I'm talking about conventional perspectives on the lumpenproletariat; early marxists clearly ran in different circles than I do.
A contemporary definition from the Communist Party of Texas:
Generally unemployable people who make no positive contribution to an economy. Sometimes described as the bottom layer of a capitalist society. May include criminal and mentally unstable people. Some activists consider them "most radical" because they are "most exploited," but they are un-organizable and more likely to act as paid agents than to have any progressive role in class struggle.
I can just feel the classism dripping out.
The wikipedia article about the phrase basically illustrates the idea of the lumpenproletariat as having been used as a punching bag by Marx, to create a foil to the proletariat in order to glorify the latter's revolutionary potential. From The Communist Manifesto:
The lumpenproletariat is passive decaying matter of the lowest layers of the old society, is here and there thrust into the [progressive] movement by a proletarian revolution; [however,] in accordance with its whole way of life, it is more likely to sell out to reactionary intrigues.
Anyway, I find this whole line of thinking precisely as deplorable as Marx, and Engels, and those who followed found the lumpenproletariat. Apparently Mao saw more revolutionary potential in the lumpenproletariat, believing they were at least educable.
It seems like the Black Panther Party looked toward the lumpenproletariat with some humanity, and they saw revolutionary potential in "the brother who's pimping, the brother who's hustling, the unemployed, the downtrodden, the brother who's robbing banks, who's not politically conscious," as Bobby Seale, in-part, defined the lumpenproletariat.
This feels much more honest and humane than the classical definitions, which I guess a lot of the major communist orgs in the u.s. still run with.
Finally, I'll just copy and paste the very short 'criticism' section from the wiki article as some food for thought:
Ernesto Laclau argued that Marx's dismissal of the lumpenproletariat showed the limitations of his theory of economic determinism and argued that the group and "its possible integration into the politics of populism as an 'absolute outside' that threatens the coherence of ideological identifications." Mark Cowling argues that the "concept is being used for its political impact rather than because it provides good explanations" and that its political impact is "pernicious" and an "obstacle to clear analysis." Laura Pulido argues that there is a diversity in the lumpen population, especially in terms of consciousness.
Anyway, just one of those 'holy shit' moments. Usually I vibe hard with classical marxism, but they can't all be hits. Wondering other peoples' takes.
But don't go telling me that my lumpen comrades are economically predestined to not be revolutionary socialists, because that analysis would run in direct contradiction to material realities ;)
Marx was just some guy. He wasn't given truth at Sinai, he was just observing shit. In 1850. Which was basically the stone age.
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Australopithecus with steam engines. Medically? Completely ignorant. Couldn't even find the clitoris, and "washing your hands" was a radical concept that got physicians cancelled. Louis Pasteur was discovering GERMS contemporary with Marx writing Kapital. Electricity was a scientific curiosity that hadn't really found it's legs yet. Lovelace and Babbage invented programming about two decades prior but it'd be about 70 years after Kapital before someone was able to build a programmable computer. Telegraphy was a cool new idea. The Bessemer process, the true beginning of the age of steel, was about ten years old.
I don't think it's much of a stretch that the technologies of the 1860s had more in common with the technologies of the iron age than they do with the technologies of 2020. 1860 was probably about as far back as you can go before modern technology starts seeming like incomprehensible magic to all but the most learned scientists and engineers.
And the social sciences have undergone just as much evolution as materials science, medicine, and engineering. We're just in the last few decades coming to understand the very, very basic workings of the human brain. The average person's understanding of how societies and groups of people work hasn't changed much since the ancient world, ie they know fuck all. And even experts in the field of sociology and anthropology know more about what they don't know than what they do.
There was, quite simply, a lot of shit that Marx could not know. The social sciences before the 1970s are almost completely worthless, and the revolution only really happened because academics got fed up with their role as spies and enablers of the colonial project and started examining their own biases. We're still not do with that process fifty years later and the jury is still out on whether the social sciences can even produce useful knowledge.
The man was embedded in his own time, with it's attended biases, beliefs, and limitations.
Thank you, so much, for this. People have a really, really hard time envisioning how human understanding is different in various decades/centuries/millenia. I completely agree with the picture you paint here, and I love how you did it.
