The Lumpenproletariat and the Itinerary of a Concept: Some Literary Reflections

What is it about?

In their political historical writings, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels coined the term lumpenproletariat for the jobless, vagrant, nomadic, and often antisocial elements of French society. Not until Frantz Fanon in the 1960s did the term lumpenproletariat shed its negative Marxian connotations for what, to Fanon, was a whole class of people waiting to be brought into and redeployed as the vanguard of a new proletarian revolutionary consciousness. In this essay, I consider the legacies in literature of the Marxian and Fanonian ways of conceptualizing the lumpenproletariat. I examine three working-class novels through which I refine the internationalism of Marx's earliest insights into the role and function of the lumpenproletariat by situating those insights alongside the writers' very specific local, cultural, and ideological affiliations and contexts.

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Photo by Eduardo Sánchez on Unsplash

Photo by Eduardo Sánchez on Unsplash

Why is it important?

In the 21st century, with neoliberalism rendering many people jobless/irregularly working, even as the economic divides between the rich and the poor grow wider and the world faces challenges of climate change and pandemics at global and local levels, we are faced with having to re-examine and revise what Marx and Fanon had to say about the lumpenproletariat. What do proletarian literatures have to say about the lumpenproletariat, even as the gap between the proletariat and lumpenproletariat narrows? How do we understand a universalist theory of class struggle in the 21st century in light of local and culture-specific resistances?