Ideas - Can abolishing all political parties topple fascism?

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

In the aftermath of World War One, French philosopher Simone Weil had a solution to address the fascism that surged across Europe: abolish political parties. She argued political parties appeared to be democratic but she saw them as dangerous. With the help of former politician Michael Ignatieff and other guests, IDEAS producer Nicola Luksic explores the radical ideas Simone Weil shared that can help us better understand the current political climate.We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.

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Book at Spexavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayy. Tuesday. Three hours of work in the course of the day. Beginning of the morning, one hour of drilling. Thursday.

From 10 a.m. until about 2 p.m. Metal polishing on the Big Fly Press. Work had to be done over again, after it was completely done by order of the four men in a way that was uncomfortable and dangerous. Paris, 1934. Excerpts from the Factory Journal, as written by French philosopher

Simone Bay. Was the order to do it over again justified or bullying? I had to dock every time in order to avoid being struck full on the head by the heavy counterweight. Pity and mute indignation of neighbors. Furious with myself, I had the idiotic feeling it wasn't worth the effort to pay attention to protecting myself. Simone Veix didn't have to be a factory worker.

She felt compelled to work in the factory, so she could more deeply understand what it feels like to work under these precarious conditions with these machines, alongside roughly 8 million other industrial workers in France. She demands of us that we go and enact our thought in the world. It can't just be something we do from an armchair. Tuesday at 1 p.m.

The effect of exhaustion is to make me forget my real reasons for spending time in the factory and to make it almost impossible for me to overcome the strongest temptation that this life entails. That of not thinking anymore. We need her now, I think, in part because there's such a state. a rabid intoxication in the political climate, that her kind of fearless calm and lucidity is important. She's the thinker who asked most clearly, what is it to have an independent thought? What is it to think for yourself? It's only on Saturday afternoon and Sunday that a few memories and shreds of ideas returned

to me. And I remember that I remember that I... I am also a thinking being. Revolt is impossible except for momentary flashes. We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits. And we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation. Any real awakening of thought is then painful. Simone Vei lived her philosophy.

From refusing to eat chocolate when she was a child, be in solidarity with French soldiers during World War I to joining the anti-fascist resistance in the trenches during the Spanish Civil War. She's a radical thinker, and by radical I mean someone who goes to the root of things with a kind of intransigent, almost ferocious determination to get you to see things that most of us slide by. So much of what Simon Vei is about. is the core of asking another human being, what are you going through?

And to actually be able to listen to them, to be able to hear how they respond, and then to recreate the world with that person in a way that will help them go through that thing that is oppressing them. And we really need to be able to step back, to listen, to hear them, and then to act together, to co-create the world with that other person. That act of co-creation is often hindered by the day-to-day demands of work, like the grueling factory work Vey describes. It's also curtailed by the political structures we create for ourselves.

Vey came to believe that the political parties of her day were similar to those factory machines. In an essay she wrote shortly before her death, in 1943 at the age of just 34, she argued that while political parties purport to be democratic, they're actually dangerous. Democracy, majority rule,

are not good in themselves. They are a means toward goodness, and their affectiveness is uncertain. Simone Vei was a child during World War I, and through her teens and into adulthood, she witnessed the horrors that transpired as Democratic European nations succumbed to charismatic fascist leaders. Reading her work gives us, I think, a foundation for a different way of thinking about

political movements and political action, especially in a situation that similar to her times with the rise of right-wing political parties, with sort of first ideas of fascism that we're seeing reflections of and echoes of now, that we can approach our political situation as one that maybe can't be resolved immediately, but that that doesn't prevent us and can't prevent us from acting to try and change it. Even if we don't think we can, we have to try. Regardless of whether you think of her as a radical anarchist or a modern saint, Simone Veix has prescient insight that can help us better understand the current political climate. At this moment, we're a few weeks after a certain American election event.

How would you describe the state of your feelings of anxiety around the situation now? Yeah, I think that my feelings of anxiety I'm not necessarily raised in any substantial way, but I think that a lot of that is sort of because of my own professional cynicism rather than the reality of what is coming. Ideas producer Nicola Luxchich brings us the radical and relevant thought of Simone Vei. I first met Scott Rittner just a couple of weeks after the 2024 American election. The results of the election weren't much of a surprise to him. I feel like I kind of saw this coming.

