Trump as Lumpenbourgeois

 

There are a lot of ways to look at Donald Trump.  One useful way is to think of Donald Trump as a member of what I like to call the lumpenbourgeoisie.  As far as I know, I made that term up.  I don't know if that is a term that other people have used before - if they have, I am probably using the word differently than they did.

As I see it, there's the actual class that has monopolistic control over the means of production - the bourgeoisie - and then, somewhere below that, there is the lumpenbourgeoisie.  But I am not using this terminology in a crude, vulgar, mechanical, economistic sense.  It's not as if there's some number which divides the bourgeoisie from the lumpenbourgeoisie, as economic income brackets.  

To understand the difference between the bourgeoisie and the lumpenbourgeoisie, one must understand the concept of class formation.  Marx wrote about this complex and fascinating topic, though his remarks are brief and scattered, and require interpretation.  In the second section of the Communist Manifesto, for instance, he writes that "The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class...."  If you're like me, when you first read that sentence, it struck you as rather odd.  Formation of the proletariat?  That's our task?  Doesn't the proletariat already exist?  Whatchoo talking about, Karly?  Haven't you been writing about the oppression of already-existing proletariat for the entire first section of this very document?  Indeed, isn't the goal of communism the self-abolition of the proletariat?  Is Marx saying that proletariat needs to form itself, only to abolish itself?  Well, in a word, yes.  But what could that mean?  And why?

Answer the puzzle with another puzzle: why does the bourgeois state exist?  Why doesn't the bourgeoisie simply rule over the proletariat, directly?  Isn't that the rhetoric of conservatives?  Small government, yadda yadda... at the extreme end, the "anarcho-capitalists" of the Von Mises-style Austrian School variety sometimes fantasize about a country in which no government existed at all and all government services are provided by a complex, market-created network of private security services and insurance companies.  So, if that's what the bourgeoisie wants, then why isn't that how it is?  Aren't the bourgeoisie in control?  Who's in charge here?

Some people say that the dreams of the "anarcho-capitalists" are simply impossible.  But they're wrong. Astute observers have pointed out that something very much like the "private government" of the Austrian economists has existed.  It was called feudalism.  Every government service was once "His Majesty's," literally - and before that, they were the private property of local feudal lords.

Notice that Marx identifies class formation as a political project.  Why does the bourgeoisie need the bourgeois state?  For the class formation of the bourgeoisie.  Because a class is more than just a numerical income bracket, or even a category of income (wages vs. capital gains).  Class may be fundamentally, infrastructurally economic, but above this is an entire superstructure: a class is not only an economic relation to the means of production, but every class also has its own social customs, its own culture, its own ethics, its own philosophy, its own forms of consciousness.  Thus there is not only a bourgeois economic relation to the production process, there are also the bourgeois family, bourgeois laws, bourgeois legal precedent, bourgeois manners, bourgeois morality, bourgeois aesthetics, bourgeois traditions in music and film and popular culture, and so on.  (Notice that, before Marx, the concept of "bourgeois" had already been analyzed, not as an economic class defined by its ownership of industry, per se, but as an ethic, characteristic of civil society - thus the often quite witty critiques of the "bourgeois gentilhomme," with his bourgeois morality, coming from the likes of Moliere, Rousseau, and Stirner.)

Marxists say things like "the bourgeoisie wants this" or "the bourgeoisie wants that," and conservatives reply that it's meaningless to say that the bourgeoisie as a whole wants anything - instead, there are only individual capitalists, who are in competition with each other, and who therefore have interests that are antagonistic to each other.  In a certain sense, they have a point.  But this is exactly where the state comes in.  The purpose of the bourgeois state is to align the interests of the bourgeoisie as a class.  The bourgeoisie has to discipline individual members of the bourgeoisie to align them with the interests of the class as a whole.  This implies a project to compel individual capitalists to conform at a cultural level as well as economic.  In a word, the bourgeois state exists to defend the interests of the class as a whole from bourgeois individuals.  The state exists to save the bourgeoisie from itself.  This is how the process of class formation occurs.

This may sound a bit like circular reasoning, and in a sense it is.  The bourgeoisie formed the bourgeois state, and the bourgeois state forms the bourgeoisie.  To put it differently, there is a dialectical relationship between the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois state.  This political project is not something that happened, once and for all, in the distant past - it is a continuous process, self-reinforcing, yet ever-changing, which continues to this day.  Throughout history, the political struggles continually swing this way and that, creating new alignments and constellations of often surprising alliances and cultural formations.  The bourgeois class must not only form itself, it must constantly re-form itself.  For one thing, this political program must be continually updated as the production process itself is continuously revolutionized with increasingly-frequent innovations.  (As an example: right now, we may be in a period of crisis of class formation, as technology is rapidly changing, and with it come competing ethics of different forms of conservatism, the tech bros versus more traditional, "Christian," American national chauvinism - to put it briefly, the battle of who will dominate: Silicon Valley, or Wall Street.  J.D. Vance seems to be attempting to bridge this divide, but I don't think he has the juice.)

