In his 1971 lecture “Remembering Richard Wright,” Ralph Ellison reflected on the life of the man who was his close friend, mentor, and intellectual partner when both began their careers as writers on the Communist left in the 1930s. Ellison describes Wright’s arrival in Chicago in 1927, “the city where after years of Southern Negro migration great jazz was being played and reinvented, where the stockyards and railroads, and the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, were transforming a group of rural, agricultural Americans into city people and into a lumpenproletariat, a class over whom we now despair.”1 The minor and relatively arcane Marxist concept of the lumpenproletariat intrudes, rhetorically, on this invocation of modern black history and culture, suggesting that Ellison perceived a connection among Wright, twentieth-century black experience, and Marxism. Another of Wright’s close friends and fellow African American Communist writers from the Depression, Margaret Walker, also associated Wright with this peculiar Marxist term. Walker defined Wright’s work as deriving “from the world of life and the chaotic, disorganized experiences of . . . the lumpenproletariat.” Wright is thus “the first black American to write the novel of social protest and to use the lumpenproletariat of black life.”2
Ellison and Walker’s similar descriptions of Wright as concerned with the black lumpenproletariat deploy the term rather casually, but together they suggest a new way of thinking about African American literary leftism and the role of Marxism in politically committed black writing. Given Wright’s well-known alignment with the Communist Party of the United States and investment in Marxism in the 1930s, the appearance in these recollections of the lumpenproletariat (“proletariat in rags”) in place of the proletariat is counterintuitive. The lumpenproletariat names that which, for Marxism, doesn’t matter or doesn’t count. Marx and Engels coined the term to describe socioeconomic outsiders like drifters, transients, prostitutes, criminals, and outlaws. Because such individuals do not participate in industrial production and thus have no class identity or social place, Marx and Engels saw them as irrelevant to their epistemological and political interests. Classical Marxism accordingly dismisses lumpenproletarian persons as degenerates who survive through illicit, disreputable measures on the margins of society and are especially prone to co-option by forces of reaction. The decision of Ellison and Walker to identify the Depression’s most famous black Marxist writer with the lumpenproletariat stems from the fact that, during the Depression, they too wrote revolutionary literature that centered not on the heroic working class, but on lumpenproletarian figures. In using the lumpenproletariat to examine Wright, Ellison, and Walker’s Depression-era engagements with Marxism, I seek not only to offer a new case study of the conceptual and cultural innovation of the 1930s black Communist literary left, but also to disrupt standing assumptions about the relationship of African American writing and Marxist thought. To do so, I pursue the trace of a long-overlooked trajectory of black radicalism, one that engages Marxism through the odd, minor concept of the lumpenproletariat.
Given that the lumpenproletariat is a pejorative term in the Marxist lexicon, a Marxism that revalues outsiders and situates them at the heart of its epistemological and political efforts must necessarily be a revisionary Marxism, one that finds Marxism’s limits in order to push it further outwards. The lumpenproletariat names such a limit. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri explain that the centrality of the proletariat and economic production to Marxism has caused it to neglect the sociopolitical potential of the global poor. “The poor are thought to be dangerous, either morally dangerous because they are unproductive social parasites—thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, and the like—or politically dangerous because they are disorganized, unpredictable, and tendentially reactionary.” The lumpenproletariat, Marx and Engels’s term for the poor as understood in this manner, has not been adequately conceptualized but rather “has functioned at times to demonize the poor as a whole.”3 Brent Hayes Edwards writes that the lumpenproletariat “has always represented a problem area in Marxist theory, for the few intellectuals who have not chosen simply to toss lumpen around as a broad term of sectarian denigration.”4 When used dismissively, the term blocks Marxism’s access to the socially marginalized, those individuals who survive outside of capitalism’s relations of production.