Right. Kind of thing. And is that reassuring that you felt like you could see it coming? No, not at all. I would say that it's the opposite of reassuring. As someone who is a scholar of Simone Veil, as someone who is concerned with the rise of radical right wing and neo-fascist.

if we want to call it that political groups around the world, I find it not reassuring at all. My name is Scott Rittner. I am a political theorist by training. I teach political science and first year of writing at University of Colorado in Boulder. And I'm a scholar of Simone Veigh. When we met, Scott was busy putting the finishing touches on his forthcoming book. The working title of my book, Revolutionary, pessimism, the political thought of Simon Vei. And why pessimism? What is pessimism? So pessimism to me,

and I draw this term from another political theorist by the name of Joshua Foa-Dienstug. And what he argues is that pessimism, rather than being the opposite of optimism, is what he calls a time-conscious or we could say like a historically oriented vision of the world. world. And what we often have in politics, especially in liberal political philosophy and liberal institutional politics, is this idea that things are sort of naturally and inevitably getting better. And this is very much part of the story, the narrative that we teach people in the United States throughout their elementary and secondary schooling. There was a foundation. It was sort of Democratic because there were slaves and women couldn't vote. And then over time, first enslavement

ended, then eventually black men gained the right to vote, then women gained the right to vote, et cetera, et cetera. So there's this nice steady progress. Nice steady progress, right? Technology gets better, lives get longer, et cetera, et cetera. Pessimism is a way of thinking about the world and of reading the material, real conditions of the world against that. It says we can't always look at the future and say it's going to be better. So how would you define pessimism succinctly? Pessimism is. Pessimism is an orientation towards the world that does not anticipate what's going to come next. It prioritizes the present over the future. Whereas optimism or progress prioritizes the future over the present. Pessimism prioritizes the

present over the future. So there's no hope with pessimism. It's more this is the reality. I think there can be hope. I don't think that it excludes hope, but it doesn't anticipate that what we're hoping for is what's going to happen. Scott's obviously not big on. blind optimism and dreams of boundless progress. But pessimism isn't something that should paralyze us either. So he turns to Simone Vei as someone who looked at the world around her and was able to throw herself into action, despite the odds, and aspire to live her life true to her moral core.

In this moment, I think that we have to go back to some of these past pessimists who lived through similar situations that we're living. I don't want to go too far in making cross-historical connections between now and the Great Depression or now and Weimar, Germany. Lots of people like to do that. I mean, I think they're relevant, but I don't want to overstate that. But I do think that a change in orientation towards pessimism, towards the idea that we don't know what the future holds, that, yes, it could get worse. I mean, I think right now all evidence shows that things are getting worse and that it is up to us to try and, at the very least, stop things from getting worse. And that's why I think we need to go back to these pessimistic thinkers, these people like Simone

Bay, whose primary question, I think, from 1932 till she dies in 1943, is how do we stop fascism rather than how do we make the world a perfect place? I think what's marvelous about her is she's not giving us a sermon from some lofty, aloof place above the torment of the time. She lived the torment of her times, and she's asking the question we're asking, which is, how do we figure out what the hell is true and what the hell is going on and what the hell we should do? And that urgency communicates very directly across time and is another reason why we might read her. If only to disagree with her, I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm not an acolyte. I have my problems with her, which we'll talk about, I hope.

But the intensity with which she asked that question seems to me perennially important and especially important. Hello, my name is Michael Ignatyev. I'm a Canadian professor of historical studies at Central European University in Vienna. I used to be the rector here, and now I'm back in the classroom. Michael Ignatjif is also the former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Also notable that he was the head of the Central European University when it was based in Budapest, and he weathered the storm as the university was pushed out of Hungary by Prime Minister Vicarious. Orban's government. Turns out, Ignatia is a Simone Bay superfan. I'm drawn to her because she lived her times to the full, applied her intelligence to her times as best she could, showed enormous, even suicidal courage, died before her time in rather tragic circumstances. So I'm drawn both to the life and to the work. I'd also say she's a kind of fearful character. She's not easy. She has fearful things to say.

