Lumpenproletariat facts for kids
In Marxist ideas, the Lumpenproletariat (pronounced: LUM-pen-proh-leh-TAIR-ee-at) refers to a group of people who are part of the underclass and don't have a strong sense of shared goals or identity as a class. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels created this term in the 1840s. They used it to describe the lowest parts of society that could be easily used by groups against revolution, especially during the revolutions of 1848. They believed this group wasn't likely to start a revolution and saw them as different from the proletariat (the working class). People like criminals and homeless individuals are often included in this group.
The Social Democratic Party of Germany used this term a lot around the year 1900. Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) and Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) agreed with Marx that this group had little chance of leading a revolution. However, Mao Zedong (1893–1976) thought that with good leadership, they could be helpful. The word Lumpenproletariat became well-known in the West after Frantz Fanon's book The Wretched of the Earth in the 1960s. It is now used as a term in sociology. But some people criticize it for being unclear and for being used as an insult. Some revolutionary groups, like the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords, have tried to organize the Lumpenproletariat.
Contents
Understanding the Lumpenproletariat
What the Word Means
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are usually given credit for creating the term Lumpenproletariat. It comes from two words:
- The German word Lumpen, which means "ragged" or "in rags."
- The French word prolétariat, which Marxists use to describe the working class in a capitalist system.
Some people, like Hal Draper, think the root might be lump meaning "knave" (a dishonest person), not "ragged."
Defining the Group
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language says the Lumpenproletariat is "the lowest part of the working class." In Marxist ideas, it describes people like criminals, homeless individuals, and the unemployed who don't realize they share common problems as an oppressed group. Today, it often includes people who are always unemployed, homeless, or are career criminals.
The Communist Party USA describes them as:
Generally unemployable people who make no positive contribution to an economy. Sometimes described as the bottom layer of a capitalist society. May include criminal and mentally unstable people. Some activists consider them "most radical" because they are "most exploited," but they are un-organizable and more likely to act as paid agents than to have any progressive role in class struggle.
In English, lumpenproletariat has also been called "dangerous classes," "ragamuffin," or "ragged-proletariat." Some experts and the Soviet government called them a "declassed" group, meaning they lost their connection to a specific social class. The term "underclass" is often seen as a modern word for lumpenproletariat. Many scholars note that this term has negative meanings. Economist Richard McGahey said in 1982 that it's one of many old terms that blame poor people for their poverty by focusing only on their individual traits. Other similar terms include "undeserving poor" and "culture of poverty." Another similar word is "riff-raff." The word can be used as an insult in some languages. In English, it might describe people who are not smart or educated and don't want to change their situation.
How Marx and Engels Used the Term
Historian Robert Bussard explains that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw the lumpenproletariat as:
essentially parasitical group was largely the remains of older, obsolete stages of social development, and that it could not normally play a progressive role in history. Indeed, because it acted only out of socially ignorant self-interest, the lumpenproletariat was easily bribed by reactionary forces and could be used to combat the true proletariat in its efforts to bring about the end of bourgeois society. Without a clear class-consciousness, the lumpenproletariat could not play a positive role in society. Instead, it exploited society for its own ends, and was in turn exploited as a tool of destruction and reaction.
They always used the term with negative feelings, even though they didn't always define it clearly. They used it in different writings for various reasons and meanings.
Hal Draper suggested the idea came from Young Hegelian thinkers. Bussard noted that Marx and Engels often used the term as a "sociological curse word" and compared it to the "working and thinking" proletariat. According to Michael Denning, by pointing out the lumpenproletariat, Marx was trying to show that not all working-class people were dangerous or immoral. He separated the working class from the lumpenproletariat to defend the good character of the workers.
In Early Writings
The first time Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the term lumpenproletariat together was in The German Ideology, written in 1845–46. They used it to describe the plebs (common people) of ancient Rome who were between free people and slaves. They also used it for Max Stirner's followers, calling them a "proletarian rabble." Marx first used the term alone in an article in Neue Rheinische Zeitung in November 1848. He called the lumpenproletariat a "tool of reaction" in the revolutions of 1848 and a "significant counterrevolutionary force" across Europe. Engels wrote in The Peasant War in Germany (1850) that the lumpenproletariat exists in some form in all known societies.
