From The Shape of Things to Come: Selected Writings & Interviews (Kersplebedeb, 2023).
Like a hand grenade of ideas thrown from the distance into our skirmishes, when Mao's iconic writings from the 1920s–30s were finally translated and widely disseminated here in the 1950s–60s, revolutionary theory on the lumpen/proletariat underwent a major shift. We still haven't come to grips with the confusion of that change, even though the blast zone is far behind us on the highway now.
While appearing to follow the form of the Marx & Engels class analysis of the stormy petrel of the lumpen/proletariat, Mao's theoretical take represented a big remodeling job. A sharper turn, in fact, than i personally could hold onto or understand back then. Mao Z most famously explained the lumpen/proletariat's difference from all other classes in his analysis of Chinese society in 1926:
“Apart from all these, there is a 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… One of China's most 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.”1
Influenced by reading Mao, electrified to recognize themselves in his terse description of the lumpen/proletariat, the Black Panthers used it to unlock the most radical advance of the 1960s wave here. According to the BPP's Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the lumpen were politically leading the u.s. revolution, while after victory the task of building the new socialist society would be taken up by the working class. Thousands of Black youth poured into the extreme danger zone that was the Party. For the left not to recognize the conscious role of the lumpen/proletariat there is to let old 19th-century dogma dim revolutionary theory. Which was the precise same old bureaucratic politics that Mao himself was struggling against so long ago in his own revolution.
Mao Z's terse last line summing up the lumpen for the revolution, became famous among many revs in the 1960s–70s. From Anti-War organizers to the Black Panthers who quoted it frequently, the line reverberating and influencing far beyond the much smaller ranks of those who called themselves “Maoists.” It seemed so basic, it didn't occur to would-be revolutionaries like myself that it wasn't anywhere near as simple as it seemed, and that in fact i didn't fully understand it at all.
Mao Z's starting analysis accepted the lumpen as ordinary people, not as primarily “dangerous” or exotic. Our guy wasn't afraid of them. Humanizing them in his analysis, Mao was painting there with broad brushstrokes, in optimistic colors, of the lumpen as victims shaped by poverty and oppression—thus as potential revolutionary tinder. This concise, seemingly easy to understand explanation of Mao's was a pretty radical change of class understanding for Marxists back then. It reflected a newer understanding of realities out in the capitalist periphery.
The other thing that many of us didn't grasp, is that Mao's words weren't just another theory, like Marx or Bakunin had. Mao's theories were in a whole different ballpark from those earlier comrades. Not because he was necessarily any more observant, but because his theory was shaped by the political experiences of millions of lumpen over almost two generations in China from the early 1900s to the 1940s. These ideas had been reforged over and over on the anvil of oppressed people's experience, up to and including all-out revolutionary war, year after year. Understanding paid for in many human lives, and which carried that more than one individual's personal weight to it.
What our guy Mao Z knew even then, subtly coloring those first words in 1926 when he called them a potential “revolutionary force,” was that the lumpen played a key role in the revolutionary process for him. They weren't just bit players or minor actors on the large stage of overturning society. The lumpen in China were a major, and even at some times and places a decisive factor, in the mass revolutionary struggle that actually took place. Whether that fit anyone's theory or not. They burst through all that. That's what becomes clearer when analyzing in depth the class politics of the Chinese revolutionary experience.
* This is a very simplified and abbreviated version of the opening of “Mao Z's Revolutionary Laboratory & The Lumpen/Proletariat,” which is the only English-language work we know of which traces and analyzes in useful detail Mao and his party's actual work with the lumpen, and how that evolved with their political theory. “Mao Z's Revolutionary Laboratory & The Lumpen/Proletariat” is short book-length itself, but is the second part within a larger volume, The “Dangerous Class” and Revolutionary Theory: Thoughts On the Making of the Lumpen/Proletariat (Kersplebedeb, 2017). Readers interested in following up this practical experience of millions of people in struggle over many years together, should definitely read the complete version in J. Sakai's The “Dangerous Class” and Revolutionary Theory.
Over and over, in the struggle in those early years, Mao Z ran into and found common cause with lumpen/proletarian fighters. Retreating after the disastrous, ambitious, 1927 “Autumn Harvest Uprising” during the first year of the open civil war, the small core of a thousand revolutionary soldiers led by Mao took shelter upon the Chingkangshan mountain range, an elevated and remote plateau that was a traditional refuge for bandits and other fugitives. They were only a tenth of the forces that uprising had started with, and Mao Z had been disavowed by the Central Committee and stripped of his party leadership positions. Not that it had made much difference to those revolutionaries resting and regaining strength on the mountains. They were being schooled in learning how to survive as guerrillas 101.
The “red” survivors ran into two bandit chiefs who were said to be Triad secret society members—Wang Tso and Yuan Wen-t'sai—with their little armies. Both of them former bandits turned army unit commanders of the new modern capitalist national army, turned back to bandit leaders. Their bands quickly became “red” and joined Mao's small army on the mountain, which increased then from one to three “regiments” (later, after Mao's main force left the area, they were rumored to have reverted to banditry again; in any case both chiefs were killed in the constant fighting of that time, as so many were).2
Starting the next Spring of 1928, other “red” forces began converging with Mao's as the new Red Army began to take shape. General Chu Teh (Zhu De in the new translation system) became the commander-in-chief of the rapidly growing central Red Army, with Mao Z as the chief political officer, in a historic partnership that shifted the center of gravity of the entire revolutionary leadership to the distant universe of mass guerrilla war in the countryside. Chu Teh was then the more famous, as a noted mercenary general, and the force—with its many tens of thousands of soldiers—was often called “the Chu-Mao army” in the Chinese newspapers and by the public.
