Seriously, I am unable to really find much about them outside of short lines from Marx and Mao about their potential destructiveness among other things, but I still do not really know what that “class” is. It seems to refer to the poorest members of society that includes unemployed, criminals, homeless, etc… And are they really so incapable of being utilized in revolutionary activities as they are portrayed?

Edit: By “destructiveness”, I refer to how Marx and Mao portrayed them as people that are not considered reliable allies in any proletarian revolution (though even this understanding might be wrong because I think the explanations about them are vague).

  • ClathrateG [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    11·
    27 days ago

    idk if they were the majority of party members or not

    but that’s besides the point, the Panther’s thesis(and later praxis in getting members of the lumpenproletariat to become genuine revolutionaries) is that the lumpenproletariat as a class have revolutionary potential, something many earlier Marxists dismissed

    • LeninZedong@lemmygrad.mlOP
      5·
      27 days ago

      Could you list examples of them doing that for the lumpenproletariat? Despite living in America, I never studied the Black Panther Party that much.

      • ClathrateG [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        12·
        27 days ago

        Of what, former criminals/lumpens becoming socalists/BPP members? Eldridge Cleaver & George Jackson were two prominent members who where involved with a convicted of major crimes before they became members

        Even founder Huey P. Newton had string of juvenile offences and no formal employment before he founded the party(although his college education puts him outside of the lumpen class by some definitions)

        You could go through the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Black_Panther_Party and see how many came from a lumpen background before joining(through I wouldn’t use this as a measure of if the party contained a majority of lumpen or of proles(and imo when dealing with racialised underclass that distinction is harder to make as systemic racism makes securing formal work much harder and pushes people into the informal/illegal economies) as only members prominent enough to have wiki page are listed)

        In general if you want to gain a better perspective on how the BPP and others view the lumpenproletariat as a potentially revolutionary vanguard then Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth is a essential read(and is explicitly quoted as an inspiration by many BPP theorists) https://dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/the-wretched-of-the-earth/The Wretched Of The Earth.pdf