In academia and the public consciousness, consensuses emerge about whether certain literary figures, texts and forms are worthy of being remembered. Was this text popular? Was it historically significant? Did its author write in an aesthetically innovative way? If the answer to these questions is no, we are likely to leave a book on the shelf, relegating it to the realm of specialists and inquisitive academics.

In an American context, the 1930s has suffered greatly from this natural canonization process. In no other era have the boundaries of the American literary canon – and its crudely-drawn cousin “the Great American Novel” – been so brutally applied. In and out of the classroom, the defining literary works of this era are usually sourced from the high modernists – see Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) and Absalom! Absalom! (1936) – or the “hardboiled” school of writers like Ernest Hemingway, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler. Race writing from this period has also endured, particularly that of Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston.

However, when we think of the 1930s in America, our minds turn instantly to the Great Depression. The only truly enduring Depression-era text – and perhaps the most iconic American novel of the early 20th century – is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), a harrowing story of economic oppression, environmental catastrophe and forced migration that remains shockingly relevant in the 21st century. Steinbeck’s legacy is a curious one, however. Why did few other tales of capitalistic injustice stand the test of time? Why are so many canonical 1930s texts only tangentially related to such a seismic event as the Great Depression?

The answer becomes clearer when we explore the proletarian literary movement, a radical artistic subculture of leftist writers – many of whom were openly affiliated with the Communist Party – who set out to repurpose literature into a tool for social justice. “We are prepared for the economic revolution of the world,” wrote proletarian author Michael Gold, “but what shakes us with terror and doubt is the cultural upheaval that must come … We cling to the old culture, but it must die. The old ideals must die.”

The flurry of novels and short stories that resulted from this clarion call were disarmingly simple and journalistic. Most were based on real instances of radical rebellion and working-class dislocation. Mary Heaton Vorse’s 1930 novel Strike, for example, vivifies the 1929 Loray Mill walkout in North Carolina with nuance and tenderness. Robert Cantwell’s The Land of Plenty (1935), meanwhile, inventively recreates the class conflicts that consume a Washington lumber mill. The more aesthetically ambitious proletarian novels, like Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930) and Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933), updated the naturalistic style of Émile Zola and Stephen Crane to fictionalise the process of capitalist decline.

Of course, the cultural revolution these writers hoped to enact never came to pass. Their work was (perhaps inevitably) derided for being too dogmatic. The reading public struggled to ignore the thinly disguised leftism of proletarian writing, and academics now treat it simply as a historical record of the decade’s strikes, protests, and migratory movements. Proletarian works are rarely considered canonical, and for conservative cultural critics, their weak sales and stunted legacy provide incontrovertible proof that literature and radicalism cannot mix.

However, in an era when organised labour appears to be making a comeback in the United States, the proletarian ethos deserves to be revisited. As Michael Gold wrote, “literature is one of the products of a civilisation, like steel or textiles … It is always the mirror of its age. It is no more mystic than a ham sandwich.” This fundamentally hopeful vision of political art reminds us that culture should be democratic. It should be an accessible form of social protest that provides a voice to the voiceless.

The contemporary significance of this philosophy expands beyond literature. In 21st century music, film and television, streaming services have elevated corporate capitalist powers like Amazon to the status of cultural arbiters. As the logics of late capitalism grow increasingly inseparable from culture itself, the dissident approach of the proletarians helps us conceive of art as existing in a separate and genuinely revolutionary space. These brilliant and intransigent artists were, in the most complimentary way possible, cultural Luddites. They saw, perhaps before anyone else, that art should be protected from the creeping tide of the new “modernity”: concentrated capital power.

It is not difficult to draw parallels between the 1930s and today. Now, as then, we face widespread poverty after unprecedented economic crises. The language we’ve begun to use – see the “Great Recession”, “Great Resignation” and “Green New Deal” – seems to confirm the similarities. Nevertheless, we are yet to replicate the shift towards cultural radicalism enacted by the proletarians and popularised by Steinbeck.  Speaking truth to power remains the purview of independent filmmakers, zine editors and journalists. Purveyors of mainstream culture are reticent to explore political themes at all.

Proletarian fiction provides a blueprint for how to restore the social function of our art. Today, thanks to the internet, we have more ways of producing subversive culture than ever before. While the proletarian writers of the 1930s were forced to rely on large publishing houses – placing them in a bind between critiquing capitalist structures and requiring them to survive – the democratised media landscape of the 21st century is infinitely more flexible. Now that our avenues of expression are seemingly endless, we should set our sights on amplifying working-class voices and exploring radical themes, just as the proletarians did.