After the Revolution

[ComradeAllende]

Assuming that we succeed in overthrowing the bourgeoisie in a global revolution, what would be on our list of main priorities. Also, how would we deal with the defeated classes (bourgeoisie, lumpenproletariat, etc) and any potential counter-revolutionaries?

[The Feral Underclass]

There's no such thing as the "lumpenproletariat." I think that's important to recognise if you're going to discuss succeeding in a revolution.

[BIXX]

Assuming that we succeed in overthrowing the bourgeoisie in a global revolution, what would be on our list of main priorities. Also, how would we deal with the defeated classes (bourgeoisie, lumpenproletariat, etc) and any potential counter-revolutionaries?

Why would you want to defeat the lumoen?

[Sinister Intents]

In The 18th Brumaire, Marx used Lumpenproletarian as a term to mean they're lacking in class consciousness and also referred to them as scum because they also represent a criminal element

[Comrade Jacob]

Ruthless suppression of the former unconverted-bourgeoisie and the installing a revolutionary spirit into the minds of the lumpen.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

The very first order of business, post-revolution, would be to first make sure that the people have their necessities taken care of, as well as making sure that infrastructue and lines of communication are repaired and smoothed out as quickly as possible. You can have all the revolutionary fervor in the world, but it don't mean jack shit if no-one has drinking water or can access the roads.

[ComradeAllende]

Why would you want to defeat the lumoen?

Assuming that there is a modern form of the lumpenproletariat in the developed countries, which I think there is (pimps, criminal gangs/mobs, maybe human traffickers?), odds are that they won't look too kindly on a socialist revolution that seeks to abolish money and class distinctions.

Odds are that these lumpen groups will serve the interests of capital one way or another; after all, revolution makes for strange bedfellows. During the American Revolution, the classical liberals in Philadelphia had little problem with accepting the military aid of the French, even though France was run by a near-absolute monarchy (which the Americans were supposedly fighting against).

[Sinister Intents]

I'd say exactly as BIR said, but it would remain highly necessary to keep fighting against counterrevolution and to maintain the achievements the formerly oppressed masses have achieved. I think it's idealist to try to say exactly what'll happen and we can't make predictions as to what will be done

[ComradeAllende]

I'd say exactly as BIR said, but it would remain highly necessary to keep fighting against counterrevolution and to maintain the achievements the formerly oppressed masses have achieved. I think it's idealist to try to say exactly what'll happen and we can't make predictions as to what will be done

Yeah, I was mainly curious about the need to defend against "counter-revolutionaries." When I was first introduced to socialist ideas and literature, I was hesitant about supporting a violent revolution because of the bloody "purges" that often follow; the "revolutionary terror" of the French Revolution was big on my mind, and I wanted to know if a socialist revolution could succeed without involving show trials, "re-education camps", and other human rights violations normally associated with "socialist" governments.

[rezider]

I often find myself thinking about such a scenario. To be honest, we can't predict how things are going to turn out. Global revolution. Main objectives: make sure every person gets their necessities taken care of; fast repairs of anything of the utmost importance; preparation for counter-revolutions. Beyond that... I'm afraid we can't say much. We're just gonna have to wait and see.

On the matter of the lumpen. They might take the side of the capitalists. Since we are trying to create a classless and moneyless society. We're dealing with strong ethical issues here - not just a new 'way of things'.

[Sinister Intents]

Certainly what is deemed the Lumpenproletariat will pose a great risk because they're exactly those unconscious philistines (Thanks Rafiq for the definition.) That will do what's necessary to protect their way of life because they've been duped by their families, the media, and so on. The existence of the unconscious masses points to the fact that the mass movement will need to focus on educating everyone. The more experienced and knowledgeable communists will need to ensure they attack not only the bourgeoisie and their creatures, but also dismantle the scars of bourgeois ideology.

[John Nada]

