lumpenproletariat

Defined emotionally and colourfully by Karl Marx as ‘the scum, the leavings, the refuse of all classes’, he included amongst their number swindlers, confidence tricksters, brothel-keepers, rag-and-bone merchants, organ-grinders, beggars, and other ‘flotsam of society’ (see The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852). They were a ‘class fraction’ in that they constituted the political power-base for Louis Bonaparte in 1848. Here, the financial aristocracy of Louis-Philippe displayed an enormous appetite for wealth created through financial gambles, where both the manner of acquiring that wealth and the enjoying of it went against ‘bourgeois law’. In this sense, both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were progressive, advancing the historical process by developing the labour-power of human species-being and their all round capacities, whereas the lumpenproletariat was marginal, unproductive, and also regressive.

Paradoxically, contemporary sociologists are as much concerned with many of the supposedly marginal social categories which Marx dismissed under this label (who are now seen as the victims of modern society), as they are with the major class protagonists which he situated at the heart of the historical process.