[sudo-discuss] Proletariat & lumpenproletariat: 2: Where the power is and isn't.

2) Where the power is, and where it isn't. Now we come to the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat. For this, credit also goes to a good friend of mine who I won't name here, but who's welcome to name him/herself if s/he so chooses: s/he got me thinking down this trail a few months ago. The proletariat is the working class: basically defined as people who have full-time jobs or at least jobs that provide sufficient income for the core necessities (shelter, clothing, food, transportation, sanitation, communication), but who have little or no ownership stake. This includes people who are in business for themselves, but earning a working class income: they own their employment, but their economic wellbeing is at the same level as that of a wage-worker. The lumpenproletariat is the level below that: basically defined as people whose employment is marginal at best, and whose access to the basic necessities is frequently interrupted in some way. The unemployed, homeless, couch-surfers (another form of homelessness), people who live at the margins of the law in order to survive, and people who earn their livings on criminal activity. This also includes wage-workers whose wage income is not sufficient to provide their basic necessities from month to month: they have jobs, but their economic wellbeing is at the same level as that of someone who's marginally employed at best. Decades ago, the Bay Area left/radical community made the deadly strategic error of embracing the (essentially Maoist) analysis that the lumpenproletariat is the revolutionary class. This error continues to this day, in the ideology of Black Block tactics, which are founded on the idea that expressing rage and provoking police over-reaction will somehow spark The Revolution. The very same tactic in more obviously violent form pops up in the ideology of the extreme right: such as the Hutaree, a group that was busted by the FBI for planning to shoot a bunch of cops and then set off bombs at their funerals, in the attempt to provoke martial law and thereby set off a "revolution" from the extreme right. But here's the nexus of the problem: To the oligarchy, the lumpenproletariat is disposable: their roles in production and consumption are so minimal that they can be totally disregarded. They have NO power. N-O power. As individuals or as any kind of collectivity or class. When a social movement identifies with the lumpenproletariat and/or attempts to organize the lumpenproletariat, the movement effectively short-circuits its efforts into something that is inherently doomed to failure. They may as well be trying to organize the squirrels on the Cal Berkeley campus to strike for better teaching-assistant salaries. How seriously do you think the UC Regents would take the threat of a squirrel strike? The proletariat is where the power is: the power to produce and consume at the level that drives the engine of oligarchy, is also the power to refuse consent in a meaningful way. The power of the proletariat takes two forms: One, the power to remove themselves from the oligarch's engines of production: by going on strike (which translates to the power of collective bargaining), by going into business for themselves, and by developing alternatives to conventional capitalism such as cooperatives and other forms of production that subordinate capital to labor. Two, the power to remove themselves from the oligarch's consumption matrix: by boycotts (consumer strikes), by anti-materialist or "simple living" principles that reduce consumption levels (the equivalent of consumer general strikes), by shifting their consumption to alternative institutions such as coops, credit unions, and small local producers (e.g. buying veggies at the farmers' market rather than Safeway), and very importantly for _us_ as hackers/makers/etc., the power to build for our own use. This is real power. It's the power that makes the oligarchs quake in their boots and have nightmares. And it's the power that gives the oligarchs strong incentive to keep us distracted, digressed, and disempowered by wasting our time trying to organize a squirrel strike. -G.