According to Hapke, Gold struggled with his project to write "proletarian fiction" because he was primarily, for the first decade, distracted by his left-sided communist politics. He struggled to express urban ghetto life artistically attributing this in part to the lack of relevant models, these being hard to attain. Hapke believed he found characterization and narration as the largest problems; problems which could have been solved with increased levels of self involvement using his own experiences and observations. Gold struggled to see U.S. working deprivation through soviet culturally centred eyes.
Solutions to this, suggested by Hapke, are found within "On a section gang" where Hapke comments on how Gold blurs the line between a short-story and a report and how this works to add an element of witty Marxist humour into the piece, that these almost layers of anecdotes form the correct level of individualism needed to give his work success. Not to create a solution to the workers problem or to create a false yet successful end, a "workers revolution" but to simply show how the workers do what they do day in day out to try and make their existence as enjoyable, well bearable as possible.
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...and see Jo's post for a sense of how Gold tries to put the small scale rebellions of 'N-----' and the Christie St gang, in the context of working class resistance, and ultimately the empowerment of that class. (And the limitations of doing this via racial difference, as Bernstein and Jo point out.)
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