Simone Weil on the Assembly Line

Reflections from abroad

Manual labor. Time entering the body. Through work man turns himself into matter, as Christ does through the Eucharist. Simone Weil

Simone Weil, rifle on shoulder, fighting fascists in Spain [1936].

A few weeks ago, I found myself puzzling over a footnote in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. In the midst of her critique of Marx’s anthropology (chapter 3, for those curious), she references a book by Simone Weil that I’d never heard of: La condition ouvrière (“the condition of the worker”). “It is perhaps no exaggeration,” Arendt writes, “to say that Simone Weil’s La condition ouvrière is the only book in the huge literature on the labor question which deals with the problem without prejudice and sentimentality.”¹ I was surprised at Arendt’s high praise, and surprised, too, that I had never heard of the book. I’ve read essays and a few posthumous compilations of Weil’s writings. As one friend of mine put it recently, Weil has the uncanny ability to attract and repulse the reader at the very same time. But I couldn’t say for sure I’d ever encountered the contents of La condition ouvrière before. Curious, I put down Arendt and started searching the internet for a copy. It didn’t take long; there are plenty of recent editions of the book, which was originally published in Gallimard editions in 1951. But if the book were different from what’s already been translated and published in English, then I must be in the dark about La condition ouvrière’s contents. I guess I could have dusted off my French dictionary, ordered a copy of the book, and stumbled through. But I had other projects to work on, so I let the matter alone.  

Fast forward, if you don’t mind, to August 15th. I’m seated on the stoop of a 16th-century house that we’ve rented in the Provencal town of Lourmarin. We’ve escaped the farm for ten days and taken our children to France. My kids are playing in the street with some other children who live a few doors down. In spite of the difficulties in communicating, the whole gang decides they want to go play inside one of the other homes. I make my way over to speak to the parents of the other children. As I get to talking with the dad, I learn that he is an executor of the Albert Camus literary estate. Camus lived in Lourmarin for many years; he’s even buried in the town cemetery. I bring up my Simone Weil query, because I know that Camus was one of the earliest supporters of Weil’s writing. (Camus once called her “the only great spirit of our time.”) The man, whose name is Alex, disappears inside. Five minutes later he comes back out with a first edition of La condition ouvrière. Camus, it turns out, picked the book out as one of the first inclusions for the imprint he ran for Gallimard. Below is an image of the book. Its glory is partly shielded by the protective paper Alex wrapped around it. 

What are you supposed to do when you encounter a moment of literary serendipity? Alex insisted that I take the book with me for as long as I needed it. I suppose I could have responded by sitting down in the middle of my vacation and reading the thing. But I didn’t. I snapped a few photos of the table of contents and went on my merry way–which was just as well, I suppose. With a little time I was able to figure out that the writings Camus picked out for inclusion: the Factory Journals, some letters, and a few short essays, which have mostly (but not entirely) been translated into English for older editions of Weil’s works that are fairly easy to find (and not $800, which is the current asking price for a Gallimard first edition). Still, all told, it was a delightful exchange. 

A letter Weil wrote pseudonymously on the metal workers’ strike, published in the Gallimard edition.

***

If you’ve never heard of Weil, a brief sketch is in order. Weil was born in 1909 to a wealthy Jewish family in Paris. From her earliest years, everyone remembered her as a sickly, clumsy, yet brilliant child. “Throughout her life,” the philosopher Costica Bradatan observes in his lovely book, In Praise of Failure, “Simone Weil was fundamentally clumsy.”² One of her classmates observed that when she was ten she still looked like a “little child, unable to use her hands.”³ Despite being preternaturally gifted in the classroom, she often lagged behind her classmates because she found writing physically difficult. Other peers described her as “completely aloof and unsociable,” and when she grew older, one of them observed, it was “only miraculously that she was not hit by cars” (ibid.).⁴ The poet Jean Tortel provided what has proven (unfortunately) to be the most enduring portrait of the young Simone Weil: “a cone of black wool, a being completely without a body, with a huge cape, large shoes and hair which looked like twigs; her mouth was large, sinuous and always moist; she looked at you with her mouth.”⁵ Hardly helping, the philosopher Georges Bataille wrote that, despite her “undeniable ugliness,” “I personally felt that she also had a true beauty….She seduced by a very gentle, very simple authority.”⁶

By all accounts, though, Weil was brilliant. Proficient in ancient Greek by age 12, Weil enrolled at L’Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1928, where she studied philosophy and logic. She graduated in 1931 with a thesis on Decartes’s Meditations. In her examinations, she received first place. That same year, Simone de Beauvoir came in second. In 1932, she accepted a post at the Lycée in Le Puy (south-central France), where she began to teach girls and agitate on behalf of workers’ rights. In her days at ENS, she had joined a group of intellectuals affiliated with La Révolution Prolétarienne. Although she had long considered herself a Marxist–when she was ten, she informed her parents that she was a Bolshevik–at Le Puy she began to advocate aggressively for the working class. Every week she traveled to Saint-Etienne, where she instructed workers and attended meetings of “militant trade union groups,” or syndicalists, who thought that the means of production should lie in the hands of labor unions.

