Justice consists in seeing that no harm is done to men. Whenever a man cries inwardly: “Why am I being hurt?” harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible.
Simone Weil, La Personne et le sacré
Leo Tolstoy’s anarchism is grounded in a religious universalism in which God is identified with love for one’s fellows. The denial of this universalism, its distortion in the religious justification of hierarchical authority, is the root of all violent oppression and slavery.
The latter cannot be addressed by merely changing social and economic arrangements – the illusion of political reformers and revolutionaries –, but only by a radical transformation of human “spirituality”. If this last word is difficult for the agnostic and atheistic – especially among anarchists opposed to all religion –, it is for these political reformers to demonstrate that their proposed changes will not imply violence in turn. Should they do so, then it is difficult to see in what way their celebrated ends will not be undermined and corrupted by the means employed; indeed, it would appear to be difficult how they will not in turn fall to the siren calls of violence.
But what of Tolstoy’s “God” – whom he so often identifies with an original Christianity –, must one embrace it? Without wishing to deny Tolstoy’s own convictions on the matter, pointing as they do to the necessity of belief in a divine source of life, his “moral universalism” points to what Simone Weil described as the impersonal in all ethical engagements. Ethics grounded in a “respect for the person” or for the law will always be conditional, justifying thereby all manner of exceptions; exceptions that are for their part reflective of or grounded in the violence of power.
“So far from its being his person, what is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him. Everything which is impersonal in man is sacred, and nothing else.” (Simone Weil, La Personne et le sacré)
How we understand this sacred, or what Weil also calls the supernatural, or that Tolstoy calls love and God, remains open, but that it should not be merely set aside by atheistic reflexes seems obvious.
We share below Leo Tolstoy’s eloquent and still timely essay, “Must it be so?”.
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Thinking with Mario Tronti
We continue to share material by and about the work of Mario Tronti, in the wake of his recent death. We share a short but excellent essay by Mårten Björk on the trajectory of Tronti’s thought (from NLR/Sidecar 25/08/2023).
Embracing Failure
Mario Tronti, who died earlier this month at the age of 92, was best-known as the author of Workers and Capital (1966). Consisting mostly of essays written in the first half of the sixties, his magnum opus was the most influential text of operaismo, the theoretical current that was then emerging in Italy amid a wave of labour militancy and factory occupations. ‘Workerism’, in the approximate translation, placed renewed emphasis on working-class struggle and consciousness. Foregrounding the primacy of labour in capitalist accumulation, the operaisti argued that the principal focus of Marxism should be not the abstract laws of capital, but workers themselves, without whom capitalism cannot function and who ‘push capitalist production forward from within’. In the bold vision of operaismo, workers act and capital adapts. ‘We too saw capitalist development first and the workers second’, Tronti wrote in ‘Lenin in England’, his editorial in the inaugural issue of Classe Operaia, a journal he co-founded in 1963. ‘This is a mistake. Now we have to turn the problem on its head, change orientation, and start again from first principles, which means focusing on the struggle of the working class.’
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