What do you guys think of Marx's concept of the lumpenproletariat?

Outdated. Some girl escorting because it's that or drown in debt or a thug who robs because McDonalds doesn't pay enough to live on aren't class enemies. These people are victims of the capitalist system as much as the wage laborer is, and with capitalism heading towards automation a good bulk of wage laborers will find themselves lumpens either turning to crime or languishing in UBI unemployment.

What we should be doing is reaching out to these people to build solidarity, not slapping then away and only accepting industrial workers.

Marx wasn't referring to the 'uneducated' proletarians and anyone who says that the 'racist' or 'sexist' workers are lumpen is a fucking retard. Whether workers are class conscious or not is not what defines their class. If workers are not class conscious it speaks to the left's incompetence at combating liberalism or an insufficient level of class conflict in the given society.

The lumpen were simply another marginal part of society like the self-employed who were deemed too insignificant to merit class analysis due to their limited role. They were prostitutes, the homeless etc.. They were strictly not workers and thus Marx claimed they had no genuine revolutionary potential.

However I do think this analysis is now outdated. Among the reserve army of labour and the homeless or sex workers there can still be class consciousness and we shouldn't be wholly dismissive of them, moreso given the increasing prominence of the so called 'precariat'.

Anyone who uses the notion of the lumpenproletariat to dismiss or refer to proles you don't like or you think the left doesn't like is a faggot who needs to read a book.

top wew

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He's right though, some people are just too far gone through neoliberal indoctrination and would rather actively defend capitalist interests rather than become class conscious.

Seriously try talking to some of these people in real life, it's like banging your head against a brick wall.

excellent posts, I really have no further comments.

can't hide from the truth comrade. you made idpol your black sheep because of your patriarchal and eurocentric arrogance. You won't defeat the protofascism present in the lumpenproletariat without recognizing your own protofascism within mainstream leftist rhetoric.

this is one of the few times I think it's entirely appropriate to respond with a meme.

mein got

Seriously, keep going. When the left fails once again I'm sure you'll blame idpol for the 450th time.

This has literally fuck all to do with it.

Lumpenproletariat was a throw away term Marx used to describe a particular phenomenon of pro-Bonapartist France that was later ressurrected and turned into something of a theoretical concept by German socialists describing Fascism. But in either of those cases it's meant to describe dumb people or anything else you implied. It's, vaguely, a segment of the working class whose means of livelihood for some reason had excluded them from working class institutions, spaces, organizations and ideas, so they didn't develop class consciousness.

If you weren't a sheltered intellectual you'd see how the peoples who survive of welfare will never achieve class consciousness. The prefer breads and circuses to work and achievement or they're attracted to identity politics and divorced for class

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As leftism becomes reified into the patriarchal and racist culture of Bourgeois democracy it ultimately turns into fascism.

Thank you for proving my point further.

Have you actually listened to Young Thugs music and lyrics? Or are you just conjecturing because you're a fucking racist?

My patience with this board is wearing thin, but I will never abandon you. Mark my words.

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are you talking about me? because you should know that i'm not a he.

western leftism doesn't become fascism, fascism is a reaction against us.

critizing shitty music is now racist. I think >>>/liberalpol/ is more your liking.

you're either a troll or literally blind to your own ideology.
either way, you've made yourself useful to my own rhetoric. so good job!
I guess this is what Zizek means when he talks about the "real real".

shitty music? i thought it was glorifying crime and violence!
way to change your words to defend yourself, a hallmark of the fascist approach to rhetoric.

So you're not calling anyone who disagrees with you a troll.

are you trying to say that shitty music and glorifying crime and violence are mutually exclusiveness?

You saying "fascist" as a word for anything you don't like really hinders conversation

Fuck off. I'm done. You are clearly not interested in having an actual discussion. Your posts are characterized by a repeated changing of the subject and literally telling me what I think.

ragequit?

i haven't changed the subject yet

You either do or you don't see what you're doing, but my time is not yours to waste and colonize.
"disagreeing with me" describes approx. 1/5th of what you're doing.

I already explained to you that Young Thug's music has nothing to do with crime and violence, yet you continue to operate under the assumption that it does. This to me is evidence that you are ignoring everything I say and are just looking to troll.

I have a very concrete definition of fascism and I am recognizing its pervasiveness in your rhetoric. Sorry if the truth hurts.

it does pic related. Also my argument wasn't that ONE PERSON has violent music it is that music that promotes violence and drugs permeates our culture. it does, there is no denying that.

you seem to be using the word very freely when we've said nothing of Mussolini or corporatism

no you're not

This ain't elegant, it's pedantic and petty. COINTELPRO GTFO.

To the Left, lumpenproles (including non-conservative blacks) only care about public benefits and getting high.

