The Dangerous Class

The Dangerous Class

The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat

Clyde W. Barrow

University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor

Copyright © 2020 by Clyde Barrow

All rights reserved

For questions or permissions, please contact um.press.perms@umich.edu

Published in the United States of America by

the University of Michigan Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

First published October 2020

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-472-13224-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-472-12808-2 (ebook)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Lumpenproletariat: Etymology, Lexicology, and Translation

Chapter 2. The Lumpenproletariat as an Economic Category

Chapter 3. The Lumpenproletariat as a Cultural Category and Style of Life

Chapter 4. The Lumpenproletariat as a Political Category

Chapter 5. The Lumpenproletariat as a New Revolutionary Vanguard

Chapter 6. The Lumpenproletariat: Communism or Dystopia?

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11595814

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the editors of the journal Teoria Polityki, who generously allowed me to include a revised version of an earlier article as chapter 6 of this book:

Clyde W. Barrow, “The Dismal Science of Post-Marxist Political Theory: Is There a Future in Postindustrial Socialism?” Teoria Polityki no. 2/2018 (April 2018): 207–36.

Abbreviations

BPP Black Panther Party

CMP Capitalist Mode of Production

ICE U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

IRA Industrial Reserve Army

MDRM Democratic Movement for Madagascar Restoration

MECW Marx-Engels Collected Works

OED Oxford English Dictionary

SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Page x →Page 1 →Introduction

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the concept of the lumpenproletariat in Marxist political theory. The book excavates and analyzes the use of this term from its introduction by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in The German Ideology (1846) and The Communist Manifesto (1848) through the central role of the relative surplus population in post-Marxist political theory. Each chapter of the book makes a unique argument, and hopefully a substantive contribution to historical and contemporary debates about the concept of the lumpenproletariat. Marx and Engels used the term sixty-four times in their collected works, not including synonyms and other appearances of the concept.[1] However, the lumpenproletariat makes it most dramatic appearance in Marx’s The Class Struggles in France (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), and as I document in subsequent chapters, Marx and Engels repeatedly returned to the concept in their analyses of the economic, cultural, and political development of capitalist societies.

Political theorists of the 2nd (Socialist) and 3rd (Communist) Internationals occasionally discussed the problem of the lumpenproletariat, but like Marx and Engels before them, they left it unresolved, except to suggest that an expansion of the lumpenproletariat in the 1930s had played a critical role in the rise of European Nazi and fascist movements just as it had been a critical base of support for the French Bonapartist regime of the 1850s and 1860s. The concept was largely dormant in Marxist political discussion until it resurfaced in the early 1960s and 1970s. This period witnessed a surge of interest in the concept of the lumpenproletariat as Third World insurgencies and the Black Power movement advanced the Page 2 →idea that the lumpenproletariat was replacing the proletariat as the new vanguard of a global anticapitalist movement. Following the demise of these movements in the late 1970s, the “lumpen debate” was superseded in the 1980s by a post-Marxist analysis of the growing surplus population in global capitalism. These largely European theoretical discussions were superseded in the 1990s as neoconservatives in the United State grew increasingly concerned about the rise of a “white underclass,” that is, a white lumpenproletariat.

This book argues that the old lumpen debate has attained renewed salience with the election of U.S. president Donald Trump and the rise of right-wing populist movements throughout the world, which are often seen as a reactionary mass movement that draws considerable support from a burgeoning lumpenproletariat; this is exactly the historical political role assigned to it by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels across four decades of historical, economic, and political writings. Marx and Engels literally invented the term lumpenproletariat, using it first in their long-unpublished work, The German Ideology (1846), to distinguish the rising industrial proletariat from a different class they described in The Communist Manifesto (1848) as “the ‘dangerous class’, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society.”[2]

In these early writings, Marx and Engels juxtapose the proletariat against the lumpenproletariat to argue that “the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.” In making this distinction, Marx and Engels were initially engaged in a polemic with the anarchist Max Stirner, and later with the anarchist Michael Bakunin, who both viewed the lumpenproletariat as a revolutionary class because of its impoverished existence on the margins of capitalist society. In contrast, Marx and Engels argued that precisely because of their impoverished existence on the margins of capitalist society, the lumpenproletariat’s “conditions of life . . . prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue,” rather than the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society.

The concept of the lumpenproletariat rarely reappears in Marx’s and Engels’s later theoretical writings, but it does occur in several of their historical political writings, particularly in The Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In these historical analyses of the French Revolution of 1848, and Louis Bonaparte’s subsequent machinations to become the dictator of France through a coup d’état, the course of historical events seemed to bear out Marx’s and Engels’s claim in The Communist Page 3 →Manifesto that the lumpenproletariat would indeed serve as “a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue” in revolutionary and postrevolutionary conditions. In short, the lumpenproletariat betrayed the proletariat at the barricades by going over to the bourgeoisie for a few francs. The lumpenproletariat was then organized into a mass base to support Louise Bonaparte’s dictatorship, while it also provided the foot soldiers for extra-legal or quasi-legal militias that maintained law and order against the dictatorship’s critics and enemies—particularly, radical workers and intellectuals.

However, Marx’s and Engels’s theoretical analysis left us with what I call the problem of the lumpenproletariat. On the one hand, Marx and Engels assigned to the lumpenproletariat a significant and even decisive role in their political analyses of historical class struggles in nineteenth-century capitalist societies, but on the other hand they assume in their more theoretical writings that in the long run, “all other classes [except the bourgeoisie and proletariat] decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry.”[3] Thus, despite the lumpenproletariat’s significant, and reactionary, historical role in nineteenth-century class struggles, Marx and Engels seem to suggest that the lumpenproletariat will eventually be relegated to the dustbin of history along with all other classes except the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and even these classes will disappear in the course of a transition from socialism to communism.

This view of the lumpenproletariat was largely accepted by Marxist theorists of the 2nd and 3rd International, including Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, V. I. Lenin, and Mao Tse-tung. However, in the twentieth century, these political theorists faced the exact same practical problem of the lumpenproletariat that Marx and Engels had confronted in the nineteenth century. While the lumpenproletariat might disappear in some distant socialist future, it remained a sociological and political reality that had to be confronted in the present time, because the lumpenproletariat could play a critical role in both parliamentary and revolutionary politics, just as it had done in France from 1848 to 1871. While later theorists grappled with the problem of the lumpenproletariat, none of them offered a definitive answer on how to prevent it from acting as bribed tools of reactionary intrigue. Karl Kautsky offered the harshest assessment, concluding that the lumpenproletariat would simply have to be dealt with by force of state. Rosa Luxemburg saw this option as counterproductive and instead proposed to make the lumpenproletariat into bribed tools of socialist intrigue with a rapid and massive expansion of social welfare that would quiet Page 4 →them. Lenin and Mao both entertained the idea that lumpenproletarians might be recruited into revolutionary armies and controlled with military discipline, but based on their experience both of them cautioned that the lumpenproletariat was always a source of disruption and it could never be trusted within the socialist movement because of its anarchistic and criminal inclinations.

With the exception of these sporadic discussions, the concept of the lumpenproletariat was largely ignored by Marxist political theorists until the 1960s and 1970s, when it was adopted by many on the New Left as a potentially fruitful concept for understanding Third World anticolonial movements, the US Black Power movement, the global youth and student movements, and even the new social movements of the 1980s.[4] As figure 1 and figure 2 document, the term lumpenproletariat rarely appears in the German language until the period from 1905 to 1930, when they were a frequent topic of discussion among Marxists of the 2nd and 3rd International. The same term lumpenproletariat was rarely used in the English language until the Great Depression, but its use skyrocketed in the 1960s and 1970s. In both languages, the term shows a notable upsurge in usage during the 1960s and 1970s, and in the German language, this surge continues through the 1980s. This surge of interest in the lumpenproletariat was initiated by neo-Marxist theorists on the New Left, who suggested for the first time in the history of Marxist political theory that a nonwhite and non-European lumpenproletariat was emerging as the vanguard of a global revolutionary movement against capitalism.

The concept of the lumpenproletariat became an object of serious theoretical discussion among Marxist and neo-Marxist scholars at a time when the US and European working classes seemed to be increasingly integrated into the structure of advanced capitalist societies.[5] The renewed interest in the concept of the lumpenproletariat was largely a response to two sets of events: (1) the outbreak of anticolonial and nationalist revolutions in the “Third World” (Asia, Africa, and Latin America), and (2) urban riots and the black liberation movement in the United States. These upheavals were not led by Marx’s industrial proletariat, but by the rural and urban masses living outside of core capitalist relations of production, who were excluded from participating in those relations by the very processes of modernization and capitalist development.

The lumpenproletariat debate of the 1960s and 1970s was initiated by Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s position bore the marks of Maoist influence, Page 5 →which was making its way into French Marxism at the time, but Fanon goes beyond Mao in his enthusiasm for both the rural peasantry and the urban lumpenproletariat. In some ways, his enthusiasm for these classes approached the position taken by many nineteenth-century anarchists, such as Mikhail Bakunin,[6] who had always argued that a global revolution against capitalism would be more likely to start in “backward” countries than in advanced industrial nations, where large sections of the proletariat had become embourgeoised through affluence and education. Fanon observed that as independent peasants were displaced by colonizer-controlled industrial agriculture, they either became disenfranchised and migratory landless agricultural labors or they flocked into burgeoning Third World cities, where they fueled the growth of a mass urban lumpenproletariat. Fanon argued that it was this new lumpenproletariat that was acting as the spearhead of anticolonial and anticapitalist revolutions in those countries.

Figure 1. Frequency of use of the term lumpenproletariat in the English language, 1840–2008. Note: Figure 1 is a Google Books Ngram, which visually and empirically illustrates how frequently the term lumpenproletariat appears in English-language books compared to other terms. The term shows a notable upsurge in usage during the 1960s and 1970s.

Figure 2. Frequency of use of the term lumpenproletariat in the German language, 1820–2008. Note: Figure 2 is a Google Books Ngram, which visually illustrates how frequently the term lumpenproletariat appears in German-language books compared to other terms. The term shows a notable upsurge in usage during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Page 6 →Fanon’s conceptualization of the lumpenproletariat as the new vanguard of anti-capitalist revolution was imported and adapted to the United States by several founders of the Black Panther Party (BPP). These theorist-activists were all adherents of Marxism-Leninism, but with a strong admixture of dependency theory, the theory of internal colonialism, and Frantz Fanon.[7] In the United States, however, Eldridge Cleaver and others in the BPP went well beyond Fanon’s assessment of the lumpenproletariat as an urban spearhead of revolution to actually argue that the lumpenproletariat was now the vanguard of the proletariat—or what little would soon be left of it.[8] Cleaver makes this leap based on a pioneering assessment of the logic of capitalist development in its postindustrial phase, which he argued was rapidly eliminating the white proletariat through automation.

Consequently, Cleaver argued that the white proletariat would soon be joining the black lumpenproletariat, and this logic of capitalist development meant that the long-term interests of the white proletariat were Page 7 →allied to those of the black lumpenproletariat. Cleaver and Huey P. Newton extended their concept of the lumpenproletariat to include Chicanos, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ groups as part of a potentially broad anticapitalist and communist coalition. The BPP theorists argued that the white working class was about to become a nonworking class as a result of globalization and automation, and they predicted that this group would soon join the ranks of a multiracial and multiethnic lumpenproletariat. The new members of the US lumpenproletariat would be no different than the current lumpenproletarians, except they would be a different color, and BPP theorists worried that instead of joining the future they would long for a bygone era when their color mattered in establishing hierarchies within the working class. Thus, the BPP theorists were concerned that structural racism would thwart any political alliance between people of color and the disintegrating core of the white working class, and as a result, they did not see any clear path forward beyond the welfare state and economic dependency on the owners of the machines. Instead of joining with other progressive elements in advanced capitalist societies, who were now largely nonwhite, nonmale, and often nonheterosexual, a burgeoning white lumpenproletariat might just as likely come to stand as a line of resistance against a progressive revolution and thus perform the historical role long assigned to them by Marx and Engels as a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

Marxism’s political and intellectual attractiveness began to wane in the late 1970s with the decline of the organized labor movement, the crisis of the welfare state, and the increasingly dismal electoral fortunes of social-democratic and left-wing parties. As these traditional vehicles of left-wing and progressive politics seemed to disintegrate, a variety of new social movements emerged to articulate the political demands of ethnic and national minorities, welfare recipients, the elderly, unemployed youth, pacifists, women, environmentalists, and people with alternative lifestyles. The apparent rise of political groups formerly perceived as marginal to the dynamics of capitalist development seemed to require a new New Left political theory with the capacity to either go beyond traditional Marxism conceptually or to replace it altogether. The development of a distinct and identifiable post-Marxist political theory was one of the numerous responses to this crisis of historical materialism.

Significantly, the emergence of post-Marxist political theory occurred in conjunction with the rise of postindustrial social theories, which the Page 8 →New Left first began to take seriously with the publication of Alain Touraine’s The Post-Industrial Society (1971) and Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. These two theoretical innovations merged intellectually in the writings of radical social theorists such as Andre Gorz, Jürgen Habermas, Antonio Negri, and Claus Offe, who began to explore the theoretical implications of postindustrialism through the lens of classical Marxist theory. Specifically, it was the discovery of Grundrisse by Western Marxists in the 1970s and 1980s that generated a shift in thinking about Marxism as dramatic as the one that occurred after the discovery of Marx’s early writings, such as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology. Post-Marxism provides a theoretical underpinning for the earlier conclusions of the BPP theorists, one that similarly forecasts a dystopian and dismal political trajectory dominated by the rise of a reactionary lumpenproletariat.

However, these efforts to reintroduce Marxist political theory to the lumpenproletariat were immediately rejected by the Old Left and, indeed, by much of the New Left, who came to see the concept as an epithet that stigmatized the poor. Old Leftists and orthodox Marxists rejected the idea that any class except the proletariat could act as the vanguard of a socialist revolution, and consequently, well-known Marxists such as Hal Draper set out to debunk the concept. Others on the New Left moralized that Marx’s portrayal of the lumpenproletariat as dangerous social scum stigmatized disadvantaged groups with Victorian bourgeois stereotypes. The universal response, in one way or another, was to eventually dismiss the concept of the lumpenproletariat as altogether useless and irrelevant to Marxist political theory.

For example, following the brief upsurge of interest in the concept of the lumpenproletariat, the highly regarded Dictionary of Marxist Thought concluded in 1983 that even though later Marxists had “made occasional references to the lumpenproletariat” the term does not refer “to any clearly defined social group which has a major socio-political role.”[9] This observation is certainly true of the paradigmatic Poulantzas-Miliband debate on the capitalist state, as well as the class-boundaries debate taking place at the same time, which do not contain a single reference to the lumpenproletariat in analyzing the class structure or class struggles of advanced capitalist societies.[10] Erik Olin Wright, who contributed to both debates, was perhaps the only Marxist theorist at the time to even reference the lumpenproletariat. Wright identified the lumpenproletariat in the United States Page 9 →with the permanently unemployed and with welfare recipients, but even he concludes that its position in the class structure was “ambiguous” and that he “cannot adequately answer this question [about the nature and role of the lumpenproletariat].”[11] By the end of the 1980s, the historian Peter Hayes could accurately conclude that there is now “a tendency to view the lumpenproletariat as being of little importance to Marx’s theory.”[12]

Robert L. Bussard sought to rectify this lack of attention by conducting what was then the most detailed exegesis of Marx’s use of the term, noting that the concept of lumpenproletariat was still “one of the undeveloped, unclear levels of Marxist thought, and it most certainly deserves greater attention than it has hitherto received.”[13] Nevertheless, Bussard’s exegesis of the concept seems to foreclose the need for any further analysis by concluding that “Marx and Engels lack a consistent and clearly reasoned definition of the notion of the lumpenproletariat. . . . It is in fact difficult to characterize Marx’s and Engels’s lumpenproletariat in any definitive way, for there are several versions of the lumpenproletariat to be found in their writings.”[14]

A textual analysis by Mark Cowling also concludes, as Hal Draper had done previously,[15] that the concept of the lumpenproletariat “should be seen as invalid as a substantive concept,” because it was used by Marx mainly as a polemical epithet for simultaneously disparaging “the part of the proletariat which supported Louis Napoleon Bonaparte on the one hand and vilifying and trivializing Bonaparte himself on the other.”[16] More recently, Cowling has reiterated his claim that “the definition of the lumpenproletariat is foggy, and the concept is dubious.”[17] Frank Bovenkerk echoes this view with his conclusion that in Marx’s and Engels’s “more theoretical works, their definition of the term lumpenproletariat is unclear and inconsistent.”[18] Bovenkerk reaffirms Cowling’s admonition that lumpenproletariat is a term “best abandoned.”[19] Finally, Peter Worsley has also argued that “it is high time to abandon the highly insulting, inaccurate and analytically befogging Marxist term lumpenproletariat, which is commonly used.”[20] In fact, as figure 1 and figure 2 document, the use of the term lumpenproletariat rapidly declined after this onslaught of academic criticism.

Thus, paradoxically, the lumpen debate waned on the left with the “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s and the global spread of neoliberalism in the 1990s—and I say “paradoxically” because, as Eldridge Cleaver had predicted, this was a time when capitalist economies were replacing Page 10 →proletarians with lumpenproletarians in unprecedented numbers and at an unprecedented pace. However, with few exceptions, the deindustrialization of America that Cleaver had predicted was mostly chronicled by right-wing policy wonks, whose message was duly ignored by a left now consumed with an identity politics completely detached from class and even hostile to it. Figure 3 illustrates how the debate about the lumpenproletariat shifted from left to right in the 1980s as the Marxist term lumpenproletariat fell into disuse only to be replaced by the preferred neoconservative term underclass.

Figure 3. Comparative use of the terms lumpenproletariat and underclass in the English language, 1840–2008. Note: Figure 1 is a Google Books Ngram, which visually illustrates how frequently the term lumpenproletariat appears in English-language books compared to other terms. The term shows a notable upsurge in usage during the 1960s and 1970s, but it is replaced by the term underclass in the 1980s. A Google Ngram of the same two terms in German (not included here) reveals a similar pattern.

In 1993, following the devastating 1990–91 recession and the first wave of catastrophic deindustrialization, Charles Murray began warning Page 11 →Americans about “the coming white underclass.” After a decade of being criticized for racializing poverty as an African-American pathology, Murray observed that in fact, “European American whites are the ethnic group [in the United States] with the most people in poverty, most illegitimate children, most women on welfare, most unemployed men, and most arrests for serious crimes,”[21] and to this we could add today, most deaths from opioid abuse.[22] Mark Cowling points out that “there is a considerable similarity in both definition and function between Marx’s view of the lumpenproletariat and Charles Murray’s contemporary theory of the underclass,”[23] but Marxist political theorists once again dismissed the entire discussion as mere ideology. The image of the lumpenproletariat portrayed by Charles Murray, who was a neoconservative policy analyst disdained by the left, was quite the opposite of the image portrayed by New Leftists in the 1960s and 1970s, although paradoxically it echoed the Marx of 1848.

A few scholars and policy analysts on the left did respond with their own warnings about an impending sociological and political crisis of the industrial working class. Bennet Harrison and Barry Bluestone chronicled the deindustrialization of America during the previous two decades, but they were convinced that “the great U-Turn” of the Reagan Revolution could be quickly reversed with liberal and progressive workforce development policies.[24] These recommendations set the stage for more than a decade of neoliberal education reform and workforce retraining programs based on the idea that American workers could reverse their declining real wages with some re-skilling and a new public school–to-work curriculum.[25] Even today, US presidential candidate Joseph Biden tells unemployed coal miners that the remedy for their misery is to “learn to program.”[26]

However, others at the time, such as Ruy Teixeira, a researcher at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, argued that there would be dire economic and political consequences if mainstream liberals continued to ignore “America’s forgotten majority”[27]—namely, the white working class—in favor of an electoral strategy based on the demographics and rhetoric of identity politics. The most prescient analysis, however, came from the philosopher Richard Rorty, who wrote in 1998 that

Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Page 12 →Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. . . . All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.[28]

In contrast to these Cassandra’s warnings, the more typical response among liberals and the left was to chastise the media, scholars, and politicians for moralizing stereotypes and negative cultural discourses about the disintegration of the white working class.[29] Mark Schmitt, for example, argues that the tendency in liberal and left-wing discourse is “to identify the poor, uneducated white working-class as the core of the problem posed by the rise of the new right” and he cautions that this narrative “entails the risk of installing the white working class as a scapegoat for recent political developments.”[30]

Charles Murray’s response to these criticisms from the left is that they all miss the mark by trying to construct a policy narrative about the future of a white working class that no longer exists in the United States or in much of Western Europe. By 2010, Murray argues, the white working class was already “coming apart.”[31] Shortly thereafter, a 2012 New York Times editorial influenced by Murray’s work concluded there was no longer any point in talking about the white working class in the United States, because the nation was “facing a crisis in which a chunk of [white] working-class America risks being calcified into an underclass, marked by drugs, despair, family decline, high incarceration rates and a diminishing role of jobs and education as escalators of upward mobility.”[32] US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton brought this growing chorus to its denouement in a fundraising speech where she claimed that half of Donald Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables.”[33]

The election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States led Page 13 →the provocative conservative columnist Kevin D. Williamson to observe that while the 2016 US presidential election had put the white working class front and center in American politics, the real problem is “what we euphemistically call the ‘white working class’ (its main problem is that it is not working).”[34] Moreover, like many traditional conservatives and Wall Street Republicans, Williamson attributes the rise of Donald Trump to this new lumpenproletariat with the dismissive comment that “Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does Oxycontin.”[35] Williamson unabashedly mocks “The White Minstrel Show” of contemporary American politics by noting that “white people acting white have embraced the ethic of the white underclass, which is distinct from the white working class, which has the distinguishing feature of regular gainful employment.” The popularity of lumpenproletarian television, such as Duck Dynasty, Swamp People, and Honey Booboo, provides cultural support to Trump’s glorification of the lumpenproletariat. Ironically, Williamson observes, “the man at the center of all this atavistic redneck revanchism is a pampered billionaire real-estate heir from New York City.”[36] Yet, at the other end of the political spectrum, the postmodern novelist Francis Levy declares in a recent essay that “it was the Marxist lumpenproletariat, now swelled like the liver of a goose that’s about to be made into foie gras, that was responsible for electing a billionaire capitalist, a reborn 19th century robber baron, president. The real question seems to be not whether ‘deplorables’ elected Trump, but what accounted for the expansion of this demographic.”[37]

As if to answer this question, the New York Times followed up with a story on Grundy, Virginia—a formerly prosperous coal-mining town where the population has fallen from 39,000 to under 22,000; the number of coal-industry jobs has fallen from 5,600 to 1,000; a high school designed for 1,000 students has 400 students; and income has fallen to about two-thirds of the national average, and 40 percent of that income comes from federal transfer payments such as Social Security and disability payments. The New York Times describes Grundy as “one of many victims of globalization, technology, and other economic dislocations that have wreaked havoc with small-town America.”[38] Its story is considered representative of “the proliferation of towns like Grundy across what used to be the nation’s industrial heartland,” and “overwhelmingly, they support President Trump.”[39] Jonah Goldberg has referred to this class of deindustrialized former proletarians as the “Trumpen Proletariat,”[40] while others simply call them the “Trumpentariat.”[41] In building on the imagery that Page 14 →Donald Trump’s core supporters are uneducated, unemployed, tobacco-chewing methheads, Robert Harrington refers to these deindustrialized Americans as “the Trump claque of drooling monotooths.”[42] These terms and phrases are intended as epithets, but they are also intended to signify that the persons being described are not the industrial working class of the 1950s and 1960s, but something lower, meaner, cruder, and less stable—both economically and mentally—than their predecessors. Ironically, the language used by contemporary neoconservatives to describe the new white underclass bears a striking resemblance to the language used by Karl Marx to describe the lumpenproletariat; Marx too evidently had “no sympathy for hillbillies.”[43]

Whether on the left or the right, this is not the image of a hard-working industrial proletariat, but the story of an emerging lumpenproletariat. As the New York Times points out, the same story is on a continuous feedback loop across the United States, but it is also being played out in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Russia. The rise of right-wing movements in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere has thus seemingly brought the concept of the lumpenproletariat back into the forefront of political analysis. The purpose of this book is to excavate the Marxist concept of the lumpenproletariat, but in doing so it also challenges many of the prevailing views in Marxist theory about that concept.

In particular, this book argues that despite the many obstacles to arriving at a coherent and well-defined concept of the lumpenproletariat, Marx and Engels did anchor this concept in their analysis of the historical origins of capitalism and in their economic analysis of its extended reproduction as a mode of production. The book attempts to bring some degree of analytical coherence to the concept of the lumpenproletariat. However, in reassessing Marx’s and Engels’s theory of capitalist development in light of this concept, I also suggest that there is an overlooked dystopian logic in Capital (and also Grundrisse) that points to a scenario where the proletariat is actually destined to decay into an ever-burgeoning lumpenproletariat and surplus population. This logic of post-industrial capitalist development may pose insurmountable obstacles to a theory of revolutionary agency.

In making these arguments, I first suggest that contemporary Marxist political theorists have mistakenly based their understanding of the concept of the lumpenproletariat on Marx’s and Engels’s historical political writings, most notably The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and, of course, the well-known Page 15 →passage in The Communist Manifesto. However, nearly everyone who has touched on this topic has ignored the much lengthier and systematic development of the category in Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), which is later reproduced in remarkably similar language in Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1. Thus, I suggest we need to foreground these works in understanding the lumpenproletariat as an economic category in Marxist political economy and then read the historical political writings through this lens. The Condition of the English Working Class and Vol. 1 of Capital are book-ends for understanding the concept of the lumpenproletariat at an economic level, first, in terms of its historical genesis as an economic category, and second in terms of its extended reproduction in capitalist social formations.

When conceptualized through the lens of these extended discussions by Engels and Marx, it becomes clear that the lumpenproletariat is not functionally part of the capitalist mode of production, because it neither produces nor appropriates surplus value as a result of its structural location within capitalist relations of production. The lumpenproletariat is a surplus byproduct—an incidental effect—of capitalist economic development, but one that steadily increases in numbers and proportions with the rising organic composition of capital and the consequent de-composition of the proletariat. As an economic category, Marx and Engels define the lumpenproletariat by its nonrelation to economic production and by its position outside capitalist relations of production.

Second, the lumpenproletariat’s nonrelation to economic production also defines it as a cultural category defined by a particular style of life at the margins of capitalist society. The lumpenproletariat does not have any economic or legal claim on profits, rents, or interest because it does not own capital, and it does not have any economic or legal claim to wages because it generally does not work. Marx and Engels offer a sober assessment of life at the furthest margins of capitalist society, where one’s status situation and lifestyle are determined by the absence of any direct relation to production. The absence of regular work, or in many cases the absence of any work, generates a variety of irregular “occupations” based on prostitution, robbery, burglary, begging, gambling, hucksterism, con artistry, trickery, thugs for hire, murder for hire, and a host of other uncertain ways of producing a meager income, including alms and charity. The lumpenproletariat is a population rife with sickness, disease, poverty, starvation, filth, physical disability, orphans, absinthe and other cheap alcohol, opium Page 16 →dens, brothels, violence, and degradation. The lumpenproletariat lifestyle generates little trust and few loyalties, and many members of this class become migratory, homeless vagabonds or orphans abandoned by their parents. This lifestyle constitutes a lumpenproletarian culture, which as Marx and Engels describe it is largely parasitic, violent, and susceptible to prostitution in many forms.

Finally, Marx and Engels did not consider the lumpenproletariat capable of independent political action, because of its dependent position at the margins of capitalism. The lumpenproletariat’s nonrelation to production means that it is not structurally organized by capitalist relations of production, and therefore it cannot develop an independent class consciousness or any sense of a historical mission within capitalism. Thus, when the lumpenproletariat does become politically active, it does so in one of two ways, consistent with its nonrelation to production. It may spontaneously erupt against its miserable conditions of life, but when it does so it takes the form of anarchistic street riots characterized by undirected looting, arson, vandalism, beatings, and murder. Marx and Engels did not view these types of riots as revolutionary action. A street riot is anarchism, not socialism, and tactically, such events often provide the police and army with a pretext for cracking down on left-wing organizations even if they did not participate in such actions.

The lumpenproletariat may also be organized into the political arena by other classes, but they are usually brought into the class struggle by the ruling class as a counterweight to the proletariat’s superior numbers. The ruling class will most often use the lumpenproletariat as bribed tools of reactionary intrigue by enlisting them in counterrevolutionary militias and special police forces directed against the working class. However, because the lumpenproletariat is literally on the outside looking in at capitalism, it lives the political irony that it can be both anticapitalist and antilabor. It has no natural loyalty to the capitalist state or to a future workers’ republic. When organized by the “strongman” that Rorty predicted—whether a Bonaparte, a Mussolini, or a Trump—the lumpenproletariat gravitates toward a parasitic and violent lumpen state created in its own image, and such a state primarily serves the interests of the equally parasitic finance aristocracy, which also has no direct relation to production.

Marx and Engels published numerous accounts of insurrections in France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Spain, which always ended with the lumpenproletariat coming to the defense of the established Page 17 →order against the working class as bribed tools of reactionary intrigue. Their claim that the lumpenproletariat’s conditions of life prepared it to be a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue was an empirical observation well grounded in the lessons of European political history. For Marx and Engels, the lumpenproletariat has no destiny of its own, because it is a byproduct of capitalist development—a castoff on the scrap heap of history. The lumpenproletariat’s political actions are therefore always attached to some other class—the peasantry, the monarchy/aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, or sometimes the proletariat—and to that extent it can and does play a pivotal role in many historical political struggles. When the lumpenproletariat becomes politically active, it brings large numbers of desperate people, an unbridled capacity for violence and brutality, and a willingness to side with anyone—or to even change sides in the middle of the struggle—depending on who is willing to pay them, feed them, clothe them, and entertain them. They are effectively the soldiers and police of whichever side is winning the class struggle, and that is usually the ruling class. This is a pessimistic book and it does not have a happy ending—at least not yet.

Page 18 →Chapter One

The Lumpenproletariat: Etymology, Lexicology, and Translation

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) credits Karl Marx with being the first person to use the word lumpenproletariat in the English language, and according to the OED, he used it to designate “the lowest and most degraded section of the proletariat; the ‘down and outs’ who make no contribution to the workers’ cause.” The OED also identifies the derivative word lumpen as an adjective meaning “boorish, stupid, unenlightened, used derisively to describe persons, attitudes, etc. supposed to be characteristic of the lumpenproletariat.”[1] In fact, the term lumpenproletariat never appeared in any language until it was first coined as a neologism by Marx and Engels in their long-unpublished The German Ideology (1846). The term lumpenproletariat is therefore peculiar and unique to Marxism, but there is nevertheless a great deal of controversy about the meaning of the term and its status within the larger corpus of Marxist economic and political theory.

While the term was first used in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels never found a publisher for this manuscript, and it remained unpublished until 1932, when it was released by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow and then published in English a few years later (1938) by Lawrence & Wishart. Thus, the term did not actually appear in print until two years after it was coined by Marx and Engels, when it was used in the German-language versions of The Communist Manifesto (February and April 1848).[2] The term did not appear in the original English version of The Communist Manifesto, which was published in 1850 in the Chartist journal The Red Page 19 →Republican. There was no directly comparable word in the English language, so the original English version of The Communist Manifesto used the terms “the ‘dangerous class,’ the social scum” instead of lumpenproletariat. However, with Frederick Engels’s approval, the word lumpenproletariat was added to Samuel Moore’s 1888 English translation of The Communist Manifesto. Moore’s translation became the standard English-language version of the text, and consequently, in most English language editions of The Communist Manifesto, the word lumpenproletariat is now included along with the terms “the dangerous class, the social scum.”[3]

The most frequent usages of the term lumpenproletariat are found in Marx’s Class Struggles in France: 1848–1850 (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), which are the two texts actually cited by the OED as the sites of genesis of the word.[4] Marxist scholars have often turned to these two texts as models of “how to apply the method of historical materialism to the elucidation of historical events.”[5] Thus, the same two texts have also received the most attention from scholars interested in the concept of the lumpenproletariat.

Frederick Engels describes The Class Struggles in France as “Marx’s first attempt to explain a piece of contemporary history by means of his materialist conception, on the basis of the prevailing economic situation.”[6] What we now know as The Class Struggles in France was originally published in 1850 as a series of articles in Marx’s Cologne newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung. These articles were relatively unknown until they were republished in 1895 as a short book, The Class Struggles in France: 1848–1850. The book was published in German under the editorship of Frederick Engels, who also authored an influential introduction to the book at that time.[7] The first English-language excerpts from The Class Struggles were published in the United States in 1921 by a short-lived monthly periodical called The Marxian (Vol. 1, No. 2), while the full text of the book was published in the United States in 1924[8] and in England in 1945.[9]

In Class Struggles in France, Marx uses historical analysis to demonstrate how the long-term economic and political interests of the proletariat are diametrically opposed to the interests of the capitalist class. This differentiation of class interests becomes the platform for distinguishing the aims of a socialist revolution from the goals of the bourgeois revolution. The demands of the workers involved in the Revolution of 1848 went beyond the political demand for a bourgeois republic based on universal suffrage, to a social republic. What made the workers’ demands “socialist”—demands Page 20 →the property-holding classes could not accept—was their demand for “the right to work” (i.e., full employment) and an economic reconstruction of society based on the collective appropriation of the means of production. Marx puts the industrial proletariat at the vanguard of an alliance of the working classes, which initially included the peasantry and the urban petite bourgeoisie, but in the end this alliance is betrayed by the lumpenproletariat, which goes over to the bourgeoisie, while the rest of the alliance frays because of continuing attachment to private property and low taxes by the peasantry and the petite bourgeoisie.

Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) is chronologically “a direct sequel” to The Class Struggles in France. It is also considered “one of Marx’s most outstanding works,” and even a masterpiece, because it too provides “one of the classic expositions of the mature theory of historical materialism and of the dialectic of history.”[10] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte was originally published in German in the United States in the nonperiodic journal Die Revolution (May 1852). It appeared in a revised second edition in 1869, while a third edition was published in 1885 with a new preface by Frederick Engels. Excerpts from the book appeared in English in the Chartist Peoples’ Paper as early as 1852, but the first full English translation was not published until 1897, when it was serialized in The People, an organ of Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party. De Leon’s translation was released in book form the following year (1898).[11] An English translation by Eden and Cedar Paul was published in Great Britain in 1926,[12] while the US version was subsequently republished with explanatory notes in 1935.[13]

In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx chronicles the defection of the peasantry and the petite bourgeoisie, who are both declining but still committed to the institution of private property. These classes were not only opposed to a social republic because they were threatened by the demands of the proletariat; they were also nostalgic for the old capitalism based on small producers, and they were mobilized by memories of Emperor Napoleon I, who had once made France great for them. Marx also identified numerous fractions of the bourgeoisie, which was far from unified in its preferred response to the proletariat and even its commitment to a republic in any form. The bourgeoisie, as Marx defined it, included large landowners (real estate), the finance aristocracy (bankers), large industrialists, and the professions—senior officers of the army, university intellectuals, priests, lawyers, and the press.

Page 21 →The division of interest within the bourgeoisie, and the nostalgic longings of the peasants and the petite bourgeoisie, set the stage for Louis Bonaparte’s election as president of the Second Republic in December 1848. However, with little support in the French National Assembly, and facing the prospect that he would have to leave office in 1854, Louis Bonaparte staged a coup d’état on December 2, 1851, with the support of the army and the approving acquiescence of the finance aristocracy. Louis Bonaparte dissolved the National Assembly and, the following year (1852), he declared the re-establishment of the French (Second) Empire.

Bonaparte had won an election with support from the high bourgeoisie, as well as the urban petite bourgeoisie and the peasantry, who were swayed by the pledge to make France great again. However, Bonaparte’s coup d’état ultimately relied on the mass support of the lumpenproletariat. Bonaparte’s coup d’état was merely tolerated by the finance aristocracy so long as it was allowed to pillage the state treasury with mounting public debt and corrupt financial schemes. Thus, “Bonapartism,” as it was called by later Marxists, was essentially a parasitic vampire state built on the loyalty of the unproductive classes, who looted French capitalism at the expense of the working classes for nearly two decades. In his preface to a second edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx observes that the purpose of this book was to “demonstrate how the class struggle in France created circumstances and relations that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity [Louis Bonaparte] to play a hero’s part.”[14]

The publication dates for The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire set the stage for an initial surge of interest in the concept of the lumpenproletariat in Germany during the apogee of the 2nd International (see figure 2) and for the brief surge of interest in the concept during the Great Depression in the United States (see figure 1). It is also the case that The Communist Manifesto, The Class Struggles in France, and The Eighteenth Brumaire provided nearly all of the textual material for Marxists’ theoretical understanding of the concept up to this time. However, as the concept of the lumpenproletariat gained new life in the works of Frantz Fanon and the Black Panthers during the 1960s and 1970s, as noted earlier, the concept itself was challenged by Hal Draper in 1972, with an article that focused almost exclusively on etymological and lexicological problems with the concept,[15] which he then followed up with an even more influential essay on “the translation problem.”[16]

While Draper’s work has contributed a great deal to our understanding Page 22 →of the origins and meaning of the word, in many ways his effort to debunk the concept sidetracked subsequent discussions into minute etymological and lexicological issues, converting the debate into a problem of linguistics and analytical philosophy, rather than a question of understanding the place of the lumpenproletariat in the economic and social development of capitalist social formations. Robert L. Bussard is correct to point out that Draper’s main polemical objective in adopting this method was to deflate “the idea (then current in some radical circles) that the lumpenproletariat had significant revolutionary potential.”[17] Draper insisted that the lumpenproletariat should not be viewed as an economic category in Marx’s theory of capitalist development, nor should it be considered a social class for purposes of political analysis. Thus, in developing my own analysis of the term, I have made several critical decisions along the way about how to resolve three major linguistic controversies that have emerged over the last half- century.

First, as Bussard demonstrates in great detail, the etymology of the word lumpenproletariat can be deployed (as Draper does) to create ambiguity about its meaning as used by Marx and Engels. Bussard insists that “among the specialized social terms which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used, das Lumpenproletariat is one of the most problematic,” because despite “the inclusion of the word ‘proletariat’ in its name (‘lumpen-’ meaning ‘ragged’ or ‘scoundrel’), the lumpenproletariat was for Marx and Engels a very ‘unproletarian’ group.”[18] Moreover, this distinction is evident in Marx’s and Engels’s very first use of the term lumpenproletariat in The German Ideology. In that work, Marx and Engels criticize Max Stirner’s reference to the “unique proletariat,” which Stirner identifies as the spiritual agent of his egoistic anarchism.[19] Stirner’s unique proletariat “consists of rogues, prostitutes, thieves, robbers and murderers, gamblers, propertyless people with no occupation and frivolous individuals. They form the ‘dangerous proletariat.’”[20] However, in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels chastise Stirner for not distinguishing between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat. They argue that

He [Stirner] is consistent also in identifying the proletariat with pauperism, whereas pauperism is the position only of the ruined proletariat, the lowest level to which the proletarian sinks who has become incapable of resisting the pressure of the bourgeoisie, and it is only the proletarian whose whole energy has been sapped who Page 23 →becomes a pauper. . . . [In Stirner] the lumpen-proletariat becomes transformed into “workers,” into ordinary proletarians.[21]

Marx and Engels were introducing this distinction in a historical context where the meaning of the term proletariat was itself undergoing a significant shift in its social meaning. As Bussard documents,

the term “proletariat,” or more precisely “proletarian,” has had a long and varied history. Its root is the Latin word proles, meaning “children,” or “offspring.” The ancient Latin proletarius was first used in the sixth century B.C. to denote poorer people in general, from small tradesmen down to emancipated slaves. These individuals had no property to speak of other than children; hence the name.[22]

The class designation as proletarians accurately described this group’s primary role in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, which was to provide soldiers (children) for the Roman legions. By the second century A.D., however, the word proletarian had also come to connote anything vulgar. The word entered the French and English languages during the Middle Ages, and it continued to have the same double meaning—cultural vulgarity and economic poverty—well into the early 1800s.[23] In this respect, Draper observes that the term “proletariat” itself had a confusing history, and it was only in the two decades before The Communist Manifesto that the term took on its modern meaning (i.e., wage workers). This did not mean, however, that it immediately lost its old meanings for everyone in every language.

However, for Marx and Engels, the meaning of the term proletariat was clear from the outset of their collaboration. Marx first uses that term (before having met Engels) near the end of his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction,” which was first published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844. Marx observes that

The proletariat is coming into being in Germany only as a result of the rising industrial development. For it is not the naturally arising poor but the artificially impoverished, not the human masses mechanically oppressed by the gravity of society but the masses resulting from the drastic dissolution of society, mainly of the middle estate, that form the proletariat, although it is obvious that graduallyPage 24 → the naturally arising poor and the Christian-Germanic serfs also join its ranks.[24]

Marx’s use of the term clearly conveys the idea that the proletariat is a new and rising class created by the industrial development of Germany and the consequent dissolution of the urban petite bourgeoisie and independent peasantry. This is a usage that bears none of the stamp of its etymological origins in ancient Rome or the Middle Ages. Similarly, a year later Engels uses the term proletariat liberally in The Condition of the English Working Class (1845) and very clearly uses it in his references to the “industrial proletariat” and “the mining proletariat,” so just as Marx used the term before meeting Engels, Engels had adopted the modern meaning of the term before meeting Marx. By the time they met in Brussels in 1845 to collaborate on The German Ideology, Marx and Engels were both using the term proletariat to denote the modern industrial working class.[25]

Thus, one hypothesis (and one that this author accepts as correct) is that Marx and Engels adopted the term lumpenproletariat to distinguish the nonworking (bread and circuses) underclass from the newly emergent industrial working class, which as a class-for-itself becomes the proletariat politically and ideologically. In fact, Bussard finds that following the Revolution of 1830, the German word der Proletarier, and the French variant of it, proletaire, were increasingly being used in radical workers’ circles to self-denote the newly emerging industrial working class. Marx and Engels would certainly have been exposed to that usage while residing in Germany and France.[26]

Bussard similarly finds that in the seventeenth century, the German word Lump generally meant “ragged” and, thus, denoted a person dressed in tatters and rags, with an emphasis on the person’s poverty. It could be equated with tramps, paupers, beggars, or vagabonds. Bussard finds that “by the early nineteenth century it was usually applied to the very poor, to those with a distinctively ‘ragged’ appearance.” Over time, however, the term also acquired a broader definition that did not just connote poverty, but referred to anyone who was disreputable, a scoundrel, or a knave. Thus, Bussard concludes that “the use of the prefix lumpen- with connotations of raggedness and rascality, was well established long before Marx and Engels began to write.”[27] Lumpen was definitely a pejorative term that would have been well understood by Germans, but it could be used in a variety of contexts to signify different things. Thus, by the nineteenth century,Page 25 → the German word Lumpen came to have the same double meaning that had formerly defined the term proletariat.

Hal Draper emphasizes this ambiguity to argue that “it is not poverty that is the crux of the lumpenproletariat. It is the second meaning, suggested by ‘knave,’ which accounts for Stirner’s usages, as well as Marx and Engels’s ”[28] Thus, Draper argues that Marx’s and Engels’s use of the term lumpenproletariat did not refer to any stable or permanent class formation in capitalist societies, but was intended entirely as a catchall political epithet to denote knaves and betrayers of the proletarian revolution. This claim, however, is inconsistent with Marx’s and Engels’s reference to the lumpenproletariat in The German Ideology, where they refer to it as “rogues, prostitutes, thieves, robbers and murderers, gamblers, propertyless people with no occupation and frivolous individuals.” There is also no reason why Marx and Engels could not simultaneously view the lumpenproletariat as an identifiable social group who are also political knaves and scoundrels, because this is exactly how Marx and Engels describe the lumpenproletariat in The Communist Manifesto.

However, Bussard correctly points out that “the idea of the lumpenproletariat receives its fullest treatment in two works by Marx: The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852),”[29] and therefore scholars have argued that we should turn primarily to those works for an understanding of the concept. In 1980, Mark Traugott counted twenty-seven explicit uses of the word lumpenproletariat and its cognates by Marx and Engels over the course of their lives, but he finds that the bulk of these references occur in the four-year period between 1848 and 1852.[30] Thus, it should not be surprising that most previous analyses of the lumpenproletariat have centered on Marx’s Class Struggles in France (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Nevertheless, even if one relies on these two works for one’s understanding of the lumpenproletariat, Traugott argues that Marx saw the 1848 Revolution and the subsequent coup d’état by Louis Bonaparte as evidence that The Communist Manifesto was correct in asserting that lumpenproletarians were more likely to serve as “bribed tools of reactionary intrigue” than as allies of a revolutionary proletariat.[31]

In The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire, the lumpenproletariat carries out this historic role through its service in the French Mobile Guard and later in the Society of 10 December. The Mobile Guard was established by the revolutionary Provisional GovernmentPage 26 → in France on February 25, 1848, for the explicit purpose of defending the Second (bourgeois) Republic by suppressing revolutionaries, who were demanding a social republic that would implement economic as well as political reforms beneficial to the working classes. The Mobile Guard consisted mainly of lumpenproletarians, who were used to crush the June 1848 uprising of Paris workers.

