Philosophy, politics, autonomy Book

In some ways a strange collection--the central essay is excellent, and some of the little squibs associated with it here are good, but I'm not sure you need to read the whole thing. The earliest piece suggests that the 20th century would witness a new form of oppression based on bureaucracy; it could be tied to power, as in the USSR or fascist states, and it's perfectly at home in capitalism too, except it eliminates most of the (non-economic) benefits of the latter. What to do given all this? We must accept that the working class has been destroyed, that 'socialism' is a form of oppression, and accept that we live in a world of total alienation. Better to understand this, she suggests, and hope for something better, than stick our heads in the sand. Fair enough.

She then asks if there can be organization without bureaucratization, and makes a case study of Lenin's thought--hardly the first place you'd go now, but more understandable in 1933. The answer, unsurprisingly, is that Lenin's thought does not give us a model of organization without bureaucratization, because he sees humans as objects, wants the masses to believe rather than think, that is, to blindly submit to "science". Which sounds like a good description of most forms of 21st century government, with a few tweaks on the definition of "science."

The main essay is a bit more diffuse, but also a laudable attempt to construct a unified theory of oppression. Weil starts with Marx, but insists that he only theorized one kind of oppression, not oppression as a whole. It's important to know what we mean when we say "oppression," because any use of the language of "revolution" without a clear concept of the former is empty--revolution away from what?

So we have to know, is it "possible to conceive of an organization of production which, though powerless to remove the necessities imposed by nature and the social constraint arising therefrom, would enable these at any rate to be exercised without grinding down souls and bodies under oppression"? To know that, we must set up, as an ideal, a model of social organization that is free of oppression entirely--while acknowledging that such a thing will never happen. It's a regulative ideal. Given our objective conditions, what is the least oppressive form possible? And how do we get there?

She argues that "oppression is exercised by force," and spends some time theorizing what "force" is--which is very similar to a lot of Marxist and Frankfurt school thought on why, despite the possibility of meeting everyone's needs, we do such a great job of meeting only a few people's. Weil's theory of "force" allows her to suggest that there is a contradiction at the heart of oppression: the material bases of power are necessarily limited, but the race for power is unlimited. Conflict is inevitable.

She gives us one version of the regulative ideal, based on recognizing the importance of collectivities and collective action, but also the importance of individual understanding and action within those collectivities--again, very post-Marxist, a vision of "society in which collective life would be subject to men as individuals instead of subjecting them to itself." She concludes with a scathing portrait of 20th century life as pretty much the opposite of this.

The book ends with fragments and an essay. The fragments are, well, fragments, but with some great little bits included, particularly on the use of contradiction in thinking (which comes very close to Adorno's negative dialectics). The essay, 'Is there a Marxist doctrine?' argues that there isn't, and, more or less, if there was one, it would be Christianity. You might not agree with that, but her argument that there is not yet a Marxist doctrine is convincing.

Weil is a real treasure, and she should be taken very seriously by anyone interested in critical theory of any stripe. She isn't, because critical theory types have, in the past, tended to be secular humanists of the no-time-for-any-religious-people kind. She saw the horrors of the USSR--not in practice, which anyone could have seen, but in theory--far earlier than most French people, at least (and thus contradicts Tony Judt's constant carping about French intellectuals). She made theoretical innovations that nobody else managed for thirty years. And she can write sentences that don't hurt my eyes. A minor miracle.