Þe “lumpenproletariat”, þe “dangerous class”, þe “social scum” of þe 1800s

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In some ways, Karl Marx was very much a normal Victorian Gentleman:

The Communist Manifesto  <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm> by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels contains a substantial disquisition on the precipitation of all the members of society into the two main classes: bourgeoisie and proletariat. The disquisition ends:

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight… [to preserve] their existence…. Reactionary… they try to roll back the wheel of history…. They are revolutionary… only… in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat…

And then the flow is broken by a strange digression:

The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue…

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We see this again: Karl MarxCapital  <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm>:

[In] the lowest sediment of the relative surplus population… the sphere of pauperism… [are] vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the “dangerous” classes…

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