say, challenging things to say, things with which I completely disagree. But I've been reading her for 30, 40 years with a sense of enormous admiration for her sheer courage, her intellectual courage. And what would you say is the key question that she is trying to answer? I think she's trying to answer the question. How do we know what the truth is? How do we know what justice is? And how do we serve both? How do we serve truth and justice together? I think that's the question. She's asking over and over again. She has this incredible way of accessing the sacred through the profane of giving us this world where we can only find God or the good or ethics through our engagement with other human beings through the natural world, through love

of the neighbor through art, through science. And this was really, really exciting for me. Hello, my name is Catherine Lawson, and I am a faculty fellow at King's University College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Catherine is also an active member of the American Simone Bay Society. Simone Bay was born in Paris in 1909, and she died in Ashford, Kent, in the UK, in 1943. She grew up with an upper middle class assimilated Jewish family and was an incredibly precocious child. She learned ancient Greek. She learned Sanskrit. She immersed herself incredibly deeply in her studies,

and her older brother, Andre Vei, became a world-famous mathematician. So the two of them were raised in this very assimilated family in Paris. Very privileged family, yes. Her father was a doctor. Her mother came from money. And her parents were highly educated for their time. Her mother was oftentimes described as sort of a frustrated philosopher. Had she been able to attend universities and gain even more education,

she would have flourished in that role. So her parents very much made education an important centerpiece of the childhood of Simone and Andre. And so it's said in many biographies of both of them, the two children learned classical Greek as children and used that to speak to each other, so their parents couldn't understand them. During the First World War, she refuses to eat chocolate or sugar because she learned that French soldiers didn't have access to chocolate and sugar. Okay. So she's empathetic?

She's empathetic, absolutely. And she very early on has a very keen sense of solidarity with those who have less than she does. Simone Vei declared herself a Bolshevik when she was just 10 years old. As a teen while on holiday with her family in Belgium, she found out that the salaries of the resort workers were too low, so she encouraged them to organize and unionize. her drive and commitment were in full force academically as well when she took the entrance exam

at the ultra-elite Ecole Normale Superior in Paris she finished first Simone de Beauvoir finished second both placed ahead of the 28 other students who were all men well she's there she's a contemporary of Simone de Beauvoir Jean-Paul Sartte and she then goes on

after school to teaching positions in small rural towns. The reason for this is because of her social activism. So throughout her education, she's given these names like the categorical imperative in skirts or the red virgin. You can't run into Simone Bay without having to sign a petition or her chastising you about your status in society. Now mind, she had that same status in society. So was she a bit of a caustic individual? Yes, that would be an accurate way to describe her. She certainly had a very strong personality. She was not afraid to let people know exactly how she thought things should be. She had strong ideas about the limitation of France's educational system. And as a teacher, she often held classes outdoors. And at times,

refused to submit student grades to the school's administration. She often gets in trouble with the parents because she's not teaching to the tests, but it seems, at least by all accounts, many of her students really truly loved her. And yet she questioned the value of her role as a teacher, believing that philosophy and the quest for truth and justice should be lived, not just talked about. And so... In 1934, she takes a year off from teaching. and goes to work in the factories, which was a difficult thing for her in many ways because

she was a very physically frail person. She suffered from migraines. She was extremely near-sighted, things like that. So she went from the ivory tower to working. Working in auto factories, like auto part factories effectively. Yeah. And why? What was the motivation? Her motivation for that, as she wrote in a letter to a student, was to a experience real life. She did not think that the ideas that she was working on, that the philosophies that she was engaging with were valuable to her without real life, without experiencing these ideas, especially amongst the Marxists of her time, she was kind of skeptical that any of them had ever actually worked in a factory. And so she said, well, if I'm going to engage with these people, debate

with these people, I need to go do this. As bad luck would have it, the turning thing that makes the infernal racket is going all day long right next to me. At noon, I can hardly eat. Still, I work fast and without headache powders. Thursday. During the interval, I felt the full brunt of fatigue, waited for the job to be given me with a sickish feeling.

During the periods of no work, the women get angry at frequently losing their turn to get a job for orders of 100 pieces. I think this comes down to, in a large part, a problem with the idea of something like an ivory tower, particularly when you are looking at ideas around Marxism, ideas around labor, ideas around affliction, you can't really know those things unless you live them. And indeed, this is what changes a lot of her thought because she sees for herself not the physical degradation, but instead the spiritual degradation. the, she feels herself no longer a subject, but actually becoming an object.

