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?
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.