On the American Working Class
Sartre, Jean-Paul
In early 1945, with the war not yet over, Jean-Paul Sartre visited the United States for the first time. He traveled with a group of correspondents who were invited for the sake of influencing...
...There is nothing comparable to this in America's case: undoubtedly one still encounDISSENT / Winter 2001 n 31 SARTRE IN AMERICA ters slums in the overpopulated Northeast, but decentralization and the "housing" [in English in the text] policy implemented by the government and management have reversed the situation...
...To finish up, the worker, just like his boss, eats a big piece of sponge cake with cream or an "ice cream" [in English in the text...
...The cost of living is rising: they have to fight in order to obtain raises that are in proportion...
...The employers have fought them off violently...
...At international meetings, worker delegates from Europe often criticize American workers for not expressing solidarity with the international proletarians but that's because you are not aware of our situation...
...But of course they do not represent the majority...
...In all these discussions, one can see Sartre thinking about the French working class—perhaps for the first time—as he learns and writes about American workers...
...Thus, America's optimism and the preference for compromise solutions have had as a result that the worker's ideal remains the establishment of permanent harmony between employers and employees, between capital and labor...
...This is especially the case for workers in small shops and department stores as well as laundry workers, etc...
...They impute to them an egoistic hard-heartedness that undoubtedly stems from their situation, but does not express the overall politics of a class...
...If he prefers to eat out, he can eat for 40 cents in the enterprise's cafeteria...
...First of all, the mechanization of labor has been pushed so far that the worker has lost all interest in what he does...
...According to his biographer, Camus was "distressed to discover that the rival paper got Sartre's report on the liveliness of American cities while his paper received a study of the economy of the Tennessee Valley Authority...
...The Beginning of Americanization America is a colonized country, and I would compare the American workers quite willingly to our French settlers in Morocco...
...The extraordinary opportunities many of them have encountered persuaded them that success depended on them...
...Unable to grasp the meaning of collective property or of a collective event, how could they have been aware of the collective nature of their condition...
...All this allows one to understand that socialism has made no inroads into the American masses...
...From 1870 to approximately 1880 a massive number of French-Canadians arrived...
...I do not know if this is really management's intention, but it is true that in regard to their workers they practice a policy of enlightened despotism...
...Similarly, in the cities' working-class neighborhoods, the streets do not look like our streets: you don't linger in them as we do for the joy of sensing oneself overwhelmed by a great unanimous wave: you cross them very quickly in order to go to work or go home...
...In restaurants, you pay mostly for the cutlery, the service, and the atmosphere, but no matter where you go you find, whether it is in the "Automats" or the dining room of the great hotels, the same green peas whose color is so garish that you think they were hand-painted, the same unsalted white beans which are served in little dishes, the same brown and odd-looking gravy...
...That health care that is in the service of the big capitalists is not exactly socialized medicine...
...But it has taken a clear position against socialism and Samuel Gompers, its leader for forty years, prevented it from linking itself up permanently with a political party...
...In other regions, industrial progress and mechanization of agriculture allowed for the opening of new factories overnight, and as a result there was a continuous influx of foreign workers: the most recent arrivals were seen as the proletarians...
...Tired and silent men dream there, alone or in small groups...
...Why was this so...
...Drinking doesn't take place there...
...But these remarks, heard regularly in France after World War I, are definitely not the rule here...
...What is important is that here a worker never considers himself a "proletarian" in the European sense of the word...
...Away from his French environment for several months and detached from the attitudes and practices of political noninvolvement that had marked his first forty years, Sartre may have felt free to act as an engaged political intellectual...
...If you really want to talk about a complex, it would be better to talk about their superiority complex in respect to intellectuals, who after studying for ten years make less money than they do...
...Henry Ford was the first to adopt the so-called "policy of high wages": since then, it has been imitated by the entire United States, and, as we know, Kaiser established a hospital with great effort...
...The movies play a social role here: many Americans call them the opium of the people...
...Diagnosis: tuberculosis in her right kidney...
...The monthly wages range roughly from $330 to $360 a month and they are far from being the highest in America...
...The Mechanization of Labor Can we say therefore, as some people maintain, that America is a worker's paradise and that goodwill and solidarity reign between management and the proletariat...
...It is one of the reasons for the disarray that typified the thirties: the government was taken aback because there was no federal organization to take care of the unemployed, specifically in California where there is no state health insurance...
...He is inclined to attribute it to a lack of organization, and, if he thinks about it, he takes pride in his own country with its high salaries, its comfortable housing, its freedom and equality...
...9 —Combat, June 9, 1945 "Hello, Jim," Says Chicago's Bishop to the School's Janitor...
...At the official exchange rate of 50 francs to the dollar, they are making between 16,500 Frs...
...He may well be proud of his factory, in the manner that we are proud of our works of art, but in his shop or construction site he suffers from the same sense of hopeless boredom that is now typical of the workers in our overrationalized industries...
...After the war, when the shipyards lost a lot of their importance, Kaiser's plan was to interest all the region's industrial enterprises in his hospital...
...If he missed his first chance to communicate with a mass audience, during the euphoric months to follow Sartre made his presence felt with two major articles, "The Republic of Silence," published in the liberation issue of Les Lettres Françaises, and "A More Precise Clarification of Existentialism" in the communist weekly Action...
