“Ragged Revolutionaries – The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression Era-Literature” by Nathaniel Mills, 2017
This is an academic look at 3 left-wing writers – Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Margaret Walker - centered on their work in the 1930s at the height of Communist Party (CP) influence in various movements. Mills claims that these 3 extended Marxism by incorporating the 'lumpen-proletariat' into the revolutionary forces, similar to what they think Frantz Fanon and the Black Panther Party (BPP) did later. Walker was a member of the CP for a time; Wright was close to the CP until he broke with them, and Ellison was in CP literary front groups until he joined the mainstream literary crowd.
The thesis is that Marx and Engel's distaste for the lumpen-proletariat was due to their negative role in the 1848 revolutions when they allied with the ruling powers or did nothing. Mills points out that this is an historical evaluation, not a theoretical one. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels wrote that this strata was a victim of capital; but at other times they wrote that they would sell out, prey on the proletariat or be useless in a struggle. I think the problem is centered in the description of 'who' is in the actual lumpen-proletariat, and this extends to Mills himself. Everyone outside the stable production system – hobos or prostitutes in his usage - or ruined by the production system – beggars - is not a necessarily a lumpen. Hobos actually work occasionally and you can make a case that prostitutes are exploited sex workers. All 'poor' people are not lumpen as many have jobs, as do homeless people and drug addicts, though some have been ruined by addiction. The categories of lumpen used by Wills are flawed and confuse marginal workers with criminals.
On the other hand the BPP and Mills both celebrate criminals as 'having agency' – a sort of romantic embrace that does not detail the real role of, for instance, gangs in social life. You can make a Marxist case that actual gangs are just illegal capitalist businesses and that illegal drug and gun dealers are providing a service like any businessman. These people are not exclusively 'Robin Hoods' robbing the rich or banks, nor are they moonshiners or weed dealers. Many criminals shoot, rob, rape or target poor people around them; cyber criminals take advantage of the vulnerable; white collar criminals effortlessly steal money. A historical study of the role of 'blue collar' gangs in social struggle would be useful in this estimation and perhaps you could start with the Haitian gangs presently fighting in Port Au Prince. Or check out the gangs in Mexico and Central America. Castro quickly got rid of the lumpen-bourgeois Mafia in Cuba, as, besides their criminality, they were in league with Batista and the U.S. This book ignores the historical role of actual criminals though.
The Texts
Figures like Wright's Bigger Thomas from Native Son, or Twain's Huckleberry Finn from his self-named Adventures are alleged to be representative of the progressive possibilities of lumpens. Huckleberry was a teenager, 13 to 14 years old. He's a teenage runaway helping Jim, and neither teenagers nor runaways are lumpens. His is a heroic act, as white folks in other parts of the slave South were executed for helping runaways or in rebellions and luckily, that did not happen to Huck.
Bigger Thomas in Native Son was a composite of 4 different people that Wright knew, as he made clear in 1940s How Bigger Was Born – a bully, a scammer, a criminal and an unemployed man – all alienated from society and very angry in some way, but not all 'lumpen.' In Wright's 1941 book The Man Who Lived Underground a similar person to Bigger is represented. He worked precariat odd jobs until the police chose to patsy and abuse him. In Native Son, being a bully doesn't mean not working – in fact they are usually 'successful' people. Being unemployed fits into Marx's strata of the reserve army of the unemployed. Bigger himself worked as a servant. Scammers and even pimps mimic regular business culture – their jobs are part of the lumpen petit-bourgeoisie. Is poverty a creature of class society? Yes. Are these characters on the edge of the official production system? Yes. Are criminals part of the 'circulation of capital'? Actually yes, as a significant chunk of the banking flow in the world comes from crime, especially drugs and white-collar fraud. Ask HSBC or any Swiss bank.
