[1][2] It is often attributed to Andre Gunder Frank in 1972,[1][4] although the term is already present in several texts by Lukács (1943), Koestler (1945), C. Wright Mills (1951) and also in Paul Baran's The Political Economy of Growth (1957).
Nonetheless, the term was popularized by Frank's book Lumpenbourgeoisie and Lumpendevelopment: Dependency, Class and Politics in Latin America (1972) which used it in its title.
This difference was in the former's mentality akin to that of the Marxist lumpenproletariat, the "refuse of all classes" (as described in Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon) who are easy to manipulate to support the capitalist system, often turning to crime.
[5] The local elites then become increasingly reliant on the system in which they supervise the gathering of the surplus production from the colonies, taking their cut before the remaining goods are sold abroad.
[8] Joseph L. Love wrote that the term is misattributed to Frank [9] and was in fact coined by C. Wright Mills in White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951).