The concept of the lumpenproletariat, the “proletariat in rags,” is peculiar to Marxism (Marx and Engels created the term) yet under-explicated by Marx and neglected in Marxist theoretical discourse. The term names individuals who persist outside of capitalist productive relations and, as a result, lack a place within capitalist social formations. Marx typically invokes such types only to dismiss them as irrelevant to theoretical concerns of production and class struggle, or to scorn them as immoral, criminal, and self-interested enemies of the proletariat. The dispossessed of modern society—drifters, criminals, underworld agents, etc.—are thus named by Marxism but denied proper epistemological scrutiny. The lumpenproletariat thus possesses a somewhat archival character: it’s catalogued and registered in Marxism’s conceptual finding aid, but awaits full exhumation and serious study. Similarly, much of the Depression-era fiction and poetry of two African American writers—Ralph Ellison and Margaret Walker—that resituates the lumpenproletariat as a means of understanding U.S. social arrangements and imagining revolutionary African American political desires also resides, unfinished and unstudied, in manuscript archives.

In this talk, I discuss Ellison and Walker’s innovative 1930s writings, showing how the concept of the lumpenproletariat allowed them to, in various ways, renovate Marxist theory in order to illuminate and challenge the intersectional dynamics of capitalism, patriarchy, and Jim Crow in America. Ellison and Walker also provide an occasion for thinking the importance of the archive, not only as a site of innovative experiments in radical literature and culture, but as a means of designating the place of the understudied within the conceptual topography of Marxist and radical thought. If Walker and Ellison were inspired by a concept Marxism had overlooked and by individuals Depression America had discarded, then we might consider their efforts as models of how to engage with Marxism through its archive, through its de-prioritized and unexamined resources.

Nathaniel Mills is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Ragged Revolutionaries: The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression-Era Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017). His articles on U.S. and African American literary radicalism have appeared or are forthcoming in venues such as African American Review, MELUS, Twentieth-Century Literature, Studies in American Naturalism, The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright, and The Cambridge Companion to American Literature of the 1930s.