Marx called Louis Bonaparte chief of lumpenproletariat. His was straight up royalty, bourgeois as fuck. Why would Marx say he was a bum or crook?
Sixteen million peasants (including women and children) dwell in caves, a large number of which have but one opening, others only two and the most favored only three. Windows are to a house what the five senses are to the head. The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly emerged small holdings and fertilized them with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks the blood from their hearts and brains and casts them into the alchemist’s caldron of capital. The Code Napoléon is now nothing but the codex of distraints, of forced sales and compulsory auctions. To the four million (including children, etc.) officially recognized paupers, vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes in France must be added another five million who hover on the margin of existence and either have their haunts in the countryside itself or, with their rags and their children, continually desert the countryside for the towns and the towns for the countryside. Therefore the interests of the peasants are no longer, as under Napoleon, in accord with, but are now in opposition to bourgeois interests, to capital. Hence they find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task it is to overthrow the bourgeois order. But “strong and unlimited government” - and this is the second “Napoleonic idea” that the second Napoleon has to carry out – is called upon to defend this “material order” by force. This “material order” also serves, in all Bonaparte’s proclamations, as the slogan against the rebellious peasants.Bold mine: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm Here peasants that would, by some people's, Wikipedia's and Marxists.org's definition, be "lumpenproletariat", Marx said they were natural allies of the proletariat! A couple paragraph over:
But the enemies whom the French peasant now has to defend his property against are not the Cossacks; they are the huissiers and the tax collectors. The small holding no longer lies in the so-called fatherland but in the registry of mortgages. The army itself is no longer the flower of the peasant youth; it is the swamp flower of the peasant lumpen proletariat. It consists largely of replacements, of substitutes, just as the second Bonaparte is himself only a replacement, the substitute for Napoleon. [b]It now performs its deeds of valor by hounding the peasants in masses like chamois, by doing gendarme duty; and if the natural contradictions of his system chase the Chief of the Society of December 10 across the French border, his army, after some acts of brigandage, will reap, not laurels, but thrashings. Because it wasn't that the homeless and criminal were outright counterrrevolutionary. Proletarians always had that shit. In The 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm) nearly every single time the lumpenproletariat is mentioned, it's in a law-enforcement or military role. Bonaparte's lumpenproletariat was his paramilitary and sympathizers in the state that he launched a coup with. In Marx's and Engels's letters, if the lumpenproletariat comes up, it's usually either suspected agent provacateurs or spies. So the lumpenproletariat everyone should be pissed at isn't the lower strata of the proletariat, but more like the SS, Pinkertons, Blackwater or Contras. How revolutionaries would deal with a counterrevolutionary organizations like the Blackshirts or AUC, I don't want to say.

Something closer to the concept of what some consider the "lumpenproletariat" would be Kautsky's "slum proletariat" mentioned in The Class Struggle (https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1892/erfurt/index.htm).
However numerous the class of menials may be, it has not, as a rule, been able to absorb the whole number of those left propertyless. The unemployable, children, old people, sick and cripples have been from the beginning unable to earn a living by entering into service. To these were added at the beginning of modern times a large number who could work but found nothing to do. For them there was nothing but to beg, steal, or prostitute themselves. They were compelled either to perish or to throw overboard all sense of shame, honor and self-respect. They prolong their existence only by giving precedence to their immediate wants over their regard for their reputations. That such a condition cannot but exercise the most demoralizing and corrupting influence is self-evident.https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1892/erfurt/ch05.htm He says some shit about how they're dependent on the bourgeoisie and useless, and said they have a class consciousness similar to small peasants and the lower petit-bourgeoisie. Next section over:
It was from the last mentioned classes that capitalism drew its first supply of wage-labor. It needed not so much skilled workers as docile ones. And since the slum-proletariat and the sections of the population most closely related to it had already learned obedience and humility they were well fitted to supply the demand. With workers from this source capitalism could develop without opposition. They were easily exploited to the limit. They would work long hours amidst almost intolerable conditions. Whoever wishes to learn of the deplorable state of the proletariat during the early days of modern industry has but to read Frederich Engels’ classic work on the working-class of England.The slum proletariat was not some fixed state. The proletariat was drawn up from the slums, and often fell back in or stayed. In a previous chapter (https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1892/erfurt/ch02.htm) specifically about the proletariat, Kautsky mentions proletarians depending on soup kitchens, daycare for kids and welfare. Sometimes desperate parents would get tricked into giving their kid to a capitalist "charity" that was really using child labor. He mentions proletarian women were forced by the bourgeoisie into sex work, either out of desperation for survival or what would now be called sexual harassment or even rape, and points out the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie's cry of how sacred the family is. And of workers getting laid off and joining the reserve army of labor.

So you have it where proletarians are often broke, homeless, unemployed, panhandling, doing sex work, living off charity, under threat of arrest and magically law-abiding for some strange reason.:rolleyes: Sounds an awful lot like the lumpen.:lol:

To get back more along what the op's point was. The proletariat "defeats" classes by eliminating classes altogether, including the proletariat. The bourgeoisie only exists as a parasite on the masses and has no interest in just abolishing classes. They thrive off pitting different classes and strata against each other, and even fight amongst themselves(ie wars and competing businesses). The petit-bourgeoisie is intermediary between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, so that class mostly wants to be straight up haute-bourgeoisie one day. The labor aristocracy tends to only worry about their immediate group interest, rather than the proletariat as a whole. Intellectuals are cross-class. And the peasantry is dying out, agribussiness is turning more and more into proletarians every year. Being the one class that exploits no one yet is the most exploited, and with nothing to lose, put the proletariat in a unique position in society to do so. The world could go on just fine without capitalist yet only the workers, but a capitalist by definition cannot exist without workers beneath them.

