GEORGE SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST
Kolakowski, Leszek
Leszek Kolakowski Georges Sorel: Jansenist Marxist In what sense is Georges Sorel’s writing part of the history of Marxism? Sorel did not participate in any political movement that laid...
...In a natural and inevitable way, the party signifies the subordination of the proletariat to professional politicians...
...78 18 Ibid., p. 380...
...he only defined its limits as an instrulment of teclhnical manipulation-in describing physical as well as social reality...
...Such comparislons are not after all groundless...
...The utopians found ist easy to write constitutionls for all the peoples of the world because they didn’t bother much with real history-but Marxism is in fact an lanalysis of real, not rationalized hisitorical processes...
...Marxism is closer to bourgeois Manchester economics than to utopian writing because it is a realistic look at a society torn apart by class warfare, which can be neither mitigated nor avoided...
...He made it easy for superficially educalkd men of the world, without any professional training, to talk in the salons about science on the basis of that “natu~al light” that makes every man capable of passing judgment on any subject...
...Furthermore, political revolution is based, not on the Marxlan doctrine of class division, but on an anti-Marxist opposition between the poor and the rich...
...He maintains that if socialism is to prevail, it must give humans all the values that they had found earlier in the teachings of the Church...
...Just GEORGES SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST 75 as the impulse of the revolutionary movement is not misery, but class opposition, and the workers’ movement is not a movement of the poor trying to deprive the rich of their estates, but one of direct producers who want to be the organizers lof production, so the chief values of socialism are in the sphere of morality, not welfare...
...According (to Bergson’s theory of personality and evolution, free creativity incessantly initiates the future...
...For he was not, and did not want to be, the legislator of the new order, but rather the prophN of the Great Catastrophe...
...The entire socialist idea is contained in the myth of the general strike, that is, the whole of the proletariat's consciousness, which radically transcends existing smiety, looks for no alliances, expects no aid from any quarter, and strives with maximum shanpness to mark its total alienation from the views of the contemporary world...
...One can find many valid remarks in Sorel’s oritique of rationalist naYvet6s...
...Marx regarded such notions as a pettybourgeois utopia, explaining that workers’ self-government in itself is not capable of abrogating the law of competition and production anarchy, and that the Proudhonian ideal, if it could be realized, would immediately bring back all the disasters of capitaliism connected with accumulation and anarchy...
...They taught him to be politically siober and to look for vested initeresits behind the humanist rhetoric...
...The society in which “everything is for sale”-in which all traditional ties of solidarity, familial, tribal, and local, consequently sundered-was subjected to criticism by all the romantic philosophers, including the young Marx...
...But, in its main (points, his critique of the orthodox klievens is close to the anarchist argument...
...ensnared in corruption and struggles for power and privilege, like the one-time Rome/Whore of Babylon in the eyes of the German reformer...
...Rati’cmalism produces cefiain simplified speculative models, which then replace, in the thought process, the intricate realities of the world...
...A discouraging spectacle for sublime souls, who believe in the supremacy of science in the modern order, expecting revolution to result from vigorous mental effort and imagining that the idea has ruled the world ever since it was freed from clerical obscurantism...
...Sorel’s anti-intellectualism, it must be noted, is far more radical than Bergson’s...
...Marxism is the truth of its time in the same sense bhat early Christianity was the truth of its own time...
...For the same reason his passionate defiense of Lenin and the Bolsheviks is extremely ambiguous...
...Such a revolution does not strive for party dictatorship...
...To some extent the Bernstein case prompted him to a criticism of orthodoxy, buit won his criticism went off in a complotely different direction...
...That same despotism would threaten society if power were handed over to people like Jaurks, who use humanist phraseology to poison the proletariat with the bourgelois desire for political power for proletarian parties, instiead of educating it to wage war against institutions of social authority...
...Myth demands total acceptance or total rejection, and the believer in the myth is indifferent to arguments intended to militate against its feasibility...
...63 In other words, Sorel treated Marxism as the tool that in his age could most effectively further the realization of man’s higher values -although those values, for Sorel, were independent of Marxism, both genetically and in content...
...he automatically proved, therefore, that an attack on 211 existing intellectual culture is a support for )barbarism, if it is not upheld by already existing values of the new culture or if it does not make clear what exactly is being oppowd to this culture...
...Sorel did not consider himself an orthodox believer, and he was not sparing in his critical remarks, when he considered them important, both with regard to Marxists and Marx himself...
...His presumably Jansenist upbringing inocultated him with an antipathy to any optimistic faith in the inherent goodness of human nature, in the ease of triumph over evil, and in the possibility of atltaining great vlalues with small efforts...
...In Sorel’s mind, however, mythic faith wi’ll completely replace the social sciences, and all practical actions must be sulbordinated to an expectation of an undefined and essentially undescibable apocalypse...
...He had many close !ties to Iitaly...
...The discerning critic of rationalism became in the end a worshiper of the Great Dragon, to whom the blind, fanatical mob voluntarily throws itself to be devoured in the tumult of a war dance...
...This phsilosophy is created spontaneously, and the revolutionary syndicalist movement develops through the efforts of people whose knowledge of Marxism is rather superficial...
...In The Socialist Future of the Syndicates he says thatt “socialism will be a society organized according to the production plan,” that this system “aims to transfer to society the regime of the production workshop,” l4 and that all social matters will pass to the level of production units...
...The Encyclopedia did not contribute to the development of any science...
...A great change will take place in the world on the day the proletariat acquires, as did the bourgeoisie after the Revolution, the feeling that it can think according to its own conditions of life.8 Work will be the foundation of the new proletarian culture : . . . work can serve as a basis for a culture that would give no cause to regret the passing of bourgeois civilization...
...Sorel also agreed with those anarchists who underscored the necessity of a ‘‘moral revolution” as an integral component of the social revolution...
...The Encyclopedia did not contribute to the development of any science...
...The myth of the proletariat is the general strike...
...there is thus no longer any place for the reconciliation of contraries in the equivocations of the professor~.~ Myth is neither “thinking” about the future nor planning tor it...
...Revolutionary syndicalism means to bring the world such a universal renaissance, taking for its pint of departure the proletariat as an encllave completely separated from the rest of society...
...AT FIRST GLANCE it may seem strange that a writer who attacks with such intransigent hostility all state and party institutions, as well as all patriotic ideas, could be recognized as an ideologist of incipient fascism and supply the functionaries and apologists of brutal nationalist tyranny with arguments -all the more since Sorel, unlike Nietzsche, adopted essential components of the Marxist faith...
...It too is a repetition of something that ‘was: it is a rejuvenation of (the world through the {breaking of all ties with tlhe dominant culture...
...In this respect he is unique...
...The syndicalist movement is such a spontaneous act of great renewal, which can regenerate the working class, corrupted by politicians and legislation, and in time bring mankind salvation...
...Thlat is, it implied that in the cultural fund of existing society there are general values, which socialism is not only capable of assimilating, but of which it alone will be the legitimate heir...
...This is what Savigny did, opposing the rationalist doctrine of the social contraa with a historioal investigation of law, arising at first las local custom and stratifying by degree in the course of consecutive ‘adaptations...
...Rationalists also imagine that rational motives govern all behavior-hence they are incapable of perceiving ‘thepsychological iatricacies and numerous conflioting motives that influence life, the tremendous importance of tradition land custom, and biological, especially sexual, circumstances in social development...
...In a natural way, commercial trade fostered the growth of a morality in which a prominent part was played by a capacity for compromise, negotiation, and auction, and also by a capacity for hypocrisy, cheating, rhetorical skills and demagogy, a spirit of competition and calculation, a fondness for wealth and comfort, a disregard for tradition, rationalist inclinations, efficiency in foresight and reasoning, and the supremacy of the ideal of success...
...It establishes, apart from syndicates, other forms of organization, committees or parties, or ready-made forms of the coming organization...
...Revolutionary syndicalism means to bring the world such a universal renaissance, taking for its pint of departure the proletariat as an encllave completely separated from the rest of society...
...slorel’s arbitrary handling of the Marxian heritage can be easily recognized in his definition of class, which he puts forth as Marx’s own thought: a community of families united by traditions, interests, and political views, families that have acquired such a degree of solidarity that the whole can be ascribed personality and treated as a being reasoning or acting according to its own interests.lT Sorel did not acknowledge anarchism, because the anarchism of his time lacked a clearly defined profile in respect to class and traditionally enlisted in its ranks the lumpenproletariat or the declassed intelligentsia...
...He did not care about the consistency and structural virtues of his writing...
...The entire socialist idea is contained in the myth of the general strike, that is, the whole of the proletariat's consciousness, which radically transcends existing smiety, looks for no alliances, expects no aid from any quarter, and strives with maximum shanpness to mark its total alienation from the views of the contemporary world...
...He called for a break in cultural continuity-in the name of a more perfect culture that would return to the popular sources of legislation and morality...
...Proudhon also imagined ‘the future order as a loose federation of industrial-agricultural associations, with a concentration of public life in communal and provincial a3sociations, with full freedom of assembly and the press, and without a sttanding army...
...Utopia and Myth...
...Translated by T. E. Hulrne and J. Roth, Introduction by Edward A. Shih (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), p. 140...
...it can be apprehended only in la single act of intuitive perception, as Bergson described it...
