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There's so much confusion over this term. The one person I know who identifies as lumpen thinks of it as the bottom of the proletariat, specifically unemployed or irregularly employed folks. While not necessary correct, this definition has considerable spread. So we all need to be careful to define the category before making claims about it.
"Unless revolution uproots the basic social organisation, the biological family - the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled - the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated."
- Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex
That's so true I remember the last thread about this some confused comrades who thought that the disabled were part of the lumpenprolatariat
Yeah, I always dread seeing this topic arise on this forum. The only useful understanding of the lumpenproletariat is that provided by its context in capitalist society. It is both the tragic excrement of capitalism and the deterrent that keeps proletarians "in their place." I might be working for an abusive boss and making less than minimum wage, but at least I'm not one of them - in jail, dead, hustling or somewhere in between.
Lumpen = poor + counterrevolutionary (gangsters, pimps, dealers).
Lumpen is not simply poor (beggars, rag and bone men, homeless, living off unemployed welfare, council estate kid).
Nor is lumpen simply counterrevolutionary in employment (junior banker, conscripted soldier, debt collector, bailiff).
The problem is that they are according to Marx which I think most of us can agree was not one of his more inspired moments.