Mills mentions the larger universe of proletarian and 'bottom dog' literature. He discusses Claude MaKay's vision of rootless precarians, including sailors in Marseilles, in Banjo; Mike Gold's Jews Without Money that depicts a New York slum youth breaking with his criminal buddies; CP'er Nelson Algren's descriptions in A Lumpen and Somebody in Boots of transient white men in Chicago who can't grasp black-white unity or collective struggle. Edward Dahlberg, author of numerous books like Bottom Dogs came closer to what Mills' is talking about.
Romantic figures like gamblers, hustlers, blues men, hobos, ragpickers and Stagolee people the imagination of the lovers of the itinerant sub-proletariat – yet who are no longer as romantic or numerous. If you hear some folk singer yowling about this archaic stuff, you'll see the contradiction. Yeah, people don't want to work, its alienated trouble, sure, and that's most of us. But these legendary roles are semi-working class except Stagolee and fraudsters who live off opportunity, mobility and chance. The Stagolee of legend, Lee Shelton, was a pimp, gang leader and murdered a competitor – very few people's role model. Modern criminal anti-heroes are served up to us on TV frequently, with assassins the pinnacle. It is tired ideological propaganda for bloody individualism and do-it-yourself capitalism. This ain't cutting edge - it's nowhere near an emancipatory blade.
In Native Son Bigger is associated with Lenin and, while abhorring waged work, he finally moves towards the CP for subjective reasons. Wright's point is that revolution contains more than just 8-hour-a-day workers - not news in the poverty-stricken 1930s. Mills repeatedly emphasizes that Bigger was extremely alienated from society and wanted to 'be seen' and his 'story told' and to 'have agency' – to not be invisible. Is this truly revolutionary? It can certainly lead many to joining socialist groups. But in a capitalist context it also means the invisibility of dark-skinned semi-proletarians will be supplanted by the visibility of middle-class people of color – which is what has actually happened. On a similar subject, is any kind of violence by the oppressed laudable 'agency?' Mills hero Eldridge Cleaver wrote in Soul on Ice that the serial raping of 'white' women was somehow revolutionary – though he practiced on 'black' women.
Mills does an in-depth study of Ellison's unpublished left-wing 1930's stories – Tillman and Tackhead and Slick - which focus on marginal workers and down and outs. It's very clear that Jim Crow and the Depression were the biggest social influences on these 1930s writers. Ellison shows multi-ethnic unity and the complexity of social groups within class society, especially the turbulent African-American side of Oklahoma City. This 'chaos' and complexity continues to exist today, which is why a simple-minded class analysis fails to understand the twisting variations of social and economic roles and how that relates to revolution. Mills attributes Ellison's position, like Wright's, to understanding the influence of what he romantically calls 'lumpen-folk' culture – something still seen today.
Lastly Mills analyzes Walker's 1930s unpublished book Goose Island and poems from her book For My People, which focus on capitalist poverty creating crime. These are Chicago versions of Les Miserables, as Goose Island's lead characters are 'juvenile delinquents' and prostitutes. Walker goes further down the line of lionizing rebellious criminals like Stagolee as agents of liberation. Mills concludes that she replaced the proletariat with the semi-proletariat and lumpen as the real agents of change. In1966 Walker published Jubilee, a somewhat traditional historical novel covering slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction from the point of view of people of color.
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| Algeria Independent 1962 |
Marxism as Method
Marx never alleged that the only people who could rebel in an emancipatory direction were those in the direct productive sphere. It is well-known that housewives would aid in strikes, for instance. Marginal semi-labor strata are created by capital's class system and poverty after all. Marxists know that full-time workers have more power and organization, as they are stationed at the heart of the profit system. This is why they were 'bought off' in the central capitalist countries, as the BPP's Cleaver wrote. They are too valuable to ignore and too strong to ignore. Does this mitigate their revolutionary potential? Of course, but that doesn't change their centrality, especially when the bribe money starts running out, which it is doing now. Some Left academics are always looking for a substitute to the “boring, stupid, complacent” working class and are more excited by criminals and culture. This book has a touch of that.