However, when Louis Bonaparte entered the contest for president of the Second Republic, his supporters grew concerned that in a conflict between Bonaparte and the republicans the Mobile Guard might side with the republicans in a renewed class struggle. Consequently, at the insistence of Bonapartists in the Provisional Government, the Mobile Guard was reduced in numbers. Many of its members were transferred to regular army units as soldiers, and many of its former officers were deprived of their rank in the regular army. These moves resulted in widespread discontent within the ranks of the Mobile Guard, so on being elected president, Bonaparte decided to disband the Mobile Guard.[32] He soon replaced them with a secret society called the Society of 10 December—the Decembrists—which had been organized by military officers seeking to ensure the election of Louis Napoleon as president of the Republic of France on December 10, 1848. The Decembrists again consisted mainly of lumpenproletarians. Bonaparte’s election effectively brought an end to the Revolution of 1848, and eventually the Second Republic came to an end when Louis Napoleon staged a coup d’état in 1851 with the support of military officers and the Decembrists.[33]

This reading of Marx’s two paradigmatic works of applied historical materialism lends credence to the idea that the French lumpenproletarians of 1848–1851 were knaves—in the sense of being unscrupulous rogues and scoundrels—but this meaning of the term is not inherently incompatible with the previously cited text of The German Ideology. The fact that lumpenproletarians can be political knaves in critical revolutionary or counterrevolutionary moments does not obviate Marx’s and Engels’s even more frequent use of the term to designate a category of economically marginal persons in capitalist society. The two meanings are only mutually exclusive if one’s explicit theoretical objective is to dismiss the concept of the lumpenproletariat as a structural economic category, as was the case with Hal Draper’s critique of the concept.

Second, the lexicology of the term lumpenproletariat has also raised questions about its meaning and role in Marx’s and Engels’s work, because Page 27 →they were often inconsistent in their use of the term. Marx and Engels do not always use the term lumpenproletariat when discussing the lumpenproletariat. In many of their writings, they sometimes refer to paupers, ragamuffins, town mobs, the dangerous class, offal, and social scum, while in several historical writings they both use the word lazzaroni—the lumpenproletariat’s Italian equivalent. For example, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx refers to Louis Bonaparte as “chief of the Paris lumpenproletariat” and “as the representative of the lumpenproletariat.”[34] He goes on to describe the lumpenproletariat as follows:

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, rogues, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10.[35]

In a series of articles on the Spanish Revolution of 1854, Marx similarly comments on the “shameless demonstrations of the town mob, partly paid for their performances, and like the lazzaroni of Naples, preferring the wanton rule of kings and monks to the sober regime of the middle classes.”[36] The lazzaroni was a term used to designate the declassed and lumpenproletarian elements in Italy, particularly those in Naples, who were repeatedly mobilized by reactionary monarchists in their struggle against Italy’s liberal and democratic movements. These types of terms often appear in Marx’s and Engels’s writings without the simultaneous use of the term lumpenproletariat, but when they use such terms it seems reasonable to conclude that they are referring to the lumpenproletariat. There is certainly enough inconsistency in Marx’s and Engels’s use of the term to leave some room for interpretation as to deciding the exact frequency of its use—it is most assuredly more than twenty-seven times[37]—but the lack of an exact count should not be an obstacle to understanding the concept, nor as some have argued does it necessarily lead to a poststructural deconstruction of the concept into its indecipherable and contingent heterogeneity.[38]

Page 28 →Finally, even a comprehensive word search for lumpenproletariat and its synonyms can prove frustrating as a result of what Hal Draper calls the problem of translation. The word lumpenproletariat appears in some versions and translations of Marx’s and Engels’s writings, but not in others. One could easily insert or substitute the word in various contexts, which is exactly what Marx and Engels, as well their translators and editors, sometimes did on various occasions. For example, Draper observes that “the career of mistranslations, or misleading translations, of the German word Lumpenproletariat started with the famous passage in the Communist Manifesto,” which sometimes included the disputed word (e.g., in the German version), but sometimes did not (e.g., in the original English translation by the Chartists), substituting instead phrases such as “dangerous classes” and “social scum,” while in still other versions including all three phrases (e.g., the standard English translation by Samuel Moore and Frederick Engels).[39]

Similarly, Hal Draper notes that in the original German edition of Capital, Vol. 1, Marx refers to “the lumpenproletariat proper,” a phrase that signals a careful distinction; but it is replaced in the Moore-Aveling translation edited by Engels with the phrase “the dangerous classes.”[40] In a parallel fashion, the word lumpenproletariat does not appear in the MECW version of Capital, Vol. 1,[41] but it does appear in the Penguin Classics edition of Capital, Vol. 1, translated by Ben Fowkes.[42] In yet another variation of this problem, the MECW version of Frederick Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) contains a lengthy description of the historical origins and structural characteristics of what is clearly the lumpenproletariat in England, but the word itself had not yet been invented by Marx and Engels.[43] Nevertheless, the economic and class content of Engels’s analysis is so strikingly obvious that the editors of MECW reference these pages in their index under the heading “lumpenproletariat.”[44] Thus, the mere absence of the term lumpenproletariat in a particular work does not necessarily mean that Marx and Engels are not describing or analyzing the lumpenproletariat.

Paradoxically, therefore, I argue that the two most important examples of Marx’s and Engels’s analysis of the lumpenproletariat are contained in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and Capital, Vol. I (1869), and that these two works provide the refractive lens for understanding the use of this concept elsewhere in Marx’s and Engels’s “political writings.”[45] These two instances of absence figure prominently in this book’s interpretation and analysis of the concept, because they are critical Page 29 →instances, respectively, of Marx and Engels giving an empirical description of the historical origins of the lumpenproletariat, as well as a theoretical analysis of its extended reproduction, without ever using that particular term as such. While this hermeneutical decision may itself prove controversial, it is my contention that the failure to incorporate these two texts into the debate about the concept of the lumpenproletariat is a major omission that has led to numerous misunderstandings of the concept and a failure to see the lumpenproletariat’s significance to the long-term development of capitalist social formations.[46]

Page 30 →Chapter Two

The Lumpenproletariat as an Economic Category

The introduction and chapter 1 of this book document that most scholars dismiss the concept of the lumpenproletariat as an ill-defined category in Marx’s and Engels’s theory of capitalist development, or as a concept that appears in their writings only as a vague and inconsistently deployed political epithet. In this chapter, I argue that the commonly accepted view of the concept of the lumpenproletariat has been based primarily on a reading of Marx’s historical political writings, most notably The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire, with occasional references to the infamous but obligatory passage in The Communist Manifesto. Most analysts have ignored the much lengthier and systematic development of the category in Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), which is later reproduced in remarkably similar language in Vol. 1 of Marx’s Capital (1867). Thus, I suggest that we should foreground these works in understanding the lumpenproletariat as an economic category and then read the historical political writings through this lens. The Condition of the Working Class in England and Vol. 1 of Capital can be read as bookends for understanding the concept of the lumpenproletariat at an economic level, first in terms of its historical genesis, and second in terms of its extended reproduction in capitalist social formations.

Historical Origins of the Lumpenproletariat in Capitalism

The earliest reference to the lumpenproletariat by either Marx or Engels occurs in Engels’s February 8, 1845, “Speeches in Elberfeld.” Although Page 31 →Engels does not actually use the word lumpenproletariat, the content of the concept is so evident in these speeches that the editors of MECW put an index reference to an important passage under the heading “Working class in England—lumpenproletariat—251, 552.” In this passage, Engels observes that

in every civilised society there are large numbers of unemployed people who would gladly work but cannot find work and their number is larger than is commonly believed. And so we find these people prostituting themselves in one way or another, begging, sweeping the streets, standing on corners, only barely keeping body and soul together by occasional small jobs, hawking and peddling all manner of petty wares or, as we saw a couple of poor girls doing this evening, going from place to place with a guitar, playing and singing for money, compelled to put up with all kinds of shameless talk, every insulting suggestion in order to earn a couple of groschen. How many finally fall victims to real prostitution! Gentlemen, the number of these destitute people who have no other course open but to prostitute themselves in one way or another is very large—our Poor Relief authorities can tell you all about this—and don’t forget that society nevertheless feeds these people in one way or another despite their uselessness.[1]

In The Peasant War in Germany (1850), published a few years later, Engels famously extends his earlier observation historically to claim that “the lumpenproletariat is, generally speaking, a phenomenon that occurs in a more or less developed form in all the so far known phases of society.”[2] Engels would later clarify this statement by claiming that the lumpenproletariat’s historical origins are similar regardless of the mode of production, although the historical specificity of that origin also varies from one mode of production to another. Engels suggests that regardless of the mode of production, the historical origin of the lumpenproletariat typically begins with the depopulation of the land, which turns a large segment of a social formation’s population into rural paupers and beggars or into migratory and casual agricultural workers; most importantly, depopulation drives large numbers of people into the cities, where the existing mode of production is unable to absorb their surplus labor. Thus, displaced peasants, shepherds, agricultural workers, and their children are transformed into Page 32 →an urban mob of the chronically unemployed, who must either be supported with bread and circuses (or disability payments and oxycodone) or they become dishonest peddlers, thieves, beggars, or pimps or prostitutes, among other unsavory occupations.[3]

In the Roman slave mode of production, for example, Engels argues that “the development of Roman agriculture during the imperial age led, on the one hand, to the extension of pastoral farming [i.e., slavery] over vast areas and the depopulation of the land; on the other, to the fragmentation of the estates into smallholdings which were handed over to colons and became miniature enterprises run by dependent small farmers, the forerunners of the serfs, thus establishing a mode of production that already contained the germ of the medieval one.” Engels observes that as the Roman Empire expanded and slaves became more abundant, the aristocracy was able to consolidate landholdings into large latifundia worked by slaves. The class of plebeian farmers was gradually ruined by its inability to compete with slave labor. However, because the Roman slave mode of production was primarily agricultural, particularly in the western empire, its cities and commercial economy did not have the capacity to productively absorb the agricultural population displaced to the cities by the expansion of the slave-based latifundia. Thus, Rome was gradually overwhelmed by an ever-increasing urban mob that Romans called “the proletariat,” but that today we call the lumpenproleriat. The result, according to Engels, was that “the Roman Lumpenproletarians were parasites who were not merely useless but even harmful to society, and hence lacked any effective power.”[4] The Roman lumpenproletariat cheered Julius Caesar’s attacks on the Senate and the Roman elite and proudly sent their proles to war at his request, while they were effectively kept in check by the emperors with military service and the diversion of bread and circuses.

Not coincidentally, it is in Engels’s chapter “The Agricultural Proletariat” in The Condition of the Working Class in England that he offers his most extensive analysis of the historical origins of the lumpenproletariat in a capitalist social formation.[5] While Engels again does not use the term lumpenproletariat in this work, it is the first time that either he or Marx uses the term surplus population. Engels builds on his basic thesis by arguing that both the rural and the urban lumpenproletariat in capitalist social formations has its origins in the industrialization and large-scale consolidation of agriculture, which displaces independent peasants and then forces unskilled and desperate agricultural day laborers into the cities in search Page 33 →of employment. As the displaced rural population migrates to the cities in search of employment, their numbers grow faster than they can be absorbed by the development of urban industries; hence, they become a surplus population to capitalism.

In specifically describing the origins of the German and European lumpenproletariat in the 1500s, Engels observes that

the number of people without a definite occupation and permanent domicile increased greatly at that time due to the decay of feudalism in a society in which every occupation, every sphere of life, was still fenced in by countless privileges. In all the developed countries vagabonds had never been so numerous as in the first half of the sixteenth century. In war time some of these tramps joined the armies, others begged their way across the countryside, and still others eked out a meagre living in the towns as day labourers or from whatever other occupation that was not under guild jurisdiction.[6]

In England, Engels recounts how the mechanization and industrialization of agriculture not only destroyed the small independent peasantry, but dissolved the previous patriarchal bonds (i.e., social relations of production) that had been inherited from the feudal mode of production. Thus,

simultaneously with the small bourgeoisie and the modest independence of the former workers, the small peasantry also was ruined when the former Union of industrial and agricultural work was dissolved, the abandoned fields thrown together into large farms, and the small peasants superseded by the overwhelming competition of the large farmers. Instead of being landowners or leaseholders, as they had been hitherto, they were now obliged to hire themselves as labourers to the large farmers or the landlords.[7]

Engels goes on to note that in the early phases of agricultural mechanization, the patriarchal bond between landlord and agricultural laborer concealed the growing poverty of the countryside, because laborers and their families were still allowed to live on the land, where the landowner had some patriarchal obligation to provide them with work. However, Engels finds that by 1830

Page 34 →all this is changed. The farm-hands have become day-labourers almost everywhere, are employed only when needed by the farmers, and, therefore, often have no work for weeks together, especially in winter . . . day-labourers, then, were the exception, not the rule. . . . It became, therefore, the interest of the farmers to dissolve this relation, drive the farm-hand from the farm, and transform him into a day-labourer . . . the hitherto latent over-population was set free.[8]

The introduction of purely capitalist relations of production in agriculture converted a previously latent surplus population into impoverished agricultural day laborers and migrant seasonal workers without regular employment. Much of the new surplus population became paupers with no means of subsistence except that provided by the English Poor Laws. Engels concludes that “from this time forward, the distress which had hitherto existed only in the manufacturing districts, and then only at times, appeared in the agricultural districts too. . . . From this time the agricultural districts became the headquarters of permanent, as the manufacturing districts had long been of periodic, pauperism.[9]

However, two other political developments contributed to the rise of a permanent lumpenproletariat in England. First, Engels calls attention to the role of the state in generating and reproducing a lumpenproletariat that was willing to work for mere subsistence wages, and thereby put downward pressure on the wages of all workers.[10] The English Game Laws prohibited displaced agricultural workers from hunting and fishing—it was now called “poaching”—and made it a criminal offense to feed one’s family in traditional ways (i.e., game belonged only to those who owned the land). By redefining what had once been the commons into a private property right, the state facilitated the development of a rural lumpenproletariat by literally starving them off the land. The Poor Laws denied support to those who worked for pauper wages, but these laws also denied support to persons who refused to work for pauper wages.[11] Thus, the state constructed a market designed to force agricultural workers into destitution and starvation if they refused to work for subsistence wages, or to “voluntarily” choose to work for subsistence wages in the expanding agricultural or industrial sectors of the new capitalist economy. Engels observes that for those who migrated into the industrializing cities, at first “the extension of industry kept pace with the increase of population,” but eventually “the perpetual improvement of machinery made it impossible Page 35 →for manufacture to absorb the whole surplus of the agricultural population.”[12] The new surplus population in the cities contributed to the development of what Marx would later call the industrial reserve army, and, for those who were pushed completely out of the labor market, it became the origins of a relative surplus population and the urban lumpenproletariat.[13]

Second, Engels introduces another thesis that reappears many times in Marx’s and Engels’s historical political writings, which is that military service and waging war are among the most important ways that capitalist nation-states absorb and regulate their surplus population, just as Rome had done in building its empire. Engels notes that as the Napoleonic Wars drew to a close in the early stages of England’s industrialization, “the military demand for workers, now suddenly came to an end; and the necessary consequence was what the English call agricultural distress.”[14] The Napoleonic Wars and the expansion of the British Empire provided a safety valve that absorbed the surplus population, and as Marx and Engels would point out many times later, the lumpenproletariat is a natural recruiting ground for foot soldiers.[15] Their numbers and their “uselessness” to society from an economic standpoint make military service an attractive occupation to them, while economic desperation makes them loyal soldiers to anyone who can pay them a salary, or, as Marx and Engels would later say, “bribed tool[s] of reactionary intrigue.”

The Extended Reproduction of the Lumpenproletariat in Capitalism

Marx’s most extensive analysis of the surplus population, the industrial reserve army, and the lumpenproletariat occurs in chapter 25 of Capital, Vol. 1, entitled “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.”[16] While these three terms are not synonymous for Marx, they are necessarily related to each other in his analysis, and the fact that he includes an analysis of the lumpenproletariat in this chapter of Capital indicates that he viewed it as a necessary byproduct of the logic of capitalist accumulation and not just a remnant of the decaying feudal relations of production.[17] The lumpenproletariat originates in the process of agricultural industrialization and the introduction of a capitalist labor market to the countryside, but once generated, capital incorporates this newly surplus population into the logic of its extended reproduction. The extended reproduction of the lumpenproletariat occurs as one result of the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation:

Page 36 →This increasing accumulation and centralization [of capital] also becomes in its turn a source of new change in the composition of capital, or in other words of an accelerated diminution of capital’s variable component [i.e., labor], as compared with its constant one [i.e., machinery/technology]. This accelerated relative diminution of the variable component, which accompanies the accelerated increase of the total capital and moves more rapidly than this increase, takes the inverse form, at the other pole, of an apparently absolute increase in the working population, an increase which always moves more rapidly than that of the variable capital or the means of employment.[18]

Marx argues that a general increase in the total accumulation of capital is simultaneously accompanied by its “centralization” as more competitive firms drive out less competitive firms, which generally means that larger firms drive out or absorb smaller firms. The superior competitiveness of these firms is the direct result of increases in labor productivity made possible by the introduction of new machinery and technology, which means that less and less labor is required to produce more and more goods, at least relative to the total value of capital being employed by capitalists. The process of displacing labor (variable capital) relative to machinery and technology (constant capital) is what Marx calls the rising organic composition of capital.[19] Thus, while the initial (growth) of new industries may absorb a portion of the surplus population, as the organic composition of capital continues to increase over time, it not only fails to absorb the surplus population, the rising organic composition of capital contributes to an increase in the relative surplus population. Marx argues that

an increase takes place in the rapidity of the change in the organic composition of capital and in its technical form, and an increasing number of spheres of production become involved in this change, sometimes simultaneously, and sometimes alternatively. This is a law of population peculiar . . . to the capitalist mode of production; and in fact every particular historical mode of production has its own special laws of population, which are historically valid within that particular sphere. But if a surplus population of workers is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on Page 37 →a capitalist basis, this surplus population also becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalist accumulation, indeed it becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production . . . it creates a mass of human material always ready for exploitation by capital in the interests of capital’s own changing valorization requirements.[20]

The function of the relative surplus population in the logic of capitalist development is twofold. First, as mature industries spin off the relative surplus population of unneeded labor due to increases in productivity (i.e., the rising organic composition of capital), it creates space in the labor market for the emergence of new industries. Marx observes that “In all such cases, there must be the possibility of suddenly throwing great masses of men into the decisive areas without doing any damage to the scale of production in other spheres. The surplus population supplies these masses.”[21] Second, according to Marx, capitalist economic growth “takes the form of a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations) of periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis, and stagnation,” and this business cycle “depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population. In their turn, varying phases of the industrial cycle recruit the surplus population, and become one of the most energetic agencies for its reproduction.”[22]

Thus, the short-term cyclical regeneration of capitalist production depends to a large degree on the availability of a surplus population—or industrial reserve army—that acts as both a break on wages and a support for profits, while the long-term structural regeneration of the capitalist mode of production depends on a constantly available labor supply that allows capital to throw “great masses of men” into new spheres of production at critical points in capitalist development.

Thus, Marx argues,

Modern industry’s whole form of motion therefore depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed “hands.” When this periodicity has once become consolidated, even political economy sees that the production of a relative surplus population—i.e. a population surplus in relation to capital’s average requirements for valorization—is a necessary condition for modern industry.[23]

Page 38 →Marx goes on to observe that

Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable labour-power which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its unrestricted activity an industrial reserve army which is independent of these natural limits. We have further seen that the capitalist buys with the same capital a greater mass of labour-power, as he progressively replaces skilled workers by less skilled, mature labour-power by immature, male by female, that of adults by that of young persons or children . . . a variable capital of the same magnitude sets in motion more labour with the same mass of labour-power, and finally, a greater number of inferior labour-powers is set in motion by the displacement of more skilled labour-powers.[24]

Marx concludes therefore that

the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, and this in turn corresponds to the periodic alternations of the industrial cycle[,] . . . by the varying proportions in which the working class is divided into an active army and reserve army, [and] by the increase or diminution in the relative amount of the surplus population. . . . The relative surplus population is therefore the background against which the law of the demand and supply of labour does its work.[25]

Forms of the Relative Surplus Population

Marx does not consider the relative surplus population to be an undifferentiated mass, but instead he identifies “three forms which it always possesses: the floating, the latent, and the stagnant.”[26] Marx largely identifies the floating surplus population with retirees and the elderly. Marx observes that the total number of persons employed in a capitalist social formation “steadily increases on the whole, although in a constantly decreasing proportion to the scale of production.” However, increases in productivity—or the rising organic composition of capital—spins off a floating Page 39 →surplus population in the form of male workers who “are employed up to the age of maturity, but not beyond. Once they reach maturity, only a very small number continue to find employment in the same branches of industry, while the majority are regularly dismissed. This majority forms an element of the floating surplus population, which grows with the extension of those branches of industry.”[27]

Marx suggests that the dismissal of male workers at the age of maturity has several specific consequences that partly determine the laws of population in a capitalist mode of production. One consequence is that some of this surplus population will “emigrate” into other branches of industry, where they provide casual or low-wage labor; for example, they transition from being coal miners to Walmart greeters. A further consequence of the physical impact of hard labor (and industrial accidents) is that over time, “the female population grows more rapidly than the male—witness England,” which also leaves behind a relative surplus population of female widows with pauper children (i.e., elderly widows and single mothers).[28] Marx observes that

the consumption of labour-power by capital is so rapid that the worker has already more or less completely lived himself out when he is only half-way through his life. He falls into the ranks of the surplus population, or is thrust down from a higher to a lower step in the scale. Hence, the rapid replacement of one generation of workers by another (this law does not hold for the other classes of the population). This social requirement is met by early marriages, which are a necessary consequence of the conditions in which workers in large-scale industry live, and by the premium that the exploitation of the workers’ children sets on their production [i.e., large families].[29]

Or to put it in simpler terms, due to the conditions of labor in the capitalist mode of production, those in the working class marry at a younger age and give birth to many children,[30] while males exhaust themselves by middle age and either die or move into less strenuous, but lower-paying occupations—ultimately leaving behind a widow and, in many cases, orphans. If not supported by charity or public assistance, the children go to work at a young age for low wages, women are recruited into low-wage industries (e.g., garment making or domestic service), where they reproducePage 40 → the established patterns of working-class life “at a lower level,” or, as Marx will later point out, they fall from the ranks of the pauperized working class into the ranks of the nonworking.

A second category of the relative surplus population is what Marx calls the “latent surplus population,” and this category, borrowed from Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, is largely equated with agricultural labor. As noted by Engels in that earlier work, agricultural labor tends to become seasonal, casual, and migratory in the capitalist mode of production.[31] Marx concurs that “as soon as capitalist production takes possession of agriculture, and in proportion to the extent to which it does so, the demand for a rural working population falls absolutely.” Consequently, there “is a constant flow from this source of the relative surplus population” into nonagricultural industries so that “part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat, and on the lookout for opportunities to complete this transformation.” Moreover, as demand for agricultural labor falls absolutely, and not just relative to the organic composition of capital, “the wages of the agricultural laborer are therefore reduced to a minimum, and he always stands with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism.” Thus, the countryside itself becomes the repository of “a constant latent surplus population, the extent of which only becomes evident at those exceptional times when its distribution channels are wide open.”[32]

Finally, Marx states that “the third category of the relative surplus population is the stagnant population.” Marx describes this category as constituting

a part of the active labour army, but with extremely irregular employment. Hence it offers capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power. Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class, and it is precisely this which makes it a broad foundation for special branches of capitalist exploitation. It is characterized by a maximum of working time and a minimum of wages. But it forms at the same time a self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of the working class, taking a proportionally greater part in the general increase of that class than the other elements. In fact, not only the number of births and deaths, but the absolute size of families, stand in the inverse proportion to the level of wages, and therefore to the amount of the means of subsistence at the disposal of different categories of worker.[33]

Page 41 →It is important to emphasize that Marx identified the stagnant surplus population as not only “a self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of the working class,” but as the fastest-growing (and most fecund) stratum of the working class.[34] Thus, the development of capitalist relations of production is seen to be systematically de-composing the working class to the point of casualizing and pauperizing ever-larger proportions of its labor force just as it had done earlier in the agricultural sector—even at times driving wages below the amount that is socially necessary to the extended reproduction of labor power.

The Lowest Sediment of the Relative Surplus Population

Beneath the stagnant relative surplus population, Marx identifies what he calls the “lowest sediment” of the relative surplus population, which “dwells in the sphere of pauperism” and which, unlike the previous three categories of the relative surplus population, are not strictly speaking even marginally a part of the working class. There is no question that this lowest sediment of the relative surplus population is considered the core component of the lumpenproletariat because it is defined economically not by any relation to the process of production. As I argue below, however, it is a mistake to limit the concept of the lumpenproletariat to this group alone. This lowest sediment of the relative surplus population definitely includes vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes, but in addition to these people, it consists of three distinct categories of nonworkers.[35]

The first group in the lowest sediment of the relative surplus population consists of those who are physically able to work but are unable to find work. This group would today be called the “chronically unemployed,” “discouraged workers,” or “nonparticipants in the labor force.” These nonworkers do not have a direct economic relation to production of any kind—not structural, cyclical, seasonal, casual, or otherwise. In this respect, these chronic nonparticipants in the labor force fall outside the class structure of capitalist society, and from the standpoint of the production process, they are a fundamentally parasitic social category. As Engels pointed out in 1845, “society nevertheless feeds these people in one way or another despite their uselessness.”[36]

Marx includes this group as part of the paupers of capitalist society, although as noted above, the concept of pauperism also includes at least two other categories of the relative surplus population, who either receive Page 42 →below-subsistence-level wages or live in poverty because they only work on a casual, seasonal, irregular, or cyclical basis. Thus, there is reason to insist that Marx viewed the lumpenproletariat as a group consisting only of the lowest sediments of capitalist society, that is, the nonworking, but it also includes an ever-growing proportion of the relative surplus population, which finds itself not only pauperized, but occupying an ever-more-tenuous relation to the production process. Marx argues in Capital that “one need only glance superficially at the statistics of English pauperism to find that the quantity of paupers increases with every crisis of trade, and diminishes with every revival.”[37]

In other words, the poverty rate increases during recessions and declines during periods of economic recovery, but this observation also reinforces the idea that the lowest parts of the working class live in pauperism, or on the edge of pauperism, and they periodically fall out of the working class and become members of its lowest sediment. Consequently, in contrast to what Draper suggests in an otherwise brilliant analysis of the lumpenproletariat as a nonclass, I suggest that the class boundaries between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat are not fixed and inflexible, but fluid and constantly shifting over the course of time. This would explain the oft-expressed puzzlement as to why Marx and Engels chose the term lumpenproletariat to designate a social category that otherwise seems quite distinct from the proletariat in terms of being a largely nonworking class. The lumpenproletariat is constantly undergoing a process of dynamic re-composition as elements of the relative surplus population and the industrial reserve army are spun off from the proletariat as a result of the continuous de-composition and re-composition of the working class. As anyone familiar with the class boundaries debate of the 1970s will recognize, it is often difficult to draw hard class boundaries on an empirical basis, because these boundaries are fluid and dynamic, but even when frozen for analytical purposes, class boundaries tend to fray at the edges.[38]

This same pattern of de-composition and re-composition is evident in Marx’s reference to the second group in the lowest sediment of capitalist society, which consists of orphans and pauper children. Marx argues that these children “are candidates for the industrial reserve army, and in time of great prosperity such as the year 1860, for instance, they enrolled in the army of active workers both speedily and in large numbers.”[39] This category could be extended in modern times to include large swaths of young laborers who drop out of school or do not attend college in hopes of Page 43 →finding work. Finally, Marx identifies a third group in the lowest sediment of capitalist society, which for lack of a better term I call the “dispossessed.” The dispossessed include

the demoralized, the ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, an incapacity which results from the division of labour; people who have lived beyond the worker’s average life-span; and the victims of industry whose number increases with the growth of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical works, etc., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, etc. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity is implied by their necessity; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It forms part of the faux frais[40] of capitalist production; but capital usually knows how to transfer these from its own shoulders to those of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie.[41]

The dispossessed include the injured and disabled, the chronically ill, the mentally ill, elderly widows, discarded orphans and abandoned children, drug addicts and chronic alcoholics, men who have lived well past the average male lifespan, and middle-aged males whose skills have been rendered obsolete by changes in the industrial structure of the capitalist economy and by continuing technological advancement.[42] This is a heterogeneous category of people who from an economic standpoint are considered “useless” to capitalist society because they are unable to work and contribute to the production of surplus value.

The Economic and Social Relation of the Lumpenproletariat to the Proletariat

Hal Draper identifies the lowest sediment of capitalist societies as a separate and distinct lumpenproletariat, which he defines in the most narrowly technical sense as a nonclass group that is outside the specific class structure of the capitalist mode of production. Therefore, he dismisses the concept of the lumpenproletariat as a catchall category that includes any Page 44 →group that does not have a direct economic relation to production; that is, the lumpenproletariat is defined by the fact that it does not work. While there is no question that Marx and Engels considered the lowest sediment of society to be a part of the lumpenproletariat, it is a mistake to equate the Marxist lumpenproletariat only with the lowest sediment.

The preponderance of the textual evidence, some of it not available to Draper at the time he wrote his article and book, suggests to the contrary that Engels did consider the most impoverished elements of the working class to be a part of the lumpenproletariat. As early as 1847, in a short essay on Germany, Engels points to “the division” of the working class “into farm labourers, day labourers, handicraft journeymen, factory workers and lumpen proletariat.”[43] A year later (1848), in a newspaper article on the victory of the counterrevolution in Vienna, Marx distinguishes the lumpenproletariat from “the working and thinking proletarians,” which seems to indicate that Marx viewed many of the lumpenproletarians who supported the counterrevolution as coming from the lowest ranks of the unemployed and ignorant proletariat.[44] The following year (1849), Engels wrote an article for Neue Rheinische Zeitung (No. 246) on the underdevelopment of the Swiss proletariat and its inability to make economic gains despite a constitution that was hailed by the bourgeoisie and its ideologists as the model republic (i.e., with no nobility, no clerical estate, and no king). Engels identified the problem with the Swiss proletariat as the fact that it is “still largely what one describes as lumpen-proletariat, prepared to sell themselves to anyone who will make extravagant promises.”[45] In other words, the Swiss proletariat was more like the old Neapolitan lazzaroni or the Roman proletariat (i.e., a displaced urban mob) than the industrial proletariat of The Communist Manifesto or Capital.

Critics who would draw a sharp class distinction between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat[46] frequently point to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France (1850), where he discusses the organization of the Mobile Guards as a military wing of the bourgeois Provisional Government of 1848, which was used to suppress the radical working class. Marx writes that

[t]he Provisional Government formed 24 battalions of Mobile Guards, each a thousand strong, composed of young men from 15 to 20 years. They belonged for the most part to the lumpenproletariat, which in all big towns forms a mass sharply differentiated Page 45 →from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds, living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu,[47] varying according to the degree of civilisation of the nation to which they belong, but never renouncing their lazzaroni character.[48]

However, what critics citing this passage have missed is the prefatory comment by Marx in the immediately preceding paragraph, where he states that the organization of the Mobile Guards was part of the bourgeois Provisional Government’s political strategy “to play off one part of the proletariat against the other,” because it knew it was too weak militarily to defeat the radical working class by itself and it could not trust the regular army, which opposed the revolution.[49] Thus, while Marx clearly did not consider the lumpenproletariat to be part of the industrial proletariat, he nevertheless, and with equal clarity, identifies the lumpenproletariat as “one part” of a larger working class.

Similarly, Marx describes the lumpenproletariat as the “refuse of all classes” in The Eighteenth Brumaire (1952), but this does not mean, as Draper claims, that the lumpenproletariat is merely a catchall concept.[50] The refuse of all classes at various times is identified with displaced peasants, the ruined petite bourgeoisie, bankrupt aristocrats with noble titles but no land, discharged soldiers, disabled veterans, alcoholics, drug addicts, and convicted criminals from all walks of life. However, the fact that an individual originates in a class other than the proletariat does not mean that one cannot end up as a lumpenproletarian. Marx and Engels identify many different paths to becoming a lumpenproletarian other than being born one.

A footnote added by Engels to the 1874 edition of Marx’s and Engels’s “The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association” (1873) perhaps best captures the fluid and ambiguous class boundary between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat. Engels observes that

In France, the déclassés are people of the propertied classes who were ousted or who broke away from that class without thereby becoming proletarians, such as business adventurers, rogues and gamblers, most of them professional literati or politicians, etc. The proletariat, too, has its déclassé elements; they make up the lumpenproletariat.[51]

Page 46 →In other words, objective circumstances have broken the déclassés away from their original class without them necessarily becoming members of an entirely different class.[52] Elsewhere, Engels describes a similarly ambiguous class situation in referring to “the poor devils of the East End [London]”—mostly dock workers—“who vegetate in the borderland between working class and lumpen proletariat.”[53] Similarly, in a letter regarding Dutch military service, Engels writes that unconscripted volunteer soldiers in capitalist nations are not normally recruited from “the working class proper,” but from “that stratum which already overlaps to a large extent with the lumpenproletariat.”[54] Similarly, in his “Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy,” Marx observes that “from the harlot to the Pope there is a mass of such rabble. But the honest and ‘working’ lumpenproletariat, too, belongs to this category, e.g., the large mob of casual day-labourers, etc., in ports, etc.”[55] In this passage, Marx seems to acknowledge that the lumpenproletariat is a lower stratum of the working class, in the sense that it is “working,” albeit as casual day laborers or with a marginal attachment to the labor market. Notably, Marx and Engels independently both single out London’s East End dockworkers as exemplars of this honest and working segment of the lumpenproletariat.

However, toward the end of his life, when recovering from surgery in Cannes, France, Marx wrote to Engels that “I have spent an entire month vegetating in this repaire of aristocratic idlers or ADVENTURERS. Nature superb, in other respects a dreary hole; it is ‘monumental’ because consisting solely of hotels; no plebeian ‘masses’ here, apart from the garçons d’hôtels, de café, etc., and ‘domestiques,’ who belong to the Lumpenproletariat.”[56] This observation suggests that it was Marx’s first serious encounter with a nonindustrial sector of capitalism, but interestingly not only did he consider low-wage hospitality, service, and domestic workers as part of the lumpenproletariat, they were part of the lumpenproletariat despite the fact that they are part of the working class. They are just not part of the industrial proletariat that was the lifelong focus of Marx’s attention, and of course they were a comparatively small part of nineteenth-century industrial economies. However, as discussed earlier, it is largely from this stratum of the working lumpenproletariat that the lowest sediment of the society—the scum and the dangerous class—tend to originate as they fall out of irregular employment due to criminal behavior, discouragement, illness, eviction and homelessness, industrial readjustment, de-skilling, Page 47 →injury, age, widowhood, orphanage, and the crushing impact of periodic economic crises.

The Distinction between Class Location and Status Situation

Max Weber suggested that one of the fundamental shortcomings of Marx’s sociology was its failure to recognize that “the social and the economic order are not identical.”[57] In other words, Marx did not distinguish between class location and status position in capitalist social formations. While Marx identified classes based on their relations to production, he did not explicitly develop a separate concept of social status. The conceptual problem of defining the ambiguous class positions between the proletariat and the dispossessed segments of the lumpenproletariat is best resolved by introducing a Weberian concept of status stratification to the analysis.

Weber points out that “in contrast to classes,” which are objectively determined by economic relations to production, “status groups are normally communities.” Weber insists that “in contrast to the purely economically determined ‘class situation’ we wish to designate as ‘status situation’ every typical component of the life fate of men that is determined by a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of honor.” Weber observes that “status honor is normally expressed by the fact that above all else a specific style of life can be expected from all those who wish to belong to the circle.” He acknowledges that status situation “can be knit to a class situation,” but status is analytically and empirically distinct from class.[58] Most importantly, Weber concludes that “with some oversimplification, one might thus say that ‘classes’ are stratified according to their relations to the production and acquisition of goods; whereas status groups are stratified according to the principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special ‘styles of life.’ . . . The differences between classes and status groups frequently overlap.”[59]

The sociological distinction between class and status allows one to conceptualize the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat (or at least segments of it) as parts of the same class, while recognizing that these two social categories occupy radically different status positions within capitalist social formations. At the same time, one can understand, as I discuss in the next chapter, how the finance aristocracy, decomposing elements of the landed aristocracy, declassed petite bourgeoisie, and dispossessed proletarians could all hold a common status as lumpenproletarians by virtue of their nonrelation to production (i.e., economic parasitism) and by virtue of a common decadent lifestyle that revolves around theft, chicanery, and gambling, among other things.

Page 48 →Table 1. Conceptual Map of the Lumpenproletariat

Class Location

Status Situation

1. PROLETARIAT

Proletariat

Proletariat

1a Industrial reserve army (direct and permanent economic relation to production) (U3) i

Proletariat

Proletariat

2. RELATIVE SURPLUS POPULATION (direct, but tenuous economic relation to production) (U4–U6) ii

2a Floating (elderly males)

Honest Lumpenproletariat

Paupers

2b Latent (casual, seasonal, and migrant agricultural workers)

Honest Lumpenproletariat

Paupers

2c Stagnant (extremely irregular employment) iii

Honest Lumpenproletariat

Paupers

3. LOWEST SEDIMENT (economic nonrelation to production)

3a Chronically unemployed (able to work)

Lumpenproletariat

Paupers

3b Widows and orphans

Lumpenproletariat

Paupers

3c Dispossessed (disabled and injured, mentally ill, chronically ill, deskilled and functionally obsolete homeless, criminals, vagabonds, elderly—too frail to work)

Lumpenproletariat

Paupers

Closest equivalent/overlay to US government statistics

Category 3 above = nonparticipants in the labor force, who consequently do not show up as part of the official unemployment statistics. They do show up as recipients of public assistance, prisoners, residents of mental institutions and nursing homes, pensioners, and in counts of homelessness.

U-1: Persons unemployed fifteen weeks or longer, as a percentage of the civilian labor force.

U-2: Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percentage of the civilian labor force.

U-3: Total unemployed, as a percentage of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate).

U-4: Total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percentage of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers.

U-5: Total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percentage of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.

U-6: Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part-time for economic reasons, as a percentage of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Table A-15. Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization,” available at https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

Employed persons (current population survey)

Persons sixteen years and over in the civilian noninstitutional population who, during the reference week, (a) did any work at all (at least one hour) as paid employees; worked in their own business, profession, or on their own farm, or worked fifteen hours or more as unpaid workers in an enterprise operated by a member of the family; and (b) all those who were not working but who had jobs or businesses from which they were temporarily absent because of vacation, illness, bad weather, childcare problems, maternity or paternity leave, labor-management dispute, job training, or other family or personal reasons, whether or not they were paid for the time off or were seeking other jobs. Each employed person is counted only once, even if he or she holds more than one job. Excluded are persons whose only activity consisted of work around their own house (painting, repairing, or own-home housework) or volunteer work for religious, charitable, and other organizations.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, “BLS Information: Glossary,” available at https://www.bls.gov/bls/glossary.htm

Page 49 →i U3 to U6 are categories employed by the US Department of Labor and constitute the closest official approximations to Marx’s conceptualization of the unemployed. See US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Table A.15. Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization,” https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

ii Marx and Engels, “The German Ideology,” Marx-Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), Vol. 5, 202, state that “pauperism is the position only of the ruined proletariat, the lowest level to which the proletarian sinks who has become incapable of resisting the pressure of the bourgeoisie, and it is only the proletarian whose whole energy has been sapped who becomes a pauper.” Elsewhere, Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 797, invokes a metaphor: “Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army.”

iii Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 796, observes that this group “forms at the same time a self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of the working class, taking a proportionally greater part in the general increase of that class than the other elements.”

The way in which class and status are knit together in defining the relationship between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat is illustrated in table 1. Draper is correct that the economic relations of production in a capitalist mode of production would seem to draw a hard line between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat—one class works, while the other class is defined by the fact that is does not work (see table 1, Class Location). However, this hard line fails to acknowledge that there is an increasingly large population in capitalist societies whose working or not working is the very definition of their class situation; these are the groups that Marx identifies as the honest and working lumpenproletariat. This category is sometimes proletarian and sometimes lumpenproletarian, depending on their work status, because they either work full-time for below-subsistence wages or their work is seasonal, migratory, part-time, casual, or irregular. Some Marxists have even used the term “semiproletarian” to designate these groups.

In terms of their status situation, or their relation to consumption, members of this category of the honest and working lumpenproletariat are generally included in the category of paupers by Marx and Engels, because of their chronic poverty, dependence on charity, lack of skills, irregular work, and illiteracy (see table 1, Status Situation).[60] In this respect, this group’s status is generally the same as that of the lumpenproletariat, properly speaking, and, consequently, they are likely to live in the same neighborhoods as the lowest sediment, where they share a common culture and Page 50 →“style of life” that is decidedly not proletarian. Thus, critics of the concept of the lumpenproletariat, such as Draper, Cowling, and Bovenkerk, err in drawing too sharp a theoretical distinction between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat. Such authors tend to ignore the empirical gradations between the proletariat and lumpenproletariat, and they fail to account for the historical dynamics of industrialization, as well as capitalism’s periodic economic crises, which move individuals into and out of the lumpenproletariat on a regular basis. This fluidity makes the lumpenproletariat a somewhat fluid and malleable category at the empirical level, although it is still much more than a catchall phrase.

The Lumpenproletariat and the Logic of Capitalist Development

In Capital, Marx clearly outlines the idea that if allowed to unfold unabated, the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation points to a future where the relative surplus population will continue to grow larger and larger as a proportion of society, which means that not only would members of the working class be thrown into this surplus population, but the surplus population itself would become more and more pauperized as those with “an incapacity for adaptation” were thrown out of the working class altogether and dropped into the lowest sediment of society, that is, the lumpenproletariat. As Marx put it, “This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. . . . The fact that the means of production and the productivity of labour increase more rapidly than the productive population expresses itself, therefore, under capitalism, in the inverse form that the working population always increases more rapidly than the valorization requirements of capital.”[61] Yet if the ever-increasing growth of the relative surplus population, including the lumpenproletariat, is built into the logic of capitalist development, what is to forestall a dystopian future of machines owned by capitalists on the one side and a dependent and powerless surplus population on the other?

The logic of class formation outlined in chapter 25 of Capital, Vol. 1, is not entirely consistent with the dialectic of class struggle in The Communist Manifesto, which claims that “Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.”[62] Yet in Capital, Marx argues that the existence of a relative surplus population Page 51 →and the lumpenproletariat is “a condition of capitalist production” that is reproduced and extended by the logic of capitalist development. Thus, the only thing that can possibly forestall the dystopian endpoint of capitalist development is the abolition of the general law of capitalist accumulation, which can only occur by abolishing capitalism.[63] This is actually Marx’s solution to the problem of the relative surplus population and the lumpenproletariat. In chapter 32 of Capital, Vol. 1, on “The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation,” Marx abruptly brings an end to history by declaring that

Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. The monopoly of capital becomes [a] fetter upon the mode of production, which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated . . . we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.[64]

It would appear that in the process of socialist revolution, the relative surplus population and the lumpenproletariat magically disappear into “the mass of the people,” who collectively expropriate the means of production for purposes of distributing socially produced wealth on the basis of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”[65] Yet the following decades of capitalist development would to the contrary result in the extended reproduction of the lumpenproletariat on a world scale.

The Extended Reproduction of the Lumpenproletariat on a World Scale

Karl Kautsky, who is considered the most direct intellectual descendant of Marx and Engels, was not entirely satisfied with how Marx evaded the problem of the lumpenproletariat in his analysis of the logic of capitalism. Page 52 →Consequently, Kautsky extended arguments articulated in Vol. 1 of Capital to argue that the industrial reserve army and the surplus population not only ebb and flow with the business cycle, but are constantly replenished and expanded through imperialism, immigration, and automation. Kautsky suggested that capitalism had the capacity to discover and reproduce ever-new reservoirs of surplus population, despite economic reforms designed to improve the conditions of labor (or indeed because of them), such as limits on hours, minimum wages, the legalization of trade unions, and government-sponsored universal health care and old-age pensions.

As an early example of this process, Kautsky points to the earliest phase of capitalist development, where the introduction of female and child labor became “one of the most powerful means whereby capitalists reduce the wages of working-men.”[66] However, as liberal democracies began to abolish child labor and to regulate female labor, the surplus population was reproduced and expanded by other means. Indeed, Kautsky was one of the first Marxists to extend the logic of the industrial reserve army spatially and temporally by analyzing its extended reproduction on a world scale and by extending its reproduction into an indefinite future based on the rising organic composition of capital.

