"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 think a lot of the people who are scoffing and telling me to read theory have some very formal (and 19th century and irrelevant) idea of what Lumpen means which isn't related to how it's actually used in 21st century discourse. Like imagine legitimately believing that just because someone has felony convictions for shoplifting or selling weed they can't participate in revolutionary work? It's ridiculous on it's face. Or saying "homeless people are lumpen" when half of homeless people in the use have a wage labor job? It's just silly. It's an outdated, irrelevant concept that doesn't apply to the 21st century paradigm of crime, labor, and class consciousness.