An extract from Weil's wartime notebooks of 1943, first published posthumously in Liberty and Oppression, 1955

Marx’s outstanding achievement was the application of his method to the study of the society around him. He defined with admirable precision the relationships of force in that society. He demonstrated that wage-earning is a form of oppression, that the workers are inevitably enslaved under a system of production where, deprived of knowledge and skill, they are reduced practically to nothing before the stupendous combination of science and natural forces which is, as it were, crystallized in the machine. He demonstrated that the State, being made up of categories of men distinct from the population—bureaucracy, police, military cadres—itself forms a machine that automatically crushes those whom it claims to represent. He perceived that economic life was itself going to become more and more centralized and bureaucratic, thus bringing together the leaders of production and those in charge of the State.

Such a premise ought to have led him to foresee the modern phenomenon of the totalitarian State and the nature of the doctrines that were to spring up around it. But Marx wanted this sombre mechanism to bring about justice, which is why he did not wish to foresee the future. So he accepted the most blatant absurdity, the one most opposed to his own principles. He assumed that, though everything is governed by force, a proletariat lacking force was nevertheless going to carry through a successful political coup d’êtat, follow it up by a purely legal measure, namely, the abolition of individual property, and as a result achieve the mastery in all fields of social life.

Yet he had himself described this proletariat as despoiled of everything except its feeble hands for performing servile tasks and its ardent thirst for justice. He had shown how the forces of nature, canalized by machinery, monopolized by the masters of industrial undertakings, reduce mere muscular strength almost to nothing; how modern culture, by fixing a gulf between manual and intellectual work, condemns the minds of the workers to banishment among objects devoid of value; how manual skill itself had been taken away from men and transferred to the machines. He had shown with pitiless clarity that this technique, this culture, this organization of labour and of social life form the chains that keep the workers enslaved. And at the same time he wanted to believe that, with all this remaining intact, the proletariat would break its servitude and take over command.

This belief is as much opposed to Marx’s materialist prejudices as it is to the solid, permanent part of his thought. It follows immediately from his most searching analyses that the transformation of production, intellectual culture and social organization must in general precede the overthrow of political and legal systems, as was the case in the Revolution of 1789. But Marx refused to see this consequence, obvious as it was, because it went contrary to his desires. There was no fear of his disciples seeing it, either, for the same reason.

As for the Marxist interpretation of history, nothing can be said about it, because there is none. No attempt was made to explain the evolution of civilization in terms of the development of the means of production. What is more, while positing that the class struggle is the key to history, Marx did not even attempt to show that this is a materialist principle of explanation. This is by no means self-evident. The human soul’s longing for liberty, its craving for power, can equally well be analysed as facts of a spiritual order.

In pasting the label “class struggle” on to these facts, Marx merely simplified things in an almost puerile manner. He left out war, a factor in human history as important as the social struggle. Hence the fact that Marxists have always found themselves ludicrously confused before all the problems posed by war. For that matter, this omission is typical of the whole of the nineteenth century; in committing it, Marx gave yet another proof of intellectual servility to the dominating influences of his age. Similarly, he chose to forget that the conflicts of the oppressed among themselves, of the oppressors among themselves, are as important as the mutual conflicts between oppressed and oppressors, and that in any case, more often than not, the same human being is both at once. He made oppression the central notion of his writings, but never attempted to analyse it. He never asked himself what it is.

What has caused the stupendous political success of Marxism is above all this juxtaposing of two meagre, sketchy and mutually incompatible doctrines. Humanity has always placed in God its hope of quenching its thirst for justice. Once God no longer inhabited men’s souls, that hope had either to be discarded or to be placed in matter. Man cannot bear to be alone in willing the good. He needs an all-powerful ally. If this ally is not spirit, it will be matter. It is simply a case of two different expressions of the same fundamental thought. But the second expression is defective. It is a badly constructed religion. But it is a religion. There is, therefore, nothing surprising in the fact that Marxism has always possessed a religious character. It has a great many things in common with the forms of religious life most bitterly attacked by Marx, especially in having frequently been used, to quote Marx’s own formula, as the opium of the people. But it is a religion devoid of mystique, in the true sense of the word.

Not only materialism in general, but the brand of materialism peculiar to Marx, was bound to guarantee him an immense influence. The nineteenth century believed that in industrial production lay the key to human progress. It was the thesis upheld by the economists, the conception that enabled industrialists, without the least qualm of conscience, to bring about the death through exhaustion of generations of children. Marx simply took over this conception and transferred it to the revolutionary camp, thus preparing for the emergence of a quite singular type of bourgeois revolutionary.

But it was left to our own age to make the maximum use of Marx’s works. The idealistic, utopian doctrine contained therein is immensely valuable for stirring up the masses, making them carry a political party to power, keeping youth in that state of permanent enthusiasm necessary to every totalitarian régime. At the same time the other doctrine, the materialist doctrine which freezes all human aspirations under the cold metallic touch of force, provides a totalitarian State with a great number of excellent answers when faced with the timid aspirations of the people. Generally speaking, the mental juxtaposition of an idealism and a materialism, each equally superficial and vulgar, constitutes the spiritual character—if one may be permitted this term—of our time.

The vice of such a conception is not the combination of materialism and idealism, for they have to be combined; it is the placing of this combination at too low a level; for their unity dwells in a place above the skies, outside this world.

Two things in Marx are solid, indestructible. One is the method which makes society an object of scientific study by seeking to define therein relationships of force; the other is the analysis of capitalist society as it existed in the nineteenth century. The rest not only is not true, but is even too inconsistent, too empty, to be called erroneous.

In omitting spiritual factors, Marx ran no risk of being greatly mistaken in his analysis of a society which, all in all, allotted them no place. At bottom, Marx’s materialism only expressed the influence of this society upon him; his weakness lay in becoming himself the best instance of his own thesis concerning the subordination of thought to economic circumstances. But in his best moments he rose above this weakness. At such times materialism horrified him, and he would stigmatize it in the society of his time. He discovered a formula impossible to surpass when he said that the essence of capitalism lies in the subordination of subject to object, of man to thing. The analysis which he made of it from this point of view is of an incomparable vigour and depth; today still, today especially, it is an infinitely valuable theme for meditation.

But the general method is of still greater value. The idea of working out a mechanics of social relationships had been adumbrated by many lucid minds. It was doubtless this that inspired Machiavelli. As in ordinary mechanics, the fundamental notion would be that of force. The great difficulty is to grasp this notion.

Such an idea contains nothing incompatible with the purest spirituality; it is complementary to it. Plato compared society to a huge beast which men are forced to serve and which they are weak enough to worship. Christianity, so close to Plato on many points, contains not only the same thought, but the same image; the beast in the Apocalypse is sister to the great beast in Plato. Working out a social mechanics means, instead of worshipping the beast, to study its anatomy, physiology, reflexes, and, above all, to try to understand the mechanism of its conditioned reflexes, that is to say find a method for training it.

The essential idea in Plato—which is also that of Christianity, but has been very much neglected—is that man cannot escape being wholly enslaved to the beast, even down to the innermost recesses of his soul, except in so far as he is freed by the supernatural operation of grace. Spiritual servitude consists in confusing the necessary with the good; for “we do not know what a distance separates the essence of the necessary from that of the good”.

The beast has one doctrine—that of force. Certain Athenians, whom Thucydides quotes, expressed it crudely, with a marvellous precision, when they said to some wretches imploring their mercy: “We believe as concerning the gods according to tradition, and we know as concerning men from unquestionable evidence, that each one always, through a necessity of nature, commands wherever he has the power to do so.” It is clear that these Athenians were but recent converts to the cult of the beast, the descendants of men who had been strangers to it; the true worshippers of this cult do not reveal its doctrine, otherwise than by action. To justify such action they invent idolatries.

The reverse of this doctrine, with respect to the divinity, is the dogma of the Incarnation. “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant … and became obedient unto death …”^[6]

The beast is supreme on earth. The devil said to Christ: “All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me …”^[7] The description of human societies purely in terms of relationships of force accounts for almost everything. The only thing it leaves out is the supernatural.

The share of the supernatural here below is secret, silent, almost invisible, infinitely small. But it is decisive. Proserpina did not think she was changing her destiny by eating just one pomegranate seed; yet from that moment, for ever after, the other world has been her home and her kingdom.

This decisive operation of the infinitely small is a paradox which the human intelligence finds it difficult to acknowledge. Through this paradox is accomplished the wise persuasion that Plato speaks of, that persuasion by means of which divine Providence induces necessity to direct most things towards the good.

Nature, which is a mirror of the divine truths, offers us everywhere an image of this paradox. Catalysts, bacteria are examples of it. Compared with a solid body, a point is something infinitely small. Yet, in each body, there is one point which predominates over the entire mass, for if the point is supported the body does not fall; that point is the centre of gravity.

But a point thus supported only prevents a mass from falling if the mass is disposed symmetrically around it, or if the asymmetry in it has certain proportions. Yeast only makes the dough rise if it is mixed with it. The catalyst only acts when in contact with the reactive elements. In the same way there exist certain material conditions for the supernatural operation of the divine that is present on earth in the form of something infinitely small.

The wretchedness of our condition subjects human nature to a moral form of gravity that is constantly pulling it downwards, towards evil, towards a total submission to force. “And God saw … that every imagination of the thoughts of his [man’s] heart was only evil continually.”^[8] It is this gravity which forces man, on the one hand, to lose half his soul, according to an ancient proverb, the day he becomes a slave, and, on the other hand, to command always, according to the words quoted by Thucydides, wherever he has the power to do so. In the same way as ordinary gravity, it has its laws. When studying them, one cannot be too cold-blooded, lucid, cynical. In this sense, to this extent, one must be a materialist.

However, an architect not only studies falling bodies, but also the conditions for equilibrium. The true knowledge of social mechanics implies that of the conditions under which the supernatural operation of an infinitely small quantity of pure good, placed at the right point, can neutralize gravity.

Those who deny the reality of the supernatural truly resemble blind men. Light, too, exerts no pressure, has no weight; but by its means the plants and trees reach towards the sky in spite of gravity. We do not eat it; but the seeds and fruits that we eat would not ripen without it.

Similarly, the purely human virtues would not spring up out of man’s animal nature without the supernatural light of grace. When man turns away from this light, a slow, progressive, but relentless decomposition finally subjects him altogether, right in the very depths of his soul, to the sway of force. As far as it is possible for a thinking creature, he becomes matter. In the same way a plant deprived of light is gradually changed into something inert.

Those who think that the supernatural, by definition, operates in an arbitrary fashion, incapable of being studied, are as wrong about it as are those who deny its reality. The true mystics, like St John of the Cross, describe the operation of grace on the soul with the precision of a chemist or a geologist. The influence of the supernatural on human societies, although perhaps still more mysterious, can no doubt also be studied.

If we examine closely not only the Middle Ages of Christendom, but all the really creative civilizations, we notice how each one, at any rate for a time, had at its very centre an empty space reserved for the purely supernatural, the reality that lies outside this world. Everything else was oriented towards this empty space.

There are not two methods of social architecture. There has never been more than one. It is eternal. But it is always the eternal which calls for a truly inventive effort on the part of the human spirit. This consists of disposing the blind forces of social mechanics around the point that also serves as centre for the blind forces of celestial mechanics, that is to say the “Love which moveth the sun and the other stars”.

It is certainly no easy thing, either to conceive in a more precise manner or to accomplish. But at any rate the first condition for moving in this direction is to let one’s thoughts dwell on it. It is not one of those things that can be obtained by accident. Maybe one can receive it after desiring it long and persistently.

The imitation of the order of the world was the great conception of pre-Roman antiquity. It should also have been the great conception behind Christianity, since the perfect model proposed for each man’s imitation was the same being as the Wisdom ordering the universe. And in fact this conception did stir subterraneously the whole of the Middle Ages.

Today, after being bemused for several centuries with pride in technical achievement, we have forgotten the existence of a divine order of the universe. We do not realize that labour, art and science are only different ways of entering into contact with it.

If the humiliation produced by unhappiness were to rouse us, if we were to re-discover this great truth, we should be able to put an end to what constitutes the scandal of modern thought, the hostility between religion and science.