Recouping the Lumpen as the basis for a poor people’s political subjectivity
“Under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited”
I have been working as an activist and cultural producer with ex/prisoners, poor people, and unhoused community for 35+ years now. I work with folx who have lived experience of being unwaged, indentured, on social assistance, and/or engaging in criminalized economic activity. Folx who Marx described as ‘lumpen.’
Parts of my own lived reality also includes lumpen survival modes. I know what it is to work under the table, to sell drugs (badly), scam, squat, pick up casual labour to make ends meet, and to rely on other survival strategies that transgress common morality or the law. I know what it is to collect a welfare check, to receive charity. I know what it’s like to live and work illegally in another country. I know what it is to come from a chaotic family, to have that trauma severely impact your ability to navigate status quo society. I know what it’s like to get high to deal with inner turmoil and bond through partying with others also driven by something that hurts inside. I know what it is to have no income and soon I will know what it is to be evicted. As my life has been, and is, chequered with lumpen survival strategies, I feel utterly outside of society.
I have working class experience too. I’ve been a member of worker owned co-ops as well as worked for fly-by-night contractors that go no where near labour standards, especially in regards to safety on the worksite. I’ve been involved with union drives. While at YorkU, I went through two long strikes, one in the hot hot summer and one in the depth of winter. As a worker, I felt the thrill of union power and solidarity against the power of the employer. I have also felt betrayed and abandoned.
Class experience is complex.
Being neurodivergent and a trauma survivor (with all the overlapping diagnoses that come with that) has made it hard for me to stay in a daily grind job. I don’t do well following rules or recipes for that matter. Boredom is intolerable to me, it’s like someone pulled the plug and my energy completely drains out of me, and then I lose focus. I need to be doing constantly challenging work working on a problem with no obvious solution. I need to be in the fight to transform this world. If I encounter something that feels like injustice, I will automatically fight. When the fight concludes, usually with the injustice going un-addressed, I will quit. I am in no way, shape, or form an ideal worker.
I also did manage to get a high level of education though, ironically paid for by money I made as a illegal working under the table.
Class is a complex experience to be sure.
The Lumpen according to Marx
Marx and Engles did a great job analyzing capitalism and class relations, but they did not apply their passion and theoretical rigour to the non-working class poor. In 19th century industrializing England, many people found themselves unable to access the burgeoning capitalist economic system. A social strata of urban poor emerged who were forced to live by criminalized and informal means as well as charity. Marx and Engels coined the term ‘lumpenproletariat’ to refer to those beneath the working class. For Marx, these included the elderly, infirm, beggars, sex-workers, injured and disabled people, thieves, former soldiers, and those living by street level trades, and gangs. The lumpen haunted the streets of growing industrial cities such as Manchester and London where even working people lived in utterly dire and unhealthy conditions. Misrepresented and misunderstood, feared and stigmatized, Marx called the lumpen a “passive rotting mass” in the Communist Manifesto.
Marx fell prey to common poor-bashing by characterizing the lumpen as harmful to liberation movements. Indeed, people generally feel the lumpen are harmful to society when the reality is, it’s the other way around - society is harmful to the poor. That is what poverty is - harm by society against those who are unable to wage labour.
But Marx didn’t reserve the term lumpen only for the poor. In what to me is a theoretically weak move, he also considered forms of aristocratic power to be ‘lumpen’: a social strata that relied on residual forms of oligarchy deemed by the bourgeoisie to be corrupt. As Marx theorized the revolution as based in the contradiction between workers and capitalists, the lumpen (in Marx’s broadest sense) were considered extraneous to the liberation project. I personally think that the problem with equating rich and poor under the banner of lumpen corruption should be self evident: the rich hoard wealth and make laws to protect themselves while to poor break those laws trying to survive. In this writing I am arguing that the lumpen should be understood as the criminalized poor, those who have fallen outside the wage relation. In another post, I will critically address the idea of corruption that will address Marx’s idea of the aristocratic or old money lumpen.
