According to historian Robert Bussard,
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels viewed the
lumpenproletariat as: They used the term exclusively with negative connotations, although their works lack a "consistent and clearly reasoned definition" of the term. They used the term in various publications "for diverse purposes and on several levels of meaning."
Hal Draper suggested that the concept has its roots in
Young Hegelian thought and possibly in
G.W.F. Hegel's
Elements of the Philosophy of Right. While Bussard believes that the idea was "at one and the same time, a hybrid of new social attitudes which crystallised in France, England and Germany, as well as an extension of more traditional, pre-nineteenth-century views of the lower classes." Bussard noted that they often used the term as a "kind of sociological profanity" and contrasted between it and "working and thinking"
proletariat. According to
Michael Denning, by identifying the
lumpenproletariat, "Marx 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." And the above did not limit expressions to where the concept originated. A graduate student argued
lumpenproletariat was one of the end products of
The 1789-1848 Struggle To Define The Concept Proletariat. This student found the term proletariat was invented during the 509BCE-27BCE Republic of Rome by
Cicero (106BCE-43BCE) as a concept reflecting a specific point in time during the earlier 753BCE-509BCE Kingdom of Rome such that the synchronic word
proletariat essentially meant the same idea as the ahistorical synchronic words
working class. In later 18th century France, this ahistorical synchronic view of the word was accepted and enhanced in the work of
Montesquieu (1689-1755) in his 1748:(p527) work
The Spirit Of Laws and also by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) in the 1762:(p95) work
The Social Contract. This ahistorical point in time view of
proletariat held until the 1789-1799 French Revolution when Journalist
Gracchus Babeuf (1760-1797) used the term in one of his 1794 pamphlets, as a historical diachronic continuity, implying that the
in struggle with a class above proletariat no longer meant the same idea as ahistorical
working class and so the fight over a
diachrony and synchrony usage of
proletariat began. Endorsing the Cicero-Montesquieu-Rousseau view of
proletariat in 1820, was the early Sociologist
Auguste Comte (1798-1857), but finally leaving this Comte view in 1824 was his previously agreeable boss,
Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), who broke down and finally agreed that Babeuf was correct, only two years before he died as personal frustration with his inability to 'sell' his harmonious view of France to influential natives ultimately seized him. Engels in 1842 and Marx in 1844 entered this debate and sided with Babeuf and Saint-Simon in saying that
proletariat was a historical concept reflecting people who had a significant optimistic role to play in humanity's future. But the duos optimistic view of
proletariat did not hold as they soon expressed frustrations, within four separate documents written in 1844-1845, with their
proletariat, and so they realized that a complimentary diachronic term needed to be invented to act as a form of pessimistic 'theoretical space filler' which played the role of a polar opposite to their optimistic view of
proletariat. So between late night glasses of wine in Brussels, Belgium, the multi-lingual duo, who both knew over 10 languages, invented the Germanic languages word
lumpenproletariat which primarily meant to them, "mass" or "size" since everywhere they looked about them, they saw
lumpenproletariat easily outnumbering the
proletariat. Yet
lumpenproletariat as describing a "mass" was not new in the 19th century; in the 17th century, England's first
Poet Laureate John Dryden (1631-1700) wrote this phrase within a 1679 poem "How dull and how insensible a beast is man, ... philosophers and poets vainly strove, in every age the lumpish mass to move". The duo's new word's built-in ambiguity, plus their added lack of a full definition of the term among any one of the 88 term uses during 1845-1890, ensured that any pursuing censor faced a challenge in decoding their new literary invention. They used it to describe the
plebs (plebeians) of
ancient Rome who were midway between freemen and
slaves, never becoming more than a "proletarian rabble [
lumpenproletariat]" and
Max Stirner's "self-professed radical constituency of the Lumpen or ragamuffin." The first work written solely by Marx to mention the term was an article published in the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung in November 1848 which described the
lumpenproletariat as a "tool of reaction" in the
revolutions of 1848 and as a "significant
counterrevolutionary force throughout Europe." Engels wrote in
The Peasant War in Germany (1850) that the
lumpenproletariat is a "phenomenon that occurs in a more or less developed form in all the so far known phases of society". In
The Communist Manifesto (1848), where
lumpenproletariat is commonly translated in English editions as the "dangerous class" and the "social scum", Marx and Engels wrote:
In writings on France In an article analyzing the
June 1848 events in Paris, Engels wrote of the
gardes mobiles, a militia which suppressed the workers' uprising: "The organized
lumpenproletariat had given battle to the working proletariat. It had, as was to be expected, put itself at the disposal of the bourgeoisie." Thoburn notes that Marx makes his most detailed descriptions of the
lumpenproletariat in his writings of the revolutionary turmoil in France between 1848 and 1852:
The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850 (1850) and
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852). In
The Class Struggles he describes the finance aristocracy of
Louis Philippe I and his
July Monarchy (1830–1848) as lumpenproletarian: "In the way it acquires wealth and enjoys it the financial aristocracy is nothing but the lumpenproletariat reborn at the pinnacle of bourgeois society." He distinguished the finance aristocracy from the industrial bourgeoisie as the former became rich "not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others." He further suggests that the
lumpenproletariat is a component of the proletariat, unlike his earlier works. He claimed that the
gardes mobiles were set up "to set one segment of the proletariat against the other": In
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Marx identified
Napoleon III as the "Chief of the
Lumpenproletariat", a claim he made repeatedly. He argued that he bought his supporters with "gifts and loans, these were the limits of the financial science of the
lumpenproletariat, both the low and the exalted. Never had a President speculated more stupidly on the stupidity of the masses." For Marx, the
lumpenproletariat represented those who were "corrupt, reactionary and without a clear sense of class-consciousness." He wrote in
The Eighteenth Brumaire:
Capital In
Capital (1867), Marx claimed that legislation turned soldiers and peasants "en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances." By this, he deviated from his focus on the vicious and degenerate behavior of the
lumpenproletariat in his writings on France. Instead, he described the
lumpenproletariat as part of what he called an "
industrial reserve army", which capitalists used as required. Thus, "vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes" and other
lumpenproletariat formed an element within the "surplus population" in a capitalist system. ==Left-wing views==