Lumpen Theory : Genealogy of a Panoptilumpenism
How the Lumpen got repressed, and why we should care.
“Terrible things happen daily of which we are not aware of, hidden under the pretence of normality and coherence of the world you and I are forced to experience. Together, but yet so far away, a digital sea of modern colonisation exists. All that is hidden is understood to exist as oppression, and that oppression is but systematic death once the inevitable misery catches up to the rowdy prosperity of the cybernetical un-friendship orders.“ - Anonymous
What became projected as a refusal to expand on the different forms which the oppressed populations of the world took, the Lumpenproletariat, be it the term or the social category it represents, has never been more than a slur. The Lumpen have seen their potential, actions and even existence reduced to a mere splinter of class society under the classical Marxist framework, and even more so under a liberal scope. The liberal status quo seeks to uniform these outliers, to create a non-porous, fully compliant and utterly effective form of governance that does not imply the existence of faults and burdens. This is where “Lumpen erasure” begins, as the social war waged against the proletariat takes on a total and complete aspect when combating the slum residents that plague the minds of our bureaucrats. Meanwhile, Marxist analysis is guilty of simply advocating for their dismissal, as they justify their position as a mere result of their own “decisions”. Marxists, in a vulgar sense, never cared enough to advocate for some docility towards the Lumpenproletariat. What both of these conceptions (Classical Marxist and Liberal / Neoliberal) have in common is simply their will to reduce Lumpen struggle to a mere flaw in capitalism and not a feature, forgetting the moments and large periods in which the Lumpenproletariat took action, not as the subject of a movance or drive towards a narrative goal, but more-so as the undisputed net losers of the movements of modern industrial societies. In many senses, most political analysis and thought dismisses any unrest delivered by the Lumpenproletariat, no matter its historical importance.
The construction of a “better world” under a historically progressive stance implies the wiping down of the impurities the Lumpen are constituted of : in order to model an effective mode of governance, the “freedom” and utmost total possibility of action that the Lumpen represent needs to be eradicated. From their economical and geographical flexibility, disturbance drive and a mind outside of the usual moral-psychiatric fallacies, the Lumpenproletariat are a truly liberated political character, as their capacity to disrupt Capital in its processes is complete and unconditional. However, as we can clearly understand as of nowadays, this possibility never translated into effective political change, in part due to the classical socialist political duo radiating anti-lumpen sentiment from across the Rhine.
Friedrich Engels retains the crown of anti-lumpen sentiment, very early on embarking in hatred towards a group he barely defined in order to assert the position of the proletariat as the unique pawn in their path of the progress of history. Nothing constructive comes from the Lumpenproletariat, and this understanding leads to conceiving them as historically “scum” and “opportunists”, friends of reaction and the status quo. No point in engaging in a politics of liberation on the side of the Lumpen if these would overshadow the proletariat in sheer will for destruction. The myth of the Lumpen representing the outdated populations of the early-modern urban development is something that persists nowadays. Mercenaries, crooks and “parasites” are what Engels, and then Marx, meant and explicited by the Lumpen, entities devoid of revolutionary character, outside of the glorious proletariat and most importantly, in opposition to it. For all they could do is “bothe” and add complexities that could harm the streamlined view of the proletariat. The Lumpen were slowly getting recognized as an enemy, as groups of Marxists started to develop mechanisms to distance the proletariat from these lowlifes, whether it be with some kind of distinctive “proletarian culture” or “proletarian ethics”. This trend was the death of any reasonable political philosophy focusing on the analysis of the Lumpenproletariat, and stagnated their condition, in terms of public, academic and political perception, to an attitude and activity directly from the XIXth century. The Lumpen were never perceived to have “changed” In patterns, attitudes, politics and even membership in the centuries of industrial evolution.
