What would a theoretical and literary critical methodology of the lumpenproletariat look like? Wright, Ellison, and Walker’s writings of the 1930s provide an occasion for outlining the protocols of such a methodology. Their work with the lumpenproletariat helpfully foregrounds broader discourses such as classical Marxist formulations of the lumpenproletariat, the Black Panther Party’s revisions of Marxism, the literary history of rags and paper as tropes for representing social marginality, the leftist literary climate of the 1930s, and forms of African American cultural practice.
Although classical Marxism sees nothing of value in the lumpenproletariat, the appropriations of the concept performed by the literature of Wright, Ellison, and Walker and later codified in the theory of the Black Panthers are best understood as revisions and expansions, not rejections, of Marxism. The deconstructions black writers and activists have performed with the concept are in fact suggested by Marx and Engels’s own texts, when those texts are read against the grain. By resituating this marginal Marxist concept at the center of their own Marxism, these writers enact a conceptual inversion licensed, paradoxically, by the rhetoric and logics of classical Marxism. The black Marxism schematized by this study is thus not the one famously outlined by Cedric Robinson: namely, a generative contradiction between Marxism’s radicalism and Eurocentrism that leads the black writer out of Marxism and toward a distinctly black cultural radicalism.1 Rather, it’s a practice of deconstructing Marxism that is, like all deconstructions, an accurate and faithful reading. Grasping the Marxist credentials of literary and sociopolitical texts organized not around the proletariat but its “ragged” counterpart first requires close examination of how the term appears in Marx and Engels’s writings.
Marx and Engels coined the term lumpenproletariat, but they didn’t explicitly theorize it. As Robert Bussard notes, they “expected their readers to understand its connotations” even though it never attains a “consistent and clearly reasoned definition” in their work.2 Generally, the term refers to social types who subsist without waged labor and by extension lack class identity, dwelling on the margins and in the interstices of capitalist social formations. These types often resort to criminal or other illicit survival practices. In an exhaustive survey of the term in Marx and Engels’s writings, Hal Draper concludes that
the lumpen-class is the catch-all for those who fall out, or drop out, of the existing social structure so that they are no longer functionally an integral part of society. To survive at all, in the interstices of the same society, they must adopt a parasitic mode of existence. The tendency toward illegality simply arises from the scarcity of other choices.3
Rather than carefully theorize the lumpenproletariat, Marx and Engels tend to load it with moralistic scorn. Their callousness is surprising, given the frequent desperation of individuals who must survive without a wage. Unlike the proletarian worker, whose place within production provides her or him with a wage (however inadequate) and sustaining social institutions (labor unions, political parties, etc.), the lumpenproletarian individual must make do with nothing. But while the term suggests, as Draper notes, a causal link between socioeconomic marginalization and criminality, Marx and Engels’s rhetoric registers only disgust, and they frequently return to the claim that lumpenproletarian activities—living through criminal pursuits rather than labor, and necessarily putting individual interest above collective collaboration—make this underclass morally and politically suspect.
Thus Dominick LaCapra notes that Marx’s “bourgeois, indeed Victorian, sense of propriety” leads him to “[occlude] the problem of the oppression of [the lumpenproletariat] in modern society as well as the need for radical politics to address that oppression and its implications.”4 Marx and Engels intended the German prefix of the term, lumpen, to signify not literally, as materially ragged (impoverished by structural disenfranchisement), but connotatively, as criminal, immoral, or knavish.5 In nineteenth-century English translations of The Communist Manifesto (1848), for instance, the term is translated with phrases like “the mob,” or “dangerous class.”6 But when Marx and Engels’s dismissal of the lumpenproletariat is approached symptomatically, it is clear that it is animated by more than just moral rectitude. The lumpenproletariat names a theoretical challenge that Marx and Engels’s texts often use disdain to repress: that modern social structures contain sites of life, practice, difference, and possibility that cannot be incorporated within a production-determined account of social form and class struggle.
The lumpenproletariat is especially salient in Marx’s writings on the 1848 revolution in France and the class struggles that rocked the French state until Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s seizure of power in 1851. In these works, the lumpenproletariat is a political threat to the proletariat. As individuals with no relation to the means of production, they have no class identity and thus no organic political allegiance. This, combined with their desperate self-interest, means that their services can be bought easily by forces of reaction. In The Communist Manifesto, the lumpenproletariat “may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”7 Marx saw this reactionary tendency as explicating Bonaparte’s coup d’état, arguing that Bonaparte, despite representing the interests of no economic class, was able to seize the state by claiming to represent two groups that could not represent themselves as classes: the opportunistic urban lumpenproletariat and the politically naïve, outmoded rural peasantry.8
In The Peasant War in Germany (1850), Engels indicates that he and Marx saw the lumpenproletariat as a “phenomenon evident in a more or less developed form, in all the phases of society to date.” Engels composed this history of the German peasant uprising of 1525 to illuminate the struggles of 1848. In an 1870 preface, he expresses as a law the political danger that was ostensibly only a tendency in The Communist Manifesto. Here, the lumpenproletariat is “absolutely venal and absolutely brazen” and “the worst of all possible allies” for the proletariat. He even encourages their destruction as a shrewd political tactic. “If the French workers, in every revolution, inscribed on the houses: Mort aux voleurs! Death to thieves! and even shot some, they did it, not out of enthusiasm for property, but because they rightly considered it necessary above all to keep that gang at a distance.”9
The disgust of even Marx and Engels’s casual references to the lump-enproletariat—“passively rotting mass,” “scum,” “offal,”10—exceeds explication by a tendency toward political reaction. Gertrude Himmelfarb thus links Marx and Engels’s revulsion to the consequences the lumpenproletariat poses for Marxist thought itself. “Even more than the counter-revolutionary tendency of the lumpenproletariat,” she writes, “it was the lack of any ‘social’ character, any productive function . . . that aroused Marx’s contempt. . . . The lumpenproletariat, having no relationship to the means of production, was, in effect, a non-class. Thus it had no historical function, no role in the class struggle, no legitimate place in society, no redemptive role in history. Even when it was reactionary, it was so by accident, so to speak, ‘bribed’ to be the tool of reaction.” The lumpenproletariat is thus what is irrelevant to Marx, “not real human beings but gross matter.”11
Marx’s disgust can be further explicated by considering his singular use of the term to describe the dominance of the French “finance aristocracy” during the 1830–1848 reign of Louis Philippe I:
the same prostitution, the same shameless cheating, the same mania to get rich was repeated in every sphere . . . to get rich not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others. In particular there broke out, at the top of bourgeois society, an unbridled display of unhealthy and dissolute appetites, which clashed every moment with the bourgeois laws themselves. . . . The finance aristocracy . . . is nothing but the resurrection of the lumpenproletariat at the top of bourgeois society.12
Since financiers speculate on the value produced by the economic rather than producing anything of value themselves, they are no different than lumpenproletarian swindlers, hustlers, or confidence men. Peter Hayes thus claims that Marx understood the lumpenproletariat, in part, as a behavioral condition that could characterize both underworld criminals and financiers: “they did not want to work, they were thieving, and given these propensities they followed their immediate material interests without scruple.”13
This would seem to imply that the marginality of the lumpenproletariat derives from an inherent, morally wayward refusal of labor and class identity. However, as we saw in The Communist Manifesto and as Draper’s definition makes clear, the term can also acknowledge the structural causation of socioeconomic exclusion and political reaction. The latter, for example, was utilized by Leon Trotsky in his diagnosis of fascism as a mobilization of “the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat—all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy.”14 The tension between these multiple significances of the lumpenproletariat’s raggedness—material victimization or inherent debasement, structural delimitation or willed moral and political dissolution—is never wholly resolved in Marx. It’s unclear often whether the lumpenproletariat is defined by instinctual criminality or economically determined desperation, whether it is a “social scum” or an immiserated stratum produced by capitalism, and this fundamental uncertainty can initiate deconstructive and appropriative readings.
