When I talk about organizing the lumpen, I do so in a completely different way from how ultra-leftists do. For a communist who truly understands their mission, the task of bringing the lumpenproletariat into the revolution is recognized as centering around dual power. Around building the structures that impoverished communities need, and that the capitalist state refuses to provide for them.
This is how Haiti’s liberation movement, led by Jimmy “Barbecue,” has succeeded in organizing a society that’s been thoroughly lumpenized. And it’s an indispensable part of how the communist movement in the United States will win, especially as our own ruling class pushes ever-more of the country’s people into a lumpen lifestyle. As U.S. Americans keep experiencing lower wages and higher unemployment, forcing them to adopt renegade means for getting by.
I’ve pointed this out in the recent past, but I was prompted to more explicitly advocate for such a dual power program by recent developments. What’s happening with lumpen politics in the U.S. right now is that there’s emerged an ideological current, boosted by the big tech algorithms, that seeks to funnel the lumpenized youngest generation into the far right.
With every month, Nazism keeps getting pushed more aggressively, as exemplified by the effort to boost Ye’s song “Heil Hitler.” The goal behind this psyop is partly to funnel anti-Zionist individuals down a pipeline of controlled opposition; and also about cultivating a general false consciousness, one that’s hostile towards class struggle. The Hitlerite psyop is largely meant to target the MAGA base, but in the longer term there’s another element that it’s going to be directed towards: Generation Alpha, whose conditions are more lumpenized than any past generation.
Hitlerism has always been a lumpen ideology. It was created as a way to rally the lumpen, the disaffected parts of the masses who aren’t part of the working class, around an agenda of race war and anarchic rage. This does not mean, though, that communists should conflate the lumpenproletariat with Hitlerism. In the society that our rulers are engineering, most people are coming to be connected towards lumpenism. At a certain stage, under-the-table activities will have become ubiquitous within American life, like they already are throughout many parts of the country. To reject the lumpen as inherently counterrevolutionary would be as bad as dismissing the MAGA base, if not more so; the lumpenproletariat are ultimately going to represent a solid majority of our society. We cannot surrender them to the reactionary political forces, anymore than we can do so with MAGA.
The ultra-left response to this reality is to treat the lumpen as the core revolutionary subject, which is a practice that discards the basic communist tenets; it’s the working class which will always be the class struggle’s central driving force, because it’s only the working class that the economy absolutely cannot do without. The working class has many potential allies outside of the proletariat, though, and historically large parts of the lumpen have been brought into such a revolutionary alliance (the Chinese revolution being an example of this). The key is to avoid making our organizational culture lumpenized, and pervaded by criminal or renegade behaviors; while constructing the dual power centers which offer the masses a path out of their lumpenized conditions.
The far right’s pitch to the economically devastated youth is that by embracing lumpenization, and adopting the aesthetics which this entails, the youth can win the brutal game they’ve been forced to play. This is tied in with the psyops that glorify gang culture, which have been popularized by the entertainment industry and are now being increasingly pushed within social media spaces. (An example is the “YN” hashtag, which signifies participation in illicit activity.) It’s a different version of the cultural lumpenization that Hitlerism pushes, where those who are disillusioned with society get mobilized behind a racial crusade. In both cases, the goal is to feed people’s lowest impulses, selling them a lifestyle of nihilistic violence and debauchery.
The answer is to build an actual future for the masses, and Haiti’s latest revolution shows how this can be done in a highly lumpenized society. For BBQ and the revolt’s other leaders, the aspect of bringing in the lumpen has been easy, because the masses will join with you when you’ve built dual power like BBQ has. That Haitian society has been so lumpenized acts as an advantage for the revolutionary forces, with these forces able to successfully connect with the masses on the basis that they’ve been dispossessed. Someone being dispossessed does not in itself make a certain social class the core revolutionary subject, but in a case like Haiti’s, it does make that class more revolution-compatible. This is because the revolutionaries have avoided the left-wing errors that would make them run into trouble.
Ultra-leftism’s problem when it comes to the lumpen is that within ultra-left thinking, poverty and criminality are romanticized; which defeats any serious efforts at organizing the lumpen masses, or the masses in general. BBQ has succeeded because his movement works to proletarianize the lumpen; this is what he’s done when he’s established education programs within the liberated territories. As BBQ has said, when the youth lack good education they end up as violent agents for the neo-colonial forces, i.e. reactionary lumpen. But now Haiti’s youth are increasingly being brought away from that state, and into the working class.
If we build serious dual power in the United States, we’ll be able to do the same for our own youth. And this will let us take advantage of the great vulnerability within the ruling class psyops, which is that though these psyops have the algorithms on their side, ruling class ideologies are detached from on-the-ground organizing efforts. The new iteration of the far right is one that’s actively opposed towards in-real-life movement building, because part of its purpose is to keep people terminally online. And the newer breed of gang-focused psyops that target Gen Alpha largely have this nature as well, since a lot of the kids who embrace these gangster memes are only LARPing. These ruling class ideas are not spreading organically, so we have the innate advantage that comes with authenticity.
Communists can definitely reach large numbers of the masses just on the merits of us being an in-person movement. To win this fight, though, we must prepare our organizations for the most tangible threats that these psyops could produce. These threats exist within the parts of the criminal world that are not a LARP, but represent real violent forces that the state seeks to weaponize against us. Our ruling class is seeking to wage a civil war against the American people, one that will be fought by the anti-social elements which these psyops have managed to mobilize. The state wants to make shootings, hate crimes, and terrorist acts more normalized, creating a destabilization that will let capital maintain its rule. Only a revolutionary movement that’s genuinely on the side of the masses can overcome this manufactured chaos, and lead the people to victory.
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