The lumpen in Marx’s works and its relevance for contemporary political struggle

Abstract

The role of class struggle in historical materialism and Marx’s works is central in explaining political, social, and historical phenomena. While the two main classes, the proletariat and bourgeoisie, drive the progress of capitalist society, Marx also includes references to other classes such as the lumpen that are historically relevant in class struggle. This article puts forward that Marx’s understanding of the lumpen continually changes throughout his works and is integral, not just peripheral, to class struggle. By examining the chronology of Marx’s definition of the lumpen, I argue that Marx’s later works break from his earlier indictments of the lumpen as counterrevolutionary when he concludes in Capital that the lumpen are an exploited class due to their relation to productive labor in capitalism. This approach to understanding the lumpen in Marx’s works leads me to argue that the lumpen can be a possible revolutionary force in revolutionary class struggle. Connecting Marx’s works to contemporary times, I show that traditional lumpen ways of production and life are becoming more ubiquitous, due to recent political and economic trends, and therefore more important to incorporate into political movements. I will contend that current political discourse has worked to discount the political actions of the lumpen in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, while at the same time the lumpen class has considerably grown in such countries. I conclude that the political left must incorporate an understanding of the lumpen into its struggles if it is to seriously create a radical class–based politics in the near future.

Keywords

Black Panther Party class flexible accumulation historical materialism lumpenproletariat Marx neoliberalism precarity

In their [Marx and Engels’] more theoretical works, their definition of the term lumpenproletariat is unclear and inconsistent. Anyone who tries to base further study upon their interpretation of the term will soon be at his or her wits’ end.

– Frank Bovenkerk (1984: 24).

In Marx and Engels’ conception of history, the struggle between classes is central to explaining how and why history progresses the way it does. In a classical Marxist conception of class in The Communist Manifesto, the two main classes that engage in class struggle are the bourgeoisie and proletarians, albeit with several subdivisions such as petit-bourgeoisie (Marx & Engels 2005: 17). The importance of class in Marx’s works is apparent to anyone who is familiar with the materialist conception of history. The productive class, insofar as their labor also produces society’s material relations, is invested with certain interests that force them into a dialectical conflict with the bourgeoisie and, as a result, produce society. Although in a classic account of historical materialism the bourgeoisie and proletarians are considered the main classes engaged in struggle, Marxist theorists have made an effort to further subdivide classes to gain a clearer picture of what other classes operate in capitalism. As there still is interest in investigating and complicating the role of class in Marx’s works, most of the attention is pointed (perhaps deservedly) at the central struggle in the driving force of history.

With such important weight given to class and class struggle in Marx’s philosophy, one might expect a more detailed and drawn out explanation for how each class functions within capitalist society. Prone to fragmentary and unfinished writings, Marx never offered such explanations. As Marxist theorists have picked up where Marx left off in class analysis, the role of one class in Marxist theory has remained a thorn in the larger picture of historical materialism. That class is the ‘lumpen’.¹ The inability for Marx to consistently define this class in his works opens the gate to a much broader interpretation than one could have of the proletariat or bourgeoisie. A truly definite idea of what the lumpen is and what role it plays in Marxist philosophy (and society as a whole) is largely forgotten by systematic accounts of Marxist class analysis.

In the space that Marx left in his theory of capitalist class dynamics, essential questions arise. How does Marx define the lumpen and how does it develop over the course of his work? What, if anything, makes the lumpen the ‘dangerous class’ and ultimately dangerous to class struggle? Can the lumpen theoretically, or in certain historical circumstances, be radicalized for a possible communist revolution? It is these three questions that will guide the inquiry of this article.

The first part of the article analyzes what I identify as four definitions that Marx proposes for the lumpen and then tracks how his conception of the class changes over time. After considering three definitions found in Marx’s early works, I argue that a proper materialist definition of the lumpen is found in Capital and rests on Marx’s theory of labor exploitation and the law of capitalist accumulation. Next, I weigh what can be discarded from Marx’s writings and what should be kept in order to understand the lumpen in class analysis. In the second part of the article, I examine theory in practice by reviewing historical instances to revolutionize the lumpen and determine the lumpen’s role in contemporary politics. Ultimately, I argue that ‘lumpen’ is still a useful concept in Marxist literature and the lumpen is essential for class struggle in contemporary times.

Marx’s writings

I

In Marx’s earliest writings, mentions of the lumpen are either made in passing or left in a fragmentary manuscript. Rather than trying to list out some determinate features that Marx prescribes of the lumpen (as Mark Cowling does in his essay on the lumpen) and then interpret how the class can be used in Marx’s works, a chronological reconstruction of how Marx wrote about the lumpen will be more fruitful for three reasons (Cowling 2002: 229). First, following the evolving definition of the lumpen over time will give a systematic account of how the lumpen are classified throughout Marx’s works. As his ideas about the lumpen change over time, it will be fruitful to track what underlining concepts are carried over from text to text. Second, it will show that there is not one singular definition of the lumpen in Marx’s works, but rather, at least, four specific attempts to understand the lumpen’s role in capitalism. Third, this process opens the door to an understanding of the lumpen that falls in line with Marxist reasoning that Marx himself did not fully entertain in his class analysis.

The earliest complete reference to the lumpen, in a finished text, by Marx comes in The Communist Manifesto.² He writes that the lumpen are

the ‘dangerous class’, social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society may here and there be swept into the [communist] movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue. (Marx & Engels 2005: 17)

The quote is contained in the chapter ‘Bourgeois and Proletarians’ in a section where Marx further delineates the classes that have been born throughout capitalist history. As this quote follows a paragraph about how everyone from ‘the lower middle class . . . the shopkeeper . . . and peasant’ are caught up in retaining their social identities among capitalism’s social and political upheavals, one can assume by the tone and language that Marx deems the ‘dangerous class’ as another counterrevolutionary class. In the first definition Marx offers about the not-named-lumpen lumpen, someone who is a communist or historical materialist is to conclude that the lumpen is an untrustworthy class in revolutionary struggle.

