“Lumpenproletariat” is exactly the kind of idea an educated German theorist would come up with in the wreckage of the industrial revolution and it’s ridiculous to try to carry that notion forward to the age of cell phones and heavily armed maoist prostitutes and if anyone can’t understand that you should throw grass at them until they stop being dorks because they’re too far gone to touch it themselves.
Like ffs read even one anthro text about black market and grey market economies and stop treating The Man’s legal system like anything but a criminal organization.
I have no idea where you’re getting this from. Saying someone is a Lumpenprole isn’t a moral judgement, just an economic one. Someone who grows rice and the bandits that steal it have different relations to the means of production. They are not just proles who break the law.
it’s ridiculous to try to carry that notion forward to the age of cell phones and heavily armed maoist prostitutes
Engels was largely revolutionary but he was also bourgeoisie, that does not mean that the bourgeoisie as a class are revolutionary. Also, many ML theorists argue that Lumpenproles do have revolutionary potential while not denying they exist as a class.
Can anyone give me a sensible definition of lumpenprole?
I thought they were an impoverished poor people, kept in a similar, if not worse position to that of the proletariat, who happens to not include themselves in, as regular, sanctioned working wage labor of capitalism e.t.c, such as people of no houses and its resulting petty criminals and prostitutes?
Now it includes the mafia and opera singers?
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat
Don’t take seriously people who refuse to read theory and instead reinvent new definitions for terms based on posting and vibes. English language social media is not actually the bleeding edge of development for proletarian revolutionary theory.
Homeless people, sex workers, unemployed people, petty drug dealers, and disabled people are a passively rotting mass with no class consciousness and no revolutionary potential.
Listen to yourself. Read your own definition out loud and listen to yourself.
It’s the twenty first century. Falling back on the form of a scientific theory as it existed over a century ago and either dismissing or never even considering the vast amount of additional data we have avilable and the drastically different nature of the experiment is silly. The whole point of marxism as a scientific discipline is that if available evidence changes the theory can be brought up to date to better model the observable world. The social sciences have undergone enormous development since the 1960s and that development has given us tools to better understand the economic relationship of traditionally dismissed and reviled groups within the working class to capital. Marx was writing in a period where the tools of the social sciences were very crude to the point of near uselessness and his theory, and personal beliefs, reflect that. Dogmatically throwing up a definition of class developed in the 1860s using the very crudest tools of sociology and anthropology, in the face of 160 years of further development that has completely overthrown the notion of a depoliticized mess of dirty, icky undesirables, is the height of sillyness. Dalits are organizing. Burakumin are organizing. The role of unemployed tramps given ax handles and a shot of whisky and told to go crush a strike has been replaced by professional police, military, and intelligence agencies. Drug cartels and such organized crime as still exists are deeply integrated in to the state and often constitute quasi-states in their own right.
Where is this passively rotting mass in 2024? Show me this class of people who do not relate to productive capital, who are cast out from the proletariat, who have no revolutionary potential? I demand to see proof of their existence.