Marx seems to acknowledge the structurally determined conditions that make the lumpenproletariat amenable to criminal recruitment at the same time that he suggests the lumpenproletariat is essentially criminal. Describing how the bourgeois provisional government, established by the revolution of 1848, recruited a militia to keep the Parisian proletariat in check, Marx explains that the ranks of these “Mobile Guards”
belonged for the most part to the lumpenproletariat, which, in all big towns form a mass strictly differentiated from the industrial proletariat, a recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds, living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds, gens sans feu et sans aveu, with differences according to the degree of civilization of the nation to which they belong, but never renouncing their lazzaroni character.15
His lumpenproletarian individuals are, on the one hand, desperate because economically excluded. Lacking specific skills that might locate them within the waged proletariat, they must scramble for “crumbs” and are thus prone to becoming criminals. But on the other hand, they are already disreputable and criminal by nature since they are “sans feu et sans aveu” and “lazzaroni [in] character.” The former phrase, literally denoting those “without fire or confession,” connotes both material and discursive homelessness: those without hearth and home, without faith or sociopolitical consciousness. Marx’s use of this colorful phrase poses conceptual problems: do lumpenproletarian individuals lack the latter because they lack the former, or are both lacks simultaneous? In other words, does economic dislocation (homelessness) lead to a deformation of consciousness and character (faithlessness), or is the lumpenproletariat always-already so deformed? In the nineteenth century, the Italian term lazzarone, referring to the underclass of Naples, often functioned as a pejorative synonym for any unemployed, impoverished, and/or criminal urban groups. More evocative than precise, Marx’s use of lazzarone indicates the difficulty of defining the lumpenproletariat through means other than rhetorical association. One might conclude that Marx’s reliance on French and Italian terms that resist translation suggests the conceptual or theoretical “foreignness” of the lumpenproletariat as that which cannot be empirically or paradigmatically categorized because it names that which resists categorization.16
Marx struggles with that resistance in The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852) when describing the lumpenproletarian elements mobilized by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. Marx does not theorize the term, but spins an open-ended catalogue of figures the term could reference in an attempt to conjure a definition through association and synecdoche:
Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley-slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème.17
Though not Marx’s intention, this passage refers less to any discernable demographic than to the virtually limitless possibility of modern social modes and places of being, a limitlessness that Marx’s concluding “in short” reveals as ultimately defying encapsulation. Peter Stallybrass reads this passage as evidence of Marx’s participation in a nineteenth-century bourgeois discourse that struggled to describe and make sense of urban poverty, which appeared as a spectacle so heterogeneous as to unsettle “the process of social differentiation” and “the distinctions between classes.”18 Marx’s catalogue suggests that modern urban life retains a density and diversity and should trouble Marxism to the extent that it exceeds explication by theoretical mechanisms of labor, production, class, and class struggle.
In Capital (1867), Marx mentions the lumpenproletariat in his description of the relative surplus population. This population is an extension of the working class, a reserve pool of labor including those unable to work and temporarily unemployed, which functions to keep down wages by keeping the available supply of labor power high. Marx delineates the “lowest sediment” of this population as that which “dwells in . . . pauperism.” This level includes three groups: those unable to find work, “orphans and pauper children,” and “the demoralized, the ragged, and those unable to work, . . . the mutilated, the sickly, the widows, etc.” These last are framed sympathetically as the human discards of production. By distinction, the lumpenproletariat is something else: Marx carefully distinguishes “vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in short the actual lumpenproletariat” from those other, legitimate proletarian victims.19 The place of the “actual lumpenproletariat” is somewhat uncertain here, both associated with this pauper strata but also not part of it. It’s not clear, necessarily, why those that turn to crime and vagabondage would be different, in any terms other than nonmaterialist moralistic ones, from those honorably “ragged” victims who are also perpetually excluded from proletarian labor. However, Marx’s implication is familiar: some of the unemployed are “good” members of the proletariat unable to work or find work, while the “bad” lumpenproletariat names those who refuse work and instead pursue illicit and immoral activity.
The referential parameters of the lumpenproletariat, as a term, become vague almost as soon as they’re interrogated. Instead, the term signifies symptomatically, marking moments of premature theoretical closure within Marxism. Its definitional instability in fact makes it useful as a device for undoing closure and identifying new routes of conceptual exploration. That instability means that Marx and Engels’s texts rely on figurative, nonliteral rhetorical strategies to represent the lumpenproletariat: parsing the significance of the lumpenproletariat often requires reading Marx and Engels in the manner of a literary critic and decoding multiple connotative gestures. Like any literary analysis, such a reading necessarily engages the play of linguistic signification and often yields multivalent or even contradictory meanings. The term, after all, alludes to that which is not fully known and thus not valued—whether materially, ideologically, or theoretically—by either modern capitalism or Marxist theory. Precisely because those outside of capitalist relations of production resist full consideration by Marxist epistemology, Marx and Engels’s attempts to make sense of them end up circling in a figurative and associative proliferation. That deferring of exact definition produces confusion, of course, but it also affords access to the possibilities of interpretation and creative revision generated by the free play of textuality.
By reading closely for the lumpenproletariat in Marx and Engels, one can discover new opportunities for deconstruction and theoretical expansion. For instance, before he faced the challenge of explicating 1848, Marx described the same individuals he’d later denounce as “social scum” in a very different manner. In the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts he critiques bourgeois political economy for studying workers only as producers and neglecting other aspects of their humanity. He then considers other types who, because they do not work, exist beyond the horizon of political economy:
The swindler, the cheat, the beggar, the unemployed, the starving, the destitute and the criminal working man are figures which exist not for it, but only for other eyes—for the eyes of doctors, judges, grave-diggers, beadles, etc. Nebulous figures which do not belong within the province of political economy.20
The criminal and the destitute are grouped together on materialist grounds, as individuals defined by a lack of participation in production. Beyond the margins of production, they are also beyond the epistemological bounds of political economy, with the result that they remain “nebulous” presences that cannot be subsumed within its ordering of reality. Of course, this situation could equally characterize orthodox Marxism’s own dismissal of those who don’t work, whose identity is not secured by class status, and who thus lack full conceptual definition within Marxism. Lumpenproletarian figures thus make the outer limits of Marxist epistemology visible: the conceptual nebulousness of the lumpenproletariat reveals Marxism’s points of closure and limitation, and the individuals of the underclass manifest the margins, interstices, and underworlds where Marxism does not yet go and which it cannot yet adequately see.
