The Regrettable Century
The old forms of the Left are moribund and the new forms are stupid. We're making a podcast that discusses the need to organize a Dialectical Pessimism and develop a salvage project capable of sparking a new workers' movement for socialism. A clean, honest, and unsentimental melancholy is required; we are cultivating one and would like to share it with you.
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”
-- Antonio Gramsci
The Regrettable Century
Lumpenization and its Discontents: Disagreements About the Lumpen Classes
This week the Law Boyz are back with a special guest, Kevin. We discuss the concept of the lumpenproletariat and their historical role as foot soldiers of reaction. Then we all argue about the police.
Peter Stallybrass (1990) Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat, Representations, No. 31, Special Issue: The Margins of Identity in Nineteenth-Century England, pp. 69-95
Nicholas Thoburn (2002) Difference in Marx: the lumpenproletariat and the proletarian unnamable, Economy and Society, 31:3, 434-460
Robert L. Bussard (1987) The ‘dangerous class’ of Marx and Engels: The rise of the idea of the Lumpenproletariat, History of European Ideas, 8:6, 675-692
Music: Johnny Cash- This Side of the Law