When are you going to address the real issue in cities? the LQ, or Lumpen Question - unfortunately many leftists have drunk the liberal koolaid with regards to the lumpenproletariat, especially anarchists but also idpol-ML's as well. When normal average people think of THE LEFT (tm) they think of liberal politicians who are in favor of being soft on criminals who basically harm normal working people. These lumpens are not shitting on porky, they are harassing and making life difficult for normal workers, the guy who gets up early to work at an auto shop. This goes from the street criminals, to the addicts you see portrayed in the documentary "Seattle is Dying", to high end mafia and organized crime who played a pivotal role in the fall of the USSR.
The lumpenproletariat is usually co-opted by the forces of reaction as its easier to be a criminal in capitalism, especially unregulated capitalism, than a socialist society where all property is owned by the state or community!
Now I know you will say BUT MUH ILLEGALIST PRAXIS! Illegalist praxis is like 0.0000001% of crime in general. You stealing paper towels from the office is in no way compatible with muggers, rapists and other scumbags. The targets of the lumpen are usually other working class people, not the rich, because other working class people are who they see and interact with on the street in their daily lives, not the rich in their gated communities and high rise offices.
Yes, both rich and poor are victims of crimes, but the workers suffer more as they are living paycheck to paycheck and the rich have the ability to recover.
Anyway you split it the lumpens the real revolutionary position would be tough on crime. Too many leftists have taken the liberal "protect the most vulnerable using the current system" ideas and internalized them. They have liberal-washed marxism. Marxism is not about protecting the workers because they are weak, marginalized, and exploited. Marxism is a triumphantalist narrative like christianity and rapture/apocalypse. Marx chose the proletariat because they were the class most likely to be powerful and succeed in overthrowing the system. Which is the fucking opposite of liberalism.
Bottom line, the lumpens are class enemies right after porky and the petit-bourgeois.
No. I'm hesitant to call addicts lumpen as they are something you can actually point towards being systemically ingrained in capitalism, with the epidemic having origins in the pharmaceutical industry, drug trafficking, and the conditions of America's cites and isolated townships. The idea that drug use just kind of "happens" is idealistic, and many drug users tend to be proles or former proles who have acquired physiological issues or dependencies that have removed them from being able to hold an occupation.
Chase Hill
Be clearer on how you define Lumpenproletariat. Drug addiction is a health care issue and most drug addicts could be perfectly functional members of society if the got proper treatment for their condition.
A lot of petty crime is commited by people who don't deserve to be written of as lost causes and a leftist justice system would owe it to its own people to prioritize rehabilitation for criminals. The ones who can't be rehabilitated would only be a tiny fraction among them, who would need to be kept under arrest under humane conditions.
This doesn't mean anyone should be soft on high level organized crime our crime commited out of pure sadism like most kinds of rape but for most criminals a normal life is possible if the justice system priotitizes rehabilitation over revanchist notions of punishment.
Nathaniel Evans
What? He didn't choose them, they are the exploited class and therefore have the most interest in changing the system for material reasons. Drawn from historical materialist conclusions.
Also, where the fuck are you getting the idea that a socialist country wouldn't be tough of crime? Do you have an example of a left-oriented state that has allowed crime to occur? I think you are literally thinking of just liberals. Bernie doesn't count as left wing.
Brody Fisher
t. never personally known a drug addict or lived in an area with bad drug a problem
Austin Gutierrez
You're not addressing anything they said though, and they made some valid points. Feels>reals isn't an argument
Zachary Martin
A health care system can treat drug addiction, but it does not prevent the formation of drug addiction.
There is something fundamentally wrong with a society if more and more people are becoming addicted to marijuana and they have to come up with irrational, unsubstantiated defenses of the soft drug industry like "it cures cancer" and "makes you smarter and creative."
Marijuana addiction isn't a fucking epidemic like opioid addiction and never will be you fucking idiot.
Ayden Lopez
Practically every drug addict is deeply fucked up and that is why they take drugs to start with. Addiction is very rarely a person's main 'condition'.
Luke Lee
Not even that much of an addiction in my experience, tbh. Quitting cigs is way harder than quitting the marijuanas
Jeremiah Watson
Don't like the look of this old town What goes up, must come down
Zachary Long
it's cringey white shitlibs from the suburbs who do this. every cringey white shitlib deserves to go to gulag for ten years whole they get raped by boons. I fucking hate cringey white anti racist shitlibs more than I hate boons. gosh I hate privileged white cuckolds from all white suburbs so god damn much.
PS read settlers there is no white prowlertariam
Owen King
cigs scientifically have been shown to literally be as addictive if not more than heroin
Adam Anderson
Really trying to completely end drug use is moralistic garbage, end problematic use not use. trying eliminate drug use entirely is anti-scientific, idealist, and just impossible. People have always done drugs and will always do them. Also OP watches too much sensationalist news.