...Pressure from below obliged them to climb up the ladder...
...The Situation of the "Intellectuals" The laborers and those who work in small shops do not have the impression that they are selling their labor but rather that they are performing a service...
...It's odd," he told me, "but all European visitors are equally amazed and indignant...
...Often the conflicts are quite violent...
...As its name indicates, it is a federation of unions in which each union preserves its autonomy...
...When I visited the hospital, I had already been informed of this state of affairs...
...He traveled with a group of correspondents who were invited for the sake of influencing French public opinion favorably toward the United States.' Sartre was sent by his friend Albert Camus to report back to Combat, the leading newspaper of the independent left that had emerged from the Resistance...
...Indeed, there is no doubt that the concept of class is foreign to American thinking...
...On April 9, B.E...
...he is a left-wing militant and an intelligent, capable, and energetic man who is totally devoted to the workers' cause, and he seemed surprised...
...This still leaves the worker $180 to $200 for clothes, miscellaneous expenses, and going out...
...And he added bitterly, "Unfortunately...
...At night, the worker hurries off to the movies in order to get away and forget a long, inhuman day of work...
...Neither in stores nor in hotels is anyone obsequious...
...They appeared to be plunged in a kind of nothingness in order "to recover their strength" from within the very depth of their being...
...NEW YORK: The figures I have provided on the American worker's living conditions should allow the reader to understand to what degree his mentality differs from his European comrade's...
...And when he discerns the relationship between his high wages and the general prosperity of the U.S.A., he expresses solidarity with capitalism: it is within the framework of the capitalist system that he wants to improve conditions...
...The Older of the Two Unions: The AFL Only one-third of the workers are unionized...
...I let my opinion be known to a worker in Detroit who replied, "I know, but what can we do...
...Tomorrow, when the soldiers come back from the war and industry will be placed on a peacetime footing, the workers may be out on the street without a penny...
...not that he participates in the profits or in its management for all that, but he considers himself a beneficiary of the cleanliness and hygiene that is strictly maintained in the workplace: every day, he is joyfully amazed over the most recent technological improvements...
...One doesn't sense the presence of those powerful social forces that throng the streets and workers' cafés in Europe...
...The only attempts to create a socialist party were made in the agrarian Northwest and not in the East or in the indusDISSENT / Winter 2001 • 33 SARTRE IN AMERICA trialized Northeast...
...They were so used to counting on themselves that they were unable to see themselves as innocent victims of VD DISSENT / Winter 2001 a collective catastrophe...
...He is just "passing through...
...But that's absurd," he answered...
...Rather, they see certain bosses as disloyal competitors or better yet as perfidious partners: in an economic system the workers accept these bosses don't play the game...
...they prevent the workers from organizing, they don't raise wages when they should, they are not sufficiently worried about the return of unemployment, and, perhaps, they even secretly wish its return...
...What the workers especially fear is socialist policies that will reduce their standard of living and compromise America's prosperity...
...He touches only briefly on race relations in these articles, but will return to the issue in the final two articles on his American trip, published in July in Le Figaro...
...Marxism, about which the immense majority of Americans don't know the first thing, is America's bogey man...
...They think that what he is today, they will perhaps be tomorrow...
...The Fear of Marxism In the big cities, especially in San Francisco, there are a few communist cells...
...And they added proudly, "We, we never studied at all...
...And now, as 1945 loomed, having just announced the project of creating a new journal and articulated his theme of the writer's commitment, he would have the opportunity once more to influence the broad public by writing for the daily press...
...In France, many bourgeois also prefer to ignore the reality of the working class...
...Therefore, should we have sabotaged the undertaking...
...Consequently, the minority that opposed the AFL proposed as a substitute for the federation system by skill a vertical structure that would unite in one single union all the workers of one particular industry...
...Nowhere else but in America has it been so difficult to establish unions...
...Everybody remained at his place, alone and in silence: most of them did not even smoke...
...It's because work, especially now during the war, has become a hell: it is not only completely mechanized, but management in agreement with the government has increased the output of the human machine to the maximum...
...This proportionally low number is explained first of all by their professional individualism of which we have already spoken, but another explanation lies in the fact that included among the "workers" are all the day and farm workers that the unions have not as yet tried to organize...
...we are not yet proletarians...
...And the bourgeois encourage this kind of familiarity, whose equivalent is found nowhere in Europe: first of all it is useful to them because it hides the profound differences of condition, but above all because they are very sincerely proud of American "equality...
...A young worker said before me, "A JOB [in English in the original] is work that one doesn't like...
...Therefore, the basic unit would no longer be the skill, but the total industry of which the skills are a part...
...He had also made several contributions to Les Lettres Françaises, like Combat published clandestinely...
...Of course, the two hospitals and everything in them belong to the workers...
...And on top of that, it represents a terrible blow to private medicine...
...In order to adopt such a view, they would have had to perform a thorough analysis of capitalism and, as we have seen, nothing is farther from their mind...
...Since the amount deducted from their wages is very small, and the advantages they enjoy considerable, it appears to them quite simply that all that is asked of them is a small fee in exchange for the services they receive...
...It requests that it be declared illegal for workers' unions to prevent the adoption of modern techniques whose purpose it is to improve production and to call wildcat and illegal strikes...
