The Left's Strategy for Reaching Out to the Lumpen Proletariat

In 1969, the Black Panthers were talking to a gang in Chicago called the Blackstone Rangers. The FBI sent them a letter saying that they'd had a hit out on him. That turned out not to be taken very seriously necessarily and definitely not to be true. But it just goes to show that they immediately start to try to create cracks and breaks in these political coalitions wherever they can. In hip hop artists like Bamboo or Dead Prez or Killer Mike, they constantly make references to street gangs as members of the lumpen proletariat.