Henry Cox
Drugs were literally pumped through my trade school on a daily basis and nearly half the people I knew did drugs.
Aiden Taylor
Weed takes control of you, but you treat it like it's going to kill your whole fucking family
Read who I'm replying to before you reply. I'm not talking about weed, we're talking about addicts.
Nicholas Green
What Drug are you talking about the? Nobody does PCP in a trade school, so what is it?
Connor Baker
Lots of opiates and pills. Strips, heroine, there was case with molly. And cocaine, but not inside the school, just kids doing it at parties outside. Weed too, but again that's not really what caused issues.
The shining path thread has some heavily relevant talk about how drugs relate to revolution, so you might want to read that
Andrew Moore
If Mao and Ho Chi Minh could organize the peasantry there's no reason modern communist parties can't organize the lunpenproletariat. If someone's a heroin addict or homeless or both and you help them get and stay clean and give them a stable home and a place they can always come to, they owe you their life.
Nathaniel Watson
way different context, for one thing the peasants were normal people, just of a different economic class. Addicts and mentally ill people are a different matter.
I've been to so many protest marches and such such as OWS where the meetings were derailed by some obviously mentally fried hippy going on and on.
Plus after a while of camping it becomes impossible to even tell the difference between the grungy anarchists, the homeless/mentally ill people who are just taking advantage of the situation to camp out, and the punk types who are both combined.
Drug addiction and crime is not the definition of lumpenproletariansim. Lumpenproletarianism would also include people like self employed minor tradesmen and the like who peddle their labor services on the market directly. Uber drivers, commissioned artists and streamers, self-employed plumbers and other similar workers. It's acutally rather interesting because the lumpenproletariat have actually grown significantly in the last few decades.
Sure, criminals and the like make up a significant chunk of this even still, but we see that there are a number of people in this description (literati at the least would not) who would not generally be thought of as being part of totally social rejects. It's more that the number of cracks in capitalist-proper society have grown significantly and the lumpen have started filling in the cracks.
Andrew Peterson
Don't sniff around for shit or you'll look like a pig.
Gavin Butler
Your participation in this thread is a study in hiding idealist moralism in Marxist language. Every class contains drug addicts, every class contains mentally ill people, every class contains criminals. This is true of all class societies throughout history. As we know, this did not stop the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, feudalists, or peasants from being organized effectively in their respective interests, so what is different with the lumpen? You have provided no real explanation for what makes the lumpenproletariat, as a class, uniquely hostile to regular proles.
The lumpen's condition is defined by their dependency on other classes. That is the full extent of their category. I do not see how this is necessarily opposed to the interests of the proletariat. Their interests are individualist and selfish, but could this not be useful? To have millions of people willing to do just about anything for money? Capitalists obviously see them this way, they are completely integrated into Western economies, as pointed out. Is the proletariat really so self-sufficient that it can afford to throw away this massive labor pool when it comes into power?
Gavin Thompson
The LQ is hard to answer because, unlike with Jews or some other identity group, what constitutes the L is a matter of opinion. It can vary quite a bit between different times and places with different material histories.
Criminals, in particular, are impossible to generalize since crime has an inherent political element to it, and the exceptions to this (i.e. serial killers) are statistically irrelevant. In the US, for example, there is an entire industry devoted to imprisoning as many people as possible to maximize rent-seeking, so the War on Drugs has led to a lot of disenfranchised prole kids doing soft drugs and ending up as hardened criminals. As a result, prisoners in modern America are much less likely to be lumpens than prisoners in Marx's time.
I think the BPP had the right idea: lumpens gonna lump, but people should be given the benefit of the doubt. Considering how butthurt they made the feds, they must have been doing something right.
I never said the lumpens were uniquely hostile to the proletariat just that they were just as hostile as every other group. Plus there are some anarchists who go on like the lumpens are the revolutionary class
Wyatt Price
The idea that there is any inherent class antagonism between lumpen and proles is what I'm trying to get at. I do not see how an economic class defined by its lack of loyalty to anyone can be /necessarily/ hostile or supportive of anything. Only conditionally, and I think it is a substantial failure to see their current conditions as their inherent nature.
Bentley Lee
This is an invalid argument. If you are going to define society into classes and the way they relate to one another, you have to define them by what makes them unique from the other classes and their relations, there is no "general" hostility.
Parker Williams
Do you guys even realise what Marx meant with Lumpens? He meant faring folk, vagabonds, Yennish people, gypsies. These groups aren't relevant anymore if they even still exist at all. Homeless are not Lumpens.