...In Greece, pessimism was the ideology 'of the warlike mountain tribes, impverislhed, proud, unyielding, and itied ti0 tradition...
...He dreamed of a free society, that is, an association of producers who have no masters over them...
...Having lost hope that the proletariat would cast itself in the role he assigned it, Sorel could then turn to nationalism without renouncing his main idea when he came to the conclusion that national ideas are mure promising as seeds of the great myth...
...The spirit of radicalism and intransigence is more important to him than the content of what this radicalism and intransigence refer to...
...The syndicalist revolution requires an expansive capitalism, choking, not on its impotence, but on its own excessive energy...
...lo V Moral Revolution...
...He opened his eyes to the proletariat-a clearly individualized class of ‘direct producers who are forced to sell <their labor power and embody the htope of a toltal revolultilon that would liberate mankind...
...Sorel did not participate in any political movement that laid claim to Marx’s inheritance...
...The first two books had been previously published in installments in the periodioal Mouvement socialisre, which was edited by Hubert Lagardelle...
...any attempt to discuss how far it can be taken literally as future history is devoid of sense...
...But they lacked the moral preparation to rule and could only imitate the ancien rkgime...
...Myth is nolt a description of the future perfect reality...
...VI Marxism, Anarchism, Fascism SOREL’S WRITINGS, as was said earlier, contain a composition of values and ideas quite dihent from that of any orthodox Marxist or of any critic of Marxism...
...In every struggle Sorel is more interested in Ithe heroism of the wsrriors than in the validity of the case or in victory...
...He began his literary career at a time when he had nothing in common with Marxism...
...Sorel charges the socialists with failing to think seriously about human nature and final goals, with taking over the shallow metaphysics of the 18th-century freethinkers, with failing to notice the tremendous role that evil plays in Marx’s historiosophy, and with failing to equal the Church in understanding mankind because of their rational optimism...
...Sorel particularly stresses this last point...
...The revolutionary orthodoxy of the Second Internationlal always emphasized the necessity of a clear separation of the proletariat...
...It is ricorso in the sense Vico gave to the word...
...He hoped, unsuccessfully, to be the Luther of the Marxist movement, which he saw as The present article is a chapter from a history of Marxism, which will be published by Clarendon Press...
...For Sorel, Marxism was above all the poetry of the Great Apocalypse, which he identified with the social revolution...
...Myth is not a kind of utopia, but its precise opposite...
...Sorel is attracted by images of uncivilized bandit tribes, solitary communities struggling for survival rather than for pleasure or comfort, ruthless in battle but untainted by the spirit of cruelty, preserving aristocratic pride in their poverty, committed to tribal tradition, cherishing their freedom, and prepared to fight to the end against foreign domination...
...Slorel’s appeals were well suited to the spiritual situation in which fascism found its support...
...The peculiarity to which, in Marx’s opinion, all of capitalism can in a way be reducednamely, the subordination of production to exchange value-is the most perfect product of this current in civilization...
...Pessimists do not clontemplate any universal 'theory of the world Ithat would establislh rational order...
...In Sorel’s view, the general strike does not fit into the stereotyped opposition between “economic” and “political” strike...
...Examples of rationalist constructions are ‘all those simplistic theories of human nature thlat perceive man las a collection of certain permanent, general qualities and types of behavior, disregarding the historical Goditions that influence aatual human aativities...
...Sorel charges the socialists with failing to think seriously about human nature and final goals, with taking over the shallow metaphysics of the 18th-century freethinkers, with failing to notice the tremendous role that evil plays in Marx’s historiosophy, and with failing to equal the Church in understanding mankind because of their rational optimism...
...The great writers of liberal conservatism‘I’ocqueville, Taine, and Renan-heavily influenced Sorel in Ithe first period of his writing, and in ceutain respects that influence extended also to his Malrxist phase...
...Criticism of the Enlightenment What Sorel contends with under the nlame of rationalism is not a defined philosophical thesis...
...Thanks to this diversity of influences, Sorel shaped a unique ideological work, shattering the ltraditionial fusions of values and joining ideas as no one had done before him...
...on this point Sorel agrees with Vandervelde, when the latter says that a victory by the workers unaccompanied by a radical moral transformation would plunge the world into such suffering, cruelty, and injustice no less terrible than that which reigns at present...
...Sorel, therefore, could remain what he was, as those prime values were concerned, and still change his attitude toward Marxism...
...task-all those things that socialist politicians kill off when they coax the exploiters into making paltry concessions at the cost of working-class demoralization...
...they are conscious of the narrow limits in which our social schemes are tackled-limijts determined by human frailty, the weight 'of tradition, and the inadequiacy of science...
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...10003From each according to his ability it is a triumph of freedom over alleged economic necessities, and because it is a protest against the tradition of Russian “occidentalism” in the name of Muscovite national traditions...
...Ricorsi occur when the human spirit returns to imts primeval state, where everything in society is instinctive, creative, and poetic, as in the age of early Christilanity or in the decline of the Middle Ages...
...13 “The Decomposition of Marxism,” p. 231...
...Thanks to this diversity of influences, Sorel shaped a unique ideological work, shattering the ltraditionial fusions of values and joining ideas as no one had done before him...
...It is a state of consciousness that anticipates and prepares for the violent destruction of the existing world, bult not by opposing to it a ready-made construction of the coming paradise...
...Sore1 died in 1922 in Boulogne-sur-Seine, where he had lived for ‘s1orn.e time...
...he mentions Sorel once in passing and with total scorn...
...Revolutions carried out in conditions of disorder and the fall of a previous regime do not improve anything, but petrify the existing decline...
...That is why these utopias never actually threaitened established systems of power...
...In all these areas there is a growth of dignity, magnanimity, heroism, solidarity, and individual responsibility...
...He cannot be contained in any classification commonly applied to that period of socialist thought...
...One must be blind not to see the dawn of a new age in the Russian Revol~tion.~~ And in the 1919 appendix to Reflections Bolshevism owed a good part of its power to the fact that the masses regarded it as a protest against an oligarchy whose greatest concern had been not to appear Russian...
...Sore1 had an extremely vague notion of Lenin’s doctrine...
...He remained aloof from political quarrels and party strife...
...He left behind him a vague trace of associations with Italian fascism, which for a time-through Mussolini and other ideologists of the movement -declared him its prophet...
...For the same reason his passionate defiense of Lenin and the Bolsheviks is extremely ambiguous...
...He was also one of the few who attempted to mold Marxism according to the philosophical style of neo-Romanticism, to conceive of it pragmatically, activistically, with an emphasis on psychological conditions, recognizing the independent role of tradition, in a radically antipositivist and antirationalist spirit...
...Just GEORGES SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST 75 secret of the future, and it advances like capitalism, throwing itself into every fissure that opens up.12 Hence revolutionary syndicalism struggles against the spirit of utopia as much as against the spirit of Blanquism-that is, the doctrine that a conspiratorial group, identifying themselves as the mandatories of rhe proletariat, can seize power in favorable circumstances and transform the subsequent society by means of violence and repression...
...he only defined its limits as an instrulment of teclhnical manipulation-in describing physical as well as social reality...
...it is only an expression of readiness for destructive action...
...But an attack on rationalism, if it is not clearly distinguished from an attack on intelligence or if it declares a “philosophy of hands” (it is hard to mark the difference between the “philosophy of hands” and the “philosophy of the fist”), turns into a call for the destruction of thought for the sake of violence...
...Until the working class has at its command a strong economic organization and a very ‘high degree of moral independence, the dictatorship of the proletariat means the dictatorship of club orators and literati.lS Neither can the syndicalist revolution result from the economic decadence of capitalism...
...In morality the clear and rational layers refer to relations of reciprocilty, similar to commercial trade, whereas sexual life is a shadowy domain that is very difficult to reduce to slimple formulas...
...And yet, in the years when his most important writings were conceived, Sorel did not merely consider himself a Marxist...
...Absurd in its very premise (the leaders of the Revolution attempted to solve economic difficulties with bloody repressions land were obviously doomed to fail), this terror was justified by Rousseau’s doctrine of the social contract, kause the Jacobin’s lost all their scruples at the very moment when they declared themselves the embodiment of the general will...
...He did not write any treatises on historical materialism...
...He believed in the class nature of the socialist movement and emphasized the absolute separateness of the class of producers as the carrier of revolution...
...The real life of history is GEORGES SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST 69 more like art than a lucid logical consitruction...
...But he looked for the basic values of thmat society in its exclusive concern with material production, whereas Mm believed that the greatest attainment of socialism will be leisure, which people will be able to devote to cultural creation, while the amount of time devoted to producing material goods will grow smaller...
...A technical education and work as an engineer implanted in him, in turn, a cult of professionalism, a dislike of dilelttantism and empty rhetoric, a conviction of the fundamental role of production (in contrast to exchange) in the society’s social life, and an admiration for capitalism in its acquisitive, primary, ruthless forms full of energy and a spirilt of expansion, untainfted by philanthropy or accommodaltim...
...the idea of establishing a government of producers will not perish...
...GEORGES SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST 73 letariat...
...He believed that he would succeed in extracting from Marx’s philosophy its real core-the idea of class war and the independence of the proletariat-and he attempted to oppose his own Marx to all contemporary orthodox thinkers, both revolutionary and reformist...
...Translated by John and Charlotte Stanley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp...
