Marx’s Conception of Surplus Population and the Lumpenproletariat

Originally written: 27.01.2021.

After having reviewed Marx’s conception of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the landowning class, and the ‘intermediate classes’ – notably the petty-bourgeoisie and the peasantry, we now come to two last specific categories or concepts that contributed to his understanding of modern capitalist society: the lumpenproletariat and the relative surplus population.

Relative Surplus Population & Pauperism

This dimension of Marx’s theoretical framework has been revisited and used in some exciting recent research, such as the works of Aaron Benanav, Endnotes, Lucia Pradella, and Nick Bernards. The latter offers (with Susan Soederberg) a review of this literature, but unfortunately doesn’t include the crucial contributions by Endnotes and Benanav, whose dissertation is a very important resource for global class (and economic) analysis, in my opinion.

The concept of “surplus population” originates from 18th and 19th century political economy. As Benanav explains, it referred to

a set of individuals without reserves or savings, dependent upon selling their labor in order to survive, yet earning incomes below (and often far below) the  prevailing  wage.  In  extreme  cases, portions  of  the  surplus  population  were  reduced  to  pauperism,  that  is,  living  by  begging.  (…) Extremely  divergent  answers  were  given  to  these  questions.  For  Reverend  Thomas Malthus  and  his  followers,  the  existence  and  growth  of  this  surplus  population  demonstrated  the futility  of   trying  to  eradicate  poverty.  Malthus  argued  that  increases  in  wages  only  encouraged  the poor  to  have  more  children;  poverty  was  thus  discovered  to  be  a  consequence  of  a  corrupted human  nature. By  contrast,  Karl  Marx  deployed  the  category  of  surplus  population  in  his  critique  of  political  economy,  including  in  his  critique  of  Malthus.  For  Marx,  the  expansion  of  the surplus  population,  in  modern  times,  had  nothing  to  do  with  human  nature;  rather,  its  expansion was  a  historically  specific  feature  of  the  capitalist  mode  of  production.  Since  the  advent  of  capitalism,  the  amount  of  work  required  to  produce  many  goods  has  been  greatly  reduced,  increasing the  material  wealth  of  society.    But  the  result  of  this  transformation  was  ultimately  a  decline  in the  overall  demand  for  labor.  This  growing  material  wealth  of  society  is  thus  linked  to  growing poverty  among  working  people.  For  Marx,  the  growth  of  the  surplus  population  was  both  cause and consequence  of  the  immiseration  of  the  working  class.

[Aaron Benanav, A Global History of Unemployment: Surplus Populations in the World Economy, 1949-2010. UCLA, 2014, p. 9-10 (emphasis added)]

The italicized part of this passage introduces what we’re going to talk about in this section, which is contained in published and final version in Chapter 25 of Marx’s Capital 1. His theoretical developments concerning relative surplus population are located, as you can guess, in his ‘CoPE’ (Critique of Political Economy) writings, i.e. the (published) Volume 1 and the various published and unpublished economic manuscripts that contain his critical account of the capitalist mode of production. As mentioned above, Marx’s ‘theory’ of immiseration is the other side of the same coin that is his conception of the relative surplus population. Michael Denning captured the meaning of ‘misery’ in this context – Marx’s theory explaining the structural tendency to produce this condition – with his term wageless life: the tragic situation that emerges if the worker becomes unable to access his primary means to access basic subsistence resources, namely wage-labour. This is why Denning strikingly opens his essay by saying that, under “capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited.”  The notion of wageless life is at the intersection of two of Marx’s concepts: the relative surplus population, which we’re gonna get into now, and the virtual pauper from the Grundrisse. Here’s how the latter is defined by Marx:

‘It is already contained in the concept of the free labourer, that he is a pauper: a virtual pauper … If the capitalist has no use for his surplus labour, then the worker may not perform his necessary labour’.

[Grundrisse]

A similar definition can be found in a footnote in Capital I, where Marx says that the proletarian “is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous to the need for valorisation.” This notion of ‘virtual pauper’ illustrates the ‘bare life’ – naked life maintained only by asymmetrical and chaotic external conditions – that is the proletarian condition: either you manage to sell your capacity to work and thus submit to the despotic rule of both the market and the individual capitalist, or you’re at risk of falling more and more into poverty and misery, all the way down to pauperism (i.e., being fully unemployable and having to resort to begging in order to survive). This was all the more threatening in Marx’s time, when most countries had little to no social safety net of any shape or form, that would offer some hope to partly contain the worst forms of social misery. Although it is not the time or place to discuss this with regards to its accuracy either in the last two centuries or about the current one  – since we’re only focusing on Marx’s thought, the following piece of contextualisation is necessary:

In the 20th century, this idea of the tendency of capital to increasingly produce workers as surplus was largely dismissed as an “immiseration thesis”, on the grounds that history had proven it wrong: the working class had clearly failed to become immiserated; on the contrary, living standards had risen. Industrial employment had grown dramatically, suggesting that the industrial working class would eventually account for the vast majority of the workforce.

[Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, in Issue 4]

We can now focus on Marx’s explanation of this tendency and process: his conception of the emergence of and consequences of the relative surplus population, and the immiseration of the proletariat as a whole, formulated in his general law of capitalist accumulation, as reproduced below. We will rely on this central statement to further examine the different parts and concepts of Marx’s argument. Whenever mentioned, it will simply be referred to as “the general law.”

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, also develop the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army thus increases with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour. The more extensive, finally, the pauperised sections of the working class and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. The folly is now patent of the economic wisdom that preaches to the labourers the accommodation of their number to the requirements of capital. The mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly effects this adjustment. The first word of this adaptation is the creation of a relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army. Its last word is the misery of constantly extending strata of the active army of labour, and the dead weight of pauperism.

Everything about this will be explained in more detail below, but basically, capital tends to transform the labour process by “[supplementing]  human labor with machinery to such a degree that labor became a mere ‘appendage’ to an objectively organized production process based on the technical application of scientific knowledge.” [1] As a result, the demand for industrial labor falls and ‘superfluous’ workers are expulsed: “it is capital accumulation  itself that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorisation, and is therefore a surplus population” [Capital I]. However, part of this relative surplus population becomes stuck, or “consolidated”, into a state of workless misery – wageless life, or, as Marx puts, misery “in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour.

First, let us clarify what Marx means by “relative surplus population.” His meaning differs from that of the classical political economists, which is why he added “relative”: the population in question isn’t a surplus in the absolute sense of constituting too many additional mouths to feed, so to say, compared to society’s capacity to reproduce itself (and provide the living minima of food, shelter, etc…). This was the conception of people like Malthus, whose conception was grounded in “natural law” rather than historical and social forces. Instead, Marx’s notion of surplus population is a ‘law of population’ specific to the capitalist mode of production: this population is surplus relatively to the needs of capital (valorisation & accumulation), in other words, an excess above capital’s demand for labour. Marx luckily defines how we are to understand the idea of this relatively ‘superfluous’ or ‘redundant’ population: “Every worker belongs to it during the time when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed.” Here’s what he says in the Grundrisse:

Thus the relation of necessary and surplus labour, as it is posited by capital, turns into its opposite, so that a part of necessary labour – i .e. of the labour reproducing labour capacity – is superfluous, and this labour capacity itself is therefore used as a surplus of the necessary working population, i.e. of the portion of the working population whose necessary labour is not superfluous but necessary for capital. Since the necessary development of the productive forces as posited by capital consists in increasing the relation of surplus labour to necessary labour, or in decreasing the portion of necessary labour required for a given amount of surplus labour, then, if a definite amount of labour capacity is given, the relation of necessary labour needed by  capital must necessarily continuously decline, i.e. part of these labour capacities must become superfluous, since a portion of them suffices to perform the quantity of surplus labour for which the whole amount was required previously. The positing of a specific portion of labour capacities as superfluous, i .e. of the labour required for their reproduction as superfluous, is therefore a necessary consequence of the growth of surplus labour relative to necessary.

[Grundrisse, Section titled “Necessary labour, Surplus labour, Surplus population, Surplus capital” (emphasis added)]

Along similar lines, he writes that,

It is a law of capital (…) to create surplus labour, disposable time ; it can do this only by setting necessary labour in motion – i.e. entering into exchange with the worker. It is its tendency, therefore, to create as much labour as possible ; just as it is equally its tendency to reduce necessary labour to a minimum. It is therefore equally a tendency of capital to increase the labouring population, as well as constantly to posit a part of it as surplus population – population which is useless until such time as capital can utilize it. (…) It is equally a tendency of capital to make human labour (relatively) superfluous, so as to drive it, as human labour, towards infinity.

[Grundrisse, Chapter on Capital – Notebook IV]

This is what Marx says in his ‘general law’ quote: the relentless motion of capital tends to create a bigger “absolute mass of the proletariat” (here meaning, the ‘active labour army’) but also, simultaneously, a “relative mass” of proletarians as the ‘industrial reserve army.’ As some people have pointed out  in recent discussions, Marx’s theoretical statement, – his general law of capitalist accumulation – goes beyond what classical marxism has generally retained of this part his work, namely the role played by the “reserve army of labour” in determining the wage rate of the ‘active labour army’. Let us first deal with this latter part before moving on to the core of Marx’s argument (the aforementioned ‘law’).