Although no more explanation is given by Marx as to why the lumpen is ‘dangerous’, it will be useful to construct a possible explanation offered by a rather short quote. First, it is odd to think of the homeless or panhandlers as a rich source for the rich and politically powerful to prey upon for ‘bribery’ to suit their interests. A walk around any major city in the world will reveal that the homeless are not actively being weaponized against the proletariat. Even if the lumpen were being hired as counterrevolutionary agents, then the ‘lumpen’ would not be lumpen because their position in society would grant them steady employment and therefore would allow them to escape from living in ragged conditions. By entering into steady employment, the lumpen would then enter into a stable form of labor and place for their existence, and lose their ‘dangerous’ qualities. For the Marx of the Manifesto, lack of consistent forms of productive labor serves as a reason to be suspicious of the lumpen. To explain why Marx fears the lumpen for their lack of attachment to a career or labor, two explanations can be offered.

First, there is a practical, although deeply dated, reason to think the lumpen were counterrevolutionary. The lumpen had, in Marx’s times, been used by the bourgeoisie to put down insurrections from time to time with the promise of monetary benefit and, as Marx put it later in 1852, ‘the soft arms of the courtesans’ (Hayes 1988: 448). The issue of bribing the lumpen plays a larger role in Marx’s works on the 1851 coup and will be examined then. Still, the idea that the lumpen are an uncontrollable mass that only act in their own short-term interests was still relevant in Marxist thought until the 1920s as Sergei Esenstein’s first film, Strike, contains ‘a memorable scene depicting the habitat of the repulsive tramps and vagabonds hired by factory owners to break the strike’, drawing them out of their self-imposed squalor to do the bidding of bosses (Bussard 1987: 675). The lumpen are not driven by the idea that collective action can create lasting economic changes and they can only be driven by self-interest.³

Another reason the lumpen be easily swayed could be considered dangerous by Marx is reconstructed by Kristin Ross in her work on the Paris Commune where she writes that the ‘dangerous’ class directly threatened established thoughts about production and therefore the legitimacy of a possible proletarian revolution. At the time, a job or career was to be thought of as an intimate relation between a worker’s hands and his tools or machinery. The vacillation between laziness (a vagabond’s undetermined work schedule) and flexibility (working several jobs at once or many jobs at different times) undermined the proletarians’ argument that they wanted to seize the means of production for a profession that the proletarian invested so much time, effort, and spirit into and saw nothing in return due to their alienation (Ross 2008: 47−74). While formulated in different ways, a prevailing suspicion of the lumpen is rooted in their inability to have strong attachments to consistent valorized labor and strong convictions toward revolutionary action.

Marx’s fear of the lumpen as indeterminable can clue the reader into understanding the first half of the Manifesto quote where the lumpen are depicted as a ‘passively rotting mass’. Peter Hayes writes that of the two main interpretations of the lumpen he identifies in Marx, one of them rests on relegating the lumpen to the role of ‘a crowd’, a mass that acts randomly and is unable to align with any serious political movement (Hayes 1988: 445). Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology that there have always been and always will be an ahistorical class of vagabonds, criminals, and homeless who are not historically determined by any particular epoch (Bovenkerk 1984: 17). Hal Draper (1972) writes that the lumpen are déclassé in the sense that they are literally without a class and writes that Marx thinks they cannot be interested in the society around them (p. 2299). This allows one to come to the conclusion that unlike the proletariat, the lumpen are not caused by the world-historical conditions of industrial capitalism, but instead are a residual class that, at their worst, act against the interests of the proletariat and, at a minimum, are permanently outside the dialectic.

As Peter Stallybrass (1990) puts it, the proletariat becomes a class, for Marx, that is in constant struggle with the bourgeoisie and is free from the base filth and spectacles that enchant street dwellers (p. 83). As a result, the two become separated not by economic conditions (wherein a proletarian could have as much commitment to the alienated land around them or material wealth as a lumpen) but by social and political conditions that structure class around them. Coming to this conclusion recapitulates the aforementioned fear about the easily swayable and passionate disposition of the lumpen, but with a historical materialist twist. At this point in Marx’s works, the lumpen are barred from any form of proletarian consciousness and therefore cannot enter into history or help the revolutionary struggle of working people. Through his early materialist reasoning of the lumpen’s social attitudes, Marx defines and denounces the lumpen in The Communist Manifesto.

II

The second and third texts in which Marx discusses the lumpen, The Class Struggle in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, are attempts by him to analyze ongoing French class struggle and the 1851 French coup using his system of historical materialism. Engels wrote that this was ‘Marx’s first attempt to explain a section of contemporary history by means of his Materialist conception’ (Marx 2000: 313). While these works are stunning attempts to analyze the role of class and capitalism in this historical event, Marx’s critical skills to examine the lumpen fall prey to popular ideological conceits about the underclass and poor. Both texts put forward a negative view of the lumpen during this short period of history and they both manage to highlight a different negative quality that can be associated with the lumpen which will be important to note for this study.

In Class Struggle, Marx identifies the ‘lumpen’ as a mindset which has taken over the dominant class, the finance aristocracy, in 1848 France. This class includes the ‘bankers, stock-exchange kings, owners of the iron mines and forests, a part of landed proprietors . . .’ that have infected every level of government (Marx 2000: 314). Marx is appalled that a class that does not even own the formal means of production has risen to power in France. Whereas the bourgeoisie exploit the means of production for their own benefit (and the proletarian revolution against it would eventually rise to power by seizing the means of production), the lumpenproletariat gained power without caring about the productive forces of society. What ties together bankers, day traders, and speculators is that they do not produce anything of material value but instead make their value through a legalized form of gambling and grifting off other people’s labor. The lumpenproletariat are ‘lumpen’ insofar as they are lazy, corrupt, and self-interested and ‘proletariat’ insofar as they do not actually own the means of production but still produce value for a wider range of people.

