Weil on business

In her essay "Sketch of contemporary social life" (written in 1934), Simone Weil writes:

It seems as though the economic struggle has ceased to be a form of competition in order to become a sort of war. It is no longer so much a system of organizing the work as of squeezing out the greatest possible amount of available capital scattered about in society by marketing shares, and then of squeezing out the greatest possible amount of money from everywhere by marketing products; everything takes place in the realm of opinion, and almost of fiction, by means of speculation and publicity.

This is, in my opinion, a passage full of insights. "Competition" is said to be the most basic concept of business, but Weil seems to say that the present state is more suggestive of war than competition. I think she means that "competition" brings to mind a situation in which competition is based in real differences (quality, quantity, etc.), but that a naked struggle for increasing capital seems to have little to do with competition as something "material". A very rudimentary struggle of power, revolving around "conquest and destruction" rather than the production of things for real people.

What I think is especially important here is the way she points out the way the contemporary world of business has marginalized work and the importance of work (she talks about this in The need for roots as well). In other text she elucidates the all-important distinction between what it means to be an instrument of something good, and what it means to be treated as an instrument to be "squeezed out". In this quote, I also agree with her that "the business world" could be said to lack reality, to live in a dimension of almost-fiction. Of appearances, rumors, speculations, publicity. What I appreciated about Weil's writings is that she, among other things, make clear the dreadfulness of activities, in which we engage, that in many ways lack reality, connections to reality. Her conception of "the real" must, of course, be taken to be a moral concept, "the real" in distinction to "lofty ideas", "lies" or propaganda.