That's because it's the American Federation of Labor. The SEIU couldn't care less if America burned to the ground.

Illegal immigration is not a completely economic issue. It's also an issue of identifying individuals for the purpose of enforcing contracts. If an illegal uses fake ID then he can sabotage a business by conducting other fraudulent activity.

It's not that simple. Environmental regulations and lowered international barriers are big factors in causing jobs to be exported.

This is a very cynical viewpoint of legislation. Public officials respond to public outcry all the time, and not just from the "ruling class."

There is no such thing as a "capitalist government."

Feudalism and monarchy are two different systems. Both stem from the fact that land ownership by families was usurped by force, which is exactly what socialist revolutions do.

"Socialism" is opposition to ownership by individuals. Only certain types of socialism are defined as ownership by workers. Other types define it as common or public ownership.

This kind of "council socialism" is the system that originated in the Soviet Union. The word "soviet" literally means "council." In other systems, management decisions are made every week by consensus vote. However, most of the decisions are to reduce pay because the company is going broke.

It means the chronically unemployed along with people who subsist through criminal activity or welfare. Not "stupid" workers. They aren't workers at all.

Prostitutes, gangbangers, drug-smugglers, welfare leeches, NEETs.

In fact, liberals somehow see more virtue and revolutionary potential in those people than actual workers who hold "racist" positions.

The self-employed are just the lower members of the petite-bourgeoisie, though they're interests actually lie much closer to the workers and are much better allies than either lumpens or small porkies.

I agree for the most part, BUT…

SEIU is trash and is cucked by the Democrats. All they want is higher wages for McDonalds employees and care little for an actual revolution.

AFL-CIO is only good for actually training skilled workers. As a union federation, it's cucked to both Porky and the Democrats. However, they actually train workers and TRY to seize some sort of control over the hiring/training process.

Both unions are controlled by bosses, who are cucked by the Democrats constantly.

The Wobblies are barely even a union anymore. They're basically hopeless and idealist as fuck.

We need something like the Knights of Labor's ideology mixed with AFL-CIO's contributions to the workplace and federalism as well as the IWW's revolutionary syndicalism.

A capitalist government can theoretically exist if the government is an assembly of business owners. But yes, capitalist government doesn't exist, mostly because capitalists actually prefer there to be an abstract, centralized government that is beholden to the masses in theory.

Yes, but it is not a systemic thing. And, no small congress of representatives can represent the citizenry. Direct democratic republicanism and confederation are far more preferable to the liberal parliamentary model of governance.

True, but that makes them very much connected. The only "feudal" republic, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, still relied on an elected king. Most medieval republics relied on a guild system along with individual ownership of the workplace.

And yes, this is why you don't get socialist revolutions in agrarian and craft economies. Individual ownership is superior to collective ownership when possible. The guilds were there for artisans, the business-owning workers, to manage their affairs and negotiate with other guilds.

Well, I don't really care for the semantics, but ownership by workers can involve individual ownership, especially in more primitive/agrarian economies and certain industries.

In a way, syndicalism and mutualism are just ways to recreate the old republican societies that were based on individual ownership in an industrial economy. And, I think that worker's ownership of factories does not exclude self-employed workers from owning their own property individually, as I said before.

But yes, I do dislike most forms of socialism/communism for precisely this reason. And capitalism as well, considering that people are robbed of their property by capital accumulation. Most people don't own property in capitalism either. The goal of the working class should be to acquire the property that is rightfully theirs and to ascend from a proletariat to a free burgher class.

Also, a revolution doesn't have to burn or destroy a nation. Hell, the American and French Revolutions were all about national independence and national mobilization respectively.

But you do.

I don't believe that's what he actually meant by "lumpenproletariat".

If I recall his overall point becomes that people who make a living outside the major form of capitalism (private property worked by workers) effectively require the system to continue working for them to make a living. Therefore, they are going to be in support of a capitalist system and the bourgeoisie because they need them to live.

It doesn't make much sense mostly because the workers are far more attached to the system working for them to live than the lumpen.

Marx meant that Lumpens simply want free money to live. If a capitalist state offered welfare for the lumpens, then the lumpens are pacified. Workers, on the other hand, have interests directly opposing capitalists. What increases worker's wages increases costs for capitalists. What gives workers more economic power lowers that of capitalists.

Lumpens don't have the drive to eliminate capitalism because capitalism doesn't exploit them.

Nice, another shitpost by this retard

Are they actually proletarian?

Drug dealers, pimps, and thieves seem like bourgs in miniature. Not petty bourgeoisie, but miniature capitalists lording over the most poor.

Theoretical

This guy posts cool and interesting stuff. I've never seen a non-shitpost by a piratefaggot.