Separating Marx from his earlier deployment of the term in the Manifesto, Marx now seems to think the lumpen have entered history, although, not the dialectic. He writes that ‘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’ (Marx 2000: 316). He then goes on to say that the lumpenproletariat has ascended from the ‘brothels, to workhouses . . . to the bar of justice . . . and to the scaffold’ (Marx 2000). The lumpen qualities of society have found their way out of back alleys and into the halls of power. Although it could no longer be contended that the lumpen played no part in history in Marx’s view, the ‘lumpen’ quality of the new lumpenproletariat still held it back from playing an important part in class struggle.

The distinction between lumpen and lumpenproletariat is a classification that Marx does not make, yet should have in order to better define what ‘lumpen’ is. As the historian Robert Bussard (1987) points out, the word proletariat (pre-Marx) already contained notions of the unwashed, ignorant, ragged class that held no property or power in society (pp. 677−682). As Marx identified production as the driving force of history, the proletariat became a class that could be vindicated from their squalor by seizing the means of production. This implies that the proletariat would have to rid itself of ideologies and illusions about class society and realize the pivotal role it plays in history. While Marx was able to identify this clearly, his ability to understand the lumpen (meaning the class of people who are not even privy to jobs or production as a means of life not in the underbelly of society) is obviously lacking of this consciousness. With this in mind, Marx thinks of being ‘lumpen’, at this point, as a harmful social attitude in capitalist society (although it predates capitalism) that infects certain people to act unscrupulously or as a leech on the rest of the productive world.⁴

While barred from the dialectic, or playing a role to move history in a different direction, the lumpen enter history in 1848. Still, Marx’s characterization of the financier class as ‘lumpen’ will seem foreign to people who are critical of capitalism today. As banks, market speculation, and owning the rights to intellectual property become more integral to non-industrialized capitalism, these sectors of the economy are undeniably the bourgeoisie: they own the vast sums of wealth and the means by which value is produced. When Joan Robinson quipped that bourgeoisie do not contribute anything meaningful to society because merely ‘owning capital is not a productive activity’ (Wood 2004: 246), she could have been said to explain Marx’s reasoning for why the ruling class in 1848 is ‘lumpen’, but also why the ruling class could be considered the bourgeois as well.

Prior to these historical works, Marx’s dialectic was more intimate, like that of Hegel’s, where the bourgeoisie are always in direct contact (in this case in the factory or workplace) and fighting to maintain power against a struggling proletariat.⁵ The interests of capital would no longer solely be tied to formal industrial production, but production that is not limited to the manual production of the worker. Yet, as Stallybrass points out, the purpose of these writings on this period of French history serves to show that even moments which seem outside of a materialist conception of history, such as the financier class taking control, can be related to its progression. Marx’s consideration of the state as something determinate of several class interests, rather than, say, just the bourgeoisie, allows him to better understand how the lumpen, some workers, and the financier class can come together and ally themselves with one figure (Stallybrass 1990: 79−80). What Marx recognizes in the rise of Bonaparte is that his rise to power allowed disparate groups, usually in conflict due to their class interests, to coalesce around a similar figure that would not actually have many of their interests at heart. As a result, the rise of such a figure implied to Marx that the lumpen qualities of spectacle and momentary self-interest permeated the eventful times, giving way to styles of the lumpen (spectacle, debauchery, crime) being used by the elite as a means of gaining power. If, in Marx’s terms, the industrial bourgeoisie was the tragedy, the financier lumpenbourgeoisie (that did not even have to engage in class struggle, but mere political spectacle) is the farce.

In the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx’s definition of the lumpen is expressed as the types of people who can be associated with it:

From the aristocracy there were bankrupted roués of doubtful means and dubious provenance, from the bourgeoisie there were degenerate wastrels on the take, vagabonds, demobbed soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, swindlers and cheats, thugs, pickpockets, conjurers, card-sharps, pimps, brothel-keepers, porters, day-laborers, organ grinders, scrap dealers, knife grinders, tinkers and beggars, in short the whole amorphous, jumbled mass of flotsam and jetsam that the French term the bohemian. (Marx 2005: 115–116)

Although not too different from Class Struggle, this definition of the lumpen is easier to understand through the multiple examples while still remaining confusing. The definition is more ‘I know a lumpen when I see a lumpen’ than it is a scientific or even a historical analysis of the situation. The Eighteenth’s definition shares the idea that the lumpen are an ahistorical mass while also having entered into recent historical events. Peter Hayes (1988) argues that in the Eighteenth the main characteristic of the lumpen is their proclivity to be a ‘bad crowd with depraved criminal elements’ (p. 460). This would explain Marx’s idea, as Draper (1972) puts it, that the upper class has become lumpen by ‘function[ing] outside the social structure’ and using unruly means to seize power (p. 2305). The newly emerging finance aristocracy and lumpen are a class but a class of ‘crowd qua crowd’, which cannot be used for anything meaningful and only look to engage in situations that benefit their passion for self-interest. As a revolution needs participants to channel their passion and struggle in larger, universal revolutionary terms, the lumpen are unable to grasp the importance of a world-historical goal and therefore are still barred from the dialectic (Hayes 1988: 461).

By explaining Marx’s exposition of the lumpen in the Eighteenth, one also gains a better understanding of the phrase ‘reactionary intrigues’ found in the Manifesto’s definition. For Marx, the lumpen in its historical actions are consistently reactionary and, due to their circumstances, cannot think about the material conditions that cause their position in society. In addition, their position and actions in society rest on the current order of society remaining hospitable to their lifestyle. Take the example of a mobster in the lumpen. The mobster having certain deals struck out with unruly cops or feeding off of the impoverished underside of a city is useful for continuing his racket. Therefore, the lumpen criminal is not as short-sighted as it may seem in supporting a riot for a strong-armed ruler. The lumpen criminal knows that someone like Louis Bonaparte will assure that the impoverished conditions where he thrives will not be addressed. Therefore, the lumpen criminal’s interests rest with the continuation and possible expansion of the existing laws, political structures, and economic classes (Hayes 1988: 454).

