In traditional Marxist theory, the lumpenproletariats are the lowest, most degraded stratum of the proletariat—especially criminals, vagrants and the unemployed—people who lack the class consciousness to participate in the socialist revolution.

One of the essays included in The Wretched of the Earth is "On National Culture", in which Fanon highlights the necessity for each generation to discover its mission and fight for it.

According to Fanon, the revolution begins as an idea of total systematic change, and through the actual application to real world situations is watered down until it becomes a small shift of power within the existing system.

"[The] pacifists and legalists ... put bluntly enough the demand ... 'Give us more power'" (46), but the "native intellectual has clothed his aggressiveness in his barely veiled desire to assimilate himself to the colonial world" (47).

To fight this, "The newly independent Third World countries are urged not to emulate the decadent societies of the West (or East), but to chart a new path in defining human and international relationship" (Fairchild, 2010, p. 194).

Rather than depending on an orientalized, fetishized understanding of precolonial history, Fanon argues a national culture should be built on the material resistance of a people against colonial domination.

[2]: 149  To upset the supremacy of the colonial society, writes Fanon, the colonized intellectual feels the need to return to their so-called 'barbaric' culture, to prove its existence and its value in relation to the West.

[2]: 150  This is a dead end, according to Fanon, because it was originally the colonists who essentialized all peoples in Africa as 'Negro', without considering distinct national cultures and histories.

In articulating a continental identity, based on the colonial category of the 'Negro', Fanon argues "the men who set out to embody it realized that every culture is first and foremost national".

[2]: 158  This radical condemnation attains its full meaning when we consider that the "final aim of colonization", according to Fanon, "was to convince the indigenous population that it would save them from darkness".

[2]: 175  Fanon specifically uses the example of Algerian storytellers changing the content and narration of their traditional stories to reflect the present moment of struggle against French colonial rule.

In the foreword to the 2004 edition of The Wretched of the Earth, Homi K. Bhabha criticized Sartre's introduction, stating that it limits the reader's approach to the book to focus on its promotion of violent resistance to oppression.

In particular, Robert J. C. Young partially credits Fanon for inspiring an interest about the way the individual human experience and cultural identity are produced in postcolonial writing.

[9]: 48  Miller also criticizes Fanon for following much of "post-Enlightenment Western thought" by treating particular or local histories as subordinate to the universal or global struggle of the nation.

[9]: 50 Neil Lazarus, professor at Warwick University, has suggested that Fanon's "On National Culture" overemphasizes a sense of unified political consciousness onto the peasantry in their struggle to overthrow colonial systems of power.

[8]: 78  In particular, Lazarus argues that the idea of a 'national consciousness' does not align with the history of the Algerian Revolution, in which Fanon was highly involved, since when the country gained independence in 1962 after an 8-year liberation war, the population was largely demobilized.

He wrote that Fanon's dedication to a national consciousness can be read as a "deeply troubling" demand for cultural homogeneity and the collapse of difference.

The last section of the essay was initially drafted as a speech for the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome: "The Unity and Responsibilities of African Negro Culture" (1959).

[13] Alioune Diop, speaking as one of the key figures of the movement at the conference, said Négritude intended to enliven black culture with qualities indigenous to African history, but made no mention of a material struggle or a nationalist dimension.

In a portion of the essay written after he delivered the speech at the conference, Fanon was especially critical of prominent Négritude writers and politicians Jacques Rabemananjara and Léopold Sédar Senghor,[2]: 169  who called for black cultural unity yet opposed Algeria's bid for independence at the United Nations.