Denning explains that the notion of ‘reserve army’ is

often taken to be distinctively Marxist since it appears in Capital’s discussion of capitalism’s relative surplus population. However, Marx was simply adopting the rhetoric of the British labour movement. Radicals, particularly the Chartists and Fourierist associationists, imagined the new factory workers as great industrial armies, and this common trope led the Chartist leader Bronterre O’Brien to write of a reserve army of labour in the Northern Star in 1839. The young Engels picked up that image in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, and Marx would invoke the metaphor occasionally, distinguishing between the active and reserve armies of the working class. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was part of the commonsense understanding of unemployment: by 1911, even the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor could conclude that, ‘however prosperous conditions may be, there is always a “reserve army” of the unemployed’.

Nonetheless, as can be seen in the ‘general law’ quote (esp. in second paragraph), this does represent the first part of Marx’s argument. As explained by Benanav and Endnotes in Misery and Debt [2]:

Marx shows how, through the structural maintenance of a certain level of unemployment, wages are kept in line with the needs of accumulation. The “industrial reserve army” of the unemployed contracts as the demand for labour rises, causing wages to rise in turn. Rising wages then eat into profitability, causing accumulation to slow down. As the demand for labour falls, the reserve army grows once again, and the previous wage gains evaporate.

This is a phenomenon that follows the rhythm of economic cycles and crises, with the demand for labour changing according to the periods of booms and busts. Moreover, this reserve army ‘comes to function as a lever by which the rate of accumulation can be increased.’ [3] In Marx’s own words

…if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus population becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.

[Capital 1, Chapter 25, Section 3]

He also explains this in Capital III:

The stagnation of production would have laid off a part of the working-class and would thereby have placed the employed part in a situation, where it would have to submit to a reduction of wages even below the average. This has the very same effect on capital as an increase of the relative or absolute surplus-value at average wages would have had. Prosperity would have led to more marriages among labourers and reduced the decimation of offspring. While implying a real increase in population, this does not signify an increase in the actual working population. But it affects the relations of the labourer to capital in the same way as an increase of the number of actually working labourers would have affected them.

[Capital 3, Chapter 15]

But this first argument about the ‘reserve army’, as important as it is, isn’t the whole of what Marx calls his general law of accumulation, which is the actual point of this chapter (25). Marx actually expects ‘a secular trajectory of a first relative then absolute decline in the demand for labour,’ based on ‘the available evidence in his time.’ [4] To quote once again the authors of “Misery and Debt”,

This is the secret of the “general law”: labour-saving technologies tend to generalise, both within and across lines, leading to a relative decline in the demand for labour. Moreover, these innovations are irreversible: they do not disappear if and when profitability is restored (indeed, as we shall see, the restoration of profitability is often conditioned on further innovations in new or expanding lines). Thus left unchecked this relative decline in labour demand threatens to outstrip capital accumulation, becoming absolute.

They call this long-term structural decline “a crisis of the reproduction of the capital-labour relation in itself”, which constitutes for Marx the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production, since both capital ( → surplus capital) and labour ( → growing mass of “stagnant” surplus proletarians) thus fail to reinsert themselves in the reproduction process which is at the very root of capitalism. Benanav and Clegg (2018) also summarize this general law in a slightly different way:

As capital transforms one sector after another in its effort to raise the productivity of labor, this tendency is reflected in a reduction in the demand of labor, issuing in the expansion of all forms of the surplus population. The growth of the surplus population also worsens the situation of the working class as a whole: when the labor market is slack, all workers find that they have less bargaining power, since the risks associated with losing one’s job rise when and where there are many people already looking for work. For these reasons, immiseration is the ‘absolute general law of capital accumulation’.36 In spite of the name he gave this law, Marx did not distinguish between the relative and absolute dimensions of capitalism’s immiserating tendency. He simply pointed out that in this context ‘the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse.’

[Benanav and Clegg, “Crisis and Immiseration: Critical Theory Today”]

In sum, the development of the relative surplus population worsens the situation of the proletariat/working class as a whole (less bargaining power, harder to find employment, even less so ‘good/decent’ working conditions, etc…)!

We can now highlight the different forms of existence (Existenzformen, as in the title of this section in German) of the relative surplus population, some of which we’ve already mentioned; this is Marx’s Section 4 of Chapter 25. Although there seem to be some differences in how people have read or interpreted this typology [5], I will here present the four main modes of existence of surplus population under capitalism. These are the ‘main’ ones since, as Marx himself wrote, the relative surplus population “exists in every possible form.” He then mentions three forms that ‘always’ exist, as opposed to ones ‘imposed’ irregularly by the industrial cycle. [6]

1. The floating surplus population

The floating form corresponds to the reserve army of unemployed proletarians, in and out of work according to the fluctuations of capitalist production and accumulation, as well as things like technological transformations of the labour process (e.g. introducing new machinery can provoke technological unemployment. They therefore have a definite connection to the active labor army (i.e. to employment), generally being “hired at the prevailing wage during economic booms and then fired during the busts.” [7] Here’s Marx’s description:

In the centres of modern industry — factories, manufactures, ironworks, mines, &c. — the labourers are sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again in greater masses, the number of those employed increasing on the whole, although in a constantly decreasing proportion to the scale of production. Here the surplus population exists in the floating form. In the automatic factories, as in all the great workshops, where machinery enters as a factor, or where only the modern division of labour is carried out, large numbers of boys are employed up to the age of maturity. When this term is once reached, only a very small number continue to find employment in the same branches of industry, whilst the majority are regularly discharged. This majority forms an element of the floating surplus population, growing with the extension of those branches of industry. Part of them emigrates, following in fact capital that has emigrated. One consequence is that the female population grows more rapidly than the male, teste England. That the natural increase of the number of labourers does not satisfy the requirements of the accumulation of capital, and yet all the time is in excess of them, is a contradiction inherent to the movement of capital itself. It wants larger numbers of youthful labourers, a smaller number of adults. The contradiction is not more glaring than that other one that there is a complaint of the want of hands, while at the same time many thousands are out of work, because the division of labour chains them to a particular branch of industry. The consumption of labour power by capital is, besides, so rapid that the labourer, half-way through his life, has already more or less completely lived himself out. He falls into the ranks of the supernumeraries, or is thrust down from a higher to a lower step in the scale. … In order to conform to these circumstances, the absolute increase of this section of the proletariat must take place under conditions that shall swell their numbers, although the individual elements are used up rapidly. Hence, rapid renewal of the generations of labourers (this law does not hold for the other classes of the population). This social need is met by early marriages, a necessary consequence of the conditions in which the labourers of modern industry live, and by the premium that the exploitation of children sets on their production.

2. The latent surplus population

The latent surplus population is a constant reservoir of (potential) labourers that can be called in from the countryside/rural areas:

As soon as capitalist production takes possession of agriculture, and in proportion to the extent to which it does so, the demand for an agricultural labouring population falls absolutely, while the accumulation of the capital employed in agriculture advances, without this repulsion being, as in non-agricultural industries, compensated by a greater attraction. Part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat, and on the look-out for circumstances favourable to this transformation. (Manufacture is used here in the sense of all non-agricultural industries.) This source of relative surplus population is thus constantly flowing. But the constant flow towards the towns pre-supposes, in the country itself, a constant latent surplus population, the extent of which becomes evident only when its channels of outlet open to exceptional width. The agricultural labourer is therefore reduced to the minimum of wages, and always stands with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism.

In addition, R. Jamil Jonna and John Bellamy Foster (2016) write that

Internationally, Ireland, as Marx pointed out, constituted a vast labor reserve, with a huge latent population of largely overpopulated rural workers at the beck and call of English industry. Such conditions were the result of the English conquest of Ireland and subsequent colonial history. “Ireland,” he explained, “is at present merely an agricultural district of England which happens to be separated by a wide stretch of water from the country for which it provides corn, wool, cattle and industrial and military recruits.” So precarious were the conditions of rural laborers in England and Ireland that they “had one foot already in the swamp of pauperism,” making it easy to attract them to industry when needed, and unceremoniously discard them the moment they were no longer of direct use to capital accumulation. [8]

3. The stagnant (or consolidated) surplus population

This is another form that we’ve already mentioned, while outlining Marx’s general law. It forms the consolidated and largely unemployable section of the relative surplus population, people who find themselves unable in the longer term to find work again after being expelled from existing lines of production. This population retains a very distant and weak connection to the labour market, but Marx still includes them as part of the active labor army, because despite their woeful living and economic conditions, they still have to work in order to survive. [This is where we’re reaching the core of Denning’s notion of ‘wageless life’: a largely workless proletarian life!] They therefore tend to be in worse conditions than other segments of the working class, and the rare work they can find often is in much more exploitative sectors. As Benanav and Endnotes put it, they are “absolutely redundant” to the needs of capital, as opposed to the relatively redundant floating/reserve army which does have a more significant – if precarious – connection to the labour market because of their roles in regulating wage rates and contributing (indirectly, structurally) to the disciplinarization of the active labour army. Here’s Marx’s own words:

The third category of the relative surplus population, the stagnant, forms a part of the active labour army, but with extremely irregular employment. Hence it furnishes to capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour power. Its conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class; this makes it at once the broad basis of special branches of capitalist exploitation. It is characterised by maximum of working-time, and minimum of wages. We have learnt to know its chief form under the rubric of “domestic industry.” It recruits itself constantly from the supernumerary forces of modern industry and agriculture, and specially from those decaying branches of industry where handicraft is yielding to manufacture, manufacture to machinery. Its extent grows, as with the extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a surplus population advances. But it forms at the same time a self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of the working class, taking a proportionally greater part in the general increase of that class than the other elements. In fact, not only the number of births and deaths, but the absolute size of the families stand in inverse proportion to the height of wages, and therefore to the amount of means of subsistence of which the different categories of labourers dispose. This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd to savages, or even civilised colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down.

