Simone Weil (1909-1943), a French intellectual with a libertarian
sensibility, left teaching in 1934, at just 25 years old, to gainexperience in factory work in the Renault factories in Paris and in
other establishments. ---- The text we present is taken from the letters
that Weil wrote between 1934 and 1935 to her revolutionary trade
unionist comrade Albertine Thévenon, a militant in the group that
published the periodical «La Révolution Prolétarienne». The latter would
remember Simone: «Social injustices had moved her since adolescence and
instinct had led her close to the underprivileged.[...]She was soon
attracted by revolutionaries. The Russian Revolution, which originally
brought with it immense hope, had changed course and the proletariat was
kept in servitude by the bureaucracy, a new caste of privileged people
who voluntarily confused industrialization and socialism. Simone loved
and respected the individual too much to be attracted by Stalinism, the
creator of a regime of which, in 1933, she would say: "To tell the
truth, this regime resembles the regime that Lenin believed he was
establishing to the extent that it is almost completely its inverse."
Having thus eliminated the Stalinists from the revolutionary world, she
approached other groups: anarchists, revolutionary syndicalists,
Trotskyists. But she was too independent to be classified in one of
these groups".
Shortly thereafter, in 1936, Weil would leave for Spain to take part, in
the anarchist column "Durruti", in the war against fascism and the fight
for the social revolution.
Dear Albertine, I am taking advantage of the forced vacation that a
slight illness (the beginning of an ear infection; it is nothing) forces
me to chat a little with you. Otherwise, during the weeks of work, every
effort that I have to add to those imposed on me costs me a lot. It is
not only this that holds me back: it is the quantity of things to say
and the impossibility of expressing the essential. Perhaps, later, the
right words will come to me: now, it seems to me that I would need
another language to be able to translate the essential.
This experience, which in many respects corresponds to what I expected,
is nevertheless separated from it by an abyss; it is reality, no longer
imagination. It has changed in me not this or that of my ideas (many
have indeed been confirmed); but infinitely more, my whole perspective
on things, the very meaning that I have of life. I will know joy again,
but a certain lightness of heart will remain, I believe, impossible to
me forever. But, on this subject, enough: the inexpressible, by dint of
wanting to express it, degrades.
As for what can be expressed, I have learned quite a bit about the
organization of a business. It is inhuman: piecework, piecework, a
completely bureaucratic organization of the relationships between the
different elements of the business, between the different operations of
the work.
Attention, deprived of worthy objects, is forced instead to concentrate,
moment after moment, on a petty problem, always the same, with
variations of this kind: making 50 pieces in 5 minutes instead of 6 or
the like. Thank goodness, there are things to learn that from time to
time make that search for speed interesting. But I wonder how all this
can become human: because if piecework were not piecework it would
develop so much boredom as to annihilate attention, it would cause
considerable slowness and many errors. And if the work were not piecework...
But I do not have time to develop this whole subject in a letter. Only,
when I think that the great Bolsheviks claimed to create a free working
class and that certainly none of them, Trotsky certainly not, and not
even Lenin I believe, had ever set foot in a factory and therefore had
not the faintest idea of the real conditions that determine servitude or
workers' freedom, I see politics as a lugubrious farce.[...]
This life, to tell the truth, is very hard for me. Even more so because
the headaches have not had the courtesy to leave me to make this
experience easier for me: and working on the machines with a headache is
painful. Only on Saturday afternoons and Sundays can I breathe, I find
myself, I regain the ability to wrap up shreds of ideas in my spirit. In
a general sense, the most difficult temptation to reject, in a life like
that, is to completely give up thinking: it feels so good that this is
the only way to stop suffering. First of all to stop suffering morally.
Because the situation automatically erases feelings of revolt: doing
one's work with irritation would mean doing it badly and condemning
oneself to starvation; there is no one to take interest in, there is
only the work. Superiors, one cannot afford to be polite to them; and on
the other hand, very often they do not even give reason to be so. And so
there is no other possible feeling toward one's fate, except sadness.
Then one is tempted to lose consciousness purely and simply of
everything that is not the vulgar and daily routine of life.
Even physically, the greatest temptation is to give in to a semi-somnolence.
I have the greatest respect for workers who come to acquire an
education. They are almost always robust types, it is true. And yet,
they really must have something in their bodies. And they become
increasingly rare, as rationalization progresses. I wonder if something
similar also happens to specialists. And yet I resist. And I never
regret having thrown myself into this experience. Indeed, every time I
think about it, I am infinitely happy. But, curiously enough, I rarely
think about it.
I have an almost unlimited capacity for adaptation that allows me to
forget that I am a wandering professor among the working class, to live
my current life as if I had always been destined for it (and, in a
certain sense, it is exactly like that) and as if it were meant to last
forever, as if this life were imposed on me by an ineluctable necessity
and not by my free choice.[...]
I realize that I have not told you anything about my workmates. Maybe
for another time. But this too, it is difficult to express... They are
polite, very polite.
