Understanding the Lumpenproletariat (And Trump's Base?)

Hillary Clinton called them "deplorables". Now, president Donald Trump calls them his minions. The Proud Boys, the Buggalou Movement, you name it. Marx had a different name for them, he referred to them as the lumpenproletariat. A class of people defined by Marx as:

"slum workers or the mob, this term identifies the class of outcast, degenerated and submerged elements that make up a section of the population of industrial centers. It includes beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons who have been cast out by industry, and all sorts of declassed, degraded or degenerated elements. In times of prolonged crisis (depression), innumerable young people also, who cannot find an opportunity to enter into the social organism as producers, are pushed into this limbo of the outcast. Here demagogues and fascists of various stripes find some area of the mass base in time of struggle and social breakdown, when the ranks of the Lumpenproletariat are enormously swelled by ruined and declassed elements from all layers of a society in decay."

-Marxist.org

In his latest essay, professor Clyde W. Barrow compares Trump to Louis Bonaparte III who Marx and Engels wrote about in their 18th Brumaire. Bonaparte was, much like Trump an authoritarian populist who rose to power on the backs of a class of people who he himself identified with. The "deplorables" have their hero in Trump. He's rude, vulgar, unforgiving, politically incorrect, and unapologetic about it all. He is a "poor man's ideal of a rich man." The cartoonish villain that people root for.

From Professor Barrow's Essay:

Bonaparte had initially won an election with support from the finance aristocracy and the votes of the rural and urban petit bourgeoisie, who were swayed by his promise to reduce their taxes and his pledge to make France great again. However, Bonaparte’s coup d’état ultimately relied on the mass support and violence of the lumpenproletariat. Marx and Engels did not consider the lumpenproletariat capable of independent political action, because of its dependent position at the margins of capitalism. Thus, when the lumpenproletariat does become politically active, it is often because it has been organized into in the political arena by other classes, although the lumpenproletariat is usually brought into the class struggle by the ruling class as a counterweight to the proletariat’s superior numbers. The ruling class will most often enlist the lumpenproletariat as “bribed tools of reactionary intrigue” by enrolling them in counterrevolutionary militias and special police forces directed against the working class. A uniform, a steady salary, medical care, a pension, and a gun are an appealing “bribe” to someone whose “conditions of life” offer no prospects for the future.

Buy the Professor Barrow's Book Here:

www.press.umich.edu/11595909/dangerous_class

Read Professor Barrow's Essay Here:

socialistproject.ca/2020/08/donald-…penproletariat/

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