ABSTRACT
In 1933-34 Simone Weil became increasingly convinced that there was little likelihood of revolutionary change through political activity; moreover, she began to perceive that the real enemy was not the capitalist economic system per se but the bureaucratic, centralized apparatus of the modern state, whose power was consolidated through war. She clearly foresaw that the European states were on a trajectory toward war-very likely, she thought, toward “another conflagration” involving “the whole of Europe and beyond”—and she feared that the efforts of the Left on behalf of “liberty, the proletariat, etc.,” would, in reality, only serve the interests of the Russian state and the Franco-Prussian military alliance and consequently spur war preparations. For this reason, she decided in mid-1934 to “take no further part in any political or social activities, with two exceptions: anticolonialism and the campaign against civil defense exercises.” Still, her consuming desire to liberate the oppressed remained. She had been coming more and more to believe “that the liberation (relative) of the workers must be brought about before all else in the workshop.”1 She turned, then, to the workplace itself, the factory.
