title, im paid by the hour so im wondering if its calculable the amount of time id need to be clocked in n not work to match the surplus value extracted from me
or am i stupid n misunderstanding surplus value
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2025
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Maybe this isn't the place for it, but I have some uncertainties or perhaps misunderstandings with how people talk about Lumpen/Lumpenproletariat. Is my understanding of these terms wrong? Wouldn't I, as a disabled unemployed adult, be classified as lumpen? Wouldn't homeless people be? Wouldn't prisoners be (including all the many people wrongly or unjustly imprisoned)? People pushed into sex work? As modern socialists, these are all groups that we support, and many of our comrades fall into these groups, so why do so many people still use lumpen in exclusively a negative sense? It's one thing to read books written in the 1800s or turn of the century referring to lumpen exclusively as unthinking, uneducated thieves and bandits and criminals, 'vagabonds' and prostitutes that serve no value to the socialist movement, but seeing it used exclusively in a negative sense or carrying those same sentiments in the modern day makes me wonder if these people are actually my comrades, or if I just seriously misunderstood the term.
Socialist movements in the past century have made a point of including the lumpens as continuous with the rest of the proletariat. The line between the two is very blurry and not very instructive.
Any worker could easily and suddenly become unemployed, or homeless, or disabled, or imprisoned; even being removed from the surplus army of labor wouldn't change their position in capitalist reality. Also, the informal and domestic economies are not fully covered by the prole/lumpen dichotomy.
Especially in the present era of neocolonialism and lower-than-ever transparency, I find it useful to categorize by credit and debt, passive income and passive expenses. There are lifetime net creditors, and lifetime net debtors. Because of the compounding structure of the economy, there will always be many times more net debtors than net creditors.