This was an analysis that the Black Panther Party took into the heart of their organizational philosophy, which was geared toward organizing the “lumpenproletariat”: the class cut off from wage labor. As Eldridge Cleaver spelled out, the lumpen, which included those “who have been displaced by machines, automation, and cybernation,” represented a real contradiction within the proletariat. 72 Indeed, machines were, in part, responsible for this bifurcation. The polarization of skill meant that “every job on the market in the American Economy today demands as high a complexity of skills as did the jobs in the elite trade and craft guilds of Marx’s time.”