S1: Official declarations will have it that henceforward the French State undertakes to put an end to the proletarian condition, that is, to all that is degrading in the life of a workingman, whether inside the factory or out.

S2: The first obstacle to be overcome in such an undertaking is ignorance.

S3: Of late, it has become more obvious than ever that factory workers are, in a sense, truly uprooted beings, exiles in their own land.

S4: But the real reasons for this are not so generally known.

• Opens with a reference to Vichy France's Charte du Travail

Claim of above: goal is is to put an end to degradation of a working man's life

• Takes general goal of charter -> zeroes in on what she wants to write about: degradation of workers
• Contempt and irony?

• Logical step: if we aim to end degradation of workers, what is the first step?

  • Overcoming ignorance

• Cool, but what is the nature of those workers? What degradation are they experiencing?

  • Qualification

• Uprooted (déraciné) beings, exiled where they live

  • First definition of exile
• Opens up to to the next step

S1: General proposition of Vichy France's labor charter: ending degradation (her qualification, her synthesis of the charter) S2: What is first step of the goal? -> overcoming ignorance (implication: almost all are ignorant. question: what defines those who are not?) S3: How are they degraded? -> Uprootedness, spatially exiled (implied spiritually too) S4: Few know the true reasons of how this really is

Escalation across the paragraph: proletarian condition (vague) -> degrading (somewhat vague, but more known) -> uprooted (specific, prompts 'what is this condition?') -> exiles in their own land (specific: uprootedness = exile)

S1: Walks in the working-class quarters, glimpses of dark, miserable rooms, the houses, the streets, are no great help in understanding the life that people lead there.

S2: An even greater mystery invests the worker's discontent in the factory.

S3: Workingmen themselves do not find it easy to write, speak, or even reflect on such a subject, for the first effect of suffering is the attempt of thought to escape.

S4: It refuses to confront the adversity that wounds it.

S5: Thus, when workingmen speak of their lot, they repeat more often than not the catch-words coined by people who are not workingmen.

S6: The difficulty involved is at least as great for a veteran worker.

S7: He finds it easy to talk of his early past, but very difficult actually to think about it, for nothing is more swiftly covered over by oblivion than past miseries.

S8: A man of talent may, through fiction and the exercise of imagination, divine and, to some extent, describe from the outside.

S9: There is, for example, Jules Romains' chapter on factory life in his Hommes de bonne volonté. But that kind of thing does not cut very deep.

• S1

  • Embodied example of how some look to understand the factory worker's life
  • Claim: Abstractions of the low wage life does not help much in comprehending their true lived life
  • General movement:
  • How might someone try to know the worker's degradation? -> Seeing their lived reality
  • Complication: it is not sufficient to see their lived reality (implication: one must live it)
  • Creates an element of suspension

• S2

  • Note: uses invest in the older form (envelopes, sorrounds, etc)
  • To look at the worker's abstractions is at best vague and not much helpful
  • Claim: Even if S1 is proven to not be true, there is something more impactful (sets up the next sections)

• S3

  • Observation: Working people find difficulty in analysis of their own condition
  • Why? Suffering causes the attempt to escape thought (implication: to think in the belly of the beast is excruciating. survival mechanism)

• S4

  • Implicit claim: to be a laborer is inherently wounding (wound to the intelligence?? implied both mind and spirit)
  • Implication: People tend to avoid being wounded, thus they do not reflect much

• S5

  • Observation: Working men repeat what they are told by higher classes
  • Why? -> those catch-words do not wound (logical following from S4)

• S6

  • She built the scaffolding: workers find difficulty in analysis of their condition, but now she wants to qualify. How does X affect a set of people?
  • Claim: Veteran workers still are in great pain, despite their time (implicit claim: time does not resolve this mystery)

• S7:

  • Claim: Veteran workers find it easier to speak of the early past but relegate it to something less than real

• S8-S9:

  • Claim: Those outside of such conditions may write something convincing but not reflective of actual reality
  • Implicit claim: Only those who have directly experienced the conditions (and survived/left them) can truly describe this reality with depth

S1: How abolish an evil without first having clearly perceived in what it consisted?

S2: What follows may perhaps help to set the terms of the problem, since they are the fruit of a direct contact with factory life.

• S1

  • Necessary question: If we aim to end the degradation of workers, how can we actually abolish it without seeing the true reality?
  • Callback to ignorance

• S2

  • Claim: I have direct sight of that reality, and I will describe the experience (implied so it can be used constructively downstream of Weil)
  • False modesty to hedge such a large claim (or maybe it is modest? but I doubt it)

  • Hedging outcome but not authority

    • She will describe the problem, not solve the problem, and she can describe it because she lived it

S1: Conceivably a plant or factory could fill the soul through a powerful awareness of collective—one might well say, unanimous—life.

S2: All noises have their meaning, they are all rhythmic, they fuse into a kind of giant respiration of the working collectivity in which it is exhilarating to play one's part.

S3: And because the sense of solitude is not touched, participation becomes even more exhilarating.

S4: Pursuing our hypothetical lead, there are only the metallic noises, the turning wheels, the bite of metal upon metals; noises that speak neither of nature nor of life, but of the serious, steady, uninterrupted acting of men upon things.

S5: Though lost in this great hum, one also dominates it; for over this permanent, yet ever-changing drone bass, what stands out while yet somehow fused with it, is the sound of one's own machine.