Jonna and Foster (2016) again offer some more details on Marx’s views:

Central to the structural conditions governing the stagnant population was the development of “so-called domestic industry” or “modern domestic industry,” alongside “modern manufacturing” (modern handicraft production). Modern domestic industry mainly took place in the homes of workers or in small workshops, for example lace-making establishments. This was a form of what Marx called “outwork” or subcontracting attached to the factory system. In modern domestic industry, he wrote, exploitation is “still more shameless than in modern manufacture,” because the workers’ power of resistance declines with their dispersal; because a whole series of plundering parasites insinuate themselves between the actual employer and the worker he employs; because a domestic industry has always to compete either with the factory system, or with manufacturing in the same branch of production; because poverty robs the worker of the conditions most essential to his labor, of space, light and ventilation; because employment becomes more and more irregular; and, finally, because in these last places of refuge for the masses made ‘redundant’ by large-scale industry and agriculture, competition for work necessarily attains its maximum. Labor conditions were particularly horrid in modern domestic industry because it took the stagnant surplus population as its basis. Here was to be found a super-abundance of cheap, freshly exploitable labor—most of them women and children. The precariousness of workers in modern domestic industry was reflected in the fact that workers were rendered “redundant in the form of under-payment and over-work” to the point of superexploitation. The typical modern domestic industry was preponderantly women and young girls, working in garment establishments as “outworkers” attached to modern manufacture. They were “always paid less than the minimum wage.” Marx pointed to a shirt factory in Londonderry that employed one thousand workers in the factory and a further “9,000 outworkers spread over the country districts.” Such outworkers were employed in small sweatshops dispersed over wide areas, weakening their power to organize collectively and resist. This tended to accentuate the “murderous side of this economy,” most notoriously the “mistress’s houses” in clothing manufacture. “In English barracks the regulation space allotted to each soldier is 500 to 600 cubic feet, and in the military hospitals 1,200 cubic feet. But in those finishing sties there are between 67 and 100 cubic feet for each person. At the same time the oxygen of the air is consumed by gas lamps.” Children beginning work at age six and working fourteen-hour days (or more), “when business is brisk,” were not uncommon. What Marx called “modern industry” or the factory system increasingly came under the Factory Acts, while branches of production associated with modern domestic industry (and modern manufacture), which the stagnant population depended on for its exceedingly precarious employment, were still “without legal limit to exploitation,” unfettered by “legal regulations.” It thus corresponded in today’s parlance with the informal economy. Here, Marx insisted, could still be found conditions where children were required to work from 4:00 A.M. to midnight. He quoted the Daily Telegraph to the effect that in these sectors there was still a struggle to limit the workday to eighteen hours! Examining branches of production as varied as pottery, wallpaper making, bread making, and lacemaking, Marx ended with a discussion of the conditions of dressmakers in London, which was to overlap with his later discussion of modern domestic industry. He recounted the story, notorious at the time, of twenty-year-old Mary Anne Walkley, who had died after working continuously for more than twenty-six hours, in one of the most respectable dressmaking establishments in London, under conditions of a chronic lack of sleep, oxygen, and space. Walkley was being forced to work long hours to produce dresses for a ball announced by the Princess of Wales. Even the Morning Star, the organ of free traders, responded by declaring “our white slaves, who are toiled into the grave, for the most part silently pine and die.” As Joseph Fracchia notes, the exploitation of labor power under capitalism, with the reserve army as its fulcrum, “is not abstract but concretely rooted in individual bodies, it is [for Marx], ‘that monstrosity of a suffering population of workers held in reserve for the changing exploitative needs of capital.’… Capitalism reproduces its supply of labor-power by perpetuating, over generations, a class of ‘needy individuals.’ And life-long neediness is a concerted attack on the body and the bodily capacities of those in need.” The precariousness of employment under capitalism extends to the conditions of work itself, and to the using up of the corporeal basis of human existence.

Finally, Marx mentions another element of the relative surplus population, its lowest layer: pauperized populations. This is the most miserable section of the working class, those unemployable either because they refuse to or cannot work, See endnotes [9] for the original passage in German, which I have checked out because the different English translations I have seen can lead to additional confusion, apart from Marx’s sometimes ambiguous statements. Here is a (very) slightly modified version from the one in the MIA:

The lowest sediment of the relative surplus population finally dwells in [or occupies; inhabits] the sphere of pauperism. Abstract from vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in short the actual lumpenproletariat, this layer of society consists of three categories. First, those able to work. One need only glance superficially at the statistics of English pauperism to find that the quantity of paupers increases with every crisis, and diminishes with every revival of trade. Second, orphans and pauper children. These are candidates for the industrial reserve army, and are, in times of great prosperity, as 1860, e.g., speedily and in large numbers enrolled in the active army of labourers. Third, the demoralised and ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, due to the division of labour; people who have passed the normal age of the labourer; the victims of industry, whose number increases with the increase of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical works, &c., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, &c. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais [10] of capitalist production; but capital knows how to throw these, for the most part, from its own shoulders on to those of the working class and the lower middle class.

As summed up by Jonna and Foster (2016):

The pauperized layer, which included both the lowest segments of the relative surplus population and elements that were past all employment, held down the industrial reserve army and the working class as a whole. The largest portion of this layer dwelled “in the sphere of [official] pauperism”—the remainder consisting of “vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in short the actual lumpenproletariat.” [11] [‘official pauperism’ = the three categories or layers mentioned in Marx’s quote]

To conclude this section, let’s mention that Marx also talks about the relative surplus population in Book 3 of Capital, mostly in Part III [“The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall”]. Here are a few selected passages and links.

The capitalist production process is essentially, and at the same time, a process of accumulation. We have shown how, with the progress of capitalist production, the mass of value that must simply be reproduced and maintained rises and grows with the rising productivity of labour, even· if the labour-power applied remains constant. But as the social productivity of labour develops, so the mass of use-values produced grows still more, and the means of production form a portion of these. The additional labour, moreover, which has to be appropriated in order for this additional wealth to be transformed back into capital does not depend on the value of these means of production (including means of subsistence), since the worker is not concerned in the labour process with the value of the· means of production but rather with their use-value. Accumulation itself, however, and the concentration of capital it involves, is simply a material means for increasing productivity. And this growth in the means of production entails a growth in the working population, the creation of a surplus population that corresponds to the surplus capital or’ even exceeds its overall requirements, thus leading to an over-population of workers. A momentary excess of surplus capital over the working population it commands has a double effect. On the one hand it will gradually increase the working population by raising wages, hence attenuating the destructive influences that decimate the offspring of the workers and making marriage easier, while on the other hand, by using methods that create relative surplus-value (introduction and improvement of machinery), it produces far more quickly an artificial and relative over-population, which in turn is the forcing house for a really rapid increase in the number of people – since, under capitalist production, misery produces population. It thus follows from the very nature of the capitalist accumulation process, and this process is simply one aspect of the capitalist process of production, that the increased mass of means of production designed to be turned into capital finds a correspondingly increased and even excessive working population available for exploitation. As the process of production and accumulation advances, therefore, the mass of surplus labour that can be and is appropriated must grow, and with it too the absolute mass of profit appropriated by the social capital. But the same laws of production and accumulation mean that the value of the constant capital increases along with its mass, and progressively more quickly than that of the variable portion of capital which is converted into living labour. The same laws, therefore, produce both a growing absolute mass of profit for the social capital, and a falling rate of profit.

[Chapter 13 LTRPF]

Its [relative surplus-population] propagation is inseparable from, and hastened by, the development of the productivity of labour as expressed by a fall in the rate of profit. The relative over-population becomes so much more apparent in a country, the more the capitalist mode of production is developed in it. This, again, is the reason why, on the one hand, the more or less imperfect subordination of labour to capital continues in many branches of production, and continues longer than seems at first glance compatible with the general stage of development. This is due to the cheapness and abundance of disposable or unemployed wage-labourers, and to the greater resistance, which some branches of production, by their very nature, render to the transformation of manual work into machine production. On the other hand, new lines of production are opened up, especially for the production of luxuries, and it is these that take as their basis this relative over-population, often set free in other lines of production through the increase of their constant capital. These new lines start out predominantly with living labour, and by degrees pass through the same evolution as the other lines of production. In either case the variable capital makes up a considerable portion of the total capital and wages are below the average, so that both the rate and mass of surplus-value in these lines of production are unusually high. Since the general rate of profit is formed by levelling the rates of profit in the individual branches of production, however, the same factor which brings about the tendency in the rate of profit to fall, again produces a counterbalance to this tendency and more or less paralyses its effects.

