Searching for the American Worker

Beginning with the 1947 publication of The American Worker pamphlet a new form of “proletarian literature”—first-person narratives of work and workers’ inquiries—emerged from the automotive factories and corners of Marxian movements in the United States. First-person narratives and workers’ inquiries are strategic interventions to grasp power in the workplace, informal work groups and divisions within the class, forms of mutual aid and working-class self-activity, and can aid emerging organizing efforts. This talk will discuss how the pamphlet aided in the circulation of struggles while furthering workers’ own self-understanding and development of class consciousness, contextualize the pamphlet within the American labor movement and changing regimes of work, and argue that first-person narratives of work and workers’ inquiries offer political possibilities today. The ability of workers to govern their own unions, workplaces and communities can only be expressed with a political project that makes such governing…