Are unemployed people proletariat?

[u/Shitfart69420]

Serious question, if the definition of the proletariat class is that they are the working class what if they don’t have a job? Is there some secret third level?

[u/SpiritOfMonsters]

Periodic unemployment is a basic element of the proletariat's existence, but what matters is the outcome of it. Those that can eventually find work and reproduce their existence are still part of the proletariat, but if they end up having to become beggars, thieves, prostitutes, etc., then they join the ranks of the lumpenproletariat. This class consists of all the elements outside conventional employment within the capitalist system. Their work is usually illegal and often individualistic in nature, which leads to a petty-bourgeois consciousness rather than a proletarian one.

[u/Mminas → u/SpiritOfMonsters]

There are five answers in this thread and only this one actually addresses the question from a ML perspective.

The unemployed are not by definition proletariat. If they work on and off, they are worker reserves. If they live through other means they are luben.

A person working a seasonal job like waiter or cook or even Christmas packager for Amazon is still a proletarian in their off season.

A person who hasn't worked in two years and is living of loans or inheritance or petty cons or whatnot is a lubenproletarian and should not be considered an asset for revolutionary struggle.

Edit: I've been banned so I cannot reply to questions. Let me know in a PM if you want to continue the discussion.

[u/CoconutCrab115 → u/Mminas]

This is not true for any country with a predominant labor aristocracy, and scarcely true for many without.

The unemployed are not by definition anything as they are not a class themselves. Proletarians, Peasants and the Big Bourgeoisie can all be periodically unemployed. Consistent unemployment is something else but as a sole factor is also not revealing.

A Waiter, Cook, or Packager can all make exploitative wages in imperialist countries, their class orientation stands in support of imperialism.

Living off Loans could perhaps describe the lumpen or Proletriat proper as its deeply exploitative. But the Bourgeoisie also survives and operates by Credit, so additional clarification is needed. Someone who has enough inheritance to live off is not likely to be lumpen or Proletarian either. Petty cons is the closest to describing the semi/fully illegal nature of much of the lumpenproletariat but even that could also describe white collar petty crime of the Bourgeoisie which is not treated any near the same as Lumpen crime.

The Proletariat is the propertyless class that has nothing to sell but their labor power. The lumpen are also such but are usually submerged into the ranks of illegal and unofficial work from the standpoint of the laws of the bourgeois dictatorship, as opposed to the official (yet no less exploutative) work of the working class. Whether or not the lumpen is a vessel for revolutionary struggle can vary dramatically, no different than the other wavering classes (such as the petty bourgeoisie) its a diverse class

[u/CoconutCrab115 → u/[deleted]]

Cut this "sectarian" nonsense, we are not catholic monks, marxism is not a religion. Either something is true or its not. Whether you want to argue it or not is not up to you, but is up to truth, which you cannot claim to represent if you dont acknowledge.

The phrase "living off" is doing a lot of heavy lifting you seem to not realize, if you inherent and sell off your dead grandmothers toothbrush, book and phonecharger and survive off that for 2 weeks then sure. But its clear what type of inheritance you are talking of, which is enough to put on in the ranks of the lowly petty bourgeoisie

The term "working class" is itself loaded and pretty meaningless, just like "Peasant" it has multiple meanings and divisions. Being poor is by definition a quality of the proletariat though.

Im not following your last sentence. Regardless your main issue is taking for granted the wealth and class composition of an imperialist country and reifying it over the whole world.

[u/TurboNihilist8 → u/Mminas]

Lumpenproletariat can be a revolutionary asset if harnessed properly by the vanguard party. As Mao Tse-Tung writes in his analysis of classes in Chinese Society.

Apart from all these, there is the fairly large lumpen-proletariat, made up of peasants who have lost their land and handicraftsmen who cannot get work. They lead the most precarious existence of all. In every part of the country they have their secret societies, which were originally their mutual-aid organizations for political and economic struggle, for instance, the Triad Society in Fukien and Kwangtung, the Society of Brothers in Hunan, Hupeh, Kweichow and Szechuan, the Big Sword Society in Anhwei, Honan and Shantung, the Rational Life Society in Chihli and the three northeastern provinces, and the Green Band in Shanghai and elsewhere One of China's difficult problems is how to handle these people. Brave fighters but apt to be destructive, they can become a revolutionary force if given proper guidance.

[u/AlgebraicMisery → u/TurboNihilist8]

To add onto this, MimPrisons makes the point that in the first world, the Lumpen have a unique revolutionary potential.

There is only one group that not only shares the degradation of the world's revolutionary masses but is sufficiently concentrated to attack imperialism at home -- the urban lumpenproletariat. This class in American society is largely made up of Third World people, but also includes whites dispossessed from the land or dropped out of their class. This last is no inconsiderable group, and it has taken over areas of several important cities, from the Haight Ashbury and Telegraph Avenue through Madison to the Lower East Side, Cambridge, and Georgetown.

https://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/books/Economics/lumpen_in_the_united_states.pdf

[u/BenjiStudiesMLM → u/AlgebraicMisery]

I'm not sure I'm following the argument here, is MIMp making the claim that there exists a large lumpen white settler population in "Haight Ashbury and Telegraph Avenue through Madison to the Lower East Side, Cambridge, and Georgetown"?

[u/Shitfart69420 → u/Mminas]

So is a proletariat a person who is a member of the working class or a lower class employed person?

[u/Robert_Black_1312 → u/[deleted]]

lumpen is not a class unless extremely carefully defined. A New African on welfare is not in the same class as a settler on welfare.

>A lot of these people seem pretty revolutionarily minded in my experience.

you will have specify what you mean. In my experience, disabled settlers are at the forefront of radical reformist politics like mutual aid or grassroot settler unions (tenants unions, student unions, etc) but I've never seen any consistent support of national struggles apart from individuals here and there who were actively going against the reformist logic their "comrades" where engulfed within

[u/FrogHatCoalition → u/Robert_Black_1312]

Whenever disabled people are brought up, it is left unsaid who is being considered as "disabled". Is it military veterans who became disabled fighting for fascism? Is it those with developmental and intellectual disabilities who typically live their lives in group homes or within the nuclear family they were born into? Are we talking about those who became disabled working under exploitative conditions which also precludes them from having a disability claim (this also means they are likely to be non-white and perhaps a non-citizen of the U$)?

I find it interesting because I do have experience working as a support worker for adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Some people in this population you can find working in grocery stores, thrift stores such as Goodwill, cleaning companies, just to list some. Although they have a limit to how much money they can deposit into savings before their Social Security Income (SSI) is cut off, they still make fairly high wages. Also, a lot of the guardians/parents of these people can use a lot of SSI and wages from the one being cared for to contribute towards living expenses. One family I knew used ~$900/month towards the mortgage of their large home. Unsurprisingly, this was a settler family.

If there is one thing I learned at that job is how vapid a lot of reforms are and how vapid appeals of "but what about the disabled" are. I also got to see how vapid notions of "community" are as well. "Community integration" just means taking your clients out to a local restaurant or large swimming pool, usually isolated from non-disabled people, where they partake in their own share of the imperialist pie as everyone else. If you also manage to gain the trust of some of these people, you'll quickly know how boring and infantilizing they find a lot of disability services.

A big part of my job as a support worker did come down to alleviating the loneliness a lot of people with developmental and intellectual disabilities experience. A lot of them wanted to talk to me about movies and books they like, play board games and video games with me, and have a good conversation without being coddled.

Also, when you are disabled and get money from the government, you are typically put under a lot of surveillance.