Ragged Revolutionaries: The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression-Era Literature addresses the ways African American authors and activists have rethought classical Marxism’s framing of the lumpenproletariat in order to better explicate the socioeconomic and cultural structures of the modern United States. The most familiar articulation of this project occurs in the theoretical work of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 1970s. The Panthers used the term lumpenproletariat to refer to the criminalized inner-city black population they saw, in place of the industrial proletariat, as the true vanguard of revolutionary change in postwar America. Panther theorists like Huey Newton, Kathleen Cleaver, and Eldridge Cleaver used Marxism’s own dialectical and materialist logic, and borrowed Frantz Fanon’s rethinking of the lumpenproletariat in colonial and racial contexts, to argue that the unemployed and criminal segments of the black population were, precisely due to their lack of incorporation in the social order, structurally positioned to overturn it. In contrast to the proletarian rhetoric of more traditional Marxist parties, Panther leaders often romanticized the lumpenproletariat: “O.K. We are Lumpen. Right on,” Eldridge Cleaver wrote.5 Their strategic adoption of the visual styles and personas associated with the African American urban underworld is well known. Amy Ongiri explains that “the Black Panther Party went to great lengths to utilize a dress code that consciously restated their affinity with the young, hip, urban ‘brother on the block.’”6 The party even featured a soul and funk band called the Lumpen that performed at rallies.7
But the Panthers’ lumpenproletarian orientation was not merely stylistic. Rather, it entailed a complex redefinition of Marxism that, at the same time, operated with fidelity to Marxism’s core revolutionary principles. Kathleen Cleaver thus explained that a proper Marxist approach to revolution in the United States involved rethinking the social origins of transformative agency. It required categorizing African Americans who lack any relationship to the means of production and “who leave the vicious system of compulsory mis-education without any marketable skills, little allegiance to anything, and a generalized hostility to everything” as a revolutionary force.8 A Marxism able to speak to and for African American concerns in postwar America, the Panthers theorized, would have to be reorganized around one of its own most neglected concepts.
Kathleen Cleaver’s description of the black lumpenproletariat conjures up, for students and scholars of African American literature, Bigger Thomas, the figure created three decades earlier by Wright in Native Son (1940). Bigger is hardly a class-conscious worker, yet had he lived in the postwar era the Panthers would have identified him as the revolutionary agent of their brand of Marxism. And in Native Son, Bigger’s lumpenproletarian perspectives and experiences catalyze, rather than obstruct, Wright’s own application of Marxism to modern African American conditions. In other words, there has been a black tradition of Marxism—one that bridges the Old and New Lefts, Depression-era Communist writers and Civil Rights–era radical activists—in which the type Bigger represents has been positioned not as the deformed product of racial and economic oppression, and not as the underworld scum whose base self-interest threatens revolutionary political organization, but as the bearer of antiracist and anticapitalist possibility.
The Panthers’ work on the lumpenproletariat can thus be read as an articulation, in theoretical form, of earlier revisions to Marxism advanced in the literary writings of Wright, Ellison, and Walker during the Depression. Each writer used the lumpenproletariat to analyze the socioeconomic processes that, in Depression America, reduce individuals to social discards. But these writers also envisioned new mechanisms and sources of revolutionary change, change that emerges not from the laboring conditions of the proletariat at the point of production, but from the inventive social and cultural practices of the dispossessed, marginalized, discarded, and outlawed. This anti-orthodox black Marxism emerges in texts like Wright’s 1936 poem “Transcontinental” and his novels Lawd, Today! (written in the 1930s but published posthumously) and Native Son; Ellison’s 1930s short fiction and two long unfinished prose works, Tillman and Tackhead and Slick; Walker’s poetry collection For My People (1942), her unfinished Depression novel Goose Island, and certain of her unpublished poems of the 1930s. These works imagine modes of agency and political desire beyond proletarian organization or institutional political leadership. Instead, they draw inspiration from the criminalized underworlds of urban America; economically dislocated hobos and transients riding the rails in the midst of the Depression; black folk heroes and romantic, defiant outlaws; and other socially marginal persons and practices.
