2 – Marx in France

Aim: to consider how Marx was received in French Philosophy

Simone Weil (1990-1943) and Louis Althusser (1918 – 1990) – these two had different
criticisms of Marxism and different approaches to rethinking communism
- One concerns the individual experience of alienation (Weil)
- One decentres the individual in political thinking (Althusser)

Weil – the individual’s experience of oppression under capitalism, criticising Marx for the
ways in which he objectifies and loses sight of the individual. Weil offers an account of
oppression extending beyond an economic analysis

Althusser – marries Marxism and Structuralism. He criticises the Marxian anthropology and
believes that to understand capitalism we need to consider the ways in which different kinds
of structure interact with one another, not simply the individual’s liberty being threatened by
productive forces

Simone Weil on Alienation, Force and Power

- Weil draws heavily on Marxian ideas, whilst criticising Marx – her socio-political
thought is heterodox Marxism (Ritner, 2020)
- Weil believed in the primacy of living one’s philosophy and is criticised for her
asceticism
o She spent time working in a factory to understand the lived experience
necessary to produce an analysis of power
o Actively involved in resistance movement in France, and the anti-fascist
resistance in Spain
- In her analysis of oppression, Weil draws on the Marxian idea of the inversion of the
subject and object distinction
o The subject has become instrumentally valuable in pursuit of the object, which
has transitioned from being merely instrumental value for the ends of huma
subjects, to now taking on intrinsic value
o Increase in tech innovation, workers become machines as they must blindly
follow rules of manual operation of their factory equivalent
o “Technical progress and mass production reduce manual workers more and more to a
passive role; in increasing proportion and to an ever greater extent they arrive at a
form of labour that enables them to carry out the necessary movements without
understanding their connection with the final result[…]Automatic machines seem to
offer the model for the intelligent, faithful, docile and conscientious worker[…] The
efforts, the labours, the inventions of beings of flesh and blood whom time introduces
in successive waves to social life only possess social value and effectiveness on
condition that they become in their turn crystallized in these huge mechanisms. The
inversion of the relation between means and ends—an inversion which is to a certain
extent the law of every oppressive society—here becomes total or nearly so, and
extends to nearly everything. The scientist does not use science in order to manage to
see more clearly into his own thinking, but aims at discovering results that will go to
swell the present volume of scientific knowledge. Machines do not run in order to
enable men to live, but we resign ourselves to feeding men in order that they may
serve the machines. (OL 103-5)
 o Weil is sceptical of Marxian belief that technological progress can usher
liberation of workers by virtue of automating their work ‘making it easier’ to
give them more time for leisure
 There is no reason, other than Victorian hope to think this is the case
 Tech innovation is an expression of the productive forces, and its
underlying social ills – it is a technique of oppression
- Central to Weil’s analysis is the concept of power
o Product of worker’s labour are finite, therefore need dividing up
o Under capitalism, products are not divided equally, they are divided in ways
that allow monopolies to arise, therefore allowing some groups to become
powerful
o For Weil, power cannot be seen to be arbitrarily located in society, it has some
justification, hence the concept of privilege is used to sustain and warrant the
inequitable division of power
o Power admits of the subject/object inversion, whereas once power was
considered a means to achieving ends, now becoming an end in itself
o The problem is that power is not the sort of thing that has an end and therefore
it can be sought out ad infinitum
o Once one makes power their end, a vicious cycle of oppression is made
 But, in order to obtain from the slaves the obedience and sacrifices
indispensable to victory, that power has to make itself more oppressive; to be
in a position to exercise this oppression, it is still more imperatively
compelled to turn outwards; and so on. We can follow out the same chain of
events by starting from another link; show how a given social group, in order
to be in a position to defend itself against the outside powers threatening to
lay hands on it, must itself submit to an oppressive form of authority; how the
power thus set up, in order to maintain its position, must stir up conflicts with
rival powers; and so on, once again. Thus it is that the most fatal of vicious
circles drags the whole society in the wake of its masters in a mad merry-go-
round. (OL 63)
- In Weil’s terminology, power is a force which turns subjects to objects
o The objectification of the oppressed subject I capitalism is the alienated
worker
 The worker has been separated from the products of their labour, but
has become the machine they were hired to operate
 This is complete objectification contains a certain humiliation
according to Weil
 To be alienated and humiliated is to be afflicted according to Weil
- This analysis of oppression is extended beyond economic contexts
o The model is mapped onto war
o War is an expression of power, lacking any determinable ‘end’ or objective,
and thus individuals are subject to force – they become a thing

Weil’s Marxian Critique

- Weil is against ‘collectives’ like political parties or religion, which she sees as
inherently involving the erasure of the individual
o These collectives make it easy for the individual to be objectified
  Best example of this is the USSR – regime set up to emancipate the
worker became wrapped in its own logic and efficiency that it
intentionally starved the worker in the name of their own emancipation
- Weil criticises Marx for an unfounded optimism built into his work
o Marx’s faith in technology and the belief that it will help achieve class
consciousness lacks an evidential basis
 This represents a way in which Marx does not move on from Hegel’s
progressive view of history
 Weil think there is not much hope in the idea that the proletariat will
achieve emancipation, as its difficult for masses to rise up, and easier
for organised collectives that are in the hands of the powerful to retain
their power
 Marxism should be a project, not a purpose
- Weil’s biggest departure from Marx is the expansion of the notion of oppression
beyond economic oppression
o Marx had neglected some of the most important aspects of oppression, which
can be found in the human experience of it
o He neglects the real cause of oppression (power) which has its very own
human cause

Althusser and the Return to Marx

- Althusser was central to the reception and re-reading of Marx in France
- Following the death of Stalin and Khruschev’s Thaw, European communists began to
question Marxism that had dominated theoretical discussions and party practice thus
far (Soviet Marixsm-Leninism)
o Led to new Marxist approaches and new interpretations of the doctrine
o Althusser developed a unique hermeneutical approach for reading Marx which
rejected humanist interpretations
o Althusser rejected orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory which endorses the strict
determination of culture and history by existing modes of economic exchange
and relations of production, and the resultant class struggle
- Althusser’s heterodox reading of Marx has it that there is a radical break in Marx’s
thinking, and the real Marxian project is not found in his work prior to 1845
o Real insight into Marx’s theory is only latent in his writings, a conceptual
framework that must be drawn out by considering what preconditions of
Marx’s claims were
 This hermeneutical approach was dubbed the symptomatic reading
- Key to Althusser’s departure from classic Marx was the rejection of Marxian
anthropology
o Althusser rejects the idea that there is an essential kind of human subject who
has essential needs – the individual wasn’t the important part of the story
o One thing is certain: one cannot begin with man, because that would be to begin with
a bourgeois idea of “man” [i.e. ideology], and because the idea of beginning with
man, in other words the idea of an absolute point of departure (= of an “essence”)
belongs to bourgeois philosophy… “Society is not composed of individuals,” says
Marx. He is right: society is not a “combination”, an “addition” of individuals. What
constitutes society is the system of its social relations in which its individuals live,
work, and struggle. He is right: society is not made up of individuals in general, in the
 abstract, just so many copies of “man”. Because each society has its own individuals,
historically and socially determined. (Althusser 1976: 52-3)
o Althusser argues we cannot move from understanding things at the microlevel
to understanding things at the macro-level
 Althusser thought the idea that material progress was motored by the
‘sensuous life activity’ of humans was no different to the idea that
material progress was the result of Hegelian Geist’s self-actualisation
 This kind of historical materialism is not materialism at all – if we
want to be truly material, we must ensure our macro-level analysis is
not based on an essentialist (and therefore metaphysical) account of
human life and activity

Structural Marxism (Althusser)

- Althusser retained key Marxist ideas and fused them with insights from structuralism
to produce structural Marxism
- Althusser retains the idea that our social formations contain contradictions or tensions
o Contrary to Hegel, Althusserian analysis it is the contradictions within social
structures that account for an uneven heterogenous development in society,
instead of a necessary development
o “Unevenness is internal to the social formation” (Althusser 2010: 213)
- Structural approaches see modes of production as the fundamental point of analysis,
but not all modes of production can be analysed with reference to one single
perspective – this would be an essentialist metaphysical approach
o Processes are all to be analysed in material terms, but all of them cannot be
analysed in economic terms
o Althusser’s alternative Marxist model dispenses w/base and superstructure
distinction, replacing it with the claim that social formation is constituted by
the interrelations of many different modes of production, which may be
economic, political or ideological structures, which exist in a hierarchy
according to the ‘structure-in-dominance’
o It is contingent fact that in a capitalist society, the economic is the structure in
dominance
- It is a characteristic of economic reductionism to believe in the eternal “primacy of
the economy” – based on the mistaken notion of the permanence of the structural
dominance of the economic region
o The belief in essential dominance of economic structure is at odds with the
historical and materialist approach
 At odds with historicism because it neglects the individuation of
historical moments
 At odds with materialism as it is a form of meta-physical thinking
- In Althusser’s analysis, out social formation is considered a complex totality of
different economic, political and ideological modes of production that all influence
one another
o The way to understand society -> unpack the ways in which different material
forces are all interacting

References
Althusser, Louis (2010) [1969]. For Marx. New York: Verso.
Althusser, Louis (1976). Essays in self-criticism. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press.
Kortesoja, M. (2023). Structural Marxism and Its Critique. In: Power of Articulation. Palgrave
Macmillan, Cham.
Resch, Robert Paul (1992). Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory. University of
California Press.
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
Sparling, R. (2012). Theory and Praxis: Simone Weil and Marx on the Dignity of Labor. The
Review of Politics, 74(1), 87–107.
Weil, S. (2001) Oppression and Liberty, Routledge, London.