Around this time, Weil began to articulate an idea for an intellectual project. As she put it, “I would very much like to prepare a philosophical treatise dealing with the relationship between modern technology, the basis of large-scale industry, and the essential aspects of our civilization, by which I mean, on the one hand, our social organization and on the other our culture.”⁷ To prepare for the treatise, Weil decided that she had to become an unskilled worker and experience factory work firsthand. Only by analyzing the factory system from the ground up–from the perspective of the lowest, least skilled laborer–could she begin to understand how labor was organized under capitalism and then articulate an alternative to it. For several years, Weil had felt that communists were failing very seriously in considering the moral and political consequences of work in an industrial manufacturing system. As she would explain her reasoning in a letter some months later, “Only when I think that the great Bolshevik leaders proposed to create a free working class and that doubtless none of them–certainly not Trotsky, and I don’t think Lenin either–had ever set foot inside a factory, so that they hadn’t the faintest idea of the real conditions which make servitude or freedom for the workers–well, politics appears to me a sinister farce.”⁸

It’s important to point out that Weil isn’t exactly taking issue with the integrity of Bolsheviks like Trotsky and Lenin. Her suspicion was that, when Soviet leaders deployed industrial-scale manufacturing in communist society, they injected workers into a system of labor that was more or less identical to the enslavement encountered in capitalist societies. The only difference in a communist society is that “the real forces, namely big industry, the police, the army, the bureaucracy, far from being smashed by the revolution, attained, thanks to it, a power unknown in other countries.”⁹ As long as a society depended on the division of labor, a skilled and unskilled workforce, and the “scientific management” of the manufacturing process, its workers would never be free.  And so Weil, in the fall of 1934, took a leave of absence from teaching and began working at an electrical factory that made parts for subways and streetcars. She would remain in and out of factory employment until August 1935. 

***

Simone Weil’s Factory Journals aren’t exactly a thrilling read.¹⁰ As you go along, over and over you encounter her attempt to grapple with the factory’s wage system and her apparent  inadequacies as a worker. Like many of the women she worked alongside, she was rarely able to make “the rate.” Factory workers were paid an hourly wage that shifted slightly from job to job inside the factory (2.28 francs for a thousand washers in an hour; 2.4 francs for stamping rivets at a press; .45 per hundred pieces copper strips, which had to be cut and drilled). The rate refers to the number of pieces produced relative to an hour, and to make it. If Weil didn’t make it, or if the factory timekeeper quibbled with the hours she reported, she would have her pay docked and threatened to be fired. 

In one humiliating instance, after having just begun at a new factory, Weil doubles down on trying to achieve a state of “uninterrupted tempo” at her workstation. By blocking out every thought and daydream, she can sometimes come close to achieving the rates. A few hours in, she realizes she’s making about 400 pieces an hour–well below the quota, but she cannot bring herself to work any faster. At 4pm, the foreman (“a handsome young man with an affable manner and voice”) drops by her station and says, “quite politely,” “if you don’t  do 800 [per hour], I won’t keep you. If you do 800 in the 2 hours that are left, I will perhaps consent to keep you. There are some who do 1,200.”¹¹ Weil, enraged, gets back to work and raises her rate to about 600. When she gets up to leave, she drops by the office to ask if she should bother showing up the next day. “Come in, just in case. We’ll see.” Later, musing on the incident at home, Weil wonders if “in the event that I were condemned to live this life, I would be able to cross the Seine every day without someday throwing myself in.”¹²

Weil thought that the root of the misery of factory work was the worker’s experience of time and not the manufacturing process itself. Timekeepers and foremen (often former workers themselves) would set the rates at the manager’s behest. Inevitably, the rates were intended to maximize production and limit the worker’s freedom in the factory. If you took a break for fifteen minutes, you were expected to report it to the timekeeper, who would deduct it from your pay. If you botched a piece–at one point Weil reports botching 500 in a sitting– you were inevitably “bawled out.”  Thus, the factory forced workers to work as fast as they possibly could in jobs they had little understanding of and zero control over. As soon as an order was completed, workers were expected to go and get another one.

Most jobs involved a subtle trick or skill that helped speed the work along. But as Weil points out, from the worker’s perspective, there’s no sense of comprehensiveness or understanding on the assembly line. Management broke down labor into discrete, isolated motions performed by dozens (or hundreds) of workers. A single worker might perform one motion thousands of times in the course of a day. On the assembly line,  “one’s attention has nothing worthy to engage it, but on the contrary is constrained to fix itself, second by second, upon the same trivial problem, with only such variants as speeding up your output from 6 minutes to 5 minutes for 50 pieces, or something of that sort.”¹³ Thus, for most workers, the machines were mysteries that they treated with “superstitious respect.”¹⁴ “Nothing is less instructive than a machine,” Weil writes, because the machine treats the worker as a fleshy extension of the manufacturing process itself.¹⁵ The worker exists to animate the motion of the machine. Beyond this, his role on the assembly line is worthless. It was entirely feasible to Weil that a worker might complete every single task in the factory and still not have any clue what, or for what purpose, something was being produced. 

