What were Simone Weil's political views?

Complicated and evolving. She began as a syndicalist and Marxist-adjacent activist, writing for labor newspapers and participating in trade union organizing in the early 1930s. She never joined the Communist Party — she was too skeptical of institutions and too committed to individual experience over ideology.

By the late 1930s she had become critical of Marxism itself. Her essay "Oppression and Liberty" argued that the problem was not capitalism versus communism but the nature of power itself: any sufficiently organized group, regardless of ideology, tends toward domination. The bureaucratic state, left or right, reproduces the same patterns.

Why did she work in a factory?

To understand. She believed that philosophical thinking disconnected from bodily experience was partial. Working in the Renault factories in 1934–1935 gave her direct knowledge of what industrial labor does to a person — the monotony, the dehumanization, the physical exhaustion that prevents thought.

She described the experience as destroying her sense of self. The factory system, she wrote, treated workers as interchangeable parts — which was spiritually as well as materially damaging. Her analysis of this fed directly into her later thinking about affliction.

What is her relevance to political thought today?

Her insight that organized power tends toward oppression regardless of its stated ideology is a usefully uncomfortable one. Her analysis of what happens to the human spirit under mechanized, alienating conditions describes gig-economy precarity as well as factory labor.

And her insistence that justice is rooted in obligation to individuals — not abstract rights — offers a framework that cuts through ideological abstraction.