Low theory in exile and war: Josef Weber and undisciplined knowledge production.

Abstract

This article explores the political and intellectual trajectory of the German activist and writer Josef Weber as a practitioner of what has been termed "low theory": a collaborative, anti-systematic mode of knowledge production that emerged outside academic and party orthodoxies. It begins with a brief reconstruction of Weber’s political and intellectual formation, from his Weimar-era radicalisation to his emergence as a leading figure within the German Trotskyist exile milieu, before turning to his early and unorthodox defence of the churches as a progressive force in anti-fascist resistance. It then examines Weber’s distinctive habits of reading, writing, and sociability, showing how his engagement with literature, satire, exile journalism, and heterodox cultural forms informed an anti-systematic and anti-dogmatic perspective. The third section analyses Weber’s major theoretical works, situating his critique of capitalist regression, mass psychology, and doctrinal rigidity within broader disputes inside the Fourth International. Finally, the article turns to the break from the (post-Trotskyist) Movement for a Democracy of Content and the group’s sustained devotion to print culture, arguing that its defence of intellectual freedom against manipulation, censorship, and specialisation constituted an enduring practice of low theory: collaborative, interdisciplinary, and oriented toward the democratisation of knowledge under conditions of exile, defeat, and political marginalisation. Rejecting the idea that Marxism failed because dialectics had been theoretically disproven, Weber argues instead that capitalist fragmentation had eroded the social and cultural conditions necessary for dialectical consciousness itself.