If the immediate effect of factory speed was a total loss of self-awareness, then the cumulative effect was spiritual decay. After working in the factory, Weil insisted that it was docility, not revolution, that the factory instilled in its workers. As she put it to her friend in a letter a year later, her experience “meant that all the external reasons (which I had previously thought internal) upon which my sense of personal dignity, my self-respect, was based were radically destroyed within two or three weeks by the daily experience of brutal constraint.” Revolt was the furthest thing from her mind. On the contrary, “it produced the last thing I expected from myself–docility.”¹⁶ As she would go on to elaborate, “it is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.”¹⁷

***

People who write about Weil often claim that her time working in the factory was a pivotal moment in her life. Across her essays, journals, and letters, Weil says that it was the first time in her life when she encountered genuine affliction (le malheur), a concept that would be central to the frugal metaphysics of the soul that she’s most famous for. In a letter to her priest and friend, Father Perrin, she insists that her entry into factory life was the expression of a profound sense of vocation: 

I saw that the carrying out of a vocation differed from the actions dictated by reason or inclination in that it was due to an impulse of an essentially and manifestly different order; and not to follow such an impulse when it made itself felt, even if it demanded impossibilities, seemed to me the greatest of all ills. Hence my conception of obedience; and I put this conception to the test when I entered the factory and stayed on there, even when I was in that state of intense and uninterrupted misery about which I recently told you. The most beautiful life possible has always seemed to me to be one where everything is determined, either by the pressure of circumstances or by impulses such as I have just mentioned, and where there is never any room for choice.¹⁸

I don’t think that Weil evinces here a betrayal of free will. She’s suggesting that practical reason belongs to “an essentially and manifestly different order” than speculative reason or modern science. The judgments of practical reason, when operating correctly, often issue in actions whose reasons are embedded in the circumstances in which one is acting, even if those reasons are imperceptible to others. In other words, the reasoning itself is in the local context within which you are attending and responding to. If you can attend to the circumstances, your action will bubble forth without (much or any) deliberation. A sign of virtue is that you don’t have to hash out an argument before acting well. (She’d probably hate to hear it, given her adoration of Plato, but her reflection on vocation rhymes with Aristotle’s teachings on prudence in the Nicomachean Ethics.)

What I take Weil to be saying is this: the decision to work in a factory for a year is the expression of a remarkable sympathy she felt with the working class, a sympathy that she believed was divinely inspired and which gripped her for her entire life. Remaining in the factory for as long as she did; enduring the physical toll of working with metal and machines every day; skipping meals when her wages ran out; continually seeking employment in the face of firings; all this was her attempt to understand and identify with, as much as possible, the experiences of the most reviled underclass of people in France. It’s sympathy that pushed her away from communism and led her to embrace syndicalism and then anarchism (of a certain sort). 

After working in the factory, Weil never completed the intellectual project she dreamed of (the “philosophical treatise dealing with the relationship between modern technology, the basis of large-scale industry, and the essential aspects of our civilization”). But the scattered fragments on labor, society, and knowledge that she left behind when she died remain some of her most compelling writings. Consider the following, from the posthumously published Gravity and Grace:

Man’s greatness is always to recreate his life, to recreate what is given to him, to fashion the very thing which he undergoes. Through work he produces his own natural existence. Through science he recreates the universe by means of symbols. Through art he recreates the alliance between his body and his soul….it is to be noticed that each of these three things is something poor, empty and vain taken by itself and not in relation to the two others. Union of the three: a working people’s culture (that will not be just yet).¹⁹

Labor, science, and art: these three spheres of flourishing complement each other and provide the means for an individual to achieve freedom. This is Weil’s dream of a “working people’s culture.” Remarkably, after everything she endured, Weil insists that manual labor–so reviled by Marxists and capitalists alike–stands on a level playing field beside science and art. Like them, it is a means to achieve a state of selflessness: “Physical labor may be painful, but it is not degrading as such. It is not art; it is not science; it is something else, possessing an exactly equal value with art and science, for it provides an equal opportunity to reach the impersonal stage of attention.”²⁰

1. The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958]), 131, n. 83.

2. In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023,) 15.

3. ibid.

4. ibid.

5. ibid., 16.

6. ibid.

7. ibid., 17.

8. ibid., 20.

9. Weil, “Analysis of Oppression,” In Anthology, 171.

10. They are found in Weil, Formative Writings, 1929-1941 (Amherst: The University of Massachussetts Press, 1987).

11. 201.

12. ibid.

13. “Letter,” in Anthology, 20.

14. Factory Journals, 193.

15. ibid.

16. “Letter,” in Anthology, 26.

17. Gravity and Grace, in Anthology, 178.

18. Waiting for God (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1951), 23.

19. 178. 

20. “Analysis of Oppression,” 79.