"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 curious about this.
I'd first heard it in a Burkinabé context. I don't remember coming across it in Marx or Lenin?
What's the history of the concept? We need to get to the bottom of this. (I'm too busy to read right now, maybe in 12 hours.)
It was coined by Marx. See glossary on marxists.org.
There can be a reactionary usage of the word, but there is also theoretical utility in distinguishing proletarians with different relations of production. Based on the glossary here it sounds like Marx used the specific word lumpe satirically against Stirner, but idk the details of that.
It's literally in the Manifesto.