[lbo-talk] Lumpen

[Michael Hoover]

>>> jdevine03 at gmail.com 01/25/06 9:38 AM >>>
FWIW, here's what Karl & Fred had to say about the LP in the CM:
>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.<
Jim Devine
<<<<<>>>>>

km says similar stuff in several writings, in _class struggle in france_,
for example, he describes lumpenproletariat as a 'recruiting ground
for thieves and criminals of all kinds, living on the crumbs of society,
people without a definite trade, vagabonds, people without a hearth
or home'...

re. above description, it is portion of passage in which marx is
discussing military that provisional gov't recruited - (he, in fact,
says that these young persons were bought) from ranks of the 
'lumpen', he says that this group is 'capable...of the basest banditry
and the foulest corruption'...

he *also* says of this group - young men between the ages of 15 and
20 - that 'at the youthful age at which the provisional government
recruited them, thoroughly malleable, [they are] capable of the most
heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices'...

latter point has been almost completely ignored in both marxist and
non-marxist characterizations of marx's conception of lumpenproletariat,
clearest exception to such one-sided attention was herbert marcuse
(who 'erred', perhaps, on utopian side)...  mh