...In a natural and inevitable way, the party signifies the subordination of the proletariat to professional politicians...
...Like the scholastics, Desaartes placed be tween man and reality ingenious reduotive machines that make the Itrue use of intelligence impossible...
...Rationalists are acuustomed to reducing society to an labstract universal man, which makes it very easy for Ithem to spin out their speculations about the perfect society and to build ubpian fictions of the future, free from confliuts, chance, or contradictory aspirations...
...not only does the party not lead to the liberation of the proletariat, but it effectively defeats that liberation and at most replaces one tyranny with the tyranny of party functionaries, parliamentary speakers, and clubs of newspaper reporters...
...Leszek Kolakowski Georges Sorel: Jansenist Marxist In what sense is Georges Sorel’s writing part of the history of Marxism...
...For the same reason it is not in the interests of the working class to weaken capitalislm by forcing it to agree to legislative concessions and reforms...
...He desires the taal spiritual separation of Ithe proletariat from all bourgeois culture...
...He involved himself, to be sure, in all the great theoretical polemics of his age, but he did so from the outside, and the guardians of orthodoxy paid him scant polemical attention...
...It establishes, apart from syndicates, other forms of organization, committees or parties, or ready-made forms of the coming organization...
...He was prepared to support anything that appeared heroic and threatened to extinguish the world he hated-democracy, party struggles, compromises, negotiations, and calculation...
...Thlat is, it implied that in the cultural fund of existing society there are general values, which socialism is not only capable of assimilating, but of which it alone will be the legitimate heir...
...use must be made of a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before any considered analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against modern society...
...The syndicalist revolution requires an expansive capitalism, choking, not on its impotence, but on its own excessive energy...
...The question is not merely one of organizational purity, but even more of spiritual purity...
...Sorel also agreed with those anarchists who underscored the necessity of a ‘‘moral revolution” as an integral component of the social revolution...
...Separation of the Classes...
...it lives in the present, but shapes it: The myth must be judged as a means of acting on the present...
...It no longer wants to be a “scientific” plan of the coming society or to replace the bourgeoisie in the organization of pmduction: it wants to be the ideology of radical class warsare...
...ited extent in Germany...
...One can find many valid remarks in Sorel’s oritique of rationalist naYvet6s...
...he mentions Sorel once in passing and with total scorn...
...g Consequently the proletariat, whlch has been summoned to carry it out, cannot have ‘any moral attitudes toward other classes: “People who have devoted their life to a cause which they identify with the regeneration of the world, could not hesitate to make use of any weapon which might serve to develop to a greater degree the spirit of the class war...
...Utopias are dangerous because they appeal to lthe privileged classes, counting on their common sense, enlightenmenit, or philanthropy, and thus weakening the understanding of the class struggle on the part of the proletariat...
...Marx showed Sorel the social place where a revolution of renewal would take place...
...The proletarian revolution was to be such la return to the cradle, a restoration of the originlal values thst were alive in tribal moralilty...
...Sorel dreamed of a morally and theoretically pure Marxism...
...Political revolution aims to obtain power...
...In the evolution of the doctrine he could pass as an accidental extravagance...
...A great change will take place in the world on the day the proletariat acquires, as did the bourgeoisie after the Revolution, the feeling that it can think according to its own conditions of life.8 Work will be the foundation of the new proletarian culture : . . . work can serve as a basis for a culture that would give no cause to regret the passing of bourgeois civilization...
...any attempt to discuss how far it can be taken literally as future history is devoid of sense...
...The peculiarity to which, in Marx’s opinion, all of capitalism can in a way be reducednamely, the subordination of production to exchange value-is the most perfect product of this current in civilization...
...and La De‘composirion du marxisme (1908...
...On the other hand, adherents of political revolution, or contemporary socialists who aim to take the place of the privileged minority, are disposed toward cruelty and inquisitorial methods, as the terror of the Great Revolution showed most clearly...
...the utopians began to imagine naively that the future of society can be oalculated like an astronomical prediction...
...Sorel, by the way, #attaches particular importance to sexual discipline and family virtues, regarding sexual dissolution and the weakening of family ties, which he ‘sees as the basic source of morality, as the natural ally of bourgeois society...
...Giambatltisto Vico supplied Sorel with ithe concept that was to form the conltenit of the coming revolution: ricorso, mankind’s cyclical returns to its forgotten sources...
...Examples of morally worthy violence are acts of spontaneous justice, as in the Corsican vendetba, in lynch law, or among Norwegian mountaineers...
...Also in contnast (to utopia, myth apprehends the existing world as an interconnected whole, which can be destroyed only as a whole...
...IV Ricorsi...
...But an attack on rationalism, if it is not clearly distinguished from an attack on intelligence or if it declares a “philosophy of hands” (it is hard to mark the difference between the “philosophy of hands” and the “philosophy of the fist”), turns into a call for the destruction of thought for the sake of violence...
...The syndicalist movement is such a spontaneous act of great renewal, which can regenerate the working class, corrupted by politicians and legislation, and in time bring mankind salvation...
...He believed that he would succeed in extracting from Marx’s philosophy its real core-the idea of class war and the independence of the proletariat-and he attempted to oppose his own Marx to all contemporary orthodox thinkers, both revolutionary and reformist...
...The history of the idea of democracy 14 MatCriaux, p. 70...
...Lilbtle ‘by Me, Sorel began to mount ever more virulenit attacks against the swialist party movement, parliamentary democracy, and what he called political socialism in distinotion to syndicalism...
...Thanks to Mcarxism, socialism breaks off with utopian thinking...
...Les illusions du progrBs (1908) ;Mate‘riaux d’une theorie du proletariat (1908, a collection of writings dating back ito 1898...
...On the other hand, adherents of political revolution, or contemporary socialists who aim to take the place of the privileged minority, are disposed toward cruelty and inquisitorial methods, as the terror of the Great Revolution showed most clearly...
...In the renewal of this morality, as opposed to mmmercial morality, he sees the most legitimate sense of the socialist idea...
...History develops, as Bergson noted, by creating the unforeseeable...
...Sore1 scoffs at Destriie and Vandervelde for imagining socialism as a land of roasted pigeons, like the abbey of ThClhme in Rabelais...
...the utopians began to imagine naively that the future of society can be oalculated like an astronomical prediction...
...The coming revolution will “mark an absolute separation between two historical eras...
...The optimislts believe that evil comes from deficiencies in legislation or enlightenment, or from la lack (of humanist feelings...
...Sorel is certainly like Marx in understanding socialism not simply as an “improvement of social organization,” but as a total transformation, embracing all aspects of lifej including morality, thought, and philosophy...
...Despite his fundamental hostility toward reformism, however, he retained his res@ and appreciation for Bemstein, regarding him a3 an honest critic who1 aimed above all lat showing ithe German socklists that their revolutionary programs had nothing in common with their tactual ‘politics-to which Sorel subscdxd without resematim...
...The general strike is the destruction of existing society without any desire for power, because it aims to turn over productive forces to free men, who can control production without any need for masters...
...After coming to power, ithe Italian Fascists frequently honGEORGES SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST 67 ored Sorel as their spiritual patron, but this was merely verbal homlage...
...This wnfusim-deservedly attacked by Pascal-was born under the influence of Cartesianism...
...He was also repelled by those anarchist groups, of Bakuninist pmvenance, Which engaged in conspiratorial work on authoritarian principles...
...Les illusions du progrBs (1908) ;Mate‘riaux d’une theorie du proletariat (1908, a collection of writings dating back ito 1898...
...Beginning wiith Plato, utopian literature is a typical, fruitless product of rationalist illusions...
...Proudhonian is the concept of (the proletariat as a kind of primitive tribe, which is forced to divide the world into itself and all the rest...
...the philosophers played the part of jesters at the royal court (“tattlm, peddlers of satires or panegyrics, and especially jesters for the degenerated aristocracy”-such is Sorel’s general characterization of Enlighknment ideology...
...10 lbid., p. 209...
...His critiques of reformism are often rmarkably simillar to those that can be found in the orthodox left wing of social democracy...
...The connection with Marxism, on the other hand, does seem accidental...
...With this perspective he enithusiastically welcomed the Russiian Bolshevik Rwolution, in which he ialso saw a turningamy from “Occidentdism” and la return to Musco&e natbnal sources...
...He created his own brand of Marxism, supplemented by the most varied sources, and pet his brand was not at all eclectic but, internally, unusually coherent...
...But the final conclusions of his critique diverge significantly from Marx’s...
...The world will be more just only to the extent that it is purer...
...After the 1920s his ideas did not have any influence in any daction of the socialist movement or in the Communist Intermational...
...Myth is an irresolvable and even inexpressible totality...
...The idea that “political” or “party” socialism is merely an augury of a new tyranny and the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat as a form of government will make the working class a prey to despotic professional politiciansthese ideas, since Bakunin’s time, have been a constant theme in anarchist propaganda (Machajski in particular was their passimate advocate...
...Immunizing mytholugy against any rational criticism, Sorel thus justified beforehiand the social movements that programmatically appealed to irrational “instincts,” land in this respect his reception by the Fascists Is not based on a misunderstanding...
...Fascism drew its strength from a feeling 17 Ibid., p. 184...
