Go Left, Young Writers!

In January 1929, the novelist and critic Mike Gold published a manifesto in the socialist magazine New Masses titled “Go Left, Young Writers!” In it, Gold argued that the American democratic project suffered from a broad inability to imagine the lives of working-class and poor people. It was necessary to inject proletarian voices into the media so that people could encounter the reality of working people’s lives as they themselves saw it.

One obstacle was that writing had earned a reputation as a somewhat otherworldly endeavor. Opaque and rarified, writing’s secret genius was inaccessible to all but a handful of highly educated and innately talented elites. Many self-important writers promoted this impression themselves, talking about their craft with an air of snobbery and territorial insularity.

Gold, who would become the architect of twentieth-century America’s proletarian literary movement, argued that this was nonsense. Writing was “not any more mystic in its origin than a ham sandwich.”

Peeling back the layers of pretentiousness, Gold argued, one found a media ecosystem controlled from the top down by capitalists for profit and social control, and populated with bourgeois scions and careerist sycophants. To conceal this basic structure, they obfuscated what writing is. For Gold, it was labor like any other. The finished product was composed of time, attention, and skill combined with paper, ink, and glue. Word people weren’t engaged in a process any more otherworldly than what transpired at the factory or the stockyard.

While seeking to demystify the process, Gold’s manifesto nevertheless argued that literature is distinct from other products. The best writing was “the mirror of its age,” showing the reader a true vision of society and the modern individual’s place in it. The working class had a point of view and naturally ought to participate with its own aesthetic sensibility. In contrast to the…