I came near to being broken. I almost was. I got up every morning with anguish. I went to the factory with dread. I worked like a slave. The noon break was a wrenching experience. I got back to my place at. 545, preoccupied immediately with getting enough sleep and waking up early enough, the feeling of

self-respect is destroyed. The main fact isn't the suffering, but the humiliation. She suffers physically during this time. She writes about how difficult the piecework is, and piecework at that time and now is literally get paid for each piece of something you make. She writes about how not only does she feel oftentimes like she's becoming a slave, and this is her terminology. She starts using this terminology of enslavement. Right. She's really enslaved to the machine.

Inslave to the machine and also to the foreman and also to the machinists who like know how to fix the machine if something goes wrong. And so there's these multiple levels of enslavement, which eventually she starts at the end of her factory journal. She writes that, and I'm not quoting exactly, but sort of paraphrasing, one of the main things that she experiences during that time is not the physical pain, but constant humiliation, the humiliation of the machine, the humiliation of the foreman, the humiliation of the other workers who don't help each other. because they all are forced to make this peace rate so that they actually get paid for their work. And how does she define humiliation? She doesn't explicitly define it at that point, but she does give one, I think, really pertinent example. She writes about how one Sunday, which is the only day off she has that week, she gets on a bus to go somewhere. And that in that moment, she is astounded and shocked that she, someone who is suffering in these factories, who is working physically harming herself emotionally and intellectually being harmed by the machines, by the people that she has to report to, that it suddenly shocks her that she can get on the bus like anyone else.

And humiliation then becomes this thing, or this experience, rather, where not only is someone exposed to constant tearing down oppression, rejection, yelling, all of these things, but also internalizes this, right? Becomes humiliated to themselves. And that's kind of what she, the way that she thinks about it. It's this, it's not just somebody else is humiliating me, but now I expect to be treated poorly because of this constant experience. Right. So it was almost like getting on the bus and being treated like everyone else on the bus is like, that's when she realized. Yeah. Wait, they're treating me like everyone else, but I expect to be treated differently.

I expect to be treated worse. Yeah. Yeah. it nearly gives her a breakdown. She is in no place to think she ever deserves a revolution, that she ever would deserve to move out of that type of factory life, of feeling so much less than of this cog in a machine, that for the rest of her life, she really sees herself as almost a slave,

as someone less than worthy. And with this in mind, she has so much respect for changing that system and how much action can and should change the way we think. Simone Vei wanted people to think. think for themselves and to think of others. And she believed that profound empathy is the key to building a more just world. The clatter, exertion, and humiliation of factory work revealed to her just how difficult that ideal can be. You're listening to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives.

That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location.

Visit Spexsavers.ca to learn more. Listen to this paid content by Beneva, now on CBC Listen. There are many factors that need to be considered in business. Experience and information can help you make informed decisions. Join host Catherine Duronso and her guests as they deep dive into the world of insurance and financial products. From claim prevention, consumer psychology, and organizational health, each episode gives you real-life examples and practical advice. Tune in to Beneva's brand new Ask the Experts podcast. learn more. After nearly 10 months of factory work, Simone Vei was all the more adamant that Marxism

was ultimately not the way to adjust society. She traveled to Spain to fight with the anti-fascist resistance in the Spanish Civil War, but her frailty and near-sightedness and an accident with a pot of boiling oil put an end to that. All along, she wrestled with ideas of what constitutes the Good, drawing on the philosophies of Plato and Rousseau. She also experienced intense spiritual revelations that drew her to Catholic mysticism, though she was never baptized. She doesn't join the church. She doesn't take baptism.

She doesn't take the comfort of the hierarchy and the knowledge and the prescriptions of the sort of messianic belief that someday Jesus will return and set everything straight. Right. Among the things that she writes, she writes, and again, I'm paraphrasing, something along the lines of Christian belief would be easier for me without the resurrection. The crucifixion itself suffices. And so she still remains grounded in this worldly ideal that people have to do the things to make the world better, right, or to make the world different,

that we can't just rely on the return of a religious figure or the appearance of a new president or Charles de Gaulle in London coming to save everyone in France. We can't rely on that. We have to do it ourselves. In 1942, as the Nazis were taking over, Europe, Simone Veix fled with her parents to the United States. But as soon as she could, she hopped on a ship back across the Atlantic and based herself in England, where she worked as a

philosopher in residence for Charles de Gaulle and the free French government in exile. She would die less than a year later at the age of 34. But during this period in England, she wrote a wave of seminal essays, including what can be read as a radical policy proposal. on the abolition of all political parties. The evils of political parties are all too evident. Therefore, the problem that should be examined is this. Do they contain enough good to compensate for their evils and make their preservation desirable?

