In the popular imagination, poverty is a site of negation, of invisibility, of absence. In a neoliberal order whose imagination orbits around the concepts of growth, accumulation, and expansion, at all scalar levels from the individual life to the multinational corporation, to lack property is to risk lacking properties, to become opaque and unnarratable, to attract prefixes like un-, dis-, and in-. Since the late 1960s of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s March and the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty, and that era’s brief, if intense, national focus on reducing inequality through access to health care, food, housing, and education, poverty has receded from public view with the ebbing of the midcentury “high tide of American liberalism.”1 During this slow retreat, policymakers have engaged in the construction of a thousand little ladders allegedly leading to opportunity and the middle class: poor people should work for welfare; poor people should marry each other; poor people should take on debt to invest in higher education as a private good; and poor people should subsist on tax credits and, well, faith.2Recent years have seen the emergence of catastrophic events and prospects without precedent that make these incrementalist approaches look increasingly feeble and even absurd. The rise of crises punctual and slow-moving, from climate change (and the Katrina disaster of 2005), to the economic collapse of 2008, to the pandemic of 2020 to the present has triggered extreme politics, from the frank fascism of the Trumpist fringe on the right to a wide range of recognizably socialist policies and leaders on the left. The latter has given rise to new ways of thinking about, envisioning, and addressing poverty, ways that differ in both degree and kind from those associated with postwar liberalism. Most profoundly, one finds an embrace of the notion that poverty is a structurally produced phenomenon, a feature of capitalism rather than a bug, and hence not something to be conceived of through whiggish narratives of expanding pies and rising tides that lift all boats.In the present moment of mounting fears of catastrophe, eroding norms, and an expanding range of political expression, Black radical traditions offer compelling perspectives on latter-day hyperinequality and structural poverty. Not only have Black bodies borne the brunt of capitalist exploitation throughout US history, as chattel and in enslavement’s many afterlives and extensions, but critical theorists of race have explored both the existential conditions of erasure and invisibility that characterize Black being in a white supremacist order, and the conditions of possibility under which that invisibility can gain expressive and inscriptive power.3 The problem of how subaltern subjects might emerge from obscurity and silence and gain the means of expressing themselves in a durable, visible, and public medium is common to battles against both economic inequality and racism, and there is significant overlap between the theoretical traditions that grapple with economic inequality and racism.In this context, it’s not surprising that scholars interested in Black radicalism are returning to the Depression era, a period of crisis, like our own, in which established traditions and institutions eroded, new ones were born, and subjects long excluded from public view clamored for recognition. The great political triumph of the New Deal era—its creation of a modern welfare state rooted in redistributionist benefits like social security—was enabled by a distinctively stereoscopic gaze, one that superimposed the particular faces of “the people” with an aggregating, continental perspective. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (1941b: 4–5) second inaugural address famously renders this point of view, performatively witnessing millions of impoverished Americans through seven paratactic clauses beginning with “I see,” a series that culminates with the famous line, “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Beginning with a wave of revisionist work in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars such as Maren Stange (1989) and Nicholas Natanson (1992) have analyzed the ideological blind spots and distortions of this technocratic-liberal perspective, which tended overwhelmingly to remember its “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” in ways that upheld whiteness and patriarchy as its defaults (Roosevelt 1941a: 628). This mode of critique correctly notes that the presence of avatars like Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936) and John Steinbeck’s Tom Joad, who still circulate in our image repertoire as emblems of the Depression in popular culture, helped to efface awareness of even more “forgotten” people. Foremost among these were African Americans who were marginalized symbolically within the trove of “official images” commissioned by the federal government to document poverty and who suffered more materially by their exclusion from