Recuperating the lumpen
I am interested in the term ‘lumpen,’ not only because it describes aspects of my own experience and identity and that of those with whom I work in community, but also because I haven’t seen a political-economic analysis of the poor and criminalized social strata in relation to the official classes. Much writing has been dedicated to: going over Marx’s usage of the term lumpen; contemporizing what we understand as lumpen identities and struggles; critiquing lumpen involvement in past revolutionary struggles; developing other terms to refer to the lumpen (informal, surplus, waste, etc.); and autobiographical accounts of lumpen life. However, rather than being understood within the greater class structure, the lumpen remain a marginal interest. Ultimately I aim to advance this discussion of the lumpen towards articulating a political identity for poor people in order to boost their struggles and claim their historical role in the fight for liberation.
This discussion is the project of this blog.
During my PhD, I sketched out a political economy of the lumpen, but so far I have I have met with dismissiveness and push back in the academic spaces in which I was present. In general, people don’t seem to understand the term lumpen, or they think the connotations of the word are too denigrating to recoup. Actually, all labels that refer to poor people, including ‘poor people’ are in some way inadequate or denigrating only because poor people are little understood and denigrated in society. There isn’t a term that poor and unhoused people can claim that asserts their positive political identity. As I have commented before, other identities have gained recognition of their oppression within colonial/capitalism; their political subjectivity and distinct contribution to the liberatory struggle is understood. Indigenous, Black, POC, queer, disabled, migrant, trans people and women have all received some recognition of their rights - and I’m not saying that these rights are upheld or that having encoded rights is equal to liberation. Only that this recognition has been hard fought and won and, despite right wing counter-revolution, offers a ground for ongoing resistance. At the same time, these groups experiencing structural oppression are overly represented among the poor. The poor are an intersectional social category that consists of all the persecuted identity group and yet the a poor people’s political identity remains un-articulated and their rights unclaimed.
It does occur to me that perhaps suggesting a poor people’s political identity makes people uncomfortable because it challenges subconscious (or overt) class-based attitudes of saviourism (well critiqued), stigmatization and fear, and/or discardability. Violent relations of charity permeate the social and political response to the poor. Charity is a demeaning and disempowering cultural practice and the way poor people are configured into the political-economic structure. Charity response to the poor is made possible by the lack of a poor peoples’ political subjecthood and is an excuse to turn away from the fact that poor people cannot have human rights or political identity within capitalism.
I ask why, when arguably, poor people are the most negatively impacted by the structures of oppression within colonial-capitalism, are we denied a political subjectivity? I propose that the lumpen have their own unique history, cultures, and critical political perspectives that arise out of their political-economic status and that are integral to the struggle for all our liberation.
What if the term ‘lumpen’ were to become an assertive political identity that describes poor people’s agency, oppression, resistance, and culture?
I am looking to recuperate the term lumpen because it arises in a Marxist context of political-economic analysis and revolutionary struggle. I think it’s vitally important to contextualize the lumpen within the constellation of class relations in order to fully understand class relations. The lumpen are a missing piece. The harm Marx has done to poor peoples’ political subjectivity needs repair and the lumpen need to be configured into revolutionary theory as political agents who deserve more consideration and engagement than the fear, pity, and/or a charitable response that they receive currently.