[Chapter 14, Section 4. Relative Surplus Population]

See also Chapter 15, Section 3. Surplus Capital alongside Surplus Population

Lumpenproletariat

We now come to the last specific category/class before addressing Marx’s overall conception of class. The category of the lumpenproletariat has been associated with marxist theory since the 20th century. Marcel van der Linden explains the emergence of this notion in Marx’s thought/works:

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the word ‘proletariat’ made a comeback. Initially, it was used in a general sense to describe the estate of people without property, beyond honour. The workers were only a part of this amorphous mass According to French nobleman Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac, writing in the 1830s, the proletariat formed ‘the lowest rank, the deepest stratum of society’, which consisted of four groups: ‘the workers, the beggars, the thieves and public women’ (…) Gradually a differentiation was made that could have one of two outcomes: either the workers declared that they were not proletarians, but a separate class or estate, or they identified with the proletariat and started to see the other groups, who had previously also been considered as proletarians, to be ‘less’ and ‘different’. The German communist workers in London, with whom Marx and Engels were associated, favoured the second outcome. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, which Marx and Engels were instructed to write for these workers on the basis of common discussions, ‘the modern working class – the proletarians’ were seen as a unity. The thieves, beggars, and prostitutes were now devaluated as a lower stratum, the lumpenproletariat

[Marcel van der Linden, “Proletariat”, in Musto, M. (Ed.). The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Interpretations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, p. 73]

This is one of the areas of Marx’s thought that has often been exaggerated considering the relatively small importance of this social category in his writings and theories. Nonetheless, it’s worth examining, both if we want to understand the social phenomena it hinted at and in order to know Marx’s viewpoint thereof. Right off the bat, we must acknowledge that this was one area where Marx failed to move beyond moralising and unsociological, conceptually unhelpful ideas and stereotypes. However, as with many other issues, the late (‘mature’) Marx isn’t really the same as the Marx writing in the Communist Manifesto, largely because of his comprehensive study of modern capitalist society. I therefore ask the reader to keep in mind the two following points/angles:

1) Looking at a) the most ‘famous’ statements/quotes and b) Marx’s ‘works as a whole’ (assuming there was one largely continuous conception throughout his life or most of it, which was the case for instance for the proletariat), you get one version of the story. For the most part, this is a negative and unclearly defined conception of this class, rightly criticized by many people, all the way back to Bakunin. For a quick summary, see Michael Denning’s quote below.

2) As I will argue later on, based on what we saw in the first part on relative surplus population and recent scholarship by Villanova (2020) and others, there’s another definition that must be given at least as much weight as the first one. This is simply because the Marx of Capital is far more conceptually and theoretically advanced, and generally far more relevant, than the younger one of the Communist Manifesto. There is a later conception of the lumpenproletariat, which is indeed different from the other one which has attracted most of the focus.

Please note that I am not claiming that the first angle is wrong: it is certainly a part of Marx’s overall thought, but the fact that some of his views evolved during his project of studying modern society (known as Critique of Political Economy) must be emphasised to properly reconstruct ‘what he thought.’ Before outlining Marx’s views on the matter, here’s a brief overview of the existing literature, with added links whenever I could find them. It happens to be a topic that has been pretty exhaustively covered, unlike some other aspects of Marx’s conception of class. This is of course due both to the controversial nature of this part of Marx’s thought, and the fact that it doesn’t require going through all his works since he doesn’t mention it that often. Nonetheless, I’ve myself checked out Marx-Engels Collected Works to make sure I didn’t miss important passages. As often, Hal Draper has done some important groundwork in the context of his multivolume Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution. There are two sections addressing the lumpenproletariat: Chapter 15 (p. 453-478) and Special Note G (Appendix, p. 628-634) in Vol. 2 (1978). You should take a look at Draper’s analysis if you want a more “exhaustive” account than the one I’m offering here; I think all the essentials are adequately covered but if you want more this is where you should go. The most important articles on Marx and the lumpenproletariat are listed below. I haven’t used all of them for writing this section – also some more recent ones sum up the insights from earlier ones – but it is worth keeping a short bibliography we could refer back to if necessary. For my part, as I’ve said a bunch of times already in this series, I choose to limit the aim of the analysis to retrieving Marx’s conception, leaving out both the accuracies/inaccuracies in terms of evidence and historical record, and the theoretical relevance of his concepts and arguments. Some of the literature below does deal with the latter, with significant insights that are worth having in mind when bringing up Marx’s ideas and whether or not they can be useful for us today (for instance, there are various errors in Marx’s understanding of the sociological composition of social movements and politics, in part because of his ideological leanings). Obviously, this applies to the whole series/project!

Bescherer, Peter, “Lumpenproleriat”, in W. F. Haug (Hg.), Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, Bd. 8/II, Berlin: Argument, 2015, p. 1379-1393.

Bescherer, Peter, “Deklassiert und korrumpiert: Das Lumpenproletariat als Grenzbegriff der politischen Theorie und Klassenanalyse von Marx und Engels”, Ethik und Gesellschaft, 0(1), 2018.

I have translated (via deepl.com) this into English, so you can read it if you want; I used this article quite a lot.

Bourdin, Jean-Claude, « Marx et le lumpenprolétariat », Actuel Marx, 54(29), 2013, p. 39-55.

Here translated into English.

I’m also interested to see what we can learn from a recent book by Clyde Barrow, The Dangerous Class. The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat, University of Michigan Press, 2020. On my reading list (you know, the one that I’ll take with me to my grave^^)!

As an useful introduction and summary, here’s how Denning describes the contents and functions of this concept in Marx’s thought:

Coined by Marx in the 1840s as one of a family of terms—the lumpenproletariat, the mob, i lazzaroni, la bohème, the poor whites—it characterized the class formations of Second Empire Paris, Risorgimento Naples, Victorian London and the slave states of North America. In most cases, Marx even used the original language to suggest the historical specificity of these formations rather than the theoretical standing of the concept. For him, such expressions had two key connotations: on the one hand, of an unproductive and parasitic layer of society, a social scum or refuse made up of those who preyed upon others; on the other hand, of a fraction of the poor that was usually allied with the forces of order—as in the account of Louis Napoleon’s recruitment of the lumpenproletariat in The Eighteenth Brumaire, or Marx’s analysis of the slaveholders’ alliance with poor whites in the us South. In these formulations, Marx had two antagonists. First, he was combating the established view that the entire working class was a dangerous and immoral element. He drew a line between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat to defend the moral character of the former. Second, he was challenging those—particularly his great anarchist ally and adversary Bakunin—who argued that criminals and thieves were a revolutionary political force.

In my opinion, this sums up almost everything you need to know about this concept in Marx; as mentioned earlier, this does however needs to be completed with some hints of a more structural conception of this class in his Critique of Political Economy. After having mentioned some key points made by those (scholars) who were – to a large extent justifiably so – the most critical of Marx’s concept, I will present a summary of both the contents and the overall meanings of this category, based on the articles by Villanova (2020), Bourdin (2013) and Bescherer (2018), as well as my own research.

Marx’s (and Engels’) descriptions of the lumpenproletariat are (in)famously harsh, moralising and downright offensive. One of the oft-cited definitions is from the Communist Manifesto: “this passive putrefaction of the lowest strata of the old society” In The Class Struggles in France, Marx describes it as a “recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds, living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu [homeless, rootless people; literally ‘men without hearth or home’]”.There is therefore no doubt that the fundamentally moralistic and negative viewpoint of the contemporary intellectual and upper classes (back then but today isn’t that different!) concerning the lowliest masses, the “rabble”, was in part shared by Marx (and Engels, and undoubtedly many other socialists and some of the more well-off urban workers). Moreover, many of the scholars who’ve looked into this topic have come away with understandably negative conclusions regarding Marx (and Engels)’s views. Although I will not rely on their approach in the rest of this section, their viewpoints are definitely worth mentioning, because they show some of the limits of Marx’s conception of class (here specifically, but by extension, his class model and assumptions more generally).

I will mention three of the authors listed above, who have been on the whole pretty ‘negative’ in their final takeaways on this issue, while offering solid analyses and noteworthy arguments or remarks. Bovenkerk (1984) argued that one major function of this category in Marx (and Engels) is ‘to explain away parts of the proletariat which failed to behave in a proper revolutionary fashion.’ [12] Both Bovenkerk and Cowling (2002, 2008) also – and again, this is pretty hard to argue against – conclude that Marx ‘fails to produce an account of a coherent social group.’ [13] This comes for example from the fact that, contrary to what one might think based on the quoted passages in the Manifesto, Marx also attaches a “lumpenproletarian character” to some sections of the upper classes. Here’s an example of, as part of a  rather strange list of individuals/groups from different economic layers, all of whom share a certain mode of existence (which is left largely unspecified):

From the aristocracy there were bankrupted roués of doubtful means and dubious provenance, from the bourgeoisie there were degenerate  wastrels on the take, vagabonds, demobbed soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, swindlers and cheats, thugs, pickpockets, conjurers, card-sharps, pimps, brothel-keepers, porters, day-labourers, organ grinders, scrap dealers, knife grinders, tinkers and beggars, in short the whole amorphous, jumbled [or ‘disintegrating’] mass, thrown hither and yon, which the French call la bohème.

