Proletarian Literature

À la fin de la première guerre mondiale, alors que Georges Navel n'est encore qu'un adolescent, sa famille quitte Pont-à-Mousson pour s'installer à Lyon. Elle s'entasse dans un logement modeste de la rue de la Part-Dieu, à la Guillotière, près de la place du Pont. Lui qui a vécu jusqu'alors au contact direct de la campagne, se retrouve projeté au coeur d'un quartier cosmopolite et haut en couleur, un espace qui est aussi le centre du monde ouvrier lyonnais. C'est dans cet espace, pendant les mobilisations ouvrières de 1919-1920, qu'il s'ouvre à l'action politique par l'entremise de son frère, militant libertaire, et qu'il découvre la condition ouvrière. Cette condition va être le centre de son récit. Au début des années vingt, Navel, à peine sorti de l'adolescence, entre chez Berliet. Là, il y fait une expérience double : Il apprend d'abord un métier, c'est-à-dire qu'il s'initie à la maîtrise des gestes nécessaires à son activité. Cette découverte du corps dans l'effort, du plaisir dans la perfection des gestes, du rapport à la matière que l'on modèle, est une expérience essentielle chez Navel. Toute aussi essentielle est la répulsion qu'il ressent immédiatement pour l'usine. Pourtant, Georges Navel occupe un poste d'ouvrier qualifié dans un atelier qui n'est pas totalement taylorisé. Il n'est donc pas un de ces ouvriers interchangeables tels qu'ils se multiplient après la 1 ère Guerre mondiale. Mais son témoignage nous parle de souffrance : « Quoi que je fasse, quand j'avais mené un mois de vie régulière, la tristesse me rongeait. Je m'ennuyais à vouloir mourir. J'étais décidé. Mais quand j'avais signé mon arrêt, en n'allant pas au travail, je guérissais. J'étais apte à nouveau, frais, dispos si, pendant deux ou trois jours, j'avais lu et marché, tiré mes facultés de leur torpeur. Je redevenais alors capable d'aller à l'usine, que je croyais avoir fuie définitivement » (p. 68 de l'édition Folio). Ce que Navel fuie, lors de ces absences répétées de l'usine, c'est la forme de rapport au travail que tente d'imposer la grande usine : l'enfermement dans le lieu clos de l'usine est un élément essentiel du rejet de cet espace de travail. Mais plus profondément c'est la régularité, la répétition, non pas tant des actes puisqu'il n'est pas ouvrier spécialisé, mais des jours qui produit l'angoisse que ressent le jeune ouvrier. Ce que rejette Navel, c'est le salariat stabilisé tel qu'il est en train de s'imposer dans l'industrie. C'est l'horizon d'une vie réglée, mesurée, identique dans son incessante répétition : « La vie à l'atelier "pour toujours" commençait à me faire peur. Je me demandais si c'est loin la mort et si on est forcé de vivre jusqu'au bout » (p. 43). Pour échapper à cette condition salariale, Navel se fait "trimardeur" : il abandonne la « sécurité » que lui offrait un poste stable dans une grande usine, part sur les routes de France et multiplie les travaux les plus divers : terrassier à Paris et sur des chantiers routiers, jardinier, peintre en bâtiment, ramasseur de lavande dans le midi, etc. Ce n'est pas un hasard si, au cours de son chemin, il rencontre régulièrement le bâtiment. Navel, qui montre un refus aigu de ce qu'il perçoit comme un quadrillage de l'existence par le rapport salarial, trouve dans ce secteur la possibilité d'une relation "mouvante" au travail et la sensation d'une liberté retrouvée. Navel, que ce soit dans le bâtiment ou dans les travaux agricoles, cherche aussi constamment le rapport avec la nature, le contact le plus direct avec les choses, une intimité avec la matière. D'où l'importance des sensations dans ce récit qui, à de nombreuses reprises, prend une forme presque poétique. A travers la multiplicité de ses travaux, Georges Navel nous parle, simplement, de sa vie d'ouvrier, sans chercher nécessairement un fil conducteur qui donnerait un sens