a wide range of New Deal relief, often to accommodate southern segregationists within the Democrats’ coalition.The complement to this ideology critique of the dominant New Deal optic has been a bottom-up search for more expansive and inclusive populisms in the period’s culture. Here, the most significant efforts have worked in a neo-Gramscian mode, recovering marginalized artifacts and social groups and exploring neglected institutions, like the Communist Party–USA and the labor movement. Emphasizing these counterhegemonic efforts illuminates the way the largely unrealized hopes for a postwar “Century of the Common Man” haunts the normative “American Century” ethos of the Cold War and persists as a source of resistant values. Michael Denning’s (1996) work is the most prominent and wide-ranging such effort, reimagining the Depression era as the crucible for the formation of a “cultural front” that, under the sign of the multiethnic and polyglot Congress of Industrial Organizations, knitted together disparate social groups in a process he calls the “laboring of American culture.”At present, especially from the standpoint of Black radical modes of thought, what seems most distinctive about the Depression era is neither its confident technocracy nor its deep and wide coalition-building under the sign of a revitalized labor movement. Rather, with today’s erosion of political norms, increased conspicuousness of white supremacist ideology and organizations, and dominance of capital over labor through the production of precarity in all its forms, we hear echoes of our own moment in Depression-era crises that displaced individuals from secure economic and social locations and, on a more structural level, undermined established institutions that governed social, political, and economic life. If the Depression era, in its official New Deal discourse, sought to re-member the “forgotten man,” it also generated the stranger and more obscure figure of the “bottom dogs” who populated a vital subgenre of the novel. These hustlers and grifters resist inclusion in laborist coalitions and normative constructions of “the people” but speak compellingly of precarious conditions in an outsider’s voice. This topological emphasis on the underbelly or remainder of mainstream, whitened constructions of “the people” finds its echo in recent mappings of an “undercommons” (Harney and Moten 2013) that subtends corporate institutions today and provides a model for a radical reorganization of those institutions and the lives they are supposed to support.Two recent works exemplify this revisionist attempt to read the Depression era through the perspective of its bottom-most spaces and subjects, the Black majority that lives, in Charles Mingus’s (1991) memorable phrase, beneath the underdog and finds, like Mingus did, alternative, infectious rhythms there that foster the creation of new collectivities and new modes of subjectivity. Nathaniel Mills’s Ragged Revolutionaries explores the role of what Karl Marx called the Lumpenproletariat in Depression-era African American writing. These Lumpen figures are defined by their exteriority to industrial production and thus represent a starting point that differs markedly from Denning’s influential laborist approach. James Edward Ford III’s Thinking Through Crisis works, in general, at a higher level of abstraction, using Depression-era Black thinkers to consider how times of crisis might lead to wholesale changes in political order and emergences of new, radically democratic collectivities. Like the best radical writing and thinking, these books seek to remove—root and branch—entrenched limits in our political imagination and to seed in their place new desires, new practices, and new modes of affiliation. Both assert the historical experience of Black people as a center of gravity for the construction of a more just, equitable order.Nathaniel Mills’s Ragged Revolutionaries engages in a sustained exploration of the Marxist genealogy of the lumpenproletariat, those subjects who exist outside of a given class structure, often in marginal spaces, subjects who have bedeviled Marxist theory since Marx and Friedrich Engels’s scattered ruminations on such figures in the mid-nineteenth century. Mills observes that Marx and Engels see the lumpen through a moralizing lens, emphasizing their exclusion as a lifestyle, if you will, rather than a structural effect, and they mobilize this figure in a dialectic in which the primary role of the lumpen is to sharpen the contours of the authentic proletariat as the source of revolutionary agency (21–25). As Peter Stallybrass has pointed out, Marx’s terminological promiscuity as he approaches these shadowy figures and the dubious locales they occupy is symptomatic. These “lazzaroni,” “maquereaus,” “ragpickers,” and so on constitute not so much a heterogeneous group or series of related groups as an unnamable and illimitable jumble of entities that fail to cohere internally or adhere to anyone or anything else (Stallybrass 1990: 71–73).Mills’s