...For Sorel, the hope of the proletariat does not lie in parties or trade unions struggling for immediate improvements in the living conditions of the proletariat, but in revolutionary syndicates, programmatically apolitical, indifferent to all parliamentary struggles, refusing to take part in the bourgeois game, and struggling above all to ground the workers’ consciousness and solidarity in the name of total revolution...
...The proletariat will never liberate itself if it attempts to model itself on the bourgeois pattern...
...He was differenit, primarily, because all the orthodox believers regarded Marx’s doctrine as scientific truth in the same sense that the quantum theory or the theory of evolution is or can be true...
...The optimislts believe that evil comes from deficiencies in legislation or enlightenment, or from la lack (of humanist feelings...
...Next to Nietzsche, Sorel is the most passionate enemy of that society and in this respect appears as the heir of romantic philosophy...
...He made it easy for superficially educalkd men of the world, without any professional training, to talk in the salons about science on the basis of that “natu~al light” that makes every man capable of passing judgment on any subject...
...From Bergson’s philosophy comes the opposition between intuitive, “global” perception and analytic thinking, which in Sorel is particularized in the contrast beltween “mylth” and “utopia...
...That same despotism would threaten society if power were handed over to people like Jaurks, who use humanist phraseology to poison the proletariat with the bourgelois desire for political power for proletarian parties, instiead of educating it to wage war against institutions of social authority...
...The Discontinuity of Culture ALTHOUGH THE SORELIAN MYTH is an organ for negating the existing world in the name of bhe coming cabastrophe, it also has certain roots in the past-but not like religious myths...
...One may speak as a historian of the process of revolutionary repression in on Violence we read: 19 Matkrriaux, Introduction, and Afterword added in 1918...
...hence they treat social conditions as interconneoted wholes, which clannoit be corrected in parts, but can only be removed all at once in a catastrophic explosion...
...Protestantism was an 'attempt to renew Christian pesisimism, but it failed when it 'tried 'to imitate Renaissance humanism and in Ithe end 'accepted its values...
...If we are grateful to the Roman soldiers for having replaced abortive, strayed, or impotent civilizations by a civilization whose pupils we are still in law, literature, and monuments, how grateful will not the future have to be to the Russian soldiers of socialism...
...Early Christianity was inspired by such a spirit when it refused to compromise with the world, programmatically rejected its membership in the existing miay and focud its entire life on the myth of the parousia...
...In every struggle Sorel is more interested in Ithe heroism of the wsrriors than in the validity of the case or in victory...
...In other words, Sorel is concerned with military and not police violence, a violence without cruelty, whose motive is never envy by the poor of the rich-a feeling morally ruinous and degrading to the pro0 Reflections on Violence, p. 157...
...Having lost hope that the proletariat would cast itself in the role he assigned it, Sorel could then turn to nationalism without renouncing his main idea when he came to the conclusion that national ideas are mure promising as seeds of the great myth...
...The revolutionary movement is indeed turned toward the future, but it foresees it only to the extent of its own spontaneous action and is led by a single irreducible, unanalyzable great idea-the myth of total transformation of the wold in a final apocalyptic battle...
...In contrast to utopia, myth has a primarily negative function...
...Sorel then attacks anarchism, appealing to Marx...
...it is best if the capitalists are possessed by a pitiless and predatory spirit of expansion, like the American conquistadors of capitalism...
...doctrine differently, but because he saw its historical significance differently and was not afraid to interpret Marx in the light of principles drawn from completely different sources-Proudhon or Tocqueville, Bergson or Nietzsche...
...The proletarian revolution was to be such la return to the cradle, a restoration of the originlal values thst were alive in tribal moralilty...
...Myth is the only itool that will allow a struggling group to preserve its solidarity, heroism, and commitment...
...The connection with Marxism, on the other hand, does seem accidental...
...The utopians found ist easy to write constitutionls for all the peoples of the world because they didn’t bother much with real history-but Marxism is in fact an lanalysis of real, not rationalized hisitorical processes...
...AT FIRST GLANCE it may seem strange that a writer who attacks with such intransigent hostility all state and party institutions, as well as all patriotic ideas, could be recognized as an ideologist of incipient fascism and supply the functionaries and apologists of brutal nationalist tyranny with arguments -all the more since Sorel, unlike Nietzsche, adopted essential components of the Marxist faith...
...He did not care about the consistency and structural virtues of his writing...
...Its value is not cognitive in ithe 'accepted sense of the word because myth is not scientific prediction...
...His most important GEORGES SOREL Was born in 1847 at CherMarxist wntings are conhained in Re‘flexiom sur la violence (1908, expanded in subsequent ediitions...
...he took an interest in Italian intellectual culture (articles on Vico and Lombroso) ;his books lappeared in Italian Itramlations, and prominent Italian !theoreticians commented sympathetically (Croce and Pareto) or aibtacked them (Labriola...
...But Sorel saw in the syndicalist movement the only real hope for a victory of the proletariat...
...Socialism is a moral question,” he writes in the introduction to the French translation of Saverio Merlino, “in the sense that it gives the world a new way of evaluating all human actions, in Nietzsche’s famous phrase, a transvaluation of all values.’’ 15 15 Ibid., p. 170...
...After the 1920s his ideas did not have any influence in any daction of the socialist movement or in the Communist Intermational...
...The opposition batween Ithe nationalist and the historically rooted menftalities is nearly the same a3 the opposition between optimism and pessimism...
...70 LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI These results could not be produced in any certain manner by the use of ordinary language...
...The writers of the Enlightenment took over this sityle, beoause for Condorcet, as for Fontenelle, the goal was to teach, not professionals trained to work in agricul’ture or industry, but salon dilettantes...
...These conditions will foster an unyielding consciousness of the absolute separation of the classes, the heroism of the struggle, the solidarity of the oppressed, the feeling of greatness and seriousness of the historical 12 Ibid., p. 64...
...The just society, in Proudhon’s words, must accept the “law of poverty,” and a modest life is honest and happy...
...Blanquism or Jacobinism is the idea of a revolution of the poor against the rich, and not the Marxian idea of a revolution of producers, guided entirely by themselves...
...The fourth edition of Re‘flexions sur la violence (1919) contains a supplement with Ian mchusi~astic apology for Lenin and the Bolshevik revolt in Russia (Lenin himself was not inkrested in Sorel...
...As soon as he opposes the mythopoeic [act to social planning, however, his criticism ceases to be an attack d historical Reason against a priori abstraots and becomes an iattack of sentiment against analytical reason in general...
...on the oontrary...
...ensnared in corruption and struggles for power and privilege, like the one-time Rome/Whore of Babylon in the eyes of the German reformer...
...They are convinced that legal reforms can easily bring about a paradise on eapth, and when it comes to actions based on these illusions they resopt to terror, which has to substitute for knowledge of real social cmdittions, as 'the leaders of 'the Revolution in fact did...
...and its institutions is certainly dependent on the history of trade, and the entire Mediterranean culture arose and developed in the ports and commercial cities...
...it is only an expression of readiness for destructive action...
...This wnfusim-deservedly attacked by Pascal-was born under the influence of Cartesianism...
...1919), was (thefirst attempt at a itheoretioal genenalization of ithe experiences of ‘the syndicalist movement, which was developing independenltly and even in defiance of the socialist parties...
...He could be a Marxist or a nationalist and yet be faithful to his guiding idea, for which Marxism was merely a historically relative tool...
...He cannot be contained in any classification commonly applied to that period of socialist thought...
...Russia only by keeping in mind the Moscovite character of Bolshevism...
...Proudhon also had an influence on Sorel...
...The Syndicalists solve this problem perfectly, by concentrating the whole of Socialism in the drama of the general strike...
...10003From each according to his ability...
...He hoped, unsuccessfully, to be the Luther of the Marxist movement, which he saw as The present article is a chapter from a history of Marxism, which will be published by Clarendon Press...
...And yet, in the years when his most important writings were conceived, Sorel did not merely consider himself a Marxist...
...Nor should one be deluded by conjectural historical necessities that would guarantee victory, as “so-called ‘scientific swialism” promises...
...If, as in Sorel’s case, the Great Catastrophe passes for an independent and even superior value, instead of deriving its value from the hoped-for consequences, then thle proletariat appears chiefly as a possible bearer of catastrophic transformations...
...In other words, Sorel is concerned with military and not police violence, a violence without cruelty, whose motive is never envy by the poor of the rich-a feeling morally ruinous and degrading to the pro0 Reflections on Violence, p. 157...
...The pessimism of authentic Mfamism is expressed in its refusal to believe in any automatic law of progress, in Ithe ease of imposing arbitrarily contrived constructions of general happiness, or in improving the world through gradual reforms...
...In Sorel’s sense, however, separation does not mean politioal isolation of the workingclass parties, because he was opposed to parties as such and regarded them as a specific expression of bourgeois society...
...One must be blind not to see the dawn of a new age in the Russian Revol~tion.~~ And in the 1919 appendix to Reflections Bolshevism owed a good part of its power to the fact that the masses regarded it as a protest against an oligarchy whose greatest concern had been not to appear Russian...
...national traditions provided the Red Guard with innumerable precedents, which they believed they had a right to imitate in order to defend the Revolution...
...Yet the emphasis on the complete destruction of state institutions, the refusal to participate in parliamentary games, and the consequent attacks against “political socialism”-basic elements that distinguish the anarchistic ideologiesare immensely strong in Sorel...
