Issue 16 of Lumpen is devoted to class and care and features takes on these themes from a variety of writers who share the experience of poverty and class-based discrimination. Lumpen's editor, Amy, wrote:
'Care is the hidden, knotty and essential work that makes the world go round. It happens behind closed doors. Those early mornings, late nights, meals made, lifts given, medication reminders, bus timetables translated, forms filled, money lent, washing up, bums wiped. It’s the hardest fucking work you will ever do.
It is underfunded. It is often performed for free or under the guise of ‘love’. Like the lumpenproletariat, care has been condemned in the Left as unorganisable. It does not fit into boxes or frameworks. It is difficult to theorise. It is disproportionately conducted by migrant, racialised, and feminised bodies. Sometimes, it is poorly, performatively, and paternalistically delivered by the state. Sometimes it’s incarceration disguised as care. Sometimes it’s co-opted by the state, ‘professionalised’ and spat
back out as ‘client-centred’. But, it is the work necessary for people to survive.'
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