In The Communist Manifesto (1848), where lumpenproletariat is often translated as the "dangerous class," Marx and Engels wrote:
The lumpenproletariat is passive decaying matter of the lowest layers of the old society, is here and there thrust into the [progressive] movement by a proletarian revolution; [however,] in accordance with its whole way of life, it is more likely to sell out to reactionary intrigues.
In Writings on France
In an article about the June 1848 events in Paris, Engels wrote about the gardes mobiles, a militia that stopped 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." Marx gave his most detailed descriptions of the lumpenproletariat in his writings about the French revolutions 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 called the wealthy bankers of Louis Philippe I's July Monarchy (1830–48) lumpenproletarian. He said they got rich "not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others." He also suggested that the lumpenproletariat was part of the proletariat, which was different from his earlier ideas. He claimed the gardes mobiles were created "to set one segment of the proletariat against the other":
They belonged for the most part to the lumpenproletariat, which forms a mass clearly distinguished from the industrial proletariat in all large cities, a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds, living on the refuse of society, people without a fixed line of work.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx called Napoleon III the "Chief of the Lumpenproletariat." He argued that Napoleon III bought his supporters with "gifts and loans." For Marx, the lumpenproletariat were "corrupt, reactionary and without a clear sense of class-consciousness." He wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire:
Alongside ruined roués with questionable means of support and of dubious origin, degenerate and adventurous scions of the bourgeoisie, there were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, swindlers, charlatans, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, ... porters, literati, organ grinders, rag-pickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars; in short, the entirely undefined, disintegrating mass, thrown hither and yon, which the French call la bohème.
Left-Wing Perspectives
Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was one of the first to use lumpenproletariat in their speeches. They used it to show who they considered "desirable" working-class people and to exclude the poor who weren't seen as respectable. By the early 1900s, German Marxists saw workers outside the SPD or labor unions as members of the lumpenproletariat. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the SPD often blamed riots and violence on the lumpenproletariat working with the secret police.
Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union
Vladimir Lenin called socialist attempts to recruit lumpenproletariat elements "opportunism" (taking advantage of situations without principles). In 1925, Nikolai Bukharin said the lumpenproletariat was known for being "shiftless, lacking discipline, hating the old, but unable to build anything new." In 1932, Leon Trotsky described the "declassed and demoralized" lumpenproletariat as "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, from a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint, defined lumpenproletariat as:
a declassed strata in an antagonistic society (including vagrants, beggars, and criminal elements) [which] has become particularly widespread under capitalism. It is recruited from various classes and is incapable of organized political struggle. It constitutes, along with the petit bourgeois strata, the social basis of anarchism. The bourgeoisie makes use of the lumpen proletariat as strikebreakers, as participants in fascist pogrom bands, and in other ways. The lumpen proletariat disappears with the abolition of the capitalist system.
The term was rarely used in the Soviet Union to describe its own people. However, it was used to label labor movements in capitalist countries that were not pro-Soviet. Soviet authorities used terms like "déclassé elements" for their own groups, seeing them as "social degenerates."
China
Mao Zedong argued in 1939 that the lumpenproletariat (Chinese: 游民无产者) in China existed because of the country's "colonial and semi-colonial status." This forced many people into illegal jobs and activities. He believed that lumpenproletariat elements, like triads (organized crime groups), "can become revolutionary given proper leadership." After the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, lumpenproletariat were sent to government reeducation centers.
Views on Revolutionary Potential
Sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan said after the riots of 1967 that the lumpenproletariat is more chaotic than revolutionary. By the early 1970s, some radical thinkers disagreed with the traditional Marxist view that the lumpenproletariat couldn't lead a revolution. Herbert Marcuse believed that the working class in the US had lost its sense of shared goals. He placed his hopes for revolution on the lumpenproletariat (social outcasts) led by intellectuals. Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, and other thinkers suggested that parts of the lumpenproletariat could be important forces in a revolution.
According to Michael Denning, Fanon brought the term back into use in his book The Wretched of the Earth (1961). He defined the lumpenproletariat as peasants in colonial societies who were not involved in factory work. He saw them as "one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people." However, he also noted their unpredictability due to "their ignorance and incomprehension."
Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party, a major revolutionary socialist group in the US after World War II, saw many of their followers as lumpenproletarian. They adopted Fanon's idea about the group's revolutionary potential. Co-founders Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton believed that the African-American lumpenproletariat could become a threat if the party didn't organize them. Seale included "the unemployed, the downtrodden, the brother who's robbing banks, who's not politically conscious" in his definition. Newton called them "street brothers" and tried to recruit them into the party.
Young Lords Party
The Young Lords Party had similar views to the Black Panther Party. They believed in the potential of the lumpen. They even created a "Lumpen Organization" within their group to enlist people considered lumpenproletariat in their fight for liberation. They stated that "it's a law of revolution that the most oppressed group takes the leadership position" and that the lumpen would be their main focus.
Criticism
Ernesto Laclau argued that Marx's dismissal of the lumpenproletariat showed the limits of his theory that everything is determined by economics. Mark Cowling argues that the term is used for its political effect rather than for clear explanations. Laura Pulido notes that the lumpen population is diverse, especially in their awareness.
Anarchist Criticism
Post-anarchist Saul Newman wrote in 2010 that classical anarchists believe the lumpenproletariat should be considered a revolutionary class. Anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin, who Engels called "the lumpen prince," wrote that only in the lumpenproletariat and "not in the bourgeois strata of workers, are there crystallised the entire intelligence and power of the coming Social Revolution." Bakunin believed that the lumpenproletariat showed a type of existing anarchism. He stated:
that eternal 'meat', [...] that great rabble of the people (underdogs, 'dregs of society') ordinarily designated by Marx and Engels in the picturesque and contemptuous phrase lumpenproletariat. I have in mind the 'riffraff', that 'rabble' almost unpolluted by bourgeois civilization, which carries in its inner being and in its aspirations [...] all the seeds of the socialism of the future...
Other Uses of the Term
Robert Ritter, who led Nazi Germany's efforts to track the families of the Romani, considered them a "highly inferior Lumpenproletariat." He saw them as "parasites who lacked ambition and many of them had become habitual criminals." After World War II, in communist-ruled eastern and central Europe, Romani people were seen as an example of the lumpenproletariat. They were then forced into a strong policy of assimilation.
In Ukraine, titushky, who were pro-Viktor Yanukovych thugs during the Euromaidan protests in 2013–14, were described as lumpen elements.
In American Politics
A 1979 report warned that the US was in danger of creating "a permanent underclass, a self‐perpetuating culture of poverty, a substantial 'lumpen proletariat'." Eleanor Holmes Norton wrote in 1985 that an "American version of a lumpenproletariat (the so-called underclass), without work and without hope, existing at the margins of society, could bring down the great cities."
Some people have described Donald Trump's political supporters as a modern American lumpenproletariat. Francis Levy compared "basket of deplorables" (Hillary Clinton's phrase for some Trump supporters) to Marx's ideas about the lumpenproletariat.
Usage in India
Ranjit Kumar Gupta, a police official in India, claimed in 1973 that the Maoist Naxalite rebels were made of "some intellectuals and lumpen proletariat." Political scientist Atul Kohli claimed in his 2001 book that "a variety of lumpen groups, especially unemployed youth in northern India, have joined right-wing proto-fascist movements," like the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In the 2010s, cow vigilantism in India has been linked to "lumpen Hindu fanaticism."
Research on the Lumpenproletariat
Ernesto Ragionieri, an Italian Marxist historian, studied the town of Sesto Fiorentino. In his 1953 book Un comune socialista, he found that about 450–500 working-class people joined the liberal-conservative party. They hoped to get recommendations to work at Richard-Ginori, a large local employer that didn't hire socialists. This study suggested that the lumpenproletariat could be a conservative force.
Similar Terms
Several terms have been created that are similar to lumpenproletariat:
- lumpenintelligentsia: This term is used to describe a group of educated people who are seen as not contributing much to society or lacking good taste.
- lumpenbourgeoisie: Coined by sociologist Andre Gunder Frank, this term describes a wealthy class that helps keep resources flowing from their own poor countries to richer ones.
- lumpen militariat: Coined by Ali Mazrui in 1973, this describes a new group of less educated soldiers who gain power in post-colonial Africa.
- Trumpen Proletariat: Coined by Jonah Goldberg in 2015, this term describes Donald Trump's most dedicated supporters.
See also
In Spanish: Lumpemproletariado para niños
- Lumpenbourgeoisie