First, Kautsky argued that the extended reproduction of capitalism on a world scale through colonization and imperialism was constantly bringing more people into the industrial reserve army through the forceful expropriation of agriculture in foreign countries. These newly landless paupers became migrant agricultural laborers at the service of their colonial landlords, or they migrated to the cities of their homelands, where they mostly became urban lumpenproletarians. Marx had touched on this process in Vol. 1 of Capital (chapters 26 and 33), where he discussed it as the secret of primitive accumulation and the modern theory of colonization. Marx ended Vol. 1 of Capital by explicitly linking the expropriation of independent peasants at home and indigenous peoples abroad with the historical origins of European capitalism and the creation of an industrial reserve army in each country or colony.[67] In effect, European and American capitalists were reproducing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the same processes that had generated the lumpenproletariat in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

However, Kautsky suggested that Marx had failed to recognize “another means which, periodically, is just as powerful” in reproducing the industrial reserve army, and which, more importantly, reproduces it on a truly Page 53 →world scale as opposed to merely replicating it in other countries: “this is the introduction of workingmen from regions that are backward and whose population has slight wants, but whose labor-power has not yet been sapped by the factory system.”[68] In other words, Kautsky argued that the process of immigration to Europe and the United States would effectively create a global surplus population that would allow the advanced capitalist societies to “periodically” increase or restrict the size of the industrial reserve army and thereby facilitate the extended reproduction of capital accumulation. Kautsky observes that

Steamships and railroads, these much-vaunted pillars of civilization, not only carry guns, liquor and syphilis to the barbarians, they also bring the barbarians and their barbarism to us. The flow of agricultural laborers into the cities is becoming constantly stronger; and from ever farther regions are the swarms of those drawing near who have fewer wants, are more patient and offer less resistance. There is a constant stream of emigration from one country of Europe to another, from Europe to America and even from the Orient to western lands. These foreign workers are partly expropriated people, small farmers and producers, whom the capitalist system of production has ruined, driven on the street and deprived not only of a home, but also of a country. Through the expropriation of the small producers, through the importation from distant lands of large masses of labor, through the use of the labor of women and children, through the shortening of the time necessary to acquire a trade—through all these means the capitalist system of production is able to increase stupendously the quantity of labor forces at its disposal.[69]

Second, Kautsky argued that the rising organic composition of capital—the introduction of machinery—also reproduced the industrial reserve army and the relative surplus population in two additional ways. By increasing the productivity of labor, machinery reduced the demand for labor even as the volume of goods produced increased with each business cycle. Kautsky observes that “in every branch of industry the transition from hand to machine labor is accompanied by the greatest suffering to the working-men who are affected by it. Whether they are factory workers or independent craftsmen, they are made superfluous by the machine and Page 54 →thrown out upon the streets,” where they become lumpenproletarians.[70] However, another critical aspect of machine production, in Kautsky’s view, is that it deskills workers, and therefore “the development of machinery makes possible, not only the employment of such untrained working-men in the place of trained ones, but also their cheap and prompt transportation to the place where they are wanted,” and this potentially makes the entire world population part of the industrial reserve army and the relative surplus population.[71]

Page 55 →Chapter Three

The Lumpenproletariat as a Cultural Category and Style of Life

In the first volume of Capital, the lumpenproletariat and the relative surplus population disappear with the death knell of capitalism, but this sleight of hand left behind the problem of the lumpenproletariat in Marxist theory. First, why would the lumpenproletariat join the proletariat in a socialist revolution when, according to Marx and Engels, “its conditions of life . . . prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue”?[1] Second, what if the logic of capitalist development continues to unfold to a point where the relative surplus population and the lumpenproletariat become such a deadweight on capitalist societies that it forestalls even the possibility of a socialist transformation? The lumpenproletariat exists on the margins of the capitalist mode of production and is effectively a surplus byproduct—an incidental effect—of capitalist economic development, but one that steadily increases with the de-composition of the proletariat. The lumpenproletariat does not have a direct economic relation to production, and therefore structurally it cannot stand in direct opposition to the capitalist class—at least not at the point of production.

These questions become more pronounced when one examines Marx’s and Engels’s comments on the lumpenproletarian style of life, which is where they invoke some of their most colorful language about the lumpenproletariat. Even the most casual reader of The Communist Manifesto is struck by Marx’s and Engels’s reference to the lumpenproletariat as “the ‘dangerous class,’ the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society.”[2] Yet, this passage is far from the only time Page 56 →that Marx and Engels hurl unflattering barbs at the lumpenproletariat.

In a literary essay published approximately one year before The Communist Manifesto, Engels discusses a German poem, entitled “The Old Maid,” which he says contains “occasional fine passages . . . for example the description of the lumpen proletariat”:

Who day by day unwearyingly

Hunt garbage in the fetid gutters;

Who flit like sparrows after food,

Mending pans and grinding knives,

Starching linen with stiff fingers,

Pushing breathless at the heavy cart,

Laden with but scarcely ripened fruits,

Crying piteously: Who’ll buy, who’ll buy?

Who fight over a copper in the dirt;

Who at the corner-stones each day

Sing praise to the God in whom they believe,

But scarcely dare hold out their hands,

Begging being against the law;

Who with deaf ears, beset by hunger.[3]

This pitiable representation of the lumpenproletariat soon gives way to the much harsher assessment first revealed in The Communist Manifesto. In a contemporaneous account of the Parisian June Days of 1848, Engels establishes the basic line of analysis adopted by Marx in his Class Struggles in France (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852), where Engels describes the lumpenproletarian composition of the Provisional Government’s new Mobile Guard. Engels laments,

the entire present state of affairs in Paris . . . when one observes how these former beggars, vagabonds, rogues, gutter-snipes and small-time thieves of the mobile guard are being pampered, praised, rewarded and decorated when only in March and April every bourgeois described them as a ruffianly gang of robbers capable of all sorts of reprehensible acts, no longer to be tolerated.[4]

In a parallel account of the 1848 Revolution in Germany, Engels castigates the “gin happy lumpenproletarians” as useless for purposes of Page 57 →proletarian revolution.[5] Elsewhere, in describing British class structure at approximately the same time, Marx and Engels deride “the lumpenproletariat, the riff-raff of Irish origin or descended from Irishmen.”[6] Similarly, in a piece on trade union demonstrations against the Sunday Bill in Hyde Park (London), Marx again alludes to the use of lumpenproletarians as auxiliary police thugs to inflict violence on peaceful demonstrators, when he refers to a group of “shifty-looking characters recruited from among the Irish lumpen-proletariat and pressed into the London police.”[7]

Yet Marx reserves some of his most poisonous venom to describe the lumpenproletarian composition of the Society of 10 December, which Louis Bonaparte organized as a secret society to replace the Mobile Guard and to support his rise to power following the defeat of the 1848 Revolution in France. Marx observes that

This society dates from the year 1849. On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpenproletariat of Paris had been organised into secret sections, each section being 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, rogues, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème.[8]

Marx goes on to describe the Parisian lumpenproletariat as the “scum, offal, refuse of all classes.”[9] In a new preface to the second edition of The Peasant War in Germany (1870), which contains one of Engels’s earliest references to the lumpenproletariat, Engels revisited the question of class alliances and whether or not the lumpenproletariat was a potential ally of the revolutionary proletariat. On the eve of the Paris Commune, Engels clearly states that “The lumpenproletariat, this scum of depraved elements from all classes, with headquarters in the big cities, is the worst of all the possible allies. This rabble is absolutely venal and absolutely brazen.”[10]

The cultural characteristics and the style of life that Marx and Engels are trying to describe are best captured by Marx’s invocation of the French Page 58 →term la bohème. When Marx uses la bohème as an umbrella term to designate the entire heterogeneous riffraff that constitutes the lumpenproletariat, he is effectively invoking the concept of a status group with a particular style of life existing on the margins of capitalist society. At the time Marx and Engels were writing, the concept of la bohème had not yet taken on the popular connotation of the romantic, carefree lifestyle associated with such artists as Toulouse-Lautrec. Marx and Engels offer a more sober assessment of life at the furthest margins of capitalist society, where one’s status situation and life style are determined by the absence of any direct relation to production.

The absence of regular work, or in many cases the absence of any work, generates a variety of irregular “occupations” based on prostitution, robbery, burglary, begging, gambling, hucksterism, con artistry, trickery, thugs for hire, murder for hire, and a host of other uncertain ways of producing a meager income. It is a population rife with sickness and disease, poverty, starvation, filth, physical disability, orphans, absinthe and other cheap alcohol, opium dens, brothels, violence, and thuggery. It is a lifestyle that generates little trust and few loyalties, with many lumpenproletarians becoming migratory, homeless vagabonds. As a lifestyle, it defines lumpenproletarian culture, which as Marx and Engels describe it, is largely a parasitic, violent, and prostituted culture whose members cannot be trusted. Moreover, because of their common status, lumpenproletarians generally live in the same “bad” districts of cities, where they intermarry, steal together, drink together, rob together, and distrust most outsiders. The lumpenproletariat has a very different understanding of “neighborhood” and la familia than the more stable proletariat. Marx and Engels suggest that even so-called honest and hard-working lumpenproletarians, or their children, are often corrupted by their constant exposure to the lumpenproletarian lifestyle and culture, because they cannot afford to live anywhere except in lumpenproletarian districts.[11]

The concept of the lumpenproletariat as a status group and style of life also allows one to understand how Marx and Engels incorporate what seem to be other disparate groups into the lumpenproletariat for purposes of political analysis. Identifying the lumpenproletariat as a status situation or style of life expands the concept as a cultural category, while maintaining its anchor in the economic structure of capitalism. Specifically, in addition to the groups identified in table 1, Marx and Engels refer to three other groups as part of the lumpenproletariat: (1) professional revolutionaryPage 59 → conspirators, (2) the literary lumpenproletariat, and (3) the degenerate aristocracy and finance aristocracy. While others have suggested that these references are merely a metaphorical use of the term lumpenproletariat, I argue that we should take these references seriously as having a foundation in Marx’s theory of social classes, particularly as modified by Weber’s concept of status situation.

The Professional Conspirators

In a particularly lengthy and highly descriptive passage, Marx describes how the social situation of a group of professional conspirators “determines its whole character from the very outset.”[12] Marx and Engels consistently argued against the formation of secret societies as a way to organize proletarian revolutions, but such societies were a fact of life in nineteenth-century Europe. However, Marx notes that proletarian conspiracy naturally affords the conspirators

only very limited and uncertain means of subsistence. They are therefore constantly obliged to dip into the cash-boxes of the conspiracy. A number of them also come into direct conflict with civil society as such and appear before the police courts with a greater or lesser degree of dignity. Their precarious livelihood, dependent in individual cases more on chance than on their activity, their irregular lives whose only fixed ports-of-call are the taverns of the marchands de vin—the places of rendezvous of the conspirators—their inevitable acquaintance with all kinds of dubious people, place them in that social category which in Paris is known as la bohème. These democratic bohemians of proletarian origin—there are also democratic bohemians of bourgeois origin, democratic loafers and piliers d’estamineth—are therefore either workers who have given up their work and have as a consequence become dissolute, or characters who have emerged from the lumpenproletariat and bring all the dissolute habits of that class with them into their new way of life. One can understand how in these circumstances a few repris de justice are to be found implicated in practically every conspiracy trial. The whole way of life of these professional conspirators has a most decidedly bohemian character. Recruiting sergeants for the Page 60 →conspiracy, they go from marchand de vin to marchand de vin, feeling the pulse of the workers, seeking out their men, cajoling them into the conspiracy and getting either the society’s treasury or their new friends to foot the bill for the litres inevitably consumed in the process. Indeed it is really the marchand de vin who provides a roof over their heads. It is with him that the conspirator spends most of his time; it is here he has his rendezvous with his colleagues, with the members of his section and with prospective recruits; it is here, finally, that the secret meetings of sections (groups) and section leaders take place. The conspirator, highly sanguine in character anyway like all Parisian proletarians, soon develops into an absolute bambocheurd in this continual tavern atmosphere. The sinister conspirator, who in secret session exhibits a Spartan self-discipline, suddenly thaws and is transformed into a tavern regular whom everybody knows and who really understands how to enjoy his wine and women. This conviviality is further intensified by the constant dangers the conspirator is exposed to; at any moment he may be called to the barricades, where he may be killed; at every turn the police set snares for him which may deliver him to prison or even to the galleys. Such dangers constitute the real spice of the trade; the greater the insecurity, the more the conspirator hastens to seize the pleasures of the moment. At the same time familiarity with danger makes him utterly indifferent to life and liberty. He is as at home in prison as in the wine-shop. He is ready for the call to action any day. The desperate recklessness which is exhibited in every insurrection in Paris is introduced precisely by these veteran professional conspirators, the hommes de coups de main.[13]

While Marx paints a picture of the professional conspirator as leading a debauched, adventuristic, and even criminal lifestyle, he also notes that “they are the ones who throw up and command the first barricades, who organise resistance, lead the looting of arms-shops and the seizure of arms and ammunition from houses, and in the midst of the uprising carry out those daring raids which so often throw the government party into confusion. In a word, they are the officers of the insurrection.”[14] The problem, as Marx describes it in Class Struggles in France, is that such characters are easily corrupted and bought off by the ruling class. Marx notes that in Page 61 →forming the Mobile Guard, which consisted mostly of lumpenproletarians, the bourgeois Provisional Government

gave them their own uniform, i.e., it made them outwardly distinct from the blouse of the workers. They had assigned to them as leaders, partly officers from the standing army; partly they themselves elected young sons of the bourgeoisie whose rhodomontades about death for the fatherland and devotion to the republic captivated them.[15]

Initially, therefore, Marx observes that the Parisian proletariat cheered for the Mobile Guard on its marches through Paris, because “it recognized in it its champions of the barricades.” However, Marx concludes that the Provisional Government paid the Mobile Guard 1 franc 50 centimes a day for its service; that is, “it bought them” and then deployed them against the proletariat during the working-class revolt in June of 1848.[16]

The Literary Lumpenproletariat

The term literary lumpenproletariat first appears as part of Marx’s political vocabulary immediately after the collapse of the revolutions of 1848. Most of Marx’s and Engels’s political writings on the 1848 revolutions inveigh against the lumpenproletariat for its service in the irregular militia and police battalions deployed against the proletarian and socialist wing of the revolutions in France, Germany, Britain, Austria, Italy, and Spain. At about the same time, however, Marx begins to criticize the literary lumpenproletariat, which he mainly identified with piecework correspondents, who contributed to liberal newspapers that supported bourgeois republicanism or bourgeois democracy, but typically took the side of the bourgeois republicans against the proletariat in those revolutions.

Marx first uses the term in a dispute between Karl Marx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung and Joseph Dumont’s Kölnische Zeitung.[17] The Kölnische Zeitung was one of Germany’s leading supraregional daily newspapers in the nineteenth century, along with the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Allgemeine Zeitung. Joseph DuMont inherited the newspaper from his father in 1831, and one of his many innovations was to hire Levin Schücking, who was Page 62 →in direct contact with the contemporary German literary scene. Thus, the newspaper was able to attract many prominent German poets and novelists as contributors. Politically, the newspaper was a leading voice of the Rhenish Liberals, and it greatly influenced public opinion leading up to the March Revolution of 1848 in Germany.

In writing for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Engels condemned the Kölnische Zeitung for the “the babble about the Paris June revolution that emanates from the German liberals, especially Herr Brüggemann, Herr Dumont and Herr Wolfers,” whom he calls “gutter snipes.”[18] Engels was dismayed that “this remarkable newspaper transforms the battle between two classes into a battle between respectable people and rogues . . . it sees in the insurrection nothing but a battle between ‘the enormous majority’ and a ‘wild horde’ of ‘cannibals, robbers and murderers.’”[19] Worse, Engels complains, “the editors of the Kölnische Zeitung pour sulphuric acid into their [the proletariat’s] wounds. They have denounced us to the bourgeois police.”[20] Following the collapse of the June 1848 revolt in France, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung repeated its complaint against “the literary lumpenproletariat of Herr Dumont,” who it castigated for “denouncing the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung to the police.”[21] Thus, where the lumpenproletariat had served as bribed tools of reactionary intrigue in 1848, a literary lumpenproletariat was doing the same thing by reporting a more radical newspaper to the German censors and police with the goal of shutting it down. The literary lumpenproletariat also served as bribed tools of reactionary intrigue.

Marx identified the problem of the literary lumpenproletariat as a generalized phenomenon that extended well beyond the Kölnische Zeitung. He argues that the finance aristocracy of the high bourgeoisie rely on the literary lumpenproletariat to articulate and defend its interests in the public sphere:

There is moreover a section of the bourgeoisie that, quite indifferent to the interests of its class as a whole, pursues its own particular interests, which may even be inimical to those of its class. These are financial magnates, big creditors of the state, bankers, and rentiers, whose wealth increases proportionately to the poverty of the people, and finally men whose business depends on the old political structure, e.g. Dumont and his literary lumpenproletariat. These are ambitious professors, lawyers and similar persons, who can only Page 63 →hope to obtain respectable posts in a state where betrayal of the people’s interests to the Government is a lucrative business.[22]

In early 1849, Engels echoes Marx with an article published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, where he observes that “there is in Germany a literary lumpenproletariat, cowardly and lying stay-at-homes.”[23] The object of Engels’s ire was again the Kölnische Zeitung, a newspaper that had also taken an editorial position against the Magyar Rebellion. The Magyar Rebellion was initially one of the many revolutions that occurred in 1848, but it quickly grew into a war for Hungarian national independence from the Austrian Empire. The liberal Kölnische Zeitung openly took the side of the Austrian monarchy and its Russian allies, who intervened to crush the revolt.

When the publisher of the Kölnische Zeitung failed to respond to Engels’s criticism, Engels fired off another article: “Such are the gentlemen of the Kölnische Zeitung. Too cowardly to indulge in any sort of polemic, which would be bound utterly to expose their hollowness, ignorance and empty-headedness, this literary lumpenproletariat seeks to vent its anger at all the blows it receives on the small Magyar people fighting against a force vastly superior to it.”[24] Importantly, the term lumpenproletariat was not so much directed at Dumont, who was a successful publisher, but at his literary contributors, who Marx and Engels saw as supporting the bourgeoisie (and even monarchism) through their literary skills, in much the same way that ruffian lumpenproletarians had done with physical thuggery and armed force in 1848.

Similarly, in a series of letters written in November and December of 1859, Marx first writes to Ferdinand LaSalle in Berlin to complain about “the Hermann, whose editors are all recruited from the literary Lumpenproletariat.”[25] The Hermann/Londoner Zeitung (1859—1914) was a London-based German weekly published by exiles from the Revolution of 1848. Its founder-editor was Gottfried Kinkel (1815–1882), who had been a professor at the University of Bonn until being sentenced to life imprisonment for political offences after the 1848 revolution. He fled to London to avoid jail. At the time Marx wrote his letters about the Hermann, it too was considered a liberal voice that promoted the idea of a greater German republic based on the abortive Frankfurt Constitution of 1849, which provided liberal freedoms and democratic suffrage. The Hermann was a direct competitor to the London-based Das Volk, a more socialist rival Page 64 →publication supported by Marx and Engels. Thus, Marx voices a similar complaint to Ferdinand Freiligrath, who had once been a contributor to the Kölnische Zeitung, but was now affiliated with Das Volk, that “It might, perhaps, do some good if the German public were to be shown what a scoundrelly bunch of lumpenproletarians it is that is croaking loudest in the foul swamp of current German literature.”[26] Finally, Marx writes to Engels that “I presume you saw the Hermann of a week ago today containing ‘Vorletzte Sitzung des Schiller-Comités,’ a self-portrait of the scoundrelly bunch of lumpenproletarians which has gathered round Gottfried Kinkel.”[27]

In one final use of the term, Marx criticizes a correspondent for the Weser-Zeitung and the Augsburgerin as “none other than the notorious literary lumpenproletarian Elard Biscamp.[28] Long rejected by any decent society, this unfortunate seeks consolation in the bottle for the broken heart caused him by Prussia annexing his native Hesse-Cassel as well as his friend Edgar Bauer.”[29] In this case, too, the Weser-Zeitung was a liberal daily newspaper published in Bremen. Marx had known Elard Biscamp when as another German refugee from the Revolution of 1848, he settled in London. Biscamp had founded Das Volk as the official organ of the German Workers’ Educational Society in London. However, Marx was unimpressed with Biscamp’s petite-bourgeois democratic liberalism; he became heavily involved in the new paper’s publication beginning with the second issue, and soon thereafter recruited Engels to help move the newspaper in a more radical direction.

Paul LaFargue, Marx’s son-in-law, later generalized Marx’s critique of the lumpen literati into a full-blown critique of “the situation of the intellectuals in capitalist society.”[30] In an address delivered to students in Paris on March 23, 1900, LaFargue observed that “in all branches there is an overproduction of intellectuals, and then when a place is vacant, tens and hundreds offer themselves to fill it; and it is this pressure which permits the capitalists to lower the price of the intellectuals and to put it even below the wage of the manual laborer.”[31] LaFargue effectively argues that by the early twentieth century, capitalist societies were generating a relative surplus population of intellectuals, and the result was that “capitalists have degraded the intellectuals below the economic level of the manual laborers.”[32] In making this claim, LaFargue made it clear that he was “not merely speaking of those two-for-a-cent intellectuals who litter up the Page 65 →newspapers, the parliaments, and the economic associations; but I mean the scientists, the university professors, the members of the Institute; the higher they raise their heads, the lower they bow the knee.”[33] Capitalist societies, in effect, were now spinning off an entire category of lumpen intellectuals, rather than a few impoverished piecework literati as had been the case in the previous century.

LaFargue thought this transformation of the intellectuals into a subcategory of the lumpenproletariat “ought to have filled the intellectuals with wrath,” but instead he found that “our intellectuals are accustoming themselves to such degradation” with an attitude of indifference.[34] LaFargue suggests that the entire higher education system in capitalist societies is designed to produce broken intellectuals, who will essentially serve the interests of the capitalist class and its state for 1 franc and 50 centimes. He notes that

the intellectual, brought up in a hot house, has the life bleached out of him by the shadow of the college walls, his nervous system is over-developed and takes on an unhealthy impressionability. What the workingman endures thoughtlessly is to him a painful shock. The intellectual is wounded to the depths of his moral being by the exigencies of a wageworker’s life.[35]

Thus, the modern intellectual was increasingly taking on the characteristics of Marx’s honest lumpenproletariat—a low-paid stratum of the proletariat with increasingly bleak employment prospects, often marginally attached to the labor market through part-time or precarious work, including piecework. As a result of this economic insecurity, LaFargue concludes that “it is not in the circle of the intellectuals, degraded by centuries of capitalist oppression, that we must seek examples of civil courage and moral dignity. They have not even the sense of professional class-consciousness.”[36]

With respect to the natural and physical sciences, LaFargue argues that scientists have “tamed the powers of nature, and might in doing so have freed man from toil to allow him to develop freely his faculties of mind and body.” Instead, LaFargue complains, scientists have “done nothing but supply means for capitalists to increase their wealth, and to intensify their exploitation of the working class. Its most wonderful applicationsPage 66 → to industrial technique have brought to the children, the women and the men of the working class nothing but overwork and misery!” In this respect, LaFargue claims “the scientists have not only sold themselves to the governments and the financiers, they have also sold science itself to, the capitalist-bourgeoisie.”[37]

In the social sciences, LaFargue notes that prominent sociologists such as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner have developed a theory of society based on Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (i.e., Social Darwinism), which proclaims “that natural selection [market competition] assigns to each one his place in society.” Thus, they have turned sociology and political science “against socialism” by ostensibly demonstrating “that the classification of individuals into rich and poor, idlers and laborers, capitalist and wage-earners is the necessary result of the inevitable laws of nature.” Despite such proclamations from the lumpen literati, LaFargue argues that capitalists are quite aware that science has failed in its Enlightenment mission to emancipate the human race not only from superstition, but from toil and economic hardship. Consequently, LaFargue suggests that the capitalist class insists that economists and other intellectual domestics “prove to the working class that it has never been so happy and that its lot goes on improving. . . . The economists, considering that to deserve the good graces of the capitalist it was not enough to falsify economic facts, are suppressing economic science” by their neglect of Marxist political economy. Finally, LaFargue contends that “the intellectuals of art and literature, like the jesters of the old feudal courts, are the entertainers of the class which pays them. To satisfy the tastes of the capitalists and beguile their leisure—this is their sole artistic aim.” The men of letters are “broken to this servile duty.”[38]

LaFargue was indignant that all of these intellectuals “do not feel their degradation,” but “joyfully fulfill their servile task.” The entire intellectual class was now effectively a lumpen literati acting as the domestic servants of the capitalist class and as bribed tools of reactionary intrigue. LaFargue concludes that “intellectuals of this description can never be led into socialism; their interests are too closely bound with those of the capitalist class for them to detach themselves and turn against it.”[39] Like the rest of the lumpenproletariat, the intellectuals have no direct relation to production, while they are entirely dependent for their livelihood on the charity of wealthy philanthropists and the generosity of the state.

Page 67 →The Degenerate Aristocracy and the Finance Aristocracy

Finally, in a famous passage from Class Struggles in France (1850), Marx paints an ugly picture of the newly emerging “finance aristocracy,” which as noted above is “quite indifferent to the interests of its class as a whole, pursues its own particular interests, which may even be inimical to those of its class.”[40] The finance aristocracy is to the capitalist class what the lumpenproletariat is to the working class—an unproductive, parasitic byproduct of capitalist development that makes its living by gambling (in the stock market or through real estate speculation), theft (bankruptcy, foreclosures), and other corrupt financial transactions. In the year prior to the Revolution of 1848, Marx observes that

Since the finance aristocracy made the laws, was at the head of the administration of the state, had command [of] all of the organised public authorities, dominated public opinion through the actual state of affairs and through the press, the same prostitution, the same shameless cheating, the same mania to get rich was repeated in every sphere, from the Court to the Café Borgne, to get rich not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others. Clashing every moment with the bourgeois laws themselves, an unbridled assertion of unhealthy and dissolute appetites manifested itself, particularly at the top of bourgeois society—lusts wherein wealth derived from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes crapuleux, where money, filth and blood commingle. The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society.[41]

Moreover, Marx does not consider his cultural indictment of the finance aristocracy to be a mere metaphor, for as he notes, “in 1847, on the most prominent stages of bourgeois society, the same scenes were publicly enacted that regularly lead the lumpenproletariat to brothels, to workhouses and lunatic asylums, to the bar of justice, to the dungeon and to the scaffold.”[42] Rosa Luxemburg would similarly conclude in her analysis of the lumpenproletariat that “the gradations between commercial profiteering, fictitious deals, adulteration of foodstuffs, cheating, official embezzlement,Page 68 → theft, burglary, and robbery, flow into another in such fashion that the boundary lines between honorable citizenry and the penitentiary has disappeared.”[43] Likewise, Paul LaFargue emphasizes that

The great capitalist bourgeoisie does not choose to work, either with its hands or with its brain; it chooses merely to drink, to eat, to practice lewdness, and to look dignified in its beastly and cumbersome luxury; it does not even deign to occupy itself with politics . . . they find it more economical to buy the deputies than the voters, and more convenient to put their clerks into ministries than to take part in parliamentary struggles. The big capitalists interest themselves only in the operations of the stock exchange, which afford the delights of gambling; they dignify these by the pompous name of “speculations”—a word formerly reserved for the highest processes of philosophical or mathematical thought.[44]

The finance aristocracy in Marxist political economy is a debauched, parasitic, and even criminal class that shares the same lifestyle as the lumpenproletariat, and indeed may even associate with them for criminal purposes—not the least of which is visiting the lumpenproletariat’s brothels and opium dens to celebrate their ill-gotten gains. Elsewhere, Marx refers to bankrupt and dispossessed landowners in Poland as “the lumpenproletariat of the aristocracy,”[45] who could only sustain themselves by serving as military officers, that is, the officers of the lumpenproletarian armies, who in many ways shared a comparable lifestyle that revolved around gambling, drinking, plunder, looting, arson, and violence. Engels later repeats this observation in The Role of Force in History (1887–1888), where he observes that the increasing centralization of land ownership in Prussia had generated “a noble Lumpenproletariat” among the Junkers:

Big landed property is in the hands of a few magnates (notably in Silesia) and a large number of middle landowners, most highly concentrated in the old Prussian provinces east of the Elbe. It is these Prussian Junkers who more or less dominate the entire class. . . . Wherever possible, their landed property is entailed upon the family by right of primogeniture. The younger sons join the army or the civil service, so that an even less wealthy petty nobility made up of officers and civil servants clings to this petty landowning gentryPage 69 → and is supplemented over and above this through the intensive promotion of nobles from among the higher officers and civil servants of bourgeois origin. On the lower fringes of all this bunch of nobles, there naturally emerges a numerically parasitic nobility, a noble Lumpenproletariat, which lives on debts, dubious gambling, pushiness, begging and political espionage. This society in its totality forms the Prussian Junkers and is one of the main pillars of the old Prussian state.[46]

Marx’s and Engels’s description of a noble lumpenproletariat that lives off gambling, military service, debt, begging, and espionage is perfectly compatible with their view that the lumpenproletariat includes the “scum, offal, refuse of all classes” or “the depraved elements of all classes.”[47] All of these social groups are part of the social category of the lumpenproletariat on the basis of two shared characteristics—one economic and one cultural. First, none of these social categories has any direct economic relation to production, nor are they essential to the extended reproduction of capitalism. They are all essentially nonworking social groups that obtain a living through some form of hustling, gambling, thievery, chicanery, or organized violence in the service of the ruling class. Karl Kautsky would later concur that the lumpenproletariat “is not necessary to the basis of society. On the contrary, they are an unnecessary burden. They live only upon the alms of the propertied classes or by plundering them.”[48]

Second, therefore, all of these social groups exist outside, or on the margins, of the capitalist mode of production, but as suggested earlier, they are a necessary and inevitable byproduct of capitalist development—the offal or refuse of capitalism. Hence, they must subsist through various forms of parasitism, rather than by any direct structural relation of economic exploitation like the capitalist class, landlords, feudal aristocracy, or slaveholders. In terms of their status situation, these social groups share a common lifestyle and consort with one another in disreputable parts of the city, where they engage in shared idleness, drinking, gambling, and prostitution, with the only difference being that the idle rich are the customers of the idle poor (and, today, of porn stars).

Page 70 →Chapter Four

The Lumpenproletariat as a Political Category

Marx and Engels did not consider the lumpenproletariat to be capable of independent political action, and consequently when it did become politically active, it nearly always did so as “a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” Marx and Engels’s claim in The Communist Manifesto was not intended to be an ideological axiom or a mere political epithet. Instead, their claim about the lumpenproletariat’s reactionary and mercenary tendencies was both a predictable structural effect of the lumpenproletariat’s nonrelation to capitalist relations of production and an empirical observation well grounded in the lessons of European political history.

For Marx and Engels, the lumpenproletariat has no inherent destiny of its own, because it is a byproduct of capitalist development—a castoff on the scrap heap of history. The lumpenproletariat’s political actions are therefore always attached to some other class—the peasantry, the monarchy/aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, or sometimes the proletariat—and to that extent it can and does play a pivotal role in many historical class struggles. When the lumpenproletariat becomes politically active it brings large numbers of desperate people, an unbridled capacity for violence and brutality, and a willingness to side with anyone—or even to change sides—depending on who is willing to pay them, house them, feed them, and give them a uniform.

The Mercenary Role of the Lumpenproletariat

Frederick Engels first broaches the political role of the lumpenproletariat in The Peasant War in Germany, written shortly after the revolutionary Page 71 →uprisings of 1848–49. The German Peasants’ War (1524–25) took place during a much earlier period of capitalist development, so the urban “plebeian mob” consisted mostly of declassed peasants and agricultural laborers who had migrated into the cities in search of work. Work was uncertain, however, because they were excluded from most occupations due to guild restrictions. Engels observes that before the Peasant War, “the plebeian opposition,” particularly in the cities, “took part in Germany’s political struggles not as an independent party, but as a noisy marauding tagtail of the burgher opposition, a mob that could be bought and sold for a few barrels of wine.”[1] Engels points to the growing number of lumpenproletarians in the countryside during the Peasant War as a “demoralising influence” on the peasant armies, which Engels asserts was “felt at all times” and helped lead to their defeat.[2] In 1848, Engels identified a similar pattern where “for a few talers the lumpen proletarian fights out with his fists the squabbles between bourgeoisie, nobility and police.”[3]

Engels also finds a precursor to 1848 in his analysis of the kingdom of Naples, where the Neapolitan lazzaroni adopted a similar pattern of mercenary brutality on behalf of the Bourbon monarchy. Lazzaroni was the name given to “declassed, lumpenproletarian elements in Italy,” who were repeatedly used by reactionary monarchists in their struggle against the liberal and democratic movements in Italy.[4] The lazzaroni were the poorest of the poor—the lowest sediment of both the city and the kingdom of Naples—who bore all the characteristics of the early lumpenproletariat as described by Engels in The Condition of the English Working Class. Lazzaroni became a term that Engels and Marx frequently invoked as a synonym for the lumpenproletariat.[5]

The French military campaigns of the late 1790s sought to export the French Revolution and its liberal republicanism to other parts of Europe, including Italy. When the French sent an army to Naples, it easily defeated King Ferdinand I’s army. Consequently, the lazzaroni, who were fiercely loyal to the House of Bourbon and specifically to the person of King Ferdinand I, demanded that they be armed to defend the kingdom and the city. Unlike most monarchs, King Ferdinand I mingled with the lazzaroni on a regular basis. Although they were unsuccessful in defending Naples against well-trained French troops, their resistance undermined the new Parthenopaean Republic established by the French by denying it a significant base of popular support. The Parthenopaean Republic was thus utterly dependent on the repressive power of the French Army for its own survival. The Page 72 →republic collapsed as soon as the French moved their troops out of Naples to support actions elsewhere in Italy, and this left the now armed lazzaroni free to exact retribution upon the city’s republicans. As Engels describes it,

This action of the Neapolitan lumpenproletariat decided the defeat of the revolution. Swiss guardsmen, Neapolitan soldiers and Lazzaroni combined pounced upon the defenders of the barricades. The palaces along Toledo Street, which had been swept clean with grape-shot, collapsed under the cannon-balls of the troops. The frantic mob of victors tore into the houses, stabbed the men, speared the children, violated the women only to murder them afterwards, plundered everything in sight and then set fire to the pillaged dwellings. The Lazzaroni proved to be the greediest and the Swiss the most brutal. The base acts and barbarities accompanying the victory of the well-armed and four times stronger Bourbon mercenaries [i.e., the Swiss] and the always sanfedistic Lazzaroni over the nearly destroyed national guard of Naples, are indescribable.[6]

However, the German Peasants’ War and the failed Parthenopaean Republic were only precursors to the June Days of 1848. Engels authored a series of contemporaneous accounts of the Paris June Days of 1848 for Neue Rheinische Zeitung well before Marx published his better-known Class Struggles in France (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852).[7] Engels writes that

Every day the intensity, violence and fury of the battle increased. . . . The mobile guard, which was mostly recruited from the Paris lumpenproletariat, has already during its brief period of existence, thanks to good pay, transformed itself into the praetorian guard of whoever was in power. The organised lumpenproletariat has given battle to the unorganised working proletariat. It has, as was to be expected, placed itself at the disposal of the bourgeoisie, just as the Lazzaroni in Naples placed themselves at the disposal of Ferdinand. Only those detachments of the mobile guard that consisted of real workers changed sides. But in what a contemptible light the entire present state of affairs in Paris appears when one observes how these former beggars, vagabonds, rogues, gutter-snipes and small-time thieves of the mobile guard are being pampered, praised, rewarded Page 73 →and decorated when only in March and April every bourgeois described them as a ruffianly gang of robbers capable of all sorts of reprehensible acts, no longer to be tolerated. These “young heroes,” these “children of Paris,” whose courage is unrivalled, who climb barricades with the most dashing bravery etc., are treated that way because these ignorant barricade fighters of February now fire just as ignorantly upon the working proletariat as they had formerly fired upon soldiers, because they let themselves be bribed to massacre their brothers for thirty sous a day! Honour to these corrupt vagabonds because they have shot down the best and most revolutionary part of the Parisian workers for thirty sous a day![8]

In his more famous Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, Marx largely repeats this story about the Mobile Guard, observing that “the Provisional Government paid them 1 franc 50 centimes a day—that is, it bought them. It gave them their own uniform, that is, it made them outwardly distinct from the blouse-wearing workers. In part it had assigned them officers from the standing army as leaders; in part they themselves elected young sons of the bourgeoisie whose rodomontades about death for the fatherland and devotion to the republic captivated them.”[9] After the events in Paris, where the armed lumpenproletariat had turned the tide against the proletariat, Marx watched the same events unfold in Austria:

The second act of the drama has just been performed in Vienna, its first act having been staged in Paris under the title of The June Days. In Paris the mobile guard, in Vienna “Croats”—in both cases Lazzaroni, lumpenproletariat hired and armed—were used against the working and thinking proletarians. We shall soon see the third act performed in Berlin.[10]

Engels reported on the third act in another series of contemporaneous accounts published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Engels again pointed to the mercenary treachery of “gin happy lumpenproletarians,” who repeatedly betrayed the working class and ultimately ended up siding with the capitalist class:

The proletariat, united in the heat of the struggle, split as soon as the Committee of Public Safety and the petty bourgeoisie began to Page 74 →waver. The artisans, the actual factory workers and a section of the silk-weavers backed the movement up to the hilt; but they, who formed the core of the proletariat, were almost entirely without weapons . . . the lumpenproletariat was here as elsewhere corruptible from the second day of the movement onwards, demanding weapons and pay from the Committee of Public Safety in the morning and selling itself to the big bourgeois in the afternoon to protect their buildings or rip down the barricades when evening fell. On the whole it stood on the side of the bourgeoisie, which paid it most and with whose money it led a gay life as long as the movement lasted.[11]

Engels and Marx identify at least two additional historical examples of lumpenproletarian treachery in Switzerland and Spain. In a political essay published in 1848 in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Engels compares the Swiss proletariat to the Neapolitan lazzaroni, because of that country’s comparatively low level of industrial development. Engels concludes that “the Swiss proletariat is still largely what one describes as lumpen-proletariat, prepared to sell themselves to anyone who will make extravagant promises.”[12] Finally, the Spanish Revolution of 1854 occurred when a military coup, supported by a popular uprising, initiated more radical liberal reforms than had been allowed under the previous Moderate Party. Marx covered these events in a series of reports published in the New York Daily Tribune, where he commented on “these shameless demonstrations of the town mob, partly paid for their performances, and like the Lazzaroni of Naples, preferring the wanton rule of kings and monks to the sober regime of the middle classes.”[13]

The Lumpenproletarian State?

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte contains Marx’s single most expansive political commentary on the lumpenproletariat, and for that reason it is has been the single most cited and analyzed text with respect to the concept of the lumpenproletariat. However, The Eighteenth Brumaire does not offer any insights into the lumpenproletariat that one cannot find scattered throughout his and Engels’s writings, but I do suggest that its unique quality is the suggestion that Bonapartism is the political form of Page 75 →the lumpenproletarian state. The idea of the lumpenproletariat as a ruling class is quite distinct from the idea that they merely serve as the auxiliary mercenaries of a different ruling class. Bonapartism has previously been called an “exceptional state” in Marxist theory, and it has frequently been identified as a precursor to fascism and Nazism by Marxist state theorists.[14] Bonapartism raises the question of whether the lumpenproletariat can independently rise to power or at least become an independent social base for political power, particularly in a context where they hold the balance of power between contending classes.

As I read The Eighteenth Brumaire, Bonapartism is an authoritarian political order supported by the petite bourgeoisie (urban and rural), because of its fear that socialists will confiscate private property, but Bonapartism find its active mass base and military wing in the lumpenproletariat. The Bonapartist leader rules with the acquiescence of the high bourgeoisie and the finance aristocracy so long as it suppresses the working class and delivers profits to the erstwhile ruling class in a spectacle of public corruption. In other words, two parasitic classes, the high and the low lumpenproletariat, join forces in an authoritarian state to secure their parasitic style of life.

Marx sets the stage for this new and unique political form with a summary of the outcome of the June Days of 1848:

The bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe can be followed only by a bourgeois republic, that is to say, whereas a limited section of the bourgeoisie ruled in the name of the king, the whole of the bourgeoisie will now rule on behalf of the people. The demands of the Paris proletariat are Utopian nonsense, to which an end must be put. To this declaration of the Constituent National Assembly the Paris proletariat replied with the June insurrection, the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars. The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the finance aristocracy, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpenproletariat organised as the Mobile Guard, the intellectuals, the clergy and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself. More than 3,000 insurgents were butchered after the victory, and 15,000 were deported without trial. With this defeat the proletariat recedes into the background of the revolutionary stage.[15]

Page 76 →However, once Louis Bonaparte was elected president in 1848, Marx argues that Bonaparte’s political strategy for remaining in power consisted of “money as a gift and money on tick, it was with prospects such as these that he hoped to allure the masses. Donations and loans—the financial science of the lumpenproletariat, whether of high degree or low, is restricted to this. Such were the only springs which Bonaparte knew how to set in motion. Never has a pretender speculated more stupidly on the stupidity of the masses.”[16] Marx’s observations about Louis Bonaparte sound remarkably similar to Donald Trump’s statement, “I love the poorly educated,” and to the admission by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, that “he lies to his base because he thinks they’re stupid.”[17]

However, Marx goes on to elaborate an even more disturbing image of Louis Bonaparte once he declares himself Emperor Napoleon III:

[T]his Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the Lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognises in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. An old crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade where the grand costumes, words and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery. Thus on his expedition to Strasbourg, where a trained Swiss vulture had played the part of the Napoleonic eagle. For his irruption into Boulogne he puts some London lackeys into French uniforms. They represent the army. In his Society of December 10, he assembles 10,000 rogues who are to play the part of the people, as Nick Bottom that of the lion. At a moment when the bourgeoisie itself played the most complete comedy, but in the most serious manner in the world, without infringing any of the pedantic conditions of French dramatic etiquette, and was itself half deceived, half convinced of the solemnity of its own performance of state, the adventurer, who took the comedy as plain comedy, was bound to win. Only when he has eliminated his solemn opponent, when he himself now takes his imperial role seriously and under the Napoleonic mask imagines he is the real Napoleon, does he become the victim of his own conception of the world, the serious buffoon who no longer takes world history for a comedy but his comedy for world history.[18]

Page 77 →Marx again refers to Louis Bonaparte as “chief of the Paris lumpenproletariat,”[19] and elsewhere Marx calls him “the Lumpenproletariat emperor.”[20] Importantly, Marx suggests that Emperor Napoleon III’s attraction for the Paris mob is “precisely because he was a Bohemian, a princely lumpenproletarian,” who had the character of a street fighter and was willing to conduct “a dirty struggle” against his opponents.[21] Napoleon III had no use for the decorum of statesmanship or the courtesies of parliamentary politics. He was the Lumpenproletariat Emperor, and thus Marx concludes that

above all, Bonaparte looks on himself as the chief of the Society of December 10, as the representative of the lumpenproletariat, to which he himself, his entourage, his government and his army belong, and whose prime consideration is to benefit itself and draw California lottery prizes from the state treasury. And he vindicates his position as chief of the Society of December 10 with decrees, without decrees and despite decrees.[22]

Marx concludes by noting that despite Emperor Napoleon III’s promise to make France great again, his efforts had in fact backfired on his own supporters. Marx observes that far from returning France to the glory days of Napoleon I, “the [French] army itself is no longer the flower of the peasant youth; it is the swamp-flower of the peasant lumpenproletariat. It consists in large measure of remplaçants, of substitutes, just as the second Bonaparte is himself only a remplaçant, the substitute for Napoleon. It now performs its deeds of valour by hunting down the peasants like chamois, and in organised drives, by doing gendarme duty” against its own citizens.[23]

The Problem of the Lumpenproletariat

It is an understatement to say that Marx and Engels left the problem of the lumpenproletariat as an unanswered question in Marxist theory. In referring to the problem of the lumpenproletariat, I am asking what is to be done with them in a revolutionary situation, or even during a peaceful transition to socialism? I suggest that reading Marx and Engels, as well as the sparse commentary after them, suggests that Marxists tinkered with three possible solutions to the political problem of the lumpenproletariat.

The problem of the lumpenproletariat was first raised in the 2nd InternationalPage 78 → by Karl Kautsky in the Erfurt Program (1892), where he argued that capitalist development generated an ongoing structural “conflict between the elevating and degrading tendencies which affect the proletariat.”[24] Kautsky suggested that the elevating tendencies of capitalism were most pronounced in the proletariat, while its degrading tendencies were most evident in what he called the “slum proletariat.” He went on to draw a sharp economic divide between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat by claiming that

the slum proletariat has always been the same, whether in modern London or ancient Rome. The modern laboring proletariat is an absolutely unique phenomenon. Between these two there is, first of all, the difference that lies in the fact that the first is a parasite and the second the most important root of modern social life. Far from receiving alms, the modern working proletarians support the whole structure of our society.[25]

In this respect, Kautsky argues that one should not conflate the proletariat with the lumpenproletariat into a single class, because the proletariat is not the lowest class in society—that is the lumpenproletariat—but the proletariat is the “lowest of the exploited classes.” Kautsky contends that in a technical economic sense, “the slum-proletariat is not exploited,”[26] although it may be poor, because it does not produce any surplus value to be expropriated by an exploiting class. Therefore, the lumpenproletariat is not structurally situated to share a common class interest with the proletariat as may occasionally be the case with the peasantry and the urban petite bourgeoisie. Instead, the lumpenproletariat lives a parasitic existence, and thus it structurally shares more in common politically with other classes that also extract value parasitically at the margins of capitalist society.

