The "Dangerous Class" and Revolutionary Theory: thoughts on the making of the lumpen/proletariat

by J. Sakai

This two-part book starts with the paper of that name, on the birth of the modern lumpen/proletariat in the 18th and 19th centuries and the storm cloud of revolutionary theory that has always surrounded them. Going back and piecing together both the actual social reality and the analyses primarily of Marx but also Bakunin and Engels, the paper shows how Marx’s class theory wasn’t something static. His views learned in quick jumps, and then all but reversed themselves in several significant aspects. While at first dismissing them in the Communist Manifesto as “that passively rotting mass” at the obscure lower depths, Marx soon realized that the lumpen could be players at the very center of events in revolutionary civil war. Even at the center in the startling rise of new regimes. The second text consists of the detailed paper “Mao Z’s Revolutionary Laboratory and the Role of the Lumpen Proletariat.” As Sakai points out, the left’s euro-centrism here prevented it from realizing the that the basic theory from European radicalism about the lumpen/proletariat was first fully tested not there or here but in the Chinese Revolution of 1921–1949. Under severely clashing political lines in the left, the class analysis finally used by Mao Z was shaken out of the shipping crate from Europe and then modified to map the organizing of millions over a prolonged generational revolutionary war. One could hardly wish for a larger test tube, and the many lessons to be learned from this mass political experience are finally put on the table.

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

Published April 15, 2017

About the author

J. Sakai is a revolutionary intellectual with decades of experience as an activist in the U.S.

Reviews

[Dont · Rating 5 out of 5]

J. Sakai's "The 'Dangerous Class' and Revolutionary Theory" reminds you of the incalculable value of history and analysis written from within and for revolutionary movements. A lifelong revolutionary from poor working class South Chicago, Sakai has assembled here a lifetime of engagement with the perennial problem of the lumpen for leftist radical theory.

The book itself is an idiosyncratic anthology of three distinct texts. The first shares the title of the book, an extended rumination on the problem of the lumpen in Marx, Engels, and Bakunin. The second text, "Mao Z's Revolutionary Laboratory & the Lumpen/Proletariat," is an extended historical case-study of the role of the lumpen in the revolutionary praxis of China's civil war. The third text, a short coda at the end, originally written in 1976 for movement comrades in which Sakai analyzes the counter-revolutionary role of street gangs in South Chicago. In an effort to throw off or dodge the expectations of the academic reader, the three texts are arranged such that the two larger texts begin at opposite ends of the book, requiring the reader to flip the book over to read the other. The coda is then at the very middle of the book, buried after the footnotes for the Mao text. In fact, the patient reader may well wish to begin with the 1976 essay as it helps to contextualize Sakai's long-term investment in the lumpen-proletarian question. Or, as Sakai writes it, lumpen/proletarian.

The formulation used by Sakai, separating lumpen from proletarian by way of slash performs the central thesis of the book. According to 19th Century revolutionary analysis, Marx and Engels considered the underclass a broad range of class drop-outs ranging from soldiers to beggars, those who hold no allegiance to any social class but will turn on a dime out of self-interest. Thus, their dangerousness stems from their likelihood to betray the working class. Whereas, for Bakunin, the lumpen signified the most radical element of the revolutionary classes; those with nothing to lose but involved everyday in lawlessness against the bourgeois order. For Sakai, the answer to the problem is to synthesize these two positions, to show where both the Marxists and the anarchists erred and where they both came close to the truth.

While all this may sound like dry dull analysis and left-insular angels on pins type stuff, no-one could ever accuse Sakai of dry scholasticism. Employing a vernacular voice, syntax, and vocabulary, Sakai writes like the reader is having a conversation with an elder in the movement. I myself have had several of these kinds of conversations with radicals from the previous generation; they always strike me as possessing a skilled ability to argue and openly entertain new ideas whilst holding firm to established principles. They take seriously the notion of a revolutionary science. It is the object and the method that guides their feet. This is exactly the experience of reading this book.

My one frustration with the text, admiring its aims and sense of audience, is that it stops short of engaging our own conjucture. Sakai spends all 300 pages (double columned!) assembling the historical and analytical tools. And what a rich and complex assortment of tools assembled? Sakai alludes to our present conjuncture; he's not checked out. It is clear that he is mindful of the urgent need for a conjunctural analysis and the role of the lumpen today. It is an urgency made all the more pointed by the rise of rightwing populist and petite bourgeois neofascism countered by an explosion of left formations including democratic socialists, anarchist-communists, neo-Maoists, and Maoists as Maoists. All of whom struggle to parse a praxis of solidarity with and within the lumpen sectors; distinguishing the same romanticization that often inflicts the left, outright hostility based on moralism and, well, something else.

Yet, while the book stops with elipses when it reaches our present moment, as a selection and synthesis of past analyses and revolutionary experiences of lumpen revolutionary praxis the book goes far to bring us all onto the same page. It's up to the movements to duke it out once we all reach that page. At least, I would hope, that debates can begin after a serious analysis of our own moment amidst a hemispheric opioid overdose epidemic, the epidemic of homelessness fueled by global real estate capital, the proletarianization and immiseration of the proletariat due to global financial monopoly capitalism, and the emergence of rightwing populist and neo-fascist orientations deploying the usual white, male, heterosexual, nationalist resentments, once weaponized, ready to serve the authoritarian oligarchs. What does solidarity with the lumpen/proletarian look like in this moment? The question has remains profoundly concrete since everyone confronts the army of the dispossessed of class status every day on the streets, on the bus, in the park, in the alleyway, and in the imaginary of everyone.

[Jayden gonzalez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Last words: That familiar cliche—“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it”—not true here. No, it won’t be even that good.

[Dan Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read and a great corrective to dogmatism generally, with some interesting forays into revolutionary history. "Truth is concrete."

[J. Moufawad-Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reviewed this book here:

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/revi...