This lumpenproletarian black Marxism owes its emergence in the Depression to a variety of historical and cultural factors. The Communist Party and the various social and cultural institutions aligned with the party were formative influences on many African American writers. Even though the literary work of Wright, Ellison, and Walker was relatively unaffected by specific turns in party policy during the period, the party fostered a unique discursive milieu in which matters of Marxist thought, black culture, and literary form could be triangulated. Lawrence Jackson’s history of mid-century African American literature demonstrates how the support of party journals, clubs, and organizations facilitated the careers of the generation of black writers to which Wright, Ellison, and Walker belonged.9 Brian Dolinar argues that the Depression-era party fostered the formation of what he calls the “black cultural front,” which “provided a network, both formal and informal, of contacts that helped many black writers and artists advance their careers.” Artists associated with the black cultural front were by no means “bound to any supposed ‘party line’” and worked in relative autonomy from the party’s internal “political twists and turns.” They were drawn and inspired instead by “the aggressive stance the Communists took against racism . . . and the belief that a society free from all forms of oppression could exist.”10
If the party created opportunities for black writers to pursue their craft, it also validated black political traditions and black cultural forms as expressive of revolutionary and progressive political ambitions. In 1928, the international Communist movement adopted the “Black Belt” thesis, proposing that territory in the southeastern United States populated primarily by African Americans constituted an oppressed nation. This complex thesis synthesized racial nationalist, anti-imperialist, and Marxist rhetorics and political strategies, elevating African American struggles, which might otherwise appear to be nationalist rather than Marxist, to prominence in Communist discourse. Robin D. G. Kelley writes that the thesis “confirmed” that “African Americans had their own unique revolutionary tradition” and “[created] an opening for African Americans to promote race politics in spite of the Party’s formal opposition to ‘Negro Nationalism.’”11 As Barbara Foley explains, “the radical working-class movement for the first time in U.S. history moved itself off dead center with regard to the issue of confronting racism” as the party “attracted a significant mass base in black communities.”12 The party valued black expressive forms like music and literature as evidence of the distinct national culture of African Americans, but also as, to quote Foley, “indices to the revolutionary spirit of the black masses . . . that . . . might be effectively mobilized in winning black workers and farmers to the Communist movement.”13 In 1935, in response to the rise of international fascist movements, the party shifted away from the Black Belt thesis toward the Popular Front, a strategy by which the party, in order to build coalitions against fascism, sought to ally itself with American liberalism and to establish the contiguity of revolutionary politics with American democratic political traditions. However, Kelley shows that the party still viewed African American culture as a potent vehicle of political desire by “embracing a broad range of black art and artists as not only inherently progressive but also profoundly American.”14 Questions of race and class, nationalism and internationalism, and the revolutionary content of black culture were thus energized by the party’s discourse of African American culture and politics, a discourse that influenced and enabled the work of writers like Wright, Ellison, and Walker.
A salient example of Communist involvement in black political struggles in the 1930s, as well as the intersection of Communist activism with the lumpenproletariat, was the party’s role in the Scottsboro incident. In 1931, nine African American transients riding a freight train in Alabama were accused by local authorities of raping two white female drifters who were riding the same train. After trials in Scottsboro, Alabama, eight of the nine young men were sentenced to death. The Communist Party’s legal arm, the International Labor Defense, stepped in to spearhead the defendants’ appeals while the party turned their ongoing legal struggles into an international antiracist cause. Dolinar writes that “the Communist Party would shape the discourse around what they called a ‘legal lynching,’” and dates the rise of the black cultural front in part to the Scottsboro campaign.15
Scottsboro galvanized African American support for the Communist left, but it also showcased the ways in which the Marxist discourse of the left opened up new avenues for conceptualizing intersectional racial, gender, and economic oppression during the Depression. Cheryl Higashida has shown that black Communist women activists like Louise Thompson challenged the “masculinist terms” of the International Labor Defense’s rhetorical strategy, which derogated the two white women involved as merely prostitutes in order to frame resistance to Jim Crow as a cross-racial masculine prerogative. For Higashida, a key text of this revisionary effort is Thompson’s report of a 1933 Scottsboro rally in Washington, DC. Thompson emphasized how Ruby Bates, one of the white accusers of the Scottsboro men who subsequently denied the charge and joined the left, marched with one of the mothers of the accused. “The text and image in Thompson’s story,” Higashida points out, “implied that women were redefining the masculinist terms of worker solidarity and Black militancy.”16 I would add to Higashida’s analysis that Thompson’s rhetorical maneuver of reframing the prostitute (a figure stigmatized, for very similar reasons, both by patriarchy and by classical Marxist evaluations of the lumpenproletariat) as a positive participant in interracial radical politics indicates how, for black Communists, revisiting the category of the lumpenproletariat could empower individuals Marxism has often disregarded.