[The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte]

Cowling therefore summarizes the content of Marx’s words with a list of how the lumpenproleriat is depicted:

1) Apparently, a tightened-up version of the common ideas of the time about the ‘dangerous classes’; although the proletariat itself tended to be identified in the terms reserved by Marx and Engels for the lumpenproletariat before socialists including Marx and Engels managed to revise common meaning;

2) People drawn from both precapitalist and capitalist social formations but who had left or been evicted from their previous social class;

3) People who do not accept the idea of their living by regular work;

4) A source of criminals;

5) Importantly, for Marx, comprised of people who are liable to be tempted by illicit pickings into the service of the right, particularly the finance aristocracy, who share the approach to life and morality of the lumpenproletariat. [14]

As he puts it, what “is going on here seems to be that Marx is including an assortment of occupations which command widespread dislike to make the lumpenproletariat seem less reputable rather than engaging in any kind of serious social (or socialist) analysis.” [15] This doesn’t seem like a wrong appraisal, unfortunately. The exception to this is the last part of the first section, where he does provide some kind of structural and mostly coherent idea of where the lumpenproletariat is situated within the capitalist totality, instead of merely relying on what are essentially moral judgements and insults.

Hence, as various authors and socialists have pointed out, a major problem in the characterizations by Marx (and Engels, and then most Marxists) of the lumpenproletariat is his reliance on dehumanizing administrative/authoritarian and policing/coplike terminology and stereotypes about this part of society. In his article which tellingy compares Marx’s view of the lumpenproletariat and that of Thomas More in Utopia (spoiler: they’re very similar), Peter Hayes mentions how “Marx’s description of the lumpenproletariat as thieves after  after loot and bribed to riot was a widespread characterization of the Paris mob at the time of the French Revolution.” [16] This is one of the conclusions – already mentioned, e.g. Cowling’s n°1 – that come out quite clearly out of all this: Marx seems to have failed (unlike some other socialists, notably Bakunin) to emancipate his viewpoint from the categories of the modern state and oppressive modern institutions and representations. For example, Bescherer (2018) points out that this description of the ‘rabble’/the lumpen is similar to Gustave Le Bon’s infamous “Psychology of the Masses” (1895), where he elaborated the bourgeois ideas of the (unruly and dangerous) masses. If that wasn’t bad enough, Cowling (2002, 2008) argues and shows that “there is a considerable similarity in both definition and function between Marx’s view of the lumpenproletariat and Charles Murray’s contemporary theory of the underclass.” [17] Yikes… But wait, there’s more! This isn’t tied directly to Marx, but still equally harrowing: “in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the ‘lumpen’ concept became a foundation for socialist eugenics.” [18]

After this general introduction to Marx’s conception of the lumpenproletariat, it’s time to offer an actual overview of this topic; hopefully what follows is satisfactory! What has been seen so far covers a lot of ground already, so this will partly be a way to take a more detailed look at some of the points mentioned above. As mentioned earlier: in my opinion, two ‘angles’ must be accounted for in order to understand Marx’s conception of the lumpenproletariat. On the one hand, most famously, the effort by Marx and Engels to distinguish between the ‘honorable’ but oppressed proletariat destined for revolutionary prowess, and the ‘dangerous classes’ that are anything but. There’s no doubt that this unfortunately narrow-minded and cynical conception – because it simultaneously tends to gravitate towards some version of ‘blaming the victim’ and reproduces conservative and offensive tropes about the ‘rabble’ and the ‘masses’ (paradoxically, all the while trying to dissociate these stereotypes from the proletariat that often were the main target/object of them) – was part of Marx’s viewpoint throughout his life, up to and including the later, more ‘mature, years. We will see that later on he still sometimes brought up this mostly negative and pejorative image of the lumpen.  However, on the other hand, Marx’s ambitious theorization of capitalist society – through his Critique of Political Economy – definitely constituted a certain evolution of his conception of classes, and the issue then is how the lumpen is accounted for in this context. Some readers will probably have noticed that Marx mentions the lumpenproletariat at the end of his analysis of relative surplus population, as part of the different pauperized groups that he takes a look in this part of his analysis. We will come back to this, in part because there seems to be yet another translation problem – or maybe Marx’s original wording is itself to blame.

First, let us review what I’ve called the ‘first angle’ [represented by the image of the ‘dangerous classes’]. As Villanova (2020) writes, throughout most of Marx’s (earlier [19]) attempts to define the lumpen [20],

[his] use of the term squarely puts the lumpen in the realm of social analysis, but not as a term that could lend itself to further material analysis. This is what leads commentators in the sociological literature, such as Bovenkerk and Cowling, to conclude that the very idea of the lumpen should be abandoned. It provides nothing of critical value and incidentally repeats reactionary political notions about the ‘underclass’ as ignorant, incapable to function in society, and often is used as a scapegoat in historical situations (in this case thwarting revolutionary uprisings). The qualities ascribed to the lumpen (their unaligned passion, propensity to mob rule, being outside of the dialectic, and tendency for corruption and laziness) are, at best, somewhat related but fail to paint a coherent picture as to why this class exists at all in history. The matter becomes especially confusing when ‘lumpen’ qualities are not relative to the lower class of the lumpen themselves but even the proletarian or financier class. In the early works, the term merely becomes a mish-mash dumping ground of easy excuses for Marx and Engels when they need to reason how the masses act in history.  Commenting on Marx’s use of the term lumpen, Michael Denning (2010) writes that he ‘was combating the established view that the entire working class was a dangerous and immoral element. He drew a line between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat to defend the moral character of the former’ (p. 87). By doing so, Marx saves the proletariat as the universal class of history while sidelining the lumpen as the refuse of history. In his early writings, Marx wrestles with the lumpen for the first time often coming up with incomplete ideas about how the underclass functions economically, historically, and politically.

[Villanova (2020), p. 8]

In the pre-Capital/CoPE writings, there are two concepts or uses of the lumpenproletariat. It is used as ‘a term for a transitory social formation in the historical transition to the capitalist mode of production. This is exclusively in the early writings when Marx and Engels are still working out their conception of the proletariat, before the Communist Manifesto:

With reference to the historical forms of property, Marx and Engels explain that under conditions of the pre-bourgeois mode of production, for example in ancient Rome, there was indeed a landless and propertyless labour force and thus a proletariat; but as long as the unfree labour of slaves remained the basis of production, it found no employment and had to be alimented by the state. The Roman proletarians lived “at the expense of society” (MEW 16, 359) and “never got beyond a lumpenproletariat” [“brachten es nie über ein Lumpenproletariat hinaus”] (MEW 3, 23). Its members were “parasites, not only of no use, but even of harm to society” (MEW 21, 497). With the establishment of wage labour as the decisive form of production, the lumpenproletariat lost its structural right to exist. During the phase of transition to the capitalist mode of production, however, the “lumpen, who have existed in every age and whose mass existence preceded the mass emergence of the profane proletariat after the fall of the Middle Ages” (MEW 3, 183) acquired a certain historical significance. For Marx and Engels, this “pre-proletariat” (MEW 39, 483) had an inclusive character, according to the usage of the time (Draper 1978, 456), and included not only the newly emerging class of wage-dependent workers but also the freed and impoverished rural working class, beggars, day labourers, vagabonds, thieves and prostitutes. Marx describes forcefully and appreciatively how the dispossessed and pauperised resist the private appropriation of the commons. The “elementary class” (MEW 1, 119) claimed rights of existence and life that could not in principle be privatised; as owners “of nothing but themselves” (ibid., 141), the statusless and excluded did not represent particular interests and therefore set the standard for a universal social order. Their “universal sufferings” are a prerequisite for the “complete recovery of man” (ibid., 390). [21]

But the most noteworthy (and/or infamous) definitions of the lumpenproletariat – as far as the ‘first angle’ is concerned – are located in the Communist Manifesto and Marx’s writings on mid-century France, namely The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. These are the passages that we’vre already mentioned earlier. In these writings, the fundamental conception of the lumpenproletariat is as a counter-revolutionary class fraction in the (defeated) European revolutions of 1848/49; this viewpoint will then be repeated in the context of the political organisation of the working class in the second half of the 19th century.

In the Communist Manifesto, we find Marx first complete reference to the lumpen in a finished text. Here he first mentions the potentially counter-revolutionary or reactionary character of that class: he writes that,

the lumpenproletariat [alt: the ‘dangerous class’, but ≠ original German], 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. [22]

Stallybrass (1990) and Villanova (2020) have pointed out that at this point, Marx denounces the lumpen “with a historical materialist twist”: the moral and political character of the proletariat distinguishes them from the lupenproletariat in terms of social and political conditions (rather than economic ones), insofar as Marx believes that the lumpen “are barred from any form of proletarian consciousness and therefore cannot enter into history or help the revolutionary struggle of the working people.” The ‘passively rotting mass’ description means that for Marx at this point (and in writings such as the German Ideology too..), the lumpenproletariat are – unlike the working class – ‘not caused by the world-historical conditions of industrial capitalism, but instead are a residual class that, at their worst, act against the interests of the proletariat and, at a minimum, are permanently outside the dialectic.” The lumpenproletarians’ lack of consistent forms of productive labor serves as a reason to be suspicious’: Marx seems to have thought – and this is for instance one of the fundamental criticisms by Bakunin – that this social stratum/category were ‘driven by self-interest and unable to have strong attachments to consistent valorized labor and strong convictions toward revolutionary action’. They were supposedly passive because they weren’t driven by the belief that collective action can provoke radical economic changes. [23]

In The Class Struggles in France, Marx describes it as constituting the majority of the Mobile Guards formed by the Provisional Government to repress the revolutionary movement, defining it by the fact that “in all big towns [it] forms a mass sharply differentiated from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds, living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu [‘men without hearth or home’], varying according to the degree of civilisation of the nation to which they belong, but never renouncing their lazzaroni character; at the youthful age at which the Provisional Government recruited them, thoroughly malleable, as capable of the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices as of the basest banditry and the foulest corruption.”

