Proletarian literature

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Proletarian literature refers to a literature tradition created by proletarian authors, or working-class writers. A proletarian author has several characteristics central ones being a working-class background, upbringing in a working class social milieu, and their influence in proletarian authors' writings.

Tim Hall defines proletarian literature as follows: "in the fullest sense (it) calls upon all working people and discontented intellectuals to associate directly—to organize against capitalism itself, to attack the problem of social class at its roots." [1]

Proletarian authors were, and often are, autodidacts, or self-taught persons who have adopted a Marxist perspective on their writing.

A research tradition studying proletarian literature and proletarian authors among other themes, such as class and its current meanings in the capitalist countries, is working-class studies.

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  1. ^ "Why 'Proletarian' Literature?", Struggle editorials, vol. 16, #4, Winter 2000–01.

Proletarian Literature in America (© John Puzzo, September 2003; 2005) Jonathan Swift: 'When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this infallible sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.'

PROLETARIAT: (‘proletariat’ is a European term, as is capitalism…)

Originally, ‘proletarii,’ “The lowest class of ancient Roman citizens; destitute of property, they contributed nothing to society but their ‘proles’ – offspring. Ineligible even for the Army due to their low station, they were useful only as laborers and breeders of more laborers.

Proletarian Literature (PL) was at the height of its influence in the 1930’s, especially in the USA. Encouraged by the Soviet subversion of the arts, similar writing was being done in the USSR, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, India, China and elsewhere.

Now in full triumphant maturity in the 21st Century, PL is the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School that lives and carries the full force of law (hate crimes = thought crimes) in every aspect of Western culture, especially in America, where its influence and power defy logic.

For the Left, poverty and politics make familiar bedfellows.

The core characteristic of proletarian literature is to present the disaffected and everyone else without influence as victimized. The labor organizers, revolutionaries, social democrats and government socialists of both major political parties, and ultimately the Communist Party, are presented as the last best hope of humanity.

Literary critics and reviewers dealt harshly with authors who showed skepticism of the proletarian Utopia.

For instance, George Orwell - the nemesis, specter, and eternal bogeyman haunting the communist/socialist (Is there a difference?) conspiracy - did not enjoy universal acceptance in the Publishing industry:

"...NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR was published during the Cold War on June 8, 1949, and the book created bitter political controversy. Communist reviewers violently attacked the book. These attacks made Orwell feel that he must have struck home. When the Communist press called him “…maggot, octopus, hyena and swine…”

Orwell wryly told David Astor: “…they seem to be very fond of animals.”

Writing about truth as a concept in literature, Orwell said that ‘truth’ would devolve into an exercise in not what is truth….but ‘where’ is truth as society plunged deeper into socialism. Orwell believed that language had become a mechanism for concealing or preventing thought rather than for its universal intended purpose of conveying thought. Orwell said, “…the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language…” [essay, "Politics and the English Language," 1946; http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.html; Citation date: 2 January 2008]

What American Proletarian Literature has produced is a bitter, rebellious, and tormented indictment of the American Dream and doomed it as tragic, sentimental, and fatalistic. In its most celebrated works, PL presents human existence in American society as predatory and destructive, the result of an imbalance in social power structures, not in the shortcomings of personal responsibility.

Proletarian Literature anticipated the existential angst of writers in post WW II America and prepared the intellectual soil for the anti-hero philosophies of the “GOD IS DEAD” universe, where life is meaningless and confusion, ambiguity, and anxiety the only reasonable response; where moral relativism would supplant the rational, “virtuous life” advocated by Christ and in the literature inspired by the pre-eminent, Greek philosopher, Socrates.

Proletarian Literature is an attempt to replace the entire perspective of Western Civilization with the never ending ‘dialectical materialist’ finger-pointing of “have” vs. “have not.”

In this atmosphere, PL authors were free to present evil in complex, sometimes sympathetic characters whose motivations may not be inherently evil and sometimes even good, but nonetheless do bad things, providing a medium for Goethian evil: the evil that produces ‘good. The mind of every reader or moviegoer is a garden for this weed and emotion is the fertilizer.

The heroes/antiheroes of PL are habitually dull, possessed of ambiguous morals, are rarely persons of rank and achievement (those of rank and achievement do not fare well in PL), and they are routinely animated by their own inferior social status and personal resentments – an ample arena for presenting troubling psychological conflict and awkward settings, as in Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men,’ where both ‘protagonists’ – it is hard to call them heroes – commit murder.

PL is the exaltation of ‘commonness’ over that of the ‘common man’ as he is epitomized in the earlier writing of Walt Whitman, Horatio Alger, Charles Dickens, and in all of the biographies of the great and near great throughout history.

Arthur Miller, in, ‘Death of a Salesman,’ trashed the ‘common man’ in his character, Willy Loman. Loman was a salesman. He produced nothing (unlike the PL masses that only have their labor to offer) but sales. The fruits of his labor - and that of every other American salesman - were hopes and dreams. Their optimism and drive produced sales - and sales filled orders and filling orders emptied inventories, meaning ‘the masses’ worked. The salesman was the point man for American industry, for American Progress, and for food on the table. For Arthur Miller, though, Willie Loman the salesman was the ultimate loser.

In the field of PL music, folksingers Pete Seeger and fellow veteran communist Woody Guthrie wrote about Joe Hill and the Wobblies and penned lyrics to such socialist anthems as “This land is my Land.”

Because of its appeal to youth and its entertainment value at mass meetings, protest gatherings and in ‘movement-building’ (you can always buy the record and take the movement with you) propaganda music provided a disarming entree into the world of socialism.

Woody Guthrie the communist was a pacifist until WW II, when ‘Mother Russia’ was threatened by Germany. Woody joined the Merchant Marine.

PL is the application of Marx’s revolutionary concepts to literature, science, history, sociology, psychology and the educational establishment. In this way, PL musicians became the troubadours of socialism, minstrels of socialist convention who found culpability for the human condition everywhere outside of the socialist camp.

But in free (and ‘capitalist’) America, the uniquely American reality of opportunity became “opportunism” for PL writers and the only good government meant enough red tape to strangle it.

For PL writers, musicians, performers, actors, and others in the creative arts, WW II was ‘the good war’ because FASCISM had to be defeated. The other side of the socialist coin, COMMUNISM, has produced the deaths of ten times as many people as National Socialism and remains unmolested by protest songs.

PL Troubador and Minstrel Folk Singer Judy Collins performed at a Pro-Viet Cong Rally in the US in 1967. No Doubt she sang her most famous song, ‘Amazing Grace,’ to a crowd of Atheists.

  • Steinberg, Mark. Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. (On proletarian literature in late-imperial and early Soviet Russia)
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