There shouldn't be any of this,"Oh, we need to build up productive forces and advance technology" shit like previous attempts used as an excuse. That just left places like the USSR and PRC ripe for capitalist productive relations. Marx and Engels thought at least the lower phase of communism was possible in their lifetime. Technologically, much of the third-world today would look like futuristic science fiction to them. Everything for full communism is already here.

If anything, we need to undo all the Taylorist, racist, patriarchal shit drilled into everyone's brains since childhood to turn everyone good workers for the bourgeoisie. No bourgeoisie means no proletariat either. There's no such thing as slaves without masters. In the long run communism is better for everyone, even the ex-bourgeoisie.

[The Feral Underclass]

Assuming that there is a modern form of the lumpenproletariat in the developed countries

Why would you assume that? Class is not defined by what kind of job you have or don't have.

[Atsumari]

Just wanna say that revolutionaries, whether they are leftist, liberal, or nationalist are notoriously bad at creating institutions, especially if their goal took a generation or more to accomplish which means that we will be put in an incredibly awkward situation in the aftermath and will have a lot of reconsidering to do in regards to ideology and who our friends are.

[Tim Cornelis]

Marx called Louis Bonaparte chief of lumpenproletariat. His was straight up royalty, bourgeois as fuck. Why would Marx say he was a bum or crook?Bold mine: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm Here peasants that would, by some people's, Wikipedia's and Marxists.org's definition, be "lumpenproletariat", Marx said they were natural allies of the proletariat! A couple paragraph over: Because it wasn't that the homeless and criminal were outright counterrrevolutionary. Proletarians always had that shit. In The 18 Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/index.htm) nearly every single time the lumpenproletariat is mentioned, it's in a law-enforcement or military role. Bonaparte's lumpenproletariat was his paramilitary and sympathizers in the state that he launched a coup with. In Marx's and Engels's letters, if the lumpenproletariat comes up, it's usually either suspected agent provacateurs or spies. So the lumpenproletariat everyone should be pissed at isn't the lower strata of the proletariat, but more like the SS, Pinkertons, Blackwater or Contras. How revolutionaries would deal with a counterrevolutionary organizations like the Blackshirts or AUC, I don't want to say.

What Marx points out is that the lumpenproletariat was mobilised as sort of mercenaries, not that the lumpenproletariat is synonymous with mercenary counter-revolutionaries. Very similar to Assad mobilising criminal gangs to fight rebels (see Shahiba). So Bonaparte is the the chief of the lumpenproletariat, not a lumpenproletarian himself.

[John Nada]

What Marx points out is that the lumpenproletariat was mobilised as sort of mercenaries, not that the lumpenproletariat is synonymous with mercenary counter-revolutionaries. Very similar to Assad mobilising criminal gangs to fight rebels (see Shahiba). So Bonaparte is the the chief of the lumpenproletariat, not a lumpenproletarian himself.
Bonaparte, who precisely because he was a bohemian, a princely lumpen proletarian, had the advantage over a rascally bourgeois in that he could conduct the struggle meanly, now saw, after the Assembly guided him with its own hand across the slippery ground of the military banquets, the reviews, the Society of December 10, and finally the Code penal, that the moment had come when he could pass from an apparent defensive to the offensive. The minor defeats meanwhile sustained by the Minister of Justice, the Minister of War, the Minister of the Navy, and the Minister of Finance, through which the National Assembly signified its snarling displeasure, troubled him little. He not only prevented the ministers from resigning and thus recognizing the sovereignty of parliament over the executive power, but could now consummate what he had begun during the recess of the National Assembly: the severance of the military power from parliament, the removal of Changarnier.Bold mine: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch05.htm Though it might just be a rhetorical devise.

The lumpenproletariat Marx describes was organized in the Society of December 10, Bonaparte's organization. It was his gang, and they were his soldiers. The pimps, thieves, bookkeepers and assassins worked for him. But it also included "adventurous and ruined" members of the bourgeoisie. Shabiha also sounds like they're either private militias, mercenaries or secret police.

The line between a gang and a paramilitary often does not exists. Perhaps mercenary class would be more accurate, rather than poor or underclass? Not necessarily counterrevolutionary, but I can't think of a bourgeois democratic or attempted socialist revolution with mercenaries in a progressive role. Counterrevolutionary, yes, but generally just a hired reaction.