The lumpenproletariat, then, is a mechanism enabling Marxism to reach beyond itself. In the texts of classical Marxism, it suggests possibilities that become thinkable when the limits of Marxist theory become recognized as limitations. So, for example, LaCapra can treat Marx’s “polemical animus” toward the lumpenproletariat as a revelation of “the possibility that modern societies did not offer a more or less ready-made group analogous to the classical revolutionary subject.”21 Jacques Rancière can argue that Marx’s rhetorical presentation of the lumpenproletariat indexes the impossibility of imposing philosophical paradigms of class and history on heterogeneous social individuals and processes.22 And Stallybrass can show how the lumpenproletariat reveals the limits of the classical Marxist assumption that “the domain of politics and the state” straightforwardly reflects economic interests.23
Marx and Engels’s discussions of the lumpenproletariat end up signaling the possibility that those on the margins of socioeconomic structures of production, and on the epistemological horizon of Marxism as the theory of those structures, could be generative of new directions for Marxist theory and practice. The lumpenproletariat ultimately suggests the adaptation of Marxism to a consideration of criminals, vagabonds, drifters, hustlers, “in short” all those with no legible social status. As we’ll see, the potential for revision and modification associated with the lumpenproletariat allowed certain African American writers and theorists to think the consequences, for Marxism, of black sociopolitical and cultural particularity.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Black Panther Party theorists sought to apply Marxism to the conditions of the internally colonized African American population, using the concept of the lumpenproletariat to make Marxism speak to and for African Americans. The Panthers followed the example of Frantz Fanon, who employed the lumpenproletariat to think the dynamics of anticolonial struggle in The Wretched of the Earth (1961). For Fanon, the colonial context necessitated revising Marxist principles—“slightly stretch[ing]” them—to incorporate the role of racial difference in the power structures of the colony.24
Fanon argues that Marx described the lumpenproletariat in a manner that universalized the political orientation of the nineteenth-century European underclass. But in the space of the colony, the lumpenproletariat is a revolutionary rather than reactionary force. For Fanon, the colonial lumpenproletariat is:
that fraction of the peasantry blocked at the urban periphery, those who still have not found a single bone to gnaw in the colonial system. . . . It is among these masses, in the people of the shanty towns and in the lumpenproletariat that the insurrection will find its urban spearhead. The lumpenproletariat, this cohort of starving men, divorced from tribe and clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneously and radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.
Doubly alienated from both the collective culture of the colonized nation and the resources of the colonizer’s urban space, Fanon’s lumpenproletariat resembles Marx’s gens sans feu et sans aveu, the materially and psychically homeless. Yet given the racial stratification of the colonial space, the lumpenproletariat finds its material needs—here, entrance into “the enemy citadel at all costs, and if need be, by the most underground channels”—filled not through the bribes of those in power, but by the anticolonial revolution: “the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals . . . give the liberation struggle all they have got, devoting themselves to the cause like valiant workers. These vagrants, these second-class citizens, find their way back to the nation thanks to their decisive, militant action.”25 Without fundamentally challenging the way Marx defined the lumpenproletariat, Fanon revised Marx’s estimate of its social and political character. In Black Panther thinker Kathleen Cleaver’s words, Fanon “articulated the colonial question in lucid originality, employing or discarding, refining or broadening, the Marxist-Leninist approach as appropriate to his subject.”26
Huey Newton developed the lumpenproletarian orientation of the Black Panther Party, but it was arguably Eldridge Cleaver who provided the party’s most sustained analysis of the lumpenproletariat. In a 1970 pamphlet, Cleaver writes that Fanon “unearthed the category of the Lumpenproletariat and began to deal with it, recognizing that vast majorities of the colonized people fall into that category.” This particular concept is thus suited to Cleaver’s aim of repurposing Marxism for midcentury US conditions inflected by racial difference. Cleaver’s revisionary appropriation of Marxism disassociates the concept of the proletariat from empirical industrial laborers. While expanding the concept’s exclusive reference to the working class, Cleaver retains Marxism’s abstract-structural designation of the proletariat as the agent of revolutionary change produced by structural conditions of capitalism. In the United States, there exist a white and a black proletariat, each composed of two elements—the working class and the lumpenproletariat. For Cleaver, the working class is the “right wing” of this revolutionary body: reactionary, bought off by capitalism, invested in the status quo, and manipulated by racist ideologies. By contrast, the lumpenproletariat forms its “left wing” and revolutionary vanguard. Industrial workers, Cleaver argues, have become conservative and actively invested in the system; the automation of production has ensured that the working class is dwindling in numbers and that its political outlook has become merely protective of jobs and wages. As a result, the lumpenproletariat, and the black lumpenproletariat in particular, possesses the revolutionary potential of the original Marxist concept of the proletariat.27
Cleaver is conscious of both the Marxist lineage of his argument and its challenge to official manifestations of Marxism:
Some blind so-called Marxist-Leninists accuse the Lumpen of being parasites upon the Working Class. This is a stupid charge derived from reading too many of Marx’s footnotes and taking some of his offhand scurrilous remarks for holy writ. In reality, it is accurate to say that the Working Class, particularly the American Working Class, is a parasite upon the heritage of mankind, of which the Lumpen has been totally robbed by the rigged system of Capitalism which in turn, has thrown the majority of mankind upon the junkheap while it buys off a percentage with jobs and security.
Cleaver presents his political theory as a better reading of Marxism. It is not the lumpenproletariat itself that is inconsequential or parasitic, but Marx’s characterization of it as such, which Cleaver in turn dismisses as the stuff of “footnotes” and “offhand remarks” rather than an essential Marxist principle. Cleaver’s redefinition of the lumpenproletariat similarly preserves, while re-evaluating, some of the rhetoric attached to Marx’s descriptions. The lumpen are “all those who have no secure relationship or vested interest in the means of production and the institutions of capitalist society, . . . who have never worked and never will,” who aren’t trained for any employment, “who have been displaced by machines, automation, and cybernation.” But the lumpenproletariat also contains “the so-called ‘Criminal Element’ . . . who don’t even want a job, who hate to work and can’t relate to punching some pig’s time clock, who would rather punch a pig in the mouth and rob him than punch that same pig’s time clock and work for him.” Echoing Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire catalogue while refusing to make Marx’s moralizing distinction between those who can’t work and who refuse to work, Cleaver wraps up his definition: “In short, all those who simply have been locked out of the economy and robbed of their rightful social heritage.”28 Given the racial divisions of American history and society, the black lumpenproletariat, the most alienated and disenfranchised segment of the population, seems to Cleaver and the Panthers to be the group most objectively invested in the overthrow of the current order.