...And he answered, honestly surprised, "But, Mr...
...It has supported Roosevelt's efforts at planning, specifically, the TVA, and accepts blacks as its members...
...A private doctor would have charged her $10 for this examination...
...As a consequence, he indicated that most proletarian families were crammed into slums and that the worker abandoned family life in order to find in the street the social life that is indispensable to the most solitary individual...
...the worker does not feel that he stands out because of the way he is dressed...
...In a factory I visited it is customary to grant the worker a fifteen-minute break every two hours...
...During their stay in the city, they retain their peasant mentality: they seem like aliens to their worker buddies...
...There are undoubtedly communists among its membership, but a minority is fiercely anticommunist and regularly demands their expulsion...
...He even participates in them...
...But they have to protect these high wages constantly...
...The worker is conscious of his exhaustion and that he is becoming an automaton...
...6, no...
...The oldest union, and today also the most important, is the American Federation of Labor (AFL...
...Therefore he created, with Dr...
...Of course, one must not exaggerate: there are still, if one includes the blacks, millions of workers whose wages are below the poverty line...
...Together with the CIO, radical movie makers have produced an unusual film, Our Native Land, which I saw in a private showing...
...In both cases, the plunder occurs with his consent...
...The Minimum Wage I must admit that their standard of living, especially today, blinds them to their real problems...
...The reader will notice, first of all, how lively and interesting they are...
...The articles on the U. S. working class appeared several weeks after Sartre's return home in May, appearing from June 6 to June 30, 1945...
...DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 37...
...Combat, June I 0-1 1, 1945 A Sadness Composed of Fatigue and Boredom Weighs on American Factory Workers NEW YORK: The American worker does not recognize his own suffering in that of his European brethren...
...they may be enjoying an easy and luxurious existence but they sense that it may well be ephemeral and they do not abandon themselves to it with confidence...
...Monsignor Shell, Chicago's bishop, was kind enough to show me around his school: in the gym we ran into the old caretaker, who was busily working...
...4 Seven of the articles from Le Figaro (gathered as "Individualism and Conformism in the United States" and "American Cities") were published in Situations III and later translated into English in Literary and Philosophical Essays...
...In the U.S.A., everybody is in agreement: this civilization is dominated by technology and it respects foremost the technician and the specialized worker...
...Mr...
...however, I said nothing...
...That's what they criticize them for...
...Since they do not own the hospitals as individuals, they immediately assume that they are the boss's personal property, that's how far removed they are from adopting a socialist point of view...
...In all factories, the number of operations that a worker must perform in one hour is rigorously determined...
...He is first of all an American...
...It seems that the United States was the laboratory where he first acted on the idea of commitment that he was just then developing...
...Kaiser would never have accepted DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 27 SARTRE IN AMERICA worker participation in the hospital's administration...
...The most progressive ones among the lot are completely in favor of improving the proletariat's condition where feasible...
...Even today, after the 1930 depression, it remains hostile to state intervention and defends free enterprise...
...What strikes me especially is that here workers do not have a sense of collective property...
...same outfit, same easy and nonchalant demeanor: the exterior class indications are nonexistent...
...Its principal weapon is the strike, which is used judiciously and commonly called its "economic power...
...Kaiser...
...But none of the Combat articles has ever been republished in French or translated into any other language...
...This is the situation that I will try to explain in these articles...
...This is what allows [André] Siegfried to remark: The cotton industry in Massachusetts has in the last seventy-five years seen the character of its workers change several times...
...But— and this is what I wanted to get to— in these factories where the big left-wing union, the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations], has a significant number of members and where the communists exercise a considerable influence, nobody is conscious of the fact that the totality of these health facilities are the exclusive property of the workers...
...The CIO, originally begun by a dissenting minority that left [the AFL], tried to organize the great industries according to these principles...
...Hutchison, vice president of the Chrysler Corporation and director of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the most conservative management organization, stated that its committees were studying a plan whose preliminary outlines had been submitted to the Chamber of Commerce...
...but since then, even though their numbers have not significantly declined, their relative place has undergone a strong decline, while they have tended to migrate towards the highly technical positions...
...But it is also to the workers' advantage: they live in the most amazing comfort and it does not cost them too much...
...These articles are also being published in Sartre Studies International, vol...
...Simone de Beauvoir said that learning of Camus's invitation in late 1944 was one of the most exciting moments of Sartre's life.' Known before the war for Nausea (1938) and The Wall (1939), Sartre's reputation had grown with the performance of The Flies and No Exit during the Occupation, and with the publication of Being and Nothingness during the same period...
...But the big fear of the American proletariat is to be unemployed...
...The boss has been luckier than they are, that's all...
...It will require a $500 operation: here everything is free...
...The conflict resulted in a split...
...DISSENT / Winter 2001 • 25 SARTRE IN AMERICA Their strengths are especially striking because these are the articles of a tyro...
...doctors are very expensive, and we have encountered terrible resistance from the American Medical Association...
...Cultural values follow far behind, and as far as traditions go, there are none...
...What," they said, "you studied so long and you make so little...
...They spoke to him in a friendly but disdainful manner...
...But many fear that the return of the soldiers, the threat of unemployment, and the actions of conservative elements will, after the war, provoke in America a violent, anti-union movement...