In the 18th Brumaire, the lumpen is defined by the types of people that can be associated with it – as a list of characters:

From the aristocracy there were the bankrupted roués of doubtful means and dubious provenance, from the bourgeoisie there were degenerate wastrels on the take, vagabonds, demobbed soldiers, discharged convicts, runaway galley slaves, swindlers and cheats, thugs, pickpockets, conjurers, card-sharps, pimps, brothel-keepers, porters, day-laborers, organ grinders, scrap dealers, knife grinders, tinkers and beggars, in short the whole amorphous, jumbled mass of flotsam and jetsam that the French term the bohemian.

[This is an alternate translation: the end of the passage is the most different part from the version quoted earlier]

He also famously ties the rise of Bonaparte to the support of various classes or class elements, among which the lumpenproletariat is included (alongside the peasantry). Villanova (2020) writes that,

[what] Marx recognizes in the rise of Bonaparte is that his rise to power allowed disparate groups, usually in conflict due to their class interests, to coalesce around a similar figure that would not actually have many of their interests at heart. As a result, the rise of such a figure implied to Marx that the lumpen qualities of spectacle and momentary selfinterest permeated the eventful times, giving way to styles of the lumpen (spectacle, debauchery, crime) being used by the elite as a means of gaining power. If, in Marx’s terms, the industrial bourgeoisie was the tragedy, the financier lumpenbourgeoisie (that did not even have to engage in class struggle, but mere political spectacle) is the farce.

Although Marx doesn’t use the term ‘financier lumpenbourgeoisie’, we can see in these quotes that the lumpen characterization is not attached solely to the lowest layers of society. This is also what makes this category so ambiguous and, frankly, quite unhelpful for any kind of rigorous ‘materialist’ analysis. The finance aristocracy is described as ‘the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society’ (he also mentions that this led to finance-centered manifestations of antisemitism):

The July monarchy was nothing but a joint-stock company for the exploitation of France’s national wealth, the dividends of which were divided among ministers, Chambers,3 240,000 voters and their adherents. Louis Philippe was the director of this company— Robert Macaire65 on the throne. Trade, industry, agriculture, shipping, the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie, were  bound to be continually endangered and prejudiced under this system. Cheap government, gouvernement à bon marché, was what it had inscribed in the July days on its banner. Since the finance aristocracy made the laws, was at the head of the administration of the state, had command of all the organised public authorities, dominated public opinion through the actual state of affairs and through the press, the same prostitution, the same shameless cheating, the same mania to get rich was repeated in every sphere, from the Court to the Café Borgne,3 to get rich not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others. Clashing every moment with the bourgeois laws themselves, an unbridled assertion of unhealthy and dissolute appetites manifested itself, particularly at the top of bourgeois society—lusts wherein wealth derived from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes crapuleux? where money, filth and blood commingle. The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society. And the non-ruling factions of the French bourgeoisie cried: Corruption! The people cried: À bas les grands voleurs! À bas les assassins! when in 1847, on the most prominent stages of bourgeois society, the same scenes were publicly enacted that regularly lead the lumpenproletariat to brothels, to workhouses and lunatic asylums, to the bar of justice, to the dungeon and to the scaffold. The industrial bourgeoisie saw its interests endangered, the petty bourgeoisie was filled with moral indignation, the imagination of the people was offended, Paris was flooded with pamphlets—La dynastie Rothschild, Les juifs rois de Vépoque, etc.—in which the rule of the finance aristocracy was denounced and stigmatised with greater or less wit.

[The Class Struggles in France]

Marx actually characterizes Bonparte as embodying or embracing this lumpen character:

This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the Lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognises in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. An old crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade where the grand costumes, words and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery. … Bonaparte, who precisely because he was a Bohemian, a princely lumpenproletarian, had the advantage over a rascally bourgeois in that he could conduct a dirty struggle, now saw, after the Assembly had itself guided him with its own hand across the slippery ground of the military banquets, the reviews, the Society of December 10, and, finally, the Code pénal, that the moment had come when he could pass from an apparent defensive to the offensive.

[18th Brumaire, emphasis added]

These writings on France, writes Villanova, while remarkable pieces of historical analysis emphasizing the roles played by capitalism and class, “put forward a negative view of the lumpen during this short period of history”, and “Marx’s critical skills to examine the lumpen fall prey to popular ideological conceits about the underclass and poor.” As we’ve seen, the concept of lumpen is simultaneously referring primarily to an ‘underclass’ situated at the lowest rungs of society, and also used quite ambiguously for characterising the moral and political qualities (‘their unaligned passion, propensity to mob rule, being outside of the dialectic, and tendency for corruption and laziness’ [24]) of different classes or class fractions across the whole social hierarchy. Apart from the fact that Marx (and Engels) are focused on portraying the ‘honorable’ working class as an uniquely-placed revolutionary agent in bourgeois society, there’s clearly some kind of productivist viewpoint at play here. Bescherer (2018) includes the relevant quotes in a summary of this conception:

The lumpenproletariat does not only consist of sub-proletarians who have become “dissolute” (MEW 7, 272), but is the “ejecta, waste, abhub of all classes”, whose primary aim is to “do themselves good at the expense of the working nation” (MEW 8, 161). This includes the financial aristocracy, which “in its mode of acquisition and in its pleasures” represents the “rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society” (MEW 7, 15), but also the state apparatus that Bonaparte maintains for himself and his kind. The ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ factions of the lumpenproletariat share “the same addiction to enriching themselves, not through production, but through the escamotage of already existing foreign wealth”; together they form a corrupt, feral and criminal milieu “where money, dirt and blood flow together” (ibid., 14-15).

In 1850, Marx wrote a review of Adolphe Cenu’s Les Conspirateurs, a book about the ‘world of professional revolutionaries and police informers.’ In this article, as J.-C. Bourdin (2013) writes,

Marx identifies two types of “bohemians” among the professional conspirators: the democratic bohemians of proletarian origin and bohemians of bourgeois origin, made up of flaneurs who prop up bars and do business with wine merchants. The first group includes workers who have given up work and turned to debauchery, fugitives from justice, and people who have come from the lumpenproletariat and who still display its dissolute ways. It produces most of the conspirators. Marx describes their scorn for the theoretical education of workers, making them hostile to the more or less cultured intellectuals representing the workers’ movement. The theme of venality is also present, because they easily go over to serving the police. They are above all serious and dangerous opponents of the secret proletarian associations, who want revolution (not the insurrection constantly presented as imminent). Their class origins remain ill defined, combining lumpenproletariat and proletarian elements. What sets them apart is their political ethic, and this is what separates lumpenproletariat and communists. (…) Here, Marx describes the active lumpenproletariat, but in conspirator form, meaning that this form reflects the place of the lumpenproletariat in society. The ambiguous nature of the term (whether it refers to a social stratum or moral characteristics) means it can be applied to the higher social strata and to groups very distant from the proletariat.

The view of a politically dangerous lumpenproletariat is generalised in this period (1850s) in Marx and Engels, who, in the aftermath of the failed revolutions, “observe the same political logic of counter-revolution elsewhere in Europe, for example in Naples (MEW 5, 20), Vienna (MEW 5, 457) and Germany (MEW 7, 126-31): everywhere the ‘armed and bought lumpen proletariat is marching against the working and thinking proletariat’ (MEW 5, 457).” [25] For instance, in the case of Vienna, Marx wrote in 1848 that,

The second act of the drama has just been performed in Vienna, its first act having been staged in Paris under the title of The June Days. In Paris the Guarde mobile, in Vienna “Croats” — in both cases lazzaroni, lumpenproletariat hired and armed — were used against the working and thinking proletarians. We shall soon see the third act performed in Berlin.