Karl August Wittfogel (1896-1988) is notoriously among Japanese scholars and intellectuals as an anticommunist social scientist and Sinologist who articulated the prevailing backwardness and stagnancy of Asian societies. However, his name’s first appearance in Japanese public life can be traced to his scriptwriting of a puppet play performed in Tokyo in 1926. Wittfogel’s early contributions to proletarian dramaturgy and Marxist aesthetics have been largely translated and published in Japan’s leftwing literature magazines and have attracted a great deal of attention among Japan’s contemporary revolutionary literary circles.
      This article explores the reception of Karl August Wittfogel’s engagement with proletarian literature in Japan in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It analyzes the intentions, the criteria of selection and other objective circumstances of those introducing Wittfogel and reflections of his Japanese readers. By shedding light on the process of recontextualization of Wittfogel’s literary pursuits in Japan, this article first tries to highlight the entanglements between Japan’s early leftwing writers and the literary scene in Weimar Germany. Second, based on this case study of reception history, this article considers the general conditions that are indispensable for intellectuals to establish a legacy beyond their own cultural realms.

With the beginning of the Pacific War in 1941, Japan seemed to be in full charge of its conquests and older colonies, Taiwan, Manchuria and Korea. Used as the premise for a comparison between writings of Korean and Japanese female writers, Ch’oe Chŏnghŭi`s Nogikushō (The Wild Chrysanthemum) is the main text analyzed in this article. The authors her work is compared with on the Japanese side are Sata Ineko, Hayashi Fumiko and Yoshiya Nobuko. The question the current article is trying to answer is why there are no good texts for comparison with Ch`oe`s work and offer a couple of hypotheses.

シポス・ジョージ 宮本百合子とその「転向」 １８９９年東京の知識人の家族に生まれた宮本百合子は彼女が属していた 階級から判断すればプロレタリア文学運動に参加していたとは想像しにくいかも しれません。勿論、プロレタリア文学運動は世界の中でどこでも労働階級から出 た作家たちばかりだというわけではありませんが、宮本のケースは特に珍しいと 言えます。宮本の文学活動をよく考察すれば二つの時代に分けられることが分か ります。その二つは１９２６年までのソビエト・ロシアに行く前の時代(いわゆ るプロレタリア文学者になる前)、もう一つは１９３０年の後のプロレタリア文 学者になった後の時代です。この論文では政治活動にあまり関心がなかった宮本 百合子がどうして共産主義者の作家になったかという過程を考察しようと思いま す。 宮本百合子はソ連への滞在をきっかけに１９３１年に秘密的に共産党員に なりましたが表向きにはプロレタリア文学運動のメンバーとして活躍しました。 百合子の夫の宮本顕示の『宮本百合子の世界』 1 という本によると彼女の ソビエト時代の変化の理由は三つあったそうです。一番目はソビエト・ロシアに おいて女性の生活と社会での役割が非常に尊重されていたことで、二番目は宮本 に精神的に非常に影響があった１９２８年の弟の自殺と日本社会は将来がないと 1 宮本賢治、『宮本百合子の世界』、新日本出版社、東京、１９６３

This book tests critical reassessments of US radical writing of the 1930s against recent developments in theories of modernism and the avant-garde. Multidisciplinary in approach, it considers poetry, fiction, classical music, commercial art, jazz, and popular contests (such as dance marathons and bingo). Relating close readings to social and economic contexts over the period 1856–1952, it centers in on a key author or text in each chapter, providing an unfolding, chronological narrative, while at the same time offering nuanced updates on existing debates. Part One focuses on the roots of the 1930s proletarian movement in poetry and music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part Two analyzes the output of proletarian novelists, considered alongside contemporaneous works by established modernist authors as well as more mainstream, popular titles.

Zacznę od paru wyjaśnień. Zwrot "awangardowa poezja czeska", którym posługuję się tytule, może budzić istotne wątpliwości wśród badaczy szczególnie przywiązanych do bohemistycznej tradycji literaturoznawczej. Interesują mnie bowiem wiersze trzech poetów-Jiřego Wolkera, Vítězslava Nezvala i Jaroslava Seiferta, a tylko dwóch ostatnich zwykło się uważać za reprezentantów czeskiej awangardy. Nezval i Seifert, zwłaszcza Seifert z połowy lat dwudziestych, to wielcy rewelatorzy czeskiej poezji, wieloletni członkowie awangardowej grupy Devětsil i bodaj najwybitniejsi przedstawiciele poetyzmu, czyli jednego z najważniejszych nurtów awangardowych w czeskiej literaturze międzywojennej, mówiąc zatem najkrócej-to awangardyści z krwi i kości. Co innego Wolker. Dorobek tego przedwcześnie zmarłego poety, podobnie jak i samą jego postać, przez długie dekady otaczano w Czechach nieomal kultem. Ale nie z powodu jego-lub ich, czyli i dzieła, i twórcyawangardowych koneksji. Wiersze Wolkera uznawano przede wszystkim za szczytowe osiągnięcie czeskiej poezji proletariackiej, która-przynajmniej w zamyśle-miała być twórczością o "zdecydowanym nastawieniu klasowym", przeciwstawiającą "indywidualizmowi kolektywizm", zaś hasłom "sztuki dla sztuki"-"tendencyjność wyrastającą organicznie" z marksistowskiego światopoglądu 2. Co zrozumiałe, niewiele więc mogło ją łączyć z jakimkolwiek przejawem "lekkomyślnego" awangardyzmu. Nie zamierzam oczywiście rewidować poglądów utrwalonych w literaturze przedmiotu, pragnę jedynie zauważyć, że istnieje szereg przesłanek, które pozwalają na jednoczesne ulokowanie Wolkera w kręgu najgorliwszych wyznawców sztuki proletariackiej i w kręgu awangardy. Zarówno postulaty sztuki kolektywnej, klasowej, ten

