Lumpenproletariat
[1] 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.
Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky followed Marx's arguments and dismissed the revolutionary potential of the group, while Mao Zedong argued that proper leadership could utilize it.
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.
[b] 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."
[21] 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.
[20][24] 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.
"[3] 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.
"[35] He wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire:[36] In Capital (1867) Marx claimed legislation which turned soldiers and peasants "en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances."
[37] The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was one of the first to use lumpenproletariat in their rhetoric, particularly to indicate the scope of their view of a "desirable" working class and exclude the non-respectable poor.
[40] August Bebel, pre-World War I leader of the SPD, linked anti-Semitic proletarians to the lumpenproletariat as the former failed to develop class consciousness, which led to a racial, and not social, explanation of economic inequality.
[41][better source needed] 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.
"[16][12] 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."
[1] 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."
"[44] Mao Zedong argued in 1939 that the lumpenproletariat (Chinese: 游民无产者, pinyin: yóumín wúchǎnzhě) in China is a legacy of the country's "colonial and semi-colonial status" which forced a vast number of people in urban and rural areas into illegitimate occupations and activities.
[48] Historian Aminda Smith notes that the "case of lumpenproletariat reformatories suggests that anti-state resistance from members of the oppressed masses was essential to early-PRC rhetoric because it validated claims about the devastating effects of the old society and the transformative power of socialist 'truth'.
[50] Marcuse, along with Afro-Caribbean philosopher Frantz Fanon and other radical intellectuals, proposed that elements of the lumpenproletariat are potentially leading forces in a revolutionary movement.
Chris Booker and Errol Henderson argued that problems such as "a lack of discipline, a tendency toward violence, the importation of street culture, including crime, and the use of weapons" by Black Panthers was caused by the disproportionately high membership of the lumpenproletariat in their ranks.
"[41] Anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin, who was dubbed "the lumpen prince" by Engels, wrote that only in the lumpenproletariat and "and not in the bourgeois strata of workers, are there crystallised the entire intelligence and power of the coming Social Revolution.
[68] Bakunin stated:[69] Robert Ritter, the head of Nazi Germany's efforts to track the genealogies of the Romani, considered them a "highly inferior Lumpenproletariat" as they were "parasites who lacked ambition and many of them had become habitual criminals.
[71] Ken Gelder noted that in cultural studies, subcultures are "often positioned outside of class, closer in kind to Marx's lumpenproletariat, lacking social consciousness, self-absorbed or self-interested, at a distance from organised or sanctioned forms of labour, and so on.
[73] The 1979 report of the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education warned that the US is in danger of creating "a permanent underclass, a self‐perpetuating culture of poverty, a substantial 'lumpen proletariat'.
[76] Mark Cowling argued that there is considerable similarity in both definition and function between the lumpenproletariat, as proposed by Marx, and the contemporary theory of the underclass by Charles Murray, an American conservative political scientist.
[77] Although Murray and Richard Herrnstein did not use the term in their 1994 book The Bell Curve, Malcolm Browne noted in a New York Times review that the authors argue that the United States is being "split between an isolated caste of ruling meritocrats on one hand and a vast, powerless Lumpenproletariat on the other.
[83] Francis Levy compared "basket of deplorables", Hillary Clinton's phrase to characterize some Trump supporters during the 2016 presidential election campaign, to Marx's rhetoric of the lumpenproletariat.
[85] Ranjit Gupta, the Inspector General of the West Bengal Police, claimed in 1973 that the Maoist Naxalite rebels in India were made of "some intellectuals and lumpen proletariat.
"[86] Political scientist Atul Kohli claimed in his 2001 book that "variety of lumpen groups, especially unemployed youth in northern India, have joined right-wing proto-fascist movements in recent years", especially the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
[89] Due to a desire to keep clean the hands of the larger public, paramilitary groups are often used to commit atrocities and they often recruit mainly among criminals, said to be used to violence and brutality and wanting to enjoy an occasion to loot.
[90][92][93] During World War II, the Nazi German Waffen-SS division Dirlewanger Brigade recruited poachers and criminals to wage the Bandenbekämpfung on the Eastern Front.
[100][101] Ernesto Ragionieri, an Italian Marxist historian, argued to have confirmed in his 1953 book Un comune socialista that the lumpenproletariat is essentially a conservative force based on his study of Sesto Fiorentino.