project intervenes at just the point, aiming to render the lumpen condition as a cultural and political site of agency and expressivity. This positivity emerges in two major ways. First, Mills observes that the very exclusion of the lumpen from the sphere of labor, in the traditional sense, imbues them with counterhegemonic potential. Often excluded from or marginalized within labor unions, educational institutions, professions, and social affinity groups that feed the economy and the social dominant, Black subjects have been, of necessity, overrepresented in the obscure and marginal space of the lumpenproletariat. Mills observes the appeal of lumpen figures in the 1930s work of African American writers like Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, and Ralph Ellison. In a strikingly original move, Mills finds in this archive an anticipation of the 1960s and 1970s embrace of the lumpenproletariat as a site of agency in the work of Black Panther Party activists like Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. In both moments one finds a celebration of the revolutionary potential in subjects who exist outside of the “administered life” that pertains in the Fordist organization of labor and leisure (Marcuse 1964: 66–67). Mills argues that lumpen figures and spaces allow us to imagine a “severing of human fulfillment from the injunction to work” and thus make the more labor-centric approaches to the era’s politics seem much more circumscribed and prone to cooptation (32).Second, Mills counters the passivity often attributed to lumpen figures in Marxist theory and in the interwar “bottom dogs” genre through an ingenious reading of the etymology of Lumpenproletariat. Lumpen means “rags” or “tatters” in German, and Mills emphasizes the way this figure condenses, as in Charles Baudelaire’s famous poem on the “ragpicker” (1857), the themes of social marginality, intoxication, and poetic expression, a thematic cluster bound by the fact that discarded rags were the main raw material for paper production until the mid-nineteenth century.4 Thus the “ragged revolutionaries” of Mills’s title represent a profound reversal of expectations. Whereas Michel Foucault (1977: 83) famously imagines bodies as subjects of power/knowledge rendered as “the inscribed surface of events . . . totally imprinted by history,” Mills links these “ragged revolutionaries” to paper and thus to the modes of self-fashioning in which these subjects write, so to speak, in society’s margins.The implications of these twinned arguments about the lumpen draw into sharp focus in the best-known text Mills engages, Wright’s Native Son (1940). That novel’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, has been read most often as a waste product of American racism and capitalism: most famously, James Baldwin (1985: 33) argued that Bigger’s “doom is written on his forehead” by the inscrutable inscriptive power of whiteness, which leaves him locked in abjection. Mills reads Bigger’s role very differently, convincingly pointing to Wright’s emphasis on the way Bigger’s very exteriority to institutions—the church, school, industrial labor, and even his own family—grants him a kind of second sight that fosters the expression of desires and self-images that exceed the imagination of the “welfare capitalism” represented in the novel by the Dalton family and even the sophisticated anti-racist communism of Boris Max. Bigger’s salient feature, for Mills, is not the stigma with which white supremacy has wounded him but his desire to express publicly the inner core of his experience that he “must’ve felt awful hard . . . to murder” (Wright 2005: 429). Nor is this quest a purely individual one: in contrast with the existentialism Wright and other Black writers explored in the postwar era, in Native Son, Bigger’s expression unfolds within and is plausibly linked to what Mills calls a “counterpublic” construction project that, however abortive, is being undertaken by Jan Erlone, Max, and Thomas in the latter pages of the novel to enhance the Party’s grasp of how race and class intersect (84).Mills develops the theme of the lumpen as resistant and expressive residue, from the standpoint of both the centrist and established Left institutions, in a chapter on lesser-known Depression-era work by Ellison and Walker. He first examines Ellison’s creation of what Mills calls “lumpen-folk” characters in Tillman and Tackhead and Slick, two longer fictional pieces from the period that Ellison never published (97). Mills argues that “lumpen-folk” characters are condensations of, on one hand, the “antecapitalist” values that displaced peasants carry with them to industrial spaces and, on the other, the “lumpen” tendency to elude categorization and assimilation to social norms (108). The theme of doubly marginalized subjects recurs in the final chapter, on Walker’s unpublished novel Goose Island and her radical poetry from the Depression era. In a way, the freshest set of arguments in the book springs from Mills’s sensitive readings of