The dangerous class: The concept of the lumpenproletariat

Abstract

An oft-cited description of the lumpenproletariat comes from Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The Parisian lumpenproletariat that Louis Bonaparte recruited during the French class struggles of 1848-1851 in order to defeat the proletariat and ultimately to seize state power consisted of the following: Alongside decayed roue´s with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars -in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohe`me (1963: 75).As self-interested hustlers whose services are for sale to the highest bidder, the lumpenproletariat -a term Marx and Engels created -is typically co-opted, as Bonaparte demonstrates, by reactionary movements. However, Marx's taxonomy indicates the difficulty of locating a synthesized and explanatory definition for a term presented here as an 'indefinite' alterity with no clear framework of composition. The term has seemed, to some commentators, incoherent or reflective of scorn toward the disreputable or poor (Bussard, 1987;Draper, 1972;Hardt and Negri, 2004). Others -typically literary and cultural critics (Stallybrass, 1990;Mills, 2017) -have approached it as the discursive trace of a complex social scene that escapes full schematization by class relations.Clyde W. Barrow's The Dangerous Class endeavors to restore the term to the status of a definitive concept. While most explications of the lumpenproletariat extrapolate from political writings -texts like The Eighteenth Brumaire or The Communist Manifesto -Barrow prioritizes economic works like Capital and Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England. This lets him move past