...The illusions of the determinists come from exaggerated hopes stimulated by the growth of natural science in the 19th century...
...that is, it becomes an apology for tyranny, at least when it moves from the realm of literary speculation into the realm of political action...
...But only around 1893 did he become interested in M’arx’s work, land then only in ithe antiplitical syndicalist movemenlt, which had in part developed out of Proudhonian and ‘miarchist tradittions land whose mast active organizer was Fernand Pelloutier...
...at the end of the year 1917, the former spokesman of the Black Hundreds said that the Bolsheviks had “proven that they were more Russian than the rebels Kaledin, Roussky, etc., who betrayed the Czar and the country...
...Sorel then attacks anarchism, appealing to Marx...
...All ideological or political battles, which can otherwise be justified, always do more harm than good if the working class participates in them with bourgeois radicals (the struggle against clericalism and the Church, not to mention patriotic ideologies), when they disturb the feeling of absolute separatlion of the classes and give birth to pernicious illusions that the proletariat can participate in social changes as an ally of the liberals...
...His presumably Jansenist upbringing inocultated him with an antipathy to any optimistic faith in the inherent goodness of human nature, in the ease of triumph over evil, and in the possibility of atltaining great vlalues with small efforts...
...13 “The Decomposition of Marxism,” p. 231...
...Furthermore, political revolution is based, not on the Marxlan doctrine of class division, but on an anti-Marxist opposition between the poor and the rich...
...But the final conclusions of his critique diverge significantly from Marx’s...
...Economic transformations presuppose the victory of the new morality in advance...
...Left-wing radical phraseology-if it is only a criticism of bourgeois democracy and not an idea of a <better democracy, if it is only an attack on rationalism and not a positive attempt at constituting new cultural values, if it is an apology for violence and dms not contain any moral restrictions on violence-is nothing more than a program for a new despotism and as such does not differ essentially from right-wing radicalism...
...Sorel is attracted by images of uncivilized bandit tribes, solitary communities struggling for survival rather than for pleasure or comfort, ruthless in battle but untainted by the spirit of cruelty, preserving aristocratic pride in their poverty, committed to tribal tradition, cherishing their freedom, and prepared to fight to the end against foreign domination...
...it is best if the capitalists are possessed by a pitiless and predatory spirit of expansion, like the American conquistadors of capitalism...
...A discouraging spectacle for sublime souls, who believe in the supremacy of science in the modern order, expecting revolution to result from vigorous mental effort and imagining that the idea has ruled the world ever since it was freed from clerical obscurantism...
...The history of communist utopilas is replete with rationlalist prejudices...
...it is true as the only and irreplaceable too1 history has given the proletariat to use, although history does not guarantee that the proletariat will use it...
...In 1918 he wrote, The bloody lesson of the events that have occurred in Russia impresses on the workers that a contradiction is developing between democracy and the mission of the proletariat...
...All ideological or political battles, which can otherwise be justified, always do more harm than good if the working class participates in them with bourgeois radicals (the struggle against clericalism and the Church, not to mention patriotic ideologies), when they disturb the feeling of absolute separatlion of the classes and give birth to pernicious illusions that the proletariat can participate in social changes as an ally of the liberals...
...The syndicalist movement (or anarchosyndicalist movement, as it is usually called) developed in the 1890s in France, somewhat later in Italy and Spain, and only to a limThat is why my friends and I never cease to We the working class not to allow itself to c, Matkriaux, p. 132...
...Utopias are sterile because they establish an undifferenitiated concept of an abstraot individual-uninfluenced by historical traditions, religion, inherited customs, or national, biologioal, and psychological determinants-and they construct imaginary countries composed of such individuals...
...Sorel is certainly like Marx in understanding socialism not simply as an “improvement of social organization,” but as a total transformation, embracing all aspects of lifej including morality, thought, and philosophy...
...In economics commercial trade is a clear domain, but production, which in the end is decisive and in which various regional, historically rooted traditions are at work, is shadowy...
...Such a separation, for Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, or even Lenin and Trotsky, did not exclude tactical alliances with nonproletarian parties in defined areas...
...The history of communist utopilas is replete with rationlalist prejudices...
...In this respect he was certainly not a Marxistdven in the period of his most arctent allegiance to Marxian philosophyin the same sense that Kautsky or Labriola were Marxists, not because he perceived the content of the...
...iit is a force that #organizes the militant consciousness of a closed group...
...Rati’cmalism produces cefiain simplified speculative models, which then replace, in the thought process, the intricate realities of the world...
...Yet his tie with fascism is not simply based on misunderstanding, even if we take into account the difficulty of seeing in 1912 the germs of Italian fascism with the eyes of people who have lived through World War 11...
...that is why we cannot do enough to break any connection between the people and the literature of the eighteenth cent~ry.~ The philosophy of the new school, as Sorel wrote, is a “philosophy of hands and not a philosophy of heads,” because it wants the working class to understand that its fnture lies entirely in the class war...
...The pessimists include the early Christians, Protestants, Jansenists, and Marxists...
...Now Darwinism was used for the same purpose...
...70-71...
...Its consolidation(, furthermore, is an absolute precondition of revolution...
...Yet the emphasis on the complete destruction of state institutions, the refusal to participate in parliamentary games, and the consequent attacks against “political socialism”-basic elements that distinguish the anarchistic ideologiesare immensely strong in Sorel...
...For example, because they failed to disclose the plurality of forces, papticularly plebeian ones, undercutting the ancien rkgime, the rationalists vied the Great Revolution as the triumph of idea over historioal reality...
...In Sorel’s sense, however, separation does not mean politioal isolation of the workingclass parties, because he was opposed to parties as such and regarded them as a specific expression of bourgeois society...
...From the Renaissance on, utopias beoame a lilterary genre that simplified questions of economics, politics, and psychology to the extreme and had a deleterious effect on the formation of the revolutionaries’ spirit...
...Didemt explained that nature knows nothing else than $&einstinct of selfpreservation and reproduction, in order to 68 LESZEK KOLAKOWSKl justify the debauchery in the salons...
...For Bergson did not in the least stigmatize analytical reasoning as la source of decadence...
...It is aadically anti-intellectual...
...In a natural way, commercial trade fostered the growth of a morality in which a prominent part was played by a capacity for compromise, negotiation, and auction, and also by a capacity for hypocrisy, cheating, rhetorical skills and demagogy, a spirit of competition and calculation, a fondness for wealth and comfort, a disregard for tradition, rationalist inclinations, efficiency in foresight and reasoning, and the supremacy of the ideal of success...
...was for Sorel the most perfect philosophical exponent of the style of thinking that prevails in his own writings...
...In legislation everything that concerns contracts and debts is easy to rationalize, but questions of the family, which have a bearing on all social life, are more difficult...
...In 1910, however, Sorel came it0 the conclusion that syndicalism had been excessively oorrupted by reformist influenceq he then put his hopes on the French land Ibalian nadical nationalist movements and for a tlime collaborated wiith Action Frangaise...
...Russia only by keeping in mind the Moscovite character of Bolshevism...
...Myth is the only itool that will allow a struggling group to preserve its solidarity, heroism, and commitment...
...Utopias are blueprints for the future...
...Left-wing radical phraseology-if it is only a criticism of bourgeois democracy and not an idea of a <better democracy, if it is only an attack on rationalism and not a positive attempt at constituting new cultural values, if it is an apology for violence and dms not contain any moral restrictions on violence-is nothing more than a program for a new despotism and as such does not differ essentially from right-wing radicalism...
...The writers of the Enlightenment took over this sityle, beoause for Condorcet, as for Fontenelle, the goal was to teach, not professionals trained to work in agricul’ture or industry, but salon dilettantes...
...For the same reason it is not in the interests of the working class to weaken capitalislm by forcing it to agree to legislative concessions and reforms...
...Marxism is a caltmtrophic invocation, which the consciousness 'of the proletariat organizes, not in utopian programs, but in myth...
...Accession to myth is not an act of reasoning...
...Such a revolution does not strive for party dictatorship...
...But, in its main (points, his critique of the orthodox klievens is close to the anarchist argument...
...Sorel, therefore, could remain what he was, as those prime values were concerned, and still change his attitude toward Marxism...
...Thus the syndicalist movement must strive to inculcate in the working class an awareness of its complete estrangement from bourgeois society, break off all moral and intellectual ties with bourgeois culture, refuse to participate in party and parliamentary contests, reject the supremacy of ideologists and parliamentary speakers, and preserve proletarian purity...
...that is why we cannot do enough to break any connection between the people and the literature of the eighteenth cent~ry.~ The philosophy of the new school, as Sorel wrote, is a “philosophy of hands and not a philosophy of heads,” because it wants the working class to understand that its fnture lies entirely in the class war...
...7 Ihid., p. 157...
...He did not take an active part in the movement (in accordance with his own position that middle-class intellectuals could only hamper working-class organizations), but he was its external ideologist...
...The rationalists suilel-defeat whenever they attempt to reduce the dark, qualitatively differentiated ta8pects of life, shaped by historical contingencies, to simple legal formulas...
...For Sorel, on the other hand, Marxism was true in the pragmatic sense of the word...
...Socialism is not a collection of piecemeal reforms, but a way of reinterpreting all human life...
