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.

  • invalidusernamelol [he/him]M
    ·
    4 years ago

    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.

      • invalidusernamelol [he/him]M
        ·
        4 years ago

        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        It's kinda an outdated term in my opinion.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.