The Erfurt Program effectively initiated a muted debate on the political problem of the lumpenproletariat with its declaration that

The unemployable, children, old people, sick and cripples have been from the beginning unable to earn a living by entering into service. To these were added at the beginning of modern times a large number who could work but found nothing to do. For them, there was nothing but to beg, steal, or prostitute themselves. They were compelled either to perish or to throw overboard all sense of Page 79 →shame, honor, and self-respect. . . . That such a condition cannot but exercise the most demoralizing and corrupting influence is self-evident. Furthermore, the effect of this influence is intensified by the fact that the unemployed poor are utterly superfluous to the existing order; their extinction would relieve it of an undesirable burden. A class that has become superfluous, that has no necessary function to fulfill, must degenerate . . . they have no way of forcing society to support them as parasites. They are only tolerated. Humility is, consequently, the first duty of the beggar and the highest virtue of the poor . . . this class of the proletariat is servile toward the powerful; it furnishes no opposition to the existing social order. On the contrary, it ekes out its existence from the crumbs that fall from the tables of the rich. Why should it want to abolish its benefactors? Furthermore, beggars are not themselves exploited . . . they are partakers in the fruits of exploitation; they have no motive for wishing to put an end to the system.[27]

Kautsky concludes that the lumpenproletariat has always lived off the charity of the ruling class, or performed menial service for the ruling class, so acting as its bribed tool in the class struggle is simply a continuation of its historic service to the ruling class. For this reason, Kautsky insists that the lumpenproletariat “cannot grasp the ideal of a new, better social order, much less are they fit to fight for it.”[28] However, given that their numbers were increasing daily, this raised a question: what is to be done with the lumpenproletariat in the coming class struggle?

The first solution to the problem of the lumpenproletariat was proposed by Marx and Engels, which is that the lumpenproletariat simply disappears with the death knell of capitalism and the expropriation of the expropriators. Marx and Engels actually provide a hint in The Communist Manifesto as to how the lumpenproletariat will be dissolved at the end of capitalism. Marx and Engels propose that during the transition to communism “the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie . . . and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”[29] On the basis of this increase in the productive forces, Marx and Engels proposed a ten-point minimum program, which they considered generally applicable to the most advanced capitalist societies. Two of the ten points establish a mandatory work requirement for all members of society, as follows:

Page 80 →5. Equal liability to work for all members of society until complete abolition of private ownership. Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

7. Increase of national factories, workshops, railways, and ships, cultivation of all uncultivated land and improvement of land already cultivated in the same proportion in which the capital and workers at the disposal of the nation increase.[30]

It would seem that lumpenproletarians are expected to work—possibly in state-owned enterprises—to the extent that the productive forces are increased sufficiently to absorb the portion of the relative surplus population that is capable of working. This interpretation is consistent with Marx’s discussion of the transition to communism in the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), where Marx observes that, in the immediate aftermath of a socialist revolution,

what we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, as it emerges from capitalist society. . . . the right of the producers is proportional to the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour . . . and labour to serve as a measure, must be defined by its durations or intensity, otherwise, it ceases to be a standard of measurement . . . it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges.[31]

V. I. Lenin states this principle with greater simplicity in The State and Revolution (1917), where he argues that in Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx establishes “He who does not work shall not eat” as a necessary principle of socialism.[32] Lenin goes on to state, “this is a ‘defect’ says Marx, but it is unavoidable during the first phase of Communism [i.e., Socialism]; for, if we are not to fall into Utopianism, we cannot imagine that, having overthrown capitalism, people will at once learn to work for society without any standards of right; indeed, the abolition of capitalism does not immediately lay the economic foundations for such a change.”[33] Thus, Lenin considered socialism to be a “defective” first phase of the transition to communism, precisely because it remained a society where goods and Page 81 →services are distributed unequally to individuals in proportion to the duration, skill, and intensity of their individual labor, as opposed to a higher phase of communist society, which is based on the principle of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”[34]

In this respect, even though Mark Cowling is skeptical about the substantive validity of the concept of the lumpenproletariat, he concludes that there are nevertheless “plenty of issues surrounding it which need attention. For socialists, these include the following: Do people who have developed some lumpen characteristics simply get back to work when offered decent opportunities? If not, what should be done about it?” Indeed, it is hard to imagine the lumpenproletarians described by Marx and Engels suddenly flocking to join industrial armies without some degree of coercion.[35] Consequently, Paul Q. Hirst is forthright in declaring that under socialism, the lumpenproletariat “would be outlawed or forced to work” insofar as their class interests “are diametrically opposed to those of the workers.”[36] In fact, in the actually existing state socialist countries of the twentieth century, the legal regulation of “social parasitism” began in postrevolutionary Russia during the 1920s when penal sanctions were first introduced for various behaviors, such as prostitution, vagrancy, and work evasion. The Soviet laws on social parasitism and the obligation to work became the model followed by Eastern European countries, including the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (1961), Bulgaria (1968), the German Democratic Republic (1968), Romania (1968), and the Hungarian Peoples’ Republic (1978), which all penalized work evasion. However, even in these countries there was still considerable debate about “the legal acceptability and social usefulness of introducing any form of forced (or compulsory) labor” into the legal system.[37]

A second proposed solution to the problem of the lumpenproletariat was offered by Rosa Luxemburg, one of the few Marxist theorists to directly confront this problem, in a chapter of The Russian Revolution (1918), “The Struggle Against Corruption.” Luxemburg contends that “a problem which is of great importance in every proletarian revolution is that of the struggle with the Lumpenproletariat.” She confronts this question directly partly because she was one of the few 2nd International theorists to recognize that “the Lumpenproletarian element is deeply embedded in bourgeois society. It is not merely a special section, a sort of social wastage which grows enormously when the walls of the social order are falling down, but rather an integral part of the social whole.”[38] In other words, Page 82 →the lumpenproletariat was not just going to disappear with the death knell of capitalism, nor would its ranks shrink as a result of continued capitalist development. Consequently, Luxemburg argues, socialists should recognize that “the proletarian revolution will have to struggle with this enemy and the instrument of counter-revolution on every hand,”[39] whether in the form of a destructive and criminal anarchist movement or as the bribed tools of reactionary intrigue.

Luxemburg was not making a dogmatic assertion about the lumpenproletariat. She was drawing on her knowledge of the Russian Revolution of 1905, where, she observes, “Anarchism has become in the Russian revolution not the theory of the struggling proletariat but the ideological signboard of the counterrevolutionary lumpenproletariat, who like a school of sharks, swarm in the wake of the battleship of the revolution.”[40] Luxemburg contemplates the possibility of deploying state power and the armed force of the revolutionary proletariat against the lumpenproletariat as a pre-emptive tactic, but she concludes that “the harshest measures of martial law are impotent against outbreaks of the lumpenproletarian sickness.”[41] She argues that even though the lumpenproletarian sickness—that is, anarchism and criminality—threatens to corrupt every working class revolution, she concludes on a practical basis that “draconian measures of terror are powerless. On the contrary, they cause still further corruption.” Thus, she concludes that a certain degree of “anarchy will be unavoidable” in a revolutionary crisis, and “the only anti-toxin” to this sickness is “the idealism and social activity of the masses, unlimited political freedom.”[42] Kautsky agreed with Luxemburg that lumpenproletarians of “strong character, turn to violent resentment and become criminals,” but he countered that in a revolutionary crisis “such elements are easily disposed of by the state.”[43]

A third proposed solution to the problem of the lumpenproletariat is to incorporate at least the honest and working lumpenproletarians into the labor movement and into the disciplined military wing of a socialist revolution. As suggested earlier, Engels was fascinated toward the end of his life with the prospect of organizing London’s East End dockworkers into industrial unions. He described London’s dockworkers as “the lowest stratum above the Lumpenproletariat.”[44] Thus, in speculating on the prospects for a dockworker’s strike in 1889, he distinguishes the unorganized workers of London’s East End, who are unskilled and poorly paid for casual work, from the lowest sediment of the lumpenproletarians, who Page 83 →generally live in the same East End neighborhoods as the dockworkers. Engels laments that it is the lumpenproletariat that “has hitherto had the last say there, purporting to be the prototype and representative of the million starvelings in the East End.” Engels bemoans the fact that these workers are generally looked down on by the more highly paid and skilled trade union workers, because it was his view that by organizing “the million starvelings in the East End,” the types of disorderly rioting, looting, fistfights, and arson that had characterized lumpenproletarian actions could be prevented or “simply put down.”[45] In particular, Engels was referring to an organized demonstration of the Social Democratic Federation in Trafalgar Square on February 8, 1886, which had been disrupted by lumpenproletarians, who used the demonstration as an excuse to loot wine shops, meat shops, and jewelry stores, while engaged in meaningless acts of vandalism. Engels criticizes leaders of the demonstration for not being able to tell the difference between unemployed workers and lumpenproletarians. Engels was beginning to see the potential of industrial unions, as opposed to trade unions, as vehicles for organizing the working class at the point of production, but this “solution” does nothing to address the problem of nonworkers with no economic relation to production.[46]

Marx also considered the prospect that lumpenproletarians could be recruited into the ranks of armed workers during revolutionary upheavals, although he offers a decidedly mixed opinion on this possibility. In his Class Struggles in France, Marx notes that the lumpenproletariat fought alongside the proletariat on the barricades during the February Revolution that resulted in a republican Provisional Government. Yet these same lumpenproletarians turned against the more radicalized industrial proletariat during the June Days, which led Marx to observe that the lumpenproletariat are “as capable of the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices as of the basest banditry and the foulest corruption.” In the end, he concludes that lumpenproletarians never renounce “their Lazzaroni character.”[47] Lenin would draw a similar conclusion after the 1905 Russian Revolution by noting that “lumpen-proletarians are sometimes distinguished for their sharp conflicts, and sometimes for their amazing instability and inability to fight.”[48]

Similarly, in his “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” (1926), Mao Tse-tung identified a “fairly large lumpen-proletariat, made up of peasants who have lost their land and handicraftsmen who cannot get work.”[49] Mao observed that

Page 84 →China’s status as a colony and semi-colony has given rise to a multitude of rural and urban unemployed. Denied proper means of making a living, many of them are forced to resort to illegitimate ones, hence, the robbers, gangsters, beggars, prostitutes and the numerous people who live on superstitious practices. This social stratum is unstable; while some are apt to be bought over to the reactionary forces, others may join the revolution.[50]

Mao concluded early in that country’s communist movement that “one of China’s difficult problems is how to handle these people [i.e., lumpenproletarians]. Brave fighters but apt to be destructive, they can become a revolutionary force if given proper guidance.”[51] However, after more than a decade of building a revolutionary movement, Mao was still convinced that lumpenproletarians “lack constructive qualities and are given to destruction rather than construction; after joining the revolution, they become a source of roving-rebel and anarchist ideology in the revolutionary ranks. Therefore, we should know how to remold them and guard against their destructiveness.”[52]

However, when left without guidance, or when efforts to remold them fail, Lenin suggests (as did Luxemburg) that the lumpenproletariat was more inclined toward anarchistic and terroristic forms of violence, which was merely a continuation of their criminal activities—murder and theft—in a politicized form.[53] Lenin observes that after the 1905 Russian Revolution,

Armed struggle pursues two different aims, which must be strictly distinguished: in the first place, this struggle aims at assassinating individuals, chiefs, and subordinates in the army and police; in the second place, it aims at the confiscation of monetary funds both from the government and from private persons [i.e., bank robbery and burglary].[54]

Lenin observes that after 1905, “this form of struggle was adopted as the preferable and even exclusive form of social struggle by the vagabond elements of the population, the lumpen proletariat and anarchist groups.”[55] However, he also concludes that this type of guerrilla warfare against the capitalist class and the state tends to result in declarations of martial law, the mobilization of military troops into police duty, pogroms, and the use Page 85 →of military courts to try political criminals, which makes revolutionary organizing more difficult. Thus, in the end, one always returns to Engels’s admonition that “the lumpenproletariat, this scum of depraved elements from all classes, with headquarters in the big cities, is the worst of all the possible allies. . . . Every leader of the workers who uses these scoundrels as guards or relies on them for support proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement.”[56]

Page 86 →Chapter Five

The Lumpenproletariat as a New Revolutionary Vanguard

The proposed Marxian solutions to the problem of the lumpenproletariat all share one common assumption—a successful socialist revolution. Accordingly, no Marxist theorists, with perhaps the exception of Kautsky, pondered the possibility of an indefinite growth of the surplus population or its extended reproduction on a world scale. More than 100 years after The Communist Manifesto, the collapse of the revolutions of 1848, the defeat of the Paris Commune, and the later disappointment of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the concept of the lumpenproletariat again became an object of serious discussion among Marxist theorists in the 1960s and 1970s. These discussions were largely a response to two sets of events: (1) the outbreak of anticolonial and nationalist revolutions in the “Third World,” and (2) urban riots and the black liberation movement in the United States. These events were not led by the industrial proletariat, but by the rural and urban masses living outside capitalist relations of production, who were often excluded from participating in those relations by the very process of “modernization” and capitalist development.

Consequently, some political theorists looked favorably on the works of Mao Tse-tung, but as pointed out in the previous chapter, Mao was quite orthodox in his theoretical analysis of the lumpenproletariat. He viewed the lumpenproletariat as an unstable substrate that could be recruited into a revolutionary army, but only if they were intensely educated and strictly disciplined by the proletarian vanguard. For Mao, the lumpenproletariat served much the same function for the proletariat and the peasantry as Page 87 →they did for monarchists and the bourgeoisie; they were “bribed tools,” in Marx’s words, but in the Red Army they were bribed tools of the alliance of proletarians and peasants. Moreover, despite the importance of the peasantry to the Chinese Revolution, Mao still insisted that “though not very numerous, the industrial proletariat represents China’s new productive forces, is the most progressive class in modern China, and has become the leading force in the revolutionary movement.”[1]

Frantz Fanon was the first political theorist influenced by Marx to seriously revisit the problem of the lumpenproletariat after the Russian and Chinese revolutions, but he did so in the context of the post–World War II anticolonial revolutions in Africa. During the previous 100 years, the African continent had been carved up into artificial “nations” based on the colonial jurisdictions of Great Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, but these nationalities had been imposed on the African landscape without any regard for traditional tribal, ethnic, religious, linguistic, or economic commonalities that were the basis of the European nation-states. After World War II, and particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, the entire continent was in upheaval as a result of armed anticolonial revolutions seeking national independence from the European colonial powers.

Fanon was born in the French overseas territory of Martinique, but the time he lived in Algeria during the Franco-Algerian War proved to be far more influential in rehabilitating the concept of the lumpenproletariat. Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth (1961) as a participant observer of the Algerian conflict with France, but he was also an astute observer of anticolonial conflicts across Africa, and thus his book was immediately declared “the handbook for the Black revolution.”[2] Fanon’s position bore the marks of Maoist influence, which was making its way into French Marxism at the time,[3] but Fanon went beyond Mao in his enthusiasm for both the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat. To a certain extent, Fanon approaches positions taken by nineteenth-century anarchists, such as Mikhail Bakunin, who argued that the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat made it more likely that revolutions would occur in “backward” countries, rather than in the advanced industrial nations, where large sections of the proletariat had become embourgeoised through affluence and education.[4]

Despite the worldwide acclaim accorded to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Peter Worsley finds that Western commentators generally focused on Fanon’s discussion of political violence, rather than his reassessment of Page 88 →the lumpenproletariat. The result is that Fanon’s analysis of the lumpenproletariat quickly became “the most underemphasized element in his thinking” despite it being “his most original notion.”[5] Worsley points out that “the key classes providing support for the revolution, for Fanon, are (1) the peasantry and (2) the lumpenproletariat, though for either class to struggle with success they must unite with the ‘urban intellectuals,’ a small number of whom ‘go to the people’ in the countryside and begin to live and work among them.”[6]

Town and Country: The Peasants

Fanon’s analysis of Africa’s anticolonial and nationalist revolutions begins by drawing a sharp contrast between the city and the countryside in colonized countries, primarily because “Third World” cities are the geographical centers of colonial political authority and economic penetration. These cities are the capitals of colonial political authority, with their government buildings, colonial courts, military and police barracks, and segregated neighborhoods, where colonial residents live in secluded security. Equally important, colonial cities are where capitalist enterprises locate their headquarters to introduce imperial mining, manufacturing, and agricultural enterprises and to ship the wealth extracted from the colony back to the epicenters of imperial power in Europe. These corporate enterprises, and the smaller locally owned businesses and professions that emerge around them, become the basis of a colonial bourgeoisie and working class that adopt a Western mode of dress, conducts business and politics in the language of the European colonizers, and even adopts Western religious orientations and cultural norms. Meanwhile, the countryside is left comparatively undisturbed except for the introduction of industrial agricultural practices on large swaths of land that are either purchased or seized by colonial settlers.[7]

Despite the industrialization and urbanization that occur in colonial cities, Fanon observes that the peasantry continues to be a large majority of the population in most of these countries, and he argues that colonial authorities and their urban compradors make the mistake of orienting themselves politically toward the peasantry based on Western experience, where the peasants’ traditional attachments and orientations tended to make them conservative and even reactionary in their political orientation. Fanon argues that

Page 89 →The history of middle-class and working class revolutions [in Europe] has shown that the bulk of the peasants often constitute a brake on the revolution. Generally in industrialized countries the peasantry as a whole are the least aware, the worst organized, and at the same time the most anarchical element. They show a whole range of characteristics—individualism, lack of discipline, liking for money, and propensities towards waves of uncontrollable rage and deep discouragement which define a line of behavior that is objectively reactionary.[8]

However, Fanon argues that it is a theoretical mistake to assume that non-European peasants are the same as the European peasantry—culturally and politically; colonial peasants have the same attachment to tradition, but it generates a different political outcome in the context of colonialism. First, the peasantry remains a majority of the population in the colonized nations of the world, and in the less-developed countries that were being integrated into the emerging informal American Empire,[9] whereas in Europe the peasantry rapidly dwindled as a result of industrialization. Colonizers are not interested in facilitating industrial development in the less-developed countries, but only in extracting wealth such as minerals, metals, lumber, and food.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, Fanon claims that

In fact if a reasoned analysis of colonized society had been made, it would have shown them that the native peasantry lives against a background of tradition, where the traditional structure of society has remained intact, whereas in the industrialized countries it is just this traditional setting which has been broken up by the progress of industrialization. In the colonies, it is at the very core of the embryonic working class that you find individualist behavior. . . . The peasant who stays put defends his traditions stubbornly, and in a colonized society stands for the disciplined element whose interests lie in maintaining the social structure.[10]

In this respect, it is the peasantry who are the pure repository of “the nation” against the intrusions of Western colonialism; they preserve the identities that existed prior to colonization because the political and cultural impact of colonialism is muted in the countryside. The peasantry are Page 90 →the repository of the true nation because they are uncorrupted by Western colonial influences and retain the original history of “the nation” as it existed before colonization. Therefore, tradition and custom become revolutionary, because custom and tradition define a nation that is uncorrupted by outside influences. Thus, Fanon contends that when urban intellectuals travel to the countryside and “get used to talking to the peasants,” what they discover is that

the mass of the country people have never ceased to think of the problem of their liberation except in terms of violence, in terms of taking back the land from the foreigners, in terms of national struggle, and of armed insurrection. It is all very simple. These men discover a coherent people who go on living, as it were, statically, but who keep their moral values and their devotion to the nation intact. They discover a people that is generous, ready to sacrifice themselves completely, an impatient people, with a stone pride.[11]

Fanon concludes that “the many peasant risings which have their roots in the country districts bear witness wherever they occur to the ubiquitous and usually solidly massed presence of the new nation.”[12] However, in a prescient observation that is generally ignored, Fanon was also acutely aware that if radical intellectuals did not work to educate and organize the peasantry in traditional societies, but instead focused their attention on the urban middle and working classes, the peasantry was equally liable to being mobilized by traditional religious leaders, tribal chieftains, and village elders in ways that “may occasionally give birth to movements which are based on religious fanaticism or tribal wars.”[13] The peasants’ traditional attachments to “the nation” as it existed before colonialism could just as readily be mobilized in a reactionary direction to recapture that past in its traditional form and to consolidate the power of traditional tribal and religious leaders.

Historical Origins of the Revolutionary Lumpenproletariat

Worsley correctly concludes that Fanon’s view of anticolonial revolution required an advance on the cities, because they were the seats of colonial political authority, economic penetration, and cultural influence. Page 91 →Thus, once entrenched among the peasants, Worsley argues, anticolonial revolutions next proceed by establishing “a second social base among the lumpenproletariat.”[14] Significantly, Fanon’s urban lumpenproletariat is not the Parisian lumpenproletariat or the Neapolitan lazzaroni so viciously castigated by Marx in The Class Struggles in France. It is more akin to the early bumpkin lumpenproletariat described by Engels in The Condition of the English Working Class and The Peasant War in Germany.

Fanon offers a description of the historical origins of the Third World lumpenproletariat that sounds remarkably similar to that offered by Engels. The process of lumpenproletarian formation described by Fanon follows a pattern remarkably similar to what Engels described in England, Germany, France, and Italy, where the industrialization of agriculture and the introduction of capitalist relations of production spin off a landless rural population of seasonal and migratory agricultural laborers, while displacing others from the land to the cities. According to Fanon,

The landless peasants, who make up the lumpenproletariat, leave the country districts, where vital statistics are just so many insoluble problems, rush toward the towns, crowd into tin-shack settlements, and try to make their way into the ports and cities founded by colonial domination. The bulk of the country people for their part continue to live within a rigid framework, and the extra mouths to feed have no other alternative than to emigrate toward the centers of population.[15]

This understanding of the urban lumpenproletariat in its early formative phase is identical to Engels’s understanding as laid out in The Peasant War in Germany, where he reports that the lumpenproletariat sometimes joined the peasantry as a revolutionary class ally, but cautions, “It will be recalled, however, that a great many [of the lumpenproletarians], namely those living in the towns, still had a substantial share of sound peasant nature and had not as yet been possessed by the venality and depravity of the present ‘civilised’ lumpenproletariat.”[16] The early lumpenproletariat in the colonial cities retains their familial, tribal, and ethnic ties to the countryside, and as recent immigrants, they retain peasant cultural, moral, and religious norms. For this reason, Worsley emphasizes, “this new population of the cities of the Third World should not be thought of in static, ‘structuralist’ terms as a separate category—lumpenproletarians—distinctlyPage 92 → marked off from the peasants on the one hand and the workers on the other. . . . they are only recent ex-peasants in many cases so that they are essentially people in process, not a fixed and consolidated, let alone self-conscious and organized social class.”[17] Worsley describes Fanon’s Third World lumpenproletariat as a group that has

no steady jobs; they live from hand to mouth, sell a few stolen goods here, buy farm-produce from relatives and resell them so as to “make” a hundredth part of penny profit. . . . Sometimes they get a brief job as a coolie; a vast mass of them live off their relatives, with whom they live on arrival in the city and on whom they fall back when times are bad. Their domestic and marital life is similar: a set of disconnected episodes rather than a continuous series of unfolding successive phases in the normal development sequence of family-life: getting married, having children, their growing up, their leaving home, etc. For the lower depths, marriage itself is abnormal, “faithful concubinage,” fatherless, matricentral families the norm. Residentially, the family has no home, only a temporary dwelling-place; they live in shanty-towns made of packing-cases, not in houses, not even in slum-houses.[18]

It is at this stage of class formation—and this stage alone—that the lumpenproletariat serves as the “spearhead,” but not the vanguard of anticolonial revolution in the cities. Fanon is acutely aware that the process of modernization and industrialization opens a brief window of opportunity for this lumpenproletariat in the process of formation to act as the spearhead of anticolonial nationalist revolutions. Lumpenproletarians are the tip of the spear, but peasants are the shaft that drives the spear into the heart of colonial authority. This is because the urban lumpenproletariat is not yet entirely a separate class, but is the point of the peasant spear. As Fanon notes,

In fact the rebellion, which began in the country districts, will filter into the towns through that faction of peasant population which is blocked on the outer fringe of the urban centers, that fraction which has not yet succeeded in finding a bone to gnaw in the colonial system. The men whom the growing population of the country districts and colonial expropriation have brought to desert their Page 93 →family holdings circle tirelessly around the different towns, hoping that one day or another they will be allowed inside. It is within this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns, at the core of the lumpenproletariat, that the rebellion will find its urban spearhead. For the lumpenproletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and from their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of colonized people.[19]

Fanon goes on to describe the lumpenproletarian revolutionary spearhead as follows:

The constitution of a lumpenproletariat is a phenomenon which obeys its own logic, and neither the brimming activity of the missionaries nor the decrees of the central government can check its growth. This lumpenproletariat is like a horde of rats; you may kick them and throw stones at them, but despite your efforts they’ll go on gnawing at the roots of the tree. . . . The lumpenproletariat, once it is constituted, brings all its forces to endanger the “security” of the town, and is the sign of the irrevocable decay, the gangrene ever present at the heart of the colonial domination. So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed and the petty criminals, urged on from behind [by the peasantry], throw themselves into the struggle for liberation like stout working men. These classless idlers will by militant and decisive action discover the path that leads to nationhood.[20]

While Fanon’s interpreters have often presented his views as the antithesis to Marx’s and Engels’s concept of the lumpenproletariat, it should be remembered that Fanon was describing a lumpenproletariat in its earliest phase of development, and in this regard, his description is actually identical to Engels’s earlier analysis. Even with respect to the lumpenproletariat’s revolutionary potential, Fanon’s work is not completely at odds with Marx’s understanding of the lumpenproletariat. In fact, in The Class Struggles in France, Marx notes that the lumpenproletarian Mobile Guard organized by the Provisional Government during the 1848 Revolution generally consisted of young recruits, who “at the youthful age at which the Provisional Government recruited them, [are] thoroughly malleable, as capable of the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices as of the basest banditry Page 94 →and the foulest corruption.”[21] Marx notes that prior to joining the Mobile Guard and their betrayal of the proletariat in 1848, the lumpenproletariat had fought bravely alongside the proletariat at the first barricades. The problem, as both Lenin and Mao concluded, was that lumpenproletarian allies were unstable or, as Fanon put it, “the most spontaneous.”

Fanon’s admirers tend to emphasize his rescue of the lumpenproletariat from the scrap heap of history, and even argue that Fanon radically breaks with Marx and Engels in his assessment of the lumpenproletariat, but this is a false claim for additional reasons beyond those mentioned above. First, Fanon identifies the lumpenproletariat as the urban spearhead of anticolonial revolution, but he does so mainly because of its recent emigration from the countryside and its retention of strong cultural, familial, tribal, ethnic, and religious ties to the peasantry. The lumpenproletariat remains an urban repository of the “traditional values” of the peasant community and of charitable generosity. However, the lumpenproletariat is not, and never appears in Fanon as, an independent agent of revolution—socialist, anticolonial, or nationalist. Rather, it must be organized and led by intellectuals and “pushed from behind” by the peasantry.

In this regard, Fanon is under no illusions about the potentially destructive and demoralizing influence of the lumpenproletariat described by Marx and Engels. Fanon is profoundly and explicitly aware of the lumpenproletariat’s destructive capacity, and even its proclivity for criminality and reactionary intrigue, but this aspect of his work has been completely ignored by most scholars. For example, Fanon comments on “the enormous influx of young Kenyans coming from the country districts and the forests, who when they did not manage to find a market for their labor took to stealing, debauchery, and alcoholism.” Fanon concludes that “juvenile delinquency in the colonized countries is the direct result of the existence of a lumpenproletariat.”[22]

Elsewhere, Fanon discusses the Malagasy Uprising of 1947. The Democratic Movement for Madagascar Restoration (MDRM) was the first political party formed in Madagascar following the Brazzaville Conference of 1944, where General Charles de Gaulle announced that all former French colonies would become French overseas territories with elected representation in the French National Assembly. The MDRM was a nationalist party and its platform was based on the principle of national independence from France. In 1946, the MDRM deputies to the French National Assembly submitted a bill seeking independence for Madagascar, but it was rejected Page 95 →by the French deputies. The effort also met with disapproval from many of France’s leading politicians, who feared the MDRM’s demands presaged the beginning of a violent conflict similar to that initiated by Vietnamese nationalists in French Indochina only a month earlier. Following an armed Malagasy uprising a few months later, the MDRM was declared illegal and several of its party officials were put on trial and imprisoned by French colonial authorities.[23] Fanon reports that after French colonial rulers suppressed the armed nationalist rebellion, they immediately began the organized repression of the MDRM, but for the colonial rulers to succeed at this effort, they had to use “the usual traditional methods: frequent arrests, racist propaganda between tribes, and the creation of a party of the unorganized elements of the lumpenproletariat.”[24]

Thus, in contrast to his limited pronouncements about the lumpenproletariat’s revolutionary potential, Fanon ultimately concludes that

Colonialism will also find in the lumpenproletariat a considerable space for maneuvering. For this reason any movement for freedom ought to give its fullest attention to this lumpenproletariat. The peasant masses will always answer the call to the rebellion, but if the rebellion’s leaders think it will be able to develop without taking the masses into consideration, the lumpenproletariat will throw itself into the battle and will take part in the conflict—but this time on the side of the oppressor. And the oppressor, who never loses a chance of setting the niggers against each other, will be extremely skillful in using that ignorance and incomprehension which are the weakness of the lumpenproletariat. If this available reserve of human effort is not immediately organized by the forces of rebellion, it will find itself fighting as hired soldiers side by side with the colonial troops. In Algeria, it is the lumpenproletariat which furnished the harkis and the messalists; in Angola, it supplied the road openers who nowadays precede the Portuguese armed columns; in the Congo, we find once more the lumpenproletariat in regional manifestations in Kasai and Katanga, while at Leopoldville the Congo’s enemies made use of it to organize “spontaneous” mass meetings against Lumumba.[25]

Fanon provides a long list of examples where the lumpenproletariat in African nations played the role of bribed tools of reactionary intrigue, or Page 96 →simply served as a recruitment ground for criminals. In contrast to this historical reality, he can only point to the theoretical potential of the lumpenproletariat serving as an ancillary agent of anticolonial revolution

The Lumpenproletariat Comes to the United States

The next effort by Marxists to conceptualize and theorize the lumpenproletariat was undertaken by the founders of the Black Panther Party, including Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, and Stokely Carmichael.[26] These thinkers were all adherents of Marxism-Leninism, but with a strong admixture of the theory of internal colonialism and Frantz Fanon.[27] In a review of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Eldridge Cleaver could rightly claim that Fanon’s book is “now known among the militants of the black liberation movement in America as ‘the Bible.’”[28] Cleaver personally admired Fanon as a political theorist, because of his “devastating attack upon Marxism-Leninism for its narrow preoccupation with Europe and the affairs and salvation of White folks.” Cleaver also emphasized that it was Fanon who “unearthed the category of the Lumpenproletariat and began to deal with it, recognizing that vast majorities of the colonized people fall into that category. It is because of the fact that Black people in the United States are also colonized that Fanon’s analysis is so relevant to us.”[29]

Like many black and Chicano radicals, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale were also deeply influenced by the Cuban Revolution. They learned about the theory of internal colonialism primarily by reading Ernesto “Che” Guevara,[30] as well as by being the beneficiaries of a wide diffusion of Latin American dependency theory in the United States.[31] In an excellent genealogy of this theoretical diffusion, Ramon A. Gutierrez finds that black nationalists and Chicano radicals “embraced, transformed, and further elaborated on the idea of internal colonialism to explain their own subordinate status in the United States, which was the product of forced enslavement and military occupation. As a colonized population in the United States, Blacks and Chicanos suffered the effects of racism, were dominated by outsiders, much as colonial subjects in the Third World had seen their indigenous values and ways of life destroyed.”[32]

The theory of internal colonization was first proposed by Harold Cruse, an African American intellectual who attended the City College of New York, but without earning a degree. In 1962, Cruse published an Page 97 →article in Studies on the Left[33] called “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American.” In this article, he argued that “the Negro is the American problem of underdevelopment,” and this problem was the direct result of political, economic, and cultural relations of domestic colonialism inside the United States. The effect of domestic colonialism was that African Americans lived in conditions similar to those of the poor populations of Latin America and Africa, plagued by “hunger, illiteracy, disease, ties to the land, urban and semi-urban slums, cultural starvation, and the psychological reactions to being ruled over by others not of his kind.”[34]

A more complete elaboration of the doctrine of internal colonialism, modified to account for the conditions of African Americans, was developed by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, who published Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967).[35] Stokely Carmichael was born in Trinidad but immigrated to the United States at the age of eleven. He became an activist while attending Howard University and was a leader in founding the Black Power movement in the United States as chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1967, he resigned from SNCC, later serving as “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party (BPP). Charles V. Hamilton was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and graduated from Roosevelt University in 1951. He earned a master’s and PhD from the University of Chicago. After receiving his PhD, he taught at Rutgers University, Lincoln University, and Roosevelt University before joining Columbia University in 1969, where he remained until his retirement in 1998.

Carmichael and Hamilton documented numerous examples of domestic colonial relations, such as denying home mortgages to ghetto residents, which forced them to remain in relations of dependency to white slumlords while paying higher prices for food and consumer goods than whites would pay in their own neighborhoods at the same white-owned stores. Carmichael and Hamilton claimed that in numerous ways, white “exploiters come into the ghetto from outside, bleed it dry, and leave it economically dependent on the larger society.”[36] Carmichael and Hamilton also drew an explicit distinction between individual racial attitudes and “institutional racism.”[37] They claimed that institutional racism was embedded in the economic, political, and cultural relations of domestic colonialism. These institutions could not be educated away one person at a time, but required a fundamental realignment of power relations in American society. Thus, Carmichael and Hamilton called for a global Black Power movementPage 98 → that would link the struggles of African Americans in the United States to the struggles of similarly colonized populations in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.[38]

Huey P. Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, embraced the theory of internal colonialism, but he extended it conceptually to emphasize that the economic exploitation of black neighborhoods in the United States required the paramilitary occupation of those same neighborhoods by white police in the same way that imperialists maintained control of foreign territories through military occupation and violence. Newton observes that

In America, black people are treated very much like the Vietnamese people or any other colonized people because we’re used, we’re brutalized by the police in our community. They occupy our community as a foreign troop occupies territory. The police are there in our community not to promote our welfare or for our security or our safety, but they are there to contain us, to brutalize us and murder us, because they have their orders to do so just as soldiers in Vietnam have their orders to destroy the Vietnamese people.[39]

On the basis of this sentiment, the Black Panther Party was founded by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in 1966 for the purpose of conducting armed citizens’ patrols for the self-defense of African American residents in Oakland, California, who were regularly subjected to police brutality.[40] During this initial phase of the party’s development, its leaders were impressed by Mao Tse-tung’s declaration that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”[41] Newton recounts that during this time, “We read the work of Frantz Fanon, particularly The Wretched of the Earth, the four volumes of chairman Mao Tse-tung, and Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare. . . . Mao and Fanon and Guevara all saw clearly that . . . the only way to win freedom was to meet force with force.”[42]

Huey P. Newton authored a “Ten-Point Program” that included demands such as self-determination for the black community, full employment, decent housing, the inclusion of black history in public school curricula, the exemption of all black men from military service, an immediate end to police brutality and the murder of black people by police, fair trials by juries of one’s black peers, and the de-incarceration of black prisoners convicted without fair trails. The Ten-Point Program declared its revolutionaryPage 99 → intent by concluding with a passage from the U.S. Declaration of Independence that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”[43] However, the BPP quickly expanded beyond its initial fascination with armed struggle by initiating several community initiatives, including the Free Breakfast for Children Program, free food pantries, and community health clinics.[44] The BPP rapidly expanded across the United States, but it enrolled its largest membership in cities, such as the Oakland–San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia

In 1969, the BPP released a document intended to clarify the party’s ideological position in the context of Marxist-Leninist theory. Eldridge Cleaver, who was the party’s minister of information, wrote On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party, which starts by firmly declaring that “we are Marxist-Leninists” and “we have studied and understood the classical principles of scientific socialism,” but “we have adapted these principles to our own situation ourselves.”[45] Cleaver criticizes Marxist theory for having “never really dealt with the United States of America.” He goes further to chastise Marxist-Leninists in the United States for relying “too heavily upon foreign, imported analyses” that “have seriously distorted the realities of the American scene.” Consequently, Cleaver insisted that it was time for “a new strictly American ideological synthesis.”[46]

Cleaver’s main concern was that U.S. Marxist-Leninists continued to theorize the working class as a unitary collective subject with a common objective interest, but they did so without taking into account the legacy of the country’s peculiar institution of black slavery. The enduring legacy of structural and attitudinal racism in the United States posed a difficulty for Marxism-Leninism as inherited in its previous iterations, because “on the subject of racism, Marxism-Leninism offers us very little assistance.” The BPP was always committed to a unified revolutionary movement in the United States, and it actively sought alliances with white radical and working-class organizations to create such a movement, but Cleaver also reminds us that “every Black Person knows that the wind may change at any given moment and that a Lynch Mob, made up of White members of the ‘Working Class,’ might come breathing down his neck if not kicking down his door.”[47] Consequently, by drawing a distinction between black and white, Cleaver found “a lot of confusion over whether we are members Page 100 →of the Working Class or whether we are Lumpenproletariat. It is necessary to confront this confusion, because it has a great deal to do with the strategy and tactics that we follow and with our strained relations with the White radicals from the oppressor section of Babylon.”[48]

Cleaver followed in the footsteps of Newton and Seale by pointing out that Frantz Fanon had been the first Marxist-Leninist political theorist to be primarily concerned about the problems of black people, but even he was focused on Africa. Consequently, Fanon’s works were indirectly useful to African Americans, but his writings did not specifically address the problems of blacks living in the heart of Babylon. Cleaver concludes that even though the BPP could “relate heavily to Fanon, he has not given us the last word on applying the Marxist-Leninist analysis to our problems inside the United States.” For that purpose, one had to “take the teachings of Huey P. Newton as our foundation and go from there.”[49] In particular, Cleaver points out that after studying Fanon, Huey P. Newton, and Seale, he began to apply their analysis of colonized people to black people in the United States. They adopted Fanon’s anticolonial perspective, but the BPP gave it a uniquely African American content.[50]

The Newton/Seale position was that the United States has a Mother Country Working Class and a Working Class from the Black Colony. While the white working class voluntarily immigrated to the United States in search of work, freedom, and opportunity, the black working class was forcibly torn from its lands and brought to the United States as slaves. Hence, white Americans effectively brought a colonized black population into the US motherland, where it was enslaved by white plantation owners, who exported their products back to the European metropolis or to northern US capitalists. Following the Civil War, when slaves were forced from the land a second time, they either immigrated to the cities in search of industrial work or they became sharecroppers—a new form of peonage or serfdom. As was discussed earlier in the analysis of Marx’s Capital, the logic of capitalist development generates an ever-increasing surplus population, and consequently the US also has “a Mother Country Lumpenproletariat [White] and a Lumpenproletariat from the Black Colony.” However, Cleaver concludes that “there is a difference between the problems of the Mother Country Working Class and the Working Class from the Black Colony. There is also a difference between the Mother Country Lumpen and the Lumpen from the Black Colony,” and these differences are anchored in the existing relations of production.[51]

Page 101 →The ideologists of the BPP argued that a “key area of the confusion” in existing US Marxist-Leninist theory was “falsely assuming the existence of one All-American Proletariat; one All-American Working Class; and one All-American Lumpenproletariat.”[52] Instead, Cleaver argues that the contemporary working class in the United States “shows little resemblance to the Working Class of Marx’s day. . . . The advent of Labor Unions, Collective Bargaining, the Union Shop, Social Security, and other special protective legislation has castrated the Working Class, transforming it into the bought-off Labor Movement—a most un-revolutionary, reformist minded movement that is only interested in higher wages and more job security. The Labor Movement has abandoned all basic criticism of the Capitalist system of exploitation itself.”[53]

Indeed, Cleaver observes that the contemporary working class “has become a new industrial elite, resembling more the chauvinistic elites of the selfish craft and trade guilds of Marx’s time than the toiling masses ground down in abject poverty.”[54] Consequently, Cleaver concludes that “in both the Mother Country and the Black Colony, the Working Class is the Right Wing of the Proletariat, and the Lumpenproletariat is the Left Wing.”[55] Cleaver insists that there “is a contradiction between the right wing and the left wing of the Proletariat, just as the right wing has created its own organizations, it is necessary for the left wing to have its form of organization to represent its interests against all hostile classes—including the Working Class.”[56] The Black Panther Party was one step forward toward organizing the lumpenproletariat for self-determination and revolution.

Cleaver is in the mainstream of Marxist political theory to the extent that he defines the lumpenproletariat as

all those who have no secure relationship or vested interest in the means of production and the institutions of capitalist society. That part of the “Industrial Reserve Army” held perpetually in reserve; who have never worked and never will; who can’t find a job; who are unskilled and unfit; who have been displaced by machines, automation, and cybernation, and were never retrained or invested with new skills; all those on Welfare or receiving State Aid.[57]

Moreover, Cleaver openly embraces the “criminal element” as a part of his lumpenproletariat. The criminal element of the lumpenproletariat Page 102 →are “those who live by their wits, existing off that which they rip off, who stick guns in the faces of businessmen and say ‘stick ’em up,’ or ‘give it up’! Those who don’t even want a job, who hate to work and can’t relate to punching some pig’s time clock, who would rather punch a pig in the mouth and rob him than punch that same pig’s time clock and work for him, those whom Huey P. Newton call ‘the illegitimate capitalists.’”[58]

Cleaver and the BPP went well beyond Fanon’s assessment of the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat as an urban spearhead to actually call it the vanguard of the proletariat. Cleaver credits Huey P. Newton with articulating the original “ideology and the methodology for organizing the Black Urban Lumpenproletariat. Armed with this ideological perspective and method, Huey transformed the Black lumpenproletariat from the forgotten people at the bottom of society into the vanguard of the proletariat.”[59] However, it is Cleaver who first makes the theoretical connection between this pioneering assessment of the lumpenproletariat’s revolutionary potential and the contemporary logic of capitalist development.

Even prior to the publication of Alain Touraine’s The Post-Industrial Society (1971) and Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973),[60] Cleaver began to unravel the impact of postindustrialization on the future of the working class. Cleaver observes that “in a highly mechanized economy, it cannot be said that the fantastically high productivity is the product solely of the Working Class. Machines and computers are not members of the Working Class.”[61] While there is both a white and a black lumpenproletariat, Cleaver already recognized that it was black workers who were the first to live the impact of postindustrialization as automation and cybernation displaced the most unskilled workers at the bottom of the labor hierarchy. While Kautsky had surmised that mechanization turns all workers into unskilled workers, Cleaver recognized that the new phase of automation eliminated the need for unskilled workers.