Gli anni Trenta: la crisi, la Grande Depressione, gli scioperi, Harlan Miners Speak, i linciaggi, gli Scottsboro Boys, l’FBI di J. Edgar Hoover, i gangster movies, Alcatraz, la retorica di Franklin D. Roosevelt, il New Deal, la Farm Security Administration, il Wagner Act, la crisi tra esecutivo e Corte Suprema, il giusrealismo. Gli anni Trenta: il libro foto-documentario, il romanzo proletario, il romanzo bottom-dogs, il romanzo del ghetto, il romanzo hard-boiled, i romanzi di John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Nathanael West e John Dos Passos. Gli anni Trenta, quindi, tra giustizia e letteratura. L’ipotesi di questo libro è che negli anni Trenta la rappresentazione letteraria delle categorie della legge possa essere analizzata alla luce di una serie di analogie tra la ridefinizione del patto sociale e la riscrittura del patto narrativo in senso più inclusivo. Gli anni Trenta, quindi, visti da lontano (con uno studio quantitativo) e da vicino (con un’analisi narratologica dei testi).

Proletarian children’s literature was developing in Germany in 1920s. Stories about Soviet Union as well as travelogue were among popular genres.These books were an obvious propaganda. Stories about the first socialist state had as their main goal to set a positive example for the young readers to follow in the class struggle as well as served as a proof of the inevitability of the proletarian revolution worldwide. German communist writer Bertha Lask in her book “How Franz and Gretha went to Russia” (1926) has told about a trip of two young proletarian children, members of the young Spartacus league, through Russia — from Leningrad and Moscow to Ukraine and Crimea. Young readers learned from the book not only about Soviet achievements, but also about obstacles in the construction of the new society: class
struggle, hunger, homeless children. The author depicted the achievements of socialism in opposition to capitalist oppression. Bertha Lask demonstrated a new attitude to children and considered them to be equal partners of the adults, her young heroes are engaged in the construction of socialism and are armed with progressive communist ideology. Bertha Lask has worked out in her book the main principles of interpretation of characters and events which will become common for all travelogues about the USSR addressed to young readers.

В 1920-е гг. в Германии развивается пролетарская детская литература. Среди популярных тем были рассказы о Советском Союзе, в том числе в жанре путешествия-травелога. Эти произведения имели откровенный пропагандистский характер. Рассказы о стране, где победила социалистическая революция, служили положительным примером для подражания, воспитывая в детях разных стран уверенность в необходимости классовой борьбы и неизбежности победы пролетариата. Писательница-коммунистка Берта Ласк в книге «Как Франц и Грета ездили в Россию» (1926) одной из первых подробно и увлекательно рассказала юным читателям о путешествии двух немецких подростков в СССР. Брат и сестра, юные спартаковцы, совершают путешествие от Ленинграда до Украины и Крыма. Они узнают не только о достижениях большевиков: успехах индустриализации, утверждении социального равноправия, заботе о детях, интернациональной борьбе рабочих, но и о трудностях социалистического строительства: сопротивлении
классовых врагов, голоде, детской беспризорности. Книга построена на противопоставлении достижений социализма безрадостному миру капиталистического угнетения. Берта Ласк утверждает новое отношение к детям — не как к пассивным объектам воспитания, а как к равноправным партнерам взрослых, активным члены общества, проводники  прогрессивных социалистических идей. В книге Берты Ласк намечены основные темы и определены принципы отбора материала и трактовки персонажей и описываемых событий, которые станут общими для всех книг этого жанра.

