In her 1934 essay, “Analysis of Oppression,” the earliest in a series of political essays, the twentieth-century French philosopher Simone Weil touches upon the state of nature as a vital insight into the nature of human beings in society. Oppression is such a fundamental aspect of social relations that Weil does not stop short at the conclusion of Marx that oppression is intrinsic to material conditions and means of production. Weil sees oppression as a more profound human expression engendered by more specific conditions than contemporary labor or production. She criticizes the Marxian position as one of “correspondence.”
Weil notes that the idea that the function creates the organ is an idea of Lamarck, an outdated notion of biology. Darwin replaced “correspondence” with the notion of conditions of existence. Function is not a cause but the result. The evolution of anything social is essentially derived from each person as he or she is, individually, whether temperament, education, custom, bias, activities, in short in human nature. Weil argues that the conditions of existence, both the natural environment and the contrived social environment with its tools, equipment, and form of social organization, already dispose the individual. And if each individual enters an existing social context and its material means and conditions, the spectrum of oppression, always accompanying (as in Lamarck), is always a condition of human society.
The most primitive economy reflects Rousseau’s original state of nature. Though Weil never mentions Rousseau, the primitive state may thus be projected as far as material conditions. In this social organization, the level of production is extremely low or limited, with each person attempting to sustain himself individually or as a nuclear unit o a family. The division of labor is based on sex. Each family produces essentially what it requires for existence, probably no more, subject to environment and nature. There is no oppression because there is, strictly speaking, no social organization. Aggression, violence, and war consist of pillage or extermination, not conquest or occupation, which cannot be consolidated given the necessities of survival. Paralleling animals, the need for observation, intuition, and mastery of technique, occupy each individual’s every effort, excluding complex social organization.
As Weil puts it, “At this stage, each man is necessarily free with respect to other men, because he is in direct contact with the conditions of his own existence, and because nothing human interposes itself between them and him.” Weil notes that in primitive conditions, nature is divinized as all-powerful and determining. At this stage, the relationship to environment is the only form of servitude.
The development out of primitive economy is itself the replacement of nature as compelling force by other human beings. The force exerted by the compellers or oppressors is oppression itself. Power or force, exerted on the part of some over others, parallels the compulsion by the force which is nature and environment, but another factor advantages the oppressors, namely privilege. Power consolidates all of the mechanisms of oppression: inequality, authority, monopoly. The oppressor essentially intervenes in the life of the primitive man, the ordinary man simply exercising the effort to live and work. Intervention terminates independence, autonomy, and equality. As nature’s divinized power wanes and the oppressors’ power replaces it, the oppressors divinize their privilege. Weil elaborates:
“This is what happens to begin with when the religious rites by which man thinks to win nature over to his side, having become too numerous and complicated to be known by all, finally become the secret and consequently the monopoly of a few priests; the priest then disposes, albeit only through a fiction, of all of nature’s powers, and it is in their name that he exercises authority. Nothing essential is changed when this monopoly is no longer made up of rites but of scientific processes, and when those in possession of it are called scientists and technicians instead of priests.”
At this point, then, the evolution of human society begins. Social structure and history take off. As soon as this point is reached, too, the trajectory is established: the dominance of the few over the many, regardless of geography, culture, or era. The question then becomes how humanity can extricate itself from this apparently inevitable dilemma. For the sake of speculation about the state of nature the question asks how the individual, let alone the masses, can return to a state of equality and industry that is without oppression, a status of tolerance at a minimum, peace and stability at most. Centuries of history have failed to provide a mechanism for alleviating oppression, and, indeed, oppression grows more acute in time as both man and nature have become oppressors. Weil concludes that oppression seems intrinsic to society. “It would seem that man is born a slave, and that servitude is his natural condition.”