Marx and Engels on the Lumpenproletariat and the Poor Laws

What if the English Poor Laws helped reproduce the social conditions Marx and Engels associated with the lumpenproletariat? This paper argues that their critique of the Poor Laws and their concept of the lumpenproletariat form part of a common analysis of capitalist accumulation and the production of relative surplus population. Marx and Engels understood poor relief as a mechanism embedded in capitalist reproduction, stabilising dependency, exerting downward pressure on wages, and fragmenting the working class. The lumpenproletariat, situated at the lowest strata of pauperism, serves as a conceptual bridge between surplus population and the institutional regulation of poverty. By clarifying this connection, the article repositions Marx and Engels within nineteenth-century debates on poverty and highlights their divergence from classical political economy, particularly regarding the structural limits of reform within capitalism.