Ralph Ellison’s Marxism: The Lumpenproletariat, the Folk, and the Revolution

This article examines Ralph Ellison’s time as a writer on the Communist left in the 1930s and identifies the distinct structures of his thought in this understudied phase of his career. Situating Ellison’s social, political, and institutional theories in relation to Communist discourse, the work of Richard Wright, and the later innovations of Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci, I present Ellison as an inventive Marxist theorist. Particularly, I delineate how his understanding of revolutionary politics revises the neglected Marxist concept of the lumpenproletariat. Aspects of Ellison’s 1930s’ Marxism continued to influence his work even after his postwar break from the left.