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

[GtwoG PublicOhOne]

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.