The Lumpenproletariat And Class Consciousness

I was doing some research into the Weimar Republic (Germany 1919-1933) and ran into this passage at Britannica:

Because of the hopes aroused in 1918–19, the fact that no far-reaching plan for securing public control over industry or for breaking up the big landed estates was carried through had two consequences. First, although the German working class undoubtedly improved its political and economic status under the republic, a considerable portion of it was embittered by the failure to effect drastic reform of the social and economic systems. This disenchantment was to provide the left-wing opposition with strong working-class support, which weakened both the Social Democratic Party and the republic.

This brought to mind Whittaker Chambers's observation that as of the 1920s, German was in fact the language of international socialism, and Germany was the locus of the movement. My takeaway from the link above is that the German working class at the time had clearly articulated interests that it systematically pursued, if utterly without success.

I was looking up Weimar because I've been seeing references to a contemporary "Weimar America", but a few minutes' thought brings me to the conclusion that any parallels are superficial at best. Consider that the class interests that have been advanced most visibly since 2020 are those of the Lumpenproletariat, the urban underclass, not the working class, whose interests have been more clearly bourgeois and Republican at least since Nixon's 1972 landslide defeat of George McGovern.

But now let's look at the puzzling case of the SUV that crashed into a Waukesha, WI Christmas parade yesterday evening. The circumstances so far aren't completely clear, but the SUV driver appears to have been identified:

Darrell Brooks Jr. is the man who was taken into custody in connection with the Waukesha Christmas parade tragedy on November 21, 2021, according to police. When Brooks was detained, police found a Ford key on him, according to scanner audio obtained by Heavy.

His social media accounts and online court records show that he is an aspiring rap singer with a lengthy criminal history and two open felony cases for which he was released on $500 and $1,000 bail, the latter just days before the parade deaths.

At 39, he's had a lifetime career as a petty criminal, which places him clearly in the Marxist Lumpenproletariat. But Waukesha and Kenosha, although both in Wisconsin, aren't all that close at about 55 miles distant. It's hard to conclude that the attack, if that's what it was, had any connection with the Rittenhouse trial, in which the defendant was acquitted in charges relating to the deaths and injury of three white Lumpenproletariat:

The motive is not clear. David Begnaud of CBS News tweeted that, according to a law enforcement official, the parade suspect was “fleeing another scene – possibly a knife fight” before injuring 40 people in the parade. “Several LE sources say preliminary: Wisconsin incident appears to be vehicle fleeing a separate crime scene (stabbing) when it plowed into parade. One person in custody. Investigation ongoing but so far no initial link to terror or the recent Rittenhouse verdict w/@tom_winter,” NBC reporter Jonathan Dienst wrote on Twitter.

This strikes me as, if anything, confirmation of the Marxist theory that the Lumpenproletariat, unlike the working class, lacks class consciousness and is not a reliable ally -- Brooks, as far as we can tell so far, was fleeing his personal demons and not acting for or against anyone else's interest. That he should plow through a Christmas parade in Waukesha was unplanned, undirected, and has no similarity to, say, the 2016 Islamist truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market.

This raises the open question of why US elites have allied themsleves with the Lumpenproletariat, who are unreliable, disorganized, and not capable of returning favors even if they wanted to. It's been wealthy elites, from George Soros to Laurene Powell Jobs, who have sponsored ballot measures to raise the felony threshold for crimes like shoplifting, supported the election of district attorneys who decline to prosecute career criminal offenses, and abolish cash bail. The criminals themselves can't organize and pursue that agenda themselves.

In fact, the most organization the criminals themselves can undertake is planning mass smash-and-grab attacks, three of which occurred in the San Francisco area over the weekend. This helps only the criminals on a short term basis, but it hurts the working and middle classes when the stores they patronize close in response, and indeed it hurts the shareholders and managers of those stores as well. The only benefit is to the wealthiest, who are insulated from the effects of their policies and feel virtuous in enabling the Lumpenproletariat.

This is an odd alliance. I'm not sure if it has any historical parallel.