The lumpen in historical context
Starting to understand the political identity of the poor means looking at the historical moment that created their structural position within colonial-capitalism, that is the advent of the system of private property: the control over and theft of Land* by the settler-bourgeois elites and their* industrialization and commodification on the market. The privatization of property happened by a complex process over time including various violent mechanisms such as Land enclosures in Europe and conquest, genocide, and colonization of Indigenous peoples in the non-European world. By and large, peoples were made Landless and thus, prevented from accessing resources for subsistence life. Without access to the means of production - Land, resources, and tools - it was sell your labour power (the only thing you own of value), or perish. The coercive conditions of wage-labour was established and became normalized. The economic sovereignty and agency of Indigenous people around the world was attacked, while European peasants moved from extraction under the feudal system to exploitation under capitalism. Whereas in smaller Land based economic arrangements children, elders, and peoples with impairments had a part, in the new capitalist labour market embodied difference becomes a barrier. A person’s labour is defined, not by their capacities, needs, and desires, or by their relation to Land, their kin and community, but by the expectation for productivity of said commodities with maximum time efficiency by the employer to profit and be competitive. Such efficiency requires a standardized body, one that labour can be extracted from, a body that comes to be seen as ‘normal.’ In this way, the wage labour system is exclusive of “non-productive,” non-compliant, and Othered bodies making capitalism a disabling economic system that produces an excess population of non-workers. This also makes disability one of the dominant intersections of wage-labour oppression. Once a person has become unwaged poor with little property to speak of, not even their own labour, they become a ward of the state. As the protection of private property and the wage-labour system, two cornerstones of colonial-capitalism, become ensconced in Western law, the unwaged are denied legal protection, rather, the poor are configured as the enemy of property and thus poverty is criminalized.
The expectation that poor people comply with laws that abuse them and institutional rules and regulations that infantilize and silence them is an affront to their integrity and knowledge.
The lumpen in the class constellation
Marx considered the lumpen to be a non-class, a social strata outside of the relations of production and profit. I am not arguing for their inclusion in class relations because I think their outside status provides a more interesting place to theorize from, a place that can critique the normativity of wage relations. For instance, it is a common misperception that poor people are just unemployed workers. While there can be overlap in the experience, being a worker and being unwaged poor diverge over time. Being a worker is to have an important role in capitalism - that is to produce profit for those who buy your labour power or, if periodically unemployed, to keep competition for jobs high and thus wages down. Although the role of workers in the scam project of profit acquisition was lessened with the financialization of markets, workers remain a great concern of governments and corporations alike - both as producers of profit and as a voting block. And workers movements are considered one of the important prongs of the revolutionary struggle. On the other hand, to be lumpen is to be unwaged within the dominant structure of the commodification of labour. The lumpen live off social assistance (provided through taxes and charities), and criminalized labour (sex-work, theft, dealing etc). While some poor people are former workers who have been under or unemployed, injured, or have experienced a catastrophic life event, it is also true that in order to maintain wage competition, there must be a constant unemployment rate ideally between 4 - 6%. This is considered ‘healthy’ for the economy. Currently, under the Canadian state there are 1,320,300 unemployed people, 6.1% of the population. Rates of unemployment are disproportionately impactful according to disability, race, class, sex, gender expression, sexuality, age, citizenship, and intersections thereof.
The lumpen are those who are unsuccessful at, unable, or unwilling to compete for jobs, whether that be because of structural issues of discrimination, localized economic decline, poor wages and quality of jobs, criminalization, ghettoization, and/or individual reasons of not fulfilling the embodied requirements of the employers. Once you, or the community you live in has experienced unemployment for an extended period of time, lumpen survival cultures become necessary and it is incredibly difficult to re-establish working-class life.
Lumpen folx often come from generational poverty and family trauma, from sites of colonial devastation, from histories of ablism, racism, xenophobia, sexism, homo and trans phobia, and all the violences that discrimination makes possible. The long history of poor peoples culture of survival and resistance as well as disabling trauma can make compliance to the wage labour system less accessible. As lumpen people age, the door to joining the working class gradually closes.
Poverty is a downward slide.
In a society that is organized to advance an elite class of wealth (reserved for those who perform cis-white-able-bodied-hetero-male subjectivity - regardless of embodiment), violently enforcing structural oppression through ‘law’ creates an enemy that naturally it will fear: the lumpen, seen as inherently criminal, is counterposed to all that is deemed good and moral. The lumpen are the constitutive Other to the established configuration of power, to the normative. They are the social haunting produced by the hoarding of obscene wealth. The lumpen must live in spectacular poverty as a threat to what happens if you drop out of the coercive and oppressive wage relation.