S6: One does not feel insignificant as in a crowd, but indispensable.

S7: The transmission belts, supposing them to be present, allow the eye to drink in that unity of rhythm which the whole body feels through the sounds and the barely perceptible vibration of everything.

S8: Through the wan hours of winter mornings and evenings when only the electric lights are shining, all the senses are participants in a universe where nothing recalls nature, where nothing is gratuitous, where everything is sheer impact, the painful yet conquering impact of man upon matter.

S9: The lamps, the belts, the noise, the hard, cold iron-work, all converge toward the transmutation of man into workman.

• S1

  • Claim: In the realm of imagination (most ideal scenario), there is a possibility where a factory could nourish the soul through knowledge of collective life (community more broadly, intricate life of things and people in the factory)

• S2

  • Paints an image to describe in what perspective S1 is true

• S3

  • Contradiction: How can workers in a factory, where most roles are solitary and bound to a specific machine, enjoy collective life?
  • Claim: Solitude is orthogonal to participation: implicit participation is even greater because you both maintain individual boundaries and the being of a whole

• S4

  • Further deepens the example: she is effectively mapping the most ideal possibility
  • This builds credibility

• S5

  • Showing, not telling: The worker hears the greater whole, but is acutely attuned to his individual part
  • The worker's experience is bifurcated at his station (resolves contradiction explicitly)

• S6

  • Implicit observation: When Weil was at the machine, she felt necessary. This feels good. She felt necessary because her machine depended on her for labor. Her labor produced X.

• S7:

  • Gives an example of transmission belts, rigorously implies this example of such machine may not hold true across all machines (too much?)
  • The unity of the experience is nourishing

• S8:

  • In this state of being, man leaves the earthly world and enters the mechanical world. Different universe.

• S9:

  • Everything described above is exactly that which transforms a man from the street into a workman

More broadly a mapping of ideal phenomenology -> implications (painting what could be to set up what is)

S1: If factory life were really this, it would be only too beautiful.

S2: But such is naturally, not the case. The joys here described are the joys of free men.

S3: Those who people the factories do not feel them, except in rare and fleeting moments, for they are not free.

S4: They can experience them only when they forget they are not free; but they can rarely forget, for the vise of their servitude grips them through the senses, their bodies, the thousand and one little details that crowd the minutes of which their lives are constituted.

• S1

  • Transition: the above is ideal

• S2

  • But this is not true
  • Claim: such joy is only for free men (implicit claim: working men are not free)
  • Once again, she is taking a broad phenomenon and working through 'Who does this affect?'

• S3

  • Explicit: factory workers are not free

• S4

  • Factory workers can only experience such joys (collective belonging, identity of workman, etc) when they forget they are free
  • More broadly, her last paragraph was greatly about painting the conditions which workers could be rooted (remember?)
  • Implicit claim: the joys of rootedness only apply to free men

  • Most workers can not forget because the evils of their laborious reality consume their life to the minute

    • Workers are so afflicted at the level of the most insignificant, to the point that it reduces them man into something less than workman
    • More broadly, suggested that control of the smallest details of your own life is the constitution of freedom
  • Workers mostly are aware they are not free

S1: The first detail which, in the work-day, makes their servitude apparent, is the time-clock.

S2: The trip from home to plant is dominated by one fact: arrival before a point in time that is arbitrarily determined.

S3: Since arrival five or ten minutes ahead of time is of no avail, the flow of time appears as something pitiless, leaving no room for the play of chance.

S4: In a man’s work-day it is the first onslaught of a regimen whose brutality dominates a life spent among machines: the rule that chance has no place, no “freedom of the city,” in a factory.

S5: Chance exists there, of course, as it does anywhere else, but it is not recognized.

S6: What is recognized, often to the great detriment of production, is the barracks formula: “Never mind the reasons!” Contradictory orders are not such according to the logic of the factory.

S7: Come what may, the work must go on. It is up to the worker to get on with the job. And he does get on with it.

• S1

  • What makes workers aware they are not free? (downstream of P4.S4)

    • "The first detail" -> Many things
    • "The time-clock" -> Measurement of time

• S2

  • Structural reality: the worker must report to work by a specific time

    • Implied: the painful aspect is that this time is likely arbitrary
    • The worker must arrive BEFORE this starts (implied: control of worker even before work, loss of freedom)

• S3

  • But why does this time constraint cause pain?

    • -> the difference between arriving early and exactly on time is zero, because each worker starts at the same time
    • -> time itself may be subservient to your scheduled labor
    • -> no time for the play of chance (implied: freedom lost, primacy of arbitrary human choice over independent will and chance. even Fortune is subservient to the schedule. she will probably observe why this is necessary later)

• S4

  • Expounding on chance

  • Okay, time makes it painful, but is it ever different? (note she qualifies all the time and looks for different instantiations of a general claim)

    • -> on the first day back to work, the brutal dictator of arbitrary choice reminds the worker of their condition as a rote executor

• S5

  • Again, she qualifies. What makes chance different in the factory versus outside world?

    • -> Nothing. Just not recognized.

• S6

  • Rhetoric: X is not recognized. Logical necessity: then what is recognized?

    • -> Following orders without judgement (implied suspension of free will of thought)

• S7

  • Regardless of the above conditions, the worker is structurally necessitated onto completing work