...Besides, they no longer occupied the bottom rung because in the last decade of the century, the heavy jobs were passed on to an improbable and colorful collection of Poles, Portuguese, Syrians, Greeks, and Russians...
...In this respect people pointed out a very important fact to me: at the beginning of that terrible depression, when millions of workers and employees found themselves out of work overnight, it was very difficult to persuade many of them to register at the unemployment office: they were ashamed...
...per month...
...Don't forget also that when a worker is hired, there never is a medical examination...
...American Equality This apparent equality also shows up in their public behavior: why should the worker, the elevator attendant, the delivery boy be hostile to, or intimidated by, his boss or a rich customer...
...Rather than speaking of fifteen minutes of rest, one should call it fifteen minutes of death...
...Its workers make on the average six dollars per day...
...A short overview of the American union movement will clarify this...
...But it is surprising that the union leaders or the communists don't try to make them understand that they have a claim to those hospitals and that, in a capitalist society, they own these facilities just as Kaiser owns his factory...
...On the one hand, he can lay full claim to the product of his labor, but on the other, he is content with a lifetime interest in a medical facility that is properly his...
...In Public the American Worker Cannot Be Distinguished from the Bourgeois The married workers live at home, just like the bourgeois...
...The tension between labor and management remains high...
...He is the author of After Marxism and several works on Sartre...
...The "Community House" Hence, it is not surprising that in each of the artificially created settlements near the big construction sites a "community house" [in English in the text] has been built, a huge shed composed of wooden boards where the workers get together after their work to smoke, read, and chat, and it is not surprising that the crowd gathering there at night resembles the people we encounter in working-class neighborhoods in our industrialized cities, but the resemblance is superficial: these halls created by the state's or the boss's paternalism preserve a puritanical air...
...Kaiser was reimbursed in six months, and since the deductions continued to come in, he was able to build a second hospital, even bigger than the first...
...Did You See Our Willow Run Plant...
...Across the ocean from the French Marxists he had recently encountered, he was now trying out Marxism as the main prism for focusing on a series of new experiences.' On this trip, he paid his first visits to factories and had his first conversations with workers and trade unionists...
...A little later, on the construction site, I had somebody ask a worker who the hospital belonged to and he answered quietly, "It's Kaiser's...
...Indeed, in these industries where the manufactured product is always the result of the co-operation of many skilled workers, the old-fashioned organization according to separate skills proved to be inefficient: fitters, bench hands, turners, finishers, even though they belong to different trades, have the same interests...
...In fact, virtually all the articles— and especially the descriptions of and reflections on the American working class—are accessible and fascinating, just the kind of fare Combat's educated audience would have feasted on...
...The Workers' Attachment to Economic Liberalism It views itself as a distributor of manpower...
...Life is so standardized here that I found no significant difference between the menus of the luxury restaurants and the canteens...
...They rolled a cigarette between their fingers but they did not even think of lighting it...
...An American, perfectly fluent in French, told me just yesterday that the term "worker" (which could be translated as "travailleur") has no equivalent in French because of the very specific connotations it possesses...
...But they expect these improvements to be initiated by management: a lot is done for the worker, but it is not done by the worker...
...In the CIO, the most progressive labor union, there is a noisy and active minority who periodically demand the expulsion of the Marxists...
...Except for those who were born of working-class parents and have worked in factories since their adolescence, the American class system appears, in [Henri] Bergson's words, like an "open society" Until the relatively recent period of massive immigration, immense regions remained undeveloped in this country, and natural resources greatly surpassed their potential for exploitation...
...10 Here, nothing like that exists...
...They did not understand that they were benefiting from an exceptional economic situation that was the result of the fact that America is a rich but underpopulated country...
...They drink the same chlorinated ice water and the same bad coffee...
...rather they are kindly and gruff in their approach...
...When discussing Kaiser's factories, I referred to the considerable number of workers who are in reality day workers from Texas and Oklahoma and are here to make in two or three years the small amount of money necessary to buy a plot of land and start out on their own...
...And the feeling that their situation is precarious may well be their greatest anxiety...
...take out $20 to $30 for taxes, $60 to $70 for war bonds (the worker considers buying war bonds a patriotic duty and spends regularly 15 percent to 20 percent of his wages on them...
...Americans First A French worker is definitely proud to be a manual laborer, but he affirms the superiority of his work all the more violently because the bourgeois hardly believe in it while they pretend to be the repositories of traditions, culture, and luxury to which he in principle has no access...
...family life is just as important as his professional life...
...A Fifteen-Minute Break Every Two Hours The constantly increasing demands from management are at the origin of numerous conflicts...
...1, 2000...
...their hopes and their deepest memories are attached to the earth and the fields...
...Hello, Jim," said the bishop...
...It was created in 1881, but did not acquire its present name until 1886...
...Who Pays for All This...
...Once invited, he arranged also to report back to the conservative newspaper Le Figaro...
...What estranges them from communism is their professional individualism...
...In accordance with their seniority, they succeeded in occupying all sorts of positions at all levels...
...And, finally, the manner in which they permit this hospital— that belongs to them—to be filched reminds me a little of what happens in the case of what is called in economics texts "profit...
...36 • DISSENT / Winter 2001 SARTRE IN AMERICA A Split in the AFL Between 1930 and 1936 it was torn apart by a violent conflict: a certain number of its members accused it of having been incapable of unionizing the big mass production industries: steel, autos, textile...
