Ragged Revolutionaries: The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression-Era Literature by Nathaniel Mills

Author:Nathaniel Mills
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004040 Literary Criticism / American / African American, LIT004020 Literary Criticism / American / General
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:46:34.563000+00:00

The Practice of Politics: Decatur and the Lumpen-Folk Figure

Ellison’s theory of revolutionary political action revises two concepts and figures: the lumpenproletariat and the folk. His memory of black Oklahoma City auto mechanics bearing folk legend status suggests an alignment, in Ellison’s thought, of the ability to manipulate technology, to work the overdetermined complexity of social form, with an organic mode of individual agency. In his Depression work, he associates that agency with lumpenproletarian outsiders who craft possibility from the gaps and margins of the social. As we’ve seen, Althusser’s theory of social form is designed to enable revolutionary action, and Gramsci’s work further theorizes such action and thus furnishes an additional theoretical vocabulary for the specification of Ellison’s Marxism.

Gramsci approaches the traditional Marxist framing of base and superstructure through his attention to what he terms “organic” (economic) and “conjunctural” (superstructural) components of social structures. Economic conditions are epistemologically grasped, however, when they are manifested on the “terrain of the ‘conjunctural,’” where the objective dynamics of production are subjectively apprehended in various social and ideological forms. Class struggle, in other words, is actually waged in terms that orthodox Marxism might dismiss as merely superstructural: cultural, political, and so forth. Gramsci thus interprets Marx’s famous preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy as arguing that “men acquire consciousness of structural conflicts [i.e., economic class conflicts] on the level of ideologies,” but that this is “an affirmation of epistemological and not simply psychological and moral value.” The economic ultimately determines this acquisition: the presence of anticapitalism in an ideological or social form indicates, Gramsci argues, that the economic “premisses exist . . . for this revolutionising.”20

Catharsis, then, describes how economic conditions can be manipulated by subjective action at the level of the superstructure. For Gramsci, catharsis is “the passage from the purely economic . . . to the ethico-political moment, that is the superior elaboration of the [organic] structure into [conjunctural] superstructure in the minds of men.” When this occurs, the capitalist totality is no longer approached as “an external force which crushes man, assimilates him to itself and makes him passive” but is “transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new ethico-political form and a source of new initiatives.” Catharsis redefines the objective conditions of capitalism as routes of subjective anticapitalist action: it is “the passage from ‘objective to subjective,’” from structural exploitation to active resistance, and inculcating the “‘cathartic’ moment” is Marxism’s top priority. As Norberto Bobbio explains, “the very moment in which the material conditions are recognized, they become degraded to an instrument for whatever end is desired.”21

Ellison’s experience in Decatur, Alabama, in 1933 would guide his thinking about politics in similar channels. In Decatur, railroad bulls seized him and other hobos, “forty or fifty of us, black and white alike,” from their train. “Not only was I guilty of stealing passage on a freight train,” Ellison recalled, “but I realized that I had been caught in the act in the very town where, at that moment, the Scottsboro case was being tried.

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