The economic criterion is one of two means used by the political novel for classifying groups. The other index identifies groups by means of overt political behavior--party membership, acceptance of discipline, performance of specific acts. These two means of classification are not parallel but complementary. The first, in a sense, serves as a background for the second. Although the first is economic, its validity lies in the fact that party lines tend to follow economic ones, that modern political theory, particularly that of revolution, has been based increasingly upon economic facts as well as political ones. The approach of this chapter differs from that of the previous one in tracing behavior patterns which cut across national lines. ECONOMIC GROUPS =The Lumpenproletariat= In trying to use these indices of group behavior it is no longer possible to deal in general terms such as “the poor.” Though “proletariat” may be precise enough for Marxism, even this term is too inclusive for close analysis of the material in these novels. Several gradations are possible within this least fortunate group on the economic scale. Professor Ambrogio Donini’s introduction to the Italian edition of _The Pine Tree and the Mole_ identifies the lowest group in that novel as members of the _lumpenproletariat_. These people are not the workers whose taking of the factories Taddei fleetingly mentions. They are the lowest stratum of Livorno’s life, the drifters and criminals from whom the Fascists recruited members for their Black Shirt squads. It is their motivation as much as their behavior which differentiates them from the workers. While groups of militant workers are usually presented as trying to better the lot of their whole group, these members of the _lumpenproletariat_ seem to be entrepreneurs. Rubachiuchi becomes an agent provocateur for the Fascists not to help the poverty-stricken, but simply to help himself. After he infiltrates an anarchist group, he aids in its destruction, not because he is personally opposed to anarchism, but because this is the job his employers are paying him to do. Very often in these novels one encounters Communists trying to destroy Socialists ostensibly because Socialism is thought to be a palliative rather than a solution to the worker’s problems. But these underworld figures do not have even this theoretical justification.