Despite the original meaning of the term, now lumpen is not just a declassified element of society. This word is increasingly called the representatives of the criminal world, as well as just tramps and beggars. The lumpen layer played a decisive role in many revolutionary movements, since a person who has neither the past, nor specific goals in life, nor the state that he values, is very easy to give in to any agitation. Materially, the representative of this layer is also easy to interest, although sometimes there are enough promises of a bright future.
Literally, the term "lumpen" means rags, rags, which exactly characterizes the unpleasant and untidy image of a typical tramp. If we consider the modern world, then in it there is a place for this class. Moreover, they are not necessarily tramps asking for alms in public places or living at train stations. Modern lumpen is a person who has no purpose in life, no dream (or it is obviously impracticable).
For example, in many teams there is such an employee (it doesn’t matter, man or woman) aged 25 years and up to 40-50. He usually lives with his parents (less often - in a dormitory). He goes to work every day and performs the same functions. He does not care what he is dressed and shod, what he eats and drinks. And surely he has a dream, which he thinks every night, returning from work. It can be a house in California, its own helicopter, or even a flight to Mars. The essence of the dream is absolutely not important, the main thing is that he simply thinks about it, doing nothing for realization.
And if a person appears who can convince such a lumpen that his dream is feasible and you just need to join a certain movement (party, sect), then the dreamer will give up everything (although there is basically nothing to throw) and will run after the leader. He will hand out leaflets (with the same pedantry with which he went to work), run home, agitate or even kill, and almost for free - just in the fight for the dream.
The Communists took advantage of this at the time, involving in their movement all the "humiliated and offended." It was the lumpen proletariat who at one time overthrew the current government, transferring power to the Bolsheviks in the hope that they would realize his dream. And even if this never happens, he will still believe, and when he is disappointed, he will continue to act by inertia, waiting for a new leader. So lumpen is not always a tramp or a ragged man. Outwardly, it may not particularly differ from the surrounding mass, since it is rather a way of life or a state of mind.
Among other things, Marx introduced another concept: the lumpenization of society, implying an increase in the share of representatives of this class. Such a society is easier to manage, it is easier to suggest. Each revolutionary idea can be realized only with a sufficient degree of lumpenization.
In the days of the USSR, this image was so tightly integrated into everyday life, it became generally accepted and to some extent even exemplary, that now there are even separate areas in art that reflect Soviet images, where lumpen is the main character of the plots. In particular, the artist Alexander Erashov works in this direction, part of the work of which is made in the style of the so-called lumpen surrealism.
