In Marxist theory, the Lumpenproletariat (; ) is the underclass devoid of class consciousness. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848. They dismissed the revolutionary potential of the Lumpenproletariat and contrasted it with the proletariat. Among other groups, criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes are usually included in this category.
The Social Democratic Party of Germany made wide use of the term by the turn of the 20th century. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky followed Marx's arguments and dismissed the group's revolutionary potential, while Mao Zedong argued that proper leadership could harness it. The word Lumpenproletariat, popularized in the West by Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth in the 1960s, has been adopted as a sociological term. However, what some consider to be its vagueness and its history as a term of abuse has led to some criticism. Some revolutionary groups, most notably the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords, have sought to mobilize the Lumpenproletariat.
Overview Etymology Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are generally considered to have coined the term Lumpenproletariat. It is composed of the German word , which is usually translated as "ragged" and prolétariat, a French word adopted as a common Marxist term for the class of wage earners in a capitalist system. Hal Draper argued that the root is ("knave"), not . Bussard noted that the meaning of shifted from being a person dressed in rags in the 17th century to knavery in the 19th century.
Definition The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines it as "the lowest stratum of the proletariat. Used originally in Marxist theory to describe those members of the proletariat, especially criminals, vagrants, and the unemployed, who lacked awareness of their collective interest as an oppressed class." In modern usage, it is commonly defined to include the chronically unemployed, the homeless, and career criminals.
In English translations of Marx and Engels, lumpenproletariat has sometimes been rendered as "social scum", "dangerous classes", "ragamuffin", and "ragged-proletariat". It has been described by some scholars and theorists, as well as the Soviet nomenclature, as a declassed (déclassé) group. The term "underclass" is considered to be the modern synonym of lumpenproleteriat. Scholars note its negative connotations. Economist Richard McGahey, writing for the New York Times in 1982, noted that it is one of the older terms in a "long line of labels that stigmatize poor people for their poverty by focusing exclusively on individual characteristics." He listed the following synonyms: "underclass", "undeserving poor", and "culture of poverty". Another synonym is "riff-raff". The word is used in some languages as a pejorative. In English, it may be used in an informal disapproving manner to "describe people who are not clever or well educated, and who are not interested in changing or improving their situation."
Usage by Marx and Engels According to historian Robert Bussard, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels viewed the lumpenproletariat as:
They used the term exclusively with negative connotations, although their works lack a "consistent and clearly reasoned definition" of the term. They used the term in various publications "for diverse purposes and on several levels of meaning."
Hal Draper suggested that the concept has its roots in Young Hegelian thought and possibly in G.W.F. Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right. While Bussard believes that the idea was "at one and the same time, a hybrid of new social attitudes which crystallised in France, England and Germany, as well as an extension of more traditional, pre-nineteenth-century views of the lower classes." Bussard noted that they often used the term as a "kind of sociological profanity" and contrasted between it and "working and thinking" proletariat. According to Michael Denning, by identifying the lumpenproletariat, "Marx was combating the established view that the entire working class was a dangerous and immoral element. He drew a line between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat to defend the moral character of the former."
