Lumpenproletariat
룸펜프롤레타리아트
A term coined by Marx and Engels in the 1840s for the underclass devoid of class consciousness that drifts at the bottom of society. It covers people without a settled livelihood, such as vagabonds, criminals and prostitutes, and the two held that reactionary forces could easily buy them and use them against the workers. In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx called Louis Bonaparte the "chief of the lumpenproletariat".
In depth
The word joins the German Lumpen, "rags", to the French prolétariat, the common Marxist term for the class of wage earners; Hal Draper argued that the root is Lump, "knave", rather than Lumpen. Marx and Engels first used it together in The German Ideology of 1845–1846, where they accused Max Stirner of confusing the proletariat with ruined bourgeois and ruined proletarians, a "collection of ragamuffins" found in every age. The Communist Manifesto called them the passive rotting of the lowest layers of the old society and warned that their conditions of life made them far readier to be bribed into reactionary intrigue.
Marx gave his most detailed descriptions of the group in his writings on France in 1848–1852, The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire. He argued that the Provisional Government of 1848 recruited the Mobile Guard from the young men of the Paris lumpenproletariat and set it against the workers of the June insurrection; Engels, too, wrote of the June days that the organised lumpenproletariat had given battle to the working proletariat. Marx also called the finance aristocracy of the July Monarchy, which grew rich by pocketing the wealth of others, "the lumpenproletariat reborn at the pinnacle of bourgeois society".
In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx listed the members of the Society of December 10, vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, swindlers, pickpockets, gamblers, pimps, ragpickers and beggars, and wrote: "This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte." Of Bonaparte's bids for popularity with gifts and loans he remarked that these "were the limits of the financial science of the lumpenproletariat, both the low and the exalted".
In Capital (1867) the emphasis shifts. Marx treated vagabonds, criminals and prostitutes as the lowest sediment of the relative surplus population, the industrial reserve army that capitalism produces, a consequence of accumulation rather than a matter of vice.
Later usage diverged. In the early twentieth century the Social Democratic Party of Germany used the word to exclude workers outside the party and the unions and the non-respectable poor. Lenin called socialist attempts to recruit lumpen elements opportunism, and Trotsky saw the lumpenproletariat, driven to desperation by finance capital, as a tool of fascism; the Soviet Union called its own comparable groups "declassed elements". Mao Zedong held that they wavered between revolution and counter-revolution but could become revolutionary given proper leadership, and by 1953 the People's Republic of China had interned some 500,000 of them in 920 reeducation centres. From the 1960s Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse and the Black Panther Party placed hopes in their revolutionary potential.