“Lumpenproletariat” is exactly the kind of idea an educated German theorist would come up with in the wreckage of the industrial revolution and it’s ridiculous to try to carry that notion forward to the age of cell phones and heavily armed maoist prostitutes and if anyone can’t understand that you should throw grass at them until they stop being dorks because they’re too far gone to touch it themselves.
Like ffs read even one anthro text about black market and grey market economies and stop treating The Man’s legal system like anything but a criminal organization.
I don’t really know that I’d agree we live in an age of Maoist prostitutes, much less heavily armed ones, or what cellphones have to do with the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat
I don’t really know what I think about the concept of the lumpenproletariat, but I don’t think this is a very compelling critique of it either
Sex workers are woke and people with cellphones can access vast amounts of information, including revolutionary theory, that were not available to poor people in prior eras. That’s pretty much it. In so far as “lumpen” was a valid category it reflected those people’s relationship to information as much as it did their relation to capital. The notion of hopelessly ignorant trash and wastrels preying on the margins of society is not reflected in the technological and informational reality of the 21st century. We can actually reach and educate every single person on the planet with infinitely reproducible digital information now and that changes the math of revolution right down to it’s foundations.