Explaining Membership Growth in the Norwegian Progress Party (Frp). From 1973 to 2008

The resulting "Proletcult" had, by 1920, become a mass movement, with a membership (between 300,000 and 450,000) perhaps as large as that of the Soviet Communist Party itself. The subsequent heeling of the movement under Party control, the later debates over the validity of the idea of a proletarian culture (notably if problematically engaged in Trotsky's Literature and Revolution), the intricacies of organizational infighting in the Soviet Union and elsewhere throughout the twenties and thirties, and the emergence of the idea that literary content and ideas should be directed by the policies of a proletarian "vanguard party" do not concern us here, except to the extent that these developments help to explain the growing disrepute of the idea itself. In the United States, however, Mike Gold in particular continued throughout the twenties to push this idea of proletarian culture; ul-343- timately in 1928 he succeeded in turning The New Masses into what Eric Homberger has accurately described as "a Proletcult magazine." In this phase the magazine received numerous submissions from working people like Jack Conroy, H. H ...»