Following Nicholas Thoburn’s reading of Marx’s lumpen in the Eighteenth, Marx is also viewing which class stands on the side of revolutionary potential and which classes stand on the side of sameness. The proletariat, as Thoburn’s reading advances, is the engine for otherness; it has the potential to seek new opportunities for revolutionary change and new modes of production. The lumpen, and by extension the bourgeoisie, are agents of conservatism for Marx (Thoburn 2002: 441).⁶ In Marx’s early works, the lumpen not only love their position in society, but they actively fight to sustain the pre-existing world in order to continue their criminal activities. While Marx would not think that the lumpen contribute anything productive, the lumpen do have the ability to reproduce their existing social position through their actions or labor. The lumpen’s relation to existing structures in society and their invested interest in continuing their underworld activities lead Marx to denounce them as a reactionary force.

In the first three attempts to define the lumpen, Marx’s use of the term squarely puts the lumpen in the realm of social analysis, but not as a term that could lend itself to further material analysis. This is what leads commentators in the sociological literature, such as Bovenkerk and Cowling, to conclude that the very idea of the lumpen should be abandoned. It provides nothing of critical value and incidentally repeats reactionary political notions about the ‘underclass’ as ignorant, incapable to function in society, and often is used as a scapegoat in historical situations (in this case thwarting revolutionary uprisings). The qualities ascribed to the lumpen (their unaligned passion, propensity to mob rule, being outside of the dialectic, and tendency for corruption and laziness) are, at best, somewhat related but fail to paint a coherent picture as to why this class exists at all in history. The matter becomes especially confusing when ‘lumpen’ qualities are not relative to the lower class of the lumpen themselves but even the proletarian or financier class. In the early works, the term merely becomes a mish-mash dumping ground of easy excuses for Marx and Engels when they need to reason how the masses act in history. Commenting on Marx’s use of the term lumpen, Michael Denning (2010) writes that he ‘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’ (p. 87). By doing so, Marx saves the proletariat as the universal class of history while sidelining the lumpen as the refuse of history. In his early writings, Marx wrestles with the lumpen for the first time often coming up with incomplete ideas about how the underclass functions economically, historically, and politically.

III

In Capital, Marx ditches the ideological and historical implications of the lumpen and tries to understand why they exist specifically in terms of capitalist production. While not explicitly using the term lumpen, he comes to understand how capitalist dynamics have led people to lives of crime, indolence, and/or unemployment. According to Draper (1972), the lumpen are finally placed, not as willing participants in capitalism but as a group that can be exploited in ‘objectively economic’ terms (p. 2302). This marks a separation between his earlier and later works as Marx investigates the economic world of capitalist society and critiques how it can cause people to become lumpen.

The ability to derive a material definition of the lumpen revolves around how labor creates value in capital and is essential to understanding how Marx thinks exploitation occurs in capitalism. The laborer is made to work under the premise that they labor ‘no more than is socially necessary’ and that the productivity they put out is ‘socially necessary’ in itself to reproduce society (Marx 1906: 46). From this labor, the worker produces commodities or objects with value that are ‘definite masses of congealed labour-time’ (Marx 1906). Through production, a division of labor is set up to produce different commodities and, by extension, also creates the conditions for workers to compete against each other for resources and wages (Marx 1906: 49). This forces the worker to reproduce himself at a lower and lower wage to remain competitive while also trying to reproduce both his life and the conditions which produce value (Marx 2000: 491). All of this is standard notion of how Marx understands exploitation to occur in capitalism. As Allen Wood points out, this form of exploitation is not a normative judgment, but it is exploitative insofar as it is an unfair situation for laborers.⁷ The methods of reproducing one’s existence deprive the worker the chance to own his own value or possibly break out of the system of capitalist production. As a result, it takes advantage of the worker’s dependency of material needs and the worker’s weak position in the capitalist system of production (Wood 2004: 252). Under capitalism, a productive division of labor leads to the exploitation of the worker as all production becomes implicit in reproducing a class system that exploits a worker’s position.

With this in mind, one can argue that the lumpen’s relation to exploitation, like the proletariat’s relation to exploitation, also serves as the possibility to them to drive history by eliminating the means by which they are exploited. Marx notes that ‘as in religion man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand’ (Marx 2000: 517). The same hand which allows one to live in squalor is the same hand that can produce or seize the means of production. In addition, due to the competition between workers, capitalism may be the same system that lets one’s hands become idle and lead one to become homeless, resorting to crime or other means of making money. The relation the lumpen have to productive labor and material conditions explains their class position and also the possible social and cultural customs that someone in the lumpen may engage in. It is this realization that the lumpen exist squarely in the struggle of class issues that leads to a Marxist conclusion that they are also exploited by capitalism.

One way Marx recognizes this in Capital is by arguing that the reserve army of labor or surplus population is created as a means of keeping wages down. This group of unemployed people (be they composed of migrants, precarious workers, or criminals) is used by the capitalist as an excuse to both increase production in a worker’s job so that the worker can believe that he will be more secure in his position and keep wages low because the capitalist can, at any moment, hire someone in the reserve army of labor (Marx 2000: 518−519). In this assessment, non-productivity becomes a sort of unproductive labor or action that can be created and then used against the proletariat. Draper (1972) argues that, in Capital, the lumpen become solely what is perceived to be the ‘non-working elements of the producing classes’, which is to say the group of people who can have the potential to produce but are made not to produce (p. 2301).⁸ Marx still uses the term ‘dangerous’ to describe the non-producing underclass, but they are no longer depicted as dangerous to society at large. The lumpen are now made to be dangerous; they exist as a moral fright to the proletariat (they are coming for your place in society!) and as an ideological excuse to keep the proletariat in line (they are coming for your productivity, better work harder!). As a result, the lumpen exist as that ‘mass of human material always ready for exploitation’ both in terms of their possibility for unproductive labor and idleness (Marx 2000: 517).