Thus, postindustrialization—a word he did not actually use—was having an uneven impact on the development of the working class by disproportionately pushing black workers into the ranks of the lumpenproletariat at a faster rate and in larger numbers than white workers. As blacks had less access to education generally, and to the types of higher education required for the new working class, blacks were not only being systemically lumpenproletarianized, they were being segregated into permanent lumpen status. For this reason, Cleaver argues, “White workers belong to a totally different world than that of Black workers. They are caught up in Page 103 →a totally different economic, political, and social reality, and on the basis of this distinct reality, the pigs of the power structure and treacherous labor leaders find it very easy to manipulate them with Babylonian racism.”[62]

However, Cleaver argues that by adopting Newton’s and Seale’s adaptation of the theory of internal colonization, and Fanon’s embrace of the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat, African Americans can avoid “the trap of criticizing mother country labor unions and workers for the racism as an explanation for the way they treat Black workers. Of course, they are racist, but this is not the full explanation.”[63] For Cleaver, as for Carmichael and Hamilton, racism is an objective relation of difference and an institutionalized structure of exploitation and marginalization. It is not just an individual attitude that can be educated away in the public schools. Ending racial inequality, and indeed all inequality, requires the destruction of the institutions that reproduce it and the revolutionary reconstitution of American society on the basis of a new egalitarian economic system. Thus, Cleaver declared, “We take a revolutionary position against every organized structure that exists in the world today.”[64]

While embracing the vanguard role of the lumpenproletariat, Cleaver insists that “even though we are Lumpen, we are still members of the Proletariat, a category which theoretically cuts across national boundaries but which in practice leaves something to be desired.”[65] Consequently, Cleaver chastises more orthodox Marxist-Leninists, who “accuse the Lumpen of being parasites upon the Working Class. This a stupid charge derived from reading too many of Marx’s footnotes and taking some of his offhand scurrilous remarks for holy writ.”[66] Cleaver’s point is similar to Fanon’s, except in reverse; instead of being peasants displaced from the land and migrating to the new industrial cities, the lumpenproletarians are being displaced from the factories and left to rot in the inner cities created by deindustrialization and white flight to the suburbs. Cleaver’s most serious point, however, is that the existing conditions of the newly emerging black lumpenproletariat will eventually extend to the white working class as the process of automation and cybernation displaces more and more workers, including those who previously thought their skills and union membership would insulate them from deindustrialization (and globalization). In the not-too-distant future, most of the working class—black and white—would be lumpenproletarianized, and it is this historical logic of class decomposition that makes the lumpenproletariat the vanguard of Page 104 →the proletariat. Lumpen status is the future of the working class without a socialist revolution.[67]

Cleaver argued that the logic of class decomposition “dictates a different strategy and set of tactics” in the United States than those typically employed by the industrial proletariat of advanced capitalist countries. Cleaver points out that the student revolution is focused on university campuses, because students are clustered in that geographic location.[68] Similarly, the industrial proletariat focuses its rebellions on setting up picket lines around the factories during a strike or physically seizing factories in more revolutionary actions. However, the lumpenproletariat finds itself “in the peculiar position of being unable to find a job and therefore is unable to attend the Universities. The lumpen has no choice but to manifest its rebellion in the University of the Streets.”[69] Cleaver emphasizes that “it’s very important to recognize that the streets belong to the Lumpen, and that it is in the streets that the Lumpen will make their rebellion.”[70] For Cleaver, the ideological problem is to legitimate street riots by convincing people that street actions are “legitimate expressions of an oppressed people,” who have no other means of expressing their discontent due to the “Black people’s lumpen relationship to the means of production and the institutions of society.” Because of their nonrelation to the means of production, and their exclusion from the major institutions of capitalist society such as schools, universities, and voting, lumpenproletarians are “unable to manifest their rebellion around those means of production and institutions. These are the means of rebellion left open to the Lumpen.”[71]

The Lumpenization of Humanity

Huey P. Newton, the BPP minister of defense, subsequently endorsed Cleaver’s claim that the lumpenproletariat was now the left-wing vanguard of the proletarian revolution, while reconfiguring Carmichael and Hamilton’s call for a global Black Power movement in a new theory of intercommunalism that stressed the common interests of the global lumpenproletariat.[72] While Fanon’s Third World alliance of the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat constituted overwhelming majorities in most countries of the world by 1970, in contrast, Newton considered the following puzzle: “How can the lumpen proletarians carry out a successful socialist Page 105 →transformation when they are only a minority?” in the United States and “in fact how can they do it when history shows that only the proletarians have carried out a successful revolution[?]”[73] Newton observes that members of the Black Panther Party were acutely aware of the fact that “the lumpen proletarians are a minority and the proletarians are the majority,” but he concludes that Cleaver was correct in predicting that “technology is developing at such a rapid rate that automation will progress to cybernation, and cybernation probably to technocracy.”[74] By technocracy, Newton meant a system of production owned and controlled by capitalists, but operated on a daily basis by a small number of highly paid individuals, who could be considered proletarians—that is, a new working class—but who essentially did nothing but stand around in one place pushing buttons and moving mountains.[75] Cleaver extrapolates Newton’s analysis and concludes that the process of technocratization will reach its zenith with

the ultimate machine, with one button, and with one technician standing there pushing it, or, better yet, a robot, itself part of the machine, standing there pushing its own button. The nightmare and the dream of the robots in control. Robots or not, this situation became the profound reality of the majority of the people of the world.[76]

Cleaver argues that the separation and alienation of the people from technology is now “the basic problem of the history of our era,” because it generates what he calls “the lumpen relationship of the people to technology.” This new logic of capitalist development is not generating new relations of production, but nonrelations to production that will swell the ranks of the dispossessed in every capitalist country in the world. This new “condition of enslavement by technology is the lumpen condition.”[77] Cleaver makes it very clear that the rapidly expanding process of lumpenization, “the basic condition of the dispossessed people, those who are cut off from technology, is not the proletarian condition described by Marx, but the Lumpen condition.”[78] For Cleaver and Newton, technocratization and lumpenization are the binary structural effect of contemporary capitalist development—the simultaneous dream of the capitalists and the nightmare of the people.[79] The logic of capitalist development was not generating a steady increase in the ranks of the proletariat, as Marx had predicted in The Communist Manifesto, but rather “the process of its development,Page 106 → the concentration and centralization of technology, produced this lumpenization of humanity.”[80]

As Newton observes, “soon the ruling circle will not need the workers, and if the ruling circle is in control of the means of production the working class will become unemployables or lumpens.”[81] Elsewhere, Newton reiterates that

if the ruling circle remains in power the proletarian working class will definitely be on the decline because they will be unemployables. Every worker is in jeopardy because of the ruling circle, which is why we say that the lumpen proletarians have the potential for revolution, will probably carry out the revolution, and in the near future will be the popular majority.[82]

Newton concludes that “if the ruling circle remains in power it seems to me that capitalists will continue to develop their technological machinery because they are not interested in the people. Therefore, I expect from them the logic that they have always followed: to make as much money as possible, and pay the people as little as possible—until the people demand more, and finally demand their heads.”[83] For Cleaver this fundamental turning point in lumpenproletarian consciousness will come when people understand that we are “involved in a struggle for the physical control of the machines, of the robots, to physically have them out of the hands of the bourgeoisie, and the working class, because as long as we are cut off we will be slaves.”[84] Only when the means of production are socialized and collectivized will it be possible to establish a society based on the communist principle “from each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs.” However, Cleaver emphasizes that the struggle for consumption is no longer about demanding the right to a job, because “even more so today, the Lumpen realize that there are no jobs to fight for.”[85] The long-term objective of a lumpenproletarian revolution is to seize the means of production to establish equality of consumption and not equality of production. The long-term objective of communism is to establish the right to be lazy and not the right to a job.[86]

As Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology,

in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, Page 107 →society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.[87]

However, to achieve this long-term objective, Cleaver identifies two revolutionary goals of the present time. This first goal was to correct an earlier mistake in how the Black Panther Party conceptualized the lumpenproletariat. Cleaver argues that in his earlier analysis (1970), he had drawn a “narrow interpretation as to who were members of the Lumpen . . . we still accepted his [Marx’s] over-all system of categories and thought of the so-called criminal element, hustlers, pimps, etc. as composing the Lumpen.” In contrast, Cleaver and the BPP were now defining the composition of the lumpenproletariat in terms of “the Lumpen relationship to the means of production. Once we get this definition clear in our mind, then we can move beyond the limitations of Marx.”[88] In other words, everyone who does not have a direct economic relation to production—including those who Marx would have labelled “unproductive labor”—are part of the lumpenproletariat.

Thus, instead of spending so much effort trying to identify a new working class, or to redefine the nonindustrial composition of the working class, it was necessary to recognize that the fundamental process of class composition and decomposition in contemporary capitalism was the lumpenization of humanity across the world based on humanity’s physical nonrelation to the means of production. Based on this definition, by 1972, the lumpenproletariat, in one form or another, was the majority of the population in nearly every capitalist country on earth. Consequently, Cleaver reiterates his earlier position that “the real revolutionary element of our era is the Lumpen, understood in its broader sense.”[89] The first intermediate goal of building a revolution is that “the Lumpen must become conscious of themselves as the vast majority, and the false proletarian, working class consciousness[,] must be negated.”[90] The second intermediate goal of building a revolution, once the lumpenproletariat understands that it is a majority of the population, is to use those numbers “to expropriate the expropriators, to abolish the usurpation, and take control of the machines, technology, into their own hands.”[91]

Thus, in contrast to French theorists of a new working class such Page 108 →as Alain Touraine, Serge Mallet, and Andre Gorz, Newton agreed with Cleaver that the lumpenproletariat was now the left-wing vanguard of the working class, because nearly all members of the working class were destined to become members of the lumpenproletarian nonworking class, but it was largely race and racism that prevented them from seeing it. The Black Panther Party actively sought coalitions and alliances with other progressive organizations, including the United Farm Workers’ movement (Mexican American), the American Indian Movement, the Asian Red Guards, the Young Lords (Puerto Rican), the Peace and Freedom Party, Students for a Democratic Society (white), and the Young Patriots Organization (Appalachian whites).[92] While the Black Panther Party clearly hoped for a unified interracial, multiethnic left-wing movement, Newton and his comrades were nevertheless concerned that the problem of race would prevent the American white working class—who were destined to become lumpenproletarians—from recognizing their own long-term objective interests and the identity of those interests with those of the black lumpenproletariat.[93]

The existence of attitudinal and structural racism was a ready-made formula for the ruling class to organize the emerging white lumpenproletariat into bribed tools of reactionary intrigue sometime in the not-too-distant future. If the left could not unify and organize a socialist movement that surmounted race, sex, lifestyle, and working status, it would leave the political field open to the ruling class, who would deploy racism, sexism, and nationalism—both individual and institutional—as the organizing principle of a reactionary, illiberal, and repressive form of capitalism.[94]

Indeed, in his last contribution to this discussion in 1972, Cleaver was profoundly concerned that the racially privileged but structurally decomposing and declining white working class had “become as much a part of the system that has to be destroyed as the capitalists themselves. They are the second line of resistance, after the cops.”[95] Cleaver derisively suggests that the decomposing white working class would eventually become “the House Niggers of Capitalism.”[96] Newton agreed that “many times the poorest White person is the most racist because he is afraid that he might lose something,” even if that something is nothing more the ability to look down on someone else, because of their race, nationality, or sexuality.[97] With the first onset of globalization in the early 1970s, Cleaver was already sounding the alarm that “the level of oppression inside capitalist countriesPage 109 → has reached a point of desperate ruthlessness that has given rise to a social, political, and economic depravity unparalleled in the history of the world.”[98] The 1980s would usher in a decade of neoliberal reconstruction followed by 1990s, which saw the globalization of neoliberalism.

The Welfare State as Neocolonial Social Control

A countervailing trend in Cleaver’s analysis of the lumpenization of humanity is that this process generates “a dependent world population, at the mercy of those who controlled technology.”[99] In capitalism, and even in socialism, it is labor (i.e., production) that creates the right to an income and consumption. Without any direct economic relation to production, the lumpenproletariat is incapable of leveraging its structural position in the production process to stop production and, thereby, injure the profits of capitalists. The lumpenproletarians exist in a condition of dependency, and this dependent relationship manifests itself in the less developed countries and in the advanced capitalist societies in a similar form: the dole. While defenders of capitalism refer to international relief and social welfare payments as “charity,” Cleaver rejects them as neocolonial forms of social control—the use of food, hunger, illness, and insecurity to manipulate and dominate the burgeoning world lumpenproletariat:

Those who were still left out, unplugged and dependent, ensnarled in a web of social relations thrown off by the new system, and with a status at the bottom of the ladder, became the candidates and objects of charity and welfare, or other forms of relief. CARE packages could now be sent out of the centers where technology had been concentrated and centralized, into those areas of the world that had been sacked and left drifting.[100]

Cleaver notes that in their street rebellions the immediate short-term demand of the lumpenproletariat is that they “be let in on Consumption even if they were blocked out of Production by the absence of jobs or even future prospects on jobs.” Thus, when we watch television footage of urban riots in the ghettos of the United States, we do not see a direct attack on the means of production, and only rarely do we see a direct confrontationPage 110 → with the capitalist state. Instead, we see a direct attack on the means of consumption and the means of distribution in the form of looting, arson, carjacking, and truck jacking. We do not see lumpenproletarians seizing the means of production, but we do see them absconding with the means of consumption. While the street riot is the main means of political action available to the lumpenproletariat, Cleaver was not convinced that these street tactics could severely stress, much less overstress, the repressive capacities of the state. Instead, street riots seem to deflect the revolutionary impulse to the margins of the capitalist economy—to circulation and consumption, rather than production—and to the edges of the capitalist state. When the capitalist state does respond to street rebellions, it does so with violent and overwhelming repression, while it responds to the demand for consumption “with the dole—the system of relief.”[101]

Cleaver criticized the expanding system of public relief in the advanced capitalist countries as “nothing but a sham substitute for equal distribution of the wealth of society.”[102] The expanding systems of public relief were a tool in the hands of the capitalist class to divide “the Lumpen by buying some of them off, thus postponing the showdown between the Lumpen and the capitalist system of production and consumption.”[103] As Cleaver observes,

The Relief People are being born. Instead of being plugged into the system through jobs, they are being plugged in through doles. As a neo-colonial technique of social control, it works. Through the dole, direct and indirect, camouflaged or naked, some people are bought off, the bought-off Lumpen. It was not exactly what they wanted. They wanted dignity and equality, in all spheres, including economic. But they had to live. They had to eat. Everything else was shaky. It was easy to fill out those forms and then wait for the check. It was also hard to find a job.[104]

Cleaver’s analysis of welfare as a form of neocolonial social control designed to regulate the poor into acquiescence ran parallel to a similar historical analysis that had been published a year earlier by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward.[105] Their analysis of the functions of public welfare suggested that mass movements, such as the Black Power movement and the urban riots of the 1960s, were generally successful in extracting material concessions from dominant elites in the form of increased social Page 111 →welfare and other public expenditures that assist the poor. The ruling class incrementally increases these benefits until social peace is reestablished and the poor return to their previous state of acquiescence. As Cleaver feared, the poor are essentially “bribed” into complacency and acquiescence without achieving any fundamental changes to the logic and structure of capitalist society. However, after a period of social stability, the state gradually begins withdrawing these material concessions. Hence, state elites can use social welfare as a way to regulate the poor, while maintaining the stability of the existing social and economic order. We end where we began—with the lumpenproletariat acting as the bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

Page 112 →Chapter Six

The Lumpenproletariat: Communism or Dystopia?

Marxism’s political and intellectual attractiveness began to wane in the late 1970s with the decline of traditional labor movements, the crisis of the welfare state, and the increasingly dismal electoral fortunes of social-democratic and left-wing parties.[1] As these traditional vehicles of left-wing and progressive politics seemed to disintegrate, a variety of new social movements emerged to articulate the political demands of ethnic and national minorities, welfare recipients, the elderly, unemployed youth, pacifists, women, advocates for the environment, and those who pursued alternative lifestyles.[2] The apparent rise of political groups formerly perceived as marginal to the dynamics of capitalist society seemed to require a “New Left” political theory with the capacity to either go beyond traditional Marxism conceptually or to replace Marxist political theory altogether.[3] The development of a distinct and identifiable post-Marxist political theory was one of the numerous responses to this crisis of historical materialism.[4]

Significantly, the emergence of post-Marxist political theory occurred in conjunction with the rise of postindustrial social theories, which the New Left first began to take seriously with the publication of Alain Touraine’s The Post-Industrial Society (1971) and Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973).[5] These two theoretical innovations merged intellectually in the writings of radical social theorists such as Andre Gorz, Jürgen Habermas, Antonio Negri, and Claus Offe, who began to explore the theoretical implications of postindustrialism through the lens of classical Marxist theory. This fusion of the New Left political critique of classical Page 113 →Marxism with postindustrial social theory resulted in a distinctly post-Marxist political theory that is conceptually distinct from postmodernism, poststructuralism, and the numerous identity movements associated with the New Left. The purpose of this chapter is to outline the basic contours of post-Marxist political theory and to identify the generally dystopian and dismal social and political trajectories implied by this theory.

The Intellectual Origins of Post-Marxism

Many scholars will be familiar with the individual writings of prominent scholars such as Gorz, Habermas, Negri, and Offe, but by the turn of the millennium some scholars were beginning to recognize their collective work as a “well-established theoretical position” called “post-Marxism.” Stuart Sim notes that the term post-Marxism first appears in Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy;[6] but the authors injected ambiguity into the term from the outset by distinguishing between post-Marxist and post-Marxist political theory.[7] Sim’s intellectual history of post-Marxism is self-consciously and primarily focused on what Laclau and Mouffe call post-Marxism, which is equated with the explicit rejection of Marxism, rather than with going beyond Marxism. Following the lead of Laclau and Mouffe, Sim identifies post-Marxism with deconstructionism and poststructuralism (Derrida, Laclau and Mouffe), postmodernism (Lyotard, Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari), and second-wave feminism (Hartmann, Butler, Haraway).[8] Thus, Sim’s intellectual history of post-Marxism has only five references to Habermas, four references to Gorz, one reference to Antonio Negri, and no references to Claus Offe, although Habermas and Gorz do receive an extended treatment as key figures in the emergence of post-Marxism. In contrast to Sim’s work, this chapter is focused self-consciously and exclusively on an analysis of post-Marxism as defined by Laclau and Mouffe and as defined in my earlier book, Critical Theories of the State, which identify Gorz, Habermas, Negri, and Offe as central figures in the emergence of post-Marxism.[9]

Sim argues that the effort to grapple with “the decline in importance, both socially and politically, of the working class” is the key theoretical problem shared by both post-Marxism and post-Marxism, and this problem, of course, is a consequence of the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial society.[10] However, Sim also correctly argues that a key Page 114 →point of commonality among post-Marxists, and what distinguishes them from post-Marxists, is that Marxism remains “at the very least, the point of departure for their theoretical speculations.” However, Sim incorrectly dismisses the post-Marxists’ retention of Marxian analytic categories “as a series of somewhat empty gestures, whose content is emotional rather than theoretical.”[11] Sim considers the post-Marxists’ effort to retain a theoretical anchor in Marx as nothing more than “nostalgia” and a “romantic gesture.” What Sim misses in his analysis, however, is the central role of Grundrisse (as opposed to Capital) in a genuinely post-Marxist position that continues to anchor its analysis of society, politics, and the state in Marxian political economy.[12]

The discovery of Grundrisse by Western Marxists generated a shift in thinking about Marx and Marxism as dramatic as the one that occurred after the discovery and publication of Marx’s early writings, such as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology. While the early manuscripts provided the theoretical basis for a new humanist Marxism as compared to the scientific Marx, Grundrisse became the cornerstone for a newly emergent post-Marxism grappling with the social dislocations of postindustrial technologies as compared to industrial machinery. The discovery of Grundrisse was first announced to the Socialist Academy (Moscow) in 1923, but it was not published until 1939 and 1941, when it was released in two volumes. However, in the midst of World War II, and then the Cold War, Grundrisse was effectively inaccessible to Western scholars until 1953 when it was published in German as a single volume by Dietz Verlag.

Grundrisse was largely ignored after its publication in Germany, because scholars viewed the previously unpublished manuscript as nothing more than a “rough draft of Capital”[13] that at best provided “interesting material for a reconstruction of the genesis of Capital.”[14] It was another decade before Herbert Marcuse[15] and Andre Gorz[16] became the first scholars to quote Grundrisse extensively in their New Left critiques of advanced capitalism. Yet Grundrisse’s theoretical significance was still not widely recognized until Martin Nicolaus devoted an entire article to it in the New Left Review and identified it as the only writing that Marx himself considered to be a representation of “the whole of his views.”[17] Thus, the intellectual stage had been set for New Left political theorists and political economists to reassess the status of Grundrisse, which was now recognized as a work that envisioned a grand treatise on political economy with Capital (in all Page 115 →its volumes) being only one small component of a more expansive and forward-looking Marxism.[18] David McLellan subsequently translated and edited an abridged English-language version of Grundrisse, while introducing the book as “the most fundamental of all Marx’s writings” and as “the centerpiece of Marx’s thought.”[19] Shortly thereafter, in 1973, McLellan’s preliminary effort was superseded by a complete English-language edition translated by Martin Nicolaus, which further stimulated interest in the book, particularly with the onset of the stagflation crisis of the 1970s in the advanced capitalist societies and the first glimpses of globalization as a response to that crisis.

For example, by 1979, Julius Sensat concludes that Habermas had shifted his focus from Capital to Grundrisse, and this change of perspective defined a fundamental break with classical Marxian political economy based on the labor theory of value.[20] Indeed, Sensat offers a lengthy analysis of what he calls a “controversial text” and frequently refers to Grundrisse as the foundation of Habermas’s revised conception of historical materialism.[21] Similarly, Adrian Little concludes that Gorz’s “work is firmly grounded in the Marxian tradition, a point emphasized by the constant recourse to Grundrisse in his works,”[22] while Conrad Lodziak and Jeremy Tatman similarly suggest that the lifelong trajectory of Gorz’s thinking was the systematic development of his earliest observations about the possibility of “an alternative thesis in Marx” anchored in Grundrisse, rather than Capital.[23] Little finds that Gorz’s work “is littered with references to Marx’s Grundrisse,” and it is these references that “locate Gorz’s position within the Marxian tradition.”[24] More broadly, Kathi Weeks suggests that “Whereas Capital is the principal text of classical Marxism and the Manuscripts the key text for the humanists . . . in Marx Beyond Marx, a study of the Grundrisse, Negri finds the outlines of an alternative to many existing Marxisms, including both the classical and the humanist traditions.”[25]

Consequently, I argue that the most fundamental distinction between post-Marxism (post-Marxism) and other “post”-ideologies/theories is the idea that Marxian concepts are still necessary, if not sufficient to understand postindustrial and global capitalism. More specifically, Gorz, Habermas, Negri, and Offe, among others, articulate the foundations of a uniquely post-Marxist political theory by anchoring their economic analysis of capitalism in Marx’s Grundrisse rather than Capital.[26] This conceptual shift made it possible to construct a theoretically powerful analysis of postindustrial capitalism, the new social movements, and socialist strategy, while Page 116 →drawing on the most basic insight of classical Marxism that the economic is determinative in the last instance. While Marx’s Capital remains an important text for post-Marxian theorists, it is Grundrisse that rises to the forefront of their economic analysis and provides the conceptual foundation for a postindustrial, as opposed to a postmodern, poststructuralist, or postcapitalist, reading of Capital and other of Marx’s political writings.[27]

The Labor Market: A Power-Generating System

In the works of leading post-Marxist theorists such as Claus Offe, Jürgen Habermas, Antonio Negri, and Andre Gorz, capitalism is always conceptualized as a system.[28] The capitalist system is actually a matrix of three interdependent but relatively autonomous subsystems: the economic system, the political system, and the socialization system. The most important institutions associated with the economic subsystem are the relations of production between classes in the workplace and relations of exchange between buyers and sellers in the marketplace. The socialization subsystem, from which individuals derive normative values, includes the family, educational institutions, religion, and culture. The political subsystem consists primarily of the institutions and policies that define the state.

Importantly, though each subsystem encompasses concretely identifiable institutions, the system as a whole is posited as an ontological entity—real in itself—that produces consequences through institutions, but that is therefore never reducible to institutions. Offe maintains, for example, that the capitalist system is a “superordinate level of mechanisms that generate ‘events.’”[29] However, the superordinate reality of this system is only observable empirically when the mechanisms that fulfill a maintenance function fail to suppress the underlying contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. A contradiction, according to Offe, “is the tendency inherent within a specific mode of production to destroy those very pre-conditions on which its survival depends.”[30] Consequently, the historical development of a contradiction must inevitably culminate in some crisis event that makes the contradiction perceptible as a crisis.[31]

In contrast to postmodernists who deride Marx’s “productivism,” post-Marxian theorists continue to identify the relative dominance of the economic subsystem in capitalist society as the basis of contradictory dynamics within the overall capitalist system.[32] Claus Offe locates the pivotal contradictionPage 117 → of capitalism in the structure of labor markets where the legal exchange of commodities between equals (labor power for wages) must coexist with an unequal distribution of property (social relations of production). Offe emphasizes that capitalist labor markets can exist only to the extent that workers are propertyless in two senses: “Labor can neither be the property of another nor possess property.”[33]

In the first instance, labor markets are only possible to the extent that labor is free and mobile, and thus available for sale on the market in exchange for wages. Yet as Offe also observes, the emergence of a market in labor power is not necessarily the “natural” outcome of liberating labor from precapitalist forms of bondage such as serfdom or slavery.[34] A second and more coercive condition for the existence of labor markets is that workers cannot control property, and thus cannot control their own chances of securing an existence outside of the labor market. Wages offer the inducement, but propertylessness imposes the necessity of an individual’s entry into the labor market.

Hence, the asymmetrical structure of the capitalist labor market establishes an unequal bargaining position between laborers and capitalists. Quite simply, capitalists are always in a position to outwait workers and to strike a more favorable bargain in the negotiation of wage contracts because they own the means of production. In this respect, labor markets constitute “the most significant feature of capitalist social structures” because they are a “power-generating mode of interaction that leads to a relatively stable and consistent matrix of social power” within capitalist societies.[35] However, Offe contends that an economic subsystem organized by the labor market is continually threatened by potential disintegration to the extent that labor power is not really a commodity.[36]

Labor power is a “fictive commodity” in the sense that one cannot physically separate it from the laborer nor, therefore, unequivocally transfer rights to it in the process of exchange. Labor power and the laborer are in fact inseparable. As a result, any extended reproduction of the economic subsystem requires the uninterrupted support of a socialization subsystem and the persistent intervention of the political subsystem. A labor market can operate smoothly only to the extent that socialization mechanisms sustain a normative structure in which it is legitimate to view labor power as if it were a commodity. Yet the labor market itself does not provide such mechanisms but instead generates class conflict.

Therefore, the political system must increasingly support the socializationPage 118 → subsystem and supply both the coercion and the inducements necessary to maintain the asymmetry of labor market exchanges.[37] Offe refers to these interventions as social policy. The operational objective of social policy is to establish “a state strategy for incorporating labor power into the wage labor relation.”[38] By contributing to the constitution of the working class, particular configurations of social policy (i.e., state forms) make the appropriation of surplus value possible at each stage of capitalist development.[39]

The Logic of Capital: Beyond the Law of Value

Post-Marxists argue that Marx was wrong historically in assessing the long-term implications of technological development for working-class formation, precisely because he was theoretically correct in understanding the logic of capitalism. For instance, Andre Gorz begins his analysis of postindustrial capitalism by acknowledging that orthodox Marxist economists such as Ernest Mandel, Paul Sweezy, and others had correctly predicted “the exhaustion of economic growth and the advent of a depressive cycle” in late capitalism using traditional Marxian categories.[40] Most importantly, orthodox Marxist economists predicted that the rising organic composition of capital and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall presaged a sequence of ever-deepening economic recessions (1973–75, 1981–82, 1990–1991, 2000–2003, 2008–10). Gorz concludes that in late capitalism “the tendency that Marx (within quite different parameters) described as ‘the rise in organic composition of capital’ was thus borne out in the increasing substitution of constant (fixed) capital for variable (circulating) capital.”[41] Indeed, the essential characteristic of postindustrial capitalism has been the displacement of human labor power (both intellectual and manual) with automated and digital technology.

However, Gorz also concludes that the failure of Marxian economics to correctly predict rising profits and economic growth along with rising unemployment and underemployment during the 1980s was due to a fundamental theoretical error in Capital. It has often been pointed out, as Gorz notes correctly, that while Marx links the tendency for the rate of profit to fall to the rising organic composition of capital, there is no mathematical (i.e., logical) necessity for profits to fall as the organic composition of capital rises.[42] Rather, the falling rate of profit and the rising organic Page 119 →composition of capital are linked historically in Capital to the success of the class struggle, which leaves capitalists with no alternative but to either substitute constant capital for variable capital (factor substitution) or flee to areas of lower labor costs (globalization).[43]

When capitalists were confronted historically with this long-term crisis, as institutionalized in the welfare state, the capitalist enterprises that were capable of doing so resolved the profits squeeze of the 1970s[44] with one or both of two strategies: (1) flight to less-developed countries (globalization), and (2) the substitution of technology for human labor power.[45] In this respect, the orthodox Marxist analysis of late capitalism correctly forecast a deep, recurring, and protracted crisis of capitalism, but according to Gorz, because the socialists’ solution to that crisis was anchored in the continuing advance of organized labor, they were incapable of “breaking from the logic of capitalism.”[46] This is not to say that the conceptual tools for such a break could not be found in Marx, but that articulating these concepts required Marxists to “break with the law of value.”[47] In other words, as Offe notes, such a break implies that assumptions “about the centrality of labour within classical Marxism must also be questioned.”[48]

This question was posed in Vol. 1 of Capital, where Marx equates the rising organic composition of capital “with the fate of the working class.”[49] Marx defines the composition of capital as “the ratio of its constant to its variable component.”[50] Marx observes that “with the introduction of machinery the composition of the total capital is altered. . . . [E]very advance in the use of machinery entails an increase in the constant component of capital, that part which consists of machinery, raw material, etc., and a decrease in its variable component, the part laid out in labour-power.”[51] The tendency for the ratio of constant capital to grow at the expense of variable capital is called the rising organic composition of capital.[52]

Moreover, Marx argues that

this law of the progressive growth of the constant part of capital in comparison with the variable part is confirmed at every step. . . . [T]he growing extent of the means of production, as compared with the labour-power incorporated into them, is an expression of the growing productivity of labour. The increase of the latter appears, therefore, in the diminution of the mass of labour in proportion to the mass of means of production moved by it. . . . This increasing Page 120 →accumulation and centralization also becomes in its turn a source of new changes in the composition of capital, or in other words of an accelerated diminution of the variable component, as compared with its constant one. This accelerated relative diminution of the variable component, which accompanies the accelerated increase of the total capital and moves more rapidly than this increase, takes the inverse form, at the other pole, of an apparently absolute increase in the working population. . . . but in fact it is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e., a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.[53]

In Capital, Marx mainly utilizes the rising organic composition of capital to explain the long-term tendency for the rate of profit to fall in capitalism, but he does not explore the long-term tendency for the rising organic composition of capital to continue generating a surplus population. Marx’s conceptualization of the surplus population as an industrial reserve army stills views this population as a segment of the working class that grows and shrinks with the business cycle to discipline wages. However, in Capital, Marx never entertains the possibility of an indefinite growth of the ratio of the surplus population, or its qualitative transformation into a permanent nonworking class, because in this work, Marx assumes that the proletarian revolution will have socialized the means of production long before such a transformation could occur in reality.[54] He also does not envision a full rupture in the law of value, that is, the ability of technology to independently generate use value and exchange value.

However, Marx often questions this very assumption in the Grundrisse as documented by Gorz, Offe, Habermas, and Negri. For example, Gorz identifies numerous passages in Grundrisse that suggest that a technological revolution will completely transform the logic of capitalist development by overturning the law of value—that is, that the value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor time required to produce it. This break in the law of value undermines the foundation of economic reasoning in Capital.[55] Specifically, Gorz finds that “the disappearance of market laws (as Marx showed in the Grundrisse), just like the disappearance of the law of value, is an inevitable consequence of automation.”[56] Page 121 →Gorz, Offe, Negri, and Habermas all agree that Marx’s Grundrisse anticipates a rupture in the law of value, but they are equally critical of Marx for thinking that such a rupture would generate

a process in which the development of the productive forces would result in the replacement of the army of unskilled workers and labourers—and the conditions of military discipline in which they worked—by a class of polytechnic, manually and intellectually skilled workers who would have comprehensive understanding of the entire work process, control complex technical systems and move with ease from one type of work to another.[57]

Gorz argues “that exactly the opposite has occurred” from what Marx anticipates, because “automation and computerisation have eliminated most skills and possibilities for workplace initiative and are in the process of replacing what remains of the skilled labour force (whether blue or white collar) by a new type of unskilled worker.”[58] Similarly, it is rarely noted that in Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas submerges an extended analysis of Grundrisse in a series of footnotes, which anchor his epistemological position and later provide the basis for his analysis in Legitimation Crisis (1975)[59] of the crisis tendencies of late capitalist systems. Like Gorz, Habermas identifies key passages in Grundrisse that anticipate a technological future where “knowledge is itself potentially a productive force.”[60] Most importantly, Habermas identifies “an unusual passage” from Grundrisse[61] that does not recur in the parallel investigations in Capital:

. . . to the degree that large-scale industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labor time and on the amount of labor employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labor time, whose “powerful effectiveness” is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labor time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production . . . the surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth.[62]

Since the objective of investing in constant capital is to facilitate increases in productivity and, therefore, in the rate of exploitation, value-generatingPage 122 → technology emerges as the postindustrial conclusion to the rising organic composition of capital described by Marx in Capital. However, this conclusion to the logic of industrial capital implies that the law of value (labor) gradually ceases to organize capitalist power relations. As the law of value is ruptured by the rising organic composition of capital, Offe observes that the capitalist labor market correspondingly shrinks “in its potential for determining both relations of social and political power and collective identity.” As a power mechanism, the capitalist labor market remains basic to an understanding of capitalist society, but as it contracts “an ever smaller part of the entire social structure is directly determined by it.”[63]

Decommodification: The New Social Groups

The labor market can only function as a determinative power-generating system to the extent that it organizes individuals within its matrix of social relations. However, post-Marxist theorists contend that the automation and digitization of production (i.e., the rising organic composition of capital) are eroding the labor market’s power-generating capacities by its contradictory tendency to produce a growing surplus population.[64] The surplus population of a capitalist society consists of those who are nonproductive in the technical sense that they no longer contribute to the creation of surplus value (i.e., profits, rents, and interest). Paradoxically, the labor market’s capacity to absorb the individuals who depend on it for wages and salaries is shrinking primarily because of increases in productivity.

For the first time in the development of capitalist social formations, post-Marxists envision a developing employment crisis that is not related to a short-term cyclical downturn or to falling rates of investment. Quite the contrary, investment in growth-generating, productivity-enhancing technologies is resulting in the structural disintegration of capitalist labor markets. The new pattern of postindustrial development has three significant structural consequences.[65] First, reduced market demand for labor power is creating a long-term tendency toward rising structural unemployment. Second, the same forces are yielding institutionalized patterns of structural underemployment in the form of casual labor markets, part-time work, migratory labor, and informal labor. Third, there is an increasing tendency for individuals to get locked into peripheral labor markets in an emerging low-wage, no-benefits, part-time service sector.[66]

Page 123 →Thus, unlike neoconservative postindustrialists, post-Marxists do not envision a tertiary service sector based in a professional and technical middle class, but instead envision a growing peripheral labor market that is neoproletarian, semiproletarian, or even lumpenproletarian.[67] As a result, post-Marxists were virtually unanimous in predicting the political displacement of the classical Marxian proletariat by a postindustrial population that is economically and socially marginal to the labor market. Gorz refers to this component of the surplus population as a new “servile class,” which is defined structurally more by its status as a largely nonworking class that lacks permanent or institutionalized participation in capitalist labor markets. At the same time, the structural contraction of the labor market systematically throws off afunctional social tailings. These labor-market tailings consist of the chronically unemployed and unemployable; the underemployed; youth who are socially and culturally anomic; a growing class of pensioners with burgeoning healthcare demands; and a servile class with growing social welfare requirements.

Finally, post-Marxist new social movement theory emphasizes that the social actors in these new groups do not rely for their political self-identity on the established left-right ideological spectrum, which defines political positions in relation to distributional issues. These actors do not define their collective identities in terms of class- or labor market–based positions such as lower, middle, working, or capitalist class. Instead, their decommodification makes it possible for them to redefine political space through a multiplicity of other identities, such as gender, age, race, nationality, ethnicity, locality, sexuality, and lifestyle. In each case, political claims are advanced from social locations uncoupled from class positions and other identities defined by participation in the labor market.

One Future: “Communism” as the Entitlement State

Offe and Gorz particularly emphasize that the growth of a surplus population places exponentially more pressure on state social policy, because the new social groups exist outside the logic of labor commodification; that is, their redistributive demands are not linked to labor-market participation but directly to social need. Consequently, Offe suggests, the new social groups are impediments, threats, and ballast to further capitalist development, because their members do not contribute to the process of surplus Page 124 →value creation, but they do make chronic demands on the state’s redistributive capacities.[68]

For this reason, the logic of postindustrial socialism is necessarily linked to the development of the new nonworking classes. Gorz observes that in classical Marxism the concepts of work and the proletariat refer “almost exclusively to activities carried out for a wage.”[69] Hence, these concepts are connected logically to the maintenance of the economic structures organized by a labor market, which includes both capitalism and socialism. On the other hand, Gorz argues that the postindustrial New Left is concerned with “liberation” and therefore with the creation of “free time,” where “individuals can exercise control over their bodies, their use of themselves, their choice of activity, their goals and productions.”[70] Thus, the objective of postindustrial socialism is not workers’ control of the means of production and the labor process, but the abolition of work and the liberation of time.

Gorz argues that the abolition of work is already underway, and it is a process that is likely to accelerate in the coming future. As noted earlier, Gorz identifies the technological revolution as the engine of this historical development, particularly automation, robotics, and digitization. In Gorz’s grand historical narrative, automation is making it “absolutely impossible to restore full employment by quantitative economic growth.”[71] Gorz observes in Paths to Paradise that “in the fully automated factory, the quantity of living labour drops towards zero, and so does purchasing power distributed as wages.”[72] Gorz claims that

A society based on mass unemployment is coming into being before our eyes. It consists of a growing mass of the permanently unemployed on one hand, an aristocracy of tenured workers on the other, and between them, a proletariat of temporary workers carrying out the least skilled and most unpleasant types of work. . . . Permanently employed workers become a narrow social stratum, alongside vast numbers of unemployed (30 to 50 percent of the “active” population). Some of the latter swell the ranks of the new “tertiary sector,” where they are forced into desperate, frenetic competition to sell domestic or sexual services to the narrow stratum of well-paid workers and employers. We are left then, with the sort of economy now predominant in parts of North and South America (New York, Brazil, Mexico, etc.) where pauperism and overabundance of commodity goods and service go hand in hand.[73]

Page 125 →Consequently, Gorz concludes that it is not an exaggeration to predict unemployment rates of 30 to 50 percent sometime in the twenty-first century. This may sound like a fantastic proposition at a time when the official US unemployment rate is hovering around 4.0 percent—so-called full employment. However, Gorz’s observation is not based on official unemployment statistics, but on the Marxian proposition that the socially necessary labor time required to produce an ever-larger volume of goods and services is rapidly shrinking over time—that is, the labor market itself is contracting, and thus adult labor-market participation is a better measure of “employment” and “unemployment.” In fact, in postindustrial societies, it is already the case that one-third or more of the adult population no longer participates in the labor market on a full-time basis, if one combines pensioners, high school and college students, social welfare recipients, the compensated unemployed, the uncounted (unofficial) unemployed, the disabled, the homeless, and individuals who are involuntarily employed on a part-time basis.[74] A very large proportion of this nonworking class depends on the social distribution of nonwage and nonsalary income and on other forms of indirect subsidies (e.g., government-sponsored healthcare, free public education, subsidized higher education, etc.). Most individuals who do work, whether full-time or part-time, increasingly occupy the precarious class location of Marx’s and Engels’s “honest lumpenproletariat” rather than the industrial proletariat.

The main question of the future is whether the abolition of work will take the form of a society based on mass unemployment—itself a socially constructed idea linked to the existence of labor markets—or a society based on free time where everyone shares equally in the benefits of reduced work. Gorz argues that “the manner in which the abolition of work is to be managed and socially implemented constitutes the central political issue of the coming decades.” Gorz concludes that a political solution to this problem will require a post-Marxian social policy, because it calls “for new mechanisms of distribution independent of the laws of the market and the ‘law of value.’”[75]

Furthermore, to avoid the potential social disorder that would follow in the wake of a mass-unemployment scenario, Gorz contends that the welfare state will remain a permanent fixture of postindustrial capitalism that is forced to redistribute a minimum income without regard to work or productivity. Even after the Reagan-Thatcher Revolution and the rise of neoliberalism, it is still the case that over half of all economic resources in Page 126 →postindustrial societies are distributed on a political basis, rather than by markets, if one combines direct government spending with the resources allocated indirectly by government through statutory mandates (e.g., the minimum wage, environmental regulation, monetary policy, etc.). Thus, the second key issue of postindustrial socialism is “the social form which income takes when automation has abolished, along with a permanent obligation to work, the law of value and wage labour itself.”[76]

In contrast to his earliest writings, Gorz vigorously rejects the skilled proletariat as the subject of postindustrial socialism, along with its organizations, such as trade unions and social-democratic parties. Gorz contends that “automation will always be perceived by skilled workers as a direct attack on their class insofar as it undermines workers’ class power over production.” Consequently, the major concern of fully employed skilled workers is to resist automation by protecting job security and skill monopolies. This means that “the main strategic goal of this stratum, which has always been hegemonic within the organised labour movement, will remain the appropriation of work, of the work tools and of power over production.”[77]

A second reason that skilled workers will oppose automation is that their collective identity is defined by the application of skills at the point of production—that is, by work. Hence, for organized labor, “the abolition of work is neither acceptable nor desirable,” because it undermines the social conditions that define them as a privileged social group within the labor market. Therefore, Gorz is certain that a defensive strategy against automation—one that is technologically determined to fail—will remain the major concern of traditional trade unionism, or in a more radical turn towards syndicalism, the same objective will be asserted in the form of workers’ control and autogestion movements.[78]

Gorz decisively abandoned the new-working-class thesis developed in his Strategy for Labor (1967) mainly because he reversed his assessment of the impact of computer technology and robotics on the working class. Gorz quickly concluded that he was wrong to ever believe that “the refinement and automation of production technology would lead to the elimination of unskilled work, leaving only a mass of relatively highly skilled technical workers, capable by their comprehensive understanding of the technico-economic processes of taking production under their own control.”[79] In contrast to neoconservative and neoliberal postindustrialists,[80] Page 127 →Gorz is persuaded that “automation and computerisation have eliminated most skills and possibilities for initiative and are in the process of replacing what remains of the skilled labour force (whether blue or white collar) by a new type of unskilled worker.”[81] Consequently, Gorz dismisses the autogestion and workers’-control movement as a basis for postindustrial socialism. In fact, Gorz considers technosyndicalism a reactionary attempt to “reestablish the old crafts . . . so that autonomous groups of workers may control both production and its products and find personal fulfillment in their work.”[82]

Gorz became convinced that automated and cybernetic work processes are inherently heteronomous, and that therefore alienation is an inevitable consequence of the socialization of the labor process. The socialization of labor means that increasingly, “the nature, modalities and objectives of work are, to a large extent, determined by necessities over which individuals or groups have relatively little control.” The externality and exteriority of the collective worker (i.e., the historical subject) in relation to particular (i.e., individual) workers is now “inherent in the material structure of the productive apparatus and in the nature of the physical processes it governs.”[83] Hence, the liberation of time must occur outside the workplace; that is, in the abolition of work:

for workers, it is no longer a question of freeing themselves within work, putting themselves in control of work, seizing power with the framework of their work. The point now is to free oneself from work by rejecting its nature, content, necessity and modalities.[84]

Gorz pursues the institutional implications of this thesis for a postindustrial socialism across two lines of analysis. First, he (1982, 12n.8) points out that in traditional Marxism as outlined in Critique of the Gotha Program,

socialism is a transitional stage towards communism. During this transition, the development and socialisation of the productive forces is to be completed; wage labour to be retained and even extended. The abolition of wage labour (at least as the dominant form of work) and market relations is, according to the schema, to be realised with the advent of communism.[85]

Page 128 →Gorz maintains that “in advanced industrial societies, socialism is already historically obsolete,” because “political tasks have now gone beyond the question of socialism, and should turn upon the question of communism as it was originally defined” in Critique of the Gotha Program and The German Ideology. Gorz observes that the technological revolution allows “the production of a growing volume of commodities with diminishing quantities of labour and capital,” and, consequently, the “aims and methods of economic management clearly cannot remain those of capitalism, any more than social relations can remain based on the sale of labour power, that is, on waged work.”[86] However, Gorz also concludes that

neither can this management be socialist, since the principle “to each according to his labour” has become obsolete and the socialisation of the productive process (which, according to Marx, was to be completed by socialism) has already been accomplished. Automation, therefore, takes us beyond capitalism and socialism.[87]

Gorz (1982, 123) muses that the term postindustrial socialism is actually inappropriate for describing post-Marxist political movements. He notes that the proper “Marxist terminology would have us refer straightforwardly to ‘communism,’ meaning that stage in which the ‘fullest development of the productive forces’ has been realised and where the principal task is no longer to maximise production or assure full employment, but to achieve a different organisation of the economy so that a full day’s work is no longer a precondition for the right to a full income. . . . We have almost reached that stage.”[88]

Gorz has little to say about political strategy, but he identifies the central principle of postindustrial socialism with establishing a new definition of “full-time” employment or a “new organization of time.”[89] Gorz suggests that the central objective of postindustrial socialism should not be the promotion of a full-employment economy as defined by the capitalist labor market, but a policy of redistributing the economically necessary quantity of work across society. He argues that state policy should gradually phase in a reduction of what constitutes full-time employment as the socially necessary labor time to produce an increasing quantity of goods and services continues to decrease in the coming decades. In fact, the state has enforced such a policy in the past by instituting the ten-hour day, the eight-hour day, and the forty-hour week without any reduction in annual compensation. Thus, such a proposal is far from utopian.

Page 129 →In this conception of postindustrial socialism, the state’s main policy initiative would be to reduce the statutory definition of full-time employment from 1,600 hours per year to an average of 1,400 hours, to 1,200 hours and, finally, to 1,000 hours over a span of fifteen to twenty years. This 1,000 hours of work annually would be considered the normal definition of full-time employment. It would entitle each individual to a normal wage, which corresponds to a particular level of skills and qualifications, just as the current 1,600-hour year is considered the full-time norm and gives one the right to draw a full-time wage or salary. This strategy is consistent with Marx’s own emphasis on the struggle for the working day, which is the single longest chapter in Capital. The working day is a legal—not merely an economic—institution. The working day is defined by the state and not by the labor market.[90]

The key to adopting this principle would be to simultaneously establish an equal right to employment and free time for all. In a postindustrial society, it is only by working less that everyone can exercise the right to work.[91] Gorz emphasizes that an essential aspect of postindustrial socialism will be “an obligation to work in exchange for a guaranteed full income,” since it is the obligation to work that provides the basis for the corresponding entitlement right. By requiring individuals to produce the income that is guaranteed to them, society simultaneously obligates itself to guarantee each individual the opportunity to work.