John Lennon has argued that the left, in the context of Scottsboro activism, redefined what is perhaps the archetypal Depression-era lumpenproletarian figure: the economically disenfranchised hobo. Lennon shows how the Scottsboro case brought the racial and gender interactions of hobo life into the purview of leftist discourse. The Communist Party spearheaded the legal defenses of the accused and challenged Jim Crow by making “class disenfranchisement the primary issue . . . defending the Scottsboro hobos not as ‘boys’ but as ‘workers,’ thereby linking their position as transient laborers to workers of every race.”17 Activists sought to redefine the black male and white female hobos of the case as both victimized by capitalism’s racial, gender, and economic manipulations. Lennon’s reading of the Scottsboro case suggests how the Communist left presented the transients not in orthodox Marxist terms, as self-interested and semi-criminal lumpenproletarians, but as “itinerant workers whose mobility offered possible disruptions to white capitalist society” and who “could become the vanguard of the coming revolution.”18
The lumpenproletariat as a concept may mark what is excluded from Marxism’s theoretical priorities, but Scottsboro suggests that in US cultural contexts it can gesture toward individuals who can access, and/or be strategically depicted as accessing, alternative modes of resistance. The rhetorical efforts documented by Higashida and Lennon indicate that this marginal Marxist concept has the potential to direct Marxism’s core epistemological and political commitments within the specific conditions of modern American society. In her unpublished memoirs, Louise Thompson reflected on the epistemological gains inspired by the left’s Scottsboro activism, particularly the participation of Ruby Bates. The case’s particular features defetishized, for African Americans, the structure of social relations normalized by Jim Crow. “We had always been taught, I mean black people, that the enemy was poor whites, and that they were poor white trash, and that the boss was the good white man,” she wrote. Ruby Bates and the other white woman involved were, she continues, enemies because they were white and “known as prostitutes.” Thompson suggests that the lumpenproletarian status of the women negated the narrative of white female sanctity that underwrote white racial violence: both of these women were unable, according to patriarchy and capitalism’s own estimation of prostitutes, to assume Jim Crow’s ideological figure of the pure white woman whose violation legitimated racial violence. If Ruby Bates, a woman from the ranks of the “poor white trash,” could address a rally and proclaim that “these black boys didn’t do it,” then the whole set of mystifications on which white supremacy rested was shaken. Out of this complex set of contradictions among patriarchy, Jim Crow, and capitalism arose the revelation that lynching, legal or extra-legal, was a straightforward mechanism of oppression: “This case, in a sense, exploded that myth about rape and exposed some of the forces that were behind it—that poor whites could be used as the agent to do the lynching, but behind it stood the state, its courts, its police, the whole government, in terms of oppression of the black people.”19 The disruptions posed by members of the lumpenproletariat involved in the Scottsboro affair revealed the terms of a decidedly Marxist critique of Jim Crow, unveiling first the ways in which Jim Crow uses racial difference to divide poor whites from poor blacks, and then the manner in which white supremacy functions as an instrument of state power.
The party’s role in the Scottsboro case suggests an insight that Wright, Ellison, and Walker would pursue in their writings of the period and that the Black Panthers would later implement: by using the lumpenproletariat as a starting point for revising and expanding Marxist thought, one can produce a Marxism positioned to speak of and for African Americans. The black Marxism I trace in Wright, Ellison, and Walker’s Depression-era work is one in which the lumpenproletarian outcast becomes useful for discerning the essential functions of Marxism, materialist critique and revolutionary change, at work within modern African American experience. These writers’ use of the lumpenproletariat to reinvent Marxism is a practice that is both epistemologically materialist and culturally African American in its protocols.
For many scholars, however, the notion of a black Marxism still presents itself as a contradiction in terms. This tension is due in part to the influence of the cultural nationalist arguments of Harold Cruse and Cedric Robinson that position Marxism as a Western intellectual tradition important to the development of black writers and intellectuals but ultimately alien to African American cultural traditions and sociopolitical needs.20 The history of the black Communist literary left, however, frequently undermines such arguments. As William Maxwell writes, “reflexively anti-Marxist interpreters of black culture” as well as “race-weary proponents of economic fairness” need to recognize that “many African-American modernists saw working-class interracialism as an arduous necessity, the final, elusive key to redeeming a society disfigured by racial slavery.” In terms of literary history, this means that “the history of African-American letters cannot be unraveled from the history of American Communism without damage to both.”21 Since the late 1990s, scholars have worked to recover the history of generative transactions between the organizations, cultural venues, and politics of the US Communist left and African American literary traditions, making the study of the black left and the history of Marxism’s general influence on African American writing a vibrant subfield of African American studies.
Ragged Revolutionaries contributes to such efforts to recover the literary and conceptual achievements of the black Communist left and to complicate the assumption that Marxism is an exclusively white or Eurocentric discourse. My reading of Wright illuminates the theoretical idiosyncrasy and novelty of his Marxism, expanding the relevant philosophical frameworks for discussing Wright’s work and challenging the perception that he wrote formulaic protest fiction. My discussion of Ellison complicates dominant readings of him as an apolitical or even conservative writer opposed to black protest by recovering his substantial intellectual and literary commitment to revolutionary political thought in the 1930s, a commitment long overlooked due to the unfinished and unpublished state of much of his Depression-era work. Barbara Foley’s groundbreaking 2010 study Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” introduced Ellison’s oft-neglected Depression career to scholarship and will hopefully inaugurate new interest in his early leftism.22 Ragged Revolutionaries provides a conceptual outline of Ellison’s 1930s Marxism and extended readings of some of his fictional endeavors of the decade. Finally, even more so than that of Ellison, Margaret Walker’s Depression-era work has received scant attention. With the exception of For My People, her work of this period is unpublished, unfinished, or uncollected. In the Depression, Walker’s efforts valuably reworked Marxism in correlation with African American feminist investments and cultural traditions; Ragged Revolutionaries asserts that she should be counted as one of the Depression left’s most innovative writers.
