In one of our conversations about Andean Lives (I believe it was at the Florencio), Jon mentioned the multiple, distinct forms of abuse that Gregorio and Asunta faced throughout their lives. It is absolutely true that these forms of abuse are intrinsically linked and feed off one another, so I don’t wish to label them as distinct phenomena. However, our discussions of the subaltern in this course have reminded me of Marx’s ‘lumpen abused’, a rather problematic categorical term for the ‘most abused’ group of people in a society. Integral to this concept is the idea of multiple forms of abuse converging to structurally suppress a group. As such, I think Marx would absolutely label the experience of Gregorio and Asunta documented within Andean Lives as an example of ‘lumpen abuse’. Take this quote, for example: “That’s justice for you—with mistis, the law looks the other way. So I was falsely and unjustly put in jail for having sipped some stew a friend offered me”. I believe Jon referred to this as state-sponsored abuse (or something along those lines), emphasizing it as distinct from the other forms of abuse and violence documented in the book, such as the inter-personal abuse (both physical and emotional) Asunta faced at the hands of her partners, including Gregorio. Again, I do find the idea of ‘lumpen abused’ to be problematic and, frankly, a bit redundant within contemporary discourse. But I do wish to contrast it against our concept of the subaltern; a concept that reminded me of lumpen abuse as soon as I heard it. Firstly, I have a question for any experts on the subaltern that might be reading this: how, if at all, is the concept of the subaltern better than Marx’s lumpen abuse? This is a question of curiosity, not a critique. What does using subaltern do not just differently, but better? Given that using the term lumpen abuse can trap people within a lens of trauma, highlighting their experiences of abuse but also sensationalizing them and reducing them to products of that trauma instead of human beings, I’m curious to see if the subaltern has the same effect. And if using subaltern has this effect as well, or one similar to it, I would love to know more appropriate terms for framing our discourse around groups of people who do face structural abuse. It feels like a safe bet to just avoid generalizing at all times, but I’m going to be in an academic setting for at least the next few years and will almost certainly encounter discourses around this again, so I’ll see what comes up. Maybe we’ll come up with a better label (lol – someone totally said this about lumpen abuse and look where we are!) someday if using subaltern isn’t adequate.
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Andean Lives and Marx’s ‘lumpen abuse’
3 replies on “Andean Lives and Marx’s ‘lumpen abuse’”
I don’t know the phrase “lumpen abuse” from Marx… perhaps you could supply a reference? But he does talk about the lumpenproletariat, whom, incidentally, he does not see as a revolutionary class, and on whom he rather looks down: in the Communist Manifesto, he calls them “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.”
I think the “subaltern” is a much more productive term, in many ways. Again, though, it’s worth tracing its history and use. Look at Ranajit Guha’s work, for instance.
A more interesting phrase of Marx’s, meanwhile, is vogelfrei, which he uses to describe the nascent proletariat not yet tied to the factory system. They are “free as birds,” but for that reason also nomadic and perpetually on the move, along the lines we discussed when we looked at Andean Lives.
Jon,
I came across the term lumpen abused – certainly derived from the lumpenproletariat – in an anthropology course last term. I’ll try to remember its title, but it was mentioned in an ethnography of San Francisco’s unhoused population who were struggling with substances use.
I know these are serious topics, but I found “lumpen abuse” funny. I’ve never heard that before. Lumpenproleteriat sounds like a German shrimp or crayfish or other spiky crustacean dumpling. Not that German food has anything that good. Lumpen abuse is a different kind of dumpling. Perhaps pork. It’s super late for me right now and words are funny. It seems lumpen abuse is like structural, intersectional abuse. In my second position paper I argued that something like the subaltern is someone who can only be represented in an overdefined way in dominant discourse. They can be represented, but only superficially as they are denied ambiguity and movement between identities and so on (I think this ambiguity and movement is crucial to being human–think of “token” characters in movies.. I think by definition they lack moral complexity. Unless there is a plot twist– which is often uncanny..).