Anarchism Today

Simone Weil wrote this text expressing her anarchist ideas in 1943. It was first published seven years later in La Table ronde (No. 26, February 1950). The text itself is scarcely more than 30 pages long. But to this new translation, Simon Leys has prepended a ‘Translator’s Foreword’ and ‘Note on the Text’ and has appended two illuminating essays: ‘The Importance of Simone Weil’ by Czeslaw Milosz and his own ‘In the Light of Simone Weil: Milosz and the Friendship of Camus’. However, this text, in which Weil argues for the abolition of all political parties, surely deserves a volume of its own. For although her remarks were inspired by the French situation and its history (specifically, the “double pressure of war and the guillotine” and its totalitarian results (p. 3)), they are most relevant to the political situation today.

Lest we think at the outset that ‘abolition’ is a step too far, Weil opens with the truism that the only reason for preserving something is its goodness. It is precisely this that should be questioned in the case of political parties: whether they contain enough good to “compensate for their evils” and warrant their preservation (p. 4). The criteria of goodness, in this case, Weil simply enumerates as the desiderata of truth, justice, and the public interest (p. 4). A democratic constitution is not good of itself but only as a means to goodness. She illustrates the point with an example that, in 1943, was very close indeed to home.

For instance, if, instead of Hitler, it had been the Weimar Republic that decided, through a most rigorous democratic and legal process, to put the Jews in concentration camps, and cruelly torture them to death, such measures would not have been one atom more legitimate than the present Nazi policies (p. 5).

Weil offers three essential characteristics of political parties, which lead every party towards totalitarianism “potentially, and by aspiration”. They generate collective passions, exert collective pressure on the minds of their individual members, and have as their “first object and…ultimate goal…[their] own growth without limit” (p. 11). For Weil, these three essential features are what make political parties the enemies of the good: truth, justice, and the public interest. She examines them in reverse order.

Firstly, the domination of individual minds by these collective political structures has the effect of reversing the proper relationship between ends and means. While a party’s growth can only be a means to the end of serving the public interest, its own growth becomes an end in itself: the party becomes its own end. Weil describes this reversal as a form of idolatry, “for God alone is legitimately his own end” (p. 14).

It is here, as George Steiner observes, that we may discern the theological moment in Weil’s political thought. Hers is a theological critique of the political abstractions, ideologies, and rhetorical illusions, fed by party politics, that ultimately foster inhumanity. Hers is a theological call for the ‘decreation’ of the “collective ‘We’—the locus of the political”, this ‘I with a halo, or ‘we’ about it’, which she exposes as a function of the hubristic desire to resemble God in his power but not his love. ¹

In order for any party to serve the public interest, Weil argues, it must secure power. “Yet, once obtained, no finite amount of power will ever be deemed sufficient…. In no circumstance could [its members] believe that their party might have too many members, too many votes, too much money.” (pp. 14–15). At an extreme, Weil suggests, the quest for power becomes absolute, a frightening possibility that most people in fact never contemplate. She argues that all political parties therefore tend towards totalitarianism. A process that begins with regard for the public interest potentially ends much more sinisterly because one “cannot serve both God and Mammon” (p. 15).

Secondly, the collective pressure that political parties necessarily exert on their individual members flattens important differences between people. While people’s opinions on various subjects are complex and nuanced, leading them into involved relationships of agreement and disagreement, political parties effect an ‘artificial crystallisation’ that flattens these complexities and often creates the false impression that all members of the party could possibly agree on everything (p. 29).

The instrument of such pressure Weil identifies as propaganda, which all parties universally produce. “A party that would not do so would disappear, since all its competitors practice it.” (p. 16) The object of such language is to persuade, rather than elucidate and, ultimately, for Weil, to enslave minds. On this point, we see the truth of Steiner’s comment on the broad relevance of Weil’s political thought; Steiner writes, “There are suggestive affinities between Weil’s language-critique and that of Orwell, under sometimes comparable circumstances.” ²

Linked to this, finally, is Weil’s view that membership of a political party is analogous to membership of a community of faith, insofar as both aim to generate collective passions. One may indeed deliberate about what is true and good in the religious or political dogma. But, when one “crosses the threshold, [one] automatically registers… implicit acceptance of countless specific articles of faith which [one] cannot possibly have considered” (p. 25). Since it is not possible, even for someone of extraordinary intellectual ability with a lifetime of study available, to examine (or even be aware of) all of them, one can only subscribe to these propositions, Weil exclaims, by “simply and unconditionally submitting to the authority which issued them!” (p. 25). The structure of political parties, in Weil’s opinion, leads their individual members to submit their thinking to the party’s authority, which “amounts to having no thoughts at all” (p. 27).

The instrument of the generation of such passions, for Weil, is the political rally, in which the view of the party on a given topic is put forward by a representative. Weil wonders aloud which oracle could have informed the representatives of the relevant point of view, since a “collectivity has no tongue and no pen. All organs of expression are individual. The Socialist collectivity is not embodied in any person, and neither is the Liberal one. Stalin embodies the Communist collectivity, but he lives far away and it is not possible to reach him by telephone before the meeting.” (p. 20).

In conclusion, for these reasons, Weil thinks of the ‘institution of political parties’ as “an almost unmixed evil”, an ‘intellectual leprosy’ which she believes has contaminated even the sciences, art, and literature (pp. 28, 34). The only cure, which Weil thinks would be almost wholly beneficial to society, is the abolition of all political parties for which this book calls (p. 28).

But what might be the contemporary relevance of these ideas? It may be that aspects of the contemporary political situation give us grounds to be less pessimistic than Weil about the potential for the system to be used as a means for goodness, in the very sense that Weil understands this. Even before the recent election, in the UK, of Jeremy Corbyn to the Leadership of the Opposition, these questions were being discussed. Drawing Weil’s parallel between politics and religion, one journalist recently wrote, “Perhaps because the alternative is too hideous to contemplate, we persuade ourselves that those who wield power know what they are doing. The belief in a guiding intelligence is hard to shake.” ³ Another wrote of Corbyn’s predecessor, Ed Miliband, and his “late-night pilgrimage to Russell Brand’s loft apartment”, interpreting the broadcast interview that followed as evidence of Miliband’s engagement with “the most dynamic element of today’s left: anarchism”. ⁴ Priestland’s article ended with a question that we might wish we could ask Simone Weil, “How can a group so suspicious of established institutions build an effective movement for the long term?”

Since Jeremy Corbyn’s succession, we in the UK may be about to find out. His call for a ‘new kind of politics’, his record of activism and of rebellion (over 500 times) against his own party in Parliament all indicate an extraordinary degree of personal resistance to the collective pressure that Weil describes. Admittedly, he has, with enormous success, resurrected the political rally, complete with the kind of propagandist rhetoric of which Weil was so suspicious, to further his political ends. But Weil could have been describing Jeremy Corbyn when she imagined an elected member of Parliament who publicly commits to examine political issues, not as the member of a particular political group, but with a sole concern to do their best to serve the public interest and justice. “Such words,” she wrote, “would not be welcome. His comrades and even many other people would accuse him of betrayal. Even the least hostile would say, ‘Why then did he join a political party?’…. This man would be expelled from his party, or at least denied pre-selection; he would certainly never be elected.” (p. 17).

In time, we shall know whether Weil’s prediction was correct. But, even more interestingly, the contemporary relevance of her ideas will be established most firmly if she is proven wrong.

GUY BENNETT-HUNTERUniversity of Edinburgh