French philosopher Simone Weil was many things at once – mystic, factory worker, activist, militant, social thinker and moral psychologist. Over the course of a very short life, she devoted great attention to the actual existence of people. The incisive trajectory of her thinking and attention produced that rarest of commodities: durable insights that have aged well.
Today’s reading is from Oppression and Liberty, a collection of essays mostly written in the 1930s that deals with sociopolitical issues that reach back to the time of the French Revolution. It may ring a bell.
Every human group that exercises power does so, not in such a way as to bring happiness to those who are subject to it, but in such a way as to increase that power; it is a matter of life and death for any form of domination whatsoever. As long as production remained at a primitive stage of development, the question of power was decided by armed force. Economic changes transferred it to the plane of production itself; it was in this way that the capitalist system came into being. The development of the system later restored war as an essential means in the struggle for power, but under a different form; superiority in the armed struggle presupposes, nowadays, superiority in production itself. If the free play of competition is the final object of production in the hands of the capitalists, its final object in the hands of technicians organized into a State bureaucracy would necessarily be preparation for war. Besides, as Rousseau had already understood, no system of oppression is interested in the welfare of the oppressed; it is on their miserable condition that oppression can rest the more easily the whole of its weight.
As for the moral atmosphere that a régime of bureaucratic dictatorship can bring about, we can realize here and now what it can be like. Capitalism is only a system for exploiting productive work; if we leave out the proletariat’s efforts at emancipation, it has given full scope, in every branch of activity, to initiative, free enquiry, invention and genius. On the other hand, the bureaucratic machine, which excludes all judgment and all genius, tends, by its very structure, to concentrate all powers in itself. It therefore threatens the very existence of everything that still remains precious for us in the bourgeois régime. Instead of the clash of contrary opinions, we should have, on all subjects, an official opinion from which no one would be able to deviate; instead of the cynicism characteristic of the capitalist system, which severs all bonds between man and man in order to replace them by mere relationships of interest, a carefully cultivated fanaticism, calculated to make poverty, in the eyes of the masses, no longer a burden passively to be borne, but a sacrifice freely consented to; a mixture of mystical devotion and unbridled bestiality; a State religion that would stifle all individual values, that is to say all real values. The capitalist system, and even the feudal system, which, through the disorder which it involved, allowed here and there individuals and collectivities to develop in an independent manner, not to mention that blissful Greek system under which the slaves were at least employed in seeing to the wants of free men—all these forms of oppression appear as forms of a free and happy existence when compared with a system that would methodically destroy all initiative, all culture, all thought.
Image: Street art image of philosopher Simone Weil in Berlin Kreuzberg, via wikimedia commons.