Revising Class: Lumpen in Literature
Book Review

http://solidarity-us.org/atc/195/review-lumpen/
Date Written:  2018-07-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2018
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23392

Review of Ragged Revolutionaries by Nathaniel Mills. Marxist analysis of depression-era African-American literaature by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Margaret Walker.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Ragged Revolutionaries:
The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression-Era Literature
By Nathaniel Mills
Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017, 208 pages, $27.95 paperback.

"LUMPENPROLETARIAT" HAS HAD a hard life in critical circles. The term was not much embraced by Marx and Engels, the very authors who coined it. They did not theorize much about the social formation other than to portray it negatively, and generations of commentators have remained wary of the construct....

Nathaniel Mills, a refreshingly flexible Marxist thinker, valiantly recuperates the idea of the lumpenproletariat as a way to reinvigorate Marxism and speak to current organizing needs to overcome the oppressive aspects of the American social order. He does so by examining some of the most salient attempts to portray the dynamic potential of the lumpenproletariat, namely, the 1930s writing of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Margaret Walker.

Mills contends that by departing from the classic conception of the lumpenproletariat, those writers did not reject Marxism. Instead they enriched it. They transcended the proletarian literary formula of contemporaries like Mike Gold, Robert Cantwell and Clara Weatherwax, who cast the working class heroically but not the lumpen.

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