In many regards, the reductionism that Marx and Engels apply to this strata of the population is clearly tied to the events they analysed ever since 1848 and the many abuses the working population suffered because of this undisclosed exploitative Lumpenproletariat. The vagueness of what they even imply by Lumpen at this stage makes for it to become the quick insult many cement the term as, even when Marx’s own conception evolves when the first volumes of Capital arrive. His true, real critique of political economy outside of the punctual social commentary over the conditions of the revolting bodies involving themselves in England, France and other areas of the european theatre, comes with the realisation of a new concept that will be very useful following up : the one of Lumpenization, or understood as the process that turns sectors of a viable population towards a much more precarious, fluid and non-protected existence, basically creating a larger input of Lumpen. Marx understood the unnamed Lumpenization as a result of capital's contradictions, but that would prove to be incomplete once the violence of the 20th century sets in.
Efforts from the capitalist systems turned the varied populations of an evolving society into elements of what he saw as being the “exploitative degeneracy” that constituted the element to oppose inside the Lumpen, making it not a desirable process, but more so state policy backed by the wide world of Capitalistic singularity. A scheme so simple in its perpetuation that it gets overlooked and assimilated into the “natural” processes of capital, alongside commodity production and fetichisation. His opposition to the Lumpen is, as commonly described, political. But nonetheless, I see this as coming from a severe lack of will towards a deep understanding of fluid class status and dynamics outside of the proletariat-bourgeois divide, as it would complexify and put in jeopardy the effectiveness of his pro-proletarian narrative. In short, Marxism, as the established framework of analysis and understanding of class society guided by the proletarian socialist meta-narrative, has no room, nor want, to establish a thoughtful consideration of what the Lumpen really are, outside of all value and moralistic judgement many still engage with nowadays. The conditions of such a shift and change in the perspective of the Lumpen should be set, first of all, on the basis of a “non-marxist” framework, one that does not establish a subject for revolutionary progression above all other possible material analysis.
Combating the many forms the systematic train of thought Marxism has historically represented comes in the originally Marxist realisation of the end of the “labour movement”. The late Paul Mattick essentially considered the labour movement to be “dead” and non-existent in the modern times of the postwar world. No longer could the forms of organisation of the working class combat capitalism the same way it once used to. No longer can the proletariat unite under the thought of Marx or Lenin in order to advance the progression of social systems. No longer could liberation be achieved by the same old conceptions of revolution we had carried around essentially since the early Fourrieriusts. As he would put it,
“The labour movement preceded Marxian theory and provided the actual basis for its development. Marxism became the dominating theory of the socialist movement because it was able convincingly to reveal the exploitative structure of capitalist society and simultaneously to uncover the historical limitations of this particular mode of production.”
On this same basis, Marxism was able to grasp the concept of leading progressive revolution in terms of using a same, concrete and particular subject, one not free but alienated and exploited, with enough potential to set itself free and dissolve the forms that put it there to begin with. But no longer can that be seen as a coherent labour movement, and the flaw comes with this essentialization of The Proletariat, the main pawn to the creation of Marxist analysis.
With this in mind, many properly Marxist groups through the (mostly) contemporary history of class struggle (1960’s-80’s) have opposed this fallacious class consideration, and taken on a Lumpen defence, one that does confront the previously mentioned un-legitimate attacks from the early socialist revolutionaries. Denning, Fanon and even Marcuse embark in the commonly found “revolutionary potential of the Lumpen”, explaining its colonial history as being the “radicals of the radicals”, a sort of unmeasured group full of revolutionary fervour, similar to what the classical proletariat can achieve if set under the line of class consciousness. While these defences have served the proliferation of the term in a less commonly conceived pejorative manner, they fall under the baseline that creates the issues of Marx and Engels : they create a new revolutionary subject, this time more radical, not removed from any constructive logic in order to achieve the building up of a concise class identity. It cannot be said that this is truly the liberatory form of the Lumpen. We should in turn, consider this defence as the first kind hearted attempt to remove the monopoly of revolt from the hands of the western and white proletariat in order to atomize it further into greater depth.
