A Truer Liberty (Routledge Revivals)

Simone Weil and Marxism

Laurence A. Blum, Victor Seidler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135232412
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Simone Weil — philosopher, trade union militant, factory worker — developed a penetrating critique of Marxism and a powerful political philosophy which serves an alternative both to liberalism and to Marxism. In A Truer Liberty, originally published in 1989, Blum and Seidler show how Simone Weil's philosophy sought to place political action on a firmly moral basis. The dignity of the manual worker became the standard for political institutions and movements. Weil criticized Marxism for its confidence in progress and revolution and its attendant illusory belief that history is on the side of the proletariat.Blum and Seidler relate Weil's work to influential trends in political philosophy today, from analytic Marxism to central traditions within liberal thought. The authors stress the importance of Weil's work for understanding liberation theology, Catholic radicalism, and, more generally, social movements against oppression which are closely tied to religion and spirituality.

1: Simone Weil's early life and politics

1 Youth

Simone Weil was born in 1909 in Paris. Her parents were cultured, freethinking, well-to-do Jews.¹ The Weils were a close family to whom Simone remained completely devoted throughout her very unconventional, rebellious, and nonbourgeois life.² Her outlook was political and radical from an early age. She said later in life that at age ten she was a Bolshevik. At school she would draw hammer-and-sickle insignias on her school reports and papers, and she read the Communist party newspaper, L'Humanite.

An important early intellectual and moral influence was Alain (Emile-Auguste Chartier), an inspiring and influential teacher of Weil's generation of students, with whom Weil studied from 1925 to 1928 at the Lycée Henri IV. Although deeply engaged with political events of his time, Alain was suspicious of organized political parties. He emphasized the importance of freedom of individual thought, was skeptical of political ideologies, and criticized socialism for insufficiently protecting the individual against abuses of power. Alain was animated by a deep moral concern conveyed forcefully to his students, which helped to inform the moral perspective from which Weil always assessed social and political questions.

During her years at the lycée Weil began an involvement with workers' education, which in one form or another continued to be a personal and political concern throughout her life. With some other students of Alain's, Weil taught in a school for railroad workers, set up through the (Communist-led) railroad union by a friend of Alain's. This project was an outgrowth of the “people's universities” and workers' education movement begun early in the century, itself an outgrowth of French syndicalism.

French syndicalism, and its later variant, anarcho-syndicalism, deeply influenced Weil's political thinking. Syndicalism was an important force in the French labor movement (much more so than the British or German) up until World War I. Its roots went back to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the French trade union movement of the mid-1800s. Syndicalism emphasized worker selfactivity, hostility to the state, and suspicion of political parties and organizations. Around the turn of the century, anarchism brought to syndicalism an emphasis on direct revolutionary action, a vision of small-scale, decentralized economic organization, and a spirit of individualistic anti-authoritarianism. The founding in 1895 of the first confederation of French trade unions, Confédération Générale du Travail (Confederation of French Labor), spread syndicalist influence to the national level in the early twentieth century. This syndicalist influence contributed to the French trade union movement's greater independence from national political parties (such as the Socialist party) than trade unions in Germany, Britain, or Italy were able to achieve³

An especially important element of syndicalist thought for Weil was its emphasis on workers' education. Local federations of trade unions, called bourses du travail sponsored classes for workers. The bourse du travail movement, led by Fernand Pelloutier, an important syndicalist figure within the labor movement, was a forerunner of the worker education projects with which Weil became involved in her years at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and afterwards. Weil expressed this continuing commitment to workers' education in a letter to a former student in 1934, in which she wrote, “The most important [positive work for the foundation of a new and more humane order than our present one] is the popularization of knowledge, and especially of scientific knowledge. Culture is a privilege which, in these days, gives power to the class which possesses it” (Seventy Letters, 8).

From early on Simone Weil showed an exceptional and striking concern for the oppressed and victimized, a concern that, in her teens, focused especially on the working class. Her sympathy for the plight of the working class was shared by many of her contemporaries at the lycée and university; but Weil was unusual among them in valuing manual work in its own right and desiring to engage in it herself. While at the lycée she worked on the farm of a fellow student. In 1928 she volunteered to be part of an international brigade engaging in manual work as civilian service, an alternative to military service. Her application was, however, turned down, presumably because she wished to work in the fields, a kind of work reserved for men only. The following year she made use of a visit to relatives to work ten-hour days picking potatoes. In 1931, as she prepared to assume her first teaching position, she visited a Breton fishing town with her parents, where, as Simone Pétrement, Weil's lifelong friend and biographer, reports, Simone prevailed on the fishermen to let her share their work. This experience had a particularly profound influence on her, providing a model for how human work and effort is able to operate against and to direct the much greater power of nature: “At every moment the helmsman—by the weak, but directed, power of his muscles on tiller and oar—maintains an equilibrium with that enormous mass of air and water. There is nothing more beautiful than a boat” [“Pre-War Notebook,” 20).

