this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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GenZedong
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A lot of people don't trust certain parts of society such as the homeless and I understand why. I wouldn't trust a mafia boss or a mobster, someone with a record for willingness to do crime against the defenseless. It's a fascist mentality.
However I would like to add my two cents with brief experience of homelessness and just general interactions with a broad section of lumpen. Be it street musicians or prostitutes. Sadly I only have anecdotes on my side which is part of the issue, it's very difficult to do empirical research on this subject and avoid biases.
In my brief experience of homelessness the only person who immediately approached me was another homeless person. He immediately noticed that something wasn't right with me and came with advice, in the meanwhile I've likely had more than a 1000 people walk past me without a care and you might wonder why didn't I go to an institution? Well because they dismantled them.
Marxism is based on Dialectical-Materialism, it means the body is the mind is the body and practical experience is necessary for change to happen. You cannot simply "fix" someone with a mental exercise. I think many Chauvinists dismiss the lumpen because they toss them a book and expect class consciousness to sort it out. It's not that simple, change needs structure that supports it.
I have found this one of the major weakness of the modern day left movement. There is a lot of effort trying to pull down the petite bourgeoise, not a lot of efforts pulling up the disenfranchised. It ends up being left upon a religious institution, the Heartfelt liberal or the extraordinarily rare mutual-aid group. All of which get infiltrated by the right.
I have never encountered a communist in the presence of the "lower classes" but I have had reactionaries try to befriend me and idk if people realize how far the influences of 1 neo-fash can spread. So this guy I will call him Measurehead, because that's what his personality was like, yeah a competitive racist. But the guy literally inserted himself anywhere and he's been all the way to China and around. Which has really bothered me because this is the kind of people who go around to the lumpen everywhere and spread their ideology. This one guy has probably ended up influencing hundreds by now if not more. And he was so good at gathering a crowd around him it's like scary to see. The way how he immediately could spot who to turn to in order to gather a crowd around him.
It scares me because the sort of people who get co-opted by the likes of him include people who would be willing to work tripple shifts for half of the pay. Regardless how one feels about the downtrodden, you're going to have to deal with them. That is a fact. This is the reason why I have been trying to shine a little bit of a light on the issue. It's not just because I've read Mao or Malcom or Che, although I believe their personal life experiences had influenced them to arrive to similar conclusions.
It's a good reminder, thanks for bringing it up. It's a strategic thing and, more importantly, a humane thing. We should be doing what we can to uplift the most downtrodden, which means empowering, educating, building ties, etc. As opposed to looking at it in a distanced charity sort of way, the way that the capitalist class does.
I think this is in some ways a symptom of individualism, the tendency to approach it in this way. You could have 50 people read the same book independently and draw wildly different interpretations. Education is an organized process, not a matter of pointing in a vague direction and hoping.