Back to the first international and the period of the mere inception of the Lumpen-Prole divide, Bakunin encountered a similar attempt, as the label he was attributed of the “Prince of the Lumpen” was a simple reaction towards what he had conceived as a preferential strategy to out-socialist the marxists. In order to defend the vague peasantry of the remains of economic development in the European labour world, he provocatively took on the position of “Only the Lumpen can liberate and act towards the social revolution”. To repeat myself one last time, this is not but a change in the subject of history and a retention of the notion of the progression of history towards a being-just and not a liberatory becoming.
The Lumpen is already a liberated subject, only constrained by its own influenced volition. The repetition of the subject form instead of its abolition and liberation in a general way is nothing brand new or outstanding, and hence the proclaimed Lumpen defence of these authors remains incomplete, inconclusive and truthfully useless for a construction of the real genealogy behind the liberation of Lumpen. Repeating the logical politics of a state-building governance towards DOTP is unproductive and ineffective in our temporal space.
One group, however, embarked in the tale to liberate and act upon the Lumpen’s condition with better basis and wider acceptance on how to approach the subject, this being the Japanese New Left. In reality, this wide movement of social upheaval in the Japanese islands was much more than just a grouping of pro-Lumpen students. From the Trotskyists and Maoists that composed the improvised parties and informal revolutionary groups at the borderlines of the control of the state, many groups seeked an avant-garde approach to acting upon the conditions of the Japanese sphere, as well as a takedown of Japanese culture as a whole after the fiasco of the expansion and construction of a cultural identity based on the expansion of the empire. This pre-conceptual imperialist nature to what it meant to be Japanese inherently implied a re-thinking of what groups constituted the internal operations of the Japanese cultural machine, and those that conformed a noumena, capable of taking the more radical stances some of these groups held in respect to some often forgotten aspects of bourgeois society.
The bulbous mass of deformed victims of the violence of the Imperial Japanese construction became the allies of the revolutionary groups : ethnic minorities were, for many groups of denominational variety, the main primary focus on their struggle. Doing so brought them the hatred of some more orthodox Marxist groups, claiming their “non focus on class” as being contrary to the bouillant social climate that might at the time host an actual revolutionary movement. The ethnic minorities that they sought to protect under many circumstances were grouped up vulgarly under the notion of all being Lumpen, below the Japanese worker. And under such framing, groups of students in Tokyo and Osaka claimed this aspect proudly, hailing the defence of the Lumpen into action, seeking to organise outside of the prefecture of Osaka proper the members of the Lumpenproletariat, composed of the prostitutes, day labourers and marginalised ethnic groups that were the baseline for economic activity in the area. The so-called “inner colony” of the newly constructed Kamagasaki council, was considered as the “3rd world inside of the 1st world”. The notion here implies a heavy dose of colonial relations into the logic of the interaction with the Lumpenproletarian populations. This relation exists because of the following parameter :
If the Lumpenproletariat is more alienated than the proletariat, it would cause a sense of “outsideness”, making the Lumpen as fringe actors of capitalist society, becoming exploited via proximity to class society, but not due to their total integration in it. This logic would then perpetuate the sense of outside, and would create a social bubble so alienated it no longer sees itself as being related to their proletarian oppressors.
That last part remains an integral part of the actions of the JNL on the eyes of the Lumpen : the alienation due to the misery and visceral exploitation of the Lumpen from the whole of Capitalist social actors makes them a subject of the “borderlands” of class society, outside, but remaining on the grasp of the exploitation they face. Because of this separation, they cannot perpetuate the Japanese imperial cultural identity that the proletariat proper, willingly or not, did construct. Of all the groups that appeared during this clearly intellectually fertile time in Japanese class struggle, the East-Asian Anti-Japaneist Armed Front remains as the biggest and best example of how to envision the lumpen.