Cleaver replaces the proletariat with the lumpenproletariat as the bearer of revolutionary change, and he derives the revolutionary potential of the black lumpenproletariat from Marxism’s understanding of the structural causation of transformative agency. Cleaver understands the lumpenproletariat to be a revolutionary force because he sees its marginalization as a denial of its “rightful social heritage.” Like the proletariat in The Communist Manifesto, it has nothing to lose and a world to win. Industrial workers in the United States, Cleaver argues, no longer occupy that structural role. “Working Class Proletarians are the House Niggers of Capitalism,” he declares in a later essay. The workers’ political institutions have taken Marxism and made it the “religion of those who had found their plug in the system.” Cleaver aims to be more Marxist than the Marxists by reclaiming Marxism from this distortion. Those who lack any stake in the system—the condition of revolutionary action—are today not the workers, he argues, but the castoffs and refuse from an increasingly automated economy. Not that the lumpenproletariat is automatically politically conscious. Cleaver retains the Marxist narrative of the lumpenproletariat’s susceptibility to bribery, arguing that the American state uses welfare, a “neo-colonial technique of social control,” to contain the lumpenproletariat’s political potential by giving it a stake in the present order. But welfare is only a tenuous “plug” in the system. Rather, like The Communist Manifesto proletariat, the objective political orientation of the lumpenproletariat—particularly the African American lumpenproletariat—is “against every organized structure that exists in the world today.”29
Marx saw the self-interested exigencies of lumpenproletarian existence as immanent to capitalism and not conducive to socialism. But in 1972, Cleaver was convinced that the lumpenproletariat was not only structurally positioned to overthrow capitalism, but that lumpenproletarian experience itself is the dialectical anticipation of post-capitalist social life. The “ultimate revolutionary demand,” he wrote, is not the demand of the workers for jobs, but of the lumpenproletariat “to be cut in on Consumption in spite of being blocked out of Production. . . . The point is not equality in Production, which is the Marxist view and basic error, but equality in distribution and consumption.”30 In other words, the lumpenproletarian demand is equal access to the means of reproducing life without dependence on labor, a severing of human fulfillment from the injunction to work. In the present, the lumpenproletariat struggles to survive without labor: in the postcapitalist future, existence without labor will be the rule. The future classlessness of socialism, for Cleaver, is best appreciated by attending to the classless existence of today’s lumpenproletariat. Cleaver thus develops a lumpenproletarian Marxism within the very conceptual framework of classical Marxist historicism, positioning the lumpenproletariat as the dialectical, even teleological precursor of post-class society.
The Panthers’ lumpenproletarian orientation has been criticized on multiple fronts. Contemporary Marxist critiques of Cleaver objected to his revisionary efforts, which they read as antirevolutionary misinterpretations. The black Marxist scholar C. J. Munford argued in 1973 that Cleaver simply hated workers, and that his emphasis on consumption was a “‘gimme-gimme’ mentality, the ultimate in consumerism which denies the human need for labor.”31 Henry Winston, an African American Communist activist, published an extensive critique of the Panthers in 1971 in Political Affairs, the journal of the Communist Party. Winston argued that in forsaking working-class organization, the Panthers handicapped the revolution in the United States. “The Cleaver-Newton theory of the lumpenproletariat as vanguard would mean objective surrender to the ruling class because only the working class can lead the fight against poverty and exploitation.”32 At issue in such critiques, of course, is the legibility of the Panthers’ approach to the lumpenproletariat as a Marxist one: the weight of Marx’s authority and of the proletarianism of classical Marxism make a Marxist revision of the lumpenproletariat simply unthinkable. Even Stokely Carmichael—hardly a dogmatic Marxist—called the Panthers “stupid” for ignoring Marx and Engels’s warnings and thinking the lumpenproletariat could be organized politically.33 Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar and Chris Booker have suggested that the Party’s emphasis on recruiting from the lumpenproletariat, and its leaders and members’ tendency to posture as lumpenproletarian outlaws, hindered its ability to organize a disciplined mass movement.34
Yet such critiques threaten to obscure the work a thinker like Cleaver was able to do with the concept of the lumpenproletariat. Surveying a racially polarized nation with an internally colonized black population, an increasingly automated productive economy, and the conservatism or inaction of traditional leftist and working-class institutions, Cleaver used this concept to reorient Marxist discourse accordingly. More important than the question of whether Cleaver’s claims were “right,” or whether the tactics drawn from them were effective, is the crucial truth about Marxism itself—and about Marxism’s identity in American contexts—that Cleaver demonstrates. Cleaver models how an African American Marxist theoretical practice can proceed by self-reflexively revising and adapting Marxist precepts to the contours of black experience and political needs.
Black Panther activist Bobby Seale used the African American folk figure Stagolee—an archetypal pimp, outlaw, and “bad man”—to reimagine Marx’s lumpenproletarians as political agents. “I transformed Stagolee . . . into brothers standing on the block and all of the illegitimate activity,” he told Cecil Brown. “In effect, they were the lumpen proletariat in a high-tech social order, different from how ‘lumpen’ had been described historically.”35 Seale foregrounded this revision in his account of his time in the Black Panther Party:
Marx and Lenin would probably turn over in their graves if they could see the lumpen proletarian Afro-Americans putting together the ideology of the Black Panther Party. Both Marx and Lenin used to say that the lumpen proletariat wouldn’t do anything for the revolution. But today, in a modern, highly technological society, with its CIA, FBI, electronic surveillance, and cops armed and equipped for overkill, here are black Americans . . . becoming the vanguard of a revolution, despite all attempts to totally wipe us out.36
For Seale, black folk sensibilities enable a strategic rewriting of orthodox Marxism’s devaluation of the lumpenproletariat. His gothic metaphor suggests that by making Marx and Lenin “turn over in their graves”—by revising their conclusions about the lumpenproletariat—the Panthers were keeping Marxism alive: reinvigorated by particular concerns of African American culture and politics and thus relevant to the specific conditions of revolutionary struggle in postwar US society.
This enactment of fidelity through revision is made possible by Marxism’s own epistemological character. Given Marxism’s status as the science of material conditions within history, modification is central to its theoretical practice. Kathleen Cleaver acknowledges as much when she writes that “any attempt to apply Marxist-Leninist theories cold from the pages of old books to the hot reality of present day life . . . betrays the essence of the science.” To be a proper Marxist, she continues, one must “advance the inherited theories into the future.” Ironically, this often puts the proper Marxist at odds with nominally Marxist institutions, including, from her perspective in 1975, the Communist Party of the United States.37 Louis Althusser explains how a Marxism that fancies it has reached an explanatory endpoint, where its theses and concepts finally make sense of reality and thus need no further adjustment, is a Marxism that has crossed from materialism to idealism, from a contingent project to a static set of absolute truths. “Marx did not ‘say everything’ . . . because to ‘say everything’ makes no sense for a scientist: only a religion can pretend to ‘say everything.’ On the contrary, a scientific theory, by definition, always has something else to say.” The “central thesis” of Althusser’s thought, which he locates as fundamental to Marx and Lenin’s as well, is thus “the idea of knowledge as production”: truth is reached only through the perpetual generation of more and updated knowledge about the world. “Marxist theory can fall behind history, and even behind itself, if ever it believes that it has arrived,” he warns.38 Althusser clarifies what the Panthers’ Marxism reveals about Marxism itself: its nature as not an all-encompassing master theory, but as the living, situated crafting of materialist knowledge and revolutionary possibility.
