The word Lump in German means ‘a scoundrel, a cheat, a trickster, a
thief’ or ‘a dirty cloth’. Lumpen is the plural of Lump. Marx coined the
term Lumpenproletariat to designate a special class of the lower
working class who, because they are on the fringes of society, are by
nature politically reactionary and so make common cause with the
establishment against their own working class brothers and sisters. The
police, hired body guards and law enforcement in general, according to
Marx, are usually drawn from the ranks of the lumpenproletariat who act
as the social janitors and enforcers of the ruling class. What generally
exemplifies the lump is his intellectual unsophistication and social
reactionism. Many social scientists working on the history of the Third
Reich have pointed out how the rank and file of the National Socialist
German Worker’s Party was drawn from the lumpen. The history of the
Devolution of 1979 likewise demonstrates how the Khomeinists drew on the
lumpen to consolidate their coup and seizure of power.
In the Anglo-European West, and particularly in the USA, lumpenism has
become an endemic part of the popular culture and has drawn within its
orbit whole stratas of society, from the working class to the ruling
class. The popularity of the sound-bite press and conservative talk
radio celebrities, like Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin, is an indication
of American cultural lumpenism. Cultural lumpenism reduces everything to
its most basic denominator gutting all detail or complexity in the
process. Cultural lumpenism cannot comprehend nuance or ambiguity.
Cultural lumpenism demands easy answers to everything and always shies
away from depth of analysis because culture lumpenism can only ever
comprehend simplistic slogans and never intricate details. Given this,
cultural lumpenism is confessedly anti-intellectual and because of this
the logic of cultural lumpenism is the logic of the “chomaq”. Whether we
speak of Hezbollahi thugs in the post-revolutionary era pouring acid
into the faces of un-hejab-ed women on the streets or the shameless
AIPAC thugs of IC bandwidth, we are essentially speaking about the same
creature.
Whatever flack she got over her article, and maybe some of the analyses
could use re-thinking and fine tuning, Azadeh Azad put her finger on the
nerve of a profound truth: a profound truth which if not overcome will
spell the end of Iran and Iranian society as we know it. Whether beating
chests for the one handed so-called ‘supreme leader’ or for the
uhj/Zionistan, Iranians by and large have become victims to the malaise
of cultural lumpenism, and nowhere is this more in evidence than on this
very site. Be that as it may, no form of cultural lumpenism is more
obnoxious than the American one. Iranians in the USA, not overcoming the
cultural lumpenism of a previous era, have also taken on board the
cultural lumpenism of their racist WASP hosts hook, line and stinker.
This, in itself, is indication that the mainstream of the
Iranian-American sub-culture has been thoroughly corrupted and so is now
corrupt from head to toe.
Ihr seid Kultur-Lumpen!