Gorz predicts that the obligation to work will be necessary in postindustrial socialism, because as the length of annual working time decreases, work will tend to become more and more intermittent. A thousand hours annually of labor may be completed in two days a week, ten days a month, two fortnights every three months, forty hours every other week, one month out of two, or six months a year. As Gorz notes, one could articulate endless permutations on this type of system, making provision for bonuses or penalties, and for fiscal incentives or disincentives to work for either long or short periods of time.

Despite its libertarian thrust, Gorz concedes that postindustrial socialism, or more appropriately communism, “will still entail planning, and planning requires a state.”[92] However, Gorz suggests that communist governance will be little more than a social-security accounting system that records labor time and processes checks, while insuring that the hours of labor and the guaranteed income received by that person are in balance over a person’s lifetime. Thus, Gorzian communism results in a stateless Page 130 →society in the Marxian sense that “the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things.”[93] For Gorz, as for many post-Marxists, the welfare state is the embryo of a compensatory political mechanism designed to decouple income distribution from the labor market and the law of value. Yet in fact, the existing welfare state utilizes dependency on redistribution as a mechanism for regulating individual and social behavior by imposing behavioral qualifications on supervised access to redistribution. Thus, Gorz acknowledges that the actually existing welfare state is an “apparatus of domination and administration, whose unrestricted power runs down towards a dislocated society which it endeavors to restructure according to the requirements of capital.”[94] Gorz concludes that any continuation down this path of political development “can only lead to the state taking greater charge of individual lives. . . . It replaces or complements, as the case may be, exploitation with welfare, while perpetuating the dependence, impotence and subordination of individuals to centralised authority.”[95] Gorz agrees that it is hard to see how a servile “nonclass” could seize power and redefine entitlements as a new form of property rights, but like so many post-Marxists, he dismisses the issue of historical agency as “beside the point.”[96]

Another Future: Communism as the Stateless Entitlement

Claus Offe has been more attuned to the agency problems that labor-market disintegration poses for a theory of the socialist state. In the 1970s, Offe predicted that the state’s dependency on capital accumulation would at some point require the welfare state to shed its sociological ballast (i.e., the surplus population) to maintain capital accumulation at more optimal levels.[97] Hinrichs, Offe, and Wiesenthal, in contrast to Gorz, concluded that the adoption of such policies would entail “a downward redefinition of the welfare state’s legal entitlements and the claims granted by it, most of all the claims of those groups that are least well organized and hence least likely to engage in collective conflict.”[98] The Reagan-Thatcher-Kohl initiatives of the 1980s are consistent with this prediction, as are the initiatives of the International Monetary Fund on a global scale. The rise of global capitalism from the 1990s onward has only accelerated these tendencies on a larger scale.

Yet the contradiction of these initiatives in a capitalist society is that dependent distributive groups are set adrift even as the absorption potentialPage 131 → of the capitalist labor market continues to shrink. Thus, the labor market’s power to economically determine relations of political power and to shape collective social identities dissipates. However, the declining absorption capacities of capitalist labor markets thus remove or exclude an increasing number of potential workers from direct and full-time contact with the central power mechanism of capitalist society.[99] Consequently, capitalists lose their direct hold on the population, because the dependency principle—whether exercised by the state or the labor market—is unable to subordinate larger and larger segments of the population. The social drift of postindustrial capitalism is what allows the new social groups to become systemic agents of a potential countermovement for a postindustrial socialism based on claims to entitlements without work.[100]

For example, Offe points out that by the 1990s, there were more university students in the European Union than craft apprentices in the skilled trades. There are more unemployed people than farmers and more pensioners than blue-collar workers. Significantly, the more numerous social groups are defined more by their legal ownership of entitlement rights than by their place in the social relations of production.[101] In fact, these groups are outside the production system, in a strict sense, and thus establish their group identity and claims to income through public policy. Hence, Offe describes these groups as “policy-takers,” because the place they occupy within the social division of labor and consumption is policy-determined rather than economically determined.[102]

Offe suggests that the contradiction of these groups’ social location is the powerlessness of state power. The state’s dependency on capital accumulation renders it powerless as a mechanism of social transformation, so any statist solution, whether a traditional social democratic or a communist one, is clearly unrealistic, in Offe’s view.[103] Furthermore, as identities move beyond the workplace in postindustrial capitalism, Offe insists that the concept of politics must be extended beyond the sphere of the state and its existing institutional channels. Thus, the paradox of postindustrial socialism is that “socialism in industrially advanced societies cannot be built without state power and it cannot be built on state power.” A socialist state “can maintain its directive capacity as a political organization only to the extent that it gives itself up as a state—that is to say, as a separate organization of the ultimate power of collective decision-making—ultimately by negating its identity as an ‘apparatus’ and eliminating the categorical distinction of ‘state’ and ‘civil society.’”[104]

Offe is acutely aware of the difficulties that the new social groups pose Page 132 →for a theory of the socialist state. The new social groups define conflicts in terms of entitlement values and social rights that are nonnegotiable principles, but these rights can only be asserted politically. Consequently, the contradiction of the capitalist welfare state is that it cannot maintain capital accumulation without shedding a non-productive surplus population from its ledgers, but it cannot maintain its democratic legitimacy without distributing entitlement rights to the new social groups. Yet despite their inherently political determination, the new social groups are distinctively libertarian and antistatist in their politics.

Offe posed the paradox of postindustrial socialism as early as 1978 when he began asking “whether the structural conditions of advanced capitalism are, in fact, conducive to non-statist forms of socialist transformation.”[105] From a systemic perspective, the possibility of postindustrial socialism hinges on whether the developmental logic of the capitalist system facilitates, or at least makes possible, “the implementation of the classical idea that the occupation of state power has to be followed by its structural transformation and democratization.”[106]

Like Gorz, Offe argues that a state-guaranteed annual income must be the core social policy of postindustrial socialism. In contrast to Gorz, however, Offe proposes “a sociocultural standard of need” as the basis for defining guaranteed income levels, rather than socially necessary labor time. As technological advances erode the operative sphere of the law of value, it is the production process itself that ruptures the link between labor and value. Therefore, the process of postindustrial development not only establishes the political conditions for postindustrial socialism (i.e., the surplus population), it erodes the institutional foundation that supports a normative commitment to the work ethic. Thus, Offe concludes that it should become increasingly “possible to make the right to an income independent of the fact and extent of an individual’s income-earning activity.”[107]

The administration of this system of stateless entitlements is linked closely to Offe’s conception of contemporary political development as a “withering away of the state.” Offe contends that a centuries-long process of political development is being reversed insofar as the state is defined by the territorial centralization of political authority, the establishment of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and the subordination of all competing forms of secular and ecclesiastical power to the state. Offe argues that for the first time in centuries, public duties are being delegated to “para-constitutional authorities and procedures, in which the state participatesPage 133 → more—if at all—in the function of a coordinator or moderator than as a sovereign authority giving orders and exerting power.”[108]

What distinguishes this stateless entitlement from the entitlement state is that strong intermediate organizations stand between the state and the individual. In place of a disorganized mass that is dependent on state allocation policies, Offe sees a trend toward strengthening intermediate organizations that are legally private but are capturing sovereign functions from the state. As the state becomes overloaded with demands on its administrative capacities, it continues to delegate and disperse regulatory and distributive powers to quasipublic corporations, trade associations, professional organizations, social service corporations, labor unions, chambers of commerce, scientific associations, and other private nonprofit organizations. These collective actors are being delegated quasisovereign functions (or usurp these functions) and thereby relieve the state of a number of responsibilities, especially those that involve the public distribution of goods and services. Different scholars have described this tendency as a form of postindustrial neocorporatism, postcapitalist society, the refeudalization of political authority, and the privatization of government.[109]

The state merely provides an arena for distributive bargaining among these organizations, and an administrative office for collecting and allocating the social product. In this sense, the state is being gradually deprived of its functions by making them societal. The state will provide coordination to society through paragovernmental procedures, but will otherwise engage in an ordered retreat by devolving institutional structures, procedures, and participative conditions and competencies into civil society and its associations. By acting as a steering and rule-making organization, the state can unburden itself of political and administrative demands, but also provide a mechanism that avoids “the danger that these areas would regress into the anarchy of market processes or dynamics determined by particular interests.”[110]

A Third Future: Statist Disentitlement

Gorz and Offe both identify developmental tendencies that are making postindustrial socialism a historical possibility and that assign this political mission to the surplus population. At the same time, Gorz is convinced that the dominant trend in contemporary economic development is toward Page 134 →the option based on mass unemployment. Gorz envisions a postindustrial social structure that consists of “a growing mass of the permanently unemployed on one hand, an aristocracy of tenured workers on the other, and, between them, a proletariat of temporary workers carrying out the least skilled and most unpleasant types of work.” However, Gorz observes that the latter jobs will be largely eliminated by automation in the near future, accelerating the historical tendency toward a mass unemployment society. This means that “the abolition of work can have no other social subject than this non-class.”[111]

However, this perspective retains historical agency at the center of the transition problem. Gorz acknowledges the dilemma that the so-called nonclass is not really a social subject since “it has no transcendent unity or mission, and hence no overall conception of history and society.” The nonclass is really a disorganized mass of dissociated individuals, and this social base makes postindustrial socialism libertarian to the core. Gorz concedes that the libertarian thrust of the new social movements is at once their strength and weakness, with the weakness being an “obvious incapacity to seize power.”[112] Thus, Gorz can offer no more practical advice about political organization than a concept of historical agency anchored by the specifically existential demand for individual autonomy and free time.[113] Gorz suggests that the desire for autonomous free space is an existential need with its own irreducible reality.

The existential character of politics means that the initial phase of a postindustrial socialist revolution must concentrate on a politics aimed at opening up new spheres of individual autonomy in which individuals can “invent and implement new relationships and forms of autonomy,” which is a way of saying that because everyone is unemployed they can spend more time at the Louvre, the pub, or mass demonstrations. Yet Gorz also recognizes that a major problem with this libertarian emphasis is that autonomous spaces captured from the existing social order will be systematically marginalized, subordinated, ghettoized, or marketized unless there is a full transformation and reconstruction of society, its economic institutions, and its legal systems. The problem is that Gorz can’t get there from here because he understands that large-scale social transformations are not effected by individuals. A social transformation of this magnitude implies an overall vision of what society is to become—and even pluralism, because a multiplication of decision-making centers, an increase in individual liberty, and further limitation of the state’s role amount to an overall vision.[114] Page 135 →The dilemma is what organization or social group will carry that vision and become the historical subject of revolutionary transformation?[115]

For Offe, it is the existence of the new identity movements that raises doubts about the prospects for postindustrial socialism. Offe concludes that it is equally questionable for normative and theoretical reasons whether the trends of de-composition and dispersion of the state’s sovereignty, authority, and rationality will result in a new balance of self-regulating but coordinated civil associations. In fact, the state’s weakening in comparison to global markets and strong civil associations increases the risk of societal instability on a national and international scale. The new identities have also set in motion anarchic and anomic dynamics that are destabilizing and reversing modernity and modernization itself. The cleavages opened by the dynamics of the new identity movements are not negotiable within a distributive framework, precisely because these social identities are not defined by distributive positions within the labor market or by places within the social relations of production. In this scenario, the Kosovo conflict, the Rwandan genocide, the disintegration of Somalia into a failed state, the quest for a global caliphate, and ethnic revolt in the republics of the former Soviet Union open windows onto the realities of a postmodern politics stripped of its neoromantic literary veneer.

In postindustrial societies such as the United States, it is the National Socialist movement, paramilitary militia movements, abortion-clinic bombers, and Christian fundamentalists who emerge as the real agents of a postmodern politics that has slipped beyond the grasp of a weakening state challenged by strong civil associations. Offe notes that even in their less extreme manifestations, “the new social movements are not entirely immune from the temptation to revert to unmistakably premodern ideals and to base their critique on particularistic, communitarian, libertarian, anarchistic, ecological-biological, or similar fundamentalisms,” which define a politics of exclusivity and conflict, rather than democratic pluralism and egalitarianism.[116] Offe views this possibility as the more realistic alternative—a postmodern rather than a post-Marxist future.

Finally, Habermas has always been ambivalent about the transformative potential of the new social groups, precisely because their marginal attachment to the labor market excludes them from participating in the central power-generating mechanism of a capitalist society. Their displacement from the labor market excludes the neoproletariat and the servile class from access to its social power in the sense that they do not have anythingPage 136 → of economic value (i.e., labor power) to bargain with or to exchange for concessions.[117] As underemployed, unemployed, or unproductive labor, the neoproletariat and the servile class are a surplus population that can be marginalized without any significant cost to the capitalist economy, particularly in a global economic system with highly mobile capital.

The theoretical key, as Habermas observes, is that the pauperization of these groups no longer coincides with economic exploitation in the technical Marxian sense, because the system no longer depends on their labor for the creation of surplus value. Hence, these groups cannot exert any structural leverage by collectively withdrawing their labor from the marketplace, and for the same reason, capital incurs no direct costs from their repression due to lost productivity. Consequently, Habermas concludes that unless these groups “are connected with protest potential from other sectors of society no conflicts arising from such underprivilege can really overturn the system—they can only provoke sharp reactions incompatible with formal democracy.”[118] There is good reason to believe that the postindustrial neoproletariat and servile class—even considered as an honest lumpenproletariat—is more likely to be an underclass that is easily suppressed, neglected, contained through coercion and violence, and regulated with marginal financial inducements. Without significant countermeasures, there is no reason to believe that postindustrial societies will not continue to disintegrate, to become more segmented between a privileged core and a dependent periphery, and consequently to sink deeper into inequality and violence.[119]

Page 137 →Conclusion

The Rise of a Lumpen-State?

In excavating Marx’s and Engels’s concept of the lumpenproletariat in the capitalist mode of production, I have proposed shifting the analytic focus of that concept from Marx’s and Engels’s political writings (e.g., Class Struggles in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire) to their more theoretical writings, especially The Condition of the Working Class in England and Vol. 1 of Capital. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels provides a theoretical analysis of the origins of the lumpenproletariat in early capitalism, while in Vol. 1 of Capital, Marx provides a lengthy description of the structure of the modern lumpenproletariat and an analysis of its extended reproduction in the capitalist mode of production. The fundamental structural characteristic of the lumpenproletariat, properly speaking, is its nonrelation to production—its existence as a nonworking class.

However, as Marx develops the concept of the lumpenproletariat in Capital, it is not a fixed and static social category with clear boundaries, but like all other classes, it is structured in layers and gradations that are always in a fluid process of composition and de-composition. Thus, as I document in chapter 2, the Marxist concept of the lumpenproletariat can only be understood within the larger context of Marx’s analysis of capitalist development and class formation. In this context, the lumpenproletariat is sometimes a part of the proletariat and sometimes not, depending on the extent and duration of its attachment to the labor market. Thus, Marx and Engels introduce a distinction between the honest and working lumpenproletariat and the lumpenproletariat, properly speaking.

Page 138 →This book has also suggested that there is a deeper logic in Capital that Marx failed to develop adequately, and that is the logic of how capitalist development systematically spins off a relative surplus population, which includes the lumpenproletariat. In Capital, Marx suggests that the rising organic composition of capital—the introduction of labor-saving machinery and technology—increasingly reduces the total demand for labor despite a constant increase in the system’s ability to produce more goods and services. Despite ever-increasing wealth, there is less demand for labor to produce it. Thus, a larger and larger proportion of the total population in capitalist social formations quite literally becomes a surplus population from the standpoint of capitalist production. The surplus population does not have any direct relation to production; on the contrary, it is a byproduct of capitalist production that is wholly unnecessary to its continuing functioning. It is not even part of the industrial reserve army. For the most part, the surplus population is not even part of the labor force, or their participation in the labor force is irregular, part-time, and sporadic at best.

The contemporary surplus population is a heterogeneous group that includes both the honest lumpenproletariat and the lumpenproletariat, properly speaking, but Marx’s analysis of capitalist development in Grundrisse leads to the conclusion that more and more of the population in capitalist social formations is destined for lumpenproletarian status. The lumpenproletarians are a subcategory of the surplus population, who generally share “pauperism” as a common status situation, but in distinguishing between the honest lumpenproletariat—with at least an irregular and marginal attachment to the labor market—and the lumpenproletariat, properly speaking, Marx and Engels consistently emphasize that the latter is a degraded and degenerate social group with no redeeming qualities. The lumpenproletariat, properly speaking, consists of people damaged beyond redemption—the byproduct, waste, and offal left behind by capitalist development. The problem of the lumpenproletariat, as posed by Marx and Engels and by later Marxists, is whether the honest lumpenproletariat could be organized into working-class institutions or whether the degrading influence of the lumpenproletariat, properly speaking, would eventually overwhelm the entire proletariat due to the postindustrial logic of capitalist development.

Marx and Engels saw a constant tug of war between the honest lumpenproletariat and the lumpenproletariat, properly speaking, and they Page 139 →were undecided as to whether the honest lumpenproletariat could ever be successfully mobilized and integrated into an organized workers’ movement. Karl Kautsky therefore emphasized that solving the problem of the lumpenproletariat was critical to the future political development of the working class. Due to their status situation (poverty) and their marginal attachment to the labor market, the honest lumpenproletariat was constantly exposed to a lumpenproletarian culture and lifestyle that was parasitic and degenerate, while both macroeconomic and personal conditions always threatened to rupture any remaining attachment to the proletariat. As the lowest segment of the proletariat, the honest lumpenproletariat, along with the lumpenproletariat, properly speaking, was ignorant, uneducated, and desperate in its conditions of life.

Consequently, Marx and Engels repeatedly warned that the lumpenproletariat’s conditions of life prepared it more to serve as a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue than as a reliable ally of the proletarian working class. Marx and Engels did not merely assert this claim in The Communist Manifesto; they wrote numerous historical analyses of class struggles in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, and Switzerland to document how the lumpenproletariat had repeatedly been used by monarchists, aristocrats, and the capitalist class as an armed battering ram against the working class in revolutionary situations. Marx and Engels seemed to believe that the problem of the lumpenproletariat would automatically resolve itself in a socialist revolution and the transition to socialism.

However, Marx and Engels left the problem unresolved in three ways. First, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lenin, and Mao each confronted the problem of the lumpenproletariat in political theory and in real-life revolutionary situations. Despite the significant doctrinal differences among these political theorists, all agreed with Marx and Engels that the lumpenproletariat was a problem. They also agreed with Marx and Engels that the lumpenproletariat’s spontaneous inclinations were disorderly and anarchistic—street riots, looting, robbery, arson, thuggery, rape, murder, and assassination. On the one hand, when associated with the organized working class, the lumpenproletariat’s anarchistic outbursts tended to turn public opinion against the workers and gave the state a reason to forcefully put down working-class demonstrations and to arrest working-class leaders. Yet, it is these qualities that ruling classes seek out in their bribed tools of reactionary intrigue. Thus, in revolutionary situations, the ruling classes Page 140 →frequently bribe and organize the lumpenproletariat into paramilitary or special police units to terrorize the working class into acquiescence. This is not a hypothesis; it is a historical fact.

There are eerie parallels to the Mobile Guard and the Decembrists as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) builds a state-of-the-art urban-warfare training facility that will include hyperrealistic simulations of homes in Chicago and Arizona, while increasing the number of “special response teams” it will deploy in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.[1] The United States already has privately operated for-profit detention centers, where immigrants seeking asylum from violence and brutality in their home countries are incarcerated; they are deprived of food, water, sanitary facilities, heat, and medical treatment, and regularly subjected to verbal degradation and sexual assaults, as well as the separation of small children from their parents.

President Donald Trump complains out loud when police are too “politically correct” in their handling of dissidents at his rallies.[2] Instead, the president boasts that his own security team is “rough” with those who challenge him and, thus, he encourages police officers to not be concerned about preventing physical harm to people being taken into custody.[3] As if in response to Trump’s entreaties, on-duty police officers in San Antonio, Texas, wore MAGA hats while escorting a Trump entourage, to declare their allegiance to the president rather than the community (predominantly Hispanic) they are supposed to protect and to serve.[4] Meanwhile, President Trump referred to armed neo-Nazis, fascists, and white supremacists as “fine people” after an anti–white supremacist protestor was murdered in Charlottesville, Virginia. Yet Trump complains about the “vicious tactics of the left,” hints that civil war is looming, and informs his opponents that “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”[5] This is the prince of the lumpenproletariat, who gleefully declares that “I love the poorly educated!”[6] This is the script of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

The problem of the lumpenproletariat surfaces in a second way. The leading figures of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals confronted the problem of the lumpenproletariat in the context of active mass movements and revolutionary upheavals that sought (and failed) to establish a socialist or communist society. However, as Marx points out in Critique of the Gotha Page 141 →Program, the transition to socialism is a lengthy process, and it is a mode of production where goods and services are still distributed on the basis of the duration, intensity, and quality of labor. The socialist mode of production, by definition, excludes the lumpenproletariat, although Marx and Engels seemed to believe that this problem would be solved by imposing an “equal liability to work for all members of society until complete abolition of private ownership” and by the “formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.”[7] This idea resulted in gulags in the Soviet Union and anti–social parasitism laws in Eastern Europe, with the latter being no different than the antivagrancy laws of capitalist states.

Another solution explored by Lenin and Mao was to organize the lumpenproletariat in the same way that capitalist states had deployed them, which is to enlist them in the military. Lenin’s and Mao’s experience with this “solution” led them to conclude that lumpenproletarians do not make reliable, trustworthy, or disciplined soldiers. In the end, Luxemburg seems to have proposed the only viable solution, which is to bribe the lumpenproletariat into acquiescence with a rapid and massive expansion of social welfare, which would at least start the transition to a society based on “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”[8] However, Eldridge Cleaver was concerned that socialists might never be able to implement this strategy, because the capitalist state had already learned how to use the same strategy to preempt mass action by the lumpenproletariat.

The third aspect of the problem of the lumpenproletariat is a contemporary problem that Kautsky seems to have partially anticipated in his musings on the lumpenproletariat. European colonialism and American imperialism introduced capitalism to previously “underdeveloped” agricultural societies, setting in motion the social production of both a rural and an urban lumpenproletariat in those societies. Thus, Kautsky foresaw the reproduction of the industrial reserve army, the surplus population, and the lumpenproletariat on a global scale. It was not until a half-century later, when a new Third World lumpenproletariat swelled the cities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, that Frantz Fanon would identify a brief and fleeting window of opportunity for the lumpenproletariat to spearhead anticolonial (and perhaps socialist) revolutions in these countries before the lumpenproletariat became a permanent fixture of the world urban landscape.

The Black Panthers built on Fanon’s insights by extending them to Page 142 →the United States, but they also contemplated the one question that all previous Marxists had ignored in their thinking about the lumpenproletariat. What if there were no death knell for capitalism, and its developmental logic continued to unfold across the world unabated by a socialist revolution? In asking this question, the Black Panthers were the first to anticipate what post-Marxists later analyzed as the tendency of capitalist development to generate an ever-larger surplus population due to the rising organic composition of capital. Even before Grundrisse was widely available in English, the Black Panthers were suggesting that the rising organic composition of capital—automation—would displace larger and larger proportions of the working class, who would fall into the ranks of the lumpenproletariat—honest or otherwise. The Black Panthers argued that the black lumpenproletariat had become the vanguard of the proletariat because its current condition (and interests) were the future of the American proletariat, which was predominantly white and male at least in its imagery and class consciousness.

The Black Panthers suggested that there was no real solution to the lumpenization of humanity other than to bypass socialism and leap directly to communism—to forget about the right to work and demand the right to be lazy. Paul LaFargue, Marx’s son-in-law and the author of The Right to Be Lazy, described the objectives of this new social order as one where

the industrial applications of mechanics, chemistry and physics, which, monopolized by capital, oppress the worker, will, when they shall become common property, emancipate man from toil and give him leisure and liberty. Mechanical production, which under capitalist direction only buffets the worker back and forth from periods of over-work to periods of enforced idleness, will when developed and regulated by a communist administration, require from the producer, to provide for the normal needs of society, only a maximum day of two or three hours in the workshop, and when this time of necessary social labor is fulfilled he will be able to enjoy freely the physical and intellectual pleasures of life.[9]

The Black Panther Party actively sought alliances with the white working class, as well as Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, LGBTQ organizations, Asian radicals, student groups, immigrants, and women of all colors, who they recognized as equally marginalized and oppressed because they too were Page 143 →lumpenproletarians. Despite these efforts, the Black Panthers recognized that by the late 1960s the capitalist state was instantiating new policies of social regulation and lumpen control with a significant expansion of the welfare state and the War on Poverty, coupled to paramilitary levels of police violence and mass incarceration. They also recognized that their efforts to bridge the racial chasm between the increasingly diverse lumpenproletariat and the white proletariat was being thwarted by structural racism and the legacy of white supremacy. The Black Panthers sadly anticipated that the latest revolutionary movement would again be thwarted—this time by the appearance of a white lumpenproletariat, who would blame those “below” them, rather than the capitalists who own the machines, even though in fact there was no longer anyone “below” them. They were now the lowest sediment of society.

The post-Marxist political theorists, who appeared in the decade after the Black Panthers extended and deepened this analysis based on the new availability of Marx’s Grundrisse, and of course because the surplus population was growing visibly larger in every capitalist country at every level of capitalist development. Post-Marxism established an innovative and prescient analysis of postindustrial and global capitalism that in retrospect now appears more relevant to contemporary political developments than it did at its first appearance. Post-Marxist theorists find an analysis of postindustrial and global capitalism in the Grundrisse that stretches Marxian categories—particularly the law of value—to the limits of their applicability, and it does so not because of their inadequacy, but because the developmental logic identified by Marx in Grundrisse is completed in postindustrial capitalism.

This conceptual shift has enabled post-Marxists to construct a theoretically powerful analysis of postindustrial capitalism that was remarkably prescient, although none of the post-Marxists successfully solved the problem of identifying a contemporary historical subject with political agency. While Hardt and Negri have identified an amorphous multitude as the historical agent of a new global commonwealth, most post-Marxist analyses implicitly culminate in a dystopian vision of the future.[10] However, in posing these contrasting alternative visions of a global postindustrial future, the post-Marxists raise theoretical, strategic, and policy issues from within Marxism that again warrant serious consideration by the political and academic left.

The main theoretical issue raised by post-Marxism is the explosive Page 144 →growth on a global scale of the surplus population and the lumpenproletariat in the twenty-first century. The key question raised by the post-Marxists is, what is left of the working class other than an honest lumpenproletariat? Marx and Engels literally invented the term lumpenproletariat during their first collaboration on The German Ideology to distinguish “the lowest layers of society” from the emerging industrial proletariat. While they considered the industrial proletariat to be a social class unique to the capitalist mode of production, they argued that a lumpenproletariat had emerged in all previous modes of production. The lumpenproletariat’s origins were nearly always to be found in the ruin of small producers—both rural and urban—by the introduction of slavery, serfdom, or large-scale machinery. This meant that in the initial phase of its development, the lumpenproletariat nearly always has familial, ethnic, and geographical ties to the petite bourgeoisie, who all long for a return to the “traditional values” and the “greatness” of an imaginary and mythical past. Whether it is to make Rome great again, France great again, Germany great again, or America great again, the petite bourgeoisie is the mass base that carries their savior into office, while it is the lumpenproletariat that supplies the shock troops to keep their messiah in power. The true ruling class—whether patricians or capitalists—stands by silently so long as they are enriched by the corrupt trepidations of this lumpen state.

Marxist political theory has generally regarded “Bonapartism” as an exceptional state form that only occurs in that rare circumstance when the political power of the exploiting class and the exploited class are equally balanced and the state is able to achieve a high degree of autonomy from civil society.[11] However, “exceptionalism” has sometimes lasted a very long time. Emperor Napoleon III ruled France for eighteen years, and he was only expelled as a result of the Franco-German War and the Paris Commune. In other words, it took a foreign war and a civil war to dislodge Bonapartism from the French state. Benito Mussolini ruled Italy for twenty-three years, and once again it took a world war to dislodge him from the state. Adolf Hitler ruled Germany for twelve years, while other “Bonapartist” dictators such as Francisco Franco and Pedro Salazar governed for much longer periods.[12] This pantheon does not even include the much longer list of dictatorships and military juntas that have been commonplace across the capitalist world in modern times.

Against this history of fascism and dictatorship, built on the support of a burgeoning and discontented lumpenproletariat, Karl Kautsky is the Page 145 →only Marxist political theorist of note to suggest that what other political theorists had called “Bonapartism” should actually be called Caesarism, because it was the political and military assistance of the lumpenproletariat “that made possible the dictatorship of a single individual in Rome, which led to the rise of Caesarism and its development into a state form.”[13] Kautsky proposed this term to highlight the idea that Bonapartism/Caesarism was not an exceptional state form, but a recurring and identifiable state form that consistently manifests itself in the transmutation of republics into strongman dictatorships based on the political and military support of the lumpenproletariat and the acquiescence of decadent segments of the ruling class—a political alliance of the unproductive classes held together by coercion and corruption. Kautsky saw Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as a reappearance of this state form, and consequently he saw no reason to believe that it could not periodically reappear in different capitalist societies under the right economic and political circumstances.[14] More recently, Nicos Poulantzas has also warned that fascism and dictatorship are ever-present tendencies of the contemporary capitalist state.[15]

It is no coincidence that the cover of Time (June 18, 2018) magazine features an image of President Donald Trump looking at his reflection in the mirror and seeing a king reflected back to him. The July 4, 2018, front page of the New York Daily News portrays President Trump as “the clown who plays King.” Even the language being used to describe the Trump regime—as a theatrical “clown show” played out on a world stage—is remarkably similar to how Marx describes Louis Bonaparte in The Eighteenth Brumaire.

Jacobin Magazine has also rekindled this comparison with an article that explicitly draws on passages from Marx’s The Class Struggles in France to analyze Trump as a “Lumpen Capitalist.”[16] Samuel Faber argues that the most important thing about Trump is not that he may be a clown, who provides his followers with an endless cycle of circuses (but no bread). What is unique in Faber’s view is that Donald Trump is a particular kind of capitalist: a lumpen capitalist of the sort described by Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Contrary to the claim that he builds things and puts people to work, The Trump Organization has very few employees and does not build or produce anything. Instead, Trump’s business ventures are designed to extract rents and royalties through various forms of financial skullduggery, which can include misrepresentation, fraud, theft, strategic bankruptcy, questionable real estate transactions, and various legal machinations to Page 146 →defraud workers and small businesses. He has surrounded himself with a cabinet full of similar individuals, including his own daughter and son-in-law. Thus Faber concludes that “true to his lumpen predatory inclinations, Trump has an almost precapitalist, predemocratic relation to government office, whereby his person and the office are merged into each other, and political office is there for him to benefit himself and his friends.”[17]

Faber goes on to suggest that the immediate explanation for the rise of a lumpen capitalist to the U.S. presidency starts with the impact of the economic crisis created by the Great Recession of 2008–2010. As Faber notes, the Great Recession came on top of the long-lasting effects of the growing deindustrialization that American workers suffered from the 1980s onward, and that the Democratic Party, whether under Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama, did nothing to ameliorate except to repeat the neoliberal mantra of “higher education” and more “workforce training.”

Thus, by 2016, Faber observes that

in the United States as a whole, millions of American families that had witnessed rising living standards and social mobility in the “glorious thirty years” between 1945 and 1975 no longer expected their children—saddled with heavy debts if they make it to college—to do as well as they did. Jobs had become increasingly limited to the low-wage, nonunion sectors such as logistics, call centers, hospitality, and health care, while the good, often technical jobs for the most part required postgraduate education. This situation is the economic and social background to the growth of the opioid epidemic within white and, increasingly, minority populations.[18]

Another way to put this is that an entire generation of proletarians slowly watched themselves and their children sink into lumpenproletarian status, with no bottom in sight. Thus, as a long-time television actor, Donald Trump—a lifetime lumpen capitalist and con artist—found it easy to don “the garb of authenticity in claiming to stand for the people” by courting the support of newly déclassé white Americans, sometimes dog-whistling, sometimes openly espousing racist, nativist, and chauvinist views.[19] And so Trump became the new clown prince of the lumpenproletariat. The immediate question that remains is whether Trump will be anointed emperor of the lumpenproletariat. In fact, Donald Trump went so far as to suggest that the United States might have a civil war should Page 147 →he be impeached and removed from office. One should remember that it was the prospect of losing re-election that prompted Louis Bonaparte to initiate his coup d’état with the support of the lumpenproletarian Decembrists.[20] Even before his recent impeachment, Donald Trump frequently stated that he will not leave office after two terms, despite a two-term limit in the U.S. Constitution, and he has even “joked” that he should have a lifetime sinecure in office.[21] Change the names, change the dates, and change the country, and Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire becomes the script of every emperor of the lumpenproletariat.

Yet, even if none of Trump’s ominous threats transpire, and Trump is sent into political exile on some remote island in the Black Sea, the long-term problem of the lumpenproletariat will still confront the United States, Great Britain, and Western Europe. The 30 percent of Americans—the Trumpentariat—who stand loyal to their Great Leader regardless of his documented crimes and corruption, will still be with us. What is to be done with this swollen and energized lumpenproletariat? It will not disappear—ever—so long as the fundamental logic of capitalist development remains intact, and in fact, it will continue to grow in size absolutely and relatively.

Page 148 →Page 149 →Notes

Introduction

1. The author conducted an electronic word search of the MECW using the keyword “lumpen” and identified sixty-four actual usages of the terms lumpenproletariat and lumpenproletarian. The previous attempt, by Mark Traugott in 1980, found 27. “The Mobile Guard in the French Revolution of 1848,” Theory and Society 9, No. 5 (September 1980): 683–720.

2. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in MECW (London: Lawrence and Wishart), Vol. 6, 494. The editors of MECW observe in a footnote c that “The German editions have ‘lumpen proletariat’ instead of ‘the dangerous class, the social scum’” (p. 494). In other English-language editions of The Communist Manifesto both terms are included in the text (e.g., International Publishers). Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. II, The Politics of Social Classes (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 632–34, provides an extensive and detailed analysis of “the translation problem” involved in the use and nonuse of this term in various editions of The Communist Manifesto.

3. Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in MECW, Vol. 6, 494.

4. Peter Worsley, “Frantz Fanon and the ‘Lumpenproletariat,’” in Socialist Register 1972, ed. Ralph Miliband and John Savile (London: Merlin Press, 1972), 193–230; Eldridge Cleaver, On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party, Part I (Black Panther Party Minister of Information, 1969); Bruce Franklin, “The Lumpenproletariat and the Revolutionary Youth Movement,” Monthly Review (January 1970): 10–25; Peter Stallybrass, “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat,” Representations, No. 31 (Summer 1990): 69–95.

5. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960); Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).

6. Sam Dolgoff, “Introduction,” in Bakunin on Anarchy, ed. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 3–21. See also Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, trans. Steven T. Byington (New York: E. C. Walker, 1913), 147–52.

Page 150 → 7. Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power,” in The Dialectics of Liberation, ed. David Cooper (London: Pelican, 1968), 150–74, refers to Fanon as “one of my patron saints.” See also Stephen Shames and Bobby Seale, Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers (New York: Abrams, 2016), 22; Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell Publishing, 1968, 1991); Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1970).

8. Cleaver, On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party, 2, notes that “essentially, what Huey did was to provide the ideology and the methodology for organizing the Black Urban Lumpenproletariat. Armed with this ideological perspective and method, Huey transformed the Black lumpenproletariat from the forgotten people at the bottom of society into the vanguard of the proletariat.”

9. “Lumpenproletariat,” in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 292–93.

10. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973); Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society: Analysis of the Western System of Power (New York: Basic Books, 1969).

11. Erik Olin Wright, Class, Crisis, and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978), 93–94. Wright does not consider the racial segmentation of the lumpenproletariat in the United States.

12. Peter Hayes, “Utopia and the Lumpenproletariat: Marx’s Reasoning in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,’” Review of Politics 50, No. 3 (Summer 1988): 445–65.

13. Robert L. Bussard, “The ‘Dangerous Class’ of Marx and Engels: The Rise of the Idea of the Lumpenproletariat,” History of European Ideas 8, No. 6 (1987), 676.

14. Ibid., 676–77.

15. Hal Draper, “The Concept of the ‘Lumpenproletariat’ in Marx and Engels,” Economies et Societes 15 (December 1972): 285–312.

16. Mark Cowling, “The Lumpenproletariat as the Criminal Class,” in Marxism and Criminological Theory: A Critique and Toolkit, ed. Mark Cowling (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 149.

17. Mark Cowling, “Can Marxism Make Sense of Crime?” Global Discourse 2, No. 2 (May 2013): 59, 61–62.

18. Frank Bovenkerk, “The Rehabilitation of the Rabble: How and Why Marx and Engels Wrongly Depicted the Lumpenproletariat as a Reactionary Force,” Netherlands Journal of Sociology 20 (1984): 37.

19. Mark Cowling, “Marx’s Lumpenproletariat and Murray’s Underclass: Concepts Best Abandoned,” in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: (Post)Modern Interpretations, ed. Mark Cowling and James Martin (London: Pluto Press, 2002).

20. Worsley, “Frantz Fanon and the ‘Lumpenproletariat,’” 208.

21. Charles Murray, “The Coming White Underclass,” Wall Street Journal, October 29, 1993. See also Nicholas Confessore, “Tramps Like Them: Charles Murray Examines the White Working Class in ‘Coming Apart,’” New York Times, February 10, 2012.

22. Atheendar S. Venkataramani, Elizabeth F. Blair, Rourke L. O’Brien, and Alexander C. Tsai, “Association Between Auto Assembly Plant Closures and Opioid Page 151 →Mortality in the United States: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis,” JAMA Internal Medicine (December 2019): E1–E9 finds that auto assembly plant closures are soon followed by a spike in opioid deaths in the surrounding area.

23. Cowling, “Marx’s Lumpenproletariat and Murray’s Underclass,” 228.

24. Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone. The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

25. Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, United States Department of Labor, What Work Requires of Schools: A SCANS Report for America 2000 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991); Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, US Department of Labor, Learning a Living: A Blueprint for High Performance (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1992); Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).

26. Quoted in Kathryn Krawczyk, “Joe Biden tells coal miners they should ‘learn to program,’” December 31, 2019.

27. Ruy Teixeira, America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

28. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 89–90.

29. Brian Creech, “Finding the White Working Class in 2016: Journalistic Discourses and the Construction of a Political identity,” European Journal of Cultural Studies (August 2018): 1–22; Andy Scerri, “Moralizing About Politics: The White Working-Class ‘Problem’ in Appalachia and Beyond,” Appalachian Studies 25, No. 2 (2019): 202–21.

30. Mark Schmitt, “From Privilege to Precarity (and Back): Whiteness, Racism and the New Right,” Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power 2 (2018), 57–58.

31. Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012).

32. Nicholas Kristof, “The White Underclass,” New York Times, February 8, 2012.

33. Quoted in Katie Reilly, “Read Hillary Clinton’s ‘Basket of Deplorables’ Remarks About Donald Trump Supporters,” Time, September 10, 2016.

34. Kevin D. Williamson, “Help Them Move,” National Review, February 6, 2107; Kevin D. Williamson, “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: White Working Class’s Dysfunction,” National Review, March 17, 2016.

35. Williamson, “Help Them Move.”

36. Kevin Williamson, “The White Minstrel Show: ‘Acting White’ for White People,” National Review, October 20, 2017.

37. Francis Levy, “The Final Solution: The Lumpenproletariat,” https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-final-solution-the-lumpenproletariat_us_58dd1335e4b04ba4a5e2512f. For historical background, see Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Viking, 2016).

38. For example, Howie Carr, “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before,” Boston Page 152 →Herald, March 16, 2019, who refers to the deindustrialized city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, as “the non-working class city, trying to keep a lid on the heroin hellhole that Lawrence has become.”

39. Eduardo Porter, “Can a Coal Town Reinvent Itself?” New York Times, December 6, 2019.

40. Jonah Goldberg, “No Movement That Embraces Trump Can Call Itself Conservative,” National Review, September 5, 2015.

41. Rick Wilson, “Trump’s Negotiating Style Is Pure Art of the Moron,” Daily Beast, June 13, 2018.

42. Robert Harrington, “Ivanka Trump, Failure,” Palmer Report, July 24, 2018.

43. Frank Rich, “No Sympathy for the Hillbilly,” New York Magazine, March 20, 2017.

Chapter 1

1. “Lumpenproletariat,” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Vol. 9 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 102.

2. Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in MECW, Vol. 6 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 494. The editors of MECW observe in a footnote that “The German editions have ‘lumpen proletariat’ instead of ‘the dangerous class, the social scum.’”

3. Editors, MECW, Vol. 6, 697–99, for a brief history of The Communist Manifesto.

4. “Lumpenproletariat,” Oxford English Dictionary, 102.

5. Editors, “Preface,” MECW, Vol. 10, Marx and Engels 1849–1851 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), xx.

6. Frederick Engels, “Introduction [to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France: 1848–1850” in MECW, Vol. 27 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 506.

7. Editors, MECW, Vol. 10 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978); see 651–53 for a brief history of The Class Struggles in France.

8. Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850, with an introduction by Frederick Engels, trans. Henry Kuhn (New York: New York Labor News Company, 1924).

9. Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France (1848–50) (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1945).

10. Editors, MECW, Vol. 11 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), xvii. See641–43 for a brief history of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

11. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Daniel De Leon (New York: International Publishing, 1898).

12. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926).

13. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, with explanatory notes (New York: International Publishers, 1935).

14. Karl Marx, “Preface the Second Edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Page 153 →Bonaparte,” in MECW , Vol. 21 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 57.

15. Hal Draper, “The Concept of the ‘Lumpenproletariat’ in Marx and Engels,” Economies et Societes 15 (December 1972): 285–312.

16. Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 2, The Politics of Social Classes (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 453–78, 628–34.

17. Robert L. Bussard, “The ‘Dangerous Class’ of Marx and Engels: The Rise of the Idea of the Lumpenproletariat,” History of European Ideas 8, No. 6 (1987): 676.

18. Ibid.: 675.

19. Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, trans. Steven T. Byinton (New York: E. C. Walker, 1913), 147–49.

20. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The German Ideology,” in MECW, Vol. 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 201–2. Written between November 1845 and August 1846. First published in full in 1932 by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.

21. Ibid., 202. This is the first known use of the word lumpen-proletariat.

22. Bussard, “The ‘Dangerous Class’ of Marx and Engels,” 676–77.

23. Ibid., 677–78. Similarly, Draper, “The Concept of the ‘Lumpenproletariat’ in Marx and Engels,” 228.

24. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction,” in MECW, Vol. 3 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 186–87.

25. Bussard, “The ‘Dangerous Class’ of Marx and Engels,” 679, claims that the word Proletariat was probably first used in a scholarly work published in 1842 by Lorenz von Stein, a German sociologist, whose work was known to Marx at the time. See Karl Marx, “Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne,” in MECW, Vol. 11 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), 455–56, which observes that The Communist Manifesto “contains a chapter devoted to criticism of the whole previous literature of socialism and communism, i.e., of the whole of the wisdom recorded in Stein.” The editors of MECW identify this as a reference to Lorenz von Stein, Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs (1848), where the word Proletariat first appears in a scholarly treatise.

26. Bussard, “The ‘Dangerous Class’ of Marx and Engels,” 677–78.

27. Ibid., 679.

28. Draper, “The Concept of the ‘Lumpenproletariat,’” 286n1.

29. Bussard, “The ‘Dangerous Class’ of Marx and Engels,” 683.

30. Traugott, “The Mobile Guard in the French Revolution of 1848,” 712n3 and 683.

31. Bussard, “The ‘Dangerous Class’ of Marx and Engels,” 683–84.

32. Editors, MECW, Vol. 8 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 282n.

33. Editors, MECW, Vol. 11, 644. For Marx’s description of the Mobile Guard, see Marx, “The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850,” MECW, Vol. 10, 62–63. Elsewhere, Marx, “Eighteenth Brumaire,” MECW, Vol. 11, 110, refers to “the lumpenproletariat organised as the Mobile Guard.” For Marx’s description of the Society of 10 December as the lumpenproletariat of Paris “organised into secret sections,” see ibid., 148.

34. Marx, “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” MECW, Vol. 11, 155, 194, respectively.

Page 154 → 35. Ibid., 150. This passage is the main basis for Cowling’s claim that the lumpenproletarians “do not seem to comprise a coherent social group”; see Cowling, “Can Marxism Make Sense of Crime?” 61.

