Uprootedness and Alienation in Simone Weil

Extract

Simone Weil was still a school-girl when she discovered Marx, and in a way through Marx the crisis-stricken Europe of the late twenties and the early thirties. While deeply influenced by Marx in her earlier writings, his doctrine was never a revelation or a religion for her. Her syndicalist experience showed her the inability of orthodox marxism to cope with twentieth century problems. Her enormous knowledge of the history of philosophy prevented her from being satisfied by a relatively poor and fragmentary philosophical system. Her moral and metaphysical aspirations were not met by Marx’s answers to eternal human problems. She threw off his influence quickly, long before her religious experiences. She still retained a strong interest in several marxist problems and especially in that of ‘estranged labour’. Her early writings describe and question. The works of her maturity answer. No one else has created so rich a synthesis of the problems which might have been raised while attempting to analyse labour. Although Plato and Marx are the most important contributors to this synthesis, its answers are of purely Christian inspiration.

One may say without hesitation that the most original, if not the only original, idea of Marx in the field of philosophy proper was that of the alienation of labour. The whole pathetic richness of his early writings culminates in his description of ‘estranged labour’. How the worker is alienated from the product of the work which will be not his own. How he is alienated from his work since it does not serve him, and how he comes to hate it as causing pain and suffering. The worker is no more the subject but the object of the work.