Marx’s shift in understanding the lumpen is evidenced by his conclusion that the lumpen’s condition is not only made by the capitalist class structure but that their existence in the class structure is a form of exploitation. The exploitation derives from work being made non-productive or by undergoing risky labor in order to stay alive. In Capital, the prostitutes, petty criminals, and the ‘demoralized and ragged’ called upon to work in abhorrent conditions are not a threat to workers or their revolutionary plans; instead, their dangerous work is made necessary by capitalism. Their labor is not viewed as inherently productive because it does not appear to create value beyond the immediate point of labor, but rather the lumpen take up forms of unproductive labor as a means of survival. Many cases of lumpen unproductive labor can be more exploited than forms of labor that are considered productive for capital. This is how even unproductive forms of labor can still be exploited, which can be expressed in physical or emotional terms, even if they are not directly exploited by a capitalist taking surplus-value (Meiksins 1981: 40). The precarious nature of the lumpen’s labor, both in terms of its consistency and conditions, is still judged against the relative nature of what is currently considered productive for capital, thereby leaving the lumpen in exploitive conditions without ever having to engage in productive labor.

Marx recognizes that the lumpen are not, by default, a non-productive class. They do forms of labor (sex work, illegal jobs, etc.), but they are depicted by the very upper classes that need their services as fraying the moral fibers of capitalist society.⁹ Even a class which produces nothing material, say ‘paupers’, can be explained in this way because ‘along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth’ (Marx 2000: 519). Marx concludes that as the lumpen are barred from official forms of labor by capitalism, both their misery grows and the capitalist’s happiness increases:

The relative mass of the industrial reserve army (read: lumpen) increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labor. The more extensive, finally, the lazurus-layers of the working-class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances . . . (Marx 2000)¹⁰

No longer a footnote, the role of the precarious lumpen is now both integral to understanding the hoarding of wealth by the bourgeoisie and, as seen above, integral in pitting the lower classes against each other for the bourgeoisie to remain in power and for exploitative production to continue.¹¹

I agree with Bussard, Bovenkerk, and Cowling that the word ‘lumpen’, if it merely means the scum of society, should be forgotten in Marxist discourse. But by doing so, it would ignore the usefulness and complexity of the term (especially in later Marx) to describe how an underclass is formed and functions in capitalist class dynamics. The repurposing of the term (or even the creation of an entirely different term, which I will leave for others to decide) allows Marxism to not only explain the productive forces of history but also explain the reason why people are not productive and need to engage in precarious or unconventional work in order to survive. Keeping the term alive in Marxist discourse can be helpful in identifying conservative and capitalist ideologies that seek to depict the lower classes (including the proletariat) as the refuse of society. From what was said above, a Marxist definition of the lumpen, consisting of three traits, can be proposed:

First, just as Marx finally comes to the conclusion in Capital, the lumpen are created by the specific material relations in capitalism. This goes against the ideological rhetoric that those who are lumpen desire to be so. The lumpen do not own the means of production; they rely on precarious jobs for work and possibly engage in illegal economic activities for a stable life. Instead, the material relations of their lives drive the lumpen to a certain set of economic and social practices in order to survive and as a result.

Second, the lumpen function within capitalist dynamics as a class whose position is determined by their relation to productive labor even if a lumpen only engages in unproductive labor or no labor at all. It cannot be ignored that the lumpen can reach class consciousness through their specific experiences of exploitation which, like proletarian consciousness, arise from their relation to the shifting nature of productive labor.

Third, the notion of the lumpen as societal refuse that deserves their squalor is the lynchpin of any conservative ideology. When used as a pejorative or even as used by the early Marx, the term is telling of the speaker’s lack of concern about the ravaging effects of capital and the speaker’s demonization of the underclass.

Two answers can now be given to the questions at the beginning of the article. In response to the second question, a materialist reading of history leads one to conclude that the lumpen are forced into dangerous conditions due to the social effects of capitalist production. In response to the first question, the role of the lumpen develops over time in Marx’s works. To say that there is one definition is misleading. In the early works, the lumpen are considered to be outside of the dialectic and unable to achieve consciousness. In Capital, Marx refutes this earlier understanding by leaving open the possibility for the lumpen to gain consciousness through their experiences of exploitation and poverty. Although from a Marxist standpoint history and progress still rest with the productive proletariat, such a reading of Capital opens the door to the lumpen joining the revolutionary struggle.¹²

The contrasting notion between the lumpen having the possibility of consciousness and the lumpen being inherently dangerous can be examined in historical and contemporary circumstances. This serves as the basis to answering the final of the questions in the introduction: can the lumpen effectively struggle alongside the proletariat for a communist revolution or radical change? Answering this question in the affirmative, I will show that notions of the lumpen being without the possibility of consciousness are wrong and that the identifier lumpen, whether it refers to a distinct class or a subsection of the proletariat, is important for understanding and engaging in contemporary class struggle.

The Lumpen in Action: From the Past to Present

The reexamination of the lumpen as a class that can achieve some form of consciousness and engage in revolutionary struggle has important political consequences for contemporary class antagonisms. Many social movements in the past, ranging from anti-racist struggles to housing movements, relied on the support and voices of those below the proletariat. The question remains: can the lumpen join radical movements due to their specific experience of exploitation, and if they can, can the lumpen can be made radical in the contemporary political climate?

In perhaps the most notable case in the United States, the Black Panther Party (BPP) made it a point to not turn away the lumpen from the movement, but rather incorporate them in their ranks. The argument around incorporating the lumpen centered on the fact that the working class, largely White, was already fully immersed in racial ideologies and consumerism. The BPP would reach out to those who were impacted by racism and absolute poverty (those in gangs, the homeless, etc.) under the premise that they had the most to gain from overthrowing these oppressive systems (Henderson 1997: 182). The working class by itself, the BPP argued, could never be the sole engine of any revolution but had to include those who were most oppressed. This approach turns the argument the early Marx made on its head by claiming that it was the proletariat, and not the lumpen, who were blind to the circumstances of class struggle and exploitation.

