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?
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.