[“The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna”, Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 136, November 1848]

To further interpret the nature and logic of this intensely negative view of the lumpen class(es), we now turn to Bourdin’s brilliant article on this question [26], before concluding this section with an outline of the ‘second angle.’ His article is worth reading fully in my opinion, but here’s his key argument, in his own words:

Why is a section of the urban plebeians considered a lumpenproletariat, with no hopes of ever joining the proletariat, when other elements have this possibility? One might hypothesize that it is not so much their place right at the bottom of the social ladder, their pauperism, which explains this, but the fact that they lack the means to become organized and fight with an awareness of the ends and means. Vagabonds and beggars acquire an ethos preventing any transformation and condemning them to a parasitic or even criminal life. We wish to argue that the difference lies in a moral or spiritual element linked to this state, allowing Marx to indirectly sketch the lineaments of a theory of revolutionary communist subjectivity. (…) “Lumpenproletariat” must be taken more as a predicate designating a set of moral characteristics seen in various social categories (the mobile guards in this case) than as a subject. This ambiguity can be reduced by saying that the lumpenproletariat, as a moral disposition, encapsulates a whole range of individuals or groups outside of capitalist working and production relationships. In social terms, the lumpenproletariat refers to both behaviors and moral attitudes seen throughout society, right up to the highest strata. (…) Marx’s and Engels’s condemnation of the lumpenproletariat is political. This is because of its role as a support for the bourgeoisie and its harmful impacts on struggles (undoubtedly corrupted by conspiracies), but above all because its ethos formally and concretely goes against the ethical condition required for revolution (not revolution as an act of insurrection or even a process of transformation-suppression of the former mode of activity, of domination of all classes, and of classes themselves). In fact, some of Marx’s statements break with the normal poetic paradigm of the revolution, which could be described as such: a subject (the dominant social relationships and type of activity), a goal (their suppression), a final form (free association), and an agent (the proletariat). Communism is not a goal and the revolution is not the means of reaching it, as stated by the frequently quoted phrase: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” However, “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” already faces the aporias of all circularity, as encountered by Rousseau in the self-institution of the people, a problem which he resolved with the miraculous intervention of the legislator. In fact, for the real movement of abolition to be communist, the masses involved must already be communist, and the revolution must be communist in itself. In other words, the masses must be what the revolution is meant to have made them. The aporia of this circularity can be resolved by considering that “in revolutionary activity, self-change and changing [the] conditions coincide.” Yet the lumpenproletariat cannot change or become involved in changing the current situation. If the proletariat can only “sweep away the decay of the old system sticking to it and become able to rebuild society on new foundations” through revolution, it is clear that the lumpenproletariat, who lack the necessary energy for revolution, will not sweep away the decay of the old system, because they are this decay. From this, Marx comes to the conclusion (a painful one for the noble) that the lumpenproletariat must be left to its fate, that it is pointless trying to reform it, and that the most important thing is to avoid becoming contaminated. (…)

There’s certainly a lot of things that must be rejected and criticized heavily in Marx (and Engels’) conception, portrayal and discourse of and about the lumpenproletariat and their whole characterization of the ‘lumpen’ across society, but hopefully this overview is satisfactory and sufficient.

As I’ve insisted a few times, there’s not just this one ‘angle’ in Marx’s viewpoint, however. The ‘second angle’ has been mentioned by various authors, but Draper (1972) and Villanova (2020) have insisted about it the most. I want therefore to follow them in arguing that although Marx did apparently hang on to some degree [27]to this pejorative view of (part of) the lumpenproletariat in a narrow sense later on in his life, this isn’t the end of the story. Villanova states this most forcefully and enthusiastically:

In Capital, Marx ditches the ideological and historical implications of the lumpen and tries to understand why they exist specifically in terms of capitalist production. While not explicitly using the term lumpen, he comes to understand how capitalist dynamics have led people to lives of crime, indolence, and/or unemployment. According to Draper (1972), the lumpen are finally placed, not as willing participants in capitalism but as a group that can be exploited in ‘objectively economic’ terms (p. 2302). This marks a separation between his earlier and later works as Marx investigates the economic world of capitalist society and critiques how it can cause people to become lumpen. [28]

Similarly, Bescherer (2018) mentions how one of Marx’s uses of the concept of the lumpenproletariat is as ‘a group of “superfluous people” permanently excluded from the production”:

After the defeat of the revolution, Marx elaborates a socialist perspective in the writings on the critique of political economy, which has the contradiction of the mode of production itself as its theme. The political organisation of the working class or its corruption by the lumpenproletariat remain relevant themes (for example, in the dispute with the anarchists within the International Workers’ Association), but take a back seat to the analysis of the capitalist mode of production. The problem of the lumpenproletariat appears here in the context of examining the social consequences both of the disintegration of pre-capitalist social structures during the original accumulation and of exclusions from the capitalist production process.

He continues:

Countervailing power potentials corresponding to the economic analysis are located in the capitalist labour process, which, through cooperative demands, gives the industrial proletariat a “mass force” (MEW 23, 345) and turns workers’ coalitions into “rallying points of resistance against the violent acts of capital” (MEW 16, 152) [29]. The lumpenproletariat, on the other hand, through its exclusion from wage labour, was not an actor relevant to the class struggle in this respect either. A movement in the history of labour is also evident with regard to economic analyses. It moves from the conviction that the lumpenproletariat is a remnant of pre-bourgeois modes of production to the placement of this class in the system of capitalist utilisation of labour power. From the point of view of the early Marx, the “scoundrel, the crook, the beggar, the unemployed, the starving, the wretched and criminal labourer” do not exist for political economy; they are all “ghosts outside its realm” (MEW 40, 523-24). In Capital, he then arrives at a sharper differentiation in the context of the forms of existence of “relative overpopulation”. In contrast to the “sphere of pauperism”, which includes “those capable of work” who are temporarily unemployed, “orphans and pauper children” as well as those “incapable of work” due to age or injury, the “actual lumpenproletariat”, consisting of “vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes”, does not represent a “condition of existence of capitalist production and development of wealth” and is still below the reserve that can be mobilised for the labour market (MEW 23, 673). It cannot be “rapidly and en masse rolled into the active workers’ army” (ibid.), but is declassified as a result of persistent unemployment. (…) the focus here is not on the defence of the lumpenproletariat as a counter-revolutionary evil, but on its suffering and unlawful punishment (Hayes 1988, 458).

Villanova’s interpretation is essentially that Marx’s theory of relative surplus population revises the earlier notion of the lumpen, by integrating it into his critical account of capitalist production:

This group of unemployed people (be they composed of migrants, precarious workers, or criminals) is used by the capitalist as an excuse to both increase production in a worker’s job so that the worker can believe that he will be more secure in his position and keep wages low because the capitalist can, at any moment, hire someone in the reserve army of labor (Marx 2000: 518−519). In this assessment, non-productivity becomes a sort of unproductive labor or action that can be created and then used against the proletariat. Draper (1972) argues that, in Capital, the lumpen become solely what is perceived to be the ‘non-working elements of the producing classes’, which is to say the group of people who can have the potential to produce but are made not to produce (p. 2301). Marx still uses the term ‘dangerous’ to describe the non-producing underclass, but they are no longer depicted as dangerous to society at large. The lumpen are now made to be dangerous; they exist as a moral fright to the proletariat (they are coming for your place in society!) and as an ideological excuse to keep the proletariat in line (they are coming for your productivity, better work harder!). As a result, the lumpen exist as that ‘mass of human material always ready for exploitation’ both in terms of their possibility for unproductive labor and idleness (Marx 2000: 517). Marx’s shift in understanding the lumpen is evidenced by his conclusion that the lumpen’s condition is not only made by the capitalist class structure but that their existence in the class structure is a form of exploitation. The exploitation derives from work being made non-productive or by undergoing risky labor in order to stay alive. In Capital, the prostitutes, petty criminals, and the ‘demoralized and ragged’ called upon to work in abhorrent conditions are not a threat to workers or their revolutionary plans; instead, their dangerous work is made necessary by capitalism. Their labor is not viewed as inherently  productive because it does not appear to create value beyond the immediate point of labor, but rather the lumpen take up forms of unproductive labor as a means of survival. Many cases of lumpen unproductive labor can be more exploited than forms of labor that are considered productive for capital. This is how even unproductive forms of labor can still be exploited, which can be expressed in physical or emotional terms, even if they are not directly exploited by a capitalist taking surplus-value (Meiksins 1981: 40). The precarious nature of the lumpen’s labor, both in terms of its consistency and conditions, is still judged against the relative nature of what is currently considered productive for capital, thereby leaving the lumpen in exploitive conditions without ever having to engage in productive labor. Marx recognizes that the lumpen are not, by default, a non-productive class. They do forms of labor (sex work, illegal jobs, etc.), but they are depicted by the very upper classes that need their services as fraying the moral fibers of capitalist society. Even a class which produces nothing material, say ‘paupers’, can be explained in this way because ‘along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth’ (Marx 2000: 519). Marx concludes that as the lumpen are barred from official forms of labor by capitalism, both their misery grows and the capitalist’s happiness increases (…) No longer a footnote, the role of the precarious lumpen is now both integral to understanding the hoarding of wealth by the bourgeoisie and, as seen above, integral in pitting the lower classes against each other for the bourgeoisie to remain in power and for exploitative production to continue.

