Þe “lumpenproletariat”, þe “dangerous class”, þe “social scum” of þe 1800s

As feared and scorned by þt Reputable Victorian-Age Gentleman Named Karl Marx

In some ways, Karl Marx was very much a normal Victorian Gentleman:

The Communist Manifesto  <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm> by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels contains a substantial disquisition on the precipitation of all the members of society into the two main classes: bourgeoisie and proletariat. The disquisition ends:

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight… [to preserve] their existence…. Reactionary… they try to roll back the wheel of history…. They are revolutionary… only… in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat…

And then the flow is broken by a strange digression:

The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue…

We see this again: Karl Marx: Capital  <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm>:

[In] the lowest sediment of the relative surplus population… the sphere of pauperism… [are] vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the “dangerous” classes…

And again: Karl Marx: 18th Brumaire <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm>:

The bourgeois republic triumphed. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population. On the side of the Paris proletariat stood none but itself…

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Charles Dickens, in his second novel Oliver Twist  <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C47T3WY7>, artfully dodged around this much-feared and much-scorned lumpenproletariat, explicating, modeling, parodying, softening, and mocking it all at once, as here in this passage about the arrest, conviction, and transportation to Tasmania for life of the professional sleight-of-hand pickpocket artist Jack Dawkins. Fagin is talking to Mr. Bolter:

"He was charged with attempting to pick a pocket, and they found a silver snuff-box on him,—his own, my dear, his own, for he took snuff himself, and was very fond of it. They remanded him till to-day, for they thought they knew the owner. Ah! he was worth fifty boxes, and I’d give the price of as many to have him back. You should have known the Dodger, my dear; you should have known the Dodger.”

“Well, but I shall know him, I hope; don’t yer think so?” said Mr. Bolter. 

“I’m doubtful about it,” replied Fagin, with a sigh. “If they don’t get any fresh evidence, it’ll only be a summary conviction, and we shall have him back again after six weeks or so; but, if they do, it’s a case of lagging. They know what a clever lad he is; he’ll be a lifer. They’ll make the Artful nothing less than a lifer.”

“What do you mean by lagging and a lifer?” demanded Mr. Bolter. “What’s the good of talking in that way to me; why don’t yer speak so as I can understand yer?” 

Fagin was about to translate these mysterious expressions into the vulgar tongue; and, being interpreted, Mr. Bolter would have been informed that they represented that combination of words, “transportation for life,” when the dialogue was cut short by the entry of Master Bates, with his hands in his breeches-pockets, and his face twisted into a look of semi-comical woe. 

“It’s all up, Fagin,” said Charley, when he and his new companion had been made known to each other. “What do you mean?” “They’ve found the gentleman as owns the box; two or three more’s a coming to ’dentify him; and the Artful’s booked for a passage out,” replied Master Bates. “I must have a full suit of mourning, Fagin, and a hatband, to wisit him in, afore he sets out upon his travels. To think of Jack Dawkins—lummy Jack—the Dodger—the Artful Dodger—going abroad for a common twopenny-halfpenny sneeze-box! I never thought he’d a done it under a gold watch, chain, and seals, at the lowest. Oh, why didn’t he rob some rich old gentleman of all his walables, and go out as a gentleman, and not like a common prig, without no honour nor glory!”…

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Do note that the four Marx quotes above are far from all there is. Do note that Marx was far from alone in this preoccupation. We also have: Friedrich Engels: The Peasant War in Germany <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant-war-germany/ch0a.htm>:

The lumpenproletariat, this scum of the decaying elements of all classes… in all the big cities, is the worst of all possible allies…. The French workers… inscribed… “Death to the thieves!” and even shot down many… not out of enthusiasm for property, but because they rightly considered it necessary to hold that band at arm’s length…

And again: Friedrich Engels: The Latest Heroic Deed of the House of Bourbon <https://larrikinmag.wordpress.com/2020/08/15/the-lazzaroni-of-naples/>:

The Neapolitan lumpenproletariat decided the defeat of the revolution. Swiss guardsmen, Neapolitan soldiers and lazzaroni combined… tore into the houses, stabbed the men, speared the children, violated the women only to murder them afterwards, plundered everything in sight and then set fire to the pillaged dwellings…

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Also worth noting—and very, very interesting, perhaps—is the rhetorical unmooring of the category from its socio-economic underpinnings that Karl Marx resorts to in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The true “social scum”, the true “rotting mass”, spring from neither the workers nor the merchant-trader entrepreneurial-boss business class. They are instead: Karl Marx: 18th Brumaire<https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch05.htm>:

Decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin… ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie… vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers,maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars… the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème… For: 

On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpenproletariat of Paris had been organized… with a Bonapartist general at the head…. The Society of December 10…

that the President of the Second French Republic Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte had funded and organized, and that he used as his urban chorus and bullyboys as he overthrew the Second Republic he headed and founded the Second Empire that he ruled as Emperor Napoleon III.

