The proletariat’s historical insider status required expelling the lumpenproletariat as outsider.

Evidence

So the terms of the alternative are clear: if the heterogeneous excess can be contained within certain limits, reduced to a marginal presence, the dialectic vision of a unified history can be maintained. If, on the contrary, heterogeneity prevails, social logics will have to be conceived in a fundamentally different way. It is at the heart of this alternative that we can locate the masterly move of Marx, which consisted in isolating, from within the world of poverty that the transition to industrialism was generating, a differentiated sector which did not belong to the interstices of history – to the non-historical – but was destined to be a major historical protagonist. … In order to maintain its credentials as an ‘insider’ of the main line of historical development, however, the proletariat had to be strictly differentiated from the absolute ‘outsider’: the lumpenproletariat. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 290

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School reading of Marx’s theory of history as needing a closed totalizing narrative. — connects to: Any antagonistic class must internally bear something of the lumpenproletariat. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 304; The lumpenproletariat’s scandal is that its identity depends on articulation. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 293; Marx saw the lumpen-proletariat as parasitic and a source of state coercion. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1100 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Marx saw the lumpen-proletariat as parasitic and a source of state coercion. #expands (0.90) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1100
• European modernity classified outsiders as either assimilable or eliminable #expands (0.75) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 79