ON SIMONE WEIL
Simone Weil lived at a time when the mass alienation of labor went hand in hand with the general standardization and commodification of the cultural code. The crisis of capitalism through the agony of the twentieth century was regenerating it into a completely new form, a form without a national idea and eternal tradition in the conditions of naked reproduction. Symbolic production began the process of its integration into material reproduction, and cultural "roots" increasingly lost their meaning, also being integrated.
For Weil, the modern factory loses its meaning within the framework of property - it is unable to provide either the worker, or the board of directors, or the shareholders in their need *to have*. The factory loses its meaning for the body, increasingly alienating the human soul. It is alienation that serves as the main reason for the separation of body and soul, which Weil poses as the main problem of the current mode of production and the cultural network. Despite her closeness to the Trotskyist and anarchist movements, her theory of "uprootedness" is far from a radical rejection of the ideas of nation, tradition and religion in favor of internationalism and the primacy of class struggle. Yet Weil's main goal is to reconcile the dualism of soul and body, for which capitalism stands in the way.
"Uprootedness" is still relevant today. Although I have already mentioned the role of tradition in Weil's philosophy, it is much deeper than that of the reactionary thinkers and movements of France at that time, such as Action Française. Without the rooting of man in his land and his people, wars, production, culture and simple human relationships lose their meaning. Capitalism divides the community - its whole nature opposes the rooting of man, because roots grow only in the cohesion of the people. No tradition can appear in a group where each person is alienated from the others.
Social institutions have ceased to shape social processes, and now social processes themselves shape institutions. Education does not give an understanding of what is naturally shown to a person, it gives a superstructure over a visual image. Previously, myth existed to connect knowledge and image, but with the death of myth, the connection itself was broken. And myth is synonymous with the root - it is regional, even large religious groups within themselves differ in their interpretation, descending in difference across all social groups to the family and the individual. And it is precisely in the example of religion that the substitution of cultural regionality is very visible. Large religions began to form small communities within themselves instead of independent communities forming a confederation of a large religion.
The capitalist crisis of the twentieth century brought this problem of alienation to the forefront. The fascist war machine, as a reactionary capital's offspring and openly ripped organs of this crisis, itself screamed with distinction about all the problems of capitalism and the death of tradition, while remaining an agonizing corpse of capital. But this time has long ended - having gone through a long joke of the Cold War, the process of shifting culture to alienated production has ended.