Apart from all these other classes, there is the fairly large lumpenproletariat, made up of peasants who have lost their land and handicraftsmen who cannot get work. They lead the most precarious existence of all . . . .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. (“Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society”).

Maybe if Westerners could get over their disgust of poor people stuck in desperate times we wouldn’t be losing so badly, on so many fronts.

Further:

There is nothing automatic or certain about the relation between the present insurgencies and the working class. On the contrary, there is an extreme danger that the contradiction between the lumpenproletariat and the working class may become antagonistic (particularly if many workers were to listen to the bourgeois press or PL), The lumpenproletariat is, after all, a parasitic class that lives off the labor of the working class. Workers may perceive anarchic rebellion as a threat to the marginal security they have been able to win from the ruling class. On its side, that part of the lumpenproletariat consisting of students who have dropped out of petit bourgeois, professional, and bourgeois families has been filled with the most virulent anti-working-class ideas. And particular situations may sharpen the contradiction. (Students and street people occupy a housing development from which working-class people have been evicted, and then demand that this be a free People’s Pad, while workers in the surrounding neighborhood cannot afford their rent. Or the same situation may be turned into unified struggle. Out of the People’s Pad project has come intensive organizing for a rent strike in the surrounding community. So the task of first linking and then uniting the struggles of the lumpenproletariat and the working class is not only essential, but needs the work of conscious revolutionaries.

Among Third World people, there is a less clear demarcation between lumpenproletariat and working class than there is between street people and the white working class. Black and brown workers are the last hired and the first fired, so that a large percentage knows what it is to be among the unemployed. Many Black and brown women are on welfare or employed in part-time “domestic” (i.e., servile) positions. The Black Panther Party has shown the way to unite lumpenproletariat with working class – by constantly developing practical programs to Serve the People in areas where the oppression of the lumpen proletariat is an extreme form of oppression suffered by Black working people. Beginning with a base almost entirely within the lumpenproletariat and committed to defending the people against police brutality, the Panthers now have wide support among Black workers, and thanks to the Breakfast for Children program, throughout the Black community. What has been central to this success has been the Panthers’ refusal to take the opportunistic course of organizing around lumpenproletarian demands per se, but rather organizing through the lumpenproletariat as the most victimized members of the Black nation and therefore as ones capable of raising demands for the people as a whole. Although now and again contradictions have intensified between lumpenproletariat and working class within Third World communities, it now seems certain that revolutionary leadership, national oppression, and the intensifying crisis of imperialism will combine to forge revolutionary unity. (This is from Bay Area Revolutionary Union - Red Papers 2 you should read all of it)

I guess. I can see some people for whom that’d hold true, and this is an observation of the whole lumpenproletariat and not of each individual. But even people with great material wealth sell out, changing their entire political stance to align with the person with the most money. I just don’t quite understand who this is a specifically lumpen issue.