...If he wants to, he can become a shareholder and participate, to a certain degree, in the life of American capital...
...Open Societies" Besides, nowhere else is the small farmers'' misery greater than in certain areas of Texas or New Mexico...
...his attitude is firmly evolutionary and progressive, he rejects everything that smells of revolution...
...And, showing their hands, they remarked, "That's what we make our living with...
...Notice also Sartre's eye for detail, his power to construct interesting chains of ideas, and his penchant to generalize sweepingly from limited experience and observation—Sartre spoke no English, and his conversations and interviews required the services of a translator...
...the much less important "Brotherhood" [in English in the text] of railroad workers...
...Of course there is no doubt that in America, as in France, a "worker" is a wage earner, that is, a man who hires out his productive power and who owns neither the instruments nor the product of his labor...
...But the communists daren't speak their name: they hide under such fancy names as "progressives" or "reformers...
...Combat, June 30, 1945 1. The story of the trip is told by Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life (Pantheon, 1985...
...This mind-set can in part be explained by the fact that many Kaiser workers come from the Southwest...
...There is a "Heinz" for clothes as there is for food...
...Although Sartre was the first writer to have a byline in Combat, Beauvoir reported to her biographer that it was she and not Sartre who wrote these well-known articles, because "he was too busy...
...These are Henry Ford's main factories), just as the bourgeois of Amiens might ask before the war, "Did you see our cathedral...
...4. For a detailed discussion see Michael Scriven, Sartre and the Media (St...
...He lives in Fontana Village, an artificial community made up of those "prefabricated houses" [in English in the text] which I talked about elsewhere...
...About a month and a half ago, the federal government raised the minimum wage to 55 cents per hour...
...A Doctor Praises the System I put the same question to a hospital doctor...
...Combat, June 12, 1945 Since the Depression of the Thirties, the American Worker Lives in Fear of Being Unemployed One Day NEW YORK: I have spoken of the pride with 34 . DISSENT / Winter 2001 SARTRE IN AMERICA which the American workers showed off their high wages...
...Even today, many bosses are resolutely opposed to unions...
...They are remarkable for a number of reasons...
...Everything depends on 26 DISSENT / Winter 2001 SARTRE IN AMERICA the states and private initiative...
...Kaiser Does...
...it is semi-sweet, semi-salty, and they spread it on a refrigerated piece of beef, and especially the same canned foods Heinz provides to all of America—its 57 varieties of canned foods allow it to play a great role as equalizer...
...Hendrik de Man (1885-1953) wrote studies of the Dutch and Belgian working classes as well as Au-dela du Marxisme (1929) and The Psychology of Socialism (1927...
...and 18,000 Frs...
...If one leaves aside the mineworkers' union, which accounts for at least a million men...
...In a restaurant, the waitress jokes with the customer, she teases him: if he comes back, she waves at him from afar as if he were an old acquaintance...
...Since that time, it has not stopped perfecting its tactics...
...One can sense that they are ready to do anything in order to avoid a return to the dark days of the 1930s...
...Martin's, 1993...
...They attributed this state of affairs to the political constitution and to America's public spirit...
...It succeeded remarkably at it...
...Those Who Forged Their Own Destiny Besides, these men have accepted their destiny and are proudly aware of having forged it themselves: they fled the miseries of Europe and in advance accepted a few difficult years in a new country which did not welcome them but in which they were sure to find their place...
...In that respect, the disastrous experience of the thirties has had a decisive impact...
...I walked through the shops during the fifteenminute break and I was struck by the gloomy stupor that showed on their faces...
...But, an American feels as if the factory in which he works is "his own...
...RONALD ARONSON teaches at Wayne State University and is currently writing about the Camus-Sartre relationship...
...But if in that sense he remains the victim of the capitalist system, everything is organized in such a way that he is rarely conscious of it...
...It shows strikes, bloody clashes, and lockouts and makes you grasp better this profound American contradiction: America is the most optimistic country in the world...
...I have difficulty imagining the same pride in a French union leader working for Michelin or Goodrich...
...What can we do...
...Of course, strictly speaking, this is true only for the immigrants of the first generation...
...The legal work week is 40 hours and overtime is paid at one-andahalf times the regular rate...
...but they raised their children with these sentiments, and Protestant individualism is responsible for the rest...
...There are couches, leather arm chairs, an electric oven, and a fridge...
...they lead a semiclandestine existence...
...Like the AFL, the CIO is particularly in favor of extracting the most from free enterprise, but it is more aware of the limits of economic liberalism and agrees that it should be corrected where there are lacunae or weaknesses by using moderate interventionism...
...American Workers Are Not Yet Proletarians SAN FRANCISCO: In my presence they interviewed a liberal journalist from Baltimore about the situation of the American working class...
...If a worker invents a device that can improve the output or save time, they reserve a place of honor for it and his picture is displayed at the entry of the factory...
...there was blood in her urine...
...Indeed, twenty years later, they had climbed one or two rungs up the social ladder, pushed up by new arrivals who replaced them in the low-paying jobs and who had to climb up the social ladder in turn...
...leaves him cold...
