“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.
Wasn’t it coined by Marx and Engels on the basis of differing relations of production? The differences in material conditions between working and non-working proletarians has theoretical significance.
The question of revolutionary potential is, I think, the main distinguishing feature between communism and so-called utopian socialism. Communism is a proletarian movement and sees the proletariat as the revolutionary class.
But does that mean that the proletariat is uniformly revolutionary?
Marx and Engels thought the struggle between workers and capitalists was the essential contradiction that would lead to revolution. Later Marxists like Mao and the Black Panthers thought non-working proletarians could be instrumental too. But the basic theoretical question I think is valid.
For feudal society, Marx identified the bourgeoisie as the revolutionary class, not because of its moral standing, but due to the specific contradictions that intensified between the old feudal rulers and a rising merchant/bourgeois class. The peasants were also exploited in feudal society, but that alone didn’t make them the class with most revolutionary potential.
Marx did refine this view over time. In 1882, a year before his death, he and Engels wrote this preface to the communist manifesto:
1882 preface to the Russian edition of the manifesto
The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.
Alright sorry I edited