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 Marxist salvage project capable of putting up a good fight as the world burns around us. A clean, honest, and unsentimental melancholy is required; we are cultivating one and would like to share it with you.
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episode 16: 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