...On the other hand, national and religious solidarities persist for a long time among immigrants and explain the existence of those innumerable Irish, Jewish, Mexican, and Chinese neighborhoods that function as barriers and blind them to class solidarity...
...Before Roosevelt, many skilled workers voted for the Republican Party, which stood for large, organized production and had as its goal the increase of the nation's material wealth...
...This film is already quite old, but it was officially withdrawn one week after it was shown in public...
...It is they and no one else who pay the doctors and the nurses: it is with their money that research scholarships will be offered to young doctors...
...it had been 50 cents, which means that there were still a lot of people in America who made less than $100 per month...
...Let us suppose he is unmarried because today everybody works in America, and if he is married, his wife's pay is added to his...
...As you know, the Belgian writer [Hendrik] de Man spoke in the books he wrote before World War II of the presence of a certain "inferiority complex" in the European worker who sensed that he did not possess any specifically bourgeois values...
...Rationalist optimism permeates him since it is one of the characteristics of Americanism that there is no problem that cannot be solved using common sense, goodwill, and mutual concessions...
...It is noteworthy that Sartre's first genuinely political writing as well as his first sociological observation took place not in France, but in the United States...
...it describes the bitter and often bloody battles the unions had to undertake in order to be officially recognized...
...Therefore, it must be considered as less conservative, which does not mean at all that it is influenced by socialist doctrine...
...What to answer him...
...they are day workers from the countryside who come to work in the factories for six months or one year, attracted by the high wages...
...they hire themselves out, but they don't give themselves...
...That's how he will have contributed to the growth of socialized medicine...
...its people have always considered war an avoidable accident and the use of force an unjustifiable tactic, but it is also a country that contains, in a latent state, the greatest possibilities for violence...
...In the street, you cannot tell the difference between a worker and a bourgeois...
...Answers the Janitor...
...The Worker's Budget As a consequence, the worker seldom has the dim but haunting notion that the rich bourgeois American eats luxurious meals that he has to do without...
...Upon arrival, the immigrants initially accepted their inferior jobs and low salaries...
...it distributes it as best as it can and in the workers' interests...
...During the Paris uprising in August 1944, with Combat now appearing openly, Camus gave Sartre the opportunity to make his presence felt in the daily press, commissioning him to write a series of articles about the liberation...
...While a worker in France, born whether he wanted to or not in a secular proletariat, sees all horizons blocked from the start and learns as a child from bitter experience that his fate is tied to the entire working class, these men have freely accepted exiling themselves and have retained the impression of having "chosen" their fate...
...Combat, June 7, 1945 DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 29 SARTRE IN AMERICA The American Worker Eats Just as Well as His Boss And Heinz Produces 57 Varieties of Canned Foods for Its Fellow Citizens NEW YORK: Here people say regularly that the poorest American believes deep down that he can become a Rockefeller or move into the White House...
...Here workers view themselves as being involved in a struggle that has at its core the bad faith of some individuals rather than the very structure of society...
...2. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance (Putnam, 1964), p. 17...
...They lacked class consciousness and identified with their bosses and nation rather than their fellow workers elsewhere—which is to say, they accepted capitalism...
...Towards 1870, the Irish and Scots still represented the majority...
...However, in fact it is made up of younger elements and it recruits its members in newer and more vibrant industries...
...At the end of the decade, this group alone surpassed in number all other foreign nationalities...
...What would have been the use...
...And that was the beginning of the process of Americanization: without being intellectually and critically minded individualists, they acquired a professional individualism...
...and a handful of small independent unions, it may be said that in the United States there are two big professional organizations...
...Their attitude is ultimately understandable...
...Upon their arrival, they discover an existing, perfectly organized health facility...
...But since life is nevertheless more expensive in America than in France (if one ignores for a moment the black market), it is better to evaluate the buying SARTRE IN AMERICA power this income confers on the worker...
...But the "real" workers: the steel workers, the miners, mechanics, and so on, enjoy a much higher standard of living and they are far more numerous than those underprivileged ones...
...In addition, even though the number of workers at Kaiser has dropped significantly, the money keeps coming in: they are now planning a training center for nurses as well as a medical research center for which they intend to hand out eight yearly scholarships of $5,000...
...63 percent of the workers accepted, which provided a weekly sum of $31,500...
...For two-thirds of the day, he is reduced to a series of identical gestures and his work is constantly speeded up and he is more and more hurried...
...Translated by Adrian van den Hoven...
...I have often eaten in these "cafeterias": there is lots of food and it is good...
...In sum, the American worker "needs" capitalism...
...At the beginning of the war, when [Henry J.] Kaiser established his enormous shipyards, which employed more than 100,000 workers, he was confronted with a very practical problem: in order to obtain the highest productivity from this enormous crowd of workers, he had to take care of their health...
...As a consequence, the American worker is not familiar with that internationalism based on poverty which before the war united the European proletariat...
...Therefore it often happens that we look after workers whose diseases were contracted well before they were hired by Kaiser...
...This does not mean that it never agrees to support a specific government action if it is shown to be necessary, but it wants to reduce its interference to the absolute minimum, because in principle it is suspicious of "planning" and it identifies democracy with economic liberalism...
...as a consequence, for the day workers that come from there, becoming part of the working class represents an incredible improvement in their condition and approximates the attainment of bourgeois respectability...
...Maybe they are more easily fooled than others...