Weil's sense of the human importance of work was reflected in some writing she did in 1929 that lead up to her dissertation, “Science and Perception in Descartes.” There she accords work or activity in the world a kind of philosophical significance, as a way of connecting sense impressions to an extended world. Work provides a model, which Weil thought could be found in Rene Descartes, for a kind of science importantly distinct from the current understanding of it, which in her view had become excessively specialized and abstracted from the world. (For more on this topic, see chapter 6, section 4.)

Although apparently not as a member of any specific political group, Weil was intensely politically active in her years at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1928–1931), where she studied to be a philosophy professor. She worked to raise money for the unemployed and attended pacifist demonstrations; she regarded herself as a revolutionary. Pétrement describes what Simone Weil seemed like to some of her contemporaries:

Simone did not have many friends at the Ecole Normale, even among the students. Many of them feared or were in awe of her. “They tried to avoid her in the corridors because of the blunt, thoughtless way she had of confronting you with your responsibilities by asking for your signature on a petition … or a contribution for some trade union strike fund.”⁴

In 1931 Weil passed her agregation, an exam conferring the status of professor. She applied to teach in a port or industrial city, where she would be near work that she valued and could participate in workers' struggles. However, through her out-spoken expression of revolutionary political views while at the Ecole Normale, she had offended an important administrator who apparently saw to it that she instead was posted to a girls' lycée in Le Puy, a small city in southeastern France.

2 Political activity in the workers' movement

From 1931 to 1934 Simone Weil taught in girls' lycees⁵ in Le Puy, Auxerre, and Roanne. This was a period of intense political activity for her but, significantly, by all accounts she was a devoted and generous teacher, and inspired great loyalty among her students, though she often offended the schools' administrations. The importance of education continued to play a central role in her outlook, and exchanges of letters with her students and notes taken by students on Weil's lectures testify to her deep respect for her students as learners. A statement from one of her students conveys her impression of Simone Weil as a teacher:

The clumsiness of her gestures, above all of her hands, the special expression on her face when she would concentrate on her thought, her piercing look through thick glasses, her smile—everything about her emanated a feeling of total frankness and forgetfulness of self, revealing a nobility of soul that was certainly at the root of the emotions she inspired in us, but that at first we were not aware of.⁶

Although Weil had been sent to Le Puy to deprive her of an appropriate setting for her revolutionary commitments, in fact she became deeply involved in political struggles in the area and continued this activity in Auxerre (in 1932–1933) and Roanne (1933–1934). Le Puy was three hours by train from St.-Etienne, an industrial city; Simone Weil traveled there at least once a week for several months to meet with workers and trade union militants and leaders. She taught courses for miners through the St.-Etienne Labor Exchange, a creation of the union movement in that area and a remnant of the syndicalist bourse du travail movement.⁷ Later she taught a course on Marx at the request of workers at Le Puy. In January, 1933, Simone Weil wrote:

We should never forget that our task is the preparation of a society “in which the degrading division of work into manual work and intellectual work will be abolished” (Marx). Among the particular tasks implied by this general task, one of the most important is to create, in the different branches of culture, the basis for a true diffusion of knowledge.⁸

Simone Weil also sought out contacts with revolutionary syndicalists, some of whom had once been in the French Communist party and thus were considered “dissident communists.” She discovered such a group connected with the journal La Revolution proletarienne, which rejected both reformism and affiliation with a political party and advocated militant class struggle. Weil regarded this journal as the only independent revolutionary review; she wrote occasionally for it, and her important article “Prospects: Are We Heading for the Proletarian Revolution:” was published in it. She remained in close contact and sympathy with revolutionary syndicalism throughout this period, much closer than she was to the Marxism of the Communist party.

While at Le Puy, Simone Weil also plunged immediately into trade union activity in both St.-Etienne and her own Haute Loire region. She managed to join the local teachers union that encompassed not only her own stratum of professor but the much larger group of secondary school teachers. At the time two national federations dominated the union movement in France — the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and the Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire (CGTU—United General Confederation of Labor). The CGT had lost much of the syndicalist-inspired revolutionary spirit of its pre-war days; but it adhered to a principle in which Weil believed deeply—the independence of trade unions from political parties. The CGTU, formed in 1921 by revolutionary syndicalists who had opposed the CGT leadership's support for French entry into World War I, rejected the principle of trade union independence and became affiliated with the newly-formed Communist party; but Weil regarded the CGTU as the more militant of the two unions, more effective in waging class struggle than the more reformist CGT. Seeing strengths and weaknesses in both confederations, she felt that the competition and division between the two unions weakened the cause of the working class. She devoted much energy to a movement for unity between the two unions and in service to this goal managed to join both the CGT and CGTU locals of the teachers' unions.

