisie, who are dealing with real problems due to the economic crisis, where large businesses like major investment banks can exert pressure on the state for assistance, but small businessmen cannot. The people who are content with American society and the American ruling class are the capitalists, and the liberal petty bourgeoisie (where for reasons beyond the scope of my comments could also be said to include certain better-off parts of the working class), which includes, or perhaps simply is, the vanguard of the Obama supporters. It's two distinct, almost opposite, groups. And again, the lumpenproletariat doesn't really play into it. There is a section of the lumpenproletariat (mostly black) which supported Obama, but it mostly doesn't anymore, and that's another complicated story.


You should check out Frantz Fanon, he wrote some very interesting things about the Lumpen, and a lot of his stuff has been a major influence on certain Palestinian groups, the Black Panther Party, a lot of South African people's movements. Very interesting stuff.
I second this.

[ZeroNowhere]

In 'The Peasant War in Germany', if I recall correctly, Engels gives thieves as an example of lumpenproletarian. Also, Marx said:


Since the finance aristocracy made the laws, was at the head of the administration of the state, had command of all the organized public authorities, dominated public opinion through the actual state of affairs and through the press, the same prostitution, the same shameless cheating, the same mania to get rich was repeated in every sphere, from the court to the Café Borgne[2] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch01.htm#n2) to get rich not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others, Clashing every moment with the bourgeois laws themselves, an unbridled assertion of unhealthy and dissolute appetites manifested itself, particularly at the top of bourgeois society – lusts wherein wealth derived from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes crapuleux [debauched], where money, filth, and blood commingle. The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society.

And the nonruling factions of the French bourgeoisie cried: Corruption! The people cried: À bas les grands voleurs! À bas les assassins! [Down with the big thieves! Down with the assassins!] when in 1847, on the most prominent stages of bourgeois society, the same scenes were publicly enacted that regularly lead the lumpenproletariat to brothels, to workhouses and lunatic asylums, to the bar of justice, to the dungeon, and to the scaffold. The industrial bourgeoisie saw its interests endangered, the petty bourgeoisie was filled with moral indignation, the imagination of the people was offended, Paris was flooded with pamphlets – “The Rothschild Dynasty,” “Usurers Kings of the Epoch,” etc. – in which the rule of the finance aristocracy was denounced and stigmatized with greater or less wit.

Engels:

The plebeian opposition consisted of ruined members of the middle-class and that mass of the city population which possessed no citizenship rights: the journeymen, the day labourers, and the numerous beginnings of the lumpenproletariat which can be found even in the lowest stages of development of city life. This low-grade proletariat is, generally speaking, a phenomenon which, in a more or less developed form, can be found in all the phases of society hitherto observed.

Marx:

Labour as mere performance of services for the satisfaction of immediate needs has nothing whatever to do with capital, since that is not capital's concern. If a capitalist hires a woodcutter to chop wood to roast his mutton over, then not only does the wood-cutter relate to the capitalist, but also the capitalist to the wood-cutter, in the relation of simple exchange. The woodcutter gives him his service, a use value, which does not increase capital; rather, capital consumes itself in it; and the capitalist gives him another commodity for it in the form of money. The same relation holds for all services which workers exchange directly for the money of other persons, and which are consumed by these persons. This is consumption of revenue, which, as such, always falls within simple circulation; it is not consumption of capital. Since one of the contracting parties does not confront the other as a capitalist, this performance of a service cannot fall under the category of productive labour. From whore to pope, there is a mass of such rabble. But the honest and 'working' lumpenproletariat belongs here as well; e.g. the great mob of porters etc. who render service in seaport cities etc. He who represents money in this relation demands the service only for its use value, which immediately vanishes for him; but the porter demands money, and since the party with money is concerned with the commodity and the party with the commodity, with money, it follows that they represent to one another no more than the two sides of simple circulation; goes without saying that the porter, as the party concerned with money, hence directly with the general form of wealth, tries to enrich himself at the expense of his improvised friend, thus injuring the latter's self-esteem, all the more so because he, a hard calculator, has need of the service not qua capitalist but as a result of his ordinary human frailty.


Marx saw this in 19th century Europe
The second act of the drama has just been performed in Vienna, its first act having been staged in Paris under the title of The June Days. In Paris the Guarde mobile, in Vienna "Croats" -- in both cases lazzaroni, lumpenproletariat hired and armed -- were used against the working and thinking proletarians.
-Marx


Finally the lumpenproletariat was here as elsewhere corruptible from the second day of the movement onwards, demanding weapons and pay from the Committee of Public Safety in the morning and selling itself to the big bourgeois in the afternoon to protect their buildings or rip down the barricades when evening fell. On the whole it stood on the side of the bourgeoisie, which paid it most and with whose money it led a gay life as long as the movement lasted.-Engels

[hammer&sickle]

IAm I correct in the above/ do you disagree with my modern definition?

For a look at the term"lumpenproletariat" I would recommend an essay in J Davis'"Cutting Edge:Technology Information Capitalism & Social Revolution"

The author, N. Peery, in the last essay talks about the origins of the word and its relevence today.

This thread dovetails with another thread on this forum where a comrade linked to an article in the NYT..the jist of the article was that unemployment for a large section of the working class is here to stay. That we are witnessing a NEW development..structual unemployment and the rise of a NEW class or as the NYT's put it the"new poor".

This structual unemployment is not really new for the black community..although it is much worse now than when automation decimated the ranks of the black worker. Structual unemployment is spreading into the ranks of the elite of the working class and even into management sections of society..that is probably why the NYT is finally admitting what some on the left have been talking about for years.

The authors in Davis' book provide a good understanding of the economic..in Marxist terms..causes of the crisis in Capitalism that we are witnessing before our very eyes.