Th is text looks at the early Communist intellectual movement in Slovakia (in an area that, for part of the time under discussion, was affi liated with the the Hungarian Soviet Republic) organized around the journal Kassai Munkás (Th e Košice Worker). By placing this movement in the context of the development of Western Marxism and the incipient Marxist aesthetics of György Lukács, who was among those who published in the journal, the paper characterizes the movement’s contribution to discussions of the meaning of proletarian culture, which elaborated on the concept of social culture developed by Lukács in his radical period. An earlier version of this article, in the original Slovak and in parallel English translation, was published in Košice Modernism: Košice Art in the Nineteen-twenties = Košická moderna. Umenie Košíc v dvadsiatych rokoch 20. storočia, ed. Zsófi a Kiss-Széman, (Košice: Východoslovenská galéria, 2013), pp. 84–94.