I am simply here for the entertainmence

I've always struggled with Marxism because of the way he and Engels wrote about the Lumpenproletariat, it's alienated me from communists for as long as I can remember (because I come from abject poverty, a long line of sex workers, unskilled laborers, and the unemployed). It just feels like communism isn't interested in helping people from my and in my socioeconomic background. We're just parasites, and communists hope we'll die just like capitalists hope we'll die. I know Frantz Fanon and Mao Ze Dong had different perspectives on the Lumpenproletariat (and differing from eachother too?). Idk where I'm going with this. Capitalism is one of the greatest evils conceived, Anarchism is doomed to failure from it's outset, but people like me don't seem to have a place in a communist revolution. At least according to dominant strains of Communist thought. It's frustrating. Sorry for venting. Do you have advice?

Nah I feel you. This is one of those concepts from classical Marxism that got converted into a borderline theological concept in official, formalized Marxism. It’s a means for condescending moralism and advocating for conformity, but in a “radical” way. It’s not a coincidence that it veers into very thinly veiled racism in countries that identify normality with whiteness and peripheralness or “lumpen”-ness with Blackness and brownness.

The way Marxists use the concept has gotten very far from the way it was used in classical Marxism, because they’re using it for completely different purposes. The lumpenproletariat is not a coherent concept distinct from the proletariat, and the way Marx used it was more about the issue of political independence than moralizing about the inherent value of wage labor (an insane thing for these people to try and pin to Marx of all people).

Marx thought that wage worker proletarians could become politically independent because they had to live by their own work, while he used lumpen to describe those who were directly dependent on some form of charity or sponsorship (whether that took a legal or illegal form) and so sometimes acted as political hired hands like in the case of the mobs supporting Napoleon III.

The traits that people ascribe to lumpen, like stealing and resentment towards society and work and shit, are all things that Marx had no problem with when they appeared in the proletariat. He actually talked about fighting against Christian morality among the proletarians, which would include this kind of worship of work in any form as a good in itself.

By the time of Capital, Marx moves on from the “lumpenproletariat” and starts talking about the reserve army of labor instead, meaning the structurally determined segment of the population that’s either temporarily unemployed or straight up just out of the workforce. By the time of writing Capital he was also praising the use of trade unions as an alliance of both employed and unemployed workers.

I’m sure some will doubt me, but if you check the search function on Marxists Internet Archive, select Marx as the author, and type in variants of “lumpen” or “lumpenproletariat,” then you’ll see for yourself what I mean. “Lumpen” completely disappears from Marx’s writings after the 1850s with the sole exception referring to a Young Hegelian. This is a hint as to its polemical purpose and relationship to the problem of political independence rather than mortal virtue.

As you’re looking at the search results, you’ll see that Marx had first started using the concept in the 1840s as a way to critique Max Stirner. He was saying against Stirner’s idea of insurrection, separate from social revolution, that it’s the structure of exploitation between proletarians and capital that makes their attempts at self-emancipation (egoism) drive them to the emancipation of the whole society (universalism).

He saw Stirner’s thinking as limited to a “lumpen”-style concern with only immediate day to day survival, which he worried would drive them to compromise with the existing relations of production. He thought this was a possibility because they got their living primarily by intervening in distribution (rather than production), whether through legal means like receiving charity or illegal means like organized crime and gangs of thieves.

The reason the analysis of the reserve army of labor and the unemployed in Capital supersedes this analysis is because Marx started to analyze how there’s also a basis and a need for an alliance of the employed and unemployed, and that trade unions can potentially be made into the means for this. This becomes even more important as automation and other technical innovations in the midst of the class struggle increase the numbers of the unemployed.

Later during the revolutionary wave in the 1910s this idea ended up coming up again when people extended the soviets to the idea and practice of social soviets that included both employed and unemployed workers, like in Turin and Milan in 1919-1920. Around the same time, Sylvia Pankhurst was also advocating for social soviets that would include laborers who were outside of the sphere of production and instead involved in reproductive labor, specifically housewives. The consequences of “lumpen”-bashing and moralist workerism are a limitation of strategy.

When Frantz Fanon and American Maoists talk about “lumpen” as the revolutionary subject, they usually are using it in a different way to Marx anyways. Fanon uses it to roughly mean landless migratory laborers scattered in the countryside, while he uses “proletariat” to mean those who work in the service economy of the colonial metropole and culturally align with their settler customers. The Maoists used it to refer to low-waged workers and the structurally unemployed.

The closest they get to Marx’s concept is that they usually mean people who depend on welfare to live, which is where Marx’s objection that they would be focused on immediate survival could come up. But there’s no need to regress to an analysis Marx himself abandoned as unviable to make that point, because there’s already better formulations of how to approach this. I like The American Revolution by James Boggs, and I think it still holds up very well for today