Soviet authorities and scholars instead reserved other terms for their own lumpenproletariat groups, especially "déclassé elements" (деклассированные элементы, deklassirovannye elementy), and viewed them, like Marx, as "social degenerates, isolated from the forces of production and incapable of having a working-class consciousness." Svetlana Stephenson notes that the Soviet state "for all its ideology of assistance, cooperation and social responsibility, was ready to descent on them with all its might."[44]
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