Mills makes it clear that these dark-skinned writers did not reject Marxism as some 'European white' thing – they, like the BPP and Fanon, adopted it and revised it to highlight marginal populations. Fanon's masses of immiserated people living in the crowded casbahs, favelas, barrios and slums of the colonies are not the same as Marx's 1848 Parisian underclass. This reveals that Marxism is a factual method, not 'Bible' study. The national oppression that Fanon addressed is an added burden to class oppression and this is significant in the U.S. too. A study of the Algerian national liberation struggle's class makeup, a struggle Fanon supported, would be useful. It certainly did not involve many people with full-time jobs and dental care! Street peddlers, shop owners, youth, street urchins, displaced rural peasants, day laborers, ex-soldiers, intellectuals, the poverty stricken and some criminals probably formed the core of the FLN military struggle. It was a national struggle after all, an angle Mills does not deal with. Of note, in Algiers the FLN actually executed criminals to take control of the Casbah. This should give Mills pause.
A modern Marxist view of the lumpen-proletariat centers around crime and fraud, not around rootlessness, precarity, poverty or invisibility. At moments of uprising many marginal workers will join a struggle. Another strata are people who are too damaged, addicted or mentally unstable to get their lives together, let alone work with a revolutionary movement. Nearly all criminals on the other hand? No. Lumpen individuals and gangs would only help in a rebellion if they see something in it for themselves, like profit, or get bribed by the wealthy. The Spanish film Gun City about a real anarchist revolt in 1922 Barcelona showed just that. In the 2020 George Floyd rebellion in Minneapolis-St. Paul, criminals took advantage of the turmoil to rob stores and banks or just burn buildings.
Crime has now grown as an industry spanning continents. It not just some jewelry heist in Boston's Beacon Hill carried out by cool future radical Malcolm X - now it's cartels, help from governments and banks and millions of dollars in riches. Crime is globalized and oligopolized. There are 4 main '1%' criminal motorcycle gangs left in the world for instance. Noticeably the IRA told the Angels to get out of Ireland - and they did for awhile. None of this is romantic - it's business. As Al Capone said: “This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we seize it with both hands and make the most of it.”
This is why the tortured academic definition of criminals as having some kind of emancipatory 'agency,' opposed to 'the system' and representing 'revolution' is nonsense, even in black-face. Without a conversion experience (the book Monster or Autobiography of Malcolm X or Native Son) or confronting a stronger people's organization, they are not going to become socialists or revolutionaries. What this book basically is is a mediation on the effect structural racism has on the economy of dark-skinned people, separating them from fully-employed life and pushing so many to the edges, making them invisible drones who hate alienated work. These writers chose to focus on them. Does this strata have revolutionary potential? Sometimes yes - provided the proletariat shows up too. Alone they can only act partially and episodically. Considering them human and having positive potential is the insight that 'bottom dog' literature provides, which is what this book is really about.
While marred by a flawed thesis, the book highlights long-neglected proletarian literature of the 1930s and stands for Marxism in its own way. This is a rarity in English studies and is certainly worth reading.
Prior reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “How Bigger Was Born” and “The Man Who Lived Underground” (both by Wright); “ “The Outlaws,” “ Amiable With Big Teeth” (McKay); “Drug War Capitalism,” “Central America's Forgotten History,” “Peaky Blinders,” “Gun City,” “How to Rob an Armored Car,” “Kill the Assassins!” Marx Dead and Alive” (Merrifield); “Ozark,” “We Own This City,” “American Made,” “Athena,” “The Committed” (Nguyen), “Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “L'Assommoir” (Zola); “Factory Days” (Gibbs); “Polar Star” (Cruz), 'proletarian fiction.'
And I got at the the UGA Library.
May Day Books has many books on racism and poverty and volumes of left-wing fiction.
Red Frog / April 7, 2024
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