A lumpenized society’s revolutionary potential
Our ruling class sees the existential threat that technological progress poses towards capital, so it’s assigned Trump to enact radical reforms that re-set the system; reforms like the progressive dismantling of higher education. The outcome is that the masses are being lumpenized at a rate which few anticipated, putting the USA on the path to becoming more like Haiti—a society where the masses as a rule are lumpen, and where an effective revolutionary movement can therefore only arise within a lumpenized strata.
This is what Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, the leader who unified Haiti’s gangs against the neo-colonial government, has achieved throughout his insurgency. And it’s something that the whole workers movement throughout the Americas must take example from amid our class war’s new era, where the empire is accelerating its offensive while leaving ever-more people dispossessed.
We need to reach a synthesis between Marxism as it’s already been practiced, and this new social reality that must be navigated all across our hemisphere. A Marxism that accounts for the lumpen question is one which builds its organization around proletarianizing the declassed. BBQ’s movement is laying the foundations for this by giving an education to the youths who would otherwise fall prey to the fascist mercenary recruiters. We must do the equivalent in our conditions, starting not after the revolution has already won power but right now; we can build the dual power institutions that the masses need as the system fails them.
This is something that the Panthers taught us, and many American communists have been rediscovering such dual-power methods. As we go into the declassed masses, and work to bring them into the class war, something we must keep in mind is that the lumpen didn’t all come from one place. Some have always been from the lumpen, some used to be working class, some are former business owners, and the newest major sector of the lumpen are former aspiring petty-bourgeois professionals.
Because they haven’t all experienced lumpenization the same way, some are more susceptible than others to the rhetoric of the proletariat’s enemies; there is a segment of the professional class who are reacting towards AI by lashing out against historical progress, and further embracing the neocon ideology that seeks to destroy global civilization. There’s also a growing element of Gen Z and Gen Alpha who, amid the bleakness of their circumstances, have embraced a solipsistic personal enrichment worldview that views our government’s global crimes with utter apathy.
Our class enemies seek to draw these downwardly mobile individuals into such forms of military nihilism, building a new fascist movement on the basis of lumpenization. This is a kind of counterrevolutionary trend that reduces everything to the personal; it appeals to the narcissistic mentality that bourgeois culture has proliferated, encouraging people to acquiesce towards the ruling power structure out of sheer self-interest. There is a parallel between this trend, and the parts of Haitian society that oppose BBQ; Haiti is deeply divided over whether to support BBQ, with there being many who hate him for personal reasons. The forces of capital can have success in turning sections of a lumpenized society against the revolutionary forces, and we must consider this as we work to bring in the USA’s recently dispossessed people.
Rescuing these newly declassed masses from such a dark path is distinct from the task of organizing the ghetto; the Panthers showed how to organize communities that have always lived on the margins, but now that the the “middle class” is becoming ghettoized, we face a new kind of question to solve. This question is unprecedented because never before have we dealt with lumpenization that’s emerged from such a highly developed type of bourgeois society; post-war America produced a new individualist generation, the boomers, whose mindset has bled into the next generations even as they’ve gotten progressively less prosperous.
Imperial decadence is rotting from the inside, yet the ones being left behind amid the rot haven’t yet escaped the social conditioning from this decadence. This is what gives military nihilism so much potential to spread among a certain strata of the post-Covid generation, and why America’s lumpenization has such dangerous potential. There are historical parallels to this situation, though, that show us what kind of battle we’ll be fighting in the class war’s more lumpenized next phase.
An attempt to pit the lumpen against itself
Marx pointed out how the lumpen come from essentially all social classes, apart from the big bourgeoisie that’s insulated from class society’s chaos. He made this observation regarding the French lumpen who were being rallied by Louis Bonaparte, the man from a conquering family who waged an insurgency from one wing of the bourgeoisie:
Alongside decayed roues with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus (pimps), brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars – in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la boheme; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10. A “benevolent society” – in so far as, like Bonaparte, all its members felt the need of benefiting themselves at the expense of the labouring nation. This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, .... here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally
What a Bonapartist does is seize upon popular alienation to shake up the system from within. In its authentic form, this shakeup consists of a real class struggle; but for the class rhetoric of the leader to have substance behind it, this leader must be an actual mutation in the bourgeois order, and be truly aligned with the working-class and declassed people who they’ve won over. Marx concluded that “Bonaparte, precisely because he was a bohemian, a princely lumpen proletarian, had the advantage over a rascally bourgeois in that he could conduct the struggle meanly.”
There are parallels between Bonapartism and what BBQ has done, as BBQ is a former elite law enforcement officer who’s used the U.S. empire’s own weapons trafficking apparatus against it; but he’s the kind of rogue inner-system figure who advances a real popular revolutionary movement, one that’s essentially proletarian even though it’s dealing with a lumpenized society. Accordingly, BBQ’s enemy-crafted villainized persona is associated with the lumpen; the colonial media calls him a “gang leader,” which he indeed is but not for the reasons he’s accused of. He’s a leader who’s given the gangs the direction they need, letting the members of a declassed militant mass fulfill their potential in the class struggle. What the imperialists and the anti-BBQ crowd are up against is a true rebellion against capital, one that they aren’t fully equipped to understand due to their bourgeois way of thinking.
Trump employed Bonapartist tactics to portray himself as a BBQ-type renegade figure, then was used to advance the goals of the establishment. Since Trump represents only one wing of the ruling class, and his politics can’t please every part of the establishment forever, he’ll likely be replaced by either a “democratic socialist” or a neoliberal Democrat. Whichever kind of ruling-class politics prevails next, the bulk of the people will keep being lumpenized, and this will leave an opening for unprecedented growth of the American Nazi movement.
This iteration of the far right will appeal towards the rural and suburban masses who’ve been shut out of the sphere of benefits, which will extend only to those on the favorable side of our emerging “k-shaped economy.” The far right will try to create hatred not just towards the urban cosmopolitans, but towards the urban lumpen; as even the Trump wing effectively continues the model of replacing U.S. workers with foreign human trafficking victims, such nativist rhetoric will keep gaining in potency. This movement’s goal is to turn one section of the lumpen against another, using the pitch that if we get rid of the nonwhites then the land will be freed up for “real” Americans.
These are the tools the ruling class will use to try resolving the degradation of the empire’s domestic population, as described by Bruce Franklin in 1969:
There is only one group that not only shares the degradation of the world’s revolutionary masses but is sufficiently concentrated to attack imperialism at home – the urban lumpenproletariat. This class in American society is largely made up of Third World people, but also includes whites dispossessed from the land or dropped out of their class. This last is no inconsiderable group, and it has taken over areas of several important cities, from the Haight Ashbury and Telegraph Avenue through Madison to the Lower East Side, Cambridge, and Georgetown. Wherever the lumpenproletariat lives in America, “law and order” are rapidly disintegrating. Imperialism, caught in its own contradictions, finds it increasingly difficult to develop effective weapons to use within its own diseased vital organs, its cities. Here stirs the lumpenproletariat, the one class whose physical existence approximates that of the main forces of the world revolution.
The liberal cosmopolitans could dismiss the significance of this long lumpenization process, up until Trump’s first victory. This was when the petty-bourgeois and working-class Americans who’d become alienated from liberalism rallied behind Bonapartist politics, showing the country could never be the same now that the ruling class had thrown the masses into perpetual depression. The Covid lockdowns further pushed these Americans into proletarianization and lumpenization, which has made them now objectively ready for revolution. With the guidance of a workers party that knows what the masses need in this time, and that can unify them against their banker regime, the USA’s people will do the equivalent of what Haiti’s have done.
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