Utopiaand the Lumpenproletariat: Marx's Reasoning inThe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Abstract

Thomas More described how Utopia held no place for criminals, beggars and vagabonds. Marx called these people “the lumpenproletariat,” and, like More, he wished to exclude them from his vision of a communist society. However, the lumpenproletariat stood outside productive society, as such, they also stood outside the dialectic. For them to be excluded from Utopia in a theory of scientific socialism they needed to be reincorporated into the dialectic. This Marx did in his analysis of Louis Napoleon's coup. Marx was simultaneously concerned to distinguish the proletariat from the violent reactionary crowds of 1848 to 1851. He did so by labeling such crowds lumpenproletarian. By focusing on lumpenproletarians as a degenerate mob, Marx precluded consideration of how they might have been victims of capitalist society. He also foreshadowed the tactics of those radical politicians who appealed to the crowd by a similar denigration of a degenerate outgroup.

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