That the lumpenproletariat would be the key term of an African American Marxism articulated in literary form is perhaps less surprising when one considers the prevalence of lumpenproletarian figures in US and African American cultural production. Besides Bigger Thomas, Huckleberry Finn is perhaps American literature’s archetypal lumpenproletarian figure, someone who refuses social incorporation because of the labor it entails and who, as a result, enjoys a freedom and mobility unstructured by relations of production. Ralph Ellison would comment in his 1953 essay “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” that Huckleberry’s decision to break the law and help Jim escape slavery emerges from the moral and politically progressive vantage point he accesses from being beyond or outside of social relations: “Huck Finn has struggled with the problem posed by the clash between property rights and human rights, between what the community considered to be the proper attitude toward an escaped slave and his knowledge of Jim’s humanity, gained through their adventures as fugitives together.” If “fugitive” experiences allow Huckleberry to demystify slavery’s coding of the black subject as property, they also allow Mark Twain, in the post-bellum era, to make a historical materialist connection between slavery and modern capitalism by representing “the clash between the direct, human relationships of the frontier and the abstract, inhuman, market-dominated relationships fostered by the rising middle class—which in Twain’s day was already compromising dangerously with the most inhuman aspects of the defeated slave system.”23 Twain used the outsider and outlaw Huckleberry Finn to illustrate the kind of socioeconomic and political insights orthodox Marxism had designated such types as being precisely unable to access.
As discussed in chapter 1, lumpenproletarian figures have performed a range of progressive political functions in modern American literature, where they’ve appeared as both symptoms of social ills and as bearers of liberatory possibility. In contrast to Twain’s romanticization of Huckleberry Finn, in Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Maggie’s fall into the urban lumpenproletarian underworld documents the gender-specific violence that lumpenproletarian status imposes on women. Her work as a prostitute is defined as not a willful rejection of proper labor, but as a gender-specific mode of capitalist victimization. And in Claude McKay’s Banjo (1929), the realm of the lumpenproletariat is the ground for the imagining of new modes of black internationalism in the context of the Harlem Renaissance.
The practices of the lumpenproletariat also appear in African American culture and in theorizations of African American expression. Lawrence Levine writes that after 1865 “the enduring plight of black Americans produced a continuing need for a folklore which would permit them to express their hostilities and aspirations and for folk heroes whose exploits would allow them to transcend their situation.”24 Levine argues that modern folk tales of “bad men” outlaw figures like Stagolee suggested that “society had to be unhinged, undone, made over,” but the stories did not seek “permanent remedies” from the “asocial, self-centered, and futile figures” of the criminal underclass.25 If Levine’s diagnosis echoes classical Marxist devaluations of the lumpenproletariat, Wright, Ellison, and Walker would refurbish folk legends of heroic outlaws in order to make them express revolutionary desires and remedies. Stagolee, for example, would be embraced as an archetypal political agent by members of the Black Panther Party and, in the Depression era, imagined by Margaret Walker as the bearer of black revolutionary ambition. Chapter 1 discusses how tactics of transience, mobility, and criminal defiance have been situated by theorists like Cecil Brown and Houston Baker as specifically African American modes of politics and expression. Ragged Revolutionaries shows how African American culture offered Wright, Ellison, and Walker resources for reconceptualizing revolution as an outsider’s tactic informed by black cultural sensibilities. If classical Marxism provided an epistemology that located the socially incorporated proletariat as structurally and dialectically positioned to achieve revolution, US and African American literary and cultural sensibilities furnished ways of imagining the socially dislocated lumpenproletariat’s capacity for revolutionary insight and action.
While lumpenproletarian figures travel across the pages of many left-wing literary works during the Depression, this study focuses on the writings of Wright, Ellison, and Walker for multiple reasons. For one, as chapter 1 discusses in more detail, these three writers differed, in their approach to the lumpenproletariat, from the decade’s “bottom dogs” writers. Bottom dogs writers like Edward Dahlberg, Nelson Algren, and others were usually affiliated with the left, and narrated underclass life largely in accord with classical Marxist assumptions about the lumpenproletariat’s apolitical or reactionary character. Bottom dogs literature and proletarian literature, the two major genres of 1930s left-wing writing, both tended to align in their denial of revolutionary capacity to the decade’s social outcasts. While never losing sight of the obstacles lumpenproletarian life poses to revolutionary consciousness, Wright, Ellison, and Walker nonetheless charted and figured political potential in lumpenproletarian experience, performing literary and epistemological maneuvers with the underclass that the decade’s other writers on the left generally did not.