Focusing on the book club "Universum-Bücherei für Alle" and Kurt Kläber’s novel "Passagiere der III. Klasse," this article reconstructs attempts by communist writers and cultural activists to produce an internationalist world literature during the Weimar Republic. In contrast to theories of world literature that often ignore such non-canonical traditions, marginalize social class, and emphasize culture, this article argues that world literature theory needs to theorize the relations between world literature, politics, and social stratification.

Resumen: Este trabajo pretende explorar cómo la novela Parque industrial: novela proletaria, de Patrícia Galvão funge como retrato directo de la violencia sufrida por la mano de obra femenina que formó parte del proyecto de industrialización llevado a cabo a comienzos de los 1930, en la ciudad de São Paulo. El objetivo principal es poner de relieve los tipos de violencia que forman parte de la vida de estas proletarias, con énfasis en la violencia sistemática y la violencia simbólica definidas por Slavoj Žižek y Pierre Bourdieu, respectivamente. Partiendo de estas definiciones, el trabajo analizará una serie de escenas y/o conversaciones de la novela, con el fin de señalar qué tipo de violencia está presente y cómo se da la violencia dentro del ámbito de la novela. Así, se evidenciará que los personajes femeninos se ven asediados, principalmente, por la violencia sistemática, íntimamente relacionada con la hegemonía y el poder. Pero se demostrará, además, que dicha violencia sistémica da lugar a y se relaciona con la violencia simbólica, la cual se conecta con la relación de opresión ente lo masculino y lo femenino. De esta manera, probaremos que la novela de Galvão retrata cómo ambas violencias se dan, de manera correlativa, en un São Paulo dominado por intereses capitalistas e industriales.

Takiji Kobayashi
LE 15 MARS 1928
Le 15 mars 1928 évoque une journée de répression. Ce jour-là, 1 600 militants communistes et socialistes, accusés de vouloir renverser le cabinet conservateur de Giichi Tanaka, sont arrêtés par la police japonaise et jetés en prison. La petite ville d’Otaru est le théâtre d’une des rafles les plus importantes du pays. C’est là que vit Takiji Kobayashi, employé de banque et militant ouvrier. Alors que les journalistes se taisent, il décide de raconter ce qu’il a vu et ce qu’il sait, en écrivant ce premier roman en forme d’enquête. Saisi et censuré dès sa parution, le livre documente la barbarie des violences policières et la vie ordinaire de ceux qu’elle mutile. Traduit pour la première fois en langue française, il peint un portrait collectif de la classe ouvrière, sobrement, en quelques fragments intimes, dans le huis clos d’une prison.

Cinq ans après la rédaction du 15 mars 1928, l’auteur du Bateau-usine et du Propriétaire absent, âgé de 29 ans seulement, meurt sous les coups de la police.

Takiji Kobayashi
Takiji Kobayashi (1903-1933), écrivain et militant communiste, est une figure majeure de la littérature prolétarienne japonaise. Après Le Bateau usine et Le propriétaire absent, Le 15 mars 1928 est son troisième livre traduit en français.

Traduction : Mathieu Capel

<http://itchymonkeypress.com/2016/12/08/literature-of-resistance-as-literal-resistance-by-mark-p-williams/> An essay on the experimental collective novel Seaton Point (1998) by Rob Colson, Martin Cooper, Ted Curtis, Robert Dellar, Keith Mallinson, Emma McElwee and Lucy Williams.
    "In 1997, seven people on an East London council estate decided to write a novel together that would be composed of stories based on their own lives and would appropriate the form of the novel to promote their circumstances and outlook. They produced the novel Seaton Point (1998), composed of intersecting stories of eccentric characters, vampirism, debt-collectors and demons, working-class culture and urban Gothic parody, set in and around a block of flats in Hackney - they published Seaton Point with a 'No Copyright' notice. 

It is a novel which resists many of the attributes of the postmodernist literary novel as we understand it.  Seaton Point demonstrates an interest in the performative quality of writing as an activity which produces its own logic; for the writers of Seaton Point, the collectivity and social activity informs every aspect of the text.  The authors of Seaton Point describe their text as ‘an inner-city tale of magic, mayhem and gratuitous sex scenes’ and wrote a provocative introduction in which they propose multi-author texts as an opposition to the cult of the author as originating genius of artistic work.  As an extension of this principle, the CIP page declared 'No Copyright.  Unauthorised reproduction, transmission, adaptation and circulation without the publisher’s prior consent are actively encouraged. Disks to facilitate this are available free of charge from the publisher.’"

