In the late nineteenth century and again in the mid-twentieth century, theorists debated the political role of the lumpenproletariat—small-time criminals, odd jobs workers, and the chronically unemployed. Karl Marx saw this disorganized group as a potential pawn of ruling elites and an impediment to revolution, while anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin, in contrast, believed that it was precisely lumpenproletarians’ lack of industrial discipline that made them natural insurgents. The 1960s saw a revival of this discussion, with Frantz Fanon hailing outsiders as a potent anti-colonial force and organizations like the Black Panther Party seeing them as a base for urban protest in the United States. Today, with employment around the world increasingly informal, flexible, part-time, and sub-contracted, fewer people belong to either the traditional working or middle class. More fall to the margins of society or into the murky gap between these groups. Amidst the ongoing revival of autocracy and threats to democracy globally, are these contemporary lumpenproletarians more likely to serve as enforcers or resistors of dictatorship? Under what conditions do they adopt one role over the other? This paper attempts a preliminary answer to these questions through analysis of protest and contention in Egypt and China. Both are authoritarian regimes with historically strong developmental states that have embraced neoliberalism in recent decades, leading to the expansion of their informal sectors. They have also both experienced different degrees of popular unrest. In China over the last two decades there has been persistent, if low-scale, resistance to state authority over issues like land and property rights, government abuses, and labor rights. Meanwhile, Egypt experience a democratic revolution in 2011 that ousted the long-standing dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, and then a counterrevolution in 2013 that restored military rule. We explore the role of lumpenproletarians in these various episodes of mobilization and resistance through analysis of survey data and original contentious event data sourced from each country. We find that though lumpenproletarians do often serve as “enforcers” – mobilizing on behalf of strongmen and quashing dissent – they also have the potential to join anti-government resistance, particularly over issues of government/police abuses and human rights violations. Moreover, we find that their resistance tends to be more violent than other groups’, and that they tend to target whatever government is currently in power – whether autocratic or democratic. As a result, lumpenproletarians tend to be equally available for mobilization toward revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ends.