"Symptoms become symbols. These identifications can be limited. Trump's symptom takes us to authoritarian fascism. Miranda's liberal identification brings us closer to…American liberal vision. Both of them are effective at accomplishing their goals. The question is: Are these the right goals?…Our answer is not to dismiss the symptom…is to take the symptom all the way.

"How can we make particular struggles into universal struggles?…How do we instead, take the symptom all the way?"

"We think we live in a hyperpolitical age—because of all the identity politics and the cancelling and the culture wars and the everything…but no, that's not politics. That's what happens when meaning becomes a commodity we can buy and sell in the free market. That's pure reaction, pure biological stimulation & algorithmic addiction. What we need is a true universalism—a way to reconfigure all these particulars into a collective popular struggle…I'm sorry, but uh, it's gonna hurt."

Relatedly, there's been some discourse over the definition of "working class", a floating signifier if ever there was one, so also have on my todo list a #lumpentheory Venn diagram of #classposture distribution within the U.S.

Key takeaway from the above?

Labor organizing is work. Hard work, to be sure; nonetheless not the same thing as organizing for societal change.

What Great Depression taught, what even communists of the era had to grapple with, was that identifying as a worker is no bulwark against calamity. We can all be lumpen.

Workerism is a familiar model, when such calamity is easier to ignore, when it has not transformed the very geography of our lived experience. Familiar, yet inaccurate.

@sleepfreeparent

The "-ee" ending on #conveyancée, setting aside the accent for the moment, is akin to parolee or employee: one to which a thing is done. Were this a reference to one collecting such conveyance, the word would end with "-er".

The accent evokes corvée: compelled labor as levy.

The frame of reference is the construction of the word.

Literally, to be of conveyancée #classposture is to be forcibly conveyed. In the context of #lumpentheory, to be levied as exchange-value harvest.

@qwazix

Following up on this, so yes, holding different postures at the same time gets into questions of temporalities and embodiment that would be the advanced-level course of inquiry.

That is, critique of how the models presented by #lumpentheory, like any models, are necessarily overt simplifications, and thus limited in their ability to describe the whole breadth of socio-phenomenological experience.

So, if anything, you've gotten the gist well enough to poke at the boundaries thereof.

Rather, #lumpentheory begins with humus…

Begins with definition of those who are the fundamental matter—the raw material—without which #RentierSociety cannot function.

Just as Marx opined the landlord class would be subsumed by the capitalist class, only for the latter to be colonized by the former…

So too he suggested we lumpen would rot away—being remnants of "old society"—only for the society that followed to enclose and foreclose us, so to more efficiently farm us.

No longer "undefined".

Marx found us too déclassé to even theorize ("entirely undefined, disintegrating mass"); anti-capitalists still today perceive us as "social scum", useful only to "reactionary intrigues" against the true proletariat.

(*cough* "you're only helping so-and-so win" *cough*)

Anarchists, meanwhile, idealize a world we are free-associated out of—where folk can freely choose not to care for the welfare of others—say, during an ongoing pandemic.

#Lumpentheory is neither anti-capitalism nor anarchism.

@violetmadder @richpuchalsky @ciggysmokebringer

We need new parables. New language. New terms to discuss these things. This is project of #lumpentheory.

@richpuchalsky @violetmadder @ciggysmokebringer

There's a reason #lumpentheory speaks of the #FrosteanBargain: a reference to Faust, yes, but also to Robert Frost & to Proteus.

This isn't the blues musician at the crossroads. Not a one-time deal made at a switch (*ahem*) in the road.

Is lifelong commitment. A social contract signed onto in childhood, that must be defended thereafter—through revisionist autobiography—lest one admit they paid full freight & shipping for that bridge in Brooklyn.