The "dangerous class", the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
I think Haus is right - what Marx is referring to here as 'the dangerous classes' is more commonly called the 'lumpenproletariat', at least in Marxian theory. Marx disliked them mainly because he saw them as being more likely to have a counter-revolutionary impact than anything else. The Wikipedia article on the term has a couple of interesting bits about how groups that Marx would probably have seen as part of the lumpenproletariat (mutineers, for example) have occasionally played roles in organised revolutionary movements. It also mentions that In modern Russian,[4] Turkish,[5], Persian, and Spanish, lumpen, the shortened form of lumpenproletariat, is sometimes used to refer to lower classes of society. The meaning of the term is roughly analogous to scrounger, riff raff, hoi polloi, white trash, bogan, or yobbo.
I don't personally think the term, or the theoretical framework it comes from, is actually terribly useful to thinking about modern day class rhetoric. A word like 'chav' often seems to mean "someone who doesn't have what I consider to be good taste", which I don't think maps at all neatly onto a Marxian analysis of society. More importantly , I think 'chavs' are probably seen as a threat to bourgeois society (wandering around shopping centres in hooded tops, drinking cider and scaring nice people); Marx's problem with the lumpenproletariat was that they made it harder to organise an effective revolutionary movement against the social order. Marx might or might not have seen lads in hooded tops as potentially counter-revolutionary, but I certainly don't think that what he meant by 'scum' (the one time that he seems to have used the term) is what anyone means when they use the word 'chav'.
Good points there.
Fistly, there's the issue of definition. Personally I think that "chav" refers precisely to the potential for the sorts of criminal and non-normative behaviour that are associated with white working class. I think "chav" is about far more than a matter of taste in dress etc. This is why I referred to Marx's notion of "scum" - and thank-you for finding the quote. That's precisely the one I was thinking of.
Secondly, making Marx "fit" is very difficult, I agree, but as I say above, who else has theorised class distinctions so thoroughly?
To my mind chavs are white working class, but not all white working class are chavs.
And finally - another point. The white working class are disparaged with terms like "chav" because it stereotypes what is seen as "wrong" with them. I reckon the reason we don't have a similar disparaging term for the middle class, however badly they may behave when, for instance, it comes to getting their kids into the right school, is because the middle classes are "playing the game" as it were. They're sustaining contemporary social norms, where "chavs" are a grotesque parody of them. |
) I was able to see that there was a way of life out there where you could slack about^H^H study and end up with a decent job!