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<p>This dissertation, Lumpen: Vagrancies of a Concept from Marx to Fanon (and on),
tracks the concept of the lumpenproletariat from its coinage by Karl Marx through
its reworking by Franz Fanon, the Black Panthers and others in the context of the
colonial liberation and Black Power movements, and onwards into contemporary debates
about populism, identity, politics, and the end of work. From its origins an unstable
concept, the lumpenproletariat raises a series of interrelated questions about the
relation of class to interest, interest to identity, and identity to politics. Succinctly,
the dissertation asks: what happens to the Marxian project when the future of productive
labor seems in doubt, both as a source of capital valorization and as a foundation
for political action? </p><p>Contemporary engagement with the category of the lumpenproletariat
has typically focused on the latter as a symbol of the irreducible autonomy of the
political, ignoring the concept’s empirical referent. Separately, a growing body of
literature has grappled with the increase of economically redundant surplus populations
produced, in part, by technological automation, a phenomenon obliquely reflected in
recent philosophical fascination with, for instance, bare life, necropolitics and
the abject. Such work has however rarely considered the political ramifications of
such transformations. What we would need, then, is a theoretical framework capable
of grasping both aspects of this twofold problematic—the determinacy of dispossession,
the indeterminacy of its political expression. </p><p>The beginnings of such a framework
can be found, I argue, in the writings on the lumpenproletariat in the work of Frantz
Fanon, James Boggs, and the Black Panthers. Developing their scattered insights, I
argue that the lumpenproletariat names both the tendential production of an economically
redundant surplus population and the lack of any automatic correlation between this
(or any) social condition and political subjectivation. This gap between economic
and political, structure and subject, becomes then the space for the creative articulation
of a collective subject as a properly political project. This is precisely the task
of a socialist politics today. </p><p>Whether in terms of its objective position at
the point of production or its subjective consciousness of the need for revolution,
the decline of the industrial proletariat has often been figured as synonymous with
that of socialist politics. In contrast, my dissertation suggestions that a recuperation
of the rich and half-forgotten legacy of the lumpenproletariat emerging out of the
Black radical tradition can help provide a model for constructing a powerful socialist
movement in the present.</p>
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