If the lumpenproletariat is a generative concept for Marxist theoretical work, it also can enable new critical considerations of literary representations of marginality. The connotations and figurative valences attending the raggedness of the “ragged proletariat” often converge as a trope in modern works that deal with socioeconomic and discursive marginality. Raggedness is a complex and mobile figure, as it can connote both delimitation and potential: a state of being discarded or a state of incipient renewal. In a manner similar to the conceptual ambiguity of the lumpenproletariat in Marxism, raggedness can suggest either hopeless moral and political depravity or openness to progressive organization and definition. Raggedness figures Marxism’s characteristic account of the lumpenproletariat as simultaneously exteriorized by and free from the institutions and discourses of capitalist modernity; as immiserated products of an oppressive system that excludes them from ideological legitimacy and material means of survival, and as free agents who create new possibilities from the margins of both capitalist social formations and traditional revolutionary organizations.
The ability of raggedness to trope the conditions of the marginalized derives from the material history of the production of paper from rags, a practice in which excess and refuse are transformed into the potential of blank pages. In Europe, paper was produced from decomposed rags until the end of the eighteenth century, when an increased demand for books and newspapers led papermakers to seek more readily available raw materials.39 Yet the state of the rag as both an endpoint (something thrown out, discarded, decomposed) and a new beginning (a raw material to be transformed into something else) persists as a useful literary trope for processes of marginalization, exclusion, and resistance. The trope of the rag figures both realistic and romantic understandings of the socially marginal: it indicates the material devastation and desperation of those reduced to rags, those who must subsist as the castoffs of society. But it also conjures the potential of those who, because exteriorized from means and relations of production, can craft new practices of subsistence and transform the margin into a place of new departures.
Patricia Yaeger identifies this figurative work of the rag in James Agee and Walker Evans’s landmark text of Depression-era photojournalism, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). She notes how Agee describes the clothing of poor whites as “surfaces” on which he can, as a writer, “[construct] a dignity for this clothing” and its wearers. However, that dignity is a romantic quality specific to literary form, one “that only he can describe; this shirt loses its aesthetic power when he shifts to the perspective of the poverty-stricken, class-bound white subjects he wants so desperately . . . to venerate.” Elsewhere in the text, rags “suggest a deeper pollution; they describe a world drifting away from the human” and “humanity immersed in dirt: the body in extremis, in crisis.”40 The rag is the sign of bodies that have been discounted, of bodies that can be reimagined through the work of writing, but in a manner necessarily removed from the real cost of that discounting. The rag and its shadow sign, paper, capture the tensions, negotiations, and possibilities emerging from social and discursive exclusion.
In similar ways, the figure of the rag animated a famous debate in the history of Marxist thought. In his study of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin interprets the figure of the ragpicker as a figure for Baudelaire himself. “The poets find the refuse of society on their streets and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse. . . . Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse, and both go about their solitary business while other citizens are sleeping.”41 As Michael Jennings notes, the ragpicker is Benjamin’s figure for his own archival methodology, one that seeks to produce knowledge from the discarded ephemera of history.42 In Benjamin’s hands, the ragpicker is a romantic figure for the subversive production, under cover of darkness, of new epistemological and political directions from out of the discards of exclusion and expulsion. Theodor Adorno, however, counters with a more sober analysis. He faults Benjamin for overlooking “the capitalist function of the ragpicker—namely, to subject even rubbish to exchange value.”43 Adorno indicates how the ragpicker plays a role in the reproduction of capitalism, and the terms of this debate are the very issues that the figure of the rag incites: Does the ragpicker turn rags into new forms of insight and practice, or simply into more commodities? Do those on the margins of capitalist society access revolutionary potential, or are they deformed by immiseration and false consciousness?
These questions often occur in American literary works that examine social marginality. Huckleberry Finn, for instance, is an outsider whose rags are a sign of both material lack and romantic potential. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Mark Twain’s titular protagonist famously dreads labor. Huck, the outcast with no familial or social place and thus no obligations, is a hero to boys like Tom and a threat in the eyes of their mothers. “Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town, because he was idle, and lawless, and vulgar and bad—and because all their children admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like him.” He “did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody.” To Tom and his friends, he is a “romantic outcast.”44 Huck’s status as a threat (to power) and source of freedom (to those subservient to power) is signified by his ragged appearance:
Huckleberry was always dressed in the cast-off clothes of full-grown men, and they were in perennial bloom and fluttering with rags. His hat was a vast ruin with a wide crescent lopped out of its brim; his coat, when he wore one, hung nearly to his heels and had the rearward buttons far down the back; but one suspender supported his trousers; the seat of the trousers bagged low and contained nothing; the fringed legs dragged in the dirt when not rolled up.45
His clothing is both a literal manifestation of the poverty being an outcast entails and registers the “gaudy” appeal of his condition to socially constrained boys like Tom. Furthermore, by describing his ragged clothes as “in perennial bloom,” Twain reimagines them in terms of potentiality and generation. Huck’s rags mark his exclusion from the social order. But they also signal his capacity, because of his exclusion, to enact Twain’s various moral and sociopolitical critiques of that order (both in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and in the 1884 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). His rags, in other words, become blank paper for the imagination of new critical perspectives.
Not all writers correlate the raggedness of lumpenproletarian marginality with possibility. In Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893), Stephen Crane highlights the destructiveness of Maggie’s recourse to prostitution at the end of the novel. Maggie lives with violent and alcoholic parents, and works in a “collars and cuffs” factory with “twenty girls of various shades of yellow discontent.” They produce collars, “the name of whose brand could be noted for its irrelevancy to anything in connection with collars.”46 Her romantic relationship with Pete, an attractive bartender, promises a means of escape from her life and her alienated labor, but it leads instead to her sexual disgrace and banishment from home. Abandoned by Pete and by her family, she turns to prostitution. In her final appearance in the novel, she has become anonymous—referred to only as “the girl”—and walks the street in search of trade. This mobility contrasts sharply with the confined life she led previously, but it contains none of Huckleberry Finn’s romantic possibility. Raggedness is aligned instead with the repulsiveness of transient men who prey on the socially outcast and defenseless Maggie: first a “ragged being with shifting, blood-shot eyes,” and then a “great figure” wearing “torn and greasy garments” who, it is suggested, violates and murders her.47 Lacking both class status and social identity, she is vulnerable in an underworld where raggedness, as it did for Marx, connotes only violent depravity. Maggie serves as a resolutely realistic counterpart to the romanticism of Twain’s marginal hero. This representation derives from Crane’s emphasis of journalistic documentation over figurative license, and also indicates his awareness of the ideological and material violence social exclusion entails for women—violence easily lost in depictions, such as Twain’s, where the outsider figure as an unencumbered male individual approximates normative patriarchal constructions of masculine individualism.