A career military officer, in difficult circumstances Chu Teh had won battlefield promotion to general, and was a star in Chinese military circles. Holding powerful capitalist government offices that came with a high income from the customary bribes and graft, Chu Teh soon had a mansion, a harem with several wives as well as concubines, and a heavy opium habit. Before he conquered his long-time addiction to put everything else away and become a revolutionary. It's no surprise that Chu Teh was also a senior member of the lumpen/proletarian Elder Brothers, a tie he freely admitted actively sustaining and using in his Communist guerrilla years.3
The Elder Brothers were the dominant lumpen secret society in the key Yangtze valley region. Many members came to hold responsible positions in the local revolutionary movement and the insurgent Red military.
In those first years of the Red Army, when the whole democratic movement was reeling on the defensive, retreating under constant attack, forced under that great repressive pressure to transform into an illegal mass movement of undergrounds and partisan organizers and rebel militias and soldiers by the many thousands—or perish—the lumpen/proletariat were the indispensible social base for the revolutionaries. Not simply some useful people, but temporarily the key strata, maybe not according to anyone's admitted political doctrine but in the actual real time situation.
At the party's 1929 Gutian conference, two years after the Red Army's founding, Mao Z's report on their political-military situation bluntly said that their military's “roving banditism” and other such political problems had their root in the reality that “the lumpen-proletariat constitute the majority in the Red Army” (while in those years of rebuilding right after the Autumn Harvest uprising, Mao also had reported that “the soldiers of peasant or working class origin in the Fourth Army in the Border Region constitute an extreme minority.”). Lumpen/proletarian soldiers were the definite majority of the many thousands of revolutionary fighters under his leadership. Although neither Mao Z nor the rest of the party leadership were eager to broadcast this heretical and scandalous situation.4
This major revolutionary role for the lumpen was only normal, we should say, in the context of China then. Since the same surprising class configuration had been responsible for the much larger mass movement which the new revolution drew its lifeblood from. A giant peasant rebellion in the form of militant Peasant Associations had broken out in 1926 across Southern China, centered in the expansive rural countryside of Hunan Province and contiguous areas, and comprising at least 4.5 million peasants.
In reporting on the new rebellion in the countryside, Mao Z didn't place the Communist Party at the center of events, because they weren't. Although the relatively small numbers of Communist cadres would try to hold village meetings and inspire the peasants to start local branches of the associations, before quickly moving on as they usually had to. Instead, he placed as the key instigators a new grouping of the most oppressed themselves—which he referred to as the “utterly destitute.”
This was difficult to pin down on the surface, because the party was reporting from the countryside through a filter. Bluntly, closeting the lumpen as much as possible. Because the major role of the lumpen in the revolution was so counter to established Marxist doctrine, both Mao Zedong and the party itself worked to lessen the flashy guest appearances of their lumpen/proletariat on late-night tv. Remember, this was a time when Mao Z was being heavily attacked within the party for recognizing the radical potential of lumpen outlaws. Party leader Li Li-san even explicitly criticized him for the sin of “guerrillaism infected by the viewpoint of the lumpenproletariat.”5
In Mao's 1927 “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” referring to surveys which showed the overall shape of the movement, Mao mentions one in Changsha county, which counted the poor peasants as 70% of the Peasant Associations' membership. Which Mao thought representative for the overall membership of the militant Peasant Associations in Hunan province. Mao then added a significant point, that there was a sub-category of the very most poor, the “utterly destitute,” which accounted for 20% of the peasant movement's total members.
Even more, Mao goes on to say that almost all the grassroots leadership at the local level were poor peasants and especially the very poorest. In fact, according to Mao, in one of the best-surveyed areas with mature peasant organizations, it was shown that “… of the officials in the township associations in Hengshan County the utterly destitute comprise 50 per cent…” There's no question that this newly identified social strata he named “the utterly destitute” played a key leadership role in the militant movement, apparently far beyond their size in the population. But who were they?
In fact, the “utterly destitute” were our old friends the rural lumpen/proletariat all over again. The Communist Party central committee editorial group supervising the later republishing of Mao's writings admitted that by the “utterly destitute,” Mao specifically meant two groups together: the “rural lumpen-proletariat” and the “rural proletariat.” The second was only a tiny fig leaf. What was really happening was that the rural lumpen themselves were playing a big grassroots leadership role in the rural uprising that would transform all China. A good day, for outcasts and outlaws.
It seems that everywhere Mao looked in those early days of the 20th century in rural China, the lumpen/proletariat were involved when battles against the rulers broke out. That this was true of the most important mass movement in China's history—the peasant movement which became the popular base of anti-capitalist guerrilla war and eventual revolution—only throws more fuel onto our theoretical camp fire.6
It was not all positive report cards. As the revolutionary war developed, in 1939 Mao Z himself warned party cadres that it was in the nature of the lumpen to “waver” and “vacillate” between revolution and counter-revolution. At the same time, however, he reaffirmed that at the root most lumpen/proletarians still remained innocent victims of oppression who needed the revolution's help in liberating and reforming themselves. Less positively, he warned: “While one portion is easily brought over by the reactionary forces, the other portion has the possibility of participating in the revolution.”7