This debate, an early topic in The Black Scholar, showed the problems and possibilities with radicalizing the lumpen.¹³ The topic of the lumpen was central to the Party’s development. Frequent letters to the Scholar showed that self-described criminals and lumpen supported the BPP for their radical platform and contributed letters on the ongoing debate about the lumpen’s role in society (Underwood 1973: 57). When Bobby Seale (1972), leader of the BPP in Oakland, was interviewed by the Scholar, he gave an explanation of how the lumpen acted within the BPP structure and could be radicalized:

Now, at the same time we attempt to take control of the system – and this is one of the things that Fanon brought out – we must recognize that the lumpen out there really wants to take the place of the oppressive establishment. But Fanon also made another note – that political education is a historical necessity for the oppressed class. So through all of these conflicts we have had a lot of political education from direct experience and direct practice. (p. 8)

Seale’s reference to Fanon notes that Black radicals and writers at the time knew the possible trouble including certain sectors of the lumpen (such as known gang members) in revolutionary struggle could bring, but also knew that the reason why the lumpen were ‘trouble’ was due to colonialism, racism, and capitalism. Instead of casting the lumpen aside, Fanon (2004) saw that they could reach social/class consciousness like any other class and, under the right conditions or ‘political education’ as Seale put it, lead revolutionary struggles (pp. 66−87).¹⁴ Without a romantic understanding of how capitalism and colonialism could malign people’s interests and consciousness, Fanon (2004) also pointed to the fact that the lumpen could be used by colonial powers as mercenaries in their armies.

The BPP’s historical record organizing the lumpen is ultimately mixed. Several attempts to organize gangs/lumpen were unsuccessful and resulted in gang members merely using the BPP organization to grow personal connections and use the aesthetics of the organization. At other times, gangs in Harlem, Chicago, and Los Angeles played an important in taking BPP ideology seriously and actively organizing for them (Henderson 1997: 182). The lumpen could be used by the ruling class to inadvertently disrupt the revolutionary actions of the BPP and also use their exploitative condition as a means to class consciousness. At the very least, the historical example of the BPP provides the possibility of the lumpen gaining class consciousness while, like the early Marx noted, that there is a relation between capitalism and the lumpen’s interests as formed by their consciousness in the existing dynamics of production.

The lumpen can be considered like any other laboring class in capitalism. Such a point recognizes the criticism of anarchists like Bakunin (1872, Marxists.org) and of Marxists who focus on consumer society and media (such as Marcuse or the early Baudrillard), that the pacification of the proletariat through the rise of an affluent society becomes important to understanding the possibilities of contemporary anti-capitalist movements.¹⁵ There will be those in the lumpen who are barred from consciousness due to their social position and interests, the ideologies they buy into, or the inability to recognize the dominant orders that control them. There will also be those in the lumpen, again, like those in the proletariat, who demand reforms to specific parts of capitalist society while not asking for the full overthrow of the economic and political order. At this point in history, this is as likely to be a lumpen trait as it is a proletarian trait of consciousness, and as a result, it serves to show the relevant blurring between the lumpen, as a distinct class, and proletariat throughout capitalist history and contemporary times.

Examples of lumpen political actions in the United States and the United Kingdom show the varying degree of radical involvement the class has had in the recent past. A few examples of individual and group political action can elucidate the range of actions taken by the lumpen both as working toward class struggle and, at times, as rehearsing old forms of lumpen exploitation. In an account of the ‘L.A. Gang Tours’, Armond R. Towns (2007) writes about the phenomenon of gang members giving interactive tours of Los Angeles’ ghettos to White, often European, tourists who highlight the blight and violence in their communities (p. 43). While the guides include a fair amount of tall tales about rival gangs fighting, they often point to the reasons why they are forced to live and work in the underbelly of society. They point to racist policing, economic problems, class issues, and a long history of racism to dissuade any attempt by the tourists to think that a gang lifestyle is something largely sought after. In short, the tour guides are not only socially aware of their predicament but are also aware of how to fix it through more inclusive police policies and challenging economic structures. Even at an individual level, someone in the lumpen class can reach an awareness of the underlying material structure of their predicament and demand reforms to address specific problems.

Focusing on larger attempts to organize the lumpen in political movements, one could examine the founding of community activist groups Movement for Justice in El Barrio (MJB) and Community Voices Heard (CVH) in New York City. MJB was started by Black and Latina women, immigrants, and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people in New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and precarious housing in East Harlem to address the immediate problems around the quality of housing stock, rising rents, and the development of luxury housing in their community. Their unstable economic position, some working class, and some underclass led them to organize against the increasing commodification of housing and demanding for radical changes within the existing system (Madden & Marcuse 2016: 181−183). By calling neoliberalism a form of colonization and protesting new development projects, the group has been able to put pressure on local politician’s housing decisions and has blocked the advancement of foreign capital to build in East Harlem (Janisch 2008).

CVH, also active in the New York Metropolitan area, was founded by Black and Hispanic women on welfare in the 1990s advocating for safer, affordable low-income housing and ending ‘workfare’ in New York. The allegiance of low-income, precarious, and unemployed women to fight for a sense of economic justice is integral in understanding that very few groups were challenging the prevailing neoliberal land reforms and housing policies at that time in New York City (Marcuse & Madden 183). It was those in the lower working class and the lumpen, not just the working class (most of whom in the White working class saw such economic and criminal reforms during this period as necessary), that took action to stem the tide of the restructuring of New York City into a playground for finance and real estate capital (Vitale 2008: 42−43). The open solidarity between the lumpen and lower working class in MJB and CVH shows not only a realization of their economic position but also an urgency to change it and articulate a concrete demand to challenge the dominance of capitalism in the housing sector.

