Del Proletaiat Al Lumpen. Sobre El Sujeto Politico En El Capitalismo Contemporaneo

Abstract

This article examines the transformation and dissolution of the political subject in contemporary capitalism, tracing the conceptual shift from the classical proletariat to the lumpenproletariat and socially excluded populations. The author begins with the Marxist formulation of the proletariat as a universal class tasked with emancipation, contrasting it with the structural transformations of modern economic systems.

Through a critical journey across the works of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer), Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and contemporary political theory, the paper explores how technological progress, instrumental reason, and the decline of revolutionary utopias have dismantled traditional class consciousness. The figure of the "lumpen" is analyzed not merely as a marginal social group, but as a defining symptom of an economic order that strips individuals of their political agency, reshaping collective action and posing fundamental challenges to the future of emancipatory politics.