#lumpen

psychosis? every resource is "how to lock up someone with psychosis so you never have to see them again." cptsd? every resource is "try this ten day mindfulness cleanse where you imagine you're on vacation, only $1199.99" disability? literally nothing, just a wall of charities and govt webpages that don't work or lead to phone calls with people who say you don't qualify because of Ordinance 128675 § Gamma - "The Harlot Decree."

the messaging is always "get help." "go to therapy." but the help doesn't exist. therapists don't know how to do their jobs. the best ones admit they can't help and try to refer you to someone else. the rest flail, wasting your time and money and eventually emotionally traumatize you with incompetence or outright cruelty.

like why do i keep trying. "community" is the leftist cry for an alternative, but they're all traumatized poor people like me who resent the possibility that they might need to expend any energy helping others, and for good reason: they have none to offer. so community doesn't exist.

«Ciertamente, ya no es posible, en mi opinión, llamarse a sí mismo anarquista sin añadir un adjetivo calificativo que lo distinga de los anarquistas personales. Como mínimo, el anarquismo social está radicalmente en desacuerdo con el anarquismo centrado en un estilo de vida, la invocación neosituacionista del éxtasis y la soberanía del ego pequeñoburgués cada vez más marchito. Los dos divergen completamente en los principios que los definen: socialismo o individualismo. Entre un cuerpo revolucionario comprometido de ideas y práctica, por una parte, y el anhelo deambulante de placer y autorrealización personal, por otra, no puede haber ningún punto en común. La mera oposición al Estado podría muy bien unir al lumpen fascista con el lumpen stirneriano, un fenómeno que no carecería de precedentes históricos.»

Murray Bookchin: Anarquismo social o anarquismo personal, un abismo insuperable. Virus Editorial, pág. 102. Barcelona, 2012.

TGO

@bocadosdefilosofia

“ Terrible things happen daily of which we are not aware of, hidden under the pretense of normality and coherence of the world you and I are forced to experience. Together, but yet so far away, a digital sea of modern colonization exists. All that is hidden is understood to exist as oppression, and that oppression is but the systematic death once the inevitable misery catches up to the rowdy prosperity of the cybernetical un-friendship orders.  “

.

What became projected as a refusal to expand on the different forms which the oppressed populations of the world took, the Lumpenproletariat has always been nothing more than a slur. The Lumpen  have seen their potential, actions and even existence reduced to a mere splinter of class society under the classical Marxist framework, and even more reductive under a liberal scope. 

The liberal status quo seeks to uniform these outliers, to create a non-porous, fully glossy and brand new form of governance that does not imply the existence of the faults and burdens called Lumpen. And the Marxist seeks to merely fault it for the errors of its own actions. What both of these conceptions have in common is simply their will to reduce struggle to a mere flaw, forgetting the moments and large periods in which the Lumpenproletariat took apart of, not as the subject of a movance or drive towards a narrative goal, but more-so as the undisputed net losers of the movements of the societies we trap  our thought around. The construction of a “better world” under the progressive stance implies the wiping down of the impurities the liberated subject of the  Lumpen are : there cannot be a better world for those  at the bottom of the existence of the present state of things, and the future ones if we try to be cynical. Engels retains the crown of anti-lumpen sentiment, very early on embarking in hatred towards a group he barely defined in order to assert the position of the proletariat as the unique pawn in their path of the progress of history. Nothing constructive comes from the Lumpenproletariat, and this understanding leads to conceiving them as historically “scum” and “opportunists”, friends of reaction and the status quo. The myth of the Lumpen representing the outdated populations of the early-modern urban development is something that persists nowadays. Mercenaries, crooks and “parasites” are what Engels, and then Marx, meant and explicited by the Lumpen, entities devoid of revolutionary character, outside of the glorious proletariat and most importantly, in opposition to it. In many regards, the reductionism that Marx and Engels apply to this strata of the population  is clearly tied to the events they analyzed ever since 1848 and the many abuses the working population suffered because of this undisclosed exploitative Lumpenproletariat. The vagueness of what they even imply by Lumpen at this stage makes for it to become the quick insult many cement the term as, even when Marx’s own conception evolves when Capital arrives. His true, real critique of political economy outside of the realizations he has on the conditions of the revolting bodies involving themselves in England, France and other areas of the  European theater, comes with the realization of a new concept that will be very useful following up : the  one of Lumpenization, or understood as the process that turns sectors of a viable population towards a much more precarious, fluid and non-protected existence, basically creating a larger aflux of Lumpen.

Efforts from the capitalist systems turned the varied populations of an evolving society into elements of what he saw as being the “exploitative degeneracy” that constituted the element to oppose inside his notion of the Lumpen, making it not a desirable process, but more so a subjected one with the whole entire violence of the state and capital behind it all. A scheme so simple in its perpetuation that it gets overlooked and assimilated into the “natural” processes of capital, alongside  commodity production and fetichisation. His opposition to the Lumpen is, as commonly described, political. But nonetheless, I see his opposition as coming from a severe lack of will towards a deep understanding of  outside regards, or as Ernesto Laclau would put it in this same topic, "the limits of Marxist determinism“ . In short, Marxism, as the established framework of analysis and understanding of class society guided by the proletarian socialist meta-narrative, has no room, nor want, to establish a thoughtful consideration of what the Lumpen REALLY are, outside of all value and moralistic judgement many engage with nowadays. The conditions of such a shift and change in the perspective of the Lumpen should be set, first of all, on the basis of a “non-marxist” framework, one that does not establish a subject for revolutionary progression above all other possible material analysis. 

Combating the many forms the systematic train of thought Marxism has historically represented comes in the originally Marxist realization of the end of the “labour movement”. The late Paul Mattick essentially considered the labour movement to be “dead” and non-existent in the modern times of the postwar world. No longer could the forms of organization of the working class combat capitalism the same way it once used to. No longer can the proletariat unite under the thought of Marx or Lenin in order to advance the  progression of social systems. No longer could liberation be achieved by the same old conceptions of revolution we had carried around essentially since the early Fourrieriusts. As he would put it : “The labour movement preceded Marxian theory and provided the actual basis for its development. Marxism became the dominating theory of the socialist movement because it was able convincingly to reveal the exploitative structure of capitalist society and simultaneously to uncover the historical limitations of this particular mode of production.” On this same basis, Marxism was able to grasp the concept of leading progressive revolution in terms of using a same, concrete and particular subject, one not free but alienated and exploited, with enough potential to set itself free and dissolve the forms that put it there to begin with. But no  longer can that be seen as a coherent labour movement, and the flaw comes with this essentialization of The Proletariat, the utmost important cog and at the same time, the main pawn to the creation of Marxist analysis.

With this in mind, many properly Marxist groups through the (mostly) modern history of class struggle (1960’s-80’s) have undertaken this fallacious class consideration, and taken on a Lumpen defense, one that does confront the previously mentioned un-legitimate attacks from the early socialist revolutionaries. Denning, Fanon and even Marcuse embark in the commonly found “revolutionary potential of the Lumpen”, explaining its colonial history as being the “radicals of the radicals”, a sort of unmeasured group full of revolutionary fervour, similar to what the classical proletariat can achieve if set  under the line of class consciousness. While these defenses have served as the proliferation of the term in a less commonly conceived pejorative notion of the Lumpenproletariat, they fall under the baseline that creates the issues of Marx and Engels : they create a new revolutionary subject,  this time more radical, not removed from any constructive logic in order to achieve the building up of a concise class identity. It cannot be said that this is truly the liberatory form of the Lumpen. We should in turn, consider this defense as the first kind hearted attempt to remove the monopoly of revolt from the hands of the western and white proletariat  in order to atomize  it further into greater depth. Back to the first international and the period of the mere inception of the Lumpen-Prole divide, Bakunin encountered a similar attempt, as the label he was attributed of the “Prince of the Lumpen” was a simple reaction towards what he had conceived as a preferential strategy to out-socialist the marxists. In order to defend the vague and, very un-deleuzian, nomadic peasantry of the remains of economic development in the European labour world, he provocatively took on the position of “Only the Lumpen can liberate and act towards the social revolution”. To repeat myself one last time, this is not but a change in the subject of history and a retention of the notion of the progression of history towards a being-just and not a liberatory becoming. 

The role of the diversification of the relations under the precognition of the Lumpen is one that serves a greater purpose, but once again, the Lumpen is already a liberated subject, only constrained by its own influenced volition. The repetition of the subject form instead of its abolition and liberation on a general form is nothing brand new or outstanding, and hence the proclaimed Lumpen defense of these authors remains incomplete, inconclusive and truthfully useless for a construction of the real genealogy behind the liberation of Lumpen. One group, however, embarked in the tale to liberate and act upon the Lumpen’s condition with greater notions and wider conceptions on how to approach it, this being the Japanese New Left (JNL). In reality, this wide movement of social upheaval in the Japanese islands was much more than just a grouping of pro-Lumpen students. From the Trotskyists and Maoists that confirmed the improvised parties and informal revolutionary groups at the borderlines of the control of the state, many groups seeked an avant-garde approach to acting upon the conditions of the Japanese sphere, and a revolution of Japanese culture as a whole after the fiasco of the expansion and construction of a cultural identity on the precognition of the expansion of the empire. This pre-conceptual imperialist nature to what it meant to be Japanese inherently implied a re-thinking of what groups constituted as the internal operations of the Japanese cultural machine, and those that conformed a noumena, purposely blinded and devoid of any constructive forms on which to base themselves on. The bulbous mass of deformed victims of the violence of the Imperial Japanese construction became the allies of the revolutionary groups : ethnic minorities were, for many groups of denominational variety, the main primary focus on their struggle. Doing so bought them the hatred of some more orthodox Marxist groups, claiming their “non focus on class” as being contrary to the bouillant social climate that might at the time host an actual revolutionary movement. The ethnic minorities that they sought to protect under many circumstances were grouped up vulgarly under the notion of all being Lumpen, below the Japanese worker. And under such framing, groups of students in Tokyo and Osaka claimed this aspect proudly, hailing the defense of the Lumpen into action, seeking to organise outside of the prefecture of Osaka proper the members of the Lumpen, in the case of Japan, the prostitutes, day labourers and marginalized ethnic groups that were comprised as the poster children of this movance popping up in the area. The so-called “inner colony” of the newly constructed Kamagasaki council, constituted of the Lumpenproletarian actors that constitute a majority of the activity in that area, was considered “the 3rd world inside the 1st world”. The notion here implies a heavy dose of colonial relations into the logic of the interaction with the Lumpenproletarian populations. This relation exists because of the following parameter:

Lumpenproletariat = Alienated > Proletariat ----------> sense of outside -------> colonial logic is applied for it, maintaining margin and distance with class society.

That last part remains an integral part of the actions of the JNL on the eyes of the Lumpen : the alienation due to the misery and visceral exploitation of the Lumpen from the whole of Capitalist social actors makes them a subject of the “borderlands” of class society, outside, but remaining on the grasp of the exploitation they phase. Because of this separation, they are unable to construct a destructive imperial entity, just like the Japanese proletariat, willingly or not, did. Of all the groups that appeared during this clearly intellectually fertile time in Japanese class struggle, the East-Asian Anti-Japaneist Armed Front (EAAJAF) remains as the biggest and best example of how to envision the lumpen. Many of the Marxist groups, specially those in accord with Eiji Oguma’s notion that the Anti-Japaneist movement had a clear “post-structuralist character, understanding its use of pseudo-history as realization of the “linguistic turn” ”, none of them actually continued and carried out the proposed total and radical deconstruction of a Japanese cultural identity itself, basing themselves around the “zenkyoto” form, or joint struggle committees that were used as organs that can be classically found on any other Marxist organization. On this, the Daidoji couple that founded the front did so in a non-explicitly “opposition” towards the general direction of the Zengakuren, that by then had abandoned all sense of radical deconstruction and erasure. The group held on to the stance that became the more Lumpen-friendly out of a movement that already greatly considered this sector. Their direct attacks on the Empire, whether it be via the numerous sabotages like in 1974 or simply the intellectual intention behind their collective writings and most specifically the Hara Hara Tokei, had crumbled, as Till Knaudt would say, the entirety of the still not anti-Japaneist enough New Left. Their actions are an expression of the concerns of the victims of this newly appearing virtual-colonialism that is so omnipresent in their conceptions. Basically founding an armed struggle group on the collaboration and retaliation of the Lumpen against even the workerist Prole identity seemed too far for the anachronistic Marxists of modern discourse, and even the ones at the time acting as formal opposition to the EAAJAF, but in reality is the utmost example of an action, an attitude and a thought against the anti-lumpen sentiment, and one favorizing its revolt, self-abolition and proliferation as the vector of the creative destruction they so wanted to see unfold on the Japanese archipelago. The Lumpenproletariat then follows the agitation that it is brought, not prescribed like in the case of the proletariat, and perpetually seeks the total liberation that is the lustful object of Communistic projects : a liberation from all sides of class society, an affirmation of non-exploitation.

Similarly, Deleuze, in his lectures on the State War Machine, retook this term and applied a machinic logic to the developments of capitalism he saw in the later part of his life. The “3rd world inside the 1st world” was then the 4th world, an absurd difference between the affluent perfection of the wealth created and then fetichized by the rich populations, and the misery created, not in response, but in consequence of such development. Total misery contrasted to total virtuosity of capital’s developments. As such, the 4th world is the situation in which Lumpenization occurs, one in which the machine of Capital, that we will from now on describe as “Technocapital”, perpetuates modes of production and exploitation in order to conceive a “virtual-colonial” situation. This neologism is something I have coined to describe that distance in the treatment of the Lumpenproletariat that was considered a form of colonial relationship by the JNL theorists. This relationship relies on distance and separation, all geographical, social and economical distance from class society, to the Lumpen inhabitants of its borderlands. Added to this notion, we have the central word of Panoptilumpenism, a porte-manteau word encompassing “panopticon” and “Lumpen” to define the effect that is to be understood as the self-biopolitical regulation of the Lumpenproletariat that is on itself the reason of their sense of “outsideness” and non-liberation, as a direct result from the total alienation they face and the absolute bottom of the barrel position in society that they held, and still hold, in relation to other groups. Panoptilumpenism, to be more concrete, is the genealogical perpetuating coincidence that pin-points the raison-d’etre of the Lumpenproletariat in its various forms.