Introduction to L’ouvrier américain (1949)

The Amer­i­can Worker by Paul Romano
Trans­lated from the American

We present here an unprece­dented doc­u­ment of great value about the lives of Amer­i­can work­ers. This appraisal stems not only from the fact that it defin­i­tively puts paid to both the absurd claim that Amer­i­can work­ers don’t have class con­scious­ness, and the myth of the com­fort and lux­ury of the Amer­i­can pro­le­tariat. This would already be amply suf­fi­cient rea­son to make a point of pub­lish­ing the doc­u­ment by the worker and mil­i­tant rev­o­lu­tion­ary Romano. It is indis­pens­able that a cred­i­ble voice is raised to destroy the barefaced pro­pa­ganda of Hol­ly­wood firms which show us work­ers in bath­rooms, or those of Reader’s Digest which depict at every oppor­tu­nity the ben­e­fits of class collaboration.

The mer­its of this small pam­phlet are much more pro­found. Every worker, regard­less of “his nation­al­ity” of exploita­tion, will find in it the image of his own exis­tence as a pro­le­tar­ian. There are, in fact, deep and con­sis­tent char­ac­ter­is­tics of pro­le­tar­ian expe­ri­ence that know nei­ther fron­tiers nor regimes. Fur­ther­more every worker, and this is pre­cisely because it’s the reflec­tion of the exploita­tion “with­out for­mal­i­ties” [sans phrase] that is given to us, will be filled with a bound­less con­fi­dence in the his­toric des­tiny [des­tinées his­toriques] of his class, because he will see there, like the author, that even at the moment when the worker is in the deep­est despair, when his sit­u­a­tion appears to him to be insol­u­ble, his own “every­day reac­tions and expres­sions” reveal that he is on “the road to a far-reaching change…”

The trans­la­tor of this small pam­phlet him­self has worked sev­eral years in the fac­tory. We was struck by the accu­racy and the impor­tant impli­ca­tions of every line. It is impos­si­ble for a worker to remain indif­fer­ent to this read­ing. It is even more impos­si­ble to trans­late such a text in an indif­fer­ent, or even rou­tine, man­ner. At sev­eral junc­tures, it was nec­es­sary to take a con­sid­er­able dis­tance from the let­ter of the Eng­lish text to pro­vide a really faith­ful trans­la­tion. Some Amer­i­can pop­u­lar expres­sions have an exact cor­re­spon­dence in French, but embed­ded in dif­fer­ent imagery. Even in his descrip­tive style, Romano uses a pro­le­tar­ian optic. It was nec­es­sary to find a cor­re­spond­ing style in French, even if it meant stray­ing from the text. Admit­tedly, this trans­la­tion is not ele­gant, but it is the most faith­ful we could have given.

Even more in trans­lat­ing than read­ing one is struck by the con­crete uni­ver­sal­ity of the pro­le­tar­ian con­di­tion, and we hope to have respected this expression.

In our eyes, it is not by acci­dent that such a sam­ple of pro­le­tar­ian doc­u­men­tary lit­er­a­ture comes to us from Amer­ica, and it is also not by acci­dent that it is, in some of its deep­est aspects, the first of the genre. One can be cer­tain that the name Romano will stay in the his­tory of pro­le­tar­ian lit­er­a­ture, and that it will even sig­nify a turn­ing point in that his­tory. The most indus­tri­al­ized coun­try in the world, with the most con­cen­trated pro­le­tariat, should give rise to new and orig­i­nal tal­ent. That is a sign of the vigor and the depth of Amer­i­can work­ers’ movement.

—Trans­lated by Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi

Philippe Guillaume was a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.