Abstract
In the 1930s and 1940s, in France and Germany, a small group of scholars and rebels reinterpreted Marx’s political thought as Stalin consolidated control over both the Soviet Union and orthodox Marxism. Their heterodoxy was largely based on the publication of Marx’s mid-career notebooks and texts, revealing previously unknown humanistic and anti-state ideals. The chapter begins by outlining those works of Marx that provide the basis for the orthodox (Soviet) and heterodox readings of his politics. The chapter then argues that Simone Weil contributed to this interwar project of the immanent critique and development of the new heterodox Marxism by synthesizing Marx’s work with her own pessimistic and mystical reading of interwar historical conditions. It is then argued that Weilienne Marxism is rooted in Marx’s critiques of labor, the State, and alienation. Weil’s innovation is her rejection of revolution and her pessimistic embrace of resistance without expectation or hope.
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Notes
- 1.
Hereafter 1844 Manuscripts.
- 2.
See Desmond Avery, Beyond Power: Simone Weil and the Notion of Authority (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008).
- 3.
The term “fellow traveler,” coined (according to rumor) by Leon Trotsky, describes someone who is in agreement with many of the goals and aims of a group—in Weil’s case the Communist Parties of Europe and especially the Communist Party of France (PCF)—while not being a member of or propagandist for the Party. The original Russian term is пoпyтчик [poputchik].
- 4.
For an excellent study of this phenomenon in France, see David Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals: 1914–1960 (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1964).
- 5.
Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty, trans. Arthur Wills and John Petrie (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), 25.
- 6.
“Words with content and meaning are not murderous. If one of them occasionally becomes associated with bloodshed, it is rather by chance than by inevitability, and the resulting action is generally controlled and efficacious. But when empty words are given capital letters, then, on the slightest pretext, men will begin shedding blood for them and piling up ruin in their name, without effectively grasping anything to which they refer, since what they refer to can never have any reality, for the simple reason that they mean nothing.” Simone Weil, “The Power of Words,” in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles (New York: Penguin, 2005), 241, 242.
- 7.
While the extant English translation by Simon Leys is titled On the Abolition of All Political Parties, Weil’s original French title is Note sur la suppression générale des partis politiques. The difference between “general suppression” and “abolition” is significant. General suppression implies government action to make illegal or to put down, while the notion of ‘abolition’ implies the outright elimination of something; this action is taken at times by government and at times by a revolutionary act, as could, for example, the abolition of the capitalist mode of production.
- 8.
Simone Weil, On the Abolition of All Political Parties, trans. Simon Leys (Collingwood, VIC, Australia: Black Inc., 2013), 11.
- 9.
Lawrence A. Blum and Victor Seidler, A Truer Liberty: Simone Weil and Marxism (New York: Routledge, 1989).
- 10.
I deliberately leave aside the question of property. There is insufficient space here for an analysis of Weil’s theoretical treatment of property which ranges from arguments in the 1930s that the organization of labor is of more significance to oppression than who explicitly “owns” the factories to the blueprint for the reorganization of France in The Need for Roots. There Weil argues that both private and public property are necessary material needs. However, property is disarmed by impersonality and decreation. Moreover, because Marx differentiates between property as possession and property as capital in Capital Vol. 1 and elsewhere, this question would need to be addressed individually and at length.
- 11.
In his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem describes romantic energies of religious traditions which burst through, but not out of, said tradition itself. These romantic impulses are the foundations of mysticism. My argument rests on the idea that political theories and ideologies also have romantic impulses, which generate heterodoxies. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, ed. Robert Alter (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 8–9.
- 12.
William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 2.
- 13.
It is already a spectral power.
- 14.
Karl Marx, The Eighteen Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1994), 18.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
See Roberts, Marx’s Inferno.
- 18.
Weil, Oppression and Liberty, 42.
- 19.
Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994). For a particularly enlightening study of the radically heterodox actions of the communards, see also, Massimilano Tomba, Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
- 20.
Friedrich Engels’ “Introduction” to Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, 629.
- 21.
See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1972).
- 22.
Especially Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, and Bruno Bauer. Marx and Engels have kind words for these philosophers but spend much more ink differentiating themselves. One Young Hegelian who is mentioned but escapes criticism is Moses Hess. For the whole of the Theses “On Feuerbach” and Part I of The German Ideology, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1994).
- 23.
Simone Weil, “On Lenin’s Book Materialism and Emperiocriticism,” in Oppression and Liberty, trans. Arthur Wills (Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1954), 32.
- 24.
Ibid., 33.
- 25.
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind, trans. Arthur Wills (New York, NY: Routledge, 1952), 73–76.
- 26.
Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, trans. Richard Rees (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 17.
- 27.
Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 208.
- 28.
Weil, Oppression & Liberty, 25.
- 29.
Ibid., 33.
- 30.
Ibid., 46.
- 31.
Weil, “On the Contradictions of Marxism,” in Oppression & Liberty, 147.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
In “Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression,” Weil writes: “The Marxist view, according to which social existence is determined by the relations between man and nature established by production, certainly remains the only sound basis for any historical investigation; only these relations must be considered first of all in terms of the problem of power, the means of subsistence forming simply one of the data of this problem.” Weil, Oppression & Liberty, 71.
- 34.
Ibid., 164.
- 35.
Robert Sparling, “Theory and Praxis: Simone Weil and Marx on the Dignity of Labor,” The Review of Politics 74, no. 1 (Winter 2012).
- 36.
Weil, “The Love of God and Affliction,” in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 57.
- 37.
Eric O. Springsted, Simone Weil & the Suffering of Love (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1986), 29.
- 38.
Simone Weil, “Factory Journal,” in Formative Writings, 1929–1941, ed. Dorothy MacFarland and Wilhelmina Van Ness (Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 225.
- 39.
Weil, Oppression and Liberty, 118.
- 40.
Weil, Oppression and Liberty, 41; Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, trans. Hugh Price (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 147.
- 41.
Weil, Oppression and Liberty, 41; Weil, Lectures, 147.
- 42.
Weil, Formative Writings, 217.
- 43.
Ibid., 159.
- 44.
Weil, 158.
- 45.
Weil, The Need for Roots, 50.
- 46.
Weil, Waiting for God, 64.
- 47.
Sparling, “Theory and Praxis,” 94.
- 48.
Weil, The Need for Roots, 298.
- 49.
Karl Marx, “The Critique of the Gotha Program,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 531.
- 50.
Sparling, “Theory and Praxis,” 100, 105.
- 51.
Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles (London: Penguin, 2005).
- 52.
E.g. “Is There a Marxist Doctrine?,” “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” and “Letter to Georges Bernanos,” among other writings for evidence of this tendency.
- 53.
Weil, Oppression and Liberty, 158, 182, 193.
- 54.
A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Lucian Stone, Simone Weil and Theology (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 164.
- 55.
Weil, Oppression and Liberty, 55.
- 56.
Ibid., 55–56.
- 57.
Ibid., 55.
- 58.
Weil, First and Last Notebooks, 17; Weil, Letter to a Priest, 48; Simone Weil, “The Romanesque Renaissance,” in Selected Essays, 1934–1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings, ed. Richard Rees, trans. Richard Rees (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 44.
- 59.
Simone Weil, Oppression & Liberty, 69.
- 60.
Ibid.
- 61.
Weil, Selected Essays, 55–72.
References
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Ritner, S.B. (2020). Simone Weil’s Heterodox Marxism: Revolutionary Pessimism and the Politics of Resistance. In: Bourgault, S., Daigle, J. (eds) Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48401-9_10
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