But, as for true brotherhood, I have almost never felt any. One
exception: the warehouseman in the tool warehouse, a skilled worker, an
excellent worker, whom I call for help whenever I am reduced to
desperation by a job that I cannot do well, because he is a hundred
times more polite, more intelligent than the operators (who are only
skilled workers). There is no small amount of jealousy among the
workers, who in reality compete with each other because of the
organization of the factory. I only know three or four who are really
nice. As for the workers, some of them seem very capable people.
But where I am there are few of them, except for the operators who are
not real workmates. I hope to change departments soon, to broaden my
field of experience[...].
Goodbye. Answer me soon.
S. W.
Dear Albertine, it did me good to receive a line from you. There are
things, it seems to me, that only you and I understand.[...]What you
wrote to me about the factory went straight to my heart. It is what I
have felt, ever since I was little. That is why I had to end up going
there and it pained me, before, that you did not understand. But, when
you are inside, how different it is![...]
Imagine me in front of a large oven, which spits flames and burning
gusts that scorch my face. The fire comes out of five or six holes
located in the lower part of the oven. I stand right in front, to put in
the oven about thirty large copper coils that an Italian worker, with a
brave and open face, is manufacturing next to me; those coils are for
the tram and the subway. I have to be very careful that none of the
coils fall into one of the holes, because they would melt; and, for
this, I have to stand right in front of the fire without the pain of the
burning blasts on my face and the fire on my arms (I still bear the
marks) ever making me make a wrong move. I lower the oven door, wait a
few minutes, raise the door and with pliers I remove the now red coils,
pulling them towards me very quickly (otherwise the last ones would
start to melt), and being even more careful than before so that a wrong
move never makes one fall into one of the holes. And then we start again.
In front of me a welder, sitting, with blue glasses and a stern face,
works meticulously; every time the pain tightens my face he gives me a
sad smile, full of brotherly sympathy, which does me an indescribable
good. On the other side, a team of panel beaters works, around large
tables: teamwork, done fraternally, with care and without haste. Very
skilled work, where you have to know how to calculate, read very
complicated drawings, apply notions of descriptive geometry. Further
away, a sturdy young man is banging on some iron bars with a mallet,
making a racket that would split your skull. All this happens in a
little corner at the back of the workshop, where you feel at home, where
the foreman and the workshop manager, you could say, never come. I spent
2 or 3 hours there on four occasions (I was getting 7 to 8 francs an
hour: and that counts, you know!).
The first time, after an hour and a half, the heat, the tiredness, the
pain, made me lose control of my movements; I could no longer lower the
oven door. One of the panel beaters (all good guys) noticed and rushed
over to do it for me. I would go back to that corner of the workshop
right away if I could (or at least as soon as I had regained some
strength). Those evenings, I felt the joy of eating a bread I had
earned. But this was unique in my experience of factory life.
For me, personally, this is what working in a factory meant: it meant
that all the external reasons (I had once thought they were internal
reasons) on which my awareness of my dignity and my self-respect were
based were radically shattered in two or three weeks under the blows of
a brutal and daily constraint. And don't think that this resulted in
some kind of revolt in me. No; on the contrary, what I least expected
from myself: docility. The docility of a resigned beast of burden. It
seemed to me that I was born to wait, to receive, to carry out orders,
that I had never done anything other than this, that I would never have
to do anything other than this. I am not proud to admit it. It is the
kind of suffering that no worker talks about; it hurts too much just to
think about it.[...]
Two factors enter into this slavery: speed and orders. Speed: to "make
it" you have to repeat one movement after another at a rate that is
faster than thought and therefore prohibits not only reflection, but
even daydreaming. By placing yourself in front of the machine, you have
to kill your soul for 8 hours a day, your thoughts, your feelings,
everything. Whether you are irritated, sad or disgusted, you have to
swallow, push irritation, sadness or disgust deep inside yourself: they
would slow down the rate. For joy, it is the same. Orders: from the
moment you clock in until you clock out, you can receive any order at
any time. And you must always keep quiet and obey. The order may be
painful or dangerous to carry out, or even impossible to carry out; or
two bosses may give contradictory orders; it doesn't matter: keep quiet
and submit. To speak to a boss, even about something indispensable, even
if he is a good person (good people also have moments of bad mood) means
risking being abused. And when that happens, you must still keep quiet.
As for your own nervous impulses and bad mood, you must keep them to
yourself; they cannot be translated into words or gestures, because
gestures are, at any moment, determined by work. This situation causes
your thoughts to curl up, to retract, like the flesh contracts before a
scalpel. You cannot be "conscious".
All this, of course, concerns unskilled work (especially that of women).
And through it all, a smile, a kind word, a moment of human contact are
worth more than the most devoted friendships between the privileged,
great or small. Only there do we know what human brotherhood is. But
there is little of it, very little. Almost always, relationships, even
between comrades, reflect the harshness that dominates everything there.
Enough, I have chatted enough, I could write volumes on this subject.
S. W.
Taken from Simone Weil, La condition ouvrière, translated by Franco
Fortini, Edizioni di Comunità, Milan, 1965 (original edition Simone
Weil, La condition ouvrière, Gallimard, Paris, 1951).
http://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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