"Lumpenproletariat" is exactly the kind of idea an educated German theorist would come up with in the wreckage of the industrial revolution and it's ridiculous to try to carry that notion forward to the age of cell phones and heavily armed maoist prostitutes and if anyone can't understand that you should throw grass at them until they stop being dorks because they're too far gone to touch it themselves.
Like ffs read even one anthro text about black market and grey market economies and stop treating The Man's legal system like anything but a criminal organization.
I'm hoping that most people here understand that and are using it as an example of criminality only as a way to talk about lumpen as a class that relates to the means of production differently than most of the rest of the proletariat (but I don't know, I also wouldn't have thought there would be so many leftists who seem to think that sex work isn't work or that no forms of it could possibly exist under communism). But either way, what I do find shocking about it is how many people here think that they have less revolutionary potential than the rest of the US proletariat which is extremely right wing. Like the comment "drug runners aren't gonna help us do communism dude." Well, they're hell of a lot more likely to than all the reactionary regular proletarians who are Trump and Biden law and order supporters.
Idk if people get that when Marx and Lenin were writing, and to a lesser extent Mao, "Criminals" were still believed by many to be people who had some inherit flaw that made them bad people. Weird skull phrenology shit. When they're talking about criminals they're working from a different theory of crime, justice, society, and biology than we are. Idk what marx or lenin or anyone back in the day believed, but back then criminal was something you are, a fixed trait. In contrast to "crime" being the breaking of arbitrary bougie laws including things like shoplifting, skateboarding, selling weed, fraud, and all the rest that everyone does and aren't necessarily a reflection on the individual person but rather a relfection of where they are in socity.e