In early writings The first collaborative work by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to feature the term lumpenproletariat is The German Ideology, written in 1845–46. They used it to describe the plebs (plebeians) of ancient Rome who were midway between freemen and slaves, never becoming more than a "proletarian rabble [lumpenproletariat]" and Max Stirner's "self-professed radical constituency of the Lumpen or ragamuffin." The first work written solely by Marx to mention the term was an article published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in November 1848 which described the lumpenproletariat as a "tool of reaction" in the revolutions of 1848 and as a "significant counterrevolutionary force throughout Europe." Engels wrote in The Peasant War in Germany (1850) that the lumpenproletariat is a "phenomenon that occurs in a more or less developed form in all the so far known phases of society".Engels, Friedrich. 1978. "The Peasant War in Germany". In The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, vol. 10, 397–482. New York: International.; Also in (web view)
In The Communist Manifesto (1848), where lumpenproletariat is commonly translated in English editions as the "dangerous class" and the "social scum", () Marx and Engels wrote:
In writings on France
In an article analyzing the June 1848 events in Paris, Engels wrote of the gardes mobiles, a militia which suppressed the workers' uprising: "The organized lumpenproletariat had given battle to the working proletariat. It had, as was to be expected, put itself at the disposal of the bourgeoisie." Thoburn notes that Marx makes his most detailed descriptions of the lumpenproletariat in his writings of the revolutionary turmoil in France between 1848 and 1852: The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852). In The Class Struggles he describes the finance aristocracy of Louis Philippe I and his July Monarchy (1830–1848) as lumpenproletarian: "In the way it acquires wealth and enjoys it the financial aristocracy is nothing but the lumpenproletariat reborn at the pinnacle of bourgeois society." He distinguished the finance aristocracy from the industrial bourgeoisie as the former became rich "not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others." He further suggests that the lumpenproletariat is a component of the proletariat, unlike his earlier works. He claimed that the gardes mobiles were set up "to set one segment of the proletariat against the other":
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Marx identified Napoleon III as the "Chief of the Lumpenproletariat", a claim he made repeatedly. He argued that he bought his supporters with "gifts and loans, these were the limits of the financial science of the lumpenproletariat, both the low and the exalted. Never had a President speculated more stupidly on the stupidity of the masses." For Marx, the lumpenproletariat represented those who were "corrupt, reactionary and without a clear sense of class-consciousness." He wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire:
Capital In Capital (1867), Marx claimed that legislation turned soldiers and peasants "en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances." By this, he deviated from his focus on the vicious and degenerate behavior of the lumpenproletariat in his writings on France. Instead, he described the lumpenproletariat as part of what he called an "industrial reserve army", which capitalists used as required. Thus, "vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes" and other lumpenproletariat formed an element within the "surplus population" in a capitalist system.
Left-wing views Social Democratic Party of Germany The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was one of the first to use lumpenproletariat in its rhetoric, particularly to indicate the scope of its view of a "desirable" working class and to exclude the non-respectable poor. By the early 20th century, the German Marxist tradition saw workers outside the SPD and/or labor unions as members of the lumpenproletariat. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rioting and violence was often attributed by the SPD and its newspaper Vorwärts to the lumpenproletariat working in collusion with the secret police. Historian Richard J. Evans argued that the SPD, thus, lost touch with the "militancy of the classes which it claimed to represent, a militancy which found expression in frequent outbursts of spontaneous collective protest, both political and industrial, at moments of high social and political tension." For many German socialists in the imperial period the lumpenproletariat—especially prostitutes and pimps—was not only a "political-moral problem, but also an objective, biological danger to the health of society." Karl Kautsky argued in 1890 that it is the lumpenproletariat and not the "militant industrial proletariat" that mostly suffer from alcoholism. August Bebel, pre-World War I leader of the SPD, linked antisemitic proletarians to the lumpenproletariat as the former failed to develop class consciousness, which led to a racial, and not social, explanation of economic inequality.
Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union Vladimir Lenin called socialist attempts to recruit lumpenproletariat elements "opportunism". In 1925 Nikolai Bukharin described the lumpenproletariat as being characterized by "shiftlessness, lack of discipline, hatred of the old, but impotence to construct anything new, an individualistic declassed 'personality' whose actions are based only on foolish caprices." In a 1932 article on "How Mussolini Triumphed" Leon Trotsky described the "declassed and demoralized" lumpenproletariat as "the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy." He argued that capitalism used them through fascism. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, written from the Marxist-Leninist perspective, defined lumpenproletariat as: (original Russian text)
The term was rarely used in the Soviet Union to describe any portion of the Soviet society because, Hemmerle argues, following the Russian Revolution of 1917, "millions of people passed through economic conditions that bore a resemblance to the traditional meaning of lumpenproletariat". However, it was used to label labor movements in capitalist countries that were not pro-Soviet. Soviet authorities and scholars instead reserved other terms for their own lumpenproletariat groups, especially "déclassé elements" (деклассированные элементы, deklassirovannye elementy), and viewed them, like Marx, as "social degenerates, isolated from the forces of production and incapable of having a working-class consciousness." Svetlana Stephenson notes that the Soviet state "for all its ideology of assistance, cooperation and social responsibility, was ready to descend on them with all its might."
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