Full article online; please follow the link to read more.

Readers of The Street, Ann Petry’s 1946 proletarian novel, generally sympathize with and even celebrate Lutie Johnson, the African American single mother at the heart of Petry’s work. Even in light of Lutie’s idealistic, delusional commitment to an up-by-one’s-bootstraps individualist philosophy—and her resultant condescending dismissal of other Black poor and working-class folk—Petry’s focalizing character tends to emerge in the bulk of the criticism as an admirable, if confused, embodiment of human agency and possibility in cramped social circumstances. This paper advances an alternative reading of Lutie and thus of Petry’s narrative and theoretical project in The Street. While Petry does indeed provide a sympathetic portrait of Lutie, that portrait is joined to a withering critique apparent in moments of disjunction between Lutie’s subjective perspective and the objective narratorial perspective of the novel, especially in relation to matters of race, gender, and exploitation. Indeed, it is in this cognitive distance between character and narrator that the novel does its most robust and dialectical theoretical work. Again and again, Lutie’s dream of individualist self-rescue through hard work and saving is held up to social structures of capitalist exploitation, mediated by racial and gender oppression, that outrun and overwhelm individual decision-making. This has often led to the reading of The Street as a naturalist novel, interested in depicting the inescapability and inevitability of the eclipse of agency by environment. However, this reading of Petry as a naturalist ignores the novel’s totalizing portrait of social and historical (and thus changeable) pressures and, more importantly, its depiction of small moments of collective action and possibility, based in collective and forceful struggles against systematic racism. If Petry, to use the great theorist of realism, Erich Auerbach’s, words, grasps this “subsurface movement” as emergent possibility, Lutie actively ignores it, lapsing into the defeatist naturalism readers often attribute to Petry. Lutie’s explanations of social problems often stops at racism itself, and yet her inability to account for the structural necessity of racism to capitalism leaves her oscillating between dreams of an individualist escape from systematic racism—based in an acquiescence to the very socio-economic system that must continually reproduce it—and naturalist-racist condemnations of so-called Black culture, behavior, and life. In this sense, Lutie believes the fiction of racial difference, always blaming the lived and everyday crises of capitalist exploitation, from un- and under-employment to poverty to gendered and racialized violence, on some sort of actually-existing racial difference, even if, sometimes, this difference is coded as cultural. While accounting for its genesis in the real material structures of systematic racism, Petry rejects Lutie’s naturalism, providing instead a spirited realism that situates, in a dialectical fashion, social oppression within the movement and rules of reproduction of capital. At the same time, though, Petry refuses to simply subordinate the material reality of systematic racism to a race-blind class reductionism. Rather, she lodges revolutionary possibility in the anti-racist self-activity of poor and working-class African Americans, treating their self-activity against social oppression as both the point of emergence and the very core of class struggle.

Este trabajo pretende explorar cómo la novela Parque industrial: novela proletaria, de Patrícia Galvão funge como retrato directo de la violencia sufrida por la mano de obra femenina que formó parte del proyecto de industrialización llevado a cabo a comienzos de los 1930, en la ciudad de São Paulo. El objetivo principal es poner de relieve los tipos de violencia que forman parte de la vida de estas proletarias, con énfasis en la violencia sistemática y la violencia simbólica definidas por Slavoj Žižek y Pierre Bourdieu, respectivamente. Partiendo de estas definiciones, el trabajo analizará una serie de escenas y/o conversaciones de la novela, con el fin de señalar qué tipo de violencia está presente y cómo se da la violencia dentro del ámbito de la novela. Así, se evidenciará que los personajes femeninos se ven asediados, principalmente, por la violencia sistemática, íntimamente relacionada con la hegemonía y el poder. Pero se demostrará, además, que dicha violencia sistémica da lugar a y se relaciona con la violencia simbólica, la cual se conecta con la relación de opresión ente lo masculino y lo femenino. De esta manera, probaremos que la novela de Galvão retrata cómo ambas violencias se dan, de manera correlativa, en un São Paulo dominado por intereses capitalistas e industriales.