...On the contrary, I asked our guide, an engineer: 'Who is paying for all this...
...Look at the tremendous advantages it provides to our workers: last week a woman came in for a consultation...
...hence, most of them are, without ulterior motives, proud of their high wages...
...Our "proletarian" buys his groceries in general food stores situated in the village itself and set up in agreement with the industry boss, and those stores sell him their wares at very low prices...
...8 Hence class characteristics interfere with national ones: in 1920, a worker no longer knows whether he is a proletarian because he belongs by birth to the proletariat or because he is an Irishman who just got off the boat...
...It is as if the workers had paid for the total cost of these facilities and then, out of indifference, had donated them to their employer...
...9. On February 26, 1946, Combat published a front-page article entitled "With His Salary an American Can Buy Five Times More Manufactured Products than a French Salaried Worker and Two to Five Times More Foodstuffs...
...If that were only the case...
...Moreover, these are his first writings influenced by Marxist ideas: he stresses the centrality of social class, the alienating effect of industrial labor, the exploitation of the workers, and the question of workers' organization and ideology...
...The famous cry, "Proletarians of the world, unite...
...The numerous factories we visited struck me by their cleanliness: they resemble offices more closely than our dark and dirty factories: the workers are properly clothed, the women are attractively made up, they wear baseball caps and long cotton pants, and colorful blouses...
...Now we have spent $60 to $70...
...6. Communist philosopher Henri Lefebvre responded critically (in "Existentialism et Marxism," Action, June 8, 1945, p. 8) to Sartre's "More Precise Clarification" just after the above articles began running in Combat...
...At the entrance, there is a reminder that the country is at war and the customers are asked not to order more food than they can eat: a clear indication that no one is starving to death...
...According to the average American, what separates the blue-collar worker from his white-collar employer is a difference in the nature of their work, but not class...
...In Detroit, local CIO leaders asked me, glowing with pride, "Did you see our Willow Run plant...
...In general, that American worker is proud of his country's riches, its overwhelming industrial power, and the scientific progress it accomplishes every day...
...The seven articles that follow are among the last of the thirty-two Sartre wrote about his American trip...
...This hospital is financed as follows: Kaiser put up $700,000, part of which by the way was lent to him by the federal government...
...The working masses feel deeply that they are in basic agreement with management: their common interest is to maintain the high living standard of the American people by raising production as much as possible...
...For them, the bosses are not the representatives of a social class whose interests are radically opposed to those of the proletariat...
...But, at the same time, he deducted 50 cents per week from the wages of all those workers who wanted to benefit from these medical services...
...Last September, when all of America anticipated the swift collapse of the German Army, a genuine panic occurred among the workers, and many quit their jobs in the war factories in order to find as quickly as possible a job in peacetime industries...
...Combat, June 14, 1945 DISSENT / Winter 2001 n 35 SARTRE IN AMERICA In the States One-third of the Workers Belong to Two Large Unions: The AFL with 5,800,000 Members, the CIO with 5,200,000 NEW YoRK: I've already written in Combat that tensions remain high between American workers and management...
...he sacrifices it to earn a living...
...The American Communists Hence in principle, this new organization which grew out of the AFL only differs from the Federation from which it split by its structure and tactics...
...There is a distinct sadness among the American working masses: it is composed of fatigue, boredom, and dreams...
...10...
...Also, most American communists are workers sympathetic to the Soviet Union's cause who see America's future lying in close cooperation with the Soviets, but who absolutely do not want to see that type of government introduced into the United States...
...After work, the worker puts on a nice readymade suit which is comparable to millions of the same suits manufactured in America because it is nearly impossible, especially today, for women and men to order clothes that are made-to-measure...
...That means that the American "proletariat" can enjoy a home life...
...They 28 DISSENT / Winter 2001 SARTRE IN AMERICA largely retained the memory of the miserable existence they had fled and which made their present condition look like a paradise and, just as important, for them this condition was temporary...
...Kaiser himself presides over these hospitals, and the vice-presidents of these organizations are doctors, selected by him, together with perhaps one or two representatives from the city of San Francisco, but not one is a worker...
...This is the fact that has struck me the most during this trip...
...If they are upset by the huge salary of a Hollywood star or a radio singer, it is not because these amounts are high but because it seems to them that all these people are paid to do nothing...
...How Kaiser Financed His Hospitals In America, there is no generalized system of socialized medicine...
...This "housing" [in English in the text] policy is advantageous to the bosses: they are not out of pocket, because their enterprise is profitable and the workers rent from them and live on their property, which allows them to better control them...
...Garfield's help, the famous Kaiser hospital, whose reputation has spread throughout the United States...
...playing rarely does...
...32 • DISSENT / Winter 2001 SARTRE IN AMERICA And the caretaker, without turning around, tossed back at him, "Hello, Bishop...
...Perhaps this is somewhat less true since the 1930s depression, but up until then this feeling was indeed quite widespread...
...In them Sartre is breaking new ground in at least three respects: not only is this his first journalistic writing, but it is also his first attempt at sustained social and political analysis...
...7. "paysans" 8. Taken from André Siegfried, America Comes of Age: A French Analysis (Harcourt, Brace, 1927...
...There are now 650 beds and 80 doctors and surgeons, all paid for by the weekly deductions of the subscribers...
