Patsocs tend to want to focus on productive labor and suggest working with students, lumpen proletarians and the average service worker is inefficient. I’ve heard the defense of this that blue-collar workers, truckers, etc are the ones who actually have the power to shut stuff down, and are therefore the most powerful for revolution and so on. Is that a valid line of argument? Is it a good strategy to focus on organizing those workers?
Service workers have skills that are very versatile and relevant to building solidarity by organising distribution of goods and services
Students need educating to not be manipulated into counter revolution. They often are extremely sensitive to psyops while being ready to go nuts on some occasions, so working with them is a matter of survival
Lumpens develop a lot of skills in the aera of unlawful activities, circumventing a lot of state control, and survival skills
And finally artists can bring life back into the communities of exploited people. The PLA got support from the masses by playing music, the various communist parties at their peak in Europe had theatres for the people. It’s extremely important for mass support
Patsocs are out of touch with life
Nothing you said is wrong, but organizing among these classes comes with certain inherent dangers which need to be recognized.
Students tend to come from a privileged strata relative to the majority of the population, and I say this as someone with a graduate degree. My parents were never wealthy, and I got into college on scholarships; still, they owned their own house, they had some land, and my mother was able to stay home and not work. Money was sometimes a little tight, but we never really felt much of a crunch. This is a basically middle-class lifestyle that a whole lot of people in the US don’t have. A lot of college students, being from the middle class, do have a fear of being absorbed into the proletariat; they may resent the ruling class for squeezing them, but they don’t themselves have much natural solidarity with working-class people. They in fact often see the ruling class and the working class as two millstones grinding the innocent middle class; thus, they are easily led toward fascism.
One has to distinguish between types of service workers here. In deindustrialized countries like the US, there is a strata among service workers which can be described as “workers becoming lumpen;” they have the values and general class tendencies of the the industrial proletariat, but from economic necessity are stuck working at Kmart or McDonalds or the like. It is a precarious position that cannot be maintained for very long, but one can often reach these people with the promise of real jobs: “wouldn’t you rather be building a hydroelectric plant on the Mississippi River than flipping burgers?” On the other hand, there are certain service jobs which seem to recruit largely from students, or parts of the middle class who have sunk economically. Luxury boutiques and high-end stores are an example of this. Their employees are not paid well, but I have found that (rather paradoxically), they tend to identify more with their employers than with working class people; probably because they make their money (and at times have a certain status within the service industry) in an artificial market propped up entirely by wealthy people’s spending.
The great danger of organizing among the lumpen is getting drawn into the criminal element which tends to exist wherever you have desperately poor people. This happened to the KPD during the 1920s. Very often, party efficiency degrades as a result. Moreover (as Marx points out) the lumpen are easily bought off, since they have literally nothing. Often they are served better by working with sectors of the working class who have a vested interest in never siding with capital; thus one can create extra-governmental structures, and eventually an entire society, which enables people to escape lumpen status.
The same things said about students can generally be said about artists, though (as you said) they are certainly important for reaching the masses.
Completely agree on every points! Your comment ad the nuances that are needed to answer the question of working with a given group at a given place in time!
Lumpen being able to “circumvent state control” is worthless if they are incapable of developing class consciousness.
CPUSA:
“Generally unemployable people who make no positive contribution to an economy. Sometimes described as the bottom layer of a capitalist society. May include criminal and mentally unstable people. Some activists consider them “most radical” because they are “most exploited,” but they are un-organizable and more likely to act as paid agents than to have any progressive role in class struggle.”
What Marx said in the Communist Manifesto:
The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
And this observation was visionary as proven decades later by fascism.
If you want to organize lumpen, you are not a Marxist, you are a fascist.
The class base of fascism is the petite bourgeoisie, not the lumpen.
It’s both
That does not necessarily make one fascist, just maybe not functional to the cause. I can undestand not wanting to start with the Lumpenproles, maybe organize the regular proles in transportation, agriculture, industry, and tech before you can get social workers to integrate the lumpenproles into the more functional industries.
Impossible to organize lumpen as lumpen. Successful communism would eliminate the lumpenproletariat as a class.