Claude McKay’s Harlem Renaissance novel Banjo (1929) is the only African American text to have been examined specifically through the lens of the lumpenproletariat concept. By selecting the underworld of Marseilles as his focus, McKay continued to challenge Harlem Renaissance preferences for depictions of black life that would affirm normative middle-class standards, an endeavor that had famously prompted W. E. B. Du Bois to denounce McKay’s previous novel, Home to Harlem, as “filth.”48 In Banjo, the lumpenproletariat enacts the novel’s sophisticated theorization of black internationalism in the interwar period. Brent Hayes Edwards observes how McKay describes Marseilles’s diasporic community of African Americans, Africans, and West Indians as a lumpenproletariat subsisting on the margins of waged labor and proletarian respectability. McKay describes this community as “dumped down in the great Provençal port, bumming a day’s work, a meal, a drink, existing from hand to mouth, anyhow any way, between box car, tramp ship, bistro, and bordel.”49 Edwards argues that unlike Marx, McKay sees this marginality as a source of potential, and the novel’s drifters embody an alternative internationalism to those of both imperialism and Marxist proletarianism. By highlighting the internal divisions among the black Marseilles lumpenproletariat, McKay also critiques various forms of black internationalism, such as Garveyism. For Edwards, this lumpenproletarian “vagabond internationalism,” articulated on the margins of established movements and collective identities, is defined only by internal difference and by the “debate” and “miscommunication” that characterize African diasporic expressive practices—“the Dozens writ large, with Ananse, Frère Lapin, and the Signifying Monkey soused and clamoring for the soapbox.”50
In an essay echoing Edwards’s reading, William Maxwell argues that Banjo redefines the transience imposed on people of African descent through slavery and imperialism as an “adversarial” internationalism, thereby reimagining rootlessness as a new source of identity and resistance.51 McKay employs papers and rags to figure the articulation of this internationalism. A key articulation of this recovery is an episode describing how wandering black sailors who, McKay writes, having “lived their lives in the great careless tradition” and lost their identification papers, are issued new papers “distinguished by the official phrase: Nationality Doubtful.”52 As Maxwell notes, “the move to deprive” these sailors of national identity “paradoxically eases their national wandering.”53 Intended to signify the loss of place and identity, the phrase “Nationality Doubtful” allows McKay to mark an emergent (trans)national identity defined only negatively (or “doubtfully”). McKay deploys tropes of paper and rags in a complex manner here: the “Nationality Doubtful” papers codify these sailors’ removal from the nation at the same time that they define a new ground of subjectivity, encapsulating the simultaneous exclusion and freedom of the “great careless tradition” of lumpenproletarian vagabondage.
Yet the papers signify in another symbolic register at the same time. One “‘Nationality Doubtful’ man,” Taloufa, an African sailor, engages in a fruitless attempt to win the right to enter England, where he had lived “for over forty years,” and has accumulated “a pile of foolscap correspondence with the British Home Office.” The “way of civilization with the colored man, especially the black” is here signaled by an excess of paper that registers the excessive repressions of national exclusion. Yet the figure of the black vagabond is then rendered as a symptomatic challenge and alternative to Western civilization, as “the red rag to the mighty-bellowing, all-trampling civilized bull.”54 Banjo reimagines the papers of that repressive and defined exclusion as “red rag[s]” that incite an unformed, undefined, and revolutionary defiance. This figurative play between paper and rags, contained form and resistant formlessness, synchronizes McKay’s complex approach to internationalism and diaspora.
When approached through the trope of raggedness, the lumpenproletariat can function in literary criticism by revealing how writers use literary tools to diagnose and recast marginality and exclusion. Whether thematically or through specific figurations of rags and paper, Wright, Ellison, and Walker’s work often reimagines lumpenproletarian existence as one of unstructured potential and transformative agency. At the same, these writers attend to the processes of economic, gender, and racial marginalization that misshape lumpenproletarian life in the Depression United States. Keeping both romantic and realistic poles of the trope of the rag in sight, their writings analyze and indict capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy while simultaneously imagining revolutionary solutions and alternatives.
In the 1930s, Marxism and the lumpenproletariat were thematic and representational concerns of US literature. During the Depression, formal protocols of literary Marxism were developed by writers and critics associated with the proletarian literature movement as well as with the lesser-studied genre of bottom dogs literature. While the focus of each differs—proletarian literature generally considers the collectivization and revolutionary agency of the militant proletariat, while bottom dogs texts map the travels of lumpenproletarian outcasts—both tend to approach their content through the lens of Marxist orthodoxy.
Signature formal maneuvers of the Depression-era proletarian novel—as identified by Walter Rideout’s The Radical Novel in the United States and codified in Barbara Foley’s magisterial Radical Representations55—involve representing the formation of proletarian class consciousness as well as the development of the revolutionary proletariat from out of the individual experiences of workers. In other words, proletarian literature is not merely a set of empirical representations of working-class identity; rather, it endeavors to depict American working-class experience in light of the specific Marxist concept of the proletariat, the collective subsumption of the singular laboring subject and the structural negation of the capitalist mode of production that the members of the working class must and will become. These novels thus tend to position the emergence of the collective proletariat, as foretold in The Communist Manifesto, as both the solution to the alienation of individual working-class characters and the bearer of societal transformation.
Accordingly, the classless lumpenproletariat is frequently an object of suspicion in proletarian literature: they’re the types who, because of their vice and political ignorance, resist incorporation into the proletarian collective. The life of the underclass serves as the individualistic, alienated, and self-interested alternative to proletarian collectivism. A clear example of this suspicion comes in Mike Gold’s 1930 novel Jews Without Money. The text depicts the development of Mikey (based on Gold himself) from a politically unconscious and criminal youth from the Jewish Lower East Side into a committed member of the proletariat. At the end of the novel, Mikey has entered the industrial workforce, but capitalist labor offers him neither security nor identity: “Jobs, jobs. I drifted from one to the other, without plan, without hope. . . . I was nothing, bound for nowhere.” Only when he hears from a “man on an East-Side soap-box” that “out of the despair, melancholy and helpless rage of millions, a world movement had been born to abolish poverty” does he overcome alienation and find his true identity and purpose. The conceptual ideal of the proletariat, heralded by a revolutionary activist, presents itself to Mikey as the bearer of the “workers’ Revolution”—the “true Messiah” that secularizes and materializes Mikey’s longing for “the Jewish Messiah who would redeem the world.” The ending line of the novel—“O great Beginning!”—makes clear that his old life, as an individual worker, has ended, and his new life, as part of the proletarian collective, has begun.56 From within the cultural and historical parameters of Jewish American working-class experience, Gold’s ending aestheticizes the ending of The Communist Manifesto, in which the formation of the proletariat is both the precondition for and the catalyst of an inevitable negation of capitalism. It also resonates with other proletarian novels that dramatize the classical Marxist emergence of the proletarian collective, such as Robert Cantwell’s The Land of Plenty (1934), Arnold Armstrong’s Parched Earth (1934), William Rollins’s The Shadow Before (1934), and Clara Weatherwax’s Marching! Marching! (1935).