The lumpen as problem
The lumpen then are seen as a burden to society, as problem. The low barrier rentals they have been able to access in the past were grounds for denigrating whole neighbourhoods as ‘sketchy,’ while laying the ground for gentrification. Property owners and developers see investments and profit while the poor are displaced and priced out of the housing market all together. Forced to live on the streets and in parks, unhoused people are subject to constant harassment and criminalization via by-law enforcement. There is literally no where in the city that unhoused people are safe. Many hide in ravines, vacant lots, by railway tracks, and abandoned corners of the city.
Considered disposable waste to be policed, displaced, and ultimately warehoused, the poor are consigned to the institutional settings of the carceral continuum that contain, control and punish them: infested, chaotic, inaccessible, and crisis laden shelters, social housing, prison, detox, rehab, foster care… The heightened risk of police violence and criminalization is a regular feature of poor life. At the same time, in discussions of race and police violence, the factors of class, poverty, and disability are much more significant than is often accounted for in an explicit way. It is the intersectional poor who populate prisons and other carceral institutions.
Being oppressed, exploited, excluded, and considered waste, to be subject to social hatred (poor-bashing), to be configured as Other to the middle-class normative, and all the stereotyping and stigmatization that comes with it produces alienation, anxiety, and depression. Such compounding trauma is the primary factor in poor physical and mental health among the lumpen. Treating the pain of utter exclusion and stigmatization becomes a pressing need, whether through pharmaceuticals (often unaffordable) or criminalized substance use. Harm reduction becomes vital in the face of the opioid crisis and the ever shifting landscape of unsafe drug supply. Perhaps a person who uses drugs in the streets is among the most denigrated figures in the public imagination.
The lumpen live in a space of necropolitics, of organized death manifested through policies and opinions that have a eugenic effect such as keeping social assistance so low that people cannot survive, considering people beyond repair, offering Medical Assistance in Dying to people who experience depression and hopelessness due to the poverty they experience as disabled people, police harassment and killing, the ongoing sterilization of Indigenous women, mistreatment and failed diagnosis in the healthcare system, the intervention of child welfare into the lives of poor parents… The Lumpen must not reproduce - even though the state reproduces the lumpen. The lumpen must be let or made to die. The life expectancy for an unhoused person on the streets of Toronto in 2022 was between 42 and 55 years.
Due to this distinct and deadly lumpen social space, poor people must have their own vital culture of survival. As society ignores and judges the poor, it is only poor people who share an acute critical understanding of a culture that, in return, does not understand them. As an intersectional social strata, Lumpen communities are incredibly diverse and tend to be more accepting of difference than the status quo. Lumpen communities are home to eccentrics and queers, mad genius’s, creatives, and fashionistas. Spiritual people of all faiths and no faith. Lumpen people are artists, musicians, story tellers, street philosophers, autodidacts, and activists. They live in survival communities that include underground economies and mutual aid, they have medical knowledge and practice street justice, recycling, and the practical survival skills of living and resourcing themselves on the streets. Lumpen community are inhabited by people who have seen a lot more of life than many, and who deeply know the ethical failure of this system.
For the status quo, though, street culture is a blight, an eyesore, dangerous, and abject. The lumpen are targeted for removal with no where to go. To constantly displace unhoused communities and individuals is to threaten their lives, making them start over and over and over again, rebuilding their survival.
This is cruelty.
A theorization of class through a lumpen lens
There is a popular, and I think faulty assumption that poor and unwaged folx are best represented by working class movements. Advanced neoliberalism and austerity support the pervasive belief that we live in a meritocracy where hard work brings success and that being a working person makes one morally superior. Broadly speaking, society resents the poor who are stigmatized as being lazy scammers mooching social assistance off the system. Whereas the working class live by a share of the profits dedicated to the cost of labour, the lumpen primarily survive from the social reproduction function of the state (where it exists). Social reproduction refers to all the labour necessary to support production for profit. On the government level this includes all the non-profit labour sectors that sustain our lives: health care, education, community infrastructure, non-profit organizations etc., paid for by the re-distribution of our taxes. On the social level this includes the unpaid labour that goes into family care such as parenting and house-work, charity, activism, and community building. Capitalism relies on this non-profit producing, what should ideally be meaningful, life giving labour, in order to sustain workers and their communities so they can work for the capitalist. Neoliberalism is the ideology that the state should do little to no social reproduction - that all work should be privatized so that profit intervenes on all of our relations.