The bourgeois class as a whole employs a variety of means to try to keep individual capitalists in line: everything from education to media propaganda to mockery from late-night talk show hosts up to and including legal proceedings, or even war.  But the political project of class formation is never perfectly achieved.  Try as the bourgeois state might to get all of the capitalists to conform to its values and interests, there is always some remainder that manages to evade its recouperative powers (there is always "value drift").  Indeed, the rogue capitalists may form their own networks, even their own culture - a kind of counterculture as it were.  This portion that manages to evade discipline is what I call the lumpenbourgeoisie.  The lumpenbourgeoisie is the unformed part of the capitalist class, the part that has not yet assimilated to class formation. Numerically, they may have enough liquid investment capital to be considered capitalists, but they do not yet conform to the rules and norms of the bourgeois class.  The lumpenbourgeoisie is a criminalized or semi-criminalized, malignant mass of rogue capitalists which exists in parallel to the bourgeoisie proper, as its distorted shadow.

The lumpenbourgeoisie is not to be confused with the petite bourgeoisie - in many ways they are indeed opposites.  The petite bourgeoisie is the sub-class of small proprietors - contractors, shopkeepers, small business owners.  They are defined by their precarious position - with relatively a relatively small amount of capital (and often, massive debt) they are always in danger of losing their ownership of business and slipping into the proletariat - indeed, culturally, they share much in common with the proletariat already - and thus, to maintain their fragile position, they will assert the values of the haute bourgeoisie all the more proudly and insistently.  Of course, they have their occasional tantrums of rebellion against the haute bourgeoisie as well, but usually this is merely a matter of complaining about the hypocrisy of the haute bourgeoisie - that they fail to live up to their own stated values.  The lumpenbourgeoisie, by contrast, presents themselves as having sufficient capital that they feel no need to conform to bourgeois values (aesthetic values, moral values, etc.), and thus flout them with impunity.  (Whether they actually have sufficient capital or are faking it - even to themselves - is another matter.) It's like Kanye West sings: "Wait 'til I get my money right / Then you can't tell me nothing, right? / Excuse me, were you saying something? / Uh uh, you can't tell me nothing."  (The lumpenbourgeoisie has even less in common with the professional class - doctors, lawyers, college professors, etc. - which is a subclass of the proletariat.)

In same cases, the lumpenbourgeoisie may simply reject bourgeois values, but more often the values of the lumpenbourgeoisie are a weird reflection of bourgeois values, exaggerated or amplified out of all proportion.  The values of the lumpenbourgeoisie are in some essential sense the same as those of the bourgeoisie, but without finesse and refinement.  What the haute bourgeoisie secretly and discretely promotes, the lumpenbourgeoisie loudly proclaims, more or less openly, often buffoonishly or cartoonishly, like Ubu Roi.  The lumpenbourgeois may violate the "norms" of bourgeois society, but is ultimately motivated by the same economic interests.

Class formation is always a rough, violent business.  And so, almost by definition, there is a contradiction, inevitably giving rise to a social antagonism, between the formed/forming bourgeoisie and its state, on the one hand, and the unformed or lumpenbourgeoisie on the other.  But this contradiction, and this social antagonism, is very different from the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat - though the lumpenbourgeoisie may attempt to blur this distinction for its own purposes.  The rogue capitalists and con men of the lumpenbourgeoisie are only in it for themselves.  They may weaken the position of the bourgeois class, but by no means do they in any way augment the power of the proletariat.

There is a spectrum of lumpenbourgeoisness, from bad taste, to mere impolite, loutish, or boorish behavior, through genuinely obscene impropriety, con artistry and corruption, all the way up to violent criminality.  Everything starts to fit into place once one recognizes Trump as a lumpenbourgeois, that is, as an undisciplined capitalist.  (This topic of "discipline" brings up the relationship between Trump and Foucault, author of "Discipline and Punish" which I have written about before.) And once you see Donald Trump as lumpenbourgeois, it's not hard to see many other examples of the lumpenbourgeoisie, throughout the world.  The most obvious example is organized crime.  If we are to believe the legends, the history of the Mafia goes all the way back to the pre-capitalist era, and thus may very literally be an example of the failure of class formation, the retention of feudal aristocratic values in the modern age.  (Certainly, Francis Ford Coppola liked to play up this angle in his Godfather movies, portraying his gangster films in the style of an epic of an aristocratic family.)  But a little closer to reality, we can see that bourgeois class formation sometimes faces obstacles with waves of immigrants and thus historic ethnic enclaves from 19th century German-Americans to turn-of-the-20th-century Irish-Americans have for a period maintained a somewhat lumpenbourgeois character.  Nowadays, it's easy to see the lumpenbourgeois character of the powerful billionaire oligarchs and kleptocrats in Russia, Ukraine, and other Eastern European countries.  For that matter, casting a wider glance, there is the obvious and semi-permanent sub-class of petty bureaucrats in countries all over the world who must be continually bribed - to "grease the wheels" as part of the cost of doing business. 

The ascendancy and rule of the lumpenbourgeoisie cannot last long, especially in the capitalist metropole.  Eventually the haute bourgeoisie always returns to power - usually by co-opting certain elements within the lumpenbourgeoisie to serve itself.  Nonetheless, even a temporary slippage must be perceived by the haute bourgeoisie as a crisis.  But in a world where bourgeois class formation is a never-complete, always changing process, the manners and customs even of the haute bourgeoisie are forever adapting, and the rogue rebel of one year may be the very model of conformity in the next.

See my other essays about Trump, like this one: "Trump avec Foucault" or this one: "What is a Ritual?"