In this ending, Mikey is also saved from the lumpenproletariat. Gold frequently describes the criminal element of the Lower East Side in tones that echo Marx and Engels’s portrait of the lumpenproletariat as scum. “They never worked. They played pool all day, or drank in saloons. Some were cheap pimps, others cheap thieves or gunmen. They fought and quarreled with the world, and with each other.” Gold even displays the classical Marxist ambivalence over whether the lumpenproletariat’s condition is socially fabricated or inherent: “One hates gangsters, as one must hate all mercenaries. Yet some are unfortunate boys, bad eggs, hatched by the bad world hen.” The notorious gangster Louis One Eye terrifies the workers of the neighborhood, but “is under the protection of Tammany Hall”: his actions have been co-opted by state forces to keep the working class in check, to stop it from emerging as the proletariat. He is “a monster useful to bosses in strikes, and to politicians on election day.” As his moniker suggests, Louis One Eye (“one-I”) is an alienated individual, unincorporated into any socioeconomic class and thus merely self-interested and a pliable tool of reaction. Mikey’s mother, the novel’s personification of proletarian virtue, voices Marx’s moral and political disapproval of the lumpenproletariat when she tells a prostitute: “Get a job in a factory, and be a good girl.”57
At the end of the novel, a desperate Mikey is on the verge of joining the neighborhood gang, which is lead by his old friend “Nigger,” a Jewish American youth whose nickname references his dark complexion. While his main pursuits involve “drinking and whoring,” Nigger has also been an effective champion and defender of the boys from the neighborhood. Before he became a gangster, Nigger punched a teacher who called Mikey a kike—“It was Justice”—and stood up to a cop who harassed Mikey and his other friends: “He was ready to die for justice. The cop was not as brave.”58 Throughout the novel, Nigger seems to be a potential force for radical resistance. His nickname, when combined with his dedication to confronting anti-Semitism, suggests that his commitment to justice transcends racial or ethnic particularism. But his individualized toughness ultimately leads him only to a lumpenproletarian life of crime. By the end of the novel, he is like Louis One Eye in that he embodies the individualistic urban subject Mikey must reject, regardless of any political potential such individuals might offer, in order to be reborn in the international proletariat.
Bottom dogs fiction of the 1930s tends to be politically aligned with the proletarian literary project but characterized by different representational and thematic procedures. Named by scholars after Bottom Dogs, the 1929 debut novel of Edward Dahlberg, bottom dogs texts were generally composed by pro-Communist writers but, to quote Rideout, their political “message tends . . . to be implicit only. For the most part refusing the assistance of slogans, resolutions, and other revolutionary gestures, these novelists ambush the reader from behind a relentlessly objective description of life in the lower depths.”59 Foley suggests that such texts “do not centrally depict the development of a revolutionary working-class identity.”60 Rather than stories of workers forming into a collective proletariat or representations of Communist activism, these novels depict outcasts and criminals who never attain sociopolitical awareness. Their protagonists rarely encounter or comprehend, and often express hostility toward, Marxism and the Communist movement. Classical Marxism’s political suspicion of the lumpenproletariat is thus often the starting point, in these works, for analyzing the obstacles American conditions pose to proletarian class struggle and to bottom dogs individuals being “swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution.”
Sometimes these authors are implicitly critical of the Communist movement for being unable or unwilling to reach the lumpenproletariat because it is devalued by Marxist orthodoxy. Looking back at the 1930s, Dahlberg would remark that poverty, the condition of the underclass he wrote about, was beyond the horizon of the Communists’ focus on labor and production. As such, it only mattered when it was “enjoyed by a drayman, hodcarrier, steamfitter or riveter, a longshoreman, millhand, or steelworker. . . . No matter what hardships the lumpenproletariat suffered such people did not count.”61 As what “didn’t count,” the lumpenproletariat is often framed in bottom dogs novels as a blind spot in need of consideration. However, these texts generally still underscore Marxism’s account of the character of lumpenproletarian types, foregrounding the unsavory behaviors and ideological leanings of the underclass as a check against the unexamined surety of Communist prescriptions. Acel, the drifter protagonist of Edward Anderson’s Hungry Men (1935) declares “there’s a million men in this country on the road, and if these men were organized or were prepared to follow some organization, it’d be something.” But throughout the novel, Acel and his fellow transients are often unable to recognize Communism as the bearer of their own interests. In fact, Acel is inclined to justify capitalism as a “survival-of-the-fittest law,” a reification of the self-interest that is all members of the lumpenproletariat know.62 Rather than offering positive evocations of proletarianism, bottom dogs texts proceed in a negative manner by diagnosing the limits of revolutionary political efficacy with respect to the lumpenproletariat.
During the 1930s, the Jewish American Communist writer Nelson Algren was the bottom dogs novelist whose treatment of the marginalized and transient was most thoroughly informed by Marxist theory. Algren demonstrates both the orthodox Marxist understanding of the lumpenproletariat and the figurative utility of rags and paper in his 1935 short story “A Lumpen.” The story opens with the titular narrator, a transient staying at a local shelter, alighting on the streets of Chicago. He encounters a man “handing out little books” and takes one to study. “Are You the Wreck of a Man, Consultation Free” proves to be the title of this self-help pamphlet. He pores over it seeking an answer to his condition—“readin’ it hard like I had buboes and wanted to know from the book where to go”—but ultimately has to throw it away when he reflects that the staff at the shelter wouldn’t approve of such reading material. The next day, he encounters an interracial Communist parade. The sight of “niggers . . . walkin’ with white men, carryin’ banners” is illegible to the narrator. One of the signs carries a prominent Communist slogan of the era—“Black and White. Unite and Fight”—but the very concept of interracial cooperation is foreign to him. “Them’s mighty cocky niggers,” he says to a fellow bystander. His recourse to white racism demonstrates his inability to read the political text before him. “I kept thinking of them Black and White signs all morning,” he tells the reader, referring at once to the literal placards of the marchers, the interracial activism of Communism, and his general inability to “read” the various printed solutions—self-help, Communism—available to him. The narrator ends the story having finally found a source of income: he sells copies of Huey Long’s newspaper The American Progress.63 As Marx predicted, his “conditions of life” have made him unable to think beyond self-interest and have primed him to become a “bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”
This straightforward illustration of Marx’s approach to the lumpenproletariat relies on figures of rags and paper. The protagonist’s ragged state—his material lack and the cognitive deformations (political illiteracy, white supremacy) accompanying that lack—is positioned in relation to a range of possible options for transforming his raggedness into something new. Those options are figured as papers: the “Are You the Wreck of a Man, Consultation Free” book, the signs of the Communist marchers, and The American Progress. Because of his exteriorized status, the lumpenproletarian figure is capable of being written into a variety of social and political identities and programs—as Marx predicted, however, he is more amenable to reaction than revolution.
