Lumpen Proletariat

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Lumpen Proletariat

declassed strata in an antagonistic society (including vagrants, beggars, and criminal elements). The lumpen proletariat has become particularly widespread under capitalism. It is recruited from various classes and is incapable of organized political struggle. It constitutes, along with the petit bourgeois strata, the social basis of anarchism. The bourgeoisie makes use of the lumpen proletariat as strikebreakers, as participants in fascist pogrom bands, and in other ways. The lumpen proletariat disappears with the abolition of the capitalist system.

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References in periodicals archive ?

And the lumpen proletariat goes to church, in the ghetto, with the Reverend Isaac Blakey at the Church of the Sheltering Arms.

God and Man in Full

Thereby upholding a tradition Ralph Ellison commented on in Invisible Man of discontented, crafty, and charismatic middle-class black boys inciting the lumpen proletariat for existential fun and profit.

Generation next, or the future of bad hair: text for a film by Greg Tate and Arthur Jafa

The cities were characterized by the presence of a "declasse" element composed of a true lumpen proletariat and a group of new young migrants from the countryside.

Amilcar Cabral's theory of class suicide and revolutionary socialism

The wealthy are the chosen targets but the lumpen proletariat are largely ignored.

An amnesty frustrated

Hence, discussing the new emerging class on both sides of Atlantic (also Useful Idiots of Euro-Med theatre - a power-base of the so-called Arab Spring), Daniel Henninger does not hesitate to consider them a retrograde force of 'lumpen proletariat', outcasts turned professional dissidents, a fake class of 'social scam'.

Neo-Religionism of the post ideological Russia

A constable was stabbed at India Gate and a vehicle torched by the mob which, by evening had been infiltrated by lumpen proletariat.