36. Karl Marx, “Revolutionary Spain,” in MECW, Vol. 13 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), 435.

37. As noted in the introduction, the author conducted an electronic word search of the MECW using the keyword “Lumpen.” I identified sixty-four actual usages of the terms lumpenproletariat and lumpenproletarian, but concluded it was a hopeless task to identify every use of a potential synonym, such as lazzaroni or pauper. At the time of Mark Traugott’s count, only twelve of the fifty volumes of the MECW had been published (through 1854). The MECW includes many manuscripts, newspaper articles, and letters that had not been published previously, and the availability of an electronic search capability today certainly allows for a more accurate and comprehensive count.

38. Peter Stallybrass, “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat,” Representations, No. 31 (Summer 1990): 69–95.

39. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 2, 632–34, provides a fascinating and meticulous reconstruction of this lexicological history. The MECW version of “The Communist Manifesto,” Vol. 6, 494, does not include the term lumpenproletariat, but instead opts for the original terms “the ‘dangerous class,’ the social scum.” In a footnote c, the editors of MECW, Vol. 6, 494, observe that “The German editions have ‘lumpen proletariat’ instead of ‘the dangerous class, the social scum.’” In other English- language editions of The Communist Manifesto both terms are included in the text.

40. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 2, 469.

41. See Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 2, 469–71.

42. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 797.

43. Frederick Engels, “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” in MECW, Vol. 4, 548–52. Cowling, “Marx’s Lumpenproletariat and Murray’s Underclass,” 228, is more tentative in his suggestion that the concept of the lumpenproletariat is “possibly presaged in Engel’s account of the Irish immigrants in The Condition of the Working Class in England,” but he still insists that “the lumpenproletariat make their initial appearance in The Communist Manifesto.”

44. Engels, “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” in MECW, Vol. 4, 771, 778.

45. Contemporary Marxists regularly draw a distinction between Marx’s theoretical writings and his political writings; see Clyde W. Barrow, Toward a Critical Theory of States: The Poulantzas-Miliband Debate After Globalization (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 12–19.

46. Dominique Parent-Ruccio, Frank R. Annunziato, and Etienne Balibar, “The Notion of Class Politics in Marx,” Rethinking Marxism 1, No. 2 (1988): 18, notes in a similar vein that “the very word ‘proletariat’ almost never appears in Capital (vol. 1)”—for example, the chapter on the working day—but who would argue that when Marx is engaged in lengthy discussions of the “working class,” he is not also talking about the development of the proletariat? Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston, IL: Page 155 →Northwestern University Press, 1964), chapter 1, who similarly argues that meaning is often conveyed through indirect language, because the proper words do not yet exist, and can even be conveyed through the silent interstices between words.

Chapter 2

1. Frederick Engels, “Speeches in Elberfeld, February 8, 1845,” in MECW, Vol. 4 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 250–51.

2. Frederick Engels, “The Peasant War in Germany,” in MECW, Vol. 10 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), 407.

3. Frederick Engels, “Lawyers’ Socialism” in MECW, Vol. 26 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 602–3.

4. Ibid.

5. Engels, “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” in MECW, Vol. 4, 548–52.

6. Engels, “The Peasant War in Germany,” in MECW, Vol. 10, 407–8.

7. Engels, “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” in MECW, Vol. 4, 48.

8. Ibid., 549.

9. Ibid., 548–49.

10. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1978), 52, observes that in maintaining the cohesion of the levels of a social formation, “the function of the state primarily concerns the economic level, and particularly the labour process, the productivity of labour.” Similarly, Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 1980), 28, emphasizes that “the state’s major contribution to reproducing the economic relations of a capitalist social formation is the effect of its policies on the reproduction of labor power and the means of labor.”

11. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 68, documents that the emergence of self-regulating markets is not a natural and organic economic evolution of society, but an institution created and maintained by “deliberate action of the state.” Also see Polanyi, The Great Transformation, chap. 9, on “The Poor Law and the Organization of Labor.”

12. Engels, “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” in MECW, Vol. 4, 549.

13. Ben Fine, Marx’s Capital, 3rd ed. (London: MacMillan, 1989), 38–41.

14. Engels, “The Condition of the Working Class in England,” in MECW, Vol. 4, 549.

15. Ernest Mandel, An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), 60–62, who concludes that “permanent military expenditures will tend to rise in amount and importance relative to the national income” of capitalist nations.

16. For this section, I have chosen to use Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), chap. 25, rather than the MECW, because it actually uses the word lumpenproletariat in its translation.

Page 156 → 17. This observation leads to the conclusion that efforts to abolish poverty within capitalism violate the logic of capital accumulation and must necessarily fail over the long term.

18. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 782.

19. Fine, Marx’s Capital, 31–37; Mandel, An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, 41–47.

20. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 783–84.

21. Ibid., 785.

22. Ibid., 785.

23. Ibid., 786.

24. Ibid., 788.

25. Ibid., 790, 792.

26. Ibid., 794.

27. Ibid., 794.

28. Ibid., 794.

29. Ibid., 795.

30. Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller, “The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America,” New York Times, August 14, 2018, reports that even today “the difference in when women start families cuts along many of the same lines that divided the country in other ways. . . . the differences in when women start families are a symptom of the nation’s inequality.”

31. Engels first uses the term latent over-population to describe agricultural labor in “The Condition of the English Working Class,” in MECW, Vol. 4, 549.

32. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 795–96

33. Ibid., 796.

34. In a highly unflattering Darwinian metaphor, Marx suggests that “this law of capitalist society . . . calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down,” ibid., 797.

35. The Penguin edition of Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 797, translates this passage as follows: “Apart from vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in short the actual lumpenproletariat, this social stratum consists of three categories.” The MECW, Vol. 35, 637, translates the same passage as “Exclusive of vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the ‘dangerous’ classes, this layer of society consists of three categories.”

36. Engels, “Speeches in Elberfeld, February 8, 1845,” in MECW, Vol. 4, 250–51.

37. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 797. Max Adler, “Metamorphosis of the Working Class,” in Austro-Marxism, ed. Tom Bottomore and Patrick Goode (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 224, mistakenly asserts that in Marx’s theory of capitalist development the lumpenproletariat “would become less and less significant with the further development of large-scale industrial production . . . he regarded unemployment as a phenomenon which, until the final crisis of the capitalist system, would have only a limited and fluctuating importance.”

38. See, for example, Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978); Erik Olin Wright, Class, Crisis, and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978).

39. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 797.

40. Translated from French, this term means “incidentals.”

Page 157 → 41. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 797. Marx does not elaborate on the last sentence, but one might speculate that he is referring to workers’ mutual aid societies or even public assistance and social insurance programs financed with regressive taxes on the working classes. For a contemporary analysis, see Jacob S. Hacker, The Great Risk Shift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

42. For example, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Projections: Fastest Declining Occupations, 2018 and Projected 2028.”

43. Frederick Engels, “The Constitutional Question in Germany,” in MECW, Vol. 6 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 83.

44. Karl Marx, “The Victory of the Counterrevolution in Vienna,” in MECW, Vol. 7 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 505.

45. Frederick Engels, “The Model Republic,” in MECW, Vol. 9 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 43–44.

46. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 2, 469–71.

47. The French phrase “gens sans feu” translates as “people without fire [hearth],” or the homeless, while “sans aveau” translates as “without confession,” or unscrupulous.

48. Marx, “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850,” in MECW, Vol. 10, 62. Italics added by author. Cowling, “Can Marxism Make Sense of Crime?,” 59, concludes that Marx and Engels “associated crime with the lumpenproletariat,” but only to the degree that it is a “recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kind,” but they do not view the lumpenproletariat, as a whole, as a criminal underclass. Elsewhere, indeed, Marx refers to an “honest lumpenproletariat.”

49. Marx, “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850,” in MECW, Vol. 10, 62.

50. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” MECW, Vol. 11, 149. Much later (1870), Frederick Engels, “Preface to the 2nd Edition of The Peasant War in Germany,” in MECW, Vol. 21 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 98, refers to the lumpenproletariat as “this scum of depraved elements from all classes.”

51. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association,” in MECW, Vol. 23 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 454.

52. Karl Kautsky, Social Democracy versus Communism (New York: Rand School, 1946), 128, argues that the boundaries between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat “are not sharply drawn. They overlap and vary with changes in the political and economic situation.” Likewise, V. I. Lenin, “The Development of Capitalism in Russia,” in V. I. Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960), 504, draws a similar conclusion in his analysis of the unproductive population, where he identifies “a semi-proletarian population (partly lumpenproletarian).”

53. Frederick Engels, “237 Engels to Laura LaFargue in Paris, London 9 of February 1886,” in MECW, Vol. 47 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), 403.

54. Frederick Engels, “42 Engels to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis in The Hague London 3 of December 1890,” in MECW, Vol. 49 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001), 78.

55. Karl Marx, “Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft of 1857–58) [First Installment]” (1857–58), in MECW, Vol. 28 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), 203.

Page 158 → 56. Karl Marx, “152 Marx to Engels in London Cannes, 5 of Juin 1882,” in MECW, Vol. 46 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1992), 272.

57. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 181.

58. Ibid., 186–87.

59. Ibid., 193.

60. Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 2, 476, deals with this problem by claiming that “since the unemployed and pauperized workers are here put in the same bag with criminals and beggars, he [Marx} does not yet understand that the latter (typifying the lumpen-class proper) are outside the purview of political economy. . . . This is an objective feature of the society, not a defect of the political economists.” Draper is wrong; Marx understands.

61. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 798.

62. Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in MECW, Vol. 6, 494.

63. Susanne Soederberg, Debtfare State and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline, and the Surplus Population (New York: Routledge, 2014), 41, correctly observes that Marx “does not theorise the social reproduction of labour power, particularly the surplus population . . . since the quantity and quality of labour supply is an important feature to Marx’s understanding of capital accumulation, this omission is, perhaps, one of the most serious of all the gaps in Marx’s own theory and one that is proving extremely difficult to plug. . . . This is particularly true with regard to the gendered, racial and ethnic dimensions of social reproduction.” See also Harvey, Limits to Capital, 163.

64. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 929–30.

65. Marx and Engels, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in MECW, Vol. 24 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 87.

66. Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle, trans. William E. Bohn (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 29.

67. On accumulation by dispossession, see David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Similarly, Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949).

68. Kautsky, The Class Struggle, 29.

69. Ibid., 29–30. See also Karl Kautsky, The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx, trans. H. J. Stenning (London: A. & C. Black, 1925), 228, where he makes an identical argument about the expanded reproduction of the industrial reserve army and surplus population: “Lastly, we must not forget the effect of railways and steam ships, which render it possible for capital to draw new masses of workers from industrially-backward countries—Ireland, Poland, Slovakia, Italy, China, etc.”

70. Kautsky, The Class Struggle, 30–31.

71. Ibid., 29.

Chapter 3

1. Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in MECW, Vol. 6, 494.

2. Ibid., 494.

Page 159 → 3. Frederick Engels, “German Socialism in Verse and Prose,” in MECW, Vol. 6 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 246.

4. Frederick Engels, “The 25th of June,” in MECW, Vol. 7 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 143.

5. Frederick Engels, “The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution,” in MECW, Vol. 10 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), 168; V. I. Lenin, “Socialism and Anarchism,” in V. I. Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 10 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962), 73–74, similarly observes that agent provocateurs working for the czarist autocracy regularly “strive to fan base passions among the ignorant masses . . . by fuddling lumpen proletarians with drink.”

6. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Review May to October 1850,” in MECW, Vol. 10 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), 514.

7. Karl Marx, “Agitation over the Tightening-Up of Sunday Observance,” in MECW, Vol. 14 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), 325.

8. Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in MECW, Vol. 11, 148–49. A roué is a debauched elderly man. A montebank is a con artist, who tricks people out of their money. The term maquereau literally translates as mackerel (fish), but its informal usage designates a pimp.

9. Ibid., 149. In a similar vein, Isenberg, White Trash, xiv–xv, notes that throughout US history, “marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children” and, hence, were labeled as “‘waste people,’ and later, ‘white trash.’ . . . The words ‘waste’ and ‘trash’ are crucial to any understanding of this powerful and enduring vocabulary.”

10. Frederick Engels, “Preface to the 2nd Edition of ‘The Peasant War in Germany,’” in MECW, Vol. 21, 98.

11. For example, in discussing London’s East End dock workers, Frederick Engels, “211 Engels to Eduard Bernstein in London, Eastbourne 22 of August 1889, 4 Cavendish Place,” in MECW, Vol. 48 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001), 365, observes that “because of the lack of organisation and the passively vegetable existence of the real East End workers, the lumpen proletariat has hitherto had last say there, purporting, and indeed being held, to be the prototype and representative of the million starvelings in the East End.”

12. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Les Conspirateurs, par A. Chenu, ex-capitaine des gardes du citoyen Caussidière. Les sociétés secrètes; la préfecture de police sous Caussidière; les corps-francs. La naissance de la République en février 1848, par Lucien de la Hodde,” in MECW, Vol. 10 (London: Lawrence and Wishart,1978), 317.

13. Ibid., 317–18.

14. Ibid., 318.

15. Marx, “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850,” in MECW, Vol. 10, 62.

16. Ibid.

17. Georg Potschka, “The Cologne Newspaper,” in Deutsche Zeitungen des 17. bis 20. Jahrhunderts, Bd. 2, edited by Heinz Dietrich Fischer (Pullach 1972), 145–58; Karl Buchheim, Von den Anfängen Joseph Dumonts bis zum Ausgang der deutschen bürgerlichen Revolution (1831–1850) Die Geschichte der kölnischen Zeitung ihrer Besitzer und Mitarbeiter; 2. Band (DuMont Schauenburg, 1930).

Page 160 → 18. Frederick Engels, “The Kölnische Zeitung on the June Revolution,” in MECW, Vol. 7 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 150.

19. Ibid., 152.

20. Ibid., 156.

21. “Refutation,” in MECW, Vol. 8 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 210.

22. Karl Marx, “Montesquieu LVI,” in MECW, Vol. 8 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 267.

23. Frederick Engels, “The Russians in Transylvania,” in MECW, Vol. 8 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 436.

24. Frederick Engels, “The Military Reports of the Kölnische Zeitung,” in MECW, Vol. 9 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 17.

25. Karl Marx, “307 Marx to Ferdinand Lasalle in Berlin [London] 22 November 1859,” in MECW, Vol. 40 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983), 537. Marx noted resentfully that the Hermann had 1,700 subscribers, while Das Volk was losing distribution. By 1867, Hermann was selling 2,000 copies in London alone, but the paper could barely sustain itself and was often on the brink of bankruptcy; see “Hermann/Londoner Zeitung, 1859–1914.”

26. Karl Marx, “308 Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath in London [London] 23 November 1859,” in MECW, Vol. 40 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983), 541.

27. Karl Marx, “312 Marx to Engels in Manchester [London] 10 December 1859,” MECW, Vol. 40, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983), 547.

28. See Christine Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees: German Socialism in Britain, 1840–1860 (London: Routledge, 2006).

29. Karl Marx, “Connections Between the International Working Men’s Association and English Working Men’s Organisations,” in MECW, Vol. 21 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 27.

30. Paul LaFargue, “Socialism and the Intellectuals,” in The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait, ed. George B. De Huszar (New York: Free Press, 1960), 322–27.

31. See Clyde W. Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: The Corporate-Liberal Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894–1928 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), chap. 6, for an empirical analysis of the increasing workload and declining economic position of American university professors compared to manual wage laborers during this time.

32. LaFargue, “Socialism and the Intellectuals,” 322.

33. Ibid., 323.

34. Ibid., 322–23.

35. LaFargue, “Socialism and the Intellectuals,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1900/03/socint.htm

36. Ibid., 323.

37. Ibid., 324.

38. LaFargue, “Socialism and the Intellectuals,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1900/03/socint.htm

39. Ibid., 324.

40. Karl Marx, “Montesquieu LVI,” in MECW, Vol. 8 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 267.

Page 161 → 41. Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850,” in MECW, Vol. 10, 50–51.

42. Ibid., 51.

43. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), 73–74.

44. LaFargue, “Socialism and the Intellectuals,” 324.

45. Karl Marx, “36 Marx to Engels in Manchester [London] 30 October 1856, 9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill,” in MECW, Vol. 40 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983), 80.

46. Frederick Engels, “The Role of Force in History,” in MECW, Vol. 26 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 498.

47. Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in MECW, Vol. 11, 149; Engels, “Preface to the 2nd Edition of ‘The Peasant War in Germany,’” in MECW, Vol. 21, 98.

48. Karl Kautsky, Social Democracy versus Communism (New York: Rand School, 1946), 126.

Chapter 4

1. Engels, “The Peasant War in Germany,” in MECW, Vol. 10, 408.

2. Ibid.

3. Engels, “The Constitutional Question in Germany,” in MECW, Vol. 6, 84.

4. Editors, MECW, Vol. 13, 435.

5. “Lazzaroni,” in The Nutall Encyclopedia, edited by James Wood (London and New York: Frederick Warne, 1907), defines the lazzaroni as “an indolent class of waifs under a chief who used to lounge about Naples, and proved formidable in periods of revolution; they subsisted partly by service as messengers, porters, &c., and partly as beggars,” available at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Nuttall_Encyclopædia/L

6. Frederick Engels, “The Latest Heroic Deed of the House of Bourbon,” in MECW, Vol. 7 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 25.

7. Frederick Engels, “Details about the 23rd of June,” in MECW, Vol. 7 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), where Engels references the Mobile Guard.

8. Frederick Engels, “The 25th of June,” in MECW, Vol. 7 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 142–43.

9. Marx, “The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850,” in MECW, Vol. 10, 62.

10. Marx, “The Victory of the Counterrevolution in Vienna,” in MECW, Vol. 7, 505.

11. Engels, “The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution,” in MECW, Vol. 10, 165.

12. Engels, “The Model Republic,” in MECW, Vol. 9, 43–44.

13. Marx, “Revolutionary Spain,” in MECW, Vol. 13, 435. For background, see V. G. Kiernan, The Revolution of 1854 in Spanish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).

14. For example, Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the Page 162 →State (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 231, observes that there are “exceptional periods . . . when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both. This applies to the absolute monarchy of the 11th and 18th centuries . . . and to the Bonapartism of the First and particularly of the Second Empire.” Ralph Miliband, “Marx and the State,” in Socialist Register, ed. R. Miliband and J. Saville (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965), 278–95, also acknowledges Bonapartism as an exceptional state form, as does Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: Verso, 1974). See also Bob Jessop, “The Political Scene and the Politics of Representation: Periodising Class Struggle and the State in the Eighteenth Brumaire,” in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: (Post)Modern Interpretations, eds. Mark Cowling and James Martin (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 179–94.

15. Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” MECW, Vol. 11, 110.

16. Ibid., 143. Kautsky, Social Democracy versus Communism, 127, similarly observes that “due to particularly favorable circumstances” the lumpenproletariat also “attained to great political power in ancient Rome . . . but not knowing how to utilize it found nothing better to do than to sell its votes to those who paid the most in bread and circuses.”

17. “Trump, ‘I Love The Poorly Educated,’” Daily Beast, February 24, 2016; Maya Oppenheim, “Jared Kushner ‘Admitted Donald Trump Lies to His Base Because He Thinks They’re Stupid,’” The Independent, May 31, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/News/world/americas/jared-kushner-donald-trump-lied-base-stupid-voters-supporters-president-son-in-law-white-house-a7764791.html

18. Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in MECW, Vol. 11, 149–50.

19. Ibid., p. 155.

20. Karl Marx, “189 Marx to Engels in Manchester [London] 12 October 1853,” in MECW, Vol. 39 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983), 388.

21. Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in MECW, Vol. 11, 157.

22. Ibid., 194.

23. Ibid., 193.

24. Published as Kautsky, The Class Struggle.

25. Ibid., 170–71.

26. Ibid., 190.

27. Kautsky, The Class Struggle, 168–69.

28. Kautsky, Social Democracy versus Communism, 126.

29. Marx and Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in MECW, Vol. 6, 504.

30. Ibid., 505.

31. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in MECW, Vol. 24 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 86.

32. It is somewhat ironic that this same principle guided Captain John Smith (1609) in the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia as he declared “he that will not work shall not eat,” which itself was derived from 2 Thessalonians 3:10 of the Bible: “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.”

Page 163 → 33. V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 78.

34. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in MECW, Vol. 24, 87.

35. Cowling, “Marx’s Lumpenproletariat and Murray’s Underclass,” 239–40.

36. Paul Q. Hirst, “Marx and Engels on Law, Crime and Morality,” Economy and Society 1, No. 1 (2006): 41, 45–53, for a lengthier discussion of criminality under socialism.

37. For excellent analyses of these laws, see Zofia Ostrihanska and Irena Rzeplinska, “The Obligation to Work. On Law Enforcement and So-Called Social Parasitism: Poland in the 1980s,” IAHCCJ Bulletin, No. 16 (July 1992): 27–33; Barbara Szamota, “Social Parasitism in Poland: Some Legal Aspects,” Crime and Social Justice, No. 23 (1985): 91–100; Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Social Parasites: How Tramps, Idle Youth, and Busy Entrepreneurs Impeded the Soviet March to Communism,” Cahiers de Monde Russe 47, Nos. 1–2 (January–June 2006): 377–408.

38. Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism?, 73.

39. Ibid., 74.

40. Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971), 12. In 1904, a year before the first Russian Revolution, Luxemburg comments on “the demonstrations of the patriotic lumpenproletariat which organized under police patronage,” ibid., 27.

41. Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 74.

42. Ibid., 75.

43. Kautsky, Social Democracy versus Communism, 126.

44. Frederick Engels, “213 Engels to Laura LaFargue at Le Perreux, Eastbourne 27 of August 1889, 4 Cavendish Place,” MECW, Vol. 48 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001), 367.

45. Frederick Engels, “211 Engels to Eduard Bernstein in London, Eastbourne 22 of August 1889, 4 Cavendish Place,” MECW, Vol. 48 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001), 365.

46. Frederick Engels, “238 Engels to Bebel in Berlin,” London 15 of February 1886,” in MECW, Vol. 47 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), 408.

47. Marx, “The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850,” MECW, Vol. 10, 62.

48. V. I. Lenin, “A Caricature of Bolshevism,” in V. I. Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 15 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), 384.

49. Mao Tse-tung, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” (March 1926), Selected Works, Vol. 1 (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1964), 19.

50. Mao Tse-tung, “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Community Party,” Selected Works, Vol. 2 (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1965), 325–26.

51. Mao Tse-tung, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” Selected Works, Vol. 1, 19.

52. Mao Tse-tung, “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Community Party,” Selected Works, Vol. 2, 326. Mao Tse-tung, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” Selected Works, Vol. 1, 19, also observes that the lumpenproletariat tends to organize itself into criminal “secret societies,” such as the Triad Society, which can easily masquerade as the type of political secret society that Marx and Engels always saw as a threat to a democratic working-class movement.

Page 164 → 53. Leon Trotsky, Against Individual Terrorism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974), 6, similarly claims that lumpenproletarian “revolutionary” activities typically consist of searching for plunder, smashing machines, setting fire to a factory, or murdering a factory owner.

54. V. I. Lenin, “Guerilla Warfare,” in V. I. Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 11, 216.

55. Ibid.

56. Frederick Engels, “Preface to the 2nd Edition of The Peasant War in Germany,” in MECW, Vol. 21, 98–99.

Chapter 5

1. Mao Tse-tung, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” Selected Works, Vol. 1 (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1964), 18–19. Later, Liu Shao-ch’i, The Political Report of the Central Committee of the Communist Part of China to the Eighth National Congress of the Party, September 15, 1956 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1956), 9, states that “After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the working class has won ruling power throughout the country in conditions of a firm alliance with several hundred millions of peasants; the party of the working class—the Chinese Communist Party—has become the party that leads the state power of the whole country; therefore, the people’s democratic republic has in essence become one form of dictatorship of the proletariat.”

2. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963).

3. Julian Bourg, “The Red Guards of Paris: French Student Maoism of the 1960s,” History of European Ideas 31, No. 4 (2005): 472–90.

4. Dolgoff, “Introduction,” 3–21. See also Stirner, The Ego and His Own, 147–52.

5. Worsley, “Frantz Fanon and the ‘Lumpenproletariat,’” 193–94.

6. Ibid., 207.

7. Fanon finds that “the Country people are suspicious of the townsman. The latter dresses like a European; he speaks the European’s language, works with him, sometimes even lives in the same district; so he is considered by the peasants as a turncoat who has betrayed everything that goes to make up the national heritage,” Ibid., 112.

8. Ibid., 111.

9. See Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of the American Empire (London: Verso, 2012).

10. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 111–12.

11. Ibid., 126–27.

12. Ibid., 131.

13. Ibid., 112. For example, Islamic militancy and the Rwanda genocide, respectively. See Najibullah Lafraie, Revolutionary Ideology and Islamic Militancy: The Iranian Revolution and Interpretations of the Quran (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2009); Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

Page 165 → 14. Worsley, “Frantz Fanon and the ‘Lumpenproletariat,’” 207.

15. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 111.

16. Engels, “The Peasant War in Germany,” in MECW, Vol. 10, 408.

17. Worsley, “Frantz Fanon and the ‘Lumpenproletariat,’” 211.

18. Ibid., 209.

19. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 129.

20. Ibid., 130.

21. Marx, “The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850,” MECW, Vol. 10, 62.

22. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 129.

23. Douglas Little, “Cold War and Colonialism in Africa: The United States, France, and the Madagascar Revolt of 1947,” Pacific Historical Review 59, No. 4 (Nov. 1990): 527–52.

24. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 115.

25. Ibid., 136–37. The harkis and the messalists were Algerians who enlisted in the French army.

26. For background, see Charles E. Jones, ed., The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998); Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

27. See Stephen Shames and Bobby Seale, Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers (New York: Abrams, 2016), 22; Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Blank Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1970). Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: the Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967), xi; Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power,” in The Dialectics of Liberation, ed. David Cooper (London: Pelican, 1968, 150–74, refers to Fanon as one of his intellectual “patron saints.”

28. Eldridge Cleaver, Post-Prison Writings and Speeches (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 18.

29. Eldridge Cleaver, On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party (1969), 6.

30. Che Guevarra, Venceremos! The Speeches and Writings of Che Guevarra, edited, annotated, and with an introduction by John Gerassi (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), esp. chaps. 3, 11, 25, and 29.

31. For example, Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, “Internal Colonialism and National Development,” Studies in Comparative International Development 1, No. 4 (1965): 27–37; Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967); Andre Gunder Frank, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution: Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970); Andre Gunder Frank, Lumpen-Bourgeoisie, Lumpen-Development: Dependence, Class, and Politics in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972); James D. Cockcroft, André Gunder Frank, and Dale L. Johnson, Dependence and Underdevelopment: Latin America’s Political Economy (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972).

32. Ramon A. Gutierrez, “Internal Colonialism: An American Theory of Race,” Du Bois Review 1, No. 2 (2004), 281.

Page 166 → 33. James Gilbert, “Studies on the Left,” in The Encyclopedia of the American Left, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 805–6.

34. Harold W. Cruse, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,” Studies on the Left, Nos. 2/3 (1962): 12–25. Later republished in Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1968), 74, 76 for quotes.

35. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), Chap. 2.

36. Ibid., 17.

37. Ibid., 4–5; Ernest Cashmore and James Jennings, Racism: Essential Readings (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 2001), 111, credit Carmichael and Hamilton as the first writers to use this term a systematic way.

38. Similarly, Julius Lester, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama (New York: Dial Press, 1968), 138–39, argues that “this system is threatened more and more each day by the refusal of those in the Third World to be exploited. They are colonial people outside the United States; blacks are a colonial people within. Thus, we have a common enemy. . . . The struggle of blacks in America is inseparable from the struggle of the Third World. This is a natural coalition—a coalition of those who know they are dispossessed.”

39. Huey P. Newton quoted in Shames and Seale, Power to the People, 24–25.

40. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 105–27.

41. Mao Tse-tung, “Problems of War and Strategy (November 1938),” Selected Works, Vol. 2 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 225, who states that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. . . . According to the Marxist theory of the state, the army is the chief component of state power. Whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army.”

42. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 111.

43. Ibid., 116–18. Also see Shames and Seale, Power to the People, 16–17.

44. Shames and Seale, Power to the People, chap. 3. Also see “Black Panther Party Community Programs, 1966–1982.”

45. Eldridge Cleaver, On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party (1969).

46. Ibid., 3.

47. Ibid., 4.

48. Ibid., 2. The BPP borrowed the concept of “Babylon” from the Jamaican Rastafarians, who used the term to denote Western capitalism and imperialism. This biblical reference invoked the image of an ancient imperial city that had collapsed under the weight of its ambition, arrogance, and corruption.

49. Ibid., 5.

50. Ibid., 6.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid., 7.

53. Ibid., 8.

54. Ibid., 9.

55. Ibid., 8.

56. Ibid., 9.

Page 167 → 57. Ibid., 7.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid., 2.

60. Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society (New York: Random House, 1971); Daniel Bell, The Coming of Postindustrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

61. Cleaver, Ideology, 9.

62. Ibid., 7.

63. Ibid., 6–7.

64. Eldridge Cleaver, “On Lumpen Ideology,” The Black Scholar 4, No. 3 (November–December 1972), 8.

65. Ibid., 7.

66. Ibid., 8.

67. Herbert Marcuse, Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 51–52, 55, rejects this claim and relies on the same logic of class de-composition to flirt with the “new working class” thesis being developed by Andre Gorz and Serge Mallet in France. See Andre Gorz, Strategy for Labor (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), and Serge Mallet, Essays on the New Working Class (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975).

68. In contrast, Bruce Franklin, “The Lumpenproletariat and the Revolutionary Youth Movement,” Monthly Review (January 1970), 10–11, argues that during the 1960s “a section of white youth has dropped out of its privileged position and consciously assumed a sub-proletarian mode of existence.” Franklin contends that “white street people own no property [and] rarely sell their labor, but hustle and drift. Their resemblance [to the Black lumpenproletariat] . . . has now been driven home by the police, who have begun to use on the white dropouts the kind of systematic terror and brutality usually reserved for black and brown people and the poorest whites.”

69. Cleaver, Ideology, 10.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., 10.

72. Huey P. Newton, “Speech Delivered at Boston College: November 18, 1970,” in the Huey P. Newton Reader, edited by David Hilliard and Donald Weise (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 160–75; Huey P. Newton, “Intercommunalism,” ibid., 181–99; Huey P. Newton, “On Pan-Africanism or Communism,” ibid., 248–55.

73. Newton, “Speech,” 165.

74. Ibid., 166.

75. Ibid., 168. Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, 55, again entertains the “new working class” thesis that the class of technicians, engineers, and computer operators “by virtue of its position, could disrupt, reorganize, and redirect the mode of production and relationships of production. However, they have neither the interest nor the vital need to do so; they are well integrated and well rewarded.” Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965), had proposed a “practicable soviet of technicians” much earlier in the century.

76. Cleaver, “On Lumpen Ideology,” 6.

77. Ibid., 5.

Page 168 → 78. Ibid., 9.

79. For example, Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,” Political Theory 34, No. 6 (December 2006): 690–714.

80. Cleaver, “On Lumpen Ideology,” 5.

81. Newton, “Speech,” 167.

82. Ibid., 166.

83. Ibid. See, for example, Kevin Roose, “The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite,” New York Times, January 25, 2019.

84. Cleaver, “On Lumpen Ideology,” 8.

85. Ibid., 9.

86. See Paul LaFargue, The Right to Be Lazy, trans. Len Bracken (Ardmore, PA: Fifth Season Press, 1999).

87. Marx and Engels, “The German Ideology,” in MECW, Vol. 5, 47.

88. Cleaver, “On Lumpen Ideology,” 8.

89. Ibid., 9.

90. Ibid., 10.

91. Ibid., 10.

92. Shames and Seale, Power to the People, 34.

93. For example, Lester, Look Out, Whitey!, 139, observes that “Whites in America are dispossessed also, but the difference is that they will not recognize the fact as yet. . . . Black Power liberates whites also, but they have refused to recognize this, preferring to defend their whiteness.”

94. See Newton, “The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements,” in The Huey P. Newton Reader, 157, who states that “I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups, we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion.” Samuel P. Huntington, “Post-Industrial Politics: How Benign Will It Be?” Comparative Politics 6, No. 2 (January 1974), 178, lays bare the blueprint for this postindustrial politics, which he predicts will entail “the declining social forces [in] conflict with each other, as blue-collar labor struggles with primarily black central city dwellers over segregation, schools, jobs, and welfare.”

95. Cleaver, “On Lumpen Ideology,” 9.

96. Ibid., 4.

97. Newton, “The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements,” 157.

98. Cleaver, “On Lumpen Ideology,” 3.

99. Ibid., 5.

100. Ibid., 7.

101. Ibid., 9.

102. Ibid., 10.

103. Ibid., 9.

104. Cleaver, “On Lumpen Ideology,” 7.

105. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971). Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

Page 169 →Chapter 6

1. Christopher Pierson, Socialism After Communism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).

2. Carl Boggs, Social Movements and Political Power: Emerging Forms of Radicalism in the West (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Hanspeter Kriese, Ruud Koopmans, and Jan Willem Duyvendak, New Social Movements in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

3. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985); Alain Touraine, Return of the Actor: Social Theory in Postindustrial Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

4. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976); Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis of Historical Materialism: Class, Politics, and Culture in Western Marxist Theory (New York: Praeger, 1981); Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Ronald Aronson, After Marxism (New York: Guilford Press, 1995).

5. Boris Frankel, The Post-Industrial Utopians (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).

6. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 5.

7. Sim, Post-Marxism: A Reader, 1–2, observes that “the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe has played a critical role in the development of post-Marxism, particularly their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), which helped to establish post-Marxism as a definite theoretical position in its own right.” More recently, Oliver Harrison, Revolutionary Subjectivity in Post-Marxist Thought: Laclau, Negri, Badiou (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014), 3, also observes that “the work of the late Ernesto Laclau is still considered by many as synonymous with post-Marxism,” but “they used the term in at least two senses.”

8. Stuart Sim, Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History (London: Routledge, 2001), 1.

9. Clyde W. Barrow, Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, and Post-Marxist (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), chap. 4.

10. Sim, Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History, 5.

11. Sim, Post-Marxism: A Reader, 7.

12. Ibid., 8–9.

13. David McLellan, “Introduction,” in Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, ed. and trans. David McLellan (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971), 2n4.

14. Martin Nicolaus, “The Unknown Marx,” New Left Review 41 (March/April 1969): 43.

15. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 35–36.

16. Andre Gorz, Strategy for Labor (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 128–30.

17. Nicolaus, “The Unknown Marx,” 42.

18. McLellan, “Introduction,” in Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, 9.

19. Ibid., 2, 3.

Page 170 → 20. Julius Sensat, Habermas and Marxism: An Appraisal (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1979), 68–72.

21. Ibid., 117–22, 99, 105–6, 109. See also Helmut Reichelt, “Jürgen Habermas’ Reconstruction of Historical Materialism,” in The Politics of Change: Globalization, Ideology and Critique, ed. Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis (New York: Palgrave Publishers, 2000), 105–6. Reichelt (116) argues, correctly in my view, that “Habermas’ theoretical work did not develop in a straight line. . . . one has to differentiate between Habermas I and Habermas II.” Reichelt suggests that this “break in the elaboration of his theory . . . this new beginning originated with his turn to linguistic theory . . . discourse theory and linguistic pragmatism” (i.e., The Theory of Communicative Action). Another way to draw this distinction is to say that Habermas I was a political sociologist, while Habermas II is a language philosopher and a theorist of some future deliberative democracy. In this respect, I am concerned exclusively with the work of Habermas I, which is a critique of contemporary capitalism and the state, although most of the secondary scholarly literature on Habermas focuses on Habermas II. Kenneth Baynes, Habermas (London: Routledge, 2016), 2, echoes Reichelt’s assessment with his observation that early in Habermas’s career “Marx (and the wider Hegelian-Marxist tradition of critical theory) engaged his thought,” while the period from The Theory of Communicative Action onward “might be described as more Weberian and [one] in which his conception of social theory looks more ‘traditional’ than ‘critical.’”

22. Adrian Little, The Political Thought of Andre Gorz (New York: Routledge, 1996), 164.

23. Conrad Lodziak and Jeremy Tatman, Andre Gorz: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 100.

24. Little, Political Thought of Andre Gorz, 173.

25. Kathi Weeks, “The Refusal of Work as Demand and Perspective,” in The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice, Vol. 1, ed. Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 188. See Alex Callinicos, “Antonio Negri and the Temptation of Ontology” in The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Theory, Vol. 2, ed. Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 170–81, for an insightful analysis of the role of Grundrisse in Negri’s political economy and theory of the state.

26. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982); Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the “Grundrisse,” ed. Jim Fleming, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991).

27. Andre Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason (London: Verso, 1989), 1, echoes a theme often articulated by Habermas: “What we are experiencing is not the crisis of modernity. We are experiencing the need to modernize the presuppositions upon which modernity is based. . . . an indication of the need for modernity itself to be modernized.” See also, Claus Offe, Modernity and the State (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 3–5.

28. Barrow, Critical Theories of the State, chap. 4.

29. Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 37.

Page 171 → 30. Ibid., 132.

31. Ibid., 116n15.

32. For example, Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 90, states that his objective is “to construct a conceptual model of institutional change brought about by the extension of subsystems of purposive-rational action” (i.e., the economic system) to the normative spheres of the life-world (i.e., politics and culture).

33. Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 53.

34. Offe, Contradictions, 92–93.

35. Offe, Disorganized Capitalism, 2. See ibid., 1, where Offe posits a key methodological premise that power “is an attribute not of actors, but of modes of interaction.” For a more extensive discussion, see ibid., 10–51.

36. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957) for the source of this concept.

37. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “The Crisis of Liberal Democratic Capitalism: The Case of the United States,” Politics and Society 11, No. 1 (1982): 51–93.

38. Offe, Contradictions, 98. Similarly, ibid., 92, argues that “social policy is the state’s manner of effecting the lasting transformation of non-wage laborers into wage-laborers.”

39. Jens Borchert and Stephan Lessenich, Claus Offe and the Critical Theory of the Capitalist State (New York: Routledge, 2016).

40. Andre Gorz, Paths to Paradise: Essays on the Liberation from Work (Boston: South End Press, 1986), 8. See also Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978); Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).

41. Gorz, Paths to Paradise, 9. See, Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 197–456, 671–710.

42. Gorz, Paths to Paradise, 11.

43. Significantly, Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 5700, 577–78, first introduces the concept of the rising organic composition of capital in the chapter on the working day.

44. Andrew Glyn and Bob Sutcliffe, Capitalism in Crisis (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).

45. Simon Clarke, ed., The State Debate (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 9–13.

46. Gorz, Paths to Paradise, 6.

47. Ibid., 43. The law of value is a claim that the valorization of a commodity is determined by the labor time “socially necessary for the production of a use-value,” see Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 303. See also Mandel, An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, 13–17.

48. Offe, Contradictions, 283. Similarly, Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

49. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 762.

50. Ibid., 571.

51. Ibid., 577–78.

52. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 762, states that “as it functions in the process of production,Page 172 → all capital is divided into means of production and living labour-power. . . . I call the former the value-composition of capital, the latter the technical composition of capital. There is a close correlation between the two. To express this [ratio], I call the value-composition of capital . . . the organic composition of capital. Wherever I refer to the composition of capital, without further qualification, its organic composition is always understood.”

53. Ibid., 773, 781–82.

54. Ibid., 929, concludes that “The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”

55. Gorz, Paths to Paradise, 29, 45.

56. Ibid., 33, quoting Grundrisse, notes that “Marx forecast that ‘the transformation of the means of labour into the automatic process’ would go together with ‘the abolition of direct individual labour and its transformation into social labour.’” Similarly, see T. Rockmore, Habermas on Historical Materialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), chap. 8, for an analysis of Habermas’s critique of Marx’s labor theory of value. On Negri, see George C. Caffentzis, “Immeasurable Value? An Essay on Marx’s Legacy,” in Reading Negri: Marxism in the Age of Empire, ed. Pierre Lamarche, David Sherman, and Max Rosenkrantz (Chicago: Open Court, 2011), 101–26.

57. Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Postindustrial Socialism (Boston: South End Press, 1982), 27. Gorz, Strategy for Labor, embraced the same logic earlier in his thinking, as did several other “new working class” Marxists. For example, Mallet, Essays on the New Working Class, and Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society. More recently, see Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon, and Thomas E. Weisskopf, After the Wasteland: A Democratic Economics for the Year 2000 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990).

58. Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, 28. Ibid., 70n3, 71n4, claims that Marx was well aware of this trend as documented in Grundrisse, where, “after describing with remarkable prescience the separation of the labourer from science and technology, as they acquired the reified form of fixed capital in the means of production [i.e., automation and computerization], Marx went on nevertheless to predict that, thanks to the freeing of time, fully developed individuals would become the subjects and agents of the immediate process of production. The polytechnic and scientific development of the individual through automation is an illusion.”

59. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 326–29n7–13.

60. Ibid., 37. Similarly, ibid., 36, observes that “The knowledge generated within the framework of instrumental action takes on external existence as a productive force.” For example, ibid., 47, quoting Grundrisse: “‘The development of fixed capital indicates the extent to which general social knowledge has become an immediate force of production and therefore(!) the conditions of the social life process itself have come under the control of the general intellect.’” See Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Random House, 1973), 706, for original source.

Page 173 → 61. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 48–49.

62. Marx, Grundrisse, 704–5. These same passages influenced Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 35–36.

63. Offe, Contradictions, 284.

64. Claus Offe, “Advanced Capitalism and the Welfare State,” Politics and Society 2 (1972): 479–88.

65. Joachim Hirsch, “The Fordist Security State and New Social Movements,” Kapitalistate, Nos. 10–11 (1983): 75–87.

66. Offe, Disorganized Capitalism, 101–28.

67. For example, contrast Gorz, Paths to Paradise, with Bell, Coming of the Post-Industrial Society.

68. Offe, Contradictions, 40.

69. Gorz, Farewell, 1.

70. Ibid., 2–3.

71. Ibid., 3.

72. Gorz, Paths to Paradise, 31.

73. Gorz, Farewell, 3, and Gorz, Paths to Paradise, 31.

74. Gwynn Guilford, “The US Unemployment Rate is at a 48-Year Low—So Why Are So Many Americans Still Out of Work?” Quartz, October 5, 2018, observes that the civilian labor force participation rate in the United States is 62.7 percent, which means that 37.5 percent could be classified as part of the relative surplus population. Since the 1990–91 recession, there has been a long-term tendency for this ratio to increase with each subsequent business cycle.

75. Gorz, Farewell, 4.

76. Gorz, Paths to Paradise, 42.

77. Gorz, Farewell, 4–6.

78. Ibid., 6–7.

79. Ibid., 28.

80. See, respectively, Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, and Reich, The Work of Nations.

81. Gorz, Farewell, 28.

82. Ibid., 8.

83. Ibid., 9, 31.

84. Ibid., 67.

85. See Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, 8–10 passim), where socialism is defined as “the first phase of communist society.” Marx observes that “as it [communism] emerges from capitalist society,” the same principle of distribution “prevails as in the exchange of commodity-equivalents, so much labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form,” i.e., from each according to his ability, to each according to his labor.

86. Gorz, Farewell, 12n8.

87. Gorz, Paths to Paradise, 32.

88. See also Levine (1993). Gorz’s equation of liberation with the abolition of work under communism also draws heavily on Marx’s distinction between “the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom” in Capital, Vol. 3; see Tucker (1978, 439–41).

Page 174 → 89. Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, 209.

90. John R. Commons, Legal Foundations of Capitalism (New York: Macmillan, 1924).

91. For example, Michelle Cheng, “Finland’s New Prime Minister Wants Her Country on a Four-Day Workweek,” Quartz at Work, January 6, 2020.

92. Gorz, Paths to Paradise, 78.

93. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring: Herr Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in Science. New York: International Publishers, 1939), 307.

94. Gorz, Farewell, 42.

95. Gorz, Paths to Paradise, 4.

96. Gorz, Farewell, 8. Little, Political Thought of Andre Gorz, 99, observes that “at no stage did Gorz state that the neo-proletariat is becoming a ‘single revolutionary subject.’ He defines it as a group that no longer relates to the work ethic and is therefore opposed to the logic of capitalism. This does not mean that Gorz believes that the neo-proletariat will achieve revolutionary class consciousness; in the present situation, this development is most unlikely.” A notable exception to this trend is Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, trans. James Newell (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

97. Cf. Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).

98. Karl Hinrichs, Clause Offe, and Hans Wiesenthal, “The Crisis of the Welfare State and Alternative Modes of Work Redistribution,” Thesis Eleven, Nos. 10–11 (1984–1985), 51.

99. Offe, Disorganized Capitalism, 3.

100. Claus Offe, “New Social Movements: Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics,” Social Research 52, No. 4 (1985): 817–68. Offe, Contradictions, 285, argues that the revolutionary potential of the labor movement “has been exhausted to the extent that it ignores the fact that the wage-labour-capital relationship is not the key determinant of social existence and that the survival of capitalism has become increasingly contingent upon non-capitalist forms of power and conflict. Any labour movement that ignores this and avoids trying to make links with conflicts generated by consumers, clients, citizens, or inhabitants of an ecosystem becomes solipsistic. In my view, the crucial problem for the labour movement is how to become more than a labour movement.”