Wright, Ellison, and Walker evinced similar sensibilities in their work in part because close personal and working relationships existed between them. Ellison met Wright in New York in 1937, and the two struck up a friendship marked by shared literary, intellectual, and political interests. Wright’s study of modernist writing, his engagement with Marxism, his connections with the cultural networks of the Communist left, and the fact that he was, to quote Lawrence Jackson, “leaning toward a theory that envisioned an American class revolution with a Negro vanguard, a perspective that was heretical to strict Marxists,” all captivated Ellison.26 The captivation was mutual. Wright’s biographer Hazel Rowley notes that by the end of 1937, Ellison was Wright’s “closest friend in New York” and “unlike Wright’s more doctrinaire Communist friends, Ellison had an open, inventive mind.” Wright and Ellison discussed Communist politics and Marxist theory alongside modern philosophy and African American culture, and Wright encouraged Ellison to take the first steps of his literary career, pressing him to write his first book review and first short story.27 Wright’s Native Son, an ambitious rendering of black lumpenproletarian interiority, was admired by Ellison, who upon its publication defended its political and representational merits against criticisms from others in the Communist Party. The first short story Ellison wrote, at Wright’s encouragement, was “Hymie’s Bull,” a narrative of Depression-era freight-hopping hobos that poses a revolutionary challenge to capitalism and racial oppression.
In later years, Ellison charged that their similar concerns led to some jealousy on Wright’s part and a rift between the two. Ellison recollected how he had shown Wright the manuscript for what was likely Tillman and Tackhead, a narrative about lumpenproletarian themes he began in the 1930s but never finished. Wright accused him of copying his own work, to which Ellison replied: “Okay, but what do you expect? I thought I was taking your advice.”28 This episode indicates how, during the 1930s, the two were very much on the same page in their approach to the lumpenproletariat, black life, and Marxism. In the postwar period, their friendship waned and their interests diverged, and Ellison accepted his canonization as an aesthetically sophisticated alternative to the allegedly blunt and didactic Wright.29 Nonetheless, Ellison continued to cite the importance of his early friendship with Wright. In “Remembering Richard Wright,” he discussed having read Native Son as Wright composed it. He had long ago moved away from the laudatory opinion of the novel he held in 1940, but the novel still marked a landmark moment for him. “After all, how many of you have had the unexpected privilege of reading a powerful novel as it was literally ripped off the typewriter?” he asked. “Such opportunities are rare, and being young, I was impressed beyond all critical words. I am still impressed.”30
Margaret Walker was also close with Wright, whom she met in Chicago in 1936. Walker had already begun writing prior to knowing Wright. “He had a lot of influence on me, but it wasn’t on my writing,” she later explained. “It concerned social perspective—Marxism and the problems of black people in this country.”31 Such interests inspired her to join the Communist Party and to participate in a range of leftist political and cultural activities.32 Walker and Wright discussed politics and literature, and Walker helped with the creation of Native Son by collecting newspaper clippings about Robert Nixon, an African American man who had murdered a white woman in 1938 and whose story and trial inspired Wright’s depiction of Bigger Thomas.33 Walker later claimed that her research was so vital that Abe Aaron, a Chicago writer and close friend of Wright’s, told Wright that he should dedicate the novel to Walker.34 Walker also discussed her own in-progress Depression novel with Wright. Goose Island, which deals in part with the Chicago lumpenproletariat, was never finished, but Walker would later suggest that scenes in Native Son were inspired by or borrowed from her novel.35 In its similarity to Ellison’s allegation that Wright felt Ellison was emulating his work too closely, this charge suggests the confluence of Wright and Walker’s aesthetic and political priorities.
Their close friendship and working relationship were soon complicated by personal attachments. “I was in love with him, and he knew it,” she reflected, but her feelings were not returned.36 Wright and Walker eventually fell out in 1939, but her admiration for his work led her to compose a biography, published in 1988, of the writer she still considered “an intellectual giant of his times” and “a writer of great power and great passion.” In a move that reflects their formerly aligned interests, Walker’s biography is able to identify the lumpenproletariat as a characteristic focus of Wright’s work.37 Walker and Ellison had a more limited relationship. Walker met Ellison through Wright at the Communist-backed League of American Writers Congress in New York in 1939. While in New York, Walker read portions of Goose Island to Ellison, and he shared his work with her, over dinner and conversation.38 Wright’s status as one of the most successful Communist writers of the period made him able to introduce Walker and Ellison to the discourses and networks of the literary left. But these three authors are best understood as a cohort of equals bound by revolutionary political commitments, a creative and expansive approach to Marxist theory, and an interest in the figurative significances of the socially dislocated. In the midst of the Depression, Wright, Walker, and Ellison bounced ideas off of each other, compared notes on their readings, and explored the implications of Marxism for the social and economic circumstances around them.
