lumpenproletariat

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By all accounts, I repeat, Lewis himself did not believe "that the lumpenproletariat had itself most to blame…."

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Definitions (4)

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  1. noun The lowest, most degraded stratum of the proletariat. Used originally in Marxist theory to describe those members of the proletariat, especially criminals, vagrants, and the unemployed, who lacked class consciousness.
  2. noun The underclass of a human population.

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Examples

  • "Considering how scarce traders had been on Aerie, and how small the population and industry probably still were, we loaded a lot of stuff more massive than usual, machinery and so on." —  Starfarers
  • This is being done with roughnecks, cactus-men, and assorted other wage slaves, but also with an abundant supply of Remade slave labor confined in pens when they are not working, a kind of ultimate bottomline lumpenproletariat, feared, despised, and looked down upon by the humans and aliens who are at least getting paid. —  Asimov's Science Fiction
  • He believes that isolated efforts such as his mean little in a world he comes close to writing off as a living hell, populated by an American lumpenproletariat: —  Lost Generation
  • By all accounts, I repeat, Lewis himself did not believe "that the lumpenproletariat had itself most to blame…." —  Cuba and Oscar Lewis: An Exchange
  • The reason Liberals really hate Wal-Mart is that the whole Liberal mantra rests on a poor and downtrodden * lumpenproletariat. —  The American Spectator
 

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Roget's II Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (1)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. German : Lumpen, pl. of Lump, ragamuffin (from Middle High German lumpe, rag) + Proletariat, proletariat (from French prolétariat; see proletariat).
 

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