Weil was also occasionally politically active in a publicly visible manner. In December of 1931 she participated in a series of demonstrations, organized by the local Communist party, in which the unemployed of Le Puy marched to the mayor's city council's offices. To see a professor of philosophy—and a woman no less—leading a group of unemployed men shocked the town establishment, who briefly threatened Weil's dismissal from the lycée. But students at the lycée and their parents rallied to her defense, and nothing came of the threat.

3 Simone Weil's political outlook

Although Simone Weil participated in many kinds of activities within the labor and left movements of her time and had friends and comrades of many different political sympathies, her political outlook during this period could not be identified fully with any extant political formation on the left—revolutionary syndicalism, communism, trade union militancy. Nevertheless, certain general tendencies in her views regarding political activity and organization can be discerned.

She continued to share with the syndicalists a distrust of political organizations and a relatively greater faith in workers' organizations such as trade unions. She saw political parties as based on the insubstantial tie of shared political beliefs rather than on the deeper bonds created by shared experience of work and working conditions, and she saw the former as having no power to bring about real change in society—that is, change that would truly alleviate the oppression of the worker. She wrote in an article in early 1932:

Experience has shown that a revolutionary party can effectively, according to Marx's formula, take possession of the bureaucratic and military machinery, but not in order to smash it. For power really to pass into the hands of the workers they would have to unite, not through the imaginary ties created by the community of opinion but through the real ties created by the community of their productive function.⁹

Weil was also entirely nonsectarian in her outlook. Despite her suspicion of parties, she was willing to join with any group that seemed to her to be taking steps to mitigate the workers' plight, however differently those groups conceived of that activity and however alien other aspects of their beliefs were to her. This principled participation in political activity, especially with regard to the French Communist Party, is evident in her participation, in December of 1931, in the demonstration of unemployed workers organized by the Communist party in Le Puy. She later wrote of this incident:

The Communists at Le Puy had decided to demand a city welfare fund for unemployment. For my part, since I thought it right that an unemployed person should have something to eat and believed it my duty to help unfortunates unable to defend themselves, I accompanied the unemployed several times to the city council and the mayor …¹⁰

Weil also believed that any organization capable of genuinely helping the working class had to reflect within its own structure control by the workers themselves. She was concerned about the bureaucratic structure of both trade unions and political organizations, in which a small group, often (though not necessarily) of bourgeois origins, ran the organization, with the members being entirely passive. This structure seemed to her to replicate the very powerlessness of the worker that it was the professed goal of radical organizations to overcome. She thought that this problem plagued the revolutionary syndicalists as well: “The ‘revolutionary syndicalists’ are against bureaucracy I know. But syndicalism is itself bureaucratic!”¹¹

Her criticisms of these political organizations had not yet led Simone Weil to abandon, as she did later (see below, chapter 2, section 8), the Marxist belief that the working class was to be the agent of any radical transformation of society. At this. point she still sought a form of organization of the working class that was capable of bringing about radical change and yet would reflect the values of worker dignity and empowerment that the workers' movement's ultimate goal of a society based on liberty and equality embodied.

For Weil the problem of restoring to the worker his or her rightful place in the work process was not a question of formal organization only but continued to be one of cultural and educational efforts as well:

the important thing is to distinguish, among the attempts at working-class culture, those that are conducted in such a way as to strengthen the ascendency of the intellectuals over the workers, and those conducted in such a way as to free the workers from domination… . This domination of those who know how to handle words over those who know how to handle things is rediscovered at every stage of human history.¹²

Finally, Weil was intensely concerned with the moral basis of political activity and in particular with her own moral relationship to that activity. This moral concern presaged the moral perspective that lay at the heart of her political thought throughout her life. Her fundamental moral commitment was to be on the side of the oppressed—that is, (as she saw it at the time) on the side of the working class. But she was sensitive to the moral differences between her own role in the workers' movement as a member of a relatively privileged intellectual stratum and the situation of the workers engaged in the same struggle. She did not want to be in a position of “leading” workers toward a goal they did not themselves actively aspire to nor of pushing them to take risks she herself was not called upon to take (e.g., of losing one's job and having little prospect of another). Moreover, she felt that she herself had much to learn from the workers and could not pretend to have answers to the problems they themselves confronted without sharing their life in some way.

Simone Weil's moral concern was consistent with her critique of bureaucratism in workers' organization, and it involved a rejection of the Lenin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor's Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Simone Weil's early life and politics
• 2: Simone Weil on Marxism: Work relations, production and progress
• 3: Simone Weil on Marxism: Revolution and materialism
• 4: Liberty
• 5: Oppression
• 6: Work
• 7: Power
• 8: Morality, truth, and politics
• Notes
• Bibliography