Whither the Dangerous Class: Bribed Tool of Reactionary Intrigue or New Revolutionary Agent?

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)

Notes

¹ Clyde W. Barrow, “Donald Trump: A New Emperor of the Lumpenproletariat?” The Bullet No. 2180, The Socialist Project, Toronto, Canada, August 30, 2020, available at https://socialistproject.ca/2020/08/donald-trump-a-new-emperor-of-the-lumpenproletariat/; Bryan D. Palmer, “Donald Trump: Emperor of the Lumpen Proletariat or the Stalin of Capitalist Counter-Revolution?,” The Bullet, The Socialist Project, Toronto, Canada, September 28, 2020, available at https://socialistproject.ca/2020/09/trump-emperor-of-lumpen-proletariat/; Clyde W. Barrow, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald J. Trump: A Response to Bryan D. Palmer,” The Bullet, The Socialist Project, Toronto, Canada, October 14, 2020, available at https://socialistproject.ca/2020/10/eighteenth-brumaire-of-donald-trump-response-to-bryan-palmer/; Clyde W. Barrow, “Ein neuer Kaiser des Lumpenproletariats?,” Sozialismus.deArchiv, September 20, 2020, available at https://www.sozialismus.de/kommentare_analysen/detail/artikel/ein-neuer-kaiser-des-lumpenproletariats/.

² Clyde W. Barrow, “A Bribed Tool of Reactionary Intrigue: Black Panther Ideology and the Rise of a White Lumpenproletariat,” New Political Science 42, no. 3 (2020): 441.

³ Clyde W. Barrow, “The US Republican Party Will Continue Its Christo-Fascist Crusade,” Legal Form, November 2, 2020, available at https://legalform.blog/2020/11/02/the-us-republican-party-will-continue-its-christo-fascist-crusade-clyde-w-barrow/.

⁴ For example, Clyde W. Barrow, Isaac Kamola, and Susanne Soederberg, “The Lumpenproletariat in the United States,” Out of the Box hosted by Jonathan Russo, September 2020, available at https://shows.acast.com/ootb/episodes/the-lumpenproletariat; Clyde W. Barrow “The Dangerous Class: The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat,” on This is Revolution! Episode No. 63 hosted by Jason Myles, September 9, 2020, available at https://www.podbean.com/eu/pb-7emby-ea521f.

⁵ See, for example, Daniel Tutt, “Recentering the Lumpen Question Today: Understanding Lumpenization and Bonapartism,” Specter, March 4, 2021, available at https://spectrejournal.com/recentering-the-lumpen-question-today/.

⁶ Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 11 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), 149; Frederick Engels, “Preface to the 2nd Edition of ‘The Peasant War in Germany,’” in MECW, Vol. 21, 98.

⁷ Todd C. Frankel, “A Majority of the People Arrested for Capitol Riot Had a History of Financial Trouble,” The Washington Post, February 10, 2021, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/10/capitol-insurrectionists-jenna-ryan-financial-problems/.

⁸ Ernesto Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

⁹ Stuart Sim, Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

¹⁰ J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time (New York: Atheneum Press, 1973).

¹¹ Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, edited with an introduction by C. B. MacPherson (Hammondsworth, Middlesex, England: Pelican Books, 1968 [1651]), Part I, Chap. 2, 87, observes that “I say not this, as disapproving the use of Universities: but because I am to speak hereafter of their office in a Common-wealth, I must let you see on all occasions by the way, what things would be amended in them; amongst which the frequency of Insignificant Speech is one.”

¹² The concept of orthodoxy in Marxist political theory is a meaningless and anachronistic relic of the early to mid-20^th century. The concept of orthodoxy emerged from a historical context where there were Socialist and Communist parties with the institutional power to enforce ideological orthodoxy on left intellectuals. Absent these legitimating and authoritative institutions, there is no longer any historical reference point for determining orthodoxy. There is most assuredly no sovereign individual who can rightly claim the magisterial authority to bestow such labels, see, Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 262.

¹³ For example, Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1970).

¹⁴ For example, Hal Draper, “The Concept of the ‘Lumpenproletariat’ in Marx and Engels” Economies et Societes 15 (December 1972): 285–312; Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol 2: The Politics of Social Classes (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1978).

¹⁵ Moreover, usage of the concept of the lumpenproletariat has been largely confined to Marxist political theory, with the exception of anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin, who picked it up from Marx after 1848 when it first appeared in print in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, see, Sam Dolgoff, “Introduction,” Bakunin on Anarchy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 3–21.

¹⁶ Frederick Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).

¹⁷ George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1971), 1.

¹⁸ Clyde W. Barrow, Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 11, 146–57.

¹⁹ Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1–138.

²⁰ Paul Dunne, ed., Quantitative Marxism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991).

²¹ Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital.

²² Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: Verso, 1978).

²³ Barrow, Critical Theories of the State, Chap. 4.

²⁴ Stephen Maher and Scott M. Aquanno, “Conceptualizing Neoliberalism: Foundations for an Institutional Marxist Theory of Capitalism,” New Political Science 40, no. 1 (March 2018): 33–50.

²⁵ G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

²⁶ Terrell Carver and Paul Thomas, eds., Rational Choice Marxism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1995).

²⁷ See, Clyde W. Barrow, Toward a Critical Theory of States: The Poulantzas-Miliband Debate After Globalization (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), Chap. 1, where I document this claim in a review of the methodological background to the Poulantzas-Miliband debate.

²⁸ Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1942); Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966); Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1978); Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience (London: New Left Books, 1979); Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon, and Thomas E. Weisskopf, Beyond the Wasteland: A Democratic Alternative to Economic Decline (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1984).

²⁹ Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, Revised and Enlarged Edition (New York: The Free Press, 1957), 299–300.

³⁰ The “ruined proletariat” includes workers who have been injured or disabled, mentally disabled workers, the chronically ill, workers who are permanently displaced by new technology, elderly workers who are shunted into lower paying occupations or part-time work, and retirees with meager pensions, among others.

³¹ Victor Wallis, “Intersectionality’s Binding Agent: The Primacy of Class,” New Political Science 37, No. 4 (December 2015): 604–19.

³² Erik Olin Wright, “Class Boundaries in Advanced Capitalist Societies,” New Left Review (July August 1976); Erik Olin Wright, Class, Crisis, and the State (London: New Left Books, 1978).