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Theory and Praxis: Simone Weil and Marx on the Dignity of Labor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2012

Robert Sparling
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Abstract

Simone Weil had an ambivalent attitude toward Marx. While she thought that the young Marx's celebration of labor had “lyrical accents,” she ultimately believed that Marx had neglected his own insights, embracing a blind worship of mechanization and a theory of history and revolution that was insufficiently attentive to the material conditions of workers. Marx, in her view, was insufficiently materialist and excessively wedded to a hierarchical model of science that maintained the domination of management. Weil and Marx's attitudes toward the dignity of labor and the necessary conditions for socialism are analyzed. The most significant cleavage between them is ultimately due to the differing manner in which they conceive of the relationship between thought and action. Through this comparison, the philosophical underpinnings of the two radically different conceptions of labor and its dignity as a human activity are explained.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 74 , Issue 1 , Winter 2012 , pp. 87 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2012

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References

1 Weil, Simone, Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l'oppression sociale, in Œuvres, ed. de Lussy, Florence (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 333Google Scholar. Unless otherwise stated, all citations will be to the Œuvres. I am responsible for all translations.

2 Ibid. She cites the same names in L'enracinement, in Œuvres, 1085.

3 Robert Chenavier might well be correct in his massive claim that Weil is “le dernier pur philosophe du travail.” See Chenavier, , “Justification philosophique du travail, critique sociale du travail,” Cahiers Simone Weil 32, no. 1 (2010): 80Google Scholar.

4 Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Pieper, Josef, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Dru, Alexander (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952), 69Google Scholar.

6 Blum, Lawrence A. and Seidler, Victor J., A Truer Liberty: Simone Weil and Marxism (New York: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar, esp. 30; Hellman, John, Simone Weil: An Introduction to Her Thought (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press), 29Google Scholar; Dietz, Mary, Between the Human and the Divine (Totowa, NY: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), 40Google Scholar. A notable exception is Fischbach, Franck, “Libérer le travail, ou se libérer du travail? Simone Weil lectrice de Marx,” Cahiers Simone Weil 32, no. 4 (2009), 453–72Google Scholar. Fischbach insists that what Marx wanted to do away with was abstract labor that characterized the capitalist manner of mediating between particularity and universality. A more thorough account is in Chenavier's, Robert masterwork, Simone Weil: une philosophie du travail (Paris: CERF, 2001)Google Scholar, which explores Weil's philosophy in much greater detail than can be done here. He places great weight on her championing of free labor over “free time” (282).

7 Réflexions, 280. She links Marx to Aristotle's view on the subject on p. 303.

8 That Marx consistently portrayed spontaneous, free labor as the highest conceivable form of human fulfillment is often challenged. Raymond Aron suggests that there are both strands, the celebration of labor (central in the youthful writings) and the championing of leisure, in Marx's thought, and these are in some tension (Aron, Raymond, Le marxisme de Marx [Paris: Fallois, 2002], 613–14Google Scholar). Robert Tucker agrees with Weil that Marx celebrated “a society in which humans, liberated from labor, would realize their creative nature in lives of leisure” (Tucker, Robert C., Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, 3rd ed. [New Jersey: Transaction Books, 2001], 4Google Scholar; see also 236).

9 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker, Robert C., 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 441Google Scholar. I find Fischbach's interpretation of this claim most satisfactory, despite the fact that it raises a host of difficult questions about Marx (“Libérer le travail”).

10 The Marx-Engels Reader, 531.

11 Marx, Karl, Economic andPhilosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Struik, D. J. (New York: International, 1964), 113Google Scholar.

12 Winch, Peter, Simone Weil: The Just Balance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The passage can be found (with a slightly different translation) in Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace, trans. Crawford, Emma and von der Ruhr, Mario (London: Routledge, 2004), 178Google Scholar.

13 Simone Weil, “Sur les contradictions du marxisme,” in Œuvres, 363.

14 Weil, Simone, “Y a-t-il une doctrine marxiste?,” in Oppression et liberté (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 224CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 L'enracinement, 1058.

16 Réflexions, 279; she attributes the same line to Marx in “Allons-nous vers la révolution prolétarienne?,” in Œuvres, 263. In neither passage does she cite Marx's works.

17 Réflexions, 315.

18 Ibid., 321.

19 Ibid., 322.

20 Marx shared the ideal of worker self-management, celebrating the moment in the Paris commune when “plain working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the Governmental privilege of their ‘natural superiors’” (Marx-Engels Reader, 636). Marx sought to place labor at the center of social and political life: “With labor emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labor ceases to be a class attribute” (ibid., 635).