In Ragged Revolutionaries, I make reference to a range of works from Western Marxism and continental philosophy in order to delineate and explore the theoretical interventions of these writers. In the chapters that follow, the conceptual inventories of figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, and Fredric Jameson are employed neither to validate Wright, Ellison, and Walker’s work, nor to indicate that these writers are to be esteemed to the extent that their ideas conform to European philosophical achievements. Rather, my intention is to situate Wright, Ellison, and Walker as participants in some of the conversations that animated Western Marxist and continental philosophical projects. If concerns like the subjective dynamics of revolutionary consciousness, the nature of political action, the structure of social form, the relation of cultural practices to economic relations, and Marxist formulations of class identity all constitute pressing research projects for modern thought, then Wright, Ellison, and Walker’s 1930s writings should be understood as pursuing those projects from the standpoint of black culture, history, and political need. Interlocutors from European philosophy, along with those from the Black Panther Party, provide a useful vocabulary for identifying the epistemological efforts advanced through fiction and poetry by Wright, Ellison, and Walker.
Of course, this method challenges the perception that Western Marxism and European philosophy are culturally and historically alien to African American literary study. However, this distinction of European intellectual projects from black expressive efforts is not one that Wright, Ellison, or Walker made. A definitive feature of their efforts to represent African American life and culture was the conviction that Western philosophical methods—Marxism, but also Freudianism and existentialism—could, when used self-reflexively, offer access to the psychological and material reality of black life. This was an assumption that guided their work during their time on the 1930s left and afterwards.
Thus, Walker would credit Marxist habits of totalization for enabling her to grasp the underlying socioeconomic dynamics of juvenile delinquency in Goose Island, the Chicago slum that served as the setting for her unfinished novel. Her major work after the Depression, her 1966 novel Jubilee, was influenced by Georg Lukács’s historical materialist theorization of historical fiction in The Historical Novel (1937). Walker credited Lukács for providing the “philosophy and point of view” that enabled her to use the form of the novel to rewrite the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction from the perspective of African Americans.39 As Ellison was writing his 1930s novel Slick, which he never finished, he consulted William H. Sheldon’s Psychology and the Promethean Will (1936), a theory of human psychology articulated in Western cultural terms, to help him tell the narrative of how his African American protagonist attains a revolutionary consciousness. Later, in 1948, he composed an essay on psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic, which treated African American patients from its location in a church basement in Harlem. In “Harlem is Nowhere,” Ellison praises the Clinic for providing materialist, philosophical, and psychological explication to Harlem residents of the ways their culture, social situation, and individuality have been shaped by modernity, with the result that “the grandchildren of those who possessed no written literature examine their lives through the eyes of Freud and Marx, Kierkegaard and Kafka, Malraux and Sartre.”40
Wright’s broad interests in European thought are familiar and have already been referenced. He would eventually meet Sartre and Arendt in the mid-1940s, and after he moved to Paris in 1947, he would connect with French intellectual circles. But when he met Sartre and Arendt, he came to them as an equal, as Native Son had already explored many of the same existential and political concerns of their own work. C. L. R. James recollected one visit to Wright in which Wright gestured toward his numerous volumes of Kierkegaard, telling James: “Everything that he writes in those books, I knew before I had them.” James explains that “he was telling me . . . that he was a black man in the United States and that gave him an insight into what today is the universal opinion and attitude of the modern personality.”41 Wright here explicates what my study takes as a guiding assumption: that the social, political, cultural, and philosophical themes of Wright, Ellison, and Walker’s writings did not simply anticipate or align with Western theorists who then retroactively validate those writings. Rather, these authors’ experiences and priorities enabled them to pursue many of the same objects of inquiry—class struggle, social form, subject formation, the psyche, the agential self, and so forth—as Western Marxism and continental philosophy.
Ragged Revolutionaries opens by making a case for the general purchase of the lumpenproletariat within literary studies. The multiple ambiguities of the term in Marx inspired the conceptual revisions to Marxism performed by the Black Panther Party theorists. Simultaneously, the conceptual mobility of the lumpenproletariat is manifested in modern literature, where the lumpenproletariat’s figurative “raggedness” characterizes both the destitution and the freedom of the socially marginalized. Multiple literary works express the political, racial, and gender dynamics of exclusion through creative significations on the trope of the rag. The history of the production of paper from rags makes this trope either indicative of reduction to discardable refuse or, through the incipient form of paper, generative of new possibilities. Thus, figures of the lumpenproletariat appear in American literature, especially during the Great Depression, to enact figurative and creative explorations of marginality and resistance, exclusion and deprivation.
