In Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), the lumpenproletariat of the colony, as ex-peasants displaced by the introduction of capitalist relations of production in agriculture, carry the kernel of the peasantry’s anti-colonial culture to the cities, where they play a crucial role in the emerging revolutionary nationalist movement. In the United States in the 1960s–1970s, the Black Panther Party postulated that the African American lumpenproletariat could, because of the racial and economic histories of American capitalism, be organized as a revolutionary agent.

“I can fix her”