Nakano Shigeharu's novella "Mura no ie" (House in the Village, 1935) is one of the most celebrated literary works of tenkō literature. Tenkō ("ideological conversion") is a socio-political phenomenon of prewar Japan, which took places roughly between 1927 and 1942. Under sustained pressure from state authorities, numerous public figures (politicians, artists, journalists, university professors) publicly denounced their previous political activities. Some of the most famous cases of tenkō are members of the Japan Communist Party. The writers among them, after being released from prison, began to write about the experience of tenkō. The texts they produced between 1934 and 1942 are known as tenkō bungaku (tenkō literature).
This paper is a close reading of the short story "House in the Village," and is focused on the possibility that the author may have used the literary conventions of shishōsetsu (Japan's autobiographical novel) in an attempt to communicate with his readership and convey to them his determination to continue his political fight despite his public tenkō the year before.

Edible microalgae have potential as low-cost cell factories for the production and oral delivery of recombinant proteins such as vaccines, anti-bacterials and gut-active enzymes that are beneficial to farmed animals including livestock, poultry and fish. However, a major economic and technical problem associated with large-scale cultivation of microalgae, even in closed photobioreactors, is invasion by contaminating microorganisms. Avoiding this requires costly media sterilisation, aseptic techniques during setup and implementation of 'crop-protection' strategies during cultivation. Here, we report a strain improvement approach in which the chloroplast of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is engineered to allow oxidation of phosphite to its bioavailable form: phosphate. We have designed a synthetic version of the bacterial gene (ptxD)-encoding phosphite oxidoreductase such that it is highly expressed in the chloroplast but has a Trp→Opal codon reassignment for bio-containment of the transgene. Under mixotrophic conditions, the growth rate of the engineered alga is unaffected when phosphate is replaced with phosphite in the medium. Furthermore, under non-sterile conditions, growth of contaminating microorganisms is severely impeded in phosphite medium. This, therefore, offers the possibility of producing algal biomass under non-sterile conditions. The ptxD gene can also serve as a dominant marker for genetic engineering of any C. reinhardtii strain, thereby avoiding the use of antibiotic resistance genes as markers and allowing the 'retro-fitting' of existing engineered strains. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate the application of our ptxD technology to a strain expressing a subunit vaccine targeting a major viral pathogen of farmed fish.

Simultaneously an emblematic and ambiguous case of engaged literature, proletarian
and revolutionary writings from 1920–1940 have been the focus of numerous studies:
whether they be in Germany, France, the United States or Soviet Russia, the principal
actors have been identified, certain works have been republished, and the ways in
which these movements were first encouraged and then dismantled by the Communist
International in the interest of the only accepted socialist realism have been demonstrated.
However, the transnational and even global dimensions of this movement and
the profound similarities among institutional processes carried out in different countries
have been overlooked. Drawing on little-known critical sources from the Francophone
world, this article reworks the terrain and presents the state of institutional sites
of proletarian and revolutionary literature. To this end, small groups, magazines, and
associations will be considered in order to shed new light on this era when, across the
globe, workers turned into writers.

Benjamin Goriély, traducteur et publiciste, a joué un rôle important dans la médiation de la pensée russe en Belgique dans l’entre-deux-guerres, en particulier entre 1925 et 1930. Grâce à son séjour à Moscou pendant la révolution de 1917 et à Berlin par la suite, il devint un acteur important des rapports triangulaires Belgique-Allemagne-Russie. Sa collaboration avec le périodique étudiant L’Universitaire et les acteurs principaux du mouvement prolétarien belge comme Augustin Habaru, Pierre Hubermont, Charles Plisnier et Albert Ayguesparse lui permettent d’accéder au Drapeau Rouge, le quotidien communiste, ainsi qu’aux revues importantes (quoique éphémères) comme Prospections et Tentatives. Progressivement, Goriély devient un des pionniers de la littérature prolétarienne en Belgique autour d’un modèle soviétique. Le futurisme russe qui occupe une place privilégiée dans le travail de ce médiateur, il le considère comme un mouvement transitoire vers la littérature prolétarienne. À part ses travaux sur la littérature et la révolution russes, Goriély suivait attentivement la littérature allemande et inspira son épouse Hélène Temerson-Goriély, pour qu’elle consacre, à l’Université Libre de Bruxelles, une première thèse de doctorat qui porta sur Carl Sternheim, l’écrivain expressionniste allemand. Son interprétation précieuse du futurisme russe et des expressionnistes allemands exprime la nécessité d’une littérature entièrement nouvelle et révolutionnaire. Malgré son départ définitif à Paris en 1930, suite à la mauvaise fortune du mouvement prolétarien en Belgique, le travail de Goriély a largement contribué à un éclairage unique du phénomène de la « poésie révolutionnaire ».