Lumping the Poor: What is the “Underclass”?

They are recidivist criminals, juvenile muggers,heroin addicts, adult winos in stumbling bottle gangs, welfare-dependent mothers of teen-age welfare mothers, homeless ex-mental patients, prostitutes and their pimps. Marx would have counted them among the lumpen proletariat, a class of dropouts from the capitalist stratification system. He also considered them dangerous because of their propensity to sell their criminal skills to the forces of reaction. Today the marginal poor who crowd urban ...