Yea, but in order to do that, you’ll need to work with the people of that class to integrate them into productive industries. Also the more of them that see our interests as their interests, means that we’ll have to deal with fewer reactionaries. Doing so also means adding more people with lumpen backgrounds to assimilate other lumpens to become proles. It is good to have fewer people to fight against us. I don’t think you need to wait till full communism to work with them. Somewhere in the socialism stage, it is good to integrate them into the economy.
Fair point, I don’t disagree. But that’s not what lil tank was talking about.
Succesful communism would eliminate the proletariat as a class
Not immediately
If we are fine with China using the capitalists to their advantage we must be fine with using the lumpens to our advantage
It’s not about what is permissible or not. It is about what is effective or not. China used the national and petit bourgeoisie against imperial Japan because everyone in China had an interest in resisting Japan’s imperialism. Even then, the lumpen do not get a star on the Chinese flag
Who is lumpen in the modern context? I don’t think we can uncritically take Marx’s categories and concepts and apply them to the modern world without updating them or our analysis. People move through classes fluidly. One day lumpen, one day a student, next day a worker, then again lumpen, and so on.
How useful is the category, ‘lumpen’, in countries where even the very poorest have free education, healthcare, housing, albeit not of the highest standard but which is paid for by exploiting the periphery? I don’t necessarily have an answer and the question is not rhetorical.
It’s certainly not fascist to organise these lumpen, even if that is what some fascists will do. But we may be talking past one another with different definitions, here.
Lumpenproletariat does deserve a refreshed analysis in the modern context, but what Marxists observed in the past is still observable. There are still criminals and thieves and so on. I’m not sure what difference education makes when most jobs that demand some type of education want a secondary degree.
Naturally, when we talk about classes, we are not talking about strictly defined groups where everyone has a class passport and can only be identified with that class. You will have people who fit the description of lumpen join the fold of a revolutionary movement. That’s inevitable. Hard to deny it happened in history.
But this is different from organizing lumpen AS lumpen. We’re talking about replacing “dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” with “dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry AND the lumpenproletariat” That kind of thinking is the beginning of fascism.
At the very least, it’s counterproductive. The ruling class has a budget of trillions on standby to squash any movement that poses them a threat, not to mention standing armies. On the communist side, resources are slim and so is manpower. It is critical to focus energy on rallying the right people. This is not a “why not both?” situation. You have to make a choice. Are you going to go to the farmers or go to the meth heads? Will the meth heads pay their party dues? Will they assist in organizing others? Or will they be a liability?
I can agree with that.
I think I misinterpreted some of what you said before, though. I think we interpreted the OP differently.
I didn’t mean to suggest that Marxists should organise lumpen as lumpen (I’m unsure why your explicit comment on that point got so down voted, tbh). Personally, rather than theoretically, I can’t see why any lumpen would join any revolutionary activity except for the promise of a better life (more stable, more secure, more social acceptance, less stigma, etc), but maybe I’m missing something.
Surely (<— weak argumentation, I know) a major task of a socialism is to eliminate unemployment and ensure that everyone can contribute to production, meaning the very act of revolutionarily organising any class is to try to eradicate class distinctions so that there’s only a proletariat left.
The point about education was related to a wider issue. I should’ve made that clearer.
Unemployment in some global north countries is high. Governments use education as a way of fudging the unemployment statistics, regardless of whether there’s a related job at the end of it. It seems to me that if governments didn’t do this, or if those students were excluded from the not-employed-but-not-unemployed stats, the number of people we’d see in the ‘lumpen’ category would increase.
As Marxists, we probably don’t want to conflate unemployment with lumpen. But there is a link. (Governments won’t count career criminals as employed even if they do regular burglaries. White collar criminals and corrupt officials do count in the employment stats, though!)
There also seems to be a link between student and lumpen as so many students enroll to stave off being a lumpen, where there aren’t enough jobs around. This doesn’t work for all, as poor students still need an income, which turns many to e.g. sex work and/or crime (depending on whether sex work is criminalised). Maybe we need a new category for the lower rung of the labour aristocracy – those who benefit materially from imperialism but who cannot find work and support themselves with a mixture of welfare and alternative, unstable income sources.
A meh bread day to you.