...It expresses, however, the truest need of the class of producers, for without it the proletariat would be threatened by the fate of the ancient Teutons who conquered the Roman Empire, became ashamed of their barbarity, and attempted to assimilate the decadent culture of the Latin rhetoricians, or by the fate of the Reformation, which brought about its own end when it took over the values of the school of the humanists...
...As a writer who avowed Marxism and at the same time became a source of fascist philosophy, Sorel is particularly important in that the fate of his idea discloses the convergence of extreme forms ofrightwing and left-wing radicalism...
...The pessimism of authentic Mfamism is expressed in its refusal to believe in any automatic law of progress, in Ithe ease of imposing arbitrarily contrived constructions of general happiness, or in improving the world through gradual reforms...
...He rejects the traditional socialist anticlericalism insofar as it is an area for cooperation between socialists and bourgeois radicals, but also insofar as it grows out of the 18th-century tradition of rationalism and optimisttic faith in the continuity and inevitability of progress...
...They also see ithe general interdependence of all aspects of life...
...Rationalists also imagine that rational motives govern all behavior-hence they are incapable of perceiving ‘thepsychological iatricacies and numerous conflioting motives that influence life, the tremendous importance of tradition land custom, and biological, especially sexual, circumstances in social development...
...Didemt explained that nature knows nothing else than $&einstinct of selfpreservation and reproduction, in order to 68 LESZEK KOLAKOWSKl Sorel as their spiritual patron, but this was merely verbal homlage...
...He published his first writings shortly before retiring (Le Proc2s de Socrate [1889...
...it was nothing more than a colleotion of dilettantish information intended for use in worldly comersations...
...But the same can be said abut the critique of democracy contained in Hitler’s writings...
...The world will be more just only to the extent that it is purer...
...Translated by John and Charlotte Stanley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp...
...As a wrilter Sorel belonged to Ithe breed of aposltles rather than the breed of reasoners...
...He left behind him a vague trace of associations with Italian fascism, which for a time-through Mussolini and other ideologists of the movement -declared him its prophet...
...The society of the future will inherit from capitalism its technology, but it cannot adopt any part of its spiritual culture...
...In economics commercial trade is a clear domain, but production, which in the end is decisive and in which various regional, historically rooted traditions are at work, is shadowy...
...Historical Necessities ALL THIS DOES NOT MEAN, however, that the proletariat is or can be a morally indifferent class...
...Bergson also supplied him witth the conceptual tools needed to oppose the idela of unexpected sponltaneity to scienltific determinism, combined with fiaith in the predictability of social processes...
...The general strike as the real goal of the proletarian struggle consequently must be distinguished from political revolution...
...Examples of morally worthy violence are acts of spontaneous justice, as in the Corsican vendetba, in lynch law, or among Norwegian mountaineers...
...The idea that “political” or “party” socialism is merely an augury of a new tyranny and the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat as a form of government will make the working class a prey to despotic professional politiciansthese ideas, since Bakunin’s time, have been a constant theme in anarchist propaganda (Machajski in particular was their passimate advocate...
...Marxism is closer to bourgeois Manchester economics than to utopian writing because it is a realistic look at a society torn apart by class warfare, which can be neither mitigated nor avoided...
...He studied at the Gmle Polytechnique and worked until 1892 ias an engineer in the Department of Bridges and Roads...
...His critique had a good deal of truth in it...
...I do not know ‘any ‘more indisputable truth...
...the philosophers played the part of jesters at the royal court (“tattlm, peddlers of satires or panegyrics, and especially jesters for the degenerated aristocracy”-such is Sorel’s general characterization of Enlighknment ideology...
...Utopias are sterile because they establish an undifferenitiated concept of an abstraot individual-uninfluenced by historical traditions, religion, inherited customs, or national, biologioal, and psychological determinants-and they construct imaginary countries composed of such individuals...
...It is the myth in its entirety which is alone important: its parts are only of interest insofar as they bring out the main idea.4 AIS we see, Sorel, as long as he cniticizes rationalism of the Cartesian or Enlightenment provenance, does not oppose it from a clearly irrationalist viewpoint, for he prosecutes the rationalist illusion as la manifestation of historical dilettantism and an attempt to replace social realities with consistent speculative models...
...That Marxism is true means, for Sorel, that it is the ideological articulation of a movement that can liberate mankind and bring it rejuvenation...
...THE SOURCES THAT SHAPED Sorel’s thinking are asltonishingly diverse, and yet in his writings they form a consistent wh’ole...
...La ruine du mode antique [1888...
...Criticism of the corruption that corrodes the democratic systems, of abuses, hypocrisy, petty quarrels, and struggles for positions disguised as struggles for an idea-all these are traditional motifs that can be found in extremely similar forms in the anarchists, communists, and fascists...
...Sorel’s apology for violence referred to military, not police violence...
...16) His sight is fixed on the Homeric heroes as seen through Nietzsche’s eyes...
...At the same time he believed in the continuity of human intellectual cultum Sorel considered the idea of the historical inevitability of socialism to ik a relic of Hegel’s doctrine of the Weltgeist...
...Hence also his attachment to the tradistion of radical Christianiity, thait is, to the Christianity of the 64 LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI martyrs, and hence his disbelief in the inexorability of progress...
...It is obviously not an economic strike insofar cis the latter implies an emphasis on improving living conditions for the working class in capitalist society...
...But Sorel saw in the syndicalist movement the only real hope for a victory of the proletariat...
...g Consequently the proletariat, whlch has been summoned to carry it out, cannot have ‘any moral attitudes toward other classes: “People who have devoted their life to a cause which they identify with the regeneration of the world, could not hesitate to make use of any weapon which might serve to develop to a greater degree the spirit of the class war...
...Myth is an irresolvable and even inexpressible totality...
...its first rule is “to preserve working-class exclusiveness, that is, to exclude the intellectuals, whose leadership would result in the restoration of hierarchies and the dissension of the workers...
...he automatically proved, therefore, that an attack on 211 existing intellectual culture is a support for )barbarism, if it is not upheld by already existing values of the new culture or if it does not make clear what exactly is being oppowd to this culture...
...Until the working class has at its command a strong economic organization and a very ‘high degree of moral independence, the dictatorship of the proletariat means the dictatorship of club orators and literati.lS Neither can the syndicalist revolution result from the economic decadence of capitalism...
...It is obviously not an economic strike insofar cis the latter implies an emphasis on improving living conditions for the working class in capitalist society...
...The Syndicalists solve this problem perfectly, by concentrating the whole of Socialism in the drama of the general strike...
...Utopias are dangerous because they appeal to lthe privileged classes, counting on their common sense, enlightenmenit, or philanthropy, and thus weakening the understanding of the class struggle on the part of the proletariat...
...the cry “death to the intellectuals,” which is so often imputed to the Bolsheviks, may in the end seize all the workers of the world...
...they were the first to supply him wilth information about early Christianity, revolutiaon, and the ancien rkgime...
...He had an unquestionable influence on such early ideologists of Italian communism as Antonio Gramsci, and also on Angelo Tasca and Palmiro Togliatti...
...so do his general stance of intransigence, his striving for radical separation of ithe sect of the chosen from the rest of the world, his refusal to compromise, and his thinking in terms of “all or nothing...
...and its institutions is certainly dependent on the history of trade, and the entire Mediterranean culture arose and developed in the ports and commercial cities...
...From Proudhon also comes the importance Sorel attaches to family and sexual morals in social life...
...It seems that from both the moral and the organizational point of view, Sorel’s ideal society was that of an isolated mountain tribe or an ancient Swiss village, organized in a direct democracy, close to self-sufficiency in production, and only slightly subject to the customs and cultural influences of commercial trade...
...The idea of itatal revolution, which the proletariat would clarry out alone with its own forces and on its own initiative after a complete break wiith the rest of society, the idea of class war, the liltorally understood idea of tearing down the state, and disdlain folr utopian thinking-these are the fundlamental motifs in Sorel’s Marxism...
...This formula does not recognize any human rights, absolute justice, or political constitutions and parliaments...
...He rejects the traditional socialist anticlericalism insofar as it is an area for cooperation between socialists and bourgeois radicals, but also insofar as it grows out of the 18th-century tradition of rationalism and optimisttic faith in the continuity and inevitability of progress...
...Now Darwinism was used for the same purpose...
...They taught him to be politically siober and to look for vested initeresits behind the humanist rhetoric...
...In legislation everything that concerns contracts and debts is easy to rationalize, but questions of the family, which have a bearing on all social life, are more difficult...
...Rationalism is by no means identicial with soientific ithinking...
...But he looked for the basic values of thmat society in its exclusive concern with material production, whereas Mm believed that the greatest attainment of socialism will be leisure, which people will be able to devote to cultural creation, while the amount of time devoted to producing material goods will grow smaller...
...But he conceived of the proletariat as la militant sect, which must above all guard its own nonallegiance to existing society...
...GEORGES SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST 71 results could not be produced in any certain manner by the use of ordinary language...
...In all these areas there is a growth of dignity, magnanimity, heroism, solidarity, and individual responsibility...
...VI Marxism, Anarchism, Fascism SOREL’S WRITINGS, as was said earlier, contain a composition of values and ideas quite dihent from that of any orthodox Marxist or of any critic of Marxism...
...influence history in all their complexity...
