I work lawn irrigation with a bunch of guys who are trapped in this career path and my coworker just coined the term "expendable worker". While essential workers have jobs that service our society, expendable workers perform labour worth more than their lives. They can't afford to stop working, even if it's non-essential business. It's depressing to see such self-awareness among a group that still views anything past liberal as too left for comfort.
I thought lumpenproletariat was for workers that had to turn to criminal activity. Ones totally invisible to the capitalist system that didn't have class consciousness.
If their co-worker is saying stuff like this, they're definitely class conscious.
Kinda? The definitions seem to be all over the place. The wiki for it mentions lack of consciousness, but also specifies "criminals, vagrants, and the unemployed". So people who have been totally disenfranchised and don't have the "worker/boss" dichotomy to leverage against for consciousness.
It's kinda an outdated term in my opinion. I think those groups have just as much revolutionary potential as the proletarian workers. That's pretty much what China's revolution was. A large uprising of uneducated peasants that didn't hadn't been proletarianized in factories yet.
So, Lumpenproletariat is generally a term that means "proletariat that are dependent on the existence of the bourgeoisie for their livelihood. ie. if the ruling class go so does their Labour."
So it's not just the precariat, beggars, or criminals, but courtesans, butlers and upper level servants, money-butlers like estate managers and personal banking assistants. Anyone who stands to lose from revolution, or is so desperate to live on Bill Gate's charitable crumbs they can't organise.
Criminals, those who scrape or beg just to live, Grifters, Propagandists and Toadies, basically.
Some of these have blurred lines, in that there is probably a place for something like it in a socialist society but the relationship of it to society needs to change. Opera Singers, for example are kind of Lumpens in Capitalist States where only the rich see Opera and it's reliant on patronage, but would be Proles in states where Opera is state funded and attended by the masses.
The Labour Aristocracy and the PMC are a little different, in that they have a reason to organise and revolt, but their relatively privileged position builds a false consciousness.|
(This doesn't mean Lumpens are bad people, btw. Like any class they have good and bad people, it's the economic pressures that force them to act largely how they do.)
Proletariat. People can have no or false consciousness for a whole heap of reasons, and most don't have time to develop it.
That's why the notion of the Vanguard was developed. That section of the class that HAS consciousness.
