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Historian Abdullah Ibrahim argues that in the late 1980s movements with well-defined ideological direction recruited lumpen (déclassé) elements.

The lumpenproletariat is not always counter-revolutionary. Though, in his extremes, Engels supports the shooting of thieves at the start of revolutionary events,Marx’s and Engels’ sense of the relative capacity of the lumpenproletariat as a revolutionary force is ambivalent. The lumpenproletariat vacillates (in The Peasant War in Germany Engels suggests that each day of the revolution sees them change positions) and is prone to reaction, usually offering their services to the highest bidder. But they can also find themselves involved in revolution, as their lack of stability leaves them easily swept up into revolutionary fervour.

Drawing upon a long tradition of negative, upper-class attitudes towards the lower classes, and utilising an already existing vocabulary, Marx and Engels developed the idea of the lumpenproletariat as a tool to expiain what they saw as the existence of a non-revolutionary-or even counterrevolutionary-group within the lower strata of society. Using the term das Lumpenprofetariat to label these disreputable, frightening (and perhaps, from their revolutionary point of view, even embarrassing) ‘social elements’, they were able to make a clear distinction in their own minds between the ‘good’, or ‘conscious’, proletariat and the ‘bad’, or ‘unthinking’, proletariat.

It seems reasonable to suggest that the two men’s idealised vision of a hardworking, reflective and progressive mass proletariat and their vehement reactions to the ragged, bohemian ~umpenpr~~etar~at was a reflection of Marx’s and Engels’ middle-class Biedermeier (or Victorian) mentality more than a faithful picture of social reality. Their reaction to lower-class backwardness was to relegate it (using terms of scorn and ridicule) to the position of an unimportant and undeveloped theoretical category. In short, Marx’s and Engels’ use and development of the concept of the ~umpenpr~~etar~at, when examined in the context of earlynineteenth-century European thought, shows them to be perceiving the world in traditional emotional categories. I believe that they betray, perhaps consciously, but certainly subconsciously, an attitude of condescension, combined with aversion and even fear, towards certain elements of the lower classes.

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote that vagabonds and other lumpenproletarian types, were not the especial products of bourgeois society, but were a group who had "existed in every epoch and whose existence on a mass scale after the decline of Middle Ages preceded the mass formation of the ordinary proletariat". The feudal lumpenproletariat were forced into their of life by the breakdown of the social and economic bases of feudal society.