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What are the lumpenproletariat? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by LeninZedong@lemmygrad.ml to c/asklemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml

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Seriously, I am unable to really find much about them outside of short lines from Marx and Mao about their potential destructiveness among other things, but I still do not really know what that "class" is. It seems to refer to the poorest members of society that includes unemployed, criminals, homeless, etc.. And are they really so incapable of being utilized in revolutionary activities as they are portrayed?

Edit: By "destructiveness", I refer to how Marx and Mao portrayed them as people that are not considered reliable allies in any proletarian revolution (though even this understanding might be wrong because I think the explanations about them are vague).

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[–] rentasintorn@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

the Black Panthers showed that people typically considered lumpenproletariats by Marx and Engels.

I don't mean this as a huge criticism of the Black Panthers, but couldn't they be taken as proof that this doesn't work as a strategy? They seem to have had a big issue with infiltrators/informants, which seems to be the expected weakness of organizing within a class that isn't class conscious.

It'd be nice to have a real critical analysis of the BPP. I feel like they had one of the better understandings of conditions in the U$, but I think if their theory was perfect they'd have been successful.

[–] LeninZedong@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Hmm, I read about their history on Marxists.org (though I have not read any of the supporting documents) and I think a major problem with the idea of them potentially becoming a general Marxist-Leninist party with a vanguard (if the FBI did not murder each member twice over) was that they did not support the idea of white members of the party; this paints them as a Black liberation group that was reinforced by Marxism-Leninism (alongside Maoism and Juche) rather than a Marxist-Leninist party fighting for all proletarians with Black liberation as one of the issues they were to tackle; the issue here is that a Black liberation party with a Marxist-Leninist spine ends up not focusing on White workers (who I know are beneficiaries of White supremacy, but they are still proletarians) and they suffer the fate of not being able to form a vanguard capable of leading the masses (though their achievements and goals were nothing to scoff at or insult).

It also begs the question of whether or not they allowed bourgeois Black people into the party: if they did permit such people to join, then their argument about white people should have been applied to the bourgeoisie here, so their action would come across as hypocritical; and if they did not, then that means they uphold bizarre purism that skipped practicality (having bourgeoisie means access to resources that would be difficult or impossible to acquire otherwise) for theoretical emphases in more aspects than one, which further proves the point that they were not going to become an all-proletariat Marxist-Leninist party (and they did not seem like they were trying to, which is why I do not blame them for it).

An all-proletarian Marxist-Leninist party would need to represent the proletariat in general (including Whites, but there will definitely be more of color because of how Whites still benefit from White supremacy), and should not exclude pro-communist bourgeoisie from joining (this might be controversial) both due to the practical benefits of having a member of the ruling class with communist goals in mind, though the party should always have the proletariat as their ideological focus.

Though I am still somewhat ignorant of their history, so please correct me if I am wrong please. :>

Edit: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/ is the source.