21 Réflexions, 310.

22 Dietz highlights the distinction between the two on this point (Dietz, Between the Human and the Divine, 66).

23 L'enracinement, 1061. Fred Rosen points out that Camus shared Weil's view on this matter (Rosen, , “Marxism, Mysticism, and Liberty: The Influence of Simone Weil on Albert Camus,” Political Theory 7, no. 3 [1979]: 307CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

24 L'enracinement, 1060.

25 An anonymous reviewer for the Review of Politics suggests that Marx would have thought engineers, freed from capitalist imperatives, would move in this direction, creatively altering the workspace to undermine the stultifying specialization of the factory. I think this suggestion is largely correct, but the precise mechanism for this shift is not, to my knowledge, outlined anywhere in Marx's corpus. If one were to attempt to reconcile Marx and Weil on this point, one would need to determine the manner in which Marx envisioned reconciling increased production with this turn away from specialization.

26 Réflexions, 283.

27 L'enracinement, 1085.

28 Ibid.

29 L'enracinement, 1155.

30 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 113.

31 Ibid., 114.

32 Réflexions, 317.

33 Ibid., 318.

34 In Between the Human and the Divine, Mary Dietz concluded from this passage that Weil retained an “instrumental rationality” of the most vulgar type: Weil “limits the art of thinking to the correct application of means to an end” (77). But this—as Dietz realized in her later work—is incorrect. Dietz corrects this interpretation in her 1994 article “‘The Slow Boring of Hard Boards’: Methodological Thinking and the Work of Politics,” American Political Science Review 88, no. 4 (1994): 876Google Scholar.

35 Réflexions, 315.

36 Ibid., 361.

37 Réflexions, 327. See Bell, Richard H., Simone Weil: The Way of Justice as Compassion (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 25–26Google Scholar.

38 Weil, Simone, Attente de Dieu (Paris: La Colombe, 1950), 96Google Scholar.

39 L'enracinement, 1186–87.

40 As Chenavier writes, “Le travail … c'est l'activité qui permet d'entrer en contact avec le monde dans sa réalité” (“Justification philosophique du travail,” 84).

41 Réflexions, 330–31.

42 Ibid., 347.

43 Attente de Dieu, 39.

44 Ibid., 86.

45 Weil, Simone, La pesanteur et la grâce (Paris: Plon, 1950), 203Google Scholar. Italics mine.

46 L'enracinement, 1105 ; Réflexions, 281–82.

47 “Sur les contradictions du marxisme,” 358–59.

48 Ibid., 358. See also “Y a-t-il une doctrine marxiste?,” in Oppression et liberté, 241–42.

49 Réflexions, 282.

50 “Sur les contradictions du marxisme,” 359.

51 Réflexions, 293–94; “Y a-t-il une doctrine marxiste?,” 243.

52 The Marx-Engels Reader, 145.

53 Simone Weil, “Le marxisme,” in Œuvres, 353.

54 L'enracinement, 1105. She is somewhat unfair in charging that Marx never even attempted to study this phenomenon.

55 The Marx-Engels Reader, 632.

56 Andrew, Edward, “Marx's Theory of Classes: Science and Ideology,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 8, no. 3 (1975): 454–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Andrew develops this theme with a helpful interpretation of Marx on class.

57 The Marx-Engels Reader, 144.

58 Ibid., 179.

59 Ibid., 484.

60 “Y a-t-il une doctrine marxiste?,” 252–53. She compares the force Marx attributes to the proletariat to the force hidden inside coal: just as the latter can only be set in motion with an elaborate steam engine, so too do masses require directing.

61 Lukács, Georg, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Livingstone, Rodney (New York: Merlin, 1971), 3Google Scholar. I am well aware that there is an entire school of Marxology denying this interpretation of Marx's praxis. I cannot enter into a defense of the interpretation here, nor am I entirely committed to Lukács's version of it. I might merely say that if Marx's method is understood in the same sense as standard scientific empiricism, with an objective, material world containing deterministic laws discovered by the socialist scientist, Weil's criticisms of Marx are fundamentally correct.

62 Avineri, Shlomo, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 149CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 For an attempt to distance Marx from this excessively idealist account (and for a direct attack on Avineri), see Wood, Allen, Karl Marx, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 189–94Google Scholar. But Wood nonetheless insists on the centrality of Marx's opposition to the “contemplative attitude,” which Marx associated with alienation.

64 Simone Weil, “Sur le livre de Lénine,” in Oppression et liberté, 49.

65 L'enracinement, 1187–88.

66 Simone Weil, “Fragments de Londres, 1943,” in Oppression et liberté, 209.

67 Attente de Dieu, 25.

68 The Marx-Engels Reader, 162.

69 Réflexions, 327.

70 Ibid.

71 Crocker, Lawrence, “Review: Oppression and Liberty,” Philosophical Review 84, no. 2 (1975): 300–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar.