Abstract
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels ([1848]1996:8) memorably argue that capitalist development is characterized by the simplification of class antagonisms. All non-fundamental groups, they insist, “descend into the proletariat.” Yet less than two decades later, Marx ([1867]1976:782) would maintain in Capital that capitalist development necessarily produces “a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.” In the first formulation, society increasingly splits into two classes, workers and capitalists; but in the second formulation, the non-working section of the proletariat increases as capitalism develops. How to reconcile these two arguments?
Hal Draper (1972) notoriously insisted that these surplus populations constitute a lumpenproletariat, Marx and Engels’s term for “a category of economically marginal persons in capitalist society” (p. 26), and that they are a non-class group exogenous to the capitalist mode of production. Frontally challenging Draper’s formulation, political theorist Clyde Barrow enters the fray with The Dangerous Class: The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat. Barrow goes to great pains to show how throughout Marx and Engels’s oeuvre, the lumpenproletariat is theorized as an impoverished section of the proletariat. They may have distinct political instincts and lifestyles from the employed proletariat, but they remain a part of that fundamental class.
However, the book is far more than a simple polemic with Draper. After a brief etymological excursus identifying linguistic controversies surrounding the term, Barrow presents a trilogy of chapters on economic, political, and cultural conceptions of the lumpenproletariat. In the first of these, on the lumpenproletariat as an economic category, Barrow argues that Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and Marx’s Capital (1867) “can be read as bookends for understanding the concept of the lumpenproletariat at an economic level” (p. 30). For these authors, he argues, the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat are “parts of the same class” but “occupy radically different status positions within capitalist social formations” (p. 47). I really appreciated Barrow’s mapping of the proliferation of categories in Chapter 25 of Capital, helping us think about various potential synonyms for lumpenproletariat as operating at different analytical levels than that term: reserve army, relative surplus population, floating population, and so forth, he argues, are all subcategories of the lumpenproletariat. At the same time, given the cultural and political baggage of the book’s namesake term, I wondered what the political and conceptual stakes are for holding onto that term as the umbrella concept.
The next pair of chapters considers the lumpenproletartiat as a cultural and political category. As a cultural category, the term identifies a certain status situation, what Weber called a “style of life,” that includes everyone from revolutionary conspirators to degenerate financiers. What is clear is that the concept is so internally diverse that it remains difficult to define precisely, but it is ultimately about making a living through chicanery—which, Barrow argues, is a direct consequence of the lumpen non-relationship to production.
As a political category, the lumpenproletariat has no destiny of its own, he insists, always harnessing its fortunes to the political projects of another class. The reason Marx and Engels are so frequently disdainful of lumpen actors is that they have a long history of engaging in mercenary treachery, doing the bidding of the bourgeoisie and betraying the working class for a pittance. In The 18th Brumaire, where Marx condemns lumpen actors as reactionary, he traces the rise of Napoleon III on the backs of the lumpen and their peasant allies. “Bonapartism is,” therefore, “the political form of the lumpenproletarian state” (p. 75). But of course, the lumpen never lead this state, nor do they occupy its highest rungs; rather, they work on behalf of the political projects of other classes and class fractions.
After the concept’s heyday, spanning from the 1840s through the Russian Revolution, it made a comeback in the context of anti-colonial struggles in Asia and Africa and the roughly contemporaneous urban uprisings in the United States, loosely tied to the Black Power movement. In the context of decolonization struggles, Barrow trains his lens on the writings of Frantz Fanon, who argued that the lumpenproletariat had the potential to be the vanguard of the proletariat in a context in which the working class was a relatively pampered minority. But this was merely a “theoretical potential” (p. 96); in practice, much as in Engels, Fanon argues that the lumpenproletariat “played the role of bribed tools of reactionary intrigue” (p. 95), working as paid agents on behalf of corrupt postcolonial regimes. The second half of the chapter turns to a comparable deployment of the concept by various Black Panthers, most notably Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, though these figures were less ambivalent about the lumpen than Fanon. For Cleaver, workers were the right wing of the proletariat, with the lumpen as that class’s vanguard. And for Newton, capitalism was lumpenizing humanity, with automation ejecting the majority from the productive economy altogether.
While the chapter is compelling, I was curious about the wider political context. Fanon and the Panthers’ writings on this question have been widely analyzed, but what about the broader field of debates? Amílcar Cabral, for example, was famously pessimistic about relying on lumpen actors, and countless other strategists fell somewhere in between.
The penultimate chapter, treating post-Marxist conceptions of the term, comes as a bit of a digression. Barrow provides close readings of Offe, Gorz, Negri, and Habermas, which, while valuable in their own right, do not advance the book’s central argument. To be sure, he analyzes these authors’ respective accounts of postindustrial pauperization. Immiseration is no longer a consequence of economic exploitation, they all argue in various ways, but of being expelled from production altogether. But these authors—and notably, Barrow—manage to make this argument without deploying the book’s key concept very often: only three times in the book’s longest chapter. The author more frequently uses “surplus population,” undermining his case for lumpen as the umbrella term. And I could not help but wonder why the latest wave of writings on surplus populations was not engaged. For example, when Barrow argues that in Capital, Marx never explores the continuous generation of a surplus population (p. 120), I immediately thought of Frederic Jameson’s (2011) contention that Capital is really a book about unemployment. And I was surprised not to see any discussion of the disputes surrounding Michael Denning’s (2010) redefinition of the proletariat in relation to their dispossession rather than their proximity to production. This is to say nothing of the debates adjacent to Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
But these minor criticisms should not be read in any way as diminishing the achievements of The Dangerous Class. Barrow’s text was a pleasure to read and is the first systematic treatment of the concept in many decades. The book’s conclusion opens some crucial lines of inquiry related to our contemporary political predicament. Given the centrality of the lumpenproletariat to the various formulations of the exceptional state—Bonapartism, Caesarism, and so forth—how should we understand Donald Trump’s base? Is Trumpism the form of the state that corresponds with the lumpenization of the American working class? And how to make sense of the man’s own seemingly “lumpen” habitus? These are just some of the questions provoked by this important new study, which will be of great interest to those interested in class formation, political sociology, and social and political theory.