Now, I think this is jumping to conclusions rather quickly, even though I agree with the general observation. Villanova is more or less equating the lumpen with the relative surplus population,  while Draper and others think that Marx still strictly excludes it from the ‘sphere of pauperism’ which constitutes the ‘lowest sediment of the relative surplus population.’ Part of what’s going on here, as far as I can tell, is that there seems to be a confusion based on the wording and/or translation of this statement from Chapter 25 in Capital 1:

Finally, the lowest sediment of the relative surplus population dwells in the sphere of pauperism. Exclusive of/Apart from vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in short the actual lumpenproletariat, this social stratum consists of three categories. First, those able to work. One need only glance superficially at the statistics of English pauperism to find that the quantity of paupers increases with every crisis of trade, and diminishes with every revival. Second, orphans and pauper children. These are candidates for the industrial reserve army, and in times of great prosperity, such as the year 1860, for instance, they are enrolled in the army of active workers both speedily and in large numbers. Third, the demoralized, the ragged [could be translated as ‘the lumpen’!], and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, an incapacity which results from the division of labour ; people who have lived beyond the worker’s average life-span ; and the victims of industry, whose number increases with the growth of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical works, etc., the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, etc. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity is implied by their necessity ; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It forms part of the faux frais [incidental operating expenses] of capitalist production : but capital usually knows how to transfer these from its own shoulders to those of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie.

As you can see, the way that “Abgesehen von Vagabunden, …” is translated can influence the reader’s interpretation, i.e. either exclude (“Exclusive of”) or include (“Apart from”) the lumpenproletariat (‘vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in short the actual lumpenproletariat’) from/in the sphere of pauperism, and therefore from/in the relative surplus population. And this is indeed what happens: for example John Bellamy Foster describes the lumpenrpoletariat as a part of this lower layer of pauperized populations, whereas Hal Draper – using the “Exclusive of” translation – maintains that the lumpenproletariat is outside of the relative surplus population. Having checked the original German “Abgesehen von”, it seems pretty clear to me that “Apart from” is a better translation, but this is just my own guess…

I think Villanova’s perspective gets something right, though: the categories, groups and conditions mentioned by Marx in his theory of relative surplus population + immiseration clearly overlap with various elements of the lumpen social stratum. Moreover, by explaining the structural necessity of (long term) immiseration of the working class, Marx is directly dealing with the specifically capitalist conditions of the lumpen underclass.

[I might revisit this last part (‘second angle’) to add stuff, modify or improve/expand it]

---

Notes/references

1.  Aaron Benanav & John Clegg, “Crisis and Immiseration: Critical Theory Today,” in B. Best. W. Bonefeld, & C. O’Kane (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, 2018, p. 1632-1634.
2. Two main resources have been useful for this part of Marx’s thought:

• Aaron Benanav & John Clegg, “Crisis and Immiseration: Critical Theory Today,” in B. Best. W. Bonefeld, & C. O’Kane (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, 2018, p. 1629-1648. URL: https://the42dialectichome.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/41607-benanavandclegg-crisisandimmiseration-sagehandbook.pdf
• Aaron Benanav and Endnotes, “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital,” in Endnotes, Endnotes 2: Misery and the Value Form, London & Oakland: Endnotes, 2010. URL: https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/2/en/endnotes-misery-and-debt

3. Benanav and Endnotes, Misery and Debt.
4.  Ibid. For Marx’s empirical analysis, see section 5 of this chapter.
5.  Mainly, some people seem to have excluded pauperism from relative surplus population, as well as the lumpenproletariat, though I may have misunderstood… This seems wrong to me, but as often Marx isn’t as clear as we would like. Alternatively, some authors may have understandably chosen to amend Marx’s categories to a lesser or greater extent, in order to make his argument more useful for theory and analysis today. I welcome any comment or feedback as to how Marx’s text should be understood on this point (but the point here is not what we might want to make of it for the present, which is another discussion!)
6.  “Not taking into account the great periodically recurring forms that the changing phases of the industrial cycle impress on it, now an acute form during the crisis, then again a chronic form during dull times — it has always three forms, the floating, the latent, the stagnant.”
7.  Benanav & Clegg (2018)
8.  I wonder if this concept could be used for instance in the case of Western European countries, whose industries and agriculture relied to a large extent on seasonal migrant labour from Southern Europe (and elsewhere) during the postwar era.
9.  “Der tiefste Niederschlag der relativen Übervölkerung endlich behaust die Sphäre des Pauperismus. Abgesehen von Vagabunden, Verbrechern, Prostituierten, kurz dem eigentlichen Lumpenproletariat, besteht dies Gesellschaftsschichte aus drei Kategorien.” Link
10.  I read somewhere (in one edition of Capital I believe)  that this simply means “incidental expenses”. The Wiki page defines it like this: “It refers to “incidental operating expenses” incurred in the productive investment of capital, which do not themselves add new value to output. In Marx’s social accounting, the faux frais are a component of constant capital, or alternately are funded by a fraction of the new surplus value.”
11.  Another passage that seems to mention this layer: “The decrease of relatively necessary labour appears as increase of the relatively superfluous labouring capacities – i.e. as the positing of surplus population. If the latter is supported, then this comes not out of the labour fund but out of the revenue of all classes. It takes place not through the labour of the labour capacity itself – no longer through its normal reproduction as worker, but rather the worker is maintained as a living being through the mercy of others ; hence becomes a tramp and a pauper ; because he no longer sustains himself through his necessary labour ; hence, through the exchange with a part of capital ; he has fallen out of the conditions of the relation of apparent exchange and apparent independence ; secondly : society in its fractional parts undertakes for Mr Capitalist the business of keeping his virtual instrument of labour – its wear and tear – intact as reserve for later use. He shifts a part of the reproduction costs of the working class off his own shoulders and thus pauperizes a part of the remaining population for his own profit. At the same time, capital has the tendency both to posit and equally to suspend this pauperism, because it constantly reproduces itself as surplus capital. It acts in opposite directions, so that sometimes one, sometimes the other is predominant.”[Grundrisse, “Necessary labour. Surplus labour. Surplus population. Surplus capital”]
12.  Cowling (2008), p. 151.
13.  Cowling (2008), p. 149.
14.  Cowling (2008), p. 150.
15.   Cowling (2008), p. 153.
16.   Hayes (1988), p. 459
17.  Cowling (2008), p. 149. For those who may not know, Charles Murray is one of the world’s most harmful authors in recent decades, having more than anyone else contributed to a renewed rise in interest in what is essentially modern-day “race science”: fabricating racist “science” about supposed genetical differnces between racial groups (remember how these ‘groups’ don’t mean shit because they’re often more diverse internally than between one another?) and proposing or justifying harmful policies. See the Ratoinal Wiki (and links provided therein) for The Bell Curve if you need an introduction.
18.  Marcel van der Linden (2020), p. 79.
19.  I put this in parentheses because most of Marx’s ‘substantive’ comments on the lumpenproletariat do appear in the ‘earlier’ (=/= ‘early’) writings, up to and including the first half of the 1850s. So while from a chronological standpoint these could be strictly called Marx’s ‘first attempts’ to define this class, as Villanova does (because he cites four definitions, three of which are ‘early’ i.e. before Capital), I think it is fair to acknowledge that this conception is the main one that one will find in Marx’s works as a whole.
20.  Using ‘lumpen’ instead of ‘lumpenproletariat’ is a way to take into account that Marx’s characterizations, while mostly referring to the latter, actually apply sometimes to elements from other classes, including some parts of the uppery layers of society.
21.  Bescherer (2018). Please note that all the quotes from this article (originally in German) were translated (by using deepl.com and then checking the original German versions – both Bescherer’s and Marx and Engels’ Werke).
22.  Notice also how there’s a similar characterization of this class as coming from pre-capitalist remnants, as the first conception just mentioned.
23.  Villanova (2020), p. 4-5. The ‘dialectic’ of world-historical class struggle, as famously portrayed in the same Communist Manifesto.
24.  Villanova (2020), p. 8.
25.  Bescherer (2018).
26.  Bourdin, Jean-Claude, « Marx et le lumpenprolétariat », Actuel Marx, 54(29), 2013, p. 39-55. For the English version: Cairn int link.
27.  As he didn’t mention the lumpenproletariat very often in the 1860s and onwards – except when insulting some anarchists or others, which says a lot about the primary function of this concept – we ultimately won’t be able to work out to what extent the very negative view of the 18 Brumaire was maintained. But there’s still for example a bad sentiment of this kind which can be found in the drafts (precisely, the second draft) of his writings on the Paris Commune: narrating the repression, he says that,

The state of siege was at once proclaimed, new arrests, new proscriptions, a new reign of terror set in. But the “lower orders” manage these things otherwise. The runaways of the 22nd March, being neither followed nor harassed on their flight, nor afterwards called to account by the judge of instruction (juge d’instruction), were able two days later to muster again an “armed” demonstration under Admiral Saisset. Even after the grotesque failure of this their second rising they were, like all other Paris citizens, allowed to try their hands at the ballot-box for the election of the Commune. When succumbing in this bloodless battle, they at last purged Paris from their presence by an unmolested exodus dragging along with them the cocottes, the lazzaroni and the other dangerous class[es] of the capital.

28.  Villanova (2020), p. 8.
29.  Note exactly sure about the translation here, so here’s the original version: “Der ökonomischen Analyse entsprechende Gegenmachtpotenziale werden im kapitalistischen Arbeitsprozess verortet, der dem Industrieproletariat durch kooperative Anforderungen eine »Massenkraft« (MEW 23, 345) zuwachsen lässt und aus Arbeiterkoalitionen »Sammelpunkte des Widerstands gegen die Gewalttaten des Kapitals« (MEW 16, 152) mache.”