Increasingly in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe, we have seen violent protests by predominantly white men from lower income backgrounds adopting racist and xenophobic views and manipulated by social media bots, often originating in the United States and Russia. For many on the political Left – it’s a head scratcher. How can people from working-class backgrounds be drifting into fascism? The answer lies in re-evaluating the Marxist concept of the Lumpenproletariat.
Since Labour came to power in July 2024, there has been a revolt of the British Lumpenproletariat. Mobilised by cynical populists, bogus social media accounts, rogue states, and neo-fascists. A deluge of fake news and misinformation on social media has conflated issues like poor housing, unemployment, low wages, lack of access to public services with increased migration, especially from outside Europe. In other words, they have deflected the blame for very real social problems on to some of the poorest people in society: migrants and refugees.
The British Lumpenproletariat – poor, angry, and wrong
This has proved very toxic. And the Lumpenproletariat has been fired up like never before. Convinced they are the most patriotic defenders of their communities, they have rioted in places like Southport, Huddersfield, Manchester, and the British capital – London. What animates these people is a visceral hatred of minorities and the stereotype of a cosmopolitan, liberal, elite that scorns them – which is why they detest the BBC so much. But they also despise the traditional Left and have little connection to the organised labour movement – the trade unions and Labour Party.
Poor, angry, and wrong. Welcome to the Great British Lumpenproletariat.
What is the Lumpenproletariat?
So – first question – what is the Lumpenproletariat of either the British, American, or European persuasion? The term was created by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to describe people at the very lowest reaches of society who can be enlisted by the ruling class as a violent reactionary mob, unleashed against the revolutionary proletariat.
That is the Lumpenproletariat in a nutshell.
They lack the ‘class consciousness’ of the proletariat and are easily whipped into a frenzy – or are paid to act – by agents of the capitalist class. Marx first used the term in one of his earliest works, The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848. In this work, Marx explained that the industrial working-class was a naturally revolutionary class because it had not stake in capitalism – it owned no property. Every aspect of society – law, morality, religion – was something hostile and in the service of the industrial bosses. So, the worker can easily be won over to revolution.
But – being poor doesn’t make somebody revolutionary on its own.
There is what Marx called, in very derogatory terms, the “dangerous class, the “social scum” (his words), “that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society” which theoretically can move with the revolutionary tide but is more likely to become “the bribed tool of reactionary intrigue”.
How the Lumpenproletariat can be used in a coup d’état
In 1852, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte – Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1808-1873) – seized power in France in a coup that in part relied on mobilising and organising the Parisian Lumpenproletariat. Marx described these people:
“Alongside decayed roués 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, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars – in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.“
Here was a classic example of a well-heeled, upper class populist posing as a man of the people to achieve power. Sounds familiar? He took power as the Emperor Napoleon III, crushing the French Republic for nearly two decades, until he was overthrown after France was defeated in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
The Lumpenproletariat and the rise of 20th century fascism
Marx and Engels did not predict the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. In his analysis of fascism, Leon Trotsky believed that it came to the fore when the bourgeoisie no longer had confidence in parliamentary democracy to defend its property rights.
“At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium – the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralised lumpenproletariat – all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.”
The lower-middle-class feels the ground is shifting under its feet. It fears the upper classes yet despises the working-class. The Lumpenproletariat is poor and desperate, and has been impoverished by capitalism, but has no affiliation to the working-class. Its fury is unleashed on to the working-class by those who have reduced the Lumpenproletariat to such a dismal condition.
The Lumpenproletariat today – and the British variant
Many Marxists have found it more comforting to emphasise the lower-middle-class – or ‘petit-bourgeois’ – presence within fascism and right-wing populism, while playing down the involvement of the poor and disenfranchised. The reality is that the modern extreme Right has both social groups. There is the golf club umbrella crowd rubbing shoulders with the beer sodden thugs up for a fight.
Who are the latter group then? The last forty years has seen the de-industrialisation of many areas of Britain. Traditional industries like steel, coal, and shipping have declined. The percentage of people working in industrial manufacturing has declined sharply. Optimists used to hope for a post-industrial ‘leisure economy’ but the reality has been a growing wealth gap and people employed in more insecure, non-unionised work. They are not experiencing the grinding absolute poverty of their grandparents, but their expectations are higher and the sense of powerlessness far greater.
Their anger is being fuelled by social media channels that have diverted their attention from mainstream media channels – characterised as propaganda arms of the liberal elite – and instead serve them an information diet narrowing their outlook and conflating unrelated issues. They become slaves to opportunistic demagogues who know exactly how to push their buttons.
British Lumpenproletariat – reincarnation of the German Brown Shirts
The British Lumpenproletariat seen rioting in the summer of 2024 is a modern variation on the Brown Shirts of Weimar Germany – without the uniforms, though that is not in the far distant future. Already, extreme Right groups have held paramilitary training exercises. This track suit wearing mass of angry men is no joke. It is every bit as dangerous as those thugs described by Karl Marx in 1852 during Louis Napoleon’s seizure of power.
The British Lumpenproletariat – and the lumpen in other countries – deserves a lot more analysis.
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