On the contrary, recent lumpen events engage in traditionally counterrevolutionary forms of social actions. Yet, like Marx’s final definition of the lumpen, these can be explained by analysis of the material conditions of contemporary capitalism and only reveal the destructive tendencies of capitalism. Jeffery Stevenson Murer examines the English Riots of 2011 and the rise of the ‘Lumpen-Consumerate’. On 4 August, a Black man Mark Duggan was shot dead by police in Tottenham, London. Two days later, many protests seeking justice for Mark Duggan devolved into violence and looting around England. As the riots took place in the poorer parts London, the lumpen (mostly poor youths, some with criminal backgrounds) took to breaking down shops to scavenge for luxury clothing items, electronics, and other valuables that could either be resold or, more importantly, be worn and used as sign of prestige among friends (Murer 2015: 165−166). Murer contends that rather than read this event as random or as a breakdown of law and order, the violence was indicative of how the lumpen have been conditioned by capitalism. Murer argues that the violence shows that they were upset by the killing of an innocent Black man but that their reaction to steal valuable items was the only way the rioters felt they could exact revenge on the oppressive systems around them. The valuable items could either bolster one’s aesthetic image once the riots were over (wearing an expensive track suit or Jordans) or be sold and used as capital at a later date. The riots acted as a way to paradoxically both reaffirm the consumptive logic of neoliberalism (the rioter’s choice of stealing more objects that further entrench them into consumer society) and lash out at the futility of its commodities and practices in being unable to deliver personal meaning or political and social change. In ‘Agency and the Concept of the Underclass’, Leonard Harris argues that these forms of ‘degenerate’ enjoyment are depicted as proof of the underclass individual choosing to remain in poverty. In reality, Harris (1992) states, such forms of enjoyment or violence can be better understood as the individual expressing discontent with their own lack of agency imposed on them by their socio-economic class or as the possible forms of labor or social actions that are available to the lumpen (p. 43). Furthermore, some forms of civil disobedience or political action are morally warranted, argues Thomas Shelby (2016), as lumpen life can be so compounded by systemic racism, economic disinvestment, and ongoing ontological insecurity (to borrow Marcuse and Madden’s term, which is explained below), that it forces the lumpen to take action in ways that transgress the moral fabric of a consumer-based society (pp. 221−227).¹⁶ Although the rioting and looting are not morally permissible under capitalism, to entirely reduce the riots to blind violence or anti-social behavior is to ignore the, at times, desperate conditions (lack of jobs, social programs, crime) and social angst building among lumpen communities which are often made to be exploited.

The rise of precarious workers has also turned to old forms of lumpen attitudes in a new guise. The tactic of ‘astroturfing’ pays low-income, often precarious, workers and homeless people to show up to political events and local council meetings and make it appear as if there is broad public support for corporate backed policies. Reminiscent of paying the lumpen to be mercenaries, this tactic has found success as it hires lumpen to protest and attend public hearings in order to make it seem that an issue, such as opening a new gas plant in a low-income neighborhood, has wide public support (Stein 2019). In other cases, the rise of low-income people raising money through GoFundMe charity drives to pay for health care expenses, rent, or living expenses has become a steady feature for people to survive (Marche 2018). This rings true of how Marx said that it would be other workers and lower-middle class that would have to create forms of charity in order to keep the lumpen alive. In both cases, it is clear to see that lumpen elements of society are still around. It is also apparent that their actions are still caused by the material conditions of capitalism, which allows this class to be exploited in new (yet, old) ways and turn to new forms of production and culture in order to survive. Creating a surplus population and preying upon them to take disingenuous political positions or having low-income people use the Internet to communally fund people’s health care costs is not a sign of the lumpen as a leech on the productive section of society, but as a symptom of the productive labor itself. In fact, in line with the ‘general law of capitalist accumulation’, it is a sign of the growing unequal distribution of wealth in capitalist societies. Just as the lumpen class could be explained in material terms in Marx’s time, the lumpen’s social actions, from rioting to GoFundMe, can be explained by understanding today’s class dynamics and the material conditions that underlie precariousness and the dominant ideologies around the lumpen.

The lumpen in contemporary class experience

If the relevance of the lumpen in radical political change is a possibility in contemporary times, then it is worth examining how the lumpen factor into how class currently operates in the global north. As David Harvey (1995) has written on several occasions, the shift from Fordist production to flexible accumulation has led to a weakening of worker’s rights, advent of the gig economy, and an overall feeling of uncertainty in precarious fields of work (p. 159). The growth of flexible markets points to both the dissolution of standard forms of production and the rise of a still productive, value-producing class that is not exactly the proletariat. While not the majority, the increasing number of people working more than one job and in gig economy points to the creation of a precarious, working lumpen class. With flexible markets, workers experience lower wages and less job security. In the United States, 8.3% of people work two jobs, with 6.9% working more than two jobs (Beckhusen 2019). In the United Kingdom, 2.8% work on zero-hour contracts (a number that continually rises; Partington 2019) and 5.85% work at least two jobs (Office for National Statistics (ONS) 2019). More often than not, people turn to exploitative apps in the gig economy such as Uber or DoorDash to supplement income, but these jobs cannot sufficiently supplement income (and rarely offer benefits) on a part-time basis (Edison Research 2018: 1−2). An estimated 9.6% of people work in the gig economy in the United Kingdom in 2019 (more than doubled from 2016) (Partington 2019), while 24% of Americans engaged in some part of the gig economy in 2018 (with 53% of Americans aged 18–34 having worked in the gig economy) (Edison Research 2018: 2).