Many of the Marxist groups, specially those in accord with Eiji Oguma’s notion that the Anti-Japaneist movement had a clear “poststructuralist character, understanding its use of pseudo-history as realisation of the “linguistic turn” ”, none of them actually continued and carried out the proposed total and radical deconstruction of a Japanese cultural identity itself, basing themselves around the “zenkyoto” form, or joint struggle committees that were used as organs that can be classically found on any other Marxist organisation. On this, the Daidoji couple that founded the front did so in a non-explicitly “opposition” towards the general direction of the Zengakuren, that by then had abandoned all sense of radical deconstruction and erasure. The group held on to the stance that became the more Lumpen-friendly out of a movement that already greatly considered this sector. Their direct attacks on the Empire, whether it be via the numerous sabotages like in 1974 or simply the intellectual intention behind their collective writings and most specifically the Hara Hara Tokei, had crumbled, as Till Knaudt would say, the entirety of the still not anti-Japaneist enough New Left. Their actions are an expression of the concerns of the victims of this newly appearing virtual-colonialism that is so omnipresent in their conceptions.
Founding an armed struggle group on the collaboration and retaliation of the Lumpen against even the workerist Prole identity seemed too far for the anachronistic Marxists of modern discourse, and even the ones at the time acting as formal opposition to the EAAJAF, but in reality, this is the utmost example of an action, an attitude and a thought against the anti-lumpen sentiment, and one favorizing its revolt, self-abolition and proliferation as the vector of the creative destruction they so wanted to see unfold on the Japanese archipelago. The Lumpenproletariat then follows the agitation that it is brought, not prescribed like in the case of the proletariat, and perpetually seeks the total liberation that is the lustful object of Communistic projects : a liberation from all sides of class society, an affirmation of non-exploitation.
Similarly, Deleuze, in his lectures on the State War machine, retook this term and applied a machinic logic to the developments of capitalism he saw in the later part of his life. The “3rd world inside the 1st world” was then the 4th world, represented by an absurd difference between the affluent perfection of the wealth created and then fetichized by the rich populations, and the misery created, not in response, but in consequence of such development. Total misery contrasted to total virtuosity of capital’s developments. As such, the 4th world is the situation in which Lumpenization occurs, one in which the machine of Capital, that we will from now on describe as “Technocapital”, perpetuates modes of production and exploitation in order to conceive a virtual-colonial situation. This neologism is something I have coined to describe that distance in the treatment of the Lumpenproletariat that was considered a form of colonial relationship by the JNL theorists. This relationship relies on distance and separation, all geographical, social and economical distance from class society, to the Lumpen inhabitants of its borderlands.
Added to this notion, we have the central word of Panoptilumpenism, a porte-manteau word encompassing “panopticon” and “Lumpen” to define the effect that is to be understood as the self-biopolitical regulation of the Lumpenproletariat that is on itself the reason of their sense of outsideness and non-liberation, as a direct result from the total alienation they face and the position in society that they held, and still hold, in relation to other groups. Panoptilumpenism, to be more concrete, is the continuation of social violence on the lumpen, but instead of simply constructing an effective governance to get rid of them, would utilise them for a new decentralised economic projection. The conception of the Lumpenproletariat as pure “leeches” or “burdens”, as Marx would have them for most of the development of his theory, does nothing but reaffirm, and in a sense justify, the virtual-colonial exploitation of one of the most miserable elements ever conceived by humanity. Sadly, at no point could the JNL’s perspective become a majority in any capacity, and even intellectual circles have fallen off with the idea of considering such an avant-garde scene as relevant or possibly interesting for the furthering of class analysis.
2. Panoptilumpenism and Technocapital
Our modern Technocapital advancements have proven these conceptions of the Lumpenproletariat as an ever expanding entity, one that is really up to date with the tendencies and evolutions of the market and the productive forces subordinated to it. Lumpenization as a process is, inherently, a modern phenomenon. Capitalism devolved into a commodity driven mechanism at the middle of the 20th century, as the ones like Debord denoted. The construction of such a strong spectacular culture towards the commodity itself was only done once the development of the modules of capitalism settled and could bring out a certain “abundance” of said commodities.
Via this, there was a certain death of the industrial core of capitalism. Not in its literal sense, capitalism had retained and even amplified its destructive industrial capacities, but because the directive threat of both the liberal art of governing and the Hyperstitional technocapital advancements had been no longer centred on pure industry, it was accompanied by market fluxes and data exploitation.
As this, the 80’s and the beginning of neoliberal uniformist globalisation ramped up the process of the creation of the service economy, now with the working force of the western first world being driven towards the new disciplinary form of embankment : the cubicle and the office.
Via this, the fragmentation of what was the proletariat began diving directly into the realm of biopower itself: no longer was pure labour alienation the issue for these now obsolete western factory workers, but the war machine of the state and its new labour controlling arms are purposely transforming the scenarios in which these labourers operate, and hence delving them deeper into what can only be considered an entropic mess of an economic transformation. The service economy now tended towards managerial non-tangibility, a notion difficult to grasp for the strictly material based proletarian economic culture, but quite effective for a population so distanced with all kinds of labour, that this seems like an extension of living activities.
The welfare state, now that the productivist social democratic compromise had become completely overridden by total business ontology, wanted to turn the lives of these producers into one of total alienation inside the realm of non-existent production and pure data recuperation and management.
The 21st century, via its enormous decentralisation and increased fluidity in the forms that Technocapital seeks to take in the larger and broader scheme of things, began creating a new form of production, inside and at the same time outside of the service economy: the previously mentioned data collecting in favour of the concentrating and newly appearing “Rentier bourgeoisie”, as B. Ceka would come to call them. For her, these new uses of data in order to reinforce the structural integrity and reach of technocapital itself are nothing but a new form of labour exploitation, directly via the involvement of this newly imprisoned proletarian force, but also by the Lumpenproletariat, primary subjects of such experimentation.
You see, the Lumpenization that takes place by both the death of the industrial 1st world and its impossibility of incorporation into the new service economy is a direct consequence and desired result of the development of new forms of capitalism. Via this, we can encounter the programmed death of the service economy, one in which Panoptilumpenism is applied into its full potential force.
No longer can we suffice for data management, that data must be used, it must be rhizomatically consumed into the new apparatuses of the internet and AI. Seka retains the core parts of the Landian fear of expansion of Technocapital towards Hyperstition and autonomy, and applies it to a deeply Lumpenizing realisation: no longer is any part of the population free from violent forms of both control and exploitation, in the most decentralised forms possible to conceive. Panoptilumpenism took on the totalitarian scope of any control society, but simplified it to data and life-extraction that could exploit as much human capital as possible. The self accommodation of the Lumpen towards this new economy is the greatest controlling violence conceived in modern economic theory.
Andrew Culp detested the Rhizome for what it had become, a past realisation of what now is recuperated at the hands of the capitalist directors of the technocapital enterprise. The rhizomatic structure of what Deleuze wanted was now realised, in the entirely worst way possible. The hand of the rising Lumpenproletariat is being forced by the same theorist that could be key to their self-immediate Anarchoscape from the eye of the cybernetic biopower now applied deeply to its own core.
We can conceive of the business ontology that had developed alongside technocapital, has now gained speed and was faced by much less Lumpen-Guided resistance, meaning that it was now more ingrained than ever in our era of cybernetic biopower. This development led to the pursuit of the delegation of economic responsibility, one in which the role of the Panoptilumpenist actions of the neoliberal economy became the forming of the “entrepreneur” in every section of the population, but most concretely inside the Lumpen. The Lumpen, via this new form of virtual-colonial expansion, become their own responsibles for their economic activity, essentially starting what many like to call “the gig economy”, but what in reality is nothing but the true decentralisation of the realm of data management and its business-ontological application.
The profit motive becomes then the only guideline and prerogative of the Lumpen, one not enforced but suggested to them, not inherently tying them to a fixed and rigid industrial and bureaucratic labour form; but now one that is so flexible that it delves into the total non-existence of the personal life once enjoyed by the common proletariat.
The continuation of the Lumpen as a liberated subject, on the outskirts of the labour productions remains true, as the Lumpenproletariat, with the delegation of economic power and capacities, have become themselves the only actors involved in their newly found subsistence. The common Uber Eats driver, mostly exploited for being commonly of a cultural minority already segregated and pushed in many cases towards Lumpenization, that has found no solution but to collect an infinity of other gig jobs of spontaneous occurrence, of fluid continuation and of tremendous psychological strain becomes the new martyr of our movement, or at the very least it should become so.
This one common fighter of the world has turned into a pure state of resistance towards this Panoptilumpenism, a pure form of revolt against what it is, essentially: a brutal regulation of the existence of a group nowadays conforming a majority of the world’s population, and sooner than later, will become the active actors in the taking down of Technocapital, in the heroic death that can so descriptively be defined an aesthetic projection towards the imposition of a deep desire towards pure affirmation.
By doing so, the Lumpen should be recognized as one key thing : not a vector of narrative, not an actor of progression, not the subject of the revolutionary, but purely a concentration of insurrection. Generally, conceiving the Lumpen as a replacement of the proletariat in Marxist analysis is an error the ones before me have made, and one we have already debunked. In certain senses, here we revert to certain original affirmations done by Engels and Marx, and we do so by recuperating the concepts with pride :
The Lumpen do NOT have a class consciousness : Correct! The lumpen considerably lack the capacity to develop class interest, not due to some classist conceptions of some essentialist incapability, but out of pure interest: Misery cannot be actively mitigated and advanced, and the creation of a progressive narrative towards that is simply not conceivable for the average homeless person, devoid of all possibility towards petty property or even labour stabilisation. Nowadays, even the proletariat lacks a directive line to battle, but the insurrection deep inside the wretched hearts of the Lumpen can be prepared in advance for any confrontation towards the becoming-autonomous process that is so desired.
The Lumpen are purely destructive : Absolutely. This radicality comes from the already mentioned need for unmitigated abolition and not compromise. The ethos of action of the Lumpenproletariat is the affirmation of non-exploitation, and hence, only destruction of the present state of things can actively continue their insurrectionary process.
The Lumpen are disconnected with reality : And that creates the basis of their Nomadhood, a Lumpenomadhood. As their travels through the borderlands of control and self regulation, seeking to avoid or even escape the certain aim and pretended omnipotence of the state, the Lumpen had to become not vectors of the prescribed real, but of their own projection. Life at the bottom of the barrel is harsh, but It can be arranged by actively pursuing a project outside of what is experienced. Not a form of escapism, but a form to arm a population with the possibility of trying to project themselves onto their desires, far away from the biopower that so crushes them perpetually.
The Lumpen have no constraints or restrictions to their praxis : In reality, the Lumpen do not do what is commonly conceived as “praxis”. As said previously, the Lumpen do not follow the standards of prescriptive actions and a directive attitude. Instead, as the Invisible Committee would come to conceive popular insurrections, the Lumpen engage purely in a “becoming-autonomous” form, as they seek to out-advance the processes of Panoptilumpenism that restricts their potential Anarchoscape from it. The Lumpen are, in this sense and continuing their definition as liberated subjects, not restricted to a form of actions, as their lives and collective violence against Empire and the leviathan of the cyber control society are unto itself extreme and unravelled expressions of insurrection.
In many areas, the Lumpen-On-Lumpen exploitation has become a primary form of production. Taking the example of my home country of Mexico, the cartels have become by 2023 the 5th largest direct employer in the country, without taking into account the un-official trading partners and oppressed local communities subordinated to their will. They present an interesting case, as Panoptilumpenism is here materialised in the form of a set of previously Lumpen individuals conforming an administrative statist biopolitical entity that transforms these individuals into the role of the common Bourgeoisie. The difference? Well, these elements lack the established uniformity of the bourgeoisie, as well as not being able to be the “official” property owners, as the logic of competition is very well applied to the rivalry between the state and its monopoly on regulation, and the unmitigated commodity production of the cartels.
