Lumpenproletariat
In Marxist theory, the Lumpenproletariat is the underclass devoid of class consciousness. 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. They dismissed the revolutionary potential of the Lumpenproletariat and contrasted it with the proletariat. Among other groups, criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes are usually included in this category.
The Social Democratic Party of Germany made wide use of the term by the turn of the 20th century. 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. The word Lumpenproletariat, popularized in the West by Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth in the 1960s, has been adopted as a sociological term. However, what some consider to be its vagueness and its history as a term of abuse has led to some criticism. Some revolutionary groups, most notably the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords, have sought to mobilize the Lumpenproletariat.
Overview
Etymology
and Friedrich Engels are generally considered to have coined the term Lumpenproletariat. It is composed of the German word Lumpen, which is usually translated as "ragged" and prolétariat, a French word adopted as a common Marxist term for the class of wage earners in a capitalist system. Hal Draper argued that the root is lump, not lumpen. Bussard noted that the meaning of lump shifted from being a person dressed in rags in the 17th century to knavery in the 19th century.Definition
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines it as "the lowest stratum of the proletariat. 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." In modern usage, it is commonly defined to include the chronically unemployed, the homeless, and career criminals.In English translations of Marx and Engels, lumpenproletariat has sometimes been rendered as "social scum", "dangerous classes", "ragamuffin", and "ragged-proletariat". It has been described by some scholars and theorists, as well as the Soviet nomenclature, as a declassed group. The term "underclass" is considered to be the modern synonym of lumpenproleteriat. Scholars note its negative connotations. 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." He listed the following synonyms: "underclass", "undeserving poor", and "culture of poverty". Another synonym is "riff-raff". The word is used in some languages as a pejorative. In English it may be used in an informal disapproving manner to "describe people who are not clever or well educated, and who are not interested in changing or improving their situation."
Usage by Marx and Engels
According to historian Robert Bussard, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels viewed the lumpenproletariat as:They used the term exclusively with negative connotations, although their works lack "consistent and clearly reasoned definition" of the term. They used the term in various publications "for diverse purposes and on several levels of meaning."
Hal Draper suggested that the concept has its roots in Young Hegelian thought and possibly in G.W.F. Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right. 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." Bussard noted that they often used the term as a "kind of sociological profanity" and contrasted between it and "working and thinking" proletariat. According to Michael Denning by identifying the lumpenproletariat, "Marx was combating the established view that the entire working class was a dangerous and immoral element. He drew a line between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat to defend the moral character of the former."
And the above did not limit expressions on where the concept originated. A graduate student argued lumpenproletariat was one of the end products of The 1789-1848 Struggle To Define The Concept Proletariat. This student found the term proletariat was invented during the 509BCE-27BCE Republic of Rome by Cicero as a concept reflecting a specific point in time during the earlier 753BCE-509BCE Kingdom of Rome such that the synchronic word proletariat essentially meant the same idea as the ahistorical synchronic words working class. In later 18th Century France, this ahistorical synchronic view of the word was accepted and enhanced in the work of Montesquieu in his 1748: work The Spirit Of Laws and also by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1762: work The Social Contract. This ahistorical point in time view of proletariat held until the 1789-1799 French Revolution when Journalist Gracchus Babeuf used the term in one of his 1794 pamphlets, as a historical diachronic continuity, implying that the in struggle with a class above proletariat no longer meant the same idea as ahistorical working class and so the fight over a diachrony and synchrony usage of proletariat began.
Endorsing the Cicero-Montesquieu-Rousseau view of proletariat in 1820, was the early Sociologist Auguste Comte, but finally leaving this Comte view in 1824 was his previously agreeable boss, Henri de Saint-Simon, who broke down and finally agreed that Babeuf was correct, only two years before he died as personal frustration with his inability to 'sell' his harmonious view of France to influential natives ultimately seized him. Engels in 1842 and Marx in 1844 entered this debate and sided with Babeuf and Saint-Simon in saying that proletariat was a historical concept reflecting people who had a significant optimistic role to play in humanity's future. But the duos optimistic view of proletariat did not hold as they soon expressed frustrations, within four separate documents written in 1844-1845, with their proletariat, and so they realized that a complimentary diachronic term needed to be invented to act as a form of pessimistic 'theoretical space filler' which played the role of a polar opposite to their optimistic view of proletariat. So between late night glasses of wine in Brussels, Belgium, the multi-lingual duo, who both knew over 10 languages, invented the Germanic languages word lumpenproletariat which primarily meant to them, "mass" or "size" since everywhere they looked about them, they saw lumpenproletariat easily outnumbering the proletariat. The rascally duo as they wrote up the 1845-1846 The German Ideology laughed those late nights away imagining future readers of their new lumpenproletariat, especially those hot on their trail censors, being unable to understand their literary creation.
Yet lumpenproletariat as describing a "mass" was not new in the 19th Century; in the 17th Century, England's first Poet Laureate John Dryden wrote this phrase within a 1679 poem "How dull and how insensible a beast is man,... philosophers and poets vainly strove, in every age the lumpish mass to move". The duo's new word's built-in ambiguity, plus their added lack of a full definition of the term among any one of the 88 term uses during 1845-1890, ensured that any pursuing censor faced a challenge in decoding their new literary invention. Since their lumpenproletariat was a proletariat polar opposite, they borrowed from Adam Smith and his 1776 The Wealth Of Nations wherein Smith used his productive labour and unproductive labour distinction, and they decreed that the proletariat emerged as the result of their mostly productive labour while the lumpenproletariat emerged mostly from doing unproductive labour.
While writing before the 50 Volume Marx-Engels: Collected Works, Hal Draper found 75 uses of lumpenproletariat within 40 documents and placed these within three of his publications, our 50 volume aided student in 1996 found 88 uses within 50 documents and also found what he thought were three distinct periods of how the duo used their 1845-1890 term; while the 1845-1847 period and the 1855-1890 period featured objective uses of the term, the middle 1848-1854 period was judged to be of a more subjective sort, so the student warned future term users to not borrow their definitions of the word from this potentially misleading middle 7 year period wherein 56 of the 88 total uses took place over 45 years.
In early writings
The first collaborative work by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to feature the term lumpenproletariat is The German Ideology, written in 1845–46. They used it to describe the plebs of ancient Rome who were midway between freemen and slaves, never becoming more than a "proletarian rabble " and Max Stirner's "self-professed radical constituency of the Lumpen or ragamuffin." 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." Engels wrote in The Peasant War in Germany that the lumpenproletariat is a "phenomenon that occurs in a more or less developed form in all the so far known phases of society".In The Communist Manifesto, where lumpenproletariat is commonly translated in English editions as the "dangerous class" and the "social scum", Marx and Engels wrote: