Newitz on white trash studies

[Charles Brown]

Yes, yet see articles by Timothy Johnson and Anthony Monteiro in the 1980's distinguishing groupings included in Williams' category of the underclass from Marx and Engels' category of lumpen proletarians. Most poor people and poor working people who Williams include in the underclass are not lumpen proletarians or dangerous to the working class as a whole. In general, most of the reserve army of the unemployed are not lumpens. In particular in the U.S. racist context, most poor Black people are not lumpen proletarians. 

CB


>>> <JKSCHW at aol.com> 12/31/99 12:11AM >>>
In a message dated 99-12-30 17:33:50 EST, you write:

<< The "underclass" is not a valid category for leftist social analysis either

 (unless one examines it only to point out how the concept is used by

 ideologues).  That is an ideological category employed in racist and often

 anti-urban discourse and stands in sharp contrast to the Marxist

 understanding of class. >>

"The 'dangerous class,' 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." --Marx & Engels, The Manifest of the Communisy Party, Part I. 

But what do you expect from a couple of German intellectuals, anyway? 
Ideologues all, with no grasp of the "Marxist understanding of class."

--Justin

PS, how's things in cow-town, Yoshie?