Lumpenproletariat

LUMPENPROLETARIAT. The lumpenproletariat (“proletariat in rags”) was the term Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels created to invoke—often casually—a corrupt and venal underclass.

The two founders of modern socialism never fully theorized or defined the term, but references in texts like The Communist Manifesto (1848), The Peasant War in Germany (1850), The Class Struggles in France (1850), and The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852) suggest several characteristics. First, it usually encompasses social types who make a living, or merely survive, without working in capitalist production: drifters, petty criminals, racketeers, and so forth. In Capital (1867), Marx distinguishes such types from the industrial reserve army of unemployed workers, as well as from those unemployed because of health or age: the lumpenproletariat refuses to work, and instead gets by on the margins of class society. Second, since their life conditions make them fundamentally self-interested, they lack any collective sociopolitical consciousness and are typically co-opted, in moments of class struggle, as mercenaries of the ruling class. Third, they are characterized by moral waywardness, a parasitic lack of industriousness, and lack of commitment to any higher values or causes.

Such moral condemnation is not just a symptom of Marx and Engels’s Victorian prejudices, but a crucial component of their understanding of the lumpenproletariat. For instance, when Marx denounced the financiers of France’s July Monarchy (1830-1848) for parasitic speculation, he described them as “the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society”: despite their obvious socioeconomic advantage, these financiers are no different, in character, from the hustling con men and swindlers of the lower depths. Marx and Engels’s evocative references give rise to multiple inconsistencies. For instance, their frequent non-materialist classification of the lumpenproletariat in behavioral or moral terms; their distinction between contemptible lumpenproletarians and unemployed workers; their assumption of the lumpenproletariat’s primarily reactionary political engagement; and the logic by which certain lumpenproletarian practices are excluded from classification as socially-productive labor, are often imprecise and not fully justified. In short, the empirical or theoretical content of the term is eclipsed by Marx and Engels’s primarily rhetorical usage as designating lower class individuals who, in contradistinction to the proletariat, are to be held in scorn and excluded from analysis.

The Great Depression in the United States led many writers to the Communist left and toward literary themes of anti-capitalist social protest. While the era’s proletarian literary movement was primarily concerned with depicting working-class experience and the formation of proletarian class consciousness, a subset of so-called “bottom dogs” fiction focused on transient, homeless, and criminal characters from a perspective often informed by Marxism’s appraisal of the lumpenproletariat. Writers on the Communist left who used narratives of the Depression-era lumpenproletariat to rethink Marxism for American contexts included Nelson Algren, Jack Conroy, Edward Dahlberg, Ralph Ellison, James T. Farrell, Meridel Le Sueur, Lawrence Lipton, and Margaret Walker. The most influential left-wing novel of the period, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), attends to the socio-psychological dynamics of modern African American subjectivity in order to revise Marx, locating in protagonist Bigger Thomas’s lumpenproletarian state of alienation the seeds not of reaction, but of revolutionary potential.

In radical political strategy, implementations of the lumpenproletariat have tended to be similarly revisionary. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon redefined the lumpenproletariat in African colonial conjunctures as—due to the economic and racial contradictions of the colony—bearing the structural revolutionary agency Marxism assigns to the proletariat. In the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther Party developed a radical practice and theory based on two methodological insights gleaned from Fanon: that Marxism’s core principles were both essential to political struggle while also in need of revision around matters of racial and colonial oppression; and that such revision could yield a generative recognition of the agency of the African American lumpenproletariat.

Party founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale used the lumpenproletariat concept to theorize the “brothers off the block”— socioeconomically-disenfranchised urban African Americans whose consequent criminality defied norms of racial capitalism—as a revolutionary force. For Party theorists like Kathleen Cleaver and Eldridge Cleaver, the black lumpenproletariat’s extreme precarity—its exclusion from even the relative security of working-class employment—combined with its oppression by a racist state made it, rather than the working class, the collective that had nothing to lose but its chains. The Party’s advocacy of armed self-defense took inspiration from those who had no stake in the American status quo. Black Panther leaders thus prioritized organizing lumpenproletarian individuals and styled themselves and the Party in a lumpenproletarian manner, an approach that often entailed importing hypermasculinity, chauvinism, and apolitical criminality into the Party. Contemporary leftist critics of the Panthers, and commentators since, argued that their lumpenproletarian orientation contributed to internecine conflict, exacerbated police repression, and prevented them from building an effective mass movement.

Yet the Panthers’ repurposing of the lumpenproletariat from within Marxism constituted a signature contribution to the ever-developing body of Marxist thought. Engaging the concept allowed the Panthers to address the applicability of Marxist theory to U.S. socioeconomic conditions, and to insert questions of race and racial oppression into historical materialist methodologies. For example, in a 1972 essay, Eldridge Cleaver reframed the lumpenproletariat’s simultaneous demand for the goods of modern capitalism while refusing to earn a wage to access those goods as dialectically anticipating a post-class society in which the reproduction of life would not depend on the exploitation of labor.

The Panthers’ orientation influenced other racial and ethnic nationalist groups of the New Left. For instance, the Puerto Rican revolutionary nationalist Young Lords Party, which modeled itself on the Panthers, held that Marx’s estimation of the lumpenproletariat needed revision in light of the internal dynamics of the Puerto Rican community, in which the lumpenproletariat were potentially a revolutionary vanguard. In the United States, then, the most prominent role played by this minor Marxist concept has been as an occasion for theoretical and practical innovation, by left-wing writers and by anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist movements.

Cleaver, Eldridge. On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party (Part 1). San Francisco: Ministry of Information of the Black Panther Party, 1970.

––––—. “On Lumpen Ideology,” Black Scholar vol. 4, no. 3 (1972): 2-10.

Draper, Hal. “The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat in Marx and Engels,” Économies et Sociétés, vol. 6, no. 12, (1972): 2285–22312.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

Fernández, Johanna. The Young Lords: A Radical History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

Mills, Nathaniel. Ragged Revolutionaries: The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression-Era Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017.