Erudite inquiry into phenomenon of oppression
D.R. Chaudhry

Oppression and Liberty
by Simone Weil. Routledge Classics, London. £ 7.99. Pages 184

SIMONE WEIL was a well-known radical activist and a progressive thinker in France in the late thirties and early forties of the last century. She fought for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and was a member of the French resistance. Her potential could not be realised fully on account of her tragically early death at the age of 34.

The book delves into the inexorable phenomenon of oppression and man’s persistent quest for liberty. However, the author finds too many odds against liberty and the curse of oppression too potent. Those who operate the levers of oppression are replaced by others and the process carries on.

In her survey of mankind’s quest for liberty she finds social organisations in the primitive stages of civilisation to be really free from oppression. Extremely low level of production then made social division of labour well-nigh impossible except between the sexes. The surplus in the production of commodities led to the phenomenon of exercise of power.

The Paris Commune, in Simone Weil’s view, was a fine example of the creative power of the working class movement but on account of its spontaneous nature, it could not sustain the fight against organised forces of repression for long. "Equality, Liberty and Fraternity" was the ringing slogan of the French Revolution but what the French labouring people eventually got was, she quotes Marx, "Infantry, Cavalry and Artillery".

The author is a great admirer of Marx. She finds the entire works of Marx permeated with the passion for liberty. Sadly, all this degenerated into vulgar materialism at the hands of his followers. Thus, the Soviet Revolution that promised a new dawn for the mankind turned out to be an anti-thesis of everything Marx stood for. Her comments on this are truly thought provoking. She found that the expression of free opinion in the Soviet system was impossible unless one was, well to run the rick of being deported. In place of free play between parties within the framework of the Soviet system, the dictatorship of the proletariat in essence meant "one party in power, and all the rest in prison". The bureaucracy, freed from responsibility, controlled all economic and political power. Her concluding observation that this bureaucracy "is in no sense tending towards a renunciation of its powers, so that the term ‘transitional’ would in any case be wrong", has proved to be quite prophetic. It clung to the power with all the tenacity and strength at its disposal but the system eventually collapsed when the crisis brewed by a host of contradictions and distortions proved too powerful to be controlled.

Today many well-known Marxists in the world tend to agree with Simone Weil’s analysis of the Soviet system and opine that it built a monstrous kind of state capitalism in the name of socialism. She did not live long enough to analyse the subsequent revolutions in the world. The distinction between socialism and capitalism is gradually getting blurred in the Chinese system today, to give one example, because of the free play of multinational corporations there, thus giving rise to numerous problems plaguing the labour class.

What are the roots of oppression? While seeking an answer to this question, the author invokes the central concept of Plato — also a Christian postulate — that a beast resides in everyone. The beast makes one incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, except in the case of souls endowed with divine grace which alone can tame the beast.

How to attain this divine grace, one may legitimately ask. The author has no answer. And the answer is not easy. All organised religions in the world lay claim to monopoly over the divine grace. However, through their senseless crusades, inquisitions, intolerance and fanaticism they have heaped unspeakable misery on mankind.

At times the author sounds pessimistic and closer to the anarchist position that social order, howsoever necessary, is, ipso facto, interwoven with oppressive structures. The issues raised by her, however, are too fundamental to be skipped over by social thinkers.

Simone Weil’s sombre thoughts that often sound depressing have acquired an all-the-more authentic ring today when one sees the mighty and the powerful marching unchallenged in an unipolar world with hitherto unknown arrogance, insolence and self-righteousness. Routledge Classics has done well in bringing out a reprint of this important treatise translated by Arthur Wills and John Petrie into flawless English.

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