Well, let's put it in context first. She's in 1943. She's writing for the free French. writing in the expectation that Nazism will be defeated and France will have the task of rebuilding itself after the defeat in 1940. And she's working off the back of the collapse of the Third Republic and the inability of the French political system to effectively resist Hitler and the inability of France to defend itself. She's reflecting on one of the great catastrophes in French history. And she's asking herself, what?

went wrong. Like so many other people are asking what went wrong. And her answer is one of the things that poisoned us were political parties. And they poisoned us because they encouraged group think. They encouraged a political form of arguing about what is true and what is false, what is happening, and what is not, that was propagandistic. It said, I'm going to tell you what you ought to think. And since the real goal of all political parties is power, everything they said was oriented and driven by their desire for power. There are three essential characteristics to political parties. One, a political party is a machine to generate collective passion. Two, a political party is designed to exert collective pressure on the minds of all its sense.

individual members. Three. The ultimate goal of the political party's growth without limits. Because of these three characteristics, every party is totalitarian, potentially, and by aspiration. And so political parties became a systematic instrument for the falsification of reality and the falsification of values. Political parties are a marvelous mechanism, which, on

the national scale ensures that not a single mind can attend to the effort of perceiving in public affairs, what is good, what is good, what is just, what is true. As a result, except for a very small number of fortuitous coincidences, nothing is decided, nothing is executed, but measures that run contrary to the public interest to justice and to truth. If one were to entrust the organization of public life to the devil, he could not invent a more clever device. I think that this really speaks to the heart of the problem of collectivities as a whole for Simone Vei. So this includes political parties, but it includes every single collective because what it asks of us is to stop thinking.

In joining the political party, we are no longer able to critically evaluate what's going on in front of us. And instead, we have to tow the party line. And she's actually confident that if people were freed from the pressure of conformity to a political ideology to a political party, their reason would allow them to deliberate freely and come up with a true sense, a shared sense of what is true and what is false, what is just and what is unjust. I have another quote.

Okay, so in fact, and with very few exceptions, when a man joins a party, he submissively adopts a mental attitude which he will express later on with words, such as a monarchist, as a socialist, I think that, it is so comfortable. It amounts to having no thoughts at all. Nothing is more comfortable than not having to think. And so you think if she were looking at the situation in the United States right now

and the way the Republican Party has evolved, would her observations then be bang on? I think there's no doubt that the Republican Party and the administration now is a movement with an ideology and above all with a clearly defined enemy. I mean, its enemy is liberalism. Its enemy is political correctness. Its enemy is pretty well everything I happen to believe, but that's not relevant to this. And pretty well everything, I'm pretty sure that Simone Vale believed, but that's also another, that's a judgment of mine. to the degree that a political party is taken over by a charismatic leader who subordinates everybody to his message, to the degree that that party uses that message as essentially a weapon of war in an ideological battle whose purpose is to destroy the other side intellectually.

Yeah, Simon Vale is saying this is a danger to freedom, because it's a danger, first of all, to free thought. If you lose three-thought, you then eventually lose everything that goes with freedom, namely the institutions that sustain it. And that makes her work pertinent and relevant to our day. For Simone Bay, one way to safety-proof the political system was to get rid of political parties, whose goal, she argued, was ever expanding growth. But her proposal to abolish political parties doesn't sit well with Michael Ignatjeff. She's anti-institutional. I think that's my problem. You can't do this on your own. You have to be in collectivities, difficult as they are, namely political parties, that force you to broker, that force you to compromise, that force you to figure out, okay, so what do we do together? Because you can't do this stuff on your own. You have to do it with others if you're going to have any weight influence and a chance of influencing events. And so there's a kind of willed, realism in her, which is irritating.

I mean, it's part of what's wonderful about her. She just doesn't care what other people keep telling her. She says, you know, and it's the sort of cussed stubbornness of Simone that I kind of admire, but I want to argue. I want to sit down with her in a cafe and say, come on, Simone, you know, get real. Exactly, get real. But he does agree with Vays' insistence, but to make. make a more just world, we have to do a better job of understanding each other, hearing each other

out. I'd add another quote, if you'll allow me. True attention is a thing so difficult for any human creature, so violent that any emotional disturbance can derail it, one must always endeavor strenuously to protect one's inner faculty of judgment against the turmoil of personal hopes and fears. It's a very live sense of what it is, what a struggle it is to think for yourself. That's what I take from her over and over again. And so what does attention mean to Simone Vei? So attention for Simone Vei is about being open to the world.

