This article examined how the socialist literary movement in colonial Korea in the 1920s imagined and recognized the “mass reader”. Socialist theory was embraced by colonial Korea as an alternative perspective for imagining the self-renovation and emancipation of non-Western colonized peoples. The fact that the magazine Kong-Je used disparate ideas as resources to unpack the meaning of labor, workers, and the labor movement is evidence that the concern of early socialists was not to accurately translate a particular theory. The magazine Kong-Je sought to address its unspecified readers as “workers” by providing them with an epistemological framework to critically perceive reality. Socialist theory was not used as an abstract theory, but as a theoretical framework for recognizing and critiquing real-world problems, and as a tool for critiquing existing perspectives on interpreting reality.
 In this respect, Yeom Sang-seop and Kim Hwa-san's critique of the socialist literary movement did not deny the possibility of socialist literature; they appropriated socialism as a theory and questioned what the goals of the socialist literary movement should be. This article examines Yeom Sang-sup's appropriation of socialist ideas and his literary theory based on them, focusing on a review he published in 1927. For him, socialism was about overcoming the notion of suppressing the “mental activity” of colonized Koreans, and therefore socialist literature should be read by readers to provide them with a critical lens through which to read reality. Kim Ki-jin's literary path in the 1920s resonated with Yeom Sang-sup's literary beliefs, as he saw the main purpose of the socialist literary movement as “educating” the masses, and constantly emphasized that literature had to be read to someone. These statements are not easily found in the socialist literary discourse produced in Korea at the time, and were made possible by applying Western “universal theories” of socialist ideology and its literary applications to the realities of colonial Korea.