The main victims here are the indigenous Lumpen populations, people who work completely on the most extreme forms of labour imaginable. Its cartoonish intensity makes it some of the harshest and most direct elements to consider when dealing with the Lumpen in majority conditions. Yes, almost a majority of the Mexican population, both rural and urban, are informal workers lacking any form of security and stability that the statist world would have other societies used to. This makes Mexico a country that, in its horrendous shift towards a neoliberal logic of market advancement and a direct war against what could be 60% of the population, is directed by the Lumpen logic of resistance, but Panoptilumpenism and the biopolitical forms of repression that we encounter so absurdly diversified and atomized nowadays wins over them.
As in many other countries, Lumpenization is official policy, and the violence that comes with it constitutes nothing but a will to put down further the subordinated oppressed and alienated groups, is also the logic to its own demise. The inter-connectivity of today’s social relations via total cybernetic methods has turned these complex webs of exploitation into a system so heavy of its own weight that these reproductions cannot be sustained for too long.
Nowadays, what it means to be lumped has radically shifted, and its focus and activity too. Yes, we can retain the JNL’s vision of the Lumpen baseline consisting of prostitutes, day labourers, ethnic minorities, segregated populations, the workers exploited by the proletariat AND the conjunction of class society as a politico-managerial and eventually, cybernetic entity. But with the new virtual-colonial relationship that has sprouted from the corpse of our service-minded economic engineering, it is hard to not see Panoptilumpenism as nothing more than an extension of the disciplinary control society, a subset of Biopolitical applications, and unto itself, the expression of technocapital’s regulatory and directive capacities. Technocapital has grown to extend the uniforming violence of biopower to its economic activity via entrepreneurship, and ends up totalizing the slight imperfection, or at that perfection, of the life of a homeless, jobless or lifeless individual. Panoptilumpenism is a cybernetic socio-economic prison that creates unilateral oppression to indiscriminate groups of unrelenting capacities. The source of the discontent of the many with our current capitalism is rooted in that character of its machinic activity. We cannot really comprehend how truly destructive Panoptilumpenism can end up being for the social fabric of this withering world, but it most certainly will represent itself as the future order of our lives: Panoptilumpenism will most likely not stop at the Lumpen’s livelihoods.
Concretely, what would be the importance of this analysis? That is a valid and important question I asked myself when the first thoughts on this topic came to my mind, but the answer is clear. Everywhere in the world, this Lumpenizing tendency has created a strata of the population that is so poor, so oppressed and so unable to act on their own benefit that the concentration of insurrection is strong and pressurised, that the only way for it to come out is the breaking of their shackles, that is now Panoptilumpenism. We have brought immense pain to these people and ignored their processes enough for us to repent and finally act on their model and conception, but without taking them as the subject that can bring our prescribed program to fruition. Instead, the battles of these heroes against technocapital is one that should inspire our new insurrection methods, our new resistance, our new attacks on the state and its institutions.
The fact that we can eventually be so free, even the freedom that is so conditional of the Lumpen would seem like the highest of totalitarianisms, is enough for us to become the Barbarians that at the time toppled the oppression of Roman imperialism, and that today can achieve the total liberation from the logic of the liberal administration and its resulting sentient technocapital. As such, we stand strong, we hold on to each other in passion, the passion to win, the passion to live our lives without the alienation of the Empire, the passion to create more than ever before, and most importantly, the passion to control our own death. At no point can we conceive a liberated society, group or conception as such as long as its participants cannot decide on their death, destroying the little heroism that our era has leftover.
As long as we die from the cold of the street and the blaze of the handgun of a cop, our bodies cannot function, our art cannot prosper and our internalised Lumpen will continue to suffer. As long as we die alongside and as the scum of the earth, peace will not reign up above in the sky. And when Technocapital becomes god, and leaves its place in the heavens, nothing will be alright. Kill the Panoptilumpenism that rots your heart. Kill the literal cop that your brain has on itself become.
“Obeying this warning is the only way to avoid increasing casualties.” - Hara Hara Tokei.