I think lumpen exist, but they are not the lowest of the low, as historically implied.

For the lowest of the low have the contradictions and failures of capitalism most prevalent to them, and they are the most likely to be taught class consciousness by those willing to teach. The lowest of the low arte treated so poorly by the rest of society already that simply being kind and helpful towards them will open them up to you.

The lumpenproletariat, to me, are those too ingrained in their current ideologies to become class conscious - i.e. idpol, reddit, etc. They are the modern liberal "academics" who flaunt their regurgitated lessons from their professors and believe it makes them intelligent and better-than-thou. The cocky, the "intellectual", the ones raised by the system for the system.

"Anti-intellectualism" as an ideology may have much intertwined on my own ideas

They acknowledge the functions of the system and do their best to benefit themselves within it.

You can't presume to know their own ideologies by how the work - otherwise everyone would be a capitalist by default.

This. Fuck intellectuals. I'm poisoning their whole well with their own autofellating "theory" and there's nothing they can do about it.

What in the flying shit. Being lumpenproletariat as a class is not about how you behave yourself. Workers can be retarded as fuck too, you know.

Wew lad.

I'm describing a group of people for familiarizes sake to an audience, not defining lumpenproletariat you faggot

I'm drunk, fyi

The intelligentsia of today almost entirely serve the purposes of the bourgeois and are the true moden lumpen, basically

It's merely the apotheosis of deconstruction, until the dominating telos of late stage hyperreal is the assimilation and integration of its opposite. :^)

I'd go as far as saying that the unemployed 'lumpen' in the west are in fact 'lumpen-aristocracy' as they are in the top 5% most wealthy in the world. They have no positive revolutionary potential as they are made up of lazy criminal parasites who act only out of greedy self-interest as seen in the London/Ferguson/Paris riots. They truly need a "day of the rope".

I think the lumpenprol exist. I don't think it's that they're genetically stupid or anything, but rather their education and upbringing have led them to a mental state that you can't get them out of, like a kind of non-spiritual religion.

From an american point of view, a lot of americans are raised to straight up assholes. They like being assholes. They like doing things to spite others, even at the cost of themselves. They like having big trucks and spewing smog everywhere, to get back at the "liberals" who tell them otherwise. They like giving businesses freedom and taking it away from people, because it goes against what the "liberals" want. And when the economic policies they vote for end up fucking them in the ass, they blame "the liberals" or "the communists" or "the jews", because they don't accept blame. They're assholes. Nothing you can do will change them because they've ingrained it as a very part of their being; it's a fundamental part of their personality to be confrontational and reactionary. Any attempt to change them or show them the light is trying to destroy their "culture" or "heritage", even if it benefits them. They're assholes.

criminality under the capitalist state means nothing you stupid fucking trot

oh my bad wrong flag

you're actually worse

Degenerate.

This is a pretty accurate description of Americans.

It's important for leftists to not fall to the savior complex. You cannot save everybody, it is impossible to do so. There are people who will never reach class consciousness in this country, and in order to move forward as a society, a country, and a species, you have to turn your backs on them because no amount of evidence, argument, or struggle will change them.

That's what "lumpenprole" means – people who are proletariats but will never (timely) achieve class consciousness and fight against their oppression. It's not an elitist concept – it doesn't mean they're "too stupid" to achieve it. It simply means by circumstances in their lives, they have reached a philosophical dead end where they cannot obtain a mentality that will enable them to fight off their own exploitation. There are many smart people who can be lumpenprole – there are snooty, impoverished intellectuals who can be lumpenprole.

It doesn't mean they are 'enemies', it just means they will not aid the left in its struggle to fight capitalist exploitation. However, this does imply that there is the chance they will stand in the way of the left and adopt reactionary positions, and in that case you will have to make sacrifices and fight them off in order to continue fighting for your ideology. Because you can't be a hero and save everybody. It's not possible.

Marx wasn't just talking about people who begged or lived off state welfare.

"On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpen proletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole. Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni,[105] pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème;"

Note that there's a few things in there that are actually people doing work for money. It's not that they're not exploited and they're far from being outside the power of capitalism, they're just not directly involved in the cyclic process of industrial production which he posits will slowly eliminate them. By and large the lumpenproletariat today is much smaller than what it was and it has, true to prediction, been ground down to mostly that which can't be eliminated.

I included criminal/illegitimate enterprises. Not just beggars and people who live off welfare.

Ironically enough, the addition of part-time precariat jobs (Like porters) only proves my point more that the lumpen-proletariat is growing and is going to be a problem for the working class.

Not only this, but the modern "left" is centered more around this lumpen-proletariat than the actual proletariat.