101. Cf. Charles Reich, “The New Property,” Yale Law Journal 73, No. 5 (1964): 733–87.

102. Offe, Modernity and the State, ix.

103. Cf. Adam Przeworski, “Material Interest, Class Compromise, and the Transition to Socialism,” Politics and Society 10, No. 2 (1980): 125–53; Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

104. Offe, Contradictions, 246.

105. Ibid., 243.

Page 175 → 106. Offe, Modernity and the State, 25.

107. Ibid., 201.

108. Ibid., 64.

109. See, respectively, Phillipe C. Schmitter, ed., Private Interest Government: Beyond Market and State (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1985); Peter F. Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993); Gianfranco Poggi, The State: Its Nature, Development, and Prospects (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Paul Q. Hirst, ed., The Pluralist Theory of the State (London: Routledge, 1989), 1–46.

110. Offe, Modernization and the State, 69.

111. Gorz, Farewell, 3, 7.

112. Ibid., 10–11, 36.

113. Bernard Henri-Levi, Barbarism with a Human Face (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 68, who describes the new philosophy as a call for “a provisional politics, a small-scale program, which some of us think can only be precarious, uncertain, and circumstantial—in a word, a matter of feeling.”

114. Gorz, Farewell, 12, 78.

115. The best critical analysis of this question is Frankel, Post-Industrial Utopians.

116. Offe, Modernity and the State, 67.

117. Gorz (1982, 67) indicates that these are nonlaboring groups “whose social activity yields no power,” while such a condition objectively strips it of “the means to take power, nor does it feel called upon to do so.”

118. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, 110. Cf. Offe, “New Social Movements,” esp. 855 ff.

119. Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, 242.

Conclusion

1. Chantal Da Silva, “ICE Is Building a ‘State-of-the-Art’ ‘Urban Warfare’ Training Facility That Will Include ‘Hyper-Realistic’ Simulations of Homes in Chicago and Arizona,” Newsweek, September 11, 2019.

2. Salvador Rizzo, “Anatomy of a Trump Rally: 67 Percent of Claims are False or Lack Evidence,” Washington Post, January 7, 2019.

3. Philip Bump, “Trump’s Speech Encouraging Police to Be ‘Rough,’ Annotated,” Washington Post, July 28, 2017.

4. Julia Craven, “On-Duty Texas Police Officers Wore Pro-Trump Hats. That’s a Problem,” Huff Post, July 22, 2019.

5. David Jackson, “Donald Trump Stirs Controversy with Breitbart Interview About His ‘Tough’ Supporters,” USA Today, March 15, 2019. Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), 6, observes that “at the moment that the ‘normal’ police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium—the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, Page 176 →capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat—all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.”

6. Dylan Stableford, “Donald Trump: I Love the Poorly Educated,” February 24, 2016, YahooNews.com; Maya Oppenheim, “Jared Kushner ‘Admitted Donald Trump Lies to His Base Because He Thinks They’re Stupid,’” The Independent, May 31, 2017.

7. Marx and Engels, “Communist Manifesto,” MECW, Vol. 6, 351.

8. Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” MECW, Vol. 24, 87.

9. Paul LaFargue, “Socialism and the Intellectuals,” Address Delivered at Paris March 23, 1900, at a Meeting Called by the Group of Collectivist Students Attached to the Parti Ouvrier Francais. For a contemporary articulation of this vision, see Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, revised and updated edition (London: Verso, 2016).

10. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).

11. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 231, observes that there are “exceptional periods . . . when the warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state power, as apparent mediator, acquires for the moment a certain independence in relation to both. This applies to the absolute monarchy of the 11th and 18th centuries . . . and to the Bonapartism of the First and particularly of the Second Empire.” See also Ralph Miliband, “Marx and the State,” in Socialist Register, ed. Ralph Miliband and John Saville (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965), 278–95; Paul Wetherly, “Making Sense of the ‘Relative Autonomy of the State,’” in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: (Post)Modern Interpretations, ed. Mark Cowling and James Martin (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 195–210.

12. Otto Bauer, “Fascism,” in Austro-Marxism, eds. Tom Bottomore and Patrick Goode (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 174, observes that in Europe of the 1920s and 1930s “circumstance drove the whole Lumpenproletariat to the Fascists. The Fascist storm troopers were clothed and paid out of the large subsidies paid by the capitalists and the landowners, and this brought the unemployed into their ranks.”

13. Karl Kautsky, Social Democracy versus Communism (New York: Rand School, 1946), 127. This book is based on several articles Kautsky wrote in the early 1930s after the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy and during the rise of Adolph Hitler in Germany and Englebert Dollfuss in Austria. He originally published the articles in Die Gesellschaft (Berlin) and Der Kampf (Vienna). Both were Social Democratic Party journals that were closed down by Hitler in 1933 and Dollfuss in 1934, respectively, see https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1930s/demvscom/index.htm

14. Similarly, Bertram D. Wolfe in Luxemburg in The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism?, 73n19, observes that the lumpenproletariat consists of “the outcast, degenerated and submerged elements that make up a considerable section of the population of the great industrial centers of all modern lands. It includes beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons broken in health or advanced in years, who have Page 177 →been cast out by industry, and all sorts of declassed, degraded or degenerated elements. In times of prolonged crisis, innumerable young people also, who cannot find an opportunity to enter into the social organism as producers, may be recruited into this limbo of the outcast. Here demagogues and fascists of various stripes find some of their mass base in time of struggle and social breakdown, when the ranks of the Lumpenproletariat are enormously swelled by ruined and declassed elements from all layers of a disintegrating society.”

15. Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: Verso, 1974); Nicos Poulantzas, Crisis of the Dictatorships (London: Verso, 1976).

16. Samuel Farber, “Donald Trump, Lumpen Capitalist,” Jacobin Magazine (October 19, 2018).

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Timothy L. O’Brien, “Trump Hints at Civil War, But He Launched a War on Facts,” Bloomberg, September 20, 2019.

21. Peter Wade, “Trump Loves to Say He May Not Leave Office After Two Terms, and It’s Dangerous,” Rolling Stone, June 16, 2019.

Page 178 →Page 179 →Bibliography

Adler, Max. “Metamorphosis of the Working Class.” In Austro-Marxism, edited by Tom Bottomore and Patrick Goode, 217–48. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.

Anderson, Perry. Considerations on Western Marxism, London: New Left Books, 1976.

Aronowitz, Stanley. The Crisis of Historical Materialism: Class, Politics, and Culture in Western Marxist Theory. New York: Praeger, 1981.

Aronson, Ronald. After Marxism. New York: Guilford Press, 1995.Baran, Paul A., and Paul M. Sweezy. Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966.

Barrow, Clyde W. Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894–1928. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Barrow, Clyde W. Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.

Barrow, Clyde W. Toward a Critical Theory of States: The Poulantzas-Miliband Debate After Globalization. Albany: SUNY Press, 2016.

Baynes, Kenneth. Habermas. London: Routledge, 2016.

Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960.

Bell, Daniel. The Coming of Postindustrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

“Black Panther Party Community Programs, 1966–1982.”

https://web.stanford.edu/group/blackpanthers/programs.shtml

Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo Martin Jr. Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

Bluestone, Barry, and Bennett Harrison. The Deindustrialization of America. New York: Basic Books, 1982.

Boggs, Carl. Social Movements and Political Power: Emerging Forms of Radicalism in the West. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.

Borchert, Jens, and Stephan Lessenich. Claus Offe and the Critical Theory of the Capitalist State. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Bourg, Julian. “The Red Guards of Paris: French Student Maoism of the 1960s.” History of European Ideas 31, No. 4 (2005): 472–90.

Bovenkerk, Frank. “The Rehabilitation of the Rabble: How and Why Marx and Engels Page 180 →Wrongly Depicted the Lumpenproletariat as a Reactionary Force.” The Netherlands Journal of Sociology 20, No. 1 (1984): 13–41.

Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis. “The Crisis of Liberal Democratic Capitalism: The Case of the United States.” Politics and Society 11, No. 1 (1982): 51–93.

Bowles, Samuel, David M. Gordon, and Thomas E. Weisskopf. After the Wasteland: A Democratic Economics for the Year 2000. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990.

Brown, Wendy. “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization.” Political Theory 34, No. 6 (December 2006): 690–714.

Buchheim, Karl. Von den Anfängen Joseph Dumonts bis zum Ausgang der deutschen bürgerlichen Revolution (1831–1850) Die Geschichte der kölnischen Zeitung ihrer Besitzer und Mitarbeiter; 2. Band. DuMont Schauenburg, 1930.

Bui, Quoctrung, and Claire Cain Miller. “The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America.” New York Times, August 4, 2018.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html

Bump, Philip. “Trump’s Speech Encouraging Police to Be ‘Rough,’ Annotated.” Washington Post, July 28, 2017.

Bussard, Robert L. “The ‘Dangerous Class’ of Marx and Engels: The Rise of the Idea of the Lumpenproletariat.” History of European Ideas 8, No. 6 (1987): 675–92.

Caffentzis, George C. “Immeasurable Value? An Essay on Marx’s Legacy.” In Reading Negri: Marxism in the Age of Empire, edited by Pierre Lamarche, David Sherman, and Max Rosenkrantz, 101–26. Chicago: Open Court, 2011.

Callinicos, Alex. “Antonio Negri and the Temptation of Ontology.” In The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Theory, Vol. 2, edited by Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha, 169–97. London: Pluto Press, 2005.

Carmichael, Stokely. “Black Power.” In The Dialectics of Liberation, edited by David Cooper, 150–74. London: Pelican, 1968.

Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.

Carr, Howie. “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before.” Boston Herald, March 16, 2019. https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/03/16/howie-carr-stop-me-if-youve-heard-this-one-before/

Casanova, Pablo Gonzalez. (1965). “Internal Colonialism and National Development.” Studies in Comparative International Development 1, No. 4 (1965): 27–37.

Cashmore, Ernest, and James Jennings. Racism: Essential Readings. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 2001.

Cheng, Michelle. “Finland’s New Prime Minister Wants Her Country on a Four-Day Workweek,” Quartz at Work, January 6, 2020.

https://qz.com/work/1780373/finlands-prime-minister-wants-her-country-on-a-four-day-workweek/

Clarke, Simon, ed. The State Debate. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

Cleaver, Eldridge. On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party, Part I. Black Panther Party Minister of Information, 1969.

https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20Power!/SugahData/Books/Cleaver.S.pdf

Cleaver, Eldridge. Post-Prison Writings and Speeches. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.

Page 181 →Cleaver, Eldridge. “On Lumpen Ideology.” The Black Scholar 4, No. 3 (November–December 1972): 2–10.

Cockcroft, James D., André Gunder Frank, and Dale L. Johnson. Dependence and Underdevelopment: Latin America’s Political Economy. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972.

Commons, John R. Legal Foundations of Capitalism. New York: Macmillan, 1924.

Confessore, Nicholas. “Tramps Like Them: Charles Murray Examines the White Working Class in ‘Coming Apart.’” New York Times, February 10, 2012.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/charles-murray-examines-the-white-working-class-in-coming-apart.html

Cowling, Mark. “Marx’s Lumpenproletariat and Murray’s Underclass: Concepts Best Abandoned.” In Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: (Post)Modern Interpretations, edited by Mark Cowling and James Martin, chap. 10. London: Pluto Press, 2002.

Cowling, Mark. “The Lumpenproletariat as the Criminal Class?” In Marxism and Criminological Theory: A Critique and Toolkit, edited by Mark Cowling, 149–61. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Cowling, Mark. “Can Marxism Make Sense of Crime?” Global Discourse 2, No. 2 (May 2013): 59–74.

Craven, Julia. “On-Duty Texas Police Officers Wore Pro-Trump Hats. That’s a Problem.” Huff Post, July 22, 2019. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/san-antonio-police-donald-trump_n_57fea9a7e4b0e8c198a5dfb0

Creech, Brian. “Finding the White Working Class in 2016: Journalistic Discourses and the Construction of a Political identity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies (August 2018): 1–22.

Cruse, Harold W. “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American.” Studies on the Left, Nos. 2/3 (1962): 12–25.

Cruse, Harold. Rebellion or Revolution? New York: William Morrow & Co., 1968.

Da Silva. Chantal. “ICE Is Building a ‘State-of-the-Art’ ‘Urban Warfare’ Training Facility That Will Include ‘Hyper-Realistic’ Simulations of Homes in Chicago and Arizona.” Newsweek, September 11, 2019.

https://www.newsweek.com/ice-hyper-realistic-training-facility-homes-chicago-arizona-1458721

Dolgoff, Sam. “Introduction.” In Bakunin on Anarchy, edited with an introduction and commentary by Sam Dolgoff, 3–21. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Draper, Hal. “The Concept of the ‘Lumpenproletariat’ in Marx and Engels.” Economies et Societes 15 (December 1972): 285–312.

Draper, Hal. Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. 2, The Politics of Social Classes. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978.

Drucker, Peter F. Post-Capitalist Society. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993.

Engels, Friedrich. Anti-Duhring: Herr Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in Science. New York: International Publishers, 1939.

Engels, Frederick. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York: International Publishers, 1972.

Engels, Frederick. “Speeches in Elberfeld, February 8, 1845.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 4, 243–55. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975.

Page 182 →Engels, Frederick. “The Condition of the Working Class in England.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 4, 295–583. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975.

Engels, Frederick. “The Constitutional Question in Germany.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6, 75–91. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976.

Engels, Frederick. “German Socialism in Verse and Prose.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6, 235–73. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976.Engels, Frederick. “The Latest Heroic Deed of the House of Bourbon.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 7, 24–26. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

Engels, Frederick. “Details about the 23rd of June.” Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 7, 24–27. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

Engels, Frederick. “The 25th of June.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 7, 139–43. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

Engels, Frederick. “The Kölnische Zeitung on the June Revolution.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 7, 150–56. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

Engels, Frederick. “The Russians in Transylvania.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 8, 432–39. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

Engels. Frederick. “The Military Reports of the Kölnische Zeitung.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 9, 13–18. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

Engels, Frederick. “The Model Republic.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 9, 42–46. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

Engels, Frederick. “The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 10, 147–239. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978.

Engels, Frederick. “The Peasant War in Germany.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 10, 397–482. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978.

Engels, Frederick. “Preface to the 2nd Edition of The Peasant War in Germany.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 21, 93–100. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985.

Engels, Frederick. “Lawyers’ Socialism.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 26, 597–616. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990.

Engels, Frederick. “The Role of Force in History.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 26, 453–510. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990.

Engels, Frederick. “Introduction [to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France: 1848–1850].” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 27, 506–524. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976.

Engels, Frederick. “237 Engels to Laura LaFargue in Paris, London 9 of February 1886.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 47, 403–5. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995.

Engels, Frederick. “238 Engels to Bebel in Berlin, London 15 of February 1886.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 47, 406–9. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995.

Engels, Frederick. “211 Engels to Eduard Bernstein in London, Eastbourne 22 of August 1889, 4 Cavendish Place.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 48, 364–65. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001.

Engels, Frederick. “213 Engels to Laura LaFargue at Le Perreux, Eastbourne 27 of Page 183 →August 1889, 4 Cavendish Place.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 48, 367–69. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001.

Engels, Frederick. “42 Engels to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis in The Hague London 3 of December 1890.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 49, 77–80. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1968.

Fine. Ben. Marx’s Capital. 3rd ed. London: MacMillan, 1989.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila. “Social Parasites: How Tramps, Idle Youth, and Busy Entrepreneurs Impeded the Soviet March to Communism.” Cahiers de Monde Russe 47, Nos. 1–2 (January–June 2006): 377–408.

Frank, Andre Gunder. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967.

Frank, Andre Gunder. Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution; Essays on the Development of Underdevelopment and the Immediate Enemy. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970.

Frank, Andre Gunder. Lumpen-Bourgeoisie, Lumpen-Development: Dependence, Class, and Politics in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.

Frankel, Boris. The Post-Industrial Utopians. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.Franklin, Bruce. “The Lumpenproletariat and the Revolutionary Youth Movement.” Monthly Review (January 1970): 10–25.

Gerth, Hans, and C. Wright Mills, eds. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.

Giddens, Anthony. A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Gilbert, James. “Studies on the Left.” In The Encyclopedia of the American Left, 2nd ed., 805–6. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Glyn, Andrew, and Bob Sutcliffe. Capitalism in Crisis. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

Goldberg, Jonah. “No Movement That Embraces Trump Can Call Itself Conservative.” National Review, September 5, 2015.

https://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/donald-trump-conservative-movement-jonah-goldberg/

Gorz, André. Strategy for Labor. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.

Gorz, André. Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Postindustrial Socialism. Boston: South End Press, 1982.

Gorz, André. Paths to Paradise: Essays on the Liberation from Work. Boston: South End Press, 1986.

Gorz, André. Critique of Economic Reason. London: Verso, 1989.

Guevara, Che. Venceremos! The Speeches and Writings of Che Guevara, edited, annotated, and with an introduction by John Gerassi. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.

Guilford, Gwynn. “The US Unemployment Rate Is at a 48-Year Low—So Why Are So Many Americans Still Out of Work?” Quartz, October 5, 2018.

Page 184 →https://qz.com/1414865/the-us-unemployment-rate-is-at-a-48-year-low-so-why-are-so-many-americans-still-out-of-work/

Gutierrez, Ramon A. “Internal Colonialism: An American Theory of Race.” Du Bois Review 1, No. 2 (2004): 281–95.

Habermas, Jürgen. Toward a Rational Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.

Habermas, Jürgen. Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.

Habermas, Jürgen. Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1975.

Hacker, Jacob S. The Great Risk Shift. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

Harrington, Robert. “Ivanka Trump, Failure.” The Palmer Report, July 24, 2018.

Harrison, Bennett, and Barry Bluestone. The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

Harrison, Oliver. Revolutionary Subjectivity in Post-Marxist Thought: Laclau, Negri, Badiou. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014.

Harvey, David. The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982.

Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Hayes, Peter. “Utopia and the Lumpenproletariat: Marx’s Reasoning in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ’” Review of Politics 50, No. 3 (Summer 1988): 445–65.

Henri-Levi, Bernard. Barbarism with a Human Face. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.

“Hermann/Londoner Zeitung, 1859–1914.” https://brill.com/view/package/9789004198494

Hilliard, David, and Donald Weise, eds. The Huey P. Newton Reader. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002.

Hinrichs, Karl, Clause Offe, and Hans Wiesenthal. “The Crisis of the Welfare State and Alternative Modes of Work Redistribution.” Thesis Eleven Nos. 10–11 (1984–1985): 37–55.

Hirsch, Arthur. The French New Left: An Intellectual History from Sartre to Gorz. Boston: South End Press, 1981.

Hirsch, Joachim. “The Fordist Security State and New Social Movements.” Kapitalistate, Nos. 10–11 (1983): 75–87.

Hirst, Paul Q., ed. The Pluralist Theory of the State. London: Routledge, 1989.

Hirst, Paul Q. “Marx and Engels on Law, Crime and Morality.” Economy and Society 1, No. 1 (2006): 28–56.

Huntington, Samuel P. “Post-Industrial Politics: How Benign Will It Be?” Comparative Politics 6, No. 2 (January 1974): 163–91.

Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Viking, 2016.

Jackson, David. “Donald Trump Stirs Controversy with Breitbart Interview About His ‘Tough’ Supporters.” USA Today, March 15, 2019.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/03/15/trump-deletes-breitbart-post-how-tough-his-supporters-can-get/3172413002/

Page 185 →Jessop, Bob. “The Political Scene and the Politics of Representation: Periodising Class Struggle and the State in the Eighteenth Brumaire.” In Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: (Post)Modern Interpretations, edited by Mark Cowling and James Martin, 179–94. London: Pluto Press, 2002.

Jones, Charles E., ed. The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998.

Kautsky, Karl. The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx. Translated by H. J. Stenning. London: A. & C. Black, 1925.

Kautsky, Karl. Social Democracy versus Communism. New York: Rand School, 1946.

Kautsky, Karl. The Class Struggle. Translated by William E. Bohn. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.

Kiernan, V. G. The Revolution of 1854 in Spanish History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Krawczyk, Kathryn, “Joe Biden Tells Coal Miners They Should ‘learn to program,’” December 31, 2019. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/politics/joe-biden-tells-coal-miners-they-should-learn-to-program/ar-BBYvdxZ

Kriese, Hanspeter, Ruud Koopmans, and Jan Willem Duyvendak. New Social Movements in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Kristof, Nicholas. “The White Underclass.” New York Times, February 8, 2012.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/opinion/kristof-the-decline-of-white-workers.html

Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985.

LaFargue, Paul. “Socialism and the Intellectuals,” Address Delivered at Paris March 23, 1900, at a Meeting Called by the Group of Collectivist Students Attached to the Parti Ouvrier Francais. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1900/03/socint.htm

LaFargue, Paul. “Socialism and the Intellectuals.” In The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait, edited by George B. De Huszar, 322–27. New York: Free Press, 1960.

LaFargue, Paul. The Right to Be Lazy. Translated by Len Bracken. Ardmore, PA: Fifth Season Press, 1999.

Lafraie, Najibullah. Revolutionary Ideology and Islamic Militancy: The Iranian Revolution and Interpretations of the Quran. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2009.

Lattek, Christine. Revolutionary Refugees: German Socialism in Britain, 1840–1860. London: Routledge, 2006.

“Lazzaroni.” In The Nutall Encyclopedia, edited by James Wood. London: Frederick Warne, 1907.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Nuttall_Encyclopædia/L

Lenin, V. I. “The Development of Capitalism in Russia.” In V. I. Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 3, 21–607. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960.

Lenin, V. I. “Socialism and Anarchism.” In V. I. Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 10, 71–74. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962.

Lenin, V. I. “Guerrilla Warfare.” In V. I. Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol. 11, 213–22. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972.

Page 186 →Lenin, V. I. “A Caricature of Bolshevism.” In V. I. Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol., 15, 383–94. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963.

Lenin, V. I., State and Revolution. New York: International Publishers, 1974.

Lester, Julius. Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama. New York: Dial Press, 1968.

Levine, Andrew. Rousseau, Marx, and Communism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Levy, Francis. “The Final Solution: the Lumpenproletariat.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-final-solution-the-lumpenproletariat_us_58dd1335e4b04ba4a5e2512f

Little, Adrian. The Political Thought of Andre Gorz. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Little, Douglas. “Cold War and Colonialism in Africa: The United States, France, and the Madagascar Revolt of 1947.” Pacific Historical Review 59, No. 4 (November 1990): 527–52.

Lodziak, Conrad, and Jeremy Tatman. Andre Gorz: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press, 1997.

“Lumpenproletariat.” In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore, 292–93. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1983.

“Lumpenproletariat.” In The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Vol. 9, 102. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961.

Luxemburg, Rosa. The Mass Strike. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971.

Mallet, Serge. Essays on the New Working Class. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975.

Mandel, Ernest. An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973.

Mandel, Ernest. Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1978.

Mao, Tse-tung. “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society.” In Selected Works, Vol. 1. Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1964.

Mao, Tse-tung. “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Community Party.” Selected Works, Vol. 2. Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1965.

Mao Tse-tung, “Problems of War and Strategy (November 1938).” Selected Works, Vol. 2. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965.

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

Herbert Marcuse, Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Translated by Daniel De Leon. New York: International Publishing, 1898.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1906.

Marx, Karl. The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850. Introduction by Frederick Engels. Translated by Henry Kuhn. New York: New York Labor News Company, 1924.

Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1926.

Page 187 →Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. With explanatory notes. New York: International Publishers, 1935.

Marx, Karl. Class Struggles in France (1848–50). London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1945.

Marx, Karl. The Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, edited and translated by David McLellan. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1971.

Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Program. New York: International Publishers, 1973.

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Random House, 1973.Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.

Marx, Karl. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3, 175–87. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975.

Marx, Karl. “The Victory of the Counterrevolution in Vienna.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 7, 503–6. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

Marx, Karl. “Montesquieu LVI.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 8, 254–67. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

Marx, Karl. “The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works,

Vol. 10, 45–146. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978.

Marx, Karl. “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 11, 99–197. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979.

Marx, Karl. “Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 11, 395–457. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979.

Marx, Karl. “Revolutionary Spain.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 13, 389–446. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980.

Marx, Karl. “Agitation over the Tightening-Up of Sunday Observance.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 14, 323–27. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980.

Marx, Karl. “Connections Between the International Working Men’s Association and English Working Men’s Organisations.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 21, 25–27. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985.

Marx, Karl. “Preface the Second Edition of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 21, 56–58. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985.

Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Program.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 24, 75–99. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989.

Marx, Karl. “Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft of 1857–58) [First Instalment] (1857–58).” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 28, 49–540. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986.

Marx, Karl. “199 Marx to Engels in Manchester [London] 12 October 1853.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 39, 387–88. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983.

Page 188 →Marx, Karl. “307 Marx, Karl. “36 Marx to Engels in Manchester [London] 30 October 1856, 9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 40, 80–81. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983.

Marx, Karl. “307 Marx to Ferdinand Lasalle in Berlin [London] 22 November 1859.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 40, 536–38. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983.

Marx, Karl. “308 Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath in London [London] 23 November 1859.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 40, 539–41. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983.

Marx, Karl. “312 Marx to Engels in Manchester [London] 10 December 1859.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 40, 547–49. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983.

Marx, Karl. “152 Marx to Engels in London Cannes, 5 of Juin 1882.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 46, 272–74. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1992.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971 [1848].

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. “The German Ideology.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, 19–539. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. “The Communist Manifesto.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6, 477–519. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. “Les Conspirateurs, par A. Chenu, ex-capitaine des gardes du citoyen Caussidière. Les sociétés secrètes; la préfecture de police sous Caussidière; les corps-francs. La naissance de la République en février 1848, par Lucien de la Hodde.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 10, 311–25. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. “Review May to October 1850.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 10, 490–532. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. “The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men’s Association.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 23, 454–580. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988.

McLellan, David. “Introduction.” In Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, edited and translated by David McLellan, 1–15. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

Miliband, Ralph. “Marx and the State.” In Socialist Register, edited by Ralph Miliband and John Saville, 278–95. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965.

Miliband, Ralph. The State in Capitalist Society: Analysis of the Western System of Power. New York: Basic Books, 1969.

Murray, Charles. Losing Ground. New York: Basic Books. 1984.

Murray, Charles. “The Coming White Underclass.” Wall Street Journal, October 29, 1993.

Murray, Charles. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. New York: Crown Forum, 2012.

Negri, Antonio. The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century. Translated by James Newell. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Negri, Antonio. Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the “Grundrisse,” edited by Jim Fleming.Page 189 → Translated by Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1991.

Negri, Antonio. Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State. Translated by Maurizia Boscagli. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Newton, Huey P. Revolutionary Suicide. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973.

Newton, Huey P. “The War Against the Panthers” (1980).

https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/1966/10/15.htm

Nicolaus, Martin. “The Unknown Marx.” New Left Review 41 (March/April 1968): 41–61.

O’Brien, Timothy L. “Trump Hints at Civil War, But He Launched a War on Facts.” Bloomberg, September 20, 2019. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-30/whistleblower-complaint-now-trump-talks-of-civil-war-and-treason

Offe, Claus. “Advanced Capitalism and the Welfare State.” Politics and Society 2 (1972): 479–88.

Offe, Claus. “The Abolition of Market Control and the Problem of Legitimacy (II).” Kapitalistate 2 (1973): 73–75.

Offe, Claus. Contradictions of the Welfare State. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984.

Offe, Claus. Disorganized Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.

Offe, C. “New Social Movements: Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics.” Social Research, 52, No. 4 (1985): 817–68.

Offe, Claus. “Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics: Social Movements Since the 1960s.” In Changing Boundaries of the Political, edited by Charles S. Maier, 63–106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Offe, Claus. Modernity and the State. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.

Olson, Mancur. The Rise and Decline of Nations. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.

Oppenheim, May. “Jared Kushner ‘Admitted Donald Trump Lies to His Base Because He Thinks They’re Stupid.’” The Independent, May 31, 2017. https://www.independent.co.uk/News/world/americas/jared-kushner-donald-trump-lied-base-stupid-voters-supporters-president-son-in-law-white-house-a7764791.html

Ostrihanska, Zofia, and Irena Rzeplinska. “The Obligation to Work. On Law Enforcement and So-Called Social Parasitism: Poland in the 1980s.” IAHCCJ Bulletin, No. 16 (July 1992): 27–33.

Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of the American Empire. London: Verso, 2012.

Parent-Ruccio, Dominique, Frank R. Annunziato, and Etienne Balibar. “The Notion of Class Politics in Marx.” Rethinking Marxism 1, No. 2 (1988): 18–51.

Pierson, Christopher. Socialism After Communism. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.

Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare. New York: Pantheon Books, 1971.

Piven, Frances Fox, and Richard A. Cloward. Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.Poggi, Gianfranco. The State: Its Nature, Development, and Prospects. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

Page 190 →Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.

Porter, Eduardo. “Can a Coal Town Reinvent Itself?” New York Times, December 6, 2019.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/06/business/economy/coal-future-virginia.html

Poster, Mark. Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.

Potschka, Georg. “The Cologne Newspaper.” In Deutsche Zeitungen des 17. bis 20. Jahrhunderts, Bd. 2, edited by Heinz Dietrich Fischer, 145–58. Pullach, 1972.

Poulantzas, Nicos. Political Power and Social Classes. London: New Left Books, 1973.

Poulantzas, Nicos. Fascism and Dictatorship. London: Verso, 1974.

Poulantzas, Nicos. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. London: Verso, 1978.

Poulantzas, Nicos. State, Power, Socialism. London: Verso, 1980.

Przeworski, Adam. “Material Interest, Class Compromise, and the Transition to Socialism.” Politics and Society 10, No. 2 (1980): 125–53.

Przeworski, Adam. Capitalism and Social Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Reich, Charles. “The New Property.” Yale Law Journal 73, No. 5 (1964): 733–87.

Reich, Robert B. The Work of Nations. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Reichelt, Helmut. “Jurgen Habermas’ Reconstruction of Historical Materialism.” In The Politics of Change: Globalization, Ideology and Critique, edited by Werner Bonefeld and Kosmas Psychopedis, 105–6. New York: Palgrave Publishers, 2000.

Reilly, Katie. “Read Hillary Clinton’s ‘Basket of Deplorables’ Remarks About Donald Trump Supporters.” Time, September 10 2016. http://time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/

Rich, Frank. “No Sympathy for the Hillbilly.” New York Magazine, March 20, 2017. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/03/frank-rich-no-sympathy-for-the-hillbilly.html

Rizzo, Salvador. “Anatomy of a Trump Rally: 67 Percent of Claims are False or Lack Evidence.” Washington Post, January 7, 2019.

Rockmore, T. Habermas on Historical Materialism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Roose. Kevin. “The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite.” New York Times, January 25, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/automation-davos-world-economic-forum.html

Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

“Refutation.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 8, 210. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977.

Scerri, Andy. “Moralizing About Politics: The White Working-Class ‘Problem’ in Appalachia and Beyond.” Appalachian Studies 25, No. 2 (2019): 202–21.

Schmitt, Mark. “From Privilege to Precarity (and Back): Whiteness, Racism and the New Right.” Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power 2 (2018): 48–64.

Schmitter, Phillipe C., ed. Private Interest Government: Beyond Market and State. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1985.

Page 191 →Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. New York: Random House, 1970.

Seale, Bobby. Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers. New York: Abrams, 2016.

Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, United States Department of Labor. What Work Requires of Schools: A SCANS Report for America 2000. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991.

Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, US Department of Labor. Learning a Living: A Blueprint for High Performance. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1992.

Shao-ch’i, Liu. The Political Report of the Central Committee of the Communist Part of China to the Eighth National Congress of the Party, September 15, 1956. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1956.

Shames, Stephen, and Bobby Seale. Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers. New York: Abrams, 2016.

Sim, Stuart, ed. Post-Marxism: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.

Sim, Stuart. Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History. London: Routledge, 2001.

Soederberg, Susanne. Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline, and the Surplus Population. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, revised and updated edition. London: Verso, 2016.

Stableford, Dylan. “Donald Trump: I Love the Poorly Educated,” February 24, 2016.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-i-love-the-poorly-educated-144008662.html

Stallybrass, Peter. “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat.” Representations, No. 31 (Summer 1990): 69–95.

Stirner, Max. The Ego and Its Own. Translated from the German by Steven T. Byington. New York: E. C. Walker, 1913.

Straus, Scott. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Szamota, Barbara. “Social Parasitism in Poland: Some Legal Aspects.” Crime and Social Justice, No. 23 (1985): 91–100.

Teixeira, Ruy. America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

Touraine, Alain. The Post-Industrial Society. New York: Random House, 1971.

Touraine, Alain. Return of the Actor: Social Theory in Postindustrial Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Traugott, Mark. “The Mobile Guard in the French Revolution of 1848.” Theory and Society 9, No. 5 (September 1980): 683–720.

Trotsky, Leon. Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972.

Trotsky, Leon. Against Individual Terrorism. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1974.

“Trump, ‘I Love The Poorly Educated,’” The Daily Beast, February 24, 2016.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/02/24/trump-i-love-the-poorly-educated

Page 192 →Tucker, Robert C., ed. The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.

US Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Alternative Measures of Labor Underutilization.” https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

US Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employment Projections: Fastest Declining Occupations, 2018 and Projected 2028.” https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/fastest-declining-occupations.htm

Veblen, Thorstein. The Engineers and the Price System. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965.

Venkataramani, Atheendar S., Elizabeth F. Blair, Rourke L. O’Brien, and Alexander C. Tsai. “Association Between Auto Assembly Plant Closures and Opioid Mortality in the United States: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis.” JAMA Internal Medicine (December 2019): E1–E9. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2757788?utm_campaign=articlePDF%26utm_medium%3darticlePDFlink%26utm_source%3darticlePDF%26utm_content%3djamainternmed.2019.5686

Wade, Peter. “Trump Loves to Say He May Not Leave Office After Two Terms, and It’s Dangerous,” Rolling Stone, June 16, 2019.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-loves-to-say-he-may-not-leave-office-848799/

Weeks, Kathi. “The Refusal of Work as Demand and Perspective.” In The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice, Vol. 1, edited by Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha, 109–35. London: Pluto Press, 2005.

Wetherly, Paul. “Making Sense of the ‘Relative Autonomy of the State.’” In Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: (Post)Modern Interpretations, ed. Mark Cowling and James Martin, 195–201. London: Pluto Press, 2002.

Williamson, Kevin D. “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: White Working Class’s Dysfunction.” National Review, March 17, 2016. https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/03/donald-trump-white-working-class-dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump/

Williamson, Kevin D. “Help Them Move.” National Review, February 6, 2107.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2017/02/06/white-working-class-move/

Williamson, Kevin D. “The White Minstrel Show: ‘Acting White’ for White People.” National Review, October 20, 2017.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/10/white-working-class-populism-underclass-anti-elitism-acting-white-incompatible-conservativism/

Wilson. Rick. “Trump’s Negotiating Style Is Pure Art of the Moron.” The Daily Beast, June 13, 2018.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-negotiating-style-is-pure-art-of-the-moron

Worsley, Peter. “Frantz Fanon and the ‘Lumpenproletariat.’” In Socialist Register 1972, edited by Ralph Miliband and John Savile, 193–230. London: Merlin Press, 1972.

Wright, Erik Olin. Class, Crisis, and the State. London: New Left Books, 1978.

Page 193 →Index

Abolition of work: as a result of automation, 124, 133–34

Anti-colonial movements, 1, 4–5; passim; role of peasantry, 88–90

Anti-social parasitism laws, 81, 141

Bakunin, Mikhail: and lumpenproletariat, 5

Bell, Daniel, 8, 102, 112

Biden, Joseph, 11

Black Panther Party: and lumpenproletariat, 6–7, 102, 141–43, 150n8; founding, 98–99

Black Power movement, 1, 4, 97, 104, 110, 166n38, 168n93

Bonaparte, Louis, 2; and Second Empire, 20–21, 26; as chief of the Paris lumpenproletariat, 27, 76–77

Bonapartism: as lumpenproletarian state, 21, 74–76, 144–45, 161–62n14

Bourgeoisie: defined by Marx, 20

Capital, 114, 129: and exhaustion of the law of value, 118–20; and extended reproduction of lumpenproletariat, 35–38, 138; and General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, 50–52, 100; on lumpenproletariat, 14–15, 28, 30, 44, 55, 137

Carmichael, Stokely, 105; on internal colonialism, 96–98

Class Struggles in France, 1, 2, 14, 25, 30, 44, 72–73, 91, 137, 145; and lumpenproletariat, 21, 56, 60, 93; as applied historical materialism, 18–20; on finance aristocracy, 67

Cleaver, Eldridge, 6, 9, 96; and lumpenization of humanity, 107–8; on technocratization, 105–6; theory of the lumpenproletariat, 99–102

Clinton, Hillary: on basket of deplorables, 12

Cloward, Richard A.: on regulating the poor, 110–11

Communist Manifesto: and problem of translation, 18–25; passim, 149n2, 154n39; equal liability to work, 79–80; on lumpenproletariat as a bribed tool, 1, 2, 15, 44, 50, 55, 70, 86, 105, 139

Condition of the Working Class in England: on lumpenproletariat, 15, 28, 30, 35, 71, 91, 137

Critique of the Gotha Program, 127, 128, 140–41: labor to serve as measurement standard, 80, 173n85

Degenerate aristocracy: as parasitic, 68–69

Deindustrialization, 10–11: and post-Marxism, 113–14; and race, 102–3

Dispossessed: described by Marx, 43

Draper, Hal, 8, 43–44, 49, 50: and the translation problem, 20–28; passim

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 8, 114

Eighteen Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1, 2, 14, 25, 30, 72, 74, 137, 145: and lumpenproletariat, 21, 27, 45, 56; as applied historical materialism, 18; as the script for Donald J. Trump, 140, 145–47

Page 194 →Fanon, Frantz: 4; influence on Black Panther Party, 96, 98, 100, 141, 150n7; on destructive capacity of lumpenproletariat, 94–96; on lumpenproletariat as spearhead of revolution, 90–94

Fascism, 1, 75, 140, 143, 175–76n5

Finance aristocracy: as parasitic, 67–69

Floating surplus population: described by Marx, 38–39

German Ideology, 1, 2, 8, 18, 24, 114, 128, 143: description of life in communist society, 106–7

Gorz, Andre, 8, 108, 123: and post-Marxist political theory, 112–16; passim; exhaustion of the law of value, 120–21; importance of Grundrisse, 114–15; on abolition of work, 124–29; passim; on postindustrial capitalist development, 118–19, 133–34; problem of agency, 134–35, 174n96; rejects new working class thesis, 126–27

Grundrisse, 8, 14, 141, 143: and intellectual origins of post-Marxism, 114–16; exhaustion of the law of value, 121

Guevara, Ernesto “Che”: influence on Black Panther Party, 96, 98

Habermas, Jurgen, 8: and new social groups, 135–36; and post-Marxist political theory, 112–16; passim; exhaustion of the law of value, 120–21; importance of Grundrisse, 115

Hamilton, Charles V., 105; on internal colonialism, 97–98

Historical materialism: crisis of, 7, 112

Immigration and Customs Enforcement: as an organized lumpenproletariat, 140

Internal colonialism, 6; theory of, 96–97, 166n38

Kautsky, Karl, 3, 139; and extended reproduction of lumpenproletariat, 51–54, 78–79, 86, 102, 141, 158n69; on lumpen-state form, 74–76, 145, 162n16; on state suppression of lumpenproletariat, 82

Laclau, Ernesto: on concept of post-Marxism, 113

LaFargue, Paul: on finance aristocracy, 68; on lumpen-intellectuals, 64–67

Latent surplus population, 40

Lazzaroni: as the Neapolitan lumpenproletariat, 27, 44, 71–72, 161n5

Lenin, Vladimir, 3–4; passim, 139, 141; on obligation to work, 80–81; on anarchistic tendency of lumpenproletariat, 84–85

Lowest sediment of society: description by Marx, 41–42

Lumpenproletariat: and anarchism, 4, 84–85, 139, 164n53; and criminality, 4, 8, 15–16, 32, 45–46, 49, 102, 139, 157n62, 163n52; and General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, 35–38; as bribed tool of reactionary intrigue, 2–3, 7, 16–17, 20, 25–27, 35, 55, 70–74, 94–96, 111, 139–40; as a fluid social category, 42, 45; as a multi-racial social formation, 2, 7, 108, 142–43, 167n68, 168n94; as vanguard of socialist revolution, 2, 5–6, 107–8, 141; as a non-working class, 25, 43, 55, 123–25, 137; as parasitic, 16, 41, 49, 58, 78, 139; as part of the proletariat, 44; as a style of life, 47–50; description of, 8–9, 15, 18, 27, 45, 56–60, 79, 93, 101, 107, 176–77n14; dismissal of term by Marxists, 8–9; extended reproduction of, 51–55; passim; finance aristocracy, 67–69; frequency of usage by Marx and Engels, 4–6, 149n1, 154n37; honest lumpenproletariat, 46, 65, 82, 138–39; in precapitalist modes of production, 31–32; intellectuals, 64–67; literary, 61–67; origins as landless agricultural laborers, 5, 30–35; origins of term, 2, 18–19, 22–25; problem of, 51, 55, 77–85, 139–42; professional conspirators, 59–61

Lumpen-State, 32: as parasitic, 21, 74–77

Luxemburg, Rosa, 3, 129; on finance aristocracy,Page 195 → 67–68; on lumpenproletariat, 81–82

Malagasy Uprising of 1947, 94–95

Mallet, Serge, 108

Mandel, Ernest, 118

Mao Tse-tung, 3–4; passim: influence on Black Panther Party, 98, 166n41; on lumpenproletarians as soldiers, 83–84, 86–87, 141

Marcuse, Herbert: and Grundrisse, 114

Military service: and the lumpenproletariat, 35, 46, 77, 82–85, 141

Mobile Guard: as the organized lumpenproletariat, 26, 44–45, 56, 60–61, 93–94

Mouffe, Chantal: on concept of post-Marxism, 113

Murray, Charles, 10–12

Nazism, 1, 75, 140

Negri, Antonio, 8, 143: and post-Marxist political theory, 112–16; passim; exhaustion of the law of value, 120–21

New social groups: generated by decommodification of labor, 122; and postmodern politics, 135–36; redistributive demands, 123–25

New working class: theory of, 107–8, 121, 126, 167n75

Newton, Huey P., 7, 96, 100, 102; on internal colonialism, 98; on technocratization, 106; theory of intercommunalism, 104–5

Obligation to work: in socialist society, 79–81, 129, 141

Offe, Claus, 8: and post-Marxist political theory, 112–16; passim; exhaustion of the law of value, 120–21; on new social groups, 123–24, 131–32, 174n100; on postmodern politics, 135; on power in a capitalist system, 116–18; on universal basic income, 132–33; retreat of the welfare state, 130

Organic composition of capital: and generation of surplus population, 36–37; 119–23

Paupers, 22, 24, 27, 31, 34, 39–43; passim, 48–50; passim, 52, 124, 136–38; passim

Peasant War in Germany, 31, 57, 70, 91

Piven, Frances Fox: on regulating the poor, 110–11

Postindustrial capitalism, 6–8, 102, 112–26; passim, 131, 143

Postindustrial socialism, 127–35

Post-Marxism, 7: intellectual origins, 113–16, 143

Poulantzas-Miliband debate, 8

Proletariat: origins of the term, 23–24, 153n25

Right to be lazy: as a goal of communism, 106–7, 142

Role of Force in History, 68

Rorty, Richard, 11–12

Seale, Bobby, 96, 100

Second International, 1, 3, 140

Society of the 10; December: as the organized lumpenproletariat, 26, 57, 77

Stagnant population: described by Marx, 40–41

Status situation: defined, 47

Stirner, Max: and the lumpenproletariat, 2; and the unique proletariat, 22–23, 25

Street riots: and lumpenproletariat, 4, 16, 104, 110, 139

Structural and institutional racism, 7, 97; as obstacle to lumpenproletarian unity, 103–4, 108

Surplus population: and industrial reserve army, 35; and rising organic composition of capital, 36–37, 119–20, 137; first use of term by Engels, 32; forms of, 38–43, 48; growth in 21st century, 143–44, 158n63, 173n74

Sweezy, Paul, 118

Technocratization, 105–6

Third International, 1, 3, 140

Page 196 →Touraine, Alaine, 8, 102, 108, 112

Trump, Donald J.: and lumpenproletariat, 12–14; passim, 140, 145

Underclass: as lumpenproletariat, 2, 11; frequency of usage, 10

Universal basic income: as a communist social policy, 129, 132–33

Weber, Max: on status situation, 47

Welfare state: as a form of social control, 109–11, 125–26, 129, 141–43; passim

White lumpenproletariat, 7, 11–14; passim

Working class, 7, 11–14; passim; and lumpenproletariat, 99–100; as reactionary, 101, 108, 126–27; lumpenization of, 103–4, 113

Wright, Erik Olin, 8

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Lumpenproletariat: Etymology, Lexicology, and Translation

Chapter 2. The Lumpenproletariat as an Economic Category

Chapter 3. The Lumpenproletariat as a Cultural Category and Style of Life

Chapter 4. The Lumpenproletariat as a Political Category

Chapter 5. The Lumpenproletariat as a New Revolutionary Vanguard

Chapter 6. The Lumpenproletariat: Communism or Dystopia?

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index