In the epilogue to my 2006 book Planet of Slums, I asked: To what extent does the informal proletariat, the most rapidly growing global class, possess that most potent of Marxist talismans, “historical agency”? Although I was not aware of it at the time, Eric Hobsbawm had asked exactly the same question in an interview given in 1995. (He is quoted at the beginning of the next chapter.) Neoliberal globalization over the last generation has recharged the meaning of the “wretched of the earth.” Hobsbawm’s “gray area of the informal economy” has expanded by almost 1 billion people since his interview, and we should probably subsume the “informal proletariat” within a broader category that includes all of those who eke out survival by day labor, “micro-entrepreneurship,” and subsistence crime; who toil unprotected by laws, unions, or job contracts; who work outside of socialized complexes such as factories, hospitals, schools, ports, and the like; or simply wander lost in the desert of structural unemployment. There are three crucial questions: (1) What are the possibilities for class consciousness in these informal or peripheral sectors of economies? (2) How can movements, say, of slum-dwellers, the technologically deskilled, or the unemployed find power resources—equivalent, for example, to the ability of formal workers to shut down large units of production—that might allow them to struggle successfully for social transformation? and (3) What kinds of united action are possible between traditional working-class organization and the diverse humanity of the “gray area”? [...]