...This phsilosophy is created spontaneously, and the revolutionary syndicalist movement develops through the efforts of people whose knowledge of Marxism is rather superficial...
...The general strike is a single integral idea, which cannot be divided into stages or conceived as a strategic plan...
...Early Christianity was permeated wilth pessimism because it did not believe (that the tempogal world could be corrected by human effort, and it awaited ithe catastrophe of the Swond Coming in unyielding islolation...
...As such, myth resists arguments, discussion, and attempts at com3 Reflections on Violence...
...Iit is clear, finally, that in Solrel the Nietzschean tradition touch& upon the culit of greatness, upon the hatred of all mediocrity and of a politicial life dominated by party bargaining...
...therefore it follows the rules of plitical struggle and allows tactical alliances, but it does not divide society into two and only two armies...
...A technical education and work as an engineer implanted in him, in turn, a cult of professionalism, a dislike of dilelttantism and empty rhetoric, a conviction of the fundamental role of production (in contrast to exchange) in the society’s social life, and an admiration for capitalism in its acquisitive, primary, ruthless forms full of energy and a spirilt of expansion, untainfted by philanthropy or accommodaltim...
...Rationalism is by no means identicial with soientific ithinking...
...promise...
...was for Sorel the most perfect philosophical exponent of the style of thinking that prevails in his own writings...
...76 LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI The new morality develops in the working class under the conditions of capitalism...
...The communist fantasies of the Enlighttenment writers did no harm to anyone...
...He subscribed to Bergson’s theory of spontaneity and called for a total destruction of cultural continuity, simultaneously declaring the sanctity of tradition, but only of the tradition that is entwined in the values of tribal solidarity and the family...
...its first rule is “to preserve working-class exclusiveness, that is, to exclude the intellectuals, whose leadership would result in the restoration of hierarchies and the dissension of the workers...
...lo V Moral Revolution...
...LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI but Sorel believed, on the mtrary, that man’s dignity is contained in his relations with tche productive activities, and he regarded the need for freedom from production as a symptom of bourgeois hedonism...
...It is aadically anti-intellectual...
...GEORGES SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST 73 pushed into the rut of bourgeois science or philosophy...
...optimism, on the other hand, was the faith of the prosperous commercial cities...
...Political revolution aims to obtain power...
...Because of Proudhon, Sorel apprehended socialism as being above all a moral matter, that is, a matter of educalting a new {type of man (the ethics of the producers...
...Fascism drew its strength from a feeling 17 Ibid., p. 184...
...That is why syndicalism fights against democracy, which is an encouragement for the proletariat to participate in bourgeois institutions-above all in parliamentary ones-and is the source of the demoralization or corruption of class solidarity...
...national traditions provided the Red Guard with innumerable precedents, which they believed they had a right to imitate in order to defend the Revolution...
...That is why syndicalism fights against democracy, which is an encouragement for the proletariat to participate in bourgeois institutions-above all in parliamentary ones-and is the source of the demoralization or corruption of class solidarity...
...He was not in the least concerned with the petty question of bettering people’s living Conditions, but only with the question of what conditions will release more of the people’s explosive energy...
...Separation of the Classes...
...As such, myth resists arguments, discussion, and attempts at com3 Reflections on Violence...
...Giambatltisto Vico supplied Sorel with ithe concept that was to form the conltenit of the coming revolution: ricorso, mankind’s cyclical returns to its forgotten sources...
...It appeals to wretched feelings of envy and vengeance and not to lofty feelings of heroism, which inspire the warriors of the people...
...Like Proudhon, Sorel never charaoterized socialism in terms of welfiare, but only in terms of dignity and justice...
...Also in contnast (to utopia, myth apprehends the existing world as an interconnected whole, which can be destroyed only as a whole...
...promise...
...on the oontrary...
...A movement led by students, journalists, and lawyers obviously had nothing in common with revolutionary syndicalism, as he understood it...
...10 lbid., p. 209...
...For Bergson did not in the least stigmatize analytical reasoning as la source of decadence...
...Cantesi’anism was la m&od that made science suiaablr: for sal’on cunversations, hence its success...
...Both wopds deviate from the ourrenit sense...
...But neither is it political revolution: in fact, the general strike is its exact opposite...
...He dreamed of a free society, that is, an association of producers who have no masters over them...
...Revolutions carried out in conditions of disorder and the fall of a previous regime do not improve anything, but petrify the existing decline...
...His critique had a good deal of truth in it...
...Social democracy is now being cruelly punished for so persistently fighting the anarchists, who wanted to arouse revolution in the minds and hearts,” he wrote in a comment on Proudhon’s letter to Michelet.l* Nationalization of the means of production, in his view, does not in itself have any value from the viewpoint of liberating the working class, since it only strengthens the means of political control over the producers...
...In the later histories of the doctrine his name is hardly mentioned...
...Certain utopian nai’vetb that occur in Marx-in the Critique of the Gotha Program, for example -are incompatible with the spirit of Marxism, which does not appeal (to a universal feeling of justice and docs not attempt to form societies in a logically ordered schema, but takes inlto account the actual forces that 2 Mate‘riaux d‘une the‘orie du proletariat, 3rd ed., p. 26...
...Sorel’s apology for violence referred to military, not police violence...
...Yet Sorel differed from other contemporary Marxislts, not merely because lhe had his own interpretation of Marx and criticized him now and then, since that happened even with such fanatics of orthodoxy as Rosa Luxemburg...
...Its value is not cognitive in ithe 'accepted sense of the word because myth is not scientific prediction...
...The communist fantasies of the Enlighttenment writers did no harm to anyone...
...aware that all other social classes without exception are opposed to its liberation...
...ited extent in Germany...
...he attempted to develop his line of thought wlithouft a preconceived plan, as if grqingly, buit the GEORGES SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST 65 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I1 Biographical Information bourg, into a bourgeois family...
...the real ideology of fascism developed in a different direction and was intended above la11 )to justify the brultal violence of aathorital-ian regimesthat is, exactly what Sorel pallticullarly hlated...
...the idea of establishing a government of producers will not perish...
...Sorel did not consider himself an orthodox believer, and he was not sparing in his critical remarks, when he considered them important, both with regard to Marxists and Marx himself...
...It is apparent that the most impoverished sections of the proletariat tare not those most imbued with revolutionary spirit...
...Marxism is humanity’s hope for rejuvenation, and not a “scientific” explanation of history, an instrument for effective forecauting, or a collection of reliable data about the world...
...It expresses, however, the truest need of the class of producers, for without it the proletariat would be threatened by the fate of the ancient Teutons who conquered the Roman Empire, became ashamed of their barbarity, and attempted to assimilate the decadent culture of the Latin rhetoricians, or by the fate of the Reformation, which brought about its own end when it took over the values of the school of the humanists...
...He remained aloof from political quarrels and party strife...
...But only around 1893 did he become interested in M’arx’s work, land then only in ithe antiplitical syndicalist movemenlt, which had in part developed out of Proudhonian and ‘miarchist tradittions land whose mast active organizer was Fernand Pelloutier...
...It was dangerous to criticize abuses in the mines, but praising communism, preaching theories of natural right, extolling republican virtues, or attacking {traditions in the name of paradisaical utopias-all this could easily be tolel-ated by the monarchy...
...In time, however, %re1 abandoned his hopes for French syndicalism, but he expmted that a similar movement would develop and abbain victory in Italy...
...there is thus no longer any place for the reconciliation of contraries in the equivocations of the professor~.~ Myth is neither “thinking” about the future nor planning tor it...
...aware that all other social classes without exception are opposed to its liberation...
...Such a separation, for Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, or even Lenin and Trotsky, did not exclude tactical alliances with nonproletarian parties in defined areas...
...And although Sorel’s best known work is in large part an apology for violence, violence is morally important in as much as it educates morally those who resort to it...
...Bergson also supplied him witth the conceptual tools needed to oppose the idela of unexpected sponltaneity to scienltific determinism, combined with fiaith in the predictability of social processes...
...For he was not, and did not want to be, the legislator of the new order, but rather the prophN of the Great Catastrophe...
...Marx expected technological development to free pple from unceasing preoccupation with materid GEORGES SOREL : JANSENIST MARXIST 77 new morality develops in the working class under the conditions of capitalism...
...A morality in which violence as such passes for a value or an occasion for heroism and greatness is a morality that easily lends itself to becoming a tool of despotism...
...LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI 74 the secret of the future, and it advances like capitalism, throwing itself into every fissure that opens up.12 Hence revolutionary syndicalism struggles against the spirit of utopia as much as against the spirit of Blanquism-that is, the doctrine that a conspiratorial group, identifying themselves as the mandatories of rhe proletariat, can seize power in favorable circumstances and transform the subsequent society by means of violence and repression...
...In ithe 189b Sorel colllabrated with the periodioals L’Bre nouvelle and Devenir social (in which he published, in 1895 and 1896, stuldies of Durkheim and Vico...
...Bernstein is right when he says a social democratic take-over would not grant the people sovereignty but would merely make them dependent on professional politicians and newspaper owners...
...In Greece, pessimism was the ideology 'of the warlike mountain tribes, impverislhed, proud, unyielding, and itied ti0 tradition...
...In the beginnings of the fascist movement in 1912, as well (as after the war, in 1919, Sml declared his sympathy for Sascism, which, he was convinced, could prefigure la 3ockil rebirth oontained in the form of folk mythology...
