chapotraphouse

From the Mao link on that page:

Apart from all these, there is the fairly large lumpen-proletariat, made up of peasants who have lost their land and handicraftsmen who cannot get work. They lead the most precarious existence of all. In every part of the country they have their secret societies, which were originally their mutual-aid organizations for political and economic struggle, for instance, the Triad Society in Fukien and Kwangtung, the Society of Brothers in Hunan, Hupeh, Kweichow and Szechuan, the Big Sword Society in Anhwei, Honan and Shantung, the Rational Life Society in Chihli and the three northeastern provinces, and the Green Band in Shanghai and elsewhere. One of China's difficult problems is how to handle these people. Brave fighters but apt to be destructive, they can become a revolutionary force if given proper guidance.

This is more optimistic about their revolutionary potential than Marx, but it still has significant reservations ("but apt to be destructive"). A footnote from the editor adds:

Through these organizations the lumpen-proletarians sought to help each other socially and economically, and sometimes fought the bureaucrats and landlords who oppressed them. Of course, such backward organizations could not provide a way out for the peasants and handicraftsmen. Furthermore, they could easily be controlled and utilized by the landlords and local tyrants and, because of this and of their blind destructiveness, come turned into reactionary forces. In his counter-revolutionary coup d'etat of 1927 Chiang Kai-shek made use of them to disrupt the unity of the labouring people and destroy the revolution.

Homeless people, sex workers, unemployed people, petty drug dealers, and disabled people are a passively rotting mass with no class consciousness and no revolutionary potential.

Listen to yourself. Read your own definition out loud and listen to yourself.

It's the twenty first century. Falling back on the form of a scientific theory as it existed over a century ago and either dismissing or never even considering the vast amount of additional data we have avilable and the drastically different nature of the experiment is silly. The whole point of marxism as a scientific discipline is that if available evidence changes the theory can be brought up to date to better model the observable world. The social sciences have undergone enormous development since the 1960s and that development has given us tools to better understand the economic relationship of traditionally dismissed and reviled groups within the working class to capital. Marx was writing in a period where the tools of the social sciences were very crude to the point of near uselessness and his theory, and personal beliefs, reflect that. Dogmatically throwing up a definition of class developed in the 1860s using the very crudest tools of sociology and anthropology, in the face of 160 years of further development that has completely overthrown the notion of a depoliticized mess of dirty, icky undesirables, is the height of sillyness. Dalits are organizing. Burakumin are organizing. The role of unemployed tramps given ax handles and a shot of whisky and told to go crush a strike has been replaced by professional police, military, and intelligence agencies. Drug cartels and such organized crime as still exists are deeply integrated in to the state and often constitute quasi-states in their own right.

Where is this passively rotting mass in 2024? Show me this class of people who do not relate to productive capital, who are cast out from the proletariat, who have no revolutionary potential? I demand to see proof of their existence.