The revenge of the lumpenproletariat
Gangsters, grifters, and cranks are leading the revolutions of today.
Niger’s new military leaders are kicking out U.S. troops. (I wrote about the affair for Reason Magazine.) It’s a remarkable move for a government that doesn’t seem to have an ideology. Last year, a clique of Nigerien army officers took power in a coup of opportunity. They’ve offered a vaguely populist, nationalist political platform — and a radical shift in Niger’s alignment, from a U.S.-French client state to a Russian ally.
A similar process may be underway in Haiti. The ex-cop Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier is leading a rebellion known as the Revolutionary Forces of the G9 Family and Allies, made of former street gangs. One of Barbecue’s powerful allies is a TikTok rapper known as Izo Vilaj de Dye. The Revolutionary Forces now control most of Haiti’s capital and have forced Prime Minister Ariel Henry to step down. Like the Nigerien military government, Barbecue’s political platform is vaguely populist and nationalistic.
We seem to be entering an age of revolutions by and for a class that Karl Marx never thought could lead, the lumpenproletariat. Marx used the term lumpenproletariat to describe people on the margins of society, whether downwardly-mobile elites or the desperate underbelly of the working class:
Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.
Today, we might call them “gangsters, grifters, and cranks.” Marx did not think they would amount to anything politically, because “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.”
In other words, social renegades would go any way the wind blows. More often that not, it would make them useful mercenaries for ruling elites. A good example is The Politics of Heroin by Alfred McCoy, which describes many cases of gangs becoming intelligence proxies during the Cold War.
Ironically, one of the first revolutions to disprove Marx’s theory was Venezuela’s socialist movement. The government of Nicolás Maduro is propped up paramilitaries known as colectivos, drawn from the former criminal underworld. These strongmen were not just “swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution.” They are a large pillar of Maduro’s power in their own right.
The colectivos are beholden, at least in theory, to a government with a real 20th century political ideology. Newer lumpen movements don’t offer anything coherent, just vague promises of change and cults of personality. (Of course, the same could be said for modern middle class movements, too.) Still, contrary to Marx, the lumpenproletariat is a force driving rather than being pulled by events.
Lumpen revolution is not just a Global South phenomenon. The most obvious American example is QAnon and its associated grifts. The pillow salesmen turned coup plotters (and coup plotters turned pillow salesmen) in Donald Trump’s orbit fit the description of “ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie” perfectly.
Other variants on the American lumpen revolutionary have murkier politics. Earlier this week, I wrote about the self-described “rat king” who terrorized St. Louis into adopting a drone ban. His ambitions weren’t obviously attached to partisan politics; he just seems to want money and/or notoriety.
Last year, the infamous Black Hammer cult fell apart after “commander-in-chief” Gazi Kodzo was charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, and ties to Russian intelligence. Kodzo’s politics had bounced between Maoism, vulgar antisemitism, and pro-Trump extremism. The Russian connection was a surprise; the creepy abuse not so much.
Moscow’s role as the godfather of lumpen revolutionaries makes sense in the grand scheme of things. China is mostly (although not entirely) “above” dealing with fringe dissidents, while Iran is too small, isolated, and ideologically rigid to be an appealing patron outside its immediate neighborhood. Russia has just the right combination of cynicism, desperation, and global power-projection capabilities to back lumpen movements.
The old engine of history were the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Today, the political center of gravity is shifting to the extremely online middle class on one hand, and dedicated social outcasts on the other. Throw in great power competition — a multipolar struggle that is a lot more complicated than the Cold War — and we’re in for a wild ride.
Only the Haitian example can readily be classified as lumpen (re: Black Hammer, this is just classic trot behavior) and violent state capture is not revolutionary in any Marxist/Hegelian sense of the word. These might be forces driving events but they're not driving history, rather they're forces reacting to and capitalizing on drastic structure changes that have occurred in global political economy over the last half century.
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/06/15/the-twin-insurgency/
You write this entire piece and don’t even mention Antifa?