The need for Marxists to avoid romanticizing the lumpenproletariat—the social element that operates on the economy’s margins—is more urgent than ever. Because our class conflict is escalating amid the recent disruptions to U.S. hegemony, and the related economic breakdowns. Which means the ruling class is increasingly seeking to weaponize the lumpen against the working class cause, heightening the dangers of investing in the lumpen.
In The Peasant War in Germany, Engels wrote that “The lumpenproletariat, this scum of the decaying elements of all classes, which establishes headquarters in all the big cities, is the worst of all possible allies. It is an absolutely venal, an absolutely brazen crew. If the French workers, in the course of the Revolution, inscribed on the houses: Mort aux voleurs! (Death to the thieves!) and even shot down many, they did it, not out of enthusiasm for property, but because they rightly considered it necessary to hold that band at arm’s length. Every leader of the workers who utilises these gutter-proletarians as guards or supports, proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement.” To many modern Marxists, this statement would be seen as incorrect, but it’s true. “Lumpen” has been redefined by the New Left to mean anyone from the underclass, when the proper definition for Marxists to use is the one which Marx and Engels used.
This is the definition of lumpen as meaning individuals who utilize illegal, or at least economically peripheral, means of subsistence. Whose immediate material interests are based not within advancing the class struggle, but within furthering their renegade means for gaining monetary benefits. The lumpen are fully detached from the productive aspect of the economy, which can create conflict between them and the workers. We’ve seen this conflict manifest in stories like that of Cheyenne, the Chicano communist who tried to unite the California gangs into a revolutionary front. His own gang betrayed him, setting him up to be murdered in prison by the enemy gang. This only escalated the conflict between the gangs, making it all the less likely that someone else will ever succeed at what he attempted.
Historically, the way that lumpenproles have become revolutionaries in the United States is by coming to no longer be lumpen; by getting brought out of this lifestyle by communist entities that can give them a viable alternative. The Black Panthers and the Brown Berets are examples of such projects to lift the lumpen out of their situation, and give them a choice. These groups, and those who’ve done similar things, have taken on the right strategy. What would be a mistake is to act like the lumpen are the same as proletarians, because both history and socioeconomic analysis show this distinction to be important.
The events from the last century-and-a-half of class struggle have shown how right Engels, as well as Marx, were about how to view the lumpen. As Marx concluded, the lumpen’s class character makes them especially susceptible to becoming “bribed tools of reactionary intrigue.” That’s why it’s not worked to simply try to build revolutionary power from within the lumpen structures; the method of the Panthers and the Brown Berets is what’s been proven as the correct one.
If we disregard the history of how communists have been backstabbed by the gangs, or act like the differences between the lumpen and the workers don’t matter, then we take the proletarian character out of communism. We make “communism” no longer about proletarian revolution, and instead into a pan-leftist project which compromises with forces which lack material ties to the workers struggle. Because there are plenty of political actors who lack proletarian class character, or alignment with the proletariat’s interests, yet who’ve adopted the “communist” label. In reality, they’re not communists but rather leftists, which are not the same thing.
The historical role of leftism is as the “progressive” wing of bourgeois politics, which places it in conflict with communism; that’s what Lenin illustrates in “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder. For the left, the only “communism” that’s acceptable is one which de-centers the proletariat, and diverts the struggle towards furthering the interests of the lumpen. Because the rule of capital will always be maintained as long as “communism” lacks a proletarian character.
What we do needs to center the proletariat. This is true both during the pre-revolutionary stage, and during the stage when we’ll need to be constructing socialism. Building socialism is about production, about growth. And if we base our practice in the non-productive parts of the economy, we won’t just enable undisciplined habits within these criminal elements, or let in gang members with conflicting loyalties. We’ll also let our operations be influenced by the anti-growth elements of the left, which are materially aligned with the lumpen. Degrowth ideology is a tool of monopoly finance capital, which seeks to further degrow our economy in the name of environmentalism. And such a program would help the operations of the lumpen, as capitalism’s engineered economic crises always do.
These realities are especially relevant to our time because at this stage in the class conflict, the lumpen and their adjacent left groups are the most useful elements the ruling class can use for counterrevolutionary violence. The Zionist counter-protesters who’ve been carrying out vigilante assaults against pro-Palestine protesters are the ones who’ve mobilized the fastest, but they’re not the ones the state ultimately views as the most useful. The vast majority of the country’s people aren’t willing to support the actions of right-wing counter-gangs like these ones, because when violence comes from the right, society easily recognizes it as fascist. The left counter-gangs can better hide the fascist nature of what they do, though, by presenting themselves as “anti-fascist.” And developing Marxists are among the most at risk of being fooled by this ploy, because Marxists tend to ideologically originate from leftism. This leads to them embracing pan-leftism, and treating left counter-gangs as allies, even though though these counter-gangs are utterly hostile towards any successful version of Marxism.
This is similar to the mistake of treating the gangs as allies, and both errors are directly related to lumpen fetishism. That’s because the social base which the left counter-gangs draw from is largely a lumpen one. The proletarians, the workers whose labor directly contributes to economic production, lack a material incentive to join these counter-gangs. The radical liberal ideology, with its opposition towards both the existing social order and towards existing socialism, is one that appeals to a particular kind of individual. To come to radical liberalism, somebody needs to be alienated, but not in the way that proletarians become alienated; the radical liberal mindset represents alienation not just from labor, but from the society one lives in. From the people as a whole, who radical liberals see as fundamentally reactionary.
When somebody has had the experience of being connected to the means of production, they’re inclined to have a dialectical way of thinking. Their radicalization towards communism tends to lack the anti-popular, idealist, anti-growth, and left anti-communist qualities of the left counter-gangs. Therefore, these counter-gangs depend on the kinds of people who are separated from production. The further away they are from the economic centers, the more likely they are to embrace radical liberalism’s idealist dogmas, where growth is seen as bad and the bulk of the workers are seen as the enemy.
The state is seeking to nurture this left opposition towards the proletarian struggle, using it as a means for assailing communists both ideologically and physically. And the lumpen are instrumental towards waging this monopoly capitalist proxy war against the workers. The factors are coming into place for the proletarian struggle to win. To end the narrative dominance of monopoly capital’s foreign policy machine, build mass workers power, expand the anti-imperialist united front, and overthrow our capitalist dictatorship during the decisive moment. This dictatorship hopes to use the lumpen as a buffer against our revolutionary momentum, recruiting lumpenroles into the left counter-gangs for an anti-communist purge.
This is what the Jakarta Method, the Cold War’s model for anti-communist terror, looks like in the United States: a threatened capitalist class pitting one section of the underclass against the other. But we’re capable of overcoming this counterinsurgency, if we navigate our conditions correctly. We must make sure to prepare our cadres for defense against whatever violence the counter-gangs enact, and to center our practice around actual workers struggle. Not around making alliances with elements that will backstab all serious revolutionary efforts.
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