...For $30 or $40 a month he can eat the same food as "everybody" else, that food that is so American and that one finds from one end of the United States to the other and at all levels of society and which is presumably rich in vitamins but has so few that after their meals most people take vitamin pills apparently made especially to be swallowed rapidly and casually by people in a hurry...
...In America they did not experience that hopeless hereditary oppression that weighs on the European proletariat...
...It is furnished and has three bedrooms, a kitchen, and bathroom, and he pays $31 per month rent...
...Not so long ago Henry Ford employed a team of boxers [goons] to beat up the striking workers...
...The working people feel profoundly terrorized...
...Hundreds of times during this trip, in every kind of place, I have been asked in a genuinely apprehensive tone, "Is it true that France will fall to the communists...
...Recently, a French professor was on a boat with some twenty workers who were going back to America after having built a floating harbor somewhere on the European coast...
...It seemed to them that their misfortune was their own fault and that they had not been sufficiently clever or hardworking...
...But this truly human kindness that pervades class relationships is surely one of the most charming and spontaneous characteristics of the United States...
...Few events have had such an impact on the history of the United States...
...Instead of having the stifling feeling of being swallowed up by an overwhelming destiny, they have acquired a kind of individualistic sense of their personal dignity because even if they are laborers or semi-skilled, they know they have come to find their destiny on the other side of the ocean and they consider themselves responsible for it...
...Sartre raises this central theme in a wide variety of ways, discussing food and dress, American informality and social mobility, workers' attitudes toward employers, their individualism, and the absence of socialist movements...
...In most factories, initiatives and criticisms by the personnel are encouraged...
...At present it has 5.8 million members and dominates the trades that have been unionized the longest, especially in the field of construction...
...The point was to get a foothold in America and to be tolerated...
...Management Against the Unions Management has done what it could to imprison the worker in his so-called individual "freedom...
...On the question of race, it intends to remain neutral, and in practice this pretty well means that blacks remain excluded from the Federation...
...That is how they hope to increase his productivity, because during the two hours that he is working, he does not have the right either to smoke or raise his head...
...One Unmarried Worker in Fontana Village Take as an example the Fontana Dam being constructed by the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority...
...These articles are an inquiry into American exceptionalism...
...if these cannot be guaranteed, it summarily rejects the jobs offered...
...Once I even heard some old ladies declare that "the workers had profited the most from the war," and that "their wives now bought chicken and silk stockings...
...I should add that in the States what we call in Europe the class struggle" is not viewed in the same light...
...The worker is happy to be paid a wage...
...Combat, June 6, 1945 The United States: A Country of Settlers SAN FRANCISCO: The American worker is not conscious of being riveted to his condition in the way his French or British comrades are...
...Taxi drivers become involved in the conversations of their passengers in the backseat of their cab...
...The "joy of working" is just about completely foreign to him: and his time at work is a waste of a part his life...
...As we have seen, the worker spends as much, if not more, on housing as he does on food...
...Hello, Bishop...
...It also demands that the individual worker's rights against the unions be protected and he be permitted to work "without fear of any molestation or forms of violence exercised against his person or his property" The Chamber of Commerce has not yet acknowledged this proposal, which would, if adopted, practically withdraw the right to strike from the unions and turn the workers away from union membership...
...In spite of the obvious and profound differences, they have the same consciousness of having established themselves freely in their place of work, and the result has been the same devotion to energy and action and the same profound conservatism...
...Copyright Combat and Arlette Elkaim-Sartre...
...There is no workers' control whatsoever and not even a consultative committee...
...Twenty were published in Combat (February 2 to June 30), a dozen in Le Figaro (January 24 to July 30...
...He answered all questions willingly, but he seemed so obviously puzzled that I finally asked him what befuddled him so: "It's because you Frenchmen talk about the American working class as if it really existed," he replied...
...5. Herbert Lottmann, Albert Camus: A Biography (Gingko Press, 1997), p. 366...
...Because," I told him, "the European working class has a clearer understanding of its rights...
...As you know, in America health is "big business" [in English in the text...
...Today it has 5.2 million members and its importance has become considerable, because the factories where it operated have been transformed for the most part into war plants...
...For the American people who had never known an economic crisis— at least not a crisis of such magnitude—it struck them like the revelation of evil...
...This may reflect the distorting retrospective thrown on virtually every aspect of the Sartre-Camus relationship after their break...
...And it goes up from year to year...
...besides, these attempts have failed...
...Before 1936, management frequently fired workers suspected of belonging to "unions" [in English in the text...
...The furniture is ordinary, but completely new: it reminded me of the furniture from Dufayel, Bücheron, or the Galeries Barbes...
...Also, the "community house" is mainly frequented by unmarried men who prefer that kind of "shared solitude" to complete loneliness...
...3. Deidre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir (Summit Books, 1990), p 293...
...It has demanded and obtained an improvement in labor legislation and sanitary conditions, wage increases, and a reduction in the work week...
...Some time ago, a sociologist who was trying to describe the consumer habits of the French worker stressed the fact that the working class spent the smallest part of its budget on housing and clothes and the largest part on food...
...Sartre's main concern in these articles is that American workers, though no less exploited or alienated than French workers, nevertheless did not share their experience, values, or social and political outlook...
Vol. 48 • January 2001 • No. 1
