The Lumpenproletariat in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn

Abstract

A lumpenproletarian coterie populates Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Attention to the lumpenproletariat opens a new vantage point from which to grapple with the contours of race and class in the book. Twain’s lumpenproletariats (namely Pap, the duke and the king) abuse enslaved people to their advantage. This is a different but productive iteration of the classic Marxist take on the lumpenproletariat, predicated on their betrayal of salaried workers as long it pays off economically. Where there should be class solidarity, these lumpenproletariats in Huckleberry Finn trod down on enslaved people, who are their unpropertied fellows. Such rupture of class solidarity between the propertyless registers the pervasiveness of the racial capitalism of Antebellum America, where living on the margins of society did not preclude access to white privilege. Dissolute individuals displaced from the economic center of society and ensconced in atypical economic relationships feed off racial supremacy as much as the propertied or wage workers. Huck, also a lumpenproletariat, seems, on the contrary, able to press his class position into the service of an anti-racist ideology. As opposed to the other characters whose marginal class position allows them to benefit from institutionalized slavery, Huck breaks through his racist conscience thanks to the same relationship of production that corrupts them. Huckleberry Finn is a novel concerned with the progressive or reactionary potential of the lumpenproletariat, and ultimately favors the latter by having Huck’s racial justice convictions crumble down.