Ragged Revolutionaries

The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression-Era Literature

Nathaniel Mills

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781625342799
• eBook ISBN: 9781613765135
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

In Marxism, the concept of the lumpenproletariat refers to the masses in rags, outsiders on the edge of society, drifters and criminals, of little or no use politically. But in Ragged Revolutionaries, Nathaniel Mills argues that the lumpenproletariat was central to an overlooked yet vibrant mode of African American Marxism formulated during the Great Depression by black writers on the Communist left.

By analyzing multiple published and unpublished works from the period, Mills shows how Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Margaret Walker used the lumpenproletariat to imagine new forms of revolutionary knowledge and agency. In their writings, hobos riding the rails, criminals hustling to make ends meet, heroic black folk-outlaws, and individuals who fall out of the proletariat into the social margins all furnish material for thinking through resistance to the exploitations of capitalism, patriarchy, and Jim Crow. Ragged Revolutionaries introduces the lumpenproletariat into literary study, offers a new account of the place of Marxism in African American literature and politics, and clarifies the political and aesthetic commitments of three major modern black writers.

1

The Ragged Proletariat

Itineraries for a Transient Concept

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.

Marxism and the Lumpenproletariat

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,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction. Communists, Writers, and Other Outsiders
• 1. The Ragged Proletariat: Itineraries for a Transient Concept
• 2. Richard Wright and the Lumpenproletarian Desire for Revolution
• 3. From Oklahoma City to Tuskegee, from Harlem to Dayton: The Sites, Levels, and Travels of Ralph Ellison’s Marxism
• 4. Prostitutes, Delinquents, and Folk Heroes: Margaret Walker’s Lumpenproletariat
• Conclusion. Afterlives of the Depression Lumpenproletariat
• Notes
• Index