...It is, rather, an intellwtual afttitude that, in his opinion, beoame widespread thanks to (the Cartesitan dwtrine, bl’osisomed in the salons of (the Enlightenment, and hlad a pernicious influence on contemporary interpretations of Marxism...
...He did not write any treatises on historical materialism...
...it lives in the present, but shapes it: The myth must be judged as a means of acting on the present...
...A morality in which violence as such passes for a value or an occasion for heroism and greatness is a morality that easily lends itself to becoming a tool of despotism...
...It seems that from both the moral and the organizational point of view, Sorel’s ideal society was that of an isolated mountain tribe or an ancient Swiss village, organized in a direct democracy, close to self-sufficiency in production, and only slightly subject to the customs and cultural influences of commercial trade...
...AI1 our efforts should tend to prevent the bourgeois ideas from coming to poison the rising class...
...On the contrary, the basic task of the revolution is the moral transformation of the working class in a spirit that will restore its full dignity, its awareness of its uniqueness in the world, its pride, and its independence...
...Write to Newsletter of the Democratic Left, 31 Union Square West Room 1112 New York, N.Y...
...The optimists include hrates, the Jesuiits, Enlightenment philosophers, ideologists of the French Revolution, utopians, believers in progress, socialist politicians, and Jaurbs...
...Historical Necessities ALL THIS DOES NOT MEAN, however, that the proletariat is or can be a morally indifferent class...
...But the distinction is not at all clear, and in Sorel it is based only on literary stereotypes, idealized images of Homeric heroes or Scandinavian Vikings...
...Ideas of greatness, dignity, heroism, and authenticity predominate in Sorel’s thinking on social matters-while revolution, ‘the proletariat, and the class struggle are in a way historical embodiments of these higher values...
...16 Ibid., p. 189...
...The general strike is the destruction of existing society without any desire for power, because it aims to turn over productive forces to free men, who can control production without any need for masters...
...Rationalists are acuustomed to reducing society to an labstract universal man, which makes it very easy for Ithem to spin out their speculations about the perfect society and to build ubpian fictions of the future, free from confliuts, chance, or contradictory aspirations...
...The rationalists suilel-defeat whenever they attempt to reduce the dark, qualitatively differentiated ta8pects of life, shaped by historical contingencies, to simple legal formulas...
...that is, it becomes an apology for tyranny, at least when it moves from the realm of literary speculation into the realm of political action...
...Hence he bows to religious faith insofar as it is a passion, but he scorns religion insofar as it is scholasticism or politics, or is contaminated by calculation, conciliation, or rationalization...
...He created his own brand of Marxism, supplemented by the most varied sources, and pet his brand was not at all eclectic but, internally, unusually coherent...
...In distinction to force, which strives to replace existing systems of power with GI different type of authoritarian rule, proletarian violence does not wish to establisth a rule of a new type...
...He published his first writings shortly before retiring (Le Proc2s de Socrate [1889...
...For Sorel, on the other hand, Marxism was true in the pragmatic sense of the word...
...It is a state of consciousness that anticipates and prepares for the violent destruction of the existing world, bult not by opposing to it a ready-made construction of the coming paradise...
...The Italian national-syndicalist gou ups, from which the fascist movementt in part derived, were under Sorel’s influence...
...He had many close !ties to Iitaly...
...The first two books had been previously published in installments in the periodioal Mouvement socialisre, which was edited by Hubert Lagardelle...
...the real ideology of fascism developed in a different direction and was intended above la11 )to justify the brultal violence of aathorital-ian regimesthat is, exactly what Sorel pallticullarly hlated...
...In time, however, %re1 abandoned his hopes for French syndicalism, but he expmted that a similar movement would develop and abbain victory in Italy...
...From Bergson, Sorel also took his conviction about the inexpressibility of (the concrete, which allowed him to protect his ideia of “myth” From rational argument...
...After coming to power, ithe Italian Fascists frequently honGEORGES SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST 67 Biographical Information bourg, into a bourgeois family...
...But even an accurate oriticisn of democracy that fails to articulate an opposition to democracy, or pushes its own ideas into the dark realm of myth, cannot help being an apology for what is either the opposite of democracy or the absence of democracy...
...it is only a perspective on the final struggle...
...In contrast to utopia, myth has a primarily negative function...
...Ideas of greatness, dignity, heroism, and authenticity predominate in Sorel’s thinking on social matters-while revolution, ‘the proletariat, and the class struggle are in a way historical embodiments of these higher values...
...70 LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI like art than a lucid logical consitruction...
...Bergsgon...
...Rationalism is a formula of simplified thought, a reduction of the world to the simplest schemata bomed from legal reaming, which naturally reduces people to legal units...
...he lauded Lenin as the harbinger of the Great Destruction and extolled Musvolini from the same viewpoint...
...16) His sight is fixed on the Homeric heroes as seen through Nietzsche’s eyes...
...At the same time he believed in the continuity of human intellectual cultum Sorel considered the idea of the historical inevitability of socialism to ik a relic of Hegel’s doctrine of the Weltgeist...
...Social democracy is now being cruelly punished for so persistently fighting the anarchists, who wanted to arouse revolution in the minds and hearts,” he wrote in a comment on Proudhon’s letter to Michelet.l* Nationalization of the means of production, in his view, does not in itself have any value from the viewpoint of liberating the working class, since it only strengthens the means of political control over the producers...
...Sorel, though in line with his disregard for any planning of the future, did not plan any details of the “perfect order,” and he surely imagined it the way Proudhon did, whose doctrine he presents...
...He called for a break in cultural continuity-in the name of a more perfect culture that would return to the popular sources of legislation and morality...
...But the distinction is not at all clear, and in Sorel it is based only on literary stereotypes, idealized images of Homeric heroes or Scandinavian Vikings...
...He is more concerned !about the conquistador spirit of the proletariat than about the prospecits of a socialist triumph...
...From Proudhon also comes the importance Sorel attaches to family and sexual morals in social life...
...Early Christianity was inspired by such a spirit when it refused to compromise with the world, programmatically rejected its membership in the existing miay and focud its entire life on the myth of the parousia...
...Everything that concerns revolution and the free postrevolutionary SOciety in Sorel’s writing lies in the sphere of “myth,” which in principle is not amenable to discussion, does not require explanation, and cannot even be explained...
...He is not afraid -following Gustave Le BonAo recognize the religious and charismatic character of socialism, differing in this respect from Marx, at least the Marx of Capital...
...The source and place of application of this new morality are the family, war, and production...
...Examples of rationalist constructions are ‘all those simplistic theories of human nature thlat perceive man las a collection of certain permanent, general qualities and types of behavior, disregarding the historical Goditions that influence aatual human aativities...
...It seems that Sorel approves of everything in human history that emerges from authentic impetuous desires, disinterested fervor, great incentives, and great hopes...
...But neither is it political revolution: in fact, the general strike is its exact opposite...
...Early Christianity was permeated wilth pessimism because it did not believe (that the tempogal world could be corrected by human effort, and it awaited ithe catastrophe of the Swond Coming in unyielding islolation...
...In ithe 189b Sorel colllabrated with the periodioals L’Bre nouvelle and Devenir social (in which he published, in 1895 and 1896, stuldies of Durkheim and Vico...
...Marx expected technological development to free pple from unceasing preoccupation with materid GEORGES SOREL : JANSENIST MARXIST 77 existence, but Sorel believed, on the mtrary, that man’s dignity is contained in his relations with tche productive activities, and he regarded the need for freedom from production as a symptom of bourgeois hedonism...
...He desires the taal spiritual separation of Ithe proletariat from all bourgeois culture...
...For Sorel, Marxism was above all the poetry of the Great Apocalypse, which he identified with the social revolution...
...The great writers of liberal conservatism‘I’ocqueville, Taine, and Renan-heavily influenced Sorel in Ithe first period of his writing, and in ceutain respects that influence extended also to his Malrxist phase...
...In the class war, the proletariat must ‘be 0 The Illusions of Progress...
...But they lacked the moral preparation to rule and could only imitate the ancien rkgime...
...Engels did not escape such thinking, because he too believes (that “the world is reduced to a single man...
...The Decomposition of Marxism,” in Irving Louis Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt against Reason: The Social Theories of Georges Sorel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), p. 249...
...Such comparislons are not after all groundless...
...Economic transformations presuppose the victory of the new morality in advance...
...For Sorel, the hope of the proletariat does not lie in parties or trade unions struggling for immediate improvements in the living conditions of the proletariat, but in revolutionary syndicates, programmatically apolitical, indifferent to all parliamentary struggles, refusing to take part in the bourgeois game, and struggling above all to ground the workers’ consciousness and solidarity in the name of total revolution...
...The syndicalist movement (or anarchosyndicalist movement, as it is usually called) developed in the 1890s in France, somewhat later in Italy and Spain, and only to a limThat is why my friends and I never cease to We the working class not to allow itself to c, Matkriaux, p. 132...
...It must be planned and consequently can be criticized in its details...
...In The Socialist Future of the Syndicates he says thatt “socialism will be a society organized according to the production plan,” that this system “aims to transfer to society the regime of the production workshop,” l4 and that all social matters will pass to the level of production units...
...The same is true of Sorel’s critique of parliamentary democracