Kenneth Novis

Karl Marx’s militant methodology of workers’ inquiry is enjoying a moment of renewed interest. This methodology serves a twofold purpose. First, it acknowledges the epistemically privileged position of workers and, based on this, attempts to draw information about the organisation of the workplace from those who personally suffer from its brutality. Second, when asking workers to share their knowledge, the workers’ inquiry hopes to awaken a radical class consciousness in them by building autonomous bonds of solidarity as they investigate their own workplaces. Histories of the workers’ inquiry, as well as of the various political movements that explicitly adopted it, have rarely mentioned Simone Weil. This paper aims to show that Weil deserves recognition within this history for her direct investigations into factory life in 1934-5, and for her further efforts surrounding the journal Entre Nous. In doing so, it casts light on her adoption within the Italian labour struggles of the 1960-70s among associates of the radical operaismo movement. Finally, from Weil’s attempts to conduct a workers’ inquiry, it attempts to help bridge the gap between researchers and workers without importing academic ideologies (or what the operaisti called ‘culture’) – perhaps the central methodological puzzle of operaismo.

Writings on epistemic injustice have assessed how people can be harmed in their capacity as knowers when they are a racial minority, a woman, disabled and so on. But what about when they belong to the working class? This paper is an initial attempt to understand why class has so far received limited attention within writings on epistemic injustice and to respond to these reasons. It focuses on how testimonial and hermeneutic injustices specifically harm workers in ways distinctive from the harm one might suffer due to other social identities. It does this by drawing attention to the special case of industrial strike action and the play of conceptual resources and credibility assessments that influence the action’s success. Additionally, it provides a first-time exposition for social epistemologists on what I term the ‘class compositional approach’, derived from 1960-70s Italian labour struggles. This approach, I argue, succeeds in evading the criticism of class reductionism while developing recent philosophical work on class-based injustice.