The loss of security in daily life alongside frequent productive uncertainty could be considered just another rehashing of the drudgery that is life for the proletariat. Yet, the line between lumpen and proletarian worker becomes blurred. David Madden and Peter Marcuse in their recent book In Defense of Housing offer a possible framework to understanding why so many people, largely considered in the proletariat, could be considered lumpen. Madden and Marcuse argue that the rise of commodified housing, among other compounding economic factors, has led to ‘ontological insecurity’ or the prevailing anxiety that most working-class and precarious people have knowing that their housing, and therefore their position toward the world and labor, can no longer be taken for granted (Madden & Marcuse 2016: 68). The lived experiences of working-class people more closely resemble the conditions of the lumpen that Marx describes in his later works. What has historically passed for enough labor and energy to exist within the working class in stable fashion is no longer enough for a plurality of people in deindustrializing countries such as the United States And the United Kingdom. It is not laziness or natural, innate lumpen traits that are holding workers back from living a stable life, it is the very system of flexible production that makes it so that workers become lumpen and vice versa.¹⁷ The proletariat, teetering between precarious jobs, an unstable relation to their own geography, unemployment, seemingly stable employment, and a flexible gig lifestyle, now effectively contains lumpen elements inside itself.

What is interesting is that much of the actions the working class takes, be it political or in everyday enjoyment, are already depicted as lumpen by the ruling class. In recent years, ideologies around the proletariat have undone the work Marx did to create a distinct delineation between proletariat and lumpen. Prior to Marx, the main class division that existed was between bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which also included the lumpen. The proletariat was viewed as a drain on resources, prone to spectacle, and a detriment to the order that the ruling class had set up. By introducing the term ‘lumpenproletariat’, Marx was able to separate the depraved element from the proletariat and show that both the bourgeoisie and the lumpen were a drain on their labor and the productive elements in society.

Marx’s idea of the lumpen being a leech to the proletariat in order to spotlight the exploitative nature of productive labor relations has largely been undone by ideologies of consumer society and many of the existing media narratives about the proletariat. As shown by Owen Jones (2016), contemporary media in the United Kingdom often represents the working class as an uneducated ‘mob’ that has to be ‘controlled’ (p. 95). Jones has reported on the increased use of the insult ‘chav’ by politicians, by those in entertainment and the media, and by the press to describe the working class in Britain. After the Premiership of Margret Thatcher, Jones (2016) contends that many, even those in the working class, bought into the myth that ‘we are all middle class now’ and, by extension, that those who were not in the upper classes chose to be due to their vulgar cultural choices, lack of concern about law and order, and general laziness (p. 139). The irony is that this ideology comes about at the exact time that wealth has become more concentrated by the wealthy, fewer people can actually claim to be ‘middle class’, and that worker productivity is still rising while worker’s wages have, on average, remained stagnant.

Despite the facts that could explain the material conditions of the economy, the myth remains that the working class are ignorant, lazy ‘chavs’. The precarious working class are not only made to be lumpen, but they are now already presumed to be lumpen by the ruling class. Attempts to make a moral defense of the proletariat by separating them from the lumpen as Marx tried and depicting the working class as squarely within ethical society fail to understand the specificity of today’s class dynamics. As the wall between a surplus, precarious lumpen and a proletarian is crumbling (and more and more of the rhetoric around class seeks to stigmatize the lives of poor people), the actively radical lumpen cannot be ignored as an ally for class struggle with the actively radical proletariat.

Conclusion: theoretical and practical

During which historical moments is a Marxist mode of analysis more obviously useful to explain historical periods? What appeared true to Marx as he wrote that the existence of the lumpen is directly attached to an increasingly powerful bourgeoisie might not have been so obvious during the post–World War II economic boom in the global north where it seemed as if everyone was prospering and a new, non-ideological society was being born. The rise of an economically insecure class that has grown alongside the rise of an uber-wealthy economic class points to Marx being vindicated that his definition of the lumpen in Capital is still relevant. The contradiction of capitalist accumulation that causes the lumpen to exist is still valid, albeit with some caveats that are needed to update the term to today’s material circumstances. Today, Marx’s framework can address the existence of non-producing or flexibly producing classes in society. In addition, such an understanding of the fluidity of class and political dynamics in this way can clear a path to answer questions which typically lie outside common areas of Marxist theory such as consumerism and the masses. These areas of theory that deal with the other of production are typically left to post-structuralism. Hopefully, now as precarity and lumpen forms of production and class dynamics are prevalent, a broader Marxist theory of these concepts can come into play.

With the historical examples of a politically active lumpen and the rise of a truly lumpenproletariat, the future of radical class politics must be aligned with the lumpen and take into account the current material conditions that have led to the rise of lumpen elements in productivity today. As old forms of class are being restructured, broad allegiances among classes that are also exploited by their relation to productivity must be made in order to combat new forms of capitalism. As Michael Denning (2010) writes, any future movement should include both the lumpen and the proletariat, if not for the reasons mentioned above, but because in the future as more and more jobs become precarious and an increasing number of people will be left to the reserve army of labor, it will not be productivity that will be the norm but idleness (p. 97). As new forms of automation are on the horizon, Marxist accounts of consumption, ideology, and mechanization become all the more important in developing class-based political strategies. The problem for the left is to effectively use the radical lumpen and growing class of people made inactive by capitalism to create change. Will orthodox Marxist thought hold sway and seek to exclude the lumpen from radical thought or will leftist movements work toward addressing problems specific to lumpen existence? The rise of the lumpen need not have negative political implications for future left-wing/Marxist movements. If understood in the appropriate context, the lumpen as a class is created by how someone in the lumpen class relates to the exploitative conditions of labor, much in the same way a proletarian does. While different social realities arise from their class positions, both classes have been shown to gain class consciousness and struggle against capitalism. What remains up in the air is whether the universal class that moves history can adapt or reconcile itself with contemporary lumpen dynamics to form a coherent class-based political movement.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Michael Villanova

Notes

Author biography

Michael Villanova is a graduate student at The Graduate Center, CUNY, studying political science. His current research focuses on the intersection between the production of culture and land development policies in neoliberal New York City. His previous work focused on the social philosophies of Soren Kierkegaard and Albert Camus.

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