And then comes the key rhetorical shift:

The members of the Society of December 10 were already very, very different in total from the standard original Victoriqn lumpenproletariat of “vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes”.

But rather than saying that the Second Empire state relies on the lumpenproletariat, Marx says that it and its functionaries are the real lumpenproletariat:

Karl Marx: 18th Brumaire <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm>:

The lumpenproletariat to which he [Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, first President Bonaparte of the Second French Republic and then Emperor Napoleon III of the Second French Empire] himself, his entourage, his government, and his army belong, and whose main object is to benefit itself and draw California lottery prizes from the state treasury… with decrees, without decrees, and despite decrees…. Industry and commerce… are to prosper in hothouse fashion… railroad concessions.

But the Bonapartist lumpenproletariat is to enrich itself… tripotage… with the railroad concessions…. Public works. But the public works increase the people’s tax obligations: hence reduction of taxes by an attack on the rentiers, by conversion of the 5-percent bonds into 4½-percent. 

But the middle class must again receive a sweetening: hence a doubling of the wine tax for the people, who buy wine retail, and a halving of the wine tax for the middle class, which drinks it wholesale; dissolution of the actual workers’ associations, but promises of miraculous future associations. The peasants… mortgage banks which hasten their indebtedness and accelerate the concentration of property…

In this attitude towards the somewhat kleptocratic political-bureaucratic power structure of the Second French Empire, Marx sounds like nobody as much as a less-polite version of those Victorian eminences, the Rothschilds. 

Niall Ferguson, The World’s Banker <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002YJK5LE>:

No figure of political importance was viewed by the Rothschilds with more suspicion, not to say contempt, than Louis Napoleon… partly because of his disreputable past—the escapades at Boulogne in 1836 and Strasbourg in 1840, the idiosyncratic books, the English mistress—and the louche lifestyle which he never wholly abandoned.

In April 1849, for example, Anthony reported that his aunt and uncle were “disgusted with L. N. They say he gets drunk every night & God knows what else he does.” His relationship with Mrs Howard was also a subject for sardonic comment: in Anthony’s words, all Louis Napoleon wanted was “plenty [of money] so that he can roger comfortably & get drunk when he likes.” 

James regarded him as “a stupid ass” but, pragmatic as ever, was prepared to put his personal aversion to one side and sup with him as early as January 16—just eighteen days after he had been sworn in as President of the Republic. “I could not refuse his invitation,” he explained to his nephews apologetically. Indeed, he seems to have taken the precaution of lending Louis Napoleon 20,000 francs shortly before his election.

Nevertheless, this was to be no repeat of the regime change of 1830, when James and Louis Philippe had translated a private, financial relationship into a public, political one almost overnight. As soon as Louis Napoleon had access to public funds, James cut off his credit, ordering Anthony “to give Napoleon no more money, he has no credit with us…. I promised him 20,000 francs before his budget was passed but now he is getting money from the government, so I don’t want to throw away our money and so I won’t give him a penny more.”

His wife felt an even deeper dislike, partly based on a lingering loyalty to the deposed Orléanist royal family. Disraeli recalled Betty inveighing against Napoleon [III] “whom she hated” to Macaulay, who sought vainly to persuade her that he might be Augustus to his uncle’s Julius Caesar. She was unimpressed: France was “floundering between a nobody and a head garotted by a subversive, useless minority.” If Cavaignac won it would be “a disaster” as he had shown “neither candour nor capacity in power.” But if Louis Napoleon won it would be “a humiliation” as he was “that ridiculous flag from a wonderful past existence, a political nothing who has no other value than as a negative power, a polished socialist hiding roughness beneath the pretence of pleasant politesse.” 

France’s “love affair” with him, she predicted, “could be just like a happy love affair at the beginning of a novel; lovers in this case always end up hating each other, or by being violently separated.” His victory was a “distress signal around which diverse and opposing opinions rally to protest against the country’s upper crust.” From the outset she assumed that “a parody of the Empire” would be restored. Until April 1849 she stayed away from the President’s receptions…

Trump, in a minor key perhaps. Napoleon III stayed at the top of French politics for 21 years.