Walker’s engagement with women sex workers in her poetry. Mills emphasizes the way the prostitute, who is radically objectified by Marx as the ur-figure for capitalist exploitation, is rendered much more fully in Walker’s work. Without losing sight of the crushing economic forces that weigh on women doing sex work, Walker emphasizes their exteriority from patriarchal norms and nuclear families as a means of finding new freedoms and pleasures while hustling at the margins.A limitation of Mills’s approach is the intensity of its focus on subjectivities and types rather than broader movements and social formations. Moreover, the lumpenproletariat as a type is, by definition, a kind of antitype, resistant to inclusion into larger social structures or political frontiers. This seeming limitation might be considered a strength, however, insofar as the location of this type outside of production—and outside of the broader Fordist penumbra of socially sanctioned institutions of recreation and leisure, like families, churches, clubs, and so on—means that a focus on the lumpen leads to a focus on alternative formations, or alternative modes of forming collectives altogether. Just how these outsider or bottom-dwelling subjects might cohere into a collective with agency is precisely the subject of James Edward Ford III’s book. Thinking Through Crisis starts from the assumption of “black radicalism’s exorbitance to conventional intellectual boundaries” in order to fashion a “theory of crisis” rooted in the close study of less-familiar texts by very familiar Black writers from the 1930s (1). Through a wide range of texts, from Wright’s 1930s short fiction to Ida B. Wells’s autobiography to Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) to Langston Hughes’s poetry to, above all, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935), Ford elaborates a theory of Black agency springing from the economic and social crises of the Depression era.Exorbitance is a felicitous term for Ford’s approach. The term derives from the Latin orbita or “wheel-track,” and Ford’s text departs from historically given grooves in its choice of primary texts, its theoretical emphasis on nonprogressive historiography, and, especially, its rhetorical method. This latter exorbitance is quite conscious and deliberate in the text, as Ford calls what would normally be chapters “notebooks,” thereby emphasizing the contingency and unfinished quality of both the argument and the historical reality it indexes. These notebooks have a fugal structure, with motifs that fade out from one place and recur in another in ways that are frustrating and rewarding by turns, such that the contours of some of the text’s central concepts, such as the “dark proletariat,” the role of “divine violence,” and the role of the “ecstatic” in the formation of collectivities, only become clear gradually, though their recurrence from different angles in the work of different thinkers. Form and theme are densely interwoven throughout, as the “performative” mode of “unwriting” that Ford practices is mirrored in the style of the Depression-era work he engages (28).In many ways, the argument grows out of Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic “critique of violence,” which posits opposing ways of linking violence with political order, the “mythic” and the “divine” (Benjamin 2021: 55–60). Ford emphasizes the way Benjamin frames “mythic” violence with debt/guilt, such that the subject is always already bound to the sovereign by obligations that can never be liquidated. Political theories like liberalism that are grounded in the position of creditors can therefore only liberate the descendants of enslaved peoples in the most contingent and partial ways, so Ford’s work explores what Benjamin calls “divine violence,” a precedent-shattering reconstruction of the political, economic, and social order.The agent of this “divine violence” is neither the liberal individual nor an institution that is thought of as an agglomeration of individuals. Rather, it is a mode of collectivity that, though observable in US history, does not map onto its political imagination in any obvious or consistent way and thus, to become thinkable and narratable, needs a new critical vocabulary. Ford names this entity the “dark proletariat” (25). The contours of this concept sharpen only gradually for readers: the term enters the text as something of an empty bucket, “an ongoing collective project, full of suspense, disruption, progress, and retrogression” that counters Eurocentric perspectives that objectify Blackness and promotes a “rethinking of the political as such” (27). Gradually, through generative, prismatic readings of the primary texts listed above, the Black proletariat comes into sharper view, characterized not by debt or guilt before a sovereign but as the site of surplus grounded in ecstatic practices that Ford links, for example, with the flight of enslaved people from plantations in search of freedom in Du Bois’s account of the Civil War, or with Hughes’s