Especially relavant, imo, are your points about advancements in the social sciences. One generation ago, we were still straight-jacketing people with mental illnesses and drilling their brains out. Before then, it was all ‘demons’ and ‘unbalanced humours’ haha.
And even more so, modern anthropology has told us some simple truths about human society that, basically, completely contradict the cultural narratives still held by like 99% of people, including most leftists in my experience.
100%, and you’re right, Marx could only work with what he had. He was basically a miracle worker, considering that. It is so, so important to move beyond the ideas of Marx; even if it’s still important to understand him for context, and possibly for an understanding of the over-arching framework/initial state of marxism.
We have learned and are learning, and thank the 13-dimensional branes for that. And just how much we’ve learned is something in and of itself that’s hard to grasp. So, thanks again!
Marx invented social critique IN A CAVE WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!
Marx didn't even have a TYPEWRITER! He drafted Capital by manually SCRAWLING on a CAVE FLOOR with his own PISS AND SHID!!!
Would you mind posting an example of this?
Sure! The first big one that comes to mind is that old narrative that ‘life was nasty, brutish, and short’. Now, that’s pretty much just unscientific. Extant hunter-gatherer societies have a life expectancy of appx. 67, which is also the global average under capitalism. All of modern health sciences are counterbalanced by the impacts of extractivist economics on the ‘have-not’ countries. It all averages out to ~67, which is how we likely lived for 2 million years.
Another is that people used to think in terms of the ‘Big Man’ theory, or the ‘Big Chief’ theory; the idea that, before Democracy, all Indigenous groups were societies the size of extended family units that were ruled by the biggest, strongest male. I learned in an anthropology class in university that this was the predominant way of thinking among anthropologists until approximately the 1970s. Obviously, that is also completely untrue, which we know now that scientists have started to actually listen to Indigenous peoples and learn about their societies.
The third big one that jumps out to me, which will be my last, ties into that last one. Nowadays, when describing ‘hunter-gatherer’ societies, the most common word anthros use is egalitarian. Traditional society was highly egalitarian, which flies in the face of the old Big Man way of thinking (which you can still see in pre-70s TV shows depicting Indigenous societies), and it also flies in the face of liberal ideology, which claims democracy to be the most equal form of social organization ever invented.
Ya, those are the big three that come to mind. The ‘updates’ in anthropology have percolated into a lot of non-anthro society, but far, far from all of it. And all of these assumptions about 'the human animal' play into what we believe we are, and how we believe we should be.
Finally, this is more from psychology than anthropology, but the watershed WEIRD study is something that everyone should know about. Basically, most (all) of early psychology studied people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic backgrounds, and these people are used as the baseline in psychology despite being really really weird and the most different group on earth compared to everyone else.
It’s really fascinating to look into. Basically, people like americans are really fucking weird from a global psychological perspective, and yet we’re the ones that pyschologists have studied, almost exclusively. It investigates everything from how we think about individualism/collectivism, to certain optical illusions working on us that don’t work on others.
It’s a really fun and fascinating read that really highlights the limitations of social sciences even into the 2010s. Mind-expanding stuff, for sure. Have a gander!
Word. I have a lot of trouble understanding that there were societies with, say, really truly alien ways of political organization. Like in the Pacific Northwest there were societies were politics, war, and economics were all rooted in certain important people gathering up as much food, durable goods, and slaves as they could manage, then periodically giving it all away. And putting it that way is an extreme simplification of what Potlach society was and how it worked, how it tied in to religious and spiritual life, how it drove regional warfare, politics, and conflict, how it tied people together across generations.
Or, like, families? We've all got mothers and fathers, aunt's and uncles, right? Well, not really. A lot of societies decide who is and isn't family, and how important that is, in very different ways than Anglosphere societies. Someone we'd consider an aunt or an uncle might not be considered closely related to you, while in some societies your mom's brothers might be as important to you as your father would be. Other societies do things like age grades, which group all people of a certain age for cultural, ritual, spiritual, military, and social reasons, but I can't really explain it in any more detail than that because I flat out don't understand it's scope and significance. Or there are famously one or two cultures where the notion of a "father", as a social role, just doesn't exist. People in that culture generally live in an extended family based around the oldest woman in the family. They don't know who their biological father is unless a woman has a stable long term partner, and there "father" doesn't have any particularly important role in their life. Their family is made up of their mom, her mom, and all her sisters and brothers.