Wright began his career fascinated with the political possibilities of African American social displacement. Marxism associates the dispossession of the lumpenproletariat with its reactionary tendencies, but Wright, attuned to the emancipatory potentials of flight and migration in modern black experience, reimagines dislocation as enabling revolutionary agency. He rethinks dislocation in various 1930s works, but the full extent of his reorientation of Marxism around the black lumpenproletariat comes in Native Son. Bigger Thomas is African American literature’s archetypal lumpenproletarian individual, but he is not the self-interested enemy of revolution that orthodox Marxism would hold him to be. Despite the critical tradition of reading Bigger as a depraved product of environmental limitations, Wright’s protagonist is actually imbued with a positive and creative human spirit. Specifically, the desire that animates his psyche and his criminal acts—a desire to be located within a social order that will recognize his subjectivity, that will permit him the opportunity to reveal his humanity through his actions—is characterized by Wright as the desire for antiracist and anticapitalist change itself. Native Son thus defines the black lumpenproletarian individual as the agent of revolution.
Despite his later reputation as a Cold War conservative, Ellison’s 1930s Marxism was remarkable in its theoretical novelty, reach, and sophistication. In the 1930s, Ellison theorized the nature of American society as a fluid and shifting landscape offering possibilities for disrupting relationships of power and exploitation. The symbolic agent of those possibilities in Ellison’s fiction is what I call the lumpen-folk figure, a character who combines the inventive practices of the lumpenproletariat with an essential capacity for revolutionary action derived, by Ellison, from Communist framings of African American folk authenticity. Ellison holds that revolutionary institutions must be able to recognize and politically educate the various forms of possibility enacted by such figures. He works through these social, political, and institutional themes in multiple short stories from the period, as well as in two unfinished longer works: Slick, a novel about the political education of a black lumpenproletarian character who anticipates Bigger Thomas, and Tillman and Tackhead, which enacts a symbolic analysis of Jim Crow’s social and psychological workings while locating the origins of antiracist and anticapitalist resistance in lumpenproletarian practices of crime and transience.
Walker’s fiction and poetry of the period challenge the classical Marxist assumption that lumpenproletarian individuals are willfully outside of and thus not victims of capitalist exploitation. By charting material connections between the lumpenproletariat and capitalist relations of production, Walker represents the emergence of radical antiracist and anticapitalist consciousness from out of the experiences of the underclass. In her unpublished poetry and her unfinished novel, Goose Island, urban lumpenproletarians—juvenile delinquents, gangsters, prostitutes—access modes of revolutionary knowledge and possibility unavailable to the socially incorporated working class. Unlike Wright and Ellison, Walker underscores the situation of lumpenproletarian women and thus offers a more expansive theorization of gender and sexuality as sites of identity and struggle; her portraits of the underclass thus enact intersectional critiques of the gender, sexual, and racial functioning of American capitalism. Walker also composed ballads that narrate the criminal accomplishments of mythic black men and women. These ballads transform the African American folk outlaw into an agent of resistance to Jim Crow, capitalist labor practices, and patriarchal gender and sexual norms. Collected in her first published volume of poetry, For My People, these poems demonstrate the resourcefulness of African American folklore as a lexicon that redefines criminal acts as expressing transformative sociopolitical meanings.
In the wake of the great recession, economic and racial modes of oppression and violence have garnered a new social visibility and a concurrent set of responses, from economic justice movements like Occupy Wall Street, to the uprising against police racism in Ferguson, Missouri, to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. As they did during the Depression, antiracist and anticapitalist sentiments and activism have entered the mainstream of US sociopolitical discourse. In this climate, there is value in returning to the 1930s, when similar concerns led black writers to take Marxism—that old-fashioned nineteenth-century European materialism—and reinvent it for African American historical experience, cultural traditions, and political desires. Residing in manuscript archives, occluded by standing narratives of Wright, Ellison, and Walker’s literary and political reputations, and obscured by Marxism’s traditional theoretical focus on labor and the proletariat, this black lumpenproletarian Marxism has long been hidden from view. Ragged Revolutionaries is a reminder that, at this current juncture, the annals of twentieth-century African American literary history can furnish valuable epistemological resources for politics. Wright, Ellison, and Walker’s 1930s work should impress upon us that we can create new ways of approaching the very systems that turn people into discards—racism, capitalism, and patriarchy, but also orthodox tendencies in Marxism—by transforming what’s been ignored, discarded, and scorned into new catalysts of political and theoretical invention.