The market of El Hueco in downtown Lima sits inside a large pit dug out for the foundation of a state building that was never built. The below-ground corridors and crammed vending stalls in this poorly regulated market are usually flooded with shoppers, yet government officials and the media frequently condemn it as a vile and dangerous place. But how and why does El Hueco offend? Through an ethnographic account of a day's events, cast against a discussion of Marxism's “lumpenproletariat” and Hernando de Soto's “informality,” I argue that implicit in El Hueco's challenge of state bureaucracy is a class critique that resists conventional class analysis and that affirms the “lumpen” as a politics in its own right. “Lumpen” here does not refer to categories of people but to a resource that can be appropriated and deployed freely. Linked to the anti-political tactics of President Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s, lumpen as a resource has changed the face of postwar Lima by defying and deforming from within the bourgeois ideals of urban development and bureaucratic form. It has also arguably changed the face of politics and played a role in the revival of fujimorismo during and since the 2016 presidential elections.