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fsa ad Se ba: oa Cc o~ 7 how socially useiul their knowledge and skills ray later prove to be, they are et{il "dependents," a pleasant word for parasites, “Rather than earn a living, students chisel or hustle for one, Even the son of a wember ef the ruling class knows that he has gotten his sports car by finagling it out of his old man, not through productive labor (like his father's workers) or legalized, respec table plunder (Like his father); he relates to his father like a call girl or swindler? Students are denicd even bourgeois ¢emocratic rights, As neither workers ner owners, living under coercive rules vithout even the illusion of having chosen the authority over them, students share some of the experience of the more clearly classless elements of society, the true lumpenproletariat, This experience has at least some effect on their conscfousness, They know vhat it 4s to be considered a parasite and to live like one, Their class loyalties weaken, The sanctity of both work and private property .is questioued, Of course they are still largely products of their natal class, But because their class position is now ambiguous, many of them slip out of the class roles for which they supposedly were being trained, and some find it quite easy to become outright class traitors, Some sons and daughters of workers compete for managerial careers, and a few even become lower level bosses over their parents, Some sons and daughters of tke wealthiest capitalists become conscious revolutionaries, seeking to overthroy their parents’ rule, and a few even succced in merging with the workers, . ‘ But the sost striking phenomenon is that of the drop-out, who slides directly fiom an existence with some superyicial resemblances to the lumpenproletariat into becoming a bona fide member of that class, And during the present period, the beginning of the final collapse of imperialism, that is becoming a mass phenomenon, The alienated street people, predominately ex-students whose neighborhood usually adjoin a Black or Brovn ghetto, form an ambiguous connection to the dispossessed lumpenprole- teriat and lover strata cf the proletariat, The potential exists for two kinds of, conflict, and both have already taken plece: in one, whites and Third World people fight against each other; in the other, both fight together against the police, This tepresents in dramatically clear form the classical ambiguity of and within the Jumpenproletariat, . The Lumpenproletariat and the Working Class Although the Jumpenproletariat must play a role in revolutionary struggle, as a class it 3s incapable of being the main force, Its capacity for fighting and destruction may be great, but cf all clarses within society it is the least capable of scizing and maintaining state pcwer, One errer currently being made within the movement is empiricism, which bases its analy: only on what hes already taken place here and now, In any pre-revolutionary or early revolutionary condition, the least stable elements within society are those te go into motion first, This almost aluays includes stuccnts and elements of the lumpenproleiaric Enpiriciom wistakes this first force for the leading force or vanguard,, and concludes thet the revolution will be rade by precisely those elements in fact Icast able to carry it through to completion, In developed capitalist socicty, there js of covrse only one class other than the bourgeoisie capable of holding state power; that class is the working cless, Auyore who questions this is not a revolutionary, for revolution at this point in his story atais the ov.vthiow ¢€ the bovrge e by the proletariat, (One can, however, be a fighting anti-inperialist, totally c itted to the destruction of the bourgeois state, without being a revolutionary, But whether the means of destruction are fire or plague,