Proletarian Literature and the John Reed Clubs

Abstract

In February 1921 Irwin Granich, not yet transformed into ‘Michael Gold’, published ‘Towards Proletarian Art’ in The Liberator.1 This essay has been described as ‘the first significant call in this country [the United States] for the creation of a distinctly and militantly working-class culture’.2 What Gold meant by ‘proletarian art’ remains unclear. He uses ‘proletarian’ interchangeably with ‘masses’, and suggests that Walt Whitman was the discoverer, without quite realizing it, of proletarian art in America. The proletariat for Gold were nothing less than heroic possessors of Life — ‘The masses know what Life is, and they live on in gusto and joy’ — who have been thwarted by society from the full realization of their artistic and cultural heritage. Gold’s thought was dominated by a lyrical and mystical celebration of the modern industrial worker, tinged by frustration at the bitter waste of human potential under capitalism. The only serious attempt anywhere in the world to encourage proletarian culture, Gold concluded, was being made by the Proletcult in Russia, where there was an ‘organized attempt to remove the economic barriers and social degradation that repressed … proletarian instinct during the centuries’.