celebration of the “frenzied ecstasy” (244) that infuses pedagogical practices of teaching and learning that privilege embodiment and radical expenditure. Crucially, this dark proletariat evades its usual position as a site of “bare life” in Giorgio Agamben’s (1998: 10–12) sense, abject before sovereign power, or as a “problem” in the ironic words of Du Bois’s (1996: 3) early work.Ford’s investments in rhetorical experimentation mentioned above make the book resistant to summary. At the risk of schematizing a text that is anything but schematic, the first two chapters consider some “lines of flight” (71) that Black subjects follow to escape the literal and figurative modes of indebtedness that threaten to fix them in place. The first considers Wright’s depiction of the state of emergency occasioned by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938): the aftermath of the disaster offers “relief” articulated through camps that seek to reinstate Black indebtedness, whereas Wright’s protagonists discover, however hazily and partially, new freedoms within the suspension of the usual political order. The second examines Wells’s autobiography, reading her struggles against racial terror as an attempt to imagine a new mode of political being that lies outside of progressive and liberal traditions, a mode of subjectivity that is a perpetual “rough draft” that is “always already written on, scratched out, partially erased” yet “also allows for reinscription” (120). The final two chapters reckon with the formation and deployment of collectivities. The penultimate chapter uses Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain to engage the role of charismatic leadership in the subordination of the multitude’s radical energies to the logic of “mythic violence.” The last chapter reads the poetry of Hughes as a Janus-faced critique/celebration of pedagogical modes, mounting a critique of the higher education apparatus’s conservatism and quietude and a celebration of the “poetic community” that characterizes collectivities grounded in Black joy (247).Between these opening and closing chapters sits the book’s fulcrum, an analysis of the emergence of the Black proletariat as a self-aware agent in Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction. Here, Ford notes that Du Bois’s narrative depicts Blackness not as a vulnerable or marginal remnant in need of recuperation but as the essential element, a new center of gravity of a reimagined polity. In a gorgeous reading, Ford examines Du Bois’s revisionary reading of John Brown, not as a Christlike martyr to the cause of emancipation or, in today’s terminology, an intersectional “ally” to enslaved people, but as a Black proletarian himself. In the received tradition, Brown’s body comes to us as a locus of mourning and redemption that establishes a postbellum national “new normal” grounded in the noblesse oblige of white sacrifice, a movement captured in the melodic transfer of the abolitionist anthem “John Brown’s Body” to the more nationalist “Battle-Hymn of the Republic.” Ford alerts us to Du Bois’s repatriation of Brown’s remains, emphasizing Brown as a brother to the nameless and unmourned victims of slavery’s violence, brother, that is, in a collective effort on the part of the nation’s “damned” to emancipate themselves in the process of moving toward an emancipated (if not yet reconstructed) nation.If this argument sounds remarkably romantic and, well, exorbitant, even in this spare sketch, it is. Despite their tonal, theoretical, and thematic differences, Ford and Mills share an enthusiasm for sifting through the dump heap of the Depression era’s crises for inspiration in our own tumultuous moment. What they find there is unsettling and strange, in terms of both received wisdom about the cultural history of the era and, a bit more abstractly, our oft-stated public desire to return to normal when pummeled by disasters natural, medical, and all too human.5 Against this nostalgic wish for restoration, the dark, the fugitive, and the lumpen—all of the beneath and outside figures that Mills and Ford explore—point to a mode of construction that outstrips “normal” models from the recent past. In this way, their reconstruction of the Depression era partakes of the explicit romanticism of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s recent work on the “undercommons,” a text that Ford engages directly at the end of his book. Harney and Moten describe their practice thus, in a fitting outro for this essay: We’re just anti-politically romantic about actually existing social life. We aren’t responsible for politics. We are the general antagonism to politics looming outside every attempt to politicise, every imposition of self-governance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home sweet home. . . . We cannot represent ourselves. We can’t be represented. (Harney and Moten 2013: 18)I would like to thank Matt Gold, Kelly Josephs, Andrea Silva, and Luke Waltzer for their helpful comments on an early draft of this essay.