There's so, so much that we think of as "Normal" that just isn't. Human experience varies radically across cultures and societies. Personally, I believe that part of the reason that the world is crashing head-long in to Oblivion is that the variation of European society that got forcibly imprinted on global society is unusually maladaptive and destructive. I could keep going for a while but I'm running out of steam.
My point, though, is that humans are really weird and varied, and a lot of what we think of as normal and immutable is just our biases due to the culture we live in
Yup. Sometimes only the uncles on your father’s side are family, sometimes vice-versa. Sometimes only the children of your aunts on your mother’s side are cousins. Humanity is wildly, unimaginably complex.
There’s at least one society where children have mutiple fathers: all of the men the mother had sex with while pregnant. All these men are believed to have contributed their qualities to the child.
Canadians had to grapple with the complexity of Indigenous societies this past spring, when Indigenous people across the country shut down the ports and railways in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en.
Canadian law says that the traditional governance structures of Indigenous nations have sovereignty over their land, and that the Canadian government has to negotiate with them.
So Canadians learned that the Wet’suwet’en are actually a federation of like 7? Houses, each with their own unique Feast Hall system of governance, where chiefs are selected in community feasts and given chief names, and can be recalled if they break the laws... which stretch back thousands and thousands of years.
And the Wet’suwet’en are just one of the ~500 Indigenous nations in Canada, who have been governing themselves in their unique, incredible ways for ~15,000 years, and longer if you consider the history of where they were coming from as the glaciers receded.
My point is that humans are super fucking cool, and that my colonized mind can barely comprehend what I even am, as a human being.
Huh, the first thing I thought is that the three examples were already challenged in Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State almost 150 years ago, and as I understand it that book is considered mostly obsolete. I haven't studied anthropology 'seriously', but seeing the state of economics I'm not very surprised that people were still giving credence to the social contract and philosophy from the 1600s in 1970.
Thanks for the WEIRD paper, it seems very interesting.
Ya, I mean that was like some of the earliest anthropology. The data base they had was limited at the time—most of that book and theorizing at the time was based on interactions with the Haudenosaunee who, while amazing people, aren’t representative of humanity as a whole, like modern anthropologists try to examine.
Particularly, archaeology wasn’t very developed at the time; we now have a pretty precise timeline about the development of private property after the beginning of agriculture, as seen in the gradual privatization (and henceforth dis-equalization) of grain stores in the archaeological record. We also now know that we didn’t start off all matrilineal and then inevitably graduate to something else.
Probably a fourth really important development I should’ve mentioned, now that I’m thinking about marxism more specifically, is the ‘death’ of unilinear cultural evolutionism. This is the belief that all humans cultures start at A, move onto B, and are inevitably driven toward C.
This is found to be... not correct haha, and is pretty firmly baked into marxist thinking. It was baked into pretty much all thinking at the time, and still is. Whether you believe we’re destined for the stars, or for communism, or that capitalism is the end of history, or that any particular element of 'modern society' is simply better than all of what came before, a lot of people subscribe unknowingly to this anthropological assumption of inevitable directional progress which decidedly does not hold water, when you examine the evidence of anthropology.
And I really don’t fault Engels for thinking that way, nor do I discount his work because he was prone to those false assumptions.
One illustrative example: an Indigenous nation north of Lake Superior was one of the first cultures on earth to discover metallurgy, something like 5-10,000 years ago. They made copper knives for a few thousand years. But they didn’t just ‘move up the tech tree’ like we tend to assume. Nor did they run out of copper. They did decide, however, to stop making copper knives. No way to know why, but they moved ‘backwards’ or ‘down’ the tech tree, just because they did.
History, and contemporary society, is rife with such examples. So, contrary to popular belief, there isn’t some instrinsic forward/backward to humanity. It’s, fortunately, not so simple .
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