“Lumpenproletariat” is exactly the kind of idea an educated German theorist would come up with in the wreckage of the industrial revolution and it’s ridiculous to try to carry that notion forward to the age of cell phones and heavily armed maoist prostitutes and if anyone can’t understand that you should throw grass at them until they stop being dorks because they’re too far gone to touch it themselves.
Like ffs read even one anthro text about black market and grey market economies and stop treating The Man’s legal system like anything but a criminal organization.
I think the problem is that the LP is a meta class. Like how the working classes are not a monolithic bloc but include the proletariat, the peseantry, the artisans, the lowest strata of the PB etc, all with their own class relations.
The Lumpens are everyone from a beggar to someone who steals to live to the mafia to an opera singer or artist who relies on bourgeois donations rather than wages. Heck, there’s an argument to be made that someone who runs an NGO is a kind of “Lumpenbourgoise”
All of these have the sense that the existence of the strata is dependant on the stability of the capitalist system and instability hurts them, but they have wildly different revolutionary potential
Opera singers are lumpen?
It was, up to the mid 20th century common to label Actors of all types lumpen. Because their industry is reliant on the rich to exist due to the economic costs of the form. Only some of this is the traditional associations of acting with sex work.
Most Opera Singers are iterant contract workers, who work for organisations that themselves are entirely reliant on donations from the rich, and sometimes governments. The rest have a wealthy patron or are already independent financially.
There are very few of the mid century repertory companies left, mostly state funded low grade German houses. Opera Companies make negligible money from ticket sales. Not only is it not profitable, it cannot be made so.
If the capitalist system goes down and the new socialist government doesn’t pick up the slack then they lose not just their current jobs but the entire industry. They’ll be collectivised like in AES high art companies or cease to exist.