Lumpen Proletariat

Yesterday as I passed Sucat moments before they closed the SLEX like a finish line at 11 a.m. I resolved to write about ICT and rallying as I remembered all the rallies I attended as a disgruntled political science major in my youth, and then I saw them.

They came by many names, the truly poor and uneducated Filipinos, not those who are poor for survey purposes as a phenomenon in social statistics. I came to Sucat to visit family, my mother taught me that it is better to be over-dressed than underdressed since one can have the latter for the former if needed be. I came to Sucat dressed well, I was going to a funeral, but there they were, the lumpen proletariat.

Lumpen proletariat is a term coined by my other favorite long-haired Jew to describe the poorer of the poor, the outcast and undesireable, those who live on a day to day basis on whatever is available to them on the streets. They also came with their best dress which may or may not include old slippers, yet we were there side by side as it rained in sobs.

The term as coined is inherently othering and might as well be so to the political scientists in every Philippine street corner as they discuss politics and current events over gin and water. I relaized now that they were called jologs or permutations of the latter term, the undesired and sometimes, literally the great unwashed or unbathed for that matter.

But yesterday we were bathing in a mix of rain, sweat and tears, which in combination smells of sadness. As the crowds swelled I felt for my high-tech low-end cellphone and decided it was better to watch it at home for the wait brought hysteria to people, the street-corner or kanto political scientists were there and they were analyzing the situation, out loud, and they were not even drinking gin.

As the ICT portion of this entry, I decided to go to family and watch on TV. And because GMA was not giving good coverage of the funeral march I turned to ABS-CBN. Here is how cellphones helped with rallying. Friends were also present at the memorial park and they kept texting, asking where the march was and we kept them updated, the crowd eagerly anticipated the arrival so much that there were so many false alarms that our friends texted over twice an hour. And that is how ICT affected our friends' rally experience.

An experiment came to mind after the burial, which came more of predictive observations. I made a personal bet that the crowd will not disperse quickly.

Lumpen or raggedy proletariat, are not politically valued as others of the class, this class within the economically poorer class are usually neglected because they can easily be swayed and are even described as a counter-revolutionary force because they depended on the upper-class' existence for day to day survival. They had no cellphones nor had internet access.

My prediction was that the crowd will not disperse and will have a vigil of sorts, I was wrong. Almost nearly an hour after the rites, Sucat was empty, and unusally clean, and as I climbed the overpass at Sucat, they were still there, as they always are, sleeping on the wet floor.