The lumpen primarily live by state social reproduction, or the welfare state, in the form of collecting social assistance, living in carceral social housing and shelters, accessing community level resources such as drop-ins, food banks, and emergency rooms. After decades of gutting via neoliberal policies, these services are barely functional and in many cases exceedingly harmful. In actuality, the welfare state manifests as the carceral continuum mentioned above where social-workers have become increasingly ineffective and guard like. I propose that the lumpen must take up the slack by doing their own autonomous social reproduction work in order to survive the state’s treatment and maintain themselves and their communities. Lumpen social reproduction labour includes: sharing vital information, keeping six, harm reduction, caring for each other, accessing and sharing resources, recycling and pan-handling, bartering within their communities, care taking elders, sharing drugs, smokes, drink, food, tent space, giving emotional support, protecting each other, building community, culture and street ethics, and many more culturally significant practices. When death is at the door, lumpen communities make life possible again.
No one can survive on their own.
Neoliberal budgetary scare tactics convince ‘taxpayers’ that it is in their material interest to support cut backs in government social programs blamed for debt and high taxes. With worker’s material interest in paying less taxes is in direct contradiction, or dialectical opposition, to the needs of the poor for redistribution of social wealth towards social program spending. What lies behind this contradiction is the hesitancy of the working and middle classes to confront the wealthy and political classes (their bosses), not just on low wages, lack of job security, and benefits, but on the hoarding of money resources by inflated CEO pay checks, low (or no) corporate taxes, offshore accounts, government handouts to corporations, and ultimately the need within colonial/capitalism for ever greater profits and shareholder dividends - a constantly accelerating dynamic that results in an accelerating wealth gap while crisis is an everyday reality for the poor.
Workers often resent their jobs (as they should) and respond by ‘quiet quitting,’ which is doing the bare minimum. That workers feel the pinch of exploitation and tax injustice creates a subjectivity of intolerance of people living from social supports (why don’t you cut your hair and get a job) even if they are unable sell their labour. At the same time, workers in many industries earn their pay checks off the miserable conditions that poor people are consigned to. The main job of police, by-law enforcement, security, and border agents is to punish the poor for their survival culture. The wages of those working in the diverse institutions of the carceral continuum extend to social workers, administrators, medical personnel, guards, construction workers who build the institutions and those who supply them with food, linens, cleaning supplies etc. Construction workers and tradespeople make a living from gentrification and the condo boom. The working class is caught up in benefiting (however poorly) from this bundle of oppressive forces by which the poor are the most impacted.
The working class can be in solidarity with the poor, but cannot effectively represent the poor. Until there is an understanding of the dialectic between working class and poor people, divide and conquer will keep the poor out of the liberation project and under the thumb of the official classes.
This points to a real and serious gap in how class is theorized in that the poor and unwaged are not included or configured in relation to classed society. And yet the poor are in direct dialectical relation to the other classes. Marx didn’t think the lumpen were a class because they are not seen to be contributing to production for profit in the capitalist sense. While this is not absolutely true globally (slavery and other lumpen labour expropriation arrangements contribute to corporate profit production), nevertheless, I think this is a really interesting and key point to push into. The way I see it is that the lumpen stand outside of class relations and in juxtaposition to them.
A lumpen politics
The position of being outside of class but in relation to it alongside the lack of a distinctly articulated political identity for poor and unwaged people has implication for left progressive movements. Perpetuating weakly politicized relations to poor people within larger relations of struggle brings leftists into alignment with the society wide war on the poor. Poor people are an add-on oppression in the list without concrete analysis of how the poor are configured in the struggle and how other struggles connect to that of the poor. It’s ironic to say the least given that the poor are arguably those most impacted by the complex and intersectional systems of oppression under colonial-capitalism.
I am also arguing that the working-class is not the penultimate subject of the revolution as Marx purported. While revolutionary subjectivity has expanded beyond the working class since Marx, there remains an ideological grounding in wage-labour as a point of demand (for inclusion in the labour market, higher wages, and worker rights) which I think could bear examination. Wage labour is grounded in a violent history and is an oppression and thus, I assert that the wage labour relation is not at a level of contradiction that, as a focus of struggle, will produce radical freedom. I do believe that labour struggles are important in terms of building collective power and obtaining resources so we can continue to fight, however, unless there is a consciousness and drive to take over and radically green the means of production, the freedom potential is minimized. An over emphasis on the productive capacities of wage labour as political leverage ignores that commodity production has led to the over extraction of planetary resources and pollution. Colonial/capitalism is causing mass extinction and the dramatic transformation of planetary systems and wage-labour, as the source of profit, is a driver. We must stop over-producing, stop producing throw away commodities, stop shopping… we need to shrink the economy according to our needs, not grow it. Until these issues are addressed directly, worker wins are ultimately reformist reforms: reforms that re-inscribe existing conditions of oppression.
Poor people do not significantly contribute to climate change, but, as people who cycle through living outside and who are the last priority in any disaster (as shown through the spread of covid through institutions that house the lumpen) they experience the worst of it. As resources inevitably become more scarce and the technological divide more wide, poor people are made more vulnerable to eugenic mechanisms of ridding society of the unproductive and thus, unwanted.
I propose that a lumpen politics involves a challenge to the roots of poverty in private property and the disabling wage-labour system. Since we are coerced into labour via the private property system, it is only the dissolution of the private property by which we will obtain radical freedom. That is a freedom that applies to all beings, not just the settler-bourgeois class who won their freedom on the backs of peoples subject to colonization, the working class, and women at the expense of Indigenous, disabled, queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people, and the intersectional poor. As Dennings says, quoted at the top of this article: “[u]nder capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited.”
A lumpen politics can be expressed through an abolitionist lens. The abolition of private property is a de-colonial position which orients around the Land Back movement. The abolition of the carceral continuum and carceral approaches to poor life is a vision of poor peoples neighbourhoods, culture, and survival networks being respected and protected. It would mean the recognition of poor people’s agency and autonomy in creating their community’s infrastructure. The abolition of wage labour would shift the power over our embodied, creative and sacred energies as engaged with materials from the environment, from the employer to the individual and community; we would labour according to our gifts, capacities, and desires and what is needed by the community and the earth which sustains us. Everyone’s labour would be valorized, not just the labour that benefits capital. As the poor represent those most vulnerablized in society (those who live off the redistribution of wealth), a poor peoples economy would centre the well being of the elderly, disabled, infirm, and children. A poor people’s economy would be based in social reproduction and redistribution, not profit and wealth divide. A lumpen political-economics would be humble, living according to our actual needs (not those that capitalism has convinced us of in order to keep it running), and living within the true and real requirements of sustainable relations with the earth.
* Im not comfortable refering to land as an “it”, I use the personal they, them, their, theirs to recognize the aliveness, complexity, and agency of the Land. Following Tuck and McKenzie (2015) along with other theorists, I capitalize the L in Land to signify Land as a complexity which includes all the beings and processes by which Land is constituted as well as multiple levels of relationality: memory, emotion, intelligence, ethics, spirituality, intimacy, kinship, intergenerationality. Land is a mother and a teacher.
Citation: Jackson, Sid. “Recouping the Lumpen as the basis for a poor peoples’ political subjectivity” (blog post: carceralcontinuum.ca, April 2024).
