TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

A. Jinha Song

Un monde sans argent: Le communisme was published serially, from 1975 to 1976, by ultra-left communist Parisian collective Les amis de 4 millions de jeunes travailleurs. It was soon thereafter translated into English by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which in 1979 produced a very short excerpt of Tract 1 for its monthly Socialist Standard. A full English translation would not appear for another thirty years, when anonymous Libcom.org users Alias Recluse and Craftwork took it in turns to upload an apparently original translation, chapter by chapter, from 2011 to 2016. Pattern Books would publish that version in 2020 as part of its Radical Reprints series.

This Mortar Press translation is my attempt to fully render the strangeness and humor that I most enjoy about Un monde sans argent. As it was originally published as a series of tracts, it bears all the energetic language, inconsistency, idiosyncrasy, and occasional rhetorical expediency one might expect from the format. I’ve resisted smoothing all of that out wherever possible. In practical terms, this has ranged from honoring some very peculiar syntax, to directly representing the consistently gendered and sometimes ableist language, to maintaining the authors’ own format for citation, irregular as it is. They were indifferent bibliographers at best; all footnotes are original to this translation, meant to supplement the text’s sparse citations and, less frequently, provide cultural context for the contemporary Anglophone reader.

On context—one of this text’s great shortcomings is its analysis of what it describes as the “primitive,” a typically imperial muddle that reaches across millennia to confound early humanity with New World indigeneity. Using footnotes to hold the text to account for this matter would have exceeded the scope of my project, but I felt compelled to provide more context here:

1. The notion of the indigenous Americas as a sparsely populated wilderness is largely a European invention, a backwards generalization of post-contact numbers that does much to obscure the genocide of 95% of the continents’ population. In fact, recent estimates of pre-Columbian population density range 7 to 12 times higher than the scholarly consensus at the time this book was written. For an history of these estimates as imperialist ideology, see Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).
2. Another useful European invention this text employs is that of the indigenous person as the passive beneficiary of natural resources. This invention was among the earliest ideological justifications for colonization and dispossession. For a recent perspective on active indigenous land management, see M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013).

Thanks to Patrick Germain, invaluable collaborator and meticulous reader. And, always, to Ian.