Algren’s first novel, Somebody in Boots (1935), frames its narrative of Depression-era transients with chapter epigraphs quoting The Communist Manifesto’s warnings about the lumpenproletariat. As William Solomon explains, Somebody in Boots is a “textual experiment designed to examine the validity of Marx’s political theory,” as articulated in The Communist Manifesto, when applied to “conditions in the United States in the 1930s.”64 The novel validates Marx’s antagonism toward the lumpenproletariat even as it displays Algren’s sensitivity to the material plight and attendant limitations of marginalized individuals. Cass McKay, a homeless drifter, is so deformed by the violence of lumpenproletarian sites (brothels, freight cars, jail cells) that his cognitive abilities and ambitions cannot transcend his conditioning. For a brief period in the novel, he is introduced to the Communist movement in Chicago by a black musician, Dill Doak, who attends Communist rallies when not performing and who possesses a clear Marxist understanding of American capitalism. But the interracialism and collectivism of the movement, and its revolutionary ambitions, find no corollary in Cass’s own experiences of a marginal realm where self-preservation trumps all. William Maxwell shows how Cass’s underworld of hobos and criminals is one in which white supremacy is violently maintained and normalized. He is thus unable to understand Communism’s appeal because the idea of transcending racial difference is, within the bounds of his experience, unintelligible.65 At the end of the novel, Cass is no better off than at the beginning: he has learned nothing, and he leaves Chicago to rejoin the freight-hopping lumpenproletariat—a form of mobility that, in the novel, offers no hope of personal or political transcendence.66
As members of the Depression-era literary left, Wright, Ellison, and Walker were certainly aware of and influenced by the various projects and texts of proletarian and bottom dogs literatures. However, in their own approach to the lumpenproletariat, they often reimagine its socioeconomic exteriority as a source of new resources for revolutionary agency. In effect, Wright, Ellison, and Walker’s work extends Dahlberg’s observation—that is, to write of the lumpenproletariat is to write about what doesn’t count—by asking what Eldridge Cleaver would ask decades later: how can the socioeconomic, racial, cultural, and gender facets of the lumpenproletariat expand the range of what can count for and as progressive radicalism?
Paul Gilroy remarks that the transatlantic black counterculture he famously theorizes has been somewhat at odds with orthodox Marxism. This is due in part to “the simple fact that in the critical thought of blacks in the West, social self-creation through labour is not the centre-piece of emancipatory hopes. For the descendants of slaves, work signifies only servitude, misery, and subordination.” Instead, artistic and cultural practices are the Black Atlantic’s “means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation.”67 Gilroy’s claim about the ambivalence toward labor in black cultural expression allows us to contextualize the relative lack of empowering portraits of labor in Wright, Ellison, and Walker. In their Depression writings, industrial and agricultural work is more often entrapping than yielding of insight or agency, and the classical Marxist emphasis on labor as the catalyst of proletarianization and revolution is largely absent.
Instead, in their writings revolutionary consciousness and action emerge primarily from and within lumpenproletarian experiences of crime, transgression, and life on the margins. The central archetype of their work could thus be described as the lumpenproletarian hustler, a character who gets by outside the law and social identities organized by class, who must invent his or her life and identity on the fly, in various states of transience. As Stuart Hall and others posit in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order hustlers, as modern black urban lumpenproletarians, “live by their wits” through “modes of survival alternative to the respectable route of hard labor and low wages.”68 This figure allegorizes politics as a creative mode of practice very different from the exploitations of labor.
By “practice,” I am referring to Michel de Certeau’s sense of the term as an everyday tactic, the creative implementation of resistance that works with and against the structural conditions of a given time and place. Like a drifter on the move or a hobo hopping a freight train, a tactic possesses a “mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment.”69 I see de Certeau’s concept of the tactical rendered within African American cultural theory by Houston Baker’s figure of the train-hopping blues singer, whose vernacular origins and deconstructionist practice of the blues register the fluid mobility and persistent political commitment of black cultural expression. “Like signification itself, blues are always nomadically wandering. Like the freight-hopping hobo, they are ever on the move, ceaselessly summing novel experience. . . . Standing at the juncture, or railhead, the singer draws into his repertoire hollers, cries, whoops, and moans of black men and women working in fields without recompense.”70
The blues and the tactic name what Louis Althusser designates as the properly scientific kind of Marxist materialism: a theoretical practice unconfined by preconceived mandates of orthodoxy or static foundational claims. In order to emphasize the necessity of revision, expansion, and theoretical invention to materialism, he employs a figure who resembles the train-hopping hobo, the archetypal lumpenproletarian of Depression America: “an idealist is a man who knows which station the train leaves from, and also its destination. . . . The materialist, on the other hand, is a man who gets on to a moving train without knowing either where it is coming from or where it is going.”71 The hobo who rides trains illegally and who is thus both exterior to and free from the structures of society and discourse in a given historical moment embodies the free-ranging experimentation that constitutes Marxism’s scientific character.
Cecil Brown’s argument about the black cultural legend of Stagolee is relevant here as well. Brown uses Benjamin’s ragpicker to delineate a particular characteristic of African American oral traditions and music. As Benjamin’s ragpicker “takes the old and discarded and turns it into something new,” rap artists have similarly reworked the contradictions of black urban experience:
The marginal people of a city have to take the scraps and fragments and put them together to make a whole cloth. Rap music takes its name from the verb ‘to rap,’ which is short for ‘rhapsodize,’ which in Greek means ‘to stitch a song together.’ African Americans have a tradition of stitching bits of narrative together.72
This practice of black culture is exemplified in the history of the Stagolee legend. A notorious underworld operator, Stagolee enabled black artists to explore the interrelations of masculinity, city life, and social marginalization. Stagolee embodies the experiences of a modern African American “‘rag’ proletariat,” and thus “it is not coincidental that the music that first celebrated the Stagolee ballad was called ragtime.”73 Brown traces how the story of Stagolee has been told by numerous black cultural forms—ballads, the blues and ragtime, toasts, the Black Panther Party’s lumpenproletarian rhetoric, and rap music—in order to express black sociopolitical needs in various modern contexts and periods. In other words, Brown suggests that the Stagolee legend, like modern black oral culture itself, is “lumpenproletarian” in form as well as content: it stitches together ragged “scraps and fragments” into the “whole cloth” of politically and socially sustaining narrative. Like Baker, Brown suggests the unexpected resemblance of Althusser’s scientific Marxism and African American cultural expression: both are defined by tactical adaptation and revision, and both resemble the practical resourcefulness of lumpenproletarian life rather than the organized, territorialized processes of labor.
Finally, literature itself converges with the tactical nature of Marxism and black culture. De Certeau observes that the working of a tactic is like that of the literary or rhetorical figure. He thus finds “homologies between practical ruses and rhetorical movements” and notes that figures perform “tricks” with language, tricks that defy “the legalities of syntax and ‘proper’ sense.”74 As an illegitimate or criminal manipulation of linguistic sense, the literary figure resembles the illicit inventiveness of the lumpenproletarian individual: the former is thus a generative resource for thinking through the epistemological and political consequences of the latter. A black Marxism organized around the possibilities of the lumpenproletariat is a Marxism well suited to literary form, and thus unsurprisingly finds expression in the work of three of the Depression-era left’s most innovative black writers.