It is an ability to be open to what's going on around you, to consenting with this openness to the world as it's appearing before you. It could be said that this is a passive attention, but it's really not passive. It's incredibly active to be this open, to be this attentive to the surrounding world. If I do it with this openness and this attention, on this higher level, I am also allowing myself to be something more than just this small ego-driven version of myself. I'm allowing myself this openness and this expansion and this Simon Vei says is a connection to the divine. But more importantly, it's a connection to the ethical good. So in cultivating this type of attention, I'm then able to turn to another human being

to see them suffering, to ask them what they are going through, and then be able to be open and listen, to be able to hear that answer from them. So this is the process of what Vey refers to as decreation or this self-abnegation through which I, in a sense, am held ransom to the other. I step back so that the other can exist. And so how does this work on, just in a practical way, say I'm walking down the street in my own little bubble of comfort or wherever I am within the machinery of my society. What do I need to do to break that? So as I'm paying attention to the other, I'm walking down the street, I see someone else

if the attention is genuine, if I am able to, and I get to this point of being able to to genuinely pay attention by cultivating, by practicing it over and over again, to genuinely see this person. It's not as if I then say, oh, okay, I see them, what do you need? Oh, you need a coffee. I'll run to Tim Hortons. I'll grab you a coffee. It's, what if it was me who was there in that spot? And everyone was just walking by as if it didn't matter, but I was thirsty. or I was hungry, and there was no one who was helping me. What would I do then? What if it was my mother?

These types of questions, this is the level that she's asking us to engage with the other. What do I do in that situation? So it's a terrifying situation to put yourself in. What is the relationship between attention and then participation in? In politics. According to her essay on the abolition of all political parties, attention is something that stops us from joining political parties because if we are paying attention, then we're going to disagree with things that the party is saying.

We are going to push back against it. And then suddenly, if I disagree with my party, well, then in fact, I am not a part of that party because I disagree on these fundamental issues. So in that sense, attention bars us. But at the same time, she recognizes we need to be a part of these collectivities. We need to be a part of these political systems in order to enact change. So can we move within them, drawing in the marginalized voices, well, still attempting to pay attention? to the world. Her suggestion is the political party structure as it is needs to be abolished in order for us to actually be attentive in creating the political world that we would

want to live in. That would probably elicit a lot of chaos. So this is why you say, okay, some people think of her as utopian. Because yes, yes. absolutely. What would happen? Say we wipe out all political parties tomorrow. Then what? We just listen to each other attentively? Yes. So here you're absolutely right. This is where we have the utopian dimension. Rather than seeing it as this utopia, I would say that we need to consider how it is that we create structures where this ethical imperative can be at the core. In a lot of ways, they defies certainly anarchist thinkers, thinkers who really believe that everything, all political structures altogether should be abolished. She's more conservative than that.

She really is, at the end of the day, more of a reformist in her thought. She has this very firebrand reaction to all political parties being abolished, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all political structures need to be abolished. But we need to be rethinking their organization. And could that happen through reform for VE? I think so. Reformist? Maybe. Scott Rittner sees VAY's call for action through the lens. of a pessimist, a revolutionary pessimist. Revolutionary pessimism, I say, is this idea of action without expectation. And by expectation, I mean expectation of success.

There's a great union chant that a lot of people do at pickets and all sorts of things. And at sports games now, too, this I believe that we will win. I don't believe that we will. I don't believe that we will win. I don't, we can't look historically and say like, yeah, I believe that we will win. Like, no, what? We have to be prepared to lose as well. No one's coming to save us. We can't expect that someone or something will appear on the scene and make everything right. And we can't expect that even the actions that we take will make everything right. So, they, I think, from her earlier moments, her earliest writings in 1932, 1934, skeptical about this idea of revolution. She doesn't think that it will necessarily succeed. And she says that because she sees the Soviet Union as a failure of its ideas. She sees the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany and Hungary and Hungary and other places. and France. And she says, like, we can lose. We probably will lose. More often than not,

revolutionary changes take one form of oppression and replace it with another. And we can't anticipate that it will be different going forward. So we have to be prepared then to try and change society for the better, maybe fail to do it for the better, and then continue to try and and change it, rather than accepting what happens because we want it to be what we thought it was going to be. Right. And she wrote that we must prefer hell to an imaginary paradise. Yeah, that's one of my favorite quotes from her.

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise. We have to live in the world. And I think that this is why this is one of the reasons that she does never take baptism. She's never able to or willing to embrace the Catholic belief that what we're living for is a place in heaven. She doesn't want a place in heaven. She wants the world to be different than it is. even if it's still bad, we have to, we can't act towards our afterlife. We have to act towards our life and towards the life of everybody around us. And that's very practical.

It's very practical. And very real, tangible. Yeah. It's a, it's a, to put it in sort of political theory terms, it's a materialist philosophy. Materialist in the sense of worldly, touch, you can touch it. physical. So the one tangible thing she would say one could do is to figure out how to love your neighbor and empathize with them in the real world. Yeah. And sympathize too. There's both empathy and sympathy. If we were to beam her into the 21st century now, what do you think she would advise to those hoping to revitalize the health of their democracies? I think it's tremendously perilous to become a ventriloquist for Simone Vale more than 80

years after her death. I don't think you should. I think what you should do is read her and draw your own extrapolations. And I think the single thing I take. The single thing I take, from her is the tremendous importance for your personal integrity and for your political integrity to think for yourself. And know what you think is true and know what you think is just, know what you think is unjust, know what you think is untrue. And simply holding on to those simple ideas is crucial to any form of judgment that you're going to make in politics or your personal life. And she's fantastic about that. She's so clear and honest and insistent. And what I like about her particularly is she knows it's bloody difficult. You know, she's never giving

advice from some up in the sky. She's been there. She's had to struggle herself to find out what she thinks. And that's moving and inspiring. Simone Vey died before the end of World War II, before she could see whether her ideas would take hold in the broader world. The cause of her death is contested. She'd contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalized in London. but her illness was compounded by her insistence that she wouldn't

and then eventually couldn't eat more than what she believed were the rations in Nazi-occupied France. The coroner at the sanatorium where she died declared her death a suicide. Her close friends and family disagreed. The vast majority of her essays and writing were published after her death. Many have since interpreted her as an anarchist, A utopian, a mystic, a materialist. Catherine Lawson adds another way of characterizing Simone Vei,

an optimistic realist. I think about her as very similar to this kind of notion of either a utopian pessimist or a revolutionary pessimist, but kind of coming from the opposite side. So in the center, you end up with the same thing, namely being able to find action in an impossible situation, to continue moving forward to find hope or love, even in the worst moments possible. At the core of her philosophy, what Vey is really doing is connecting us to love. And in a lot of ways, this divine love, we could say the good, we could say God. I think we do need to have something of the divine in this forebé. But it is the heart of what she is doing.

And there's so much suffering within her thought. There's so much suffering in the world all around her that she really deeply feels. But why is it that we feel suffering and pain? It's because we know beauty. because we know love, we know relationships. And finally, Vey is also very inspired, not just by Christianity, but by the Bhagavad Gita. And one of the lines that I think is really helpful in thinking about Vey's position from the Bhagavagata Gita, you have a right to perform your duty, but never to the fruits of your actions. For Vey, in performing a

her duty in doing what we have to do in the world, we've already found that divine love. We've already found that connection to the other. We are already creating a better world. So are we going to get the fruits of our actions in a way that we would want to? Maybe, maybe not. In a sense, that's none of our business. All we can do are the actions. And so in this way, if we can achieve those actions, which we can, then we've won. This is where I see the optimism in it. So I could see if we're focused on the fruits, yes, we might be a little pessimistic about where we're going, but we can always act. And in that way, she is absolutely an optimist. to all of our guests.

My name is Catherine Lawson, and I am a faculty fellow at King's University College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My name is Scott Rittner. I am a political theorist by training. I teach political science and first year of writing at University of Colorado in Boulder. And I'm a scholar of Simone Vey. Hello, my name is Michael Ignativ. I'm a Canadian.

Professor of Historical Studies at Central European University in Vienna. I used to be the rector here, and now I'm back in the classroom. My name is Kitri Ervett. Who read the excerpts from Simone Vé's Factory Journal and on the abolition of all political parties. This episode was produced by Nikola Lugschich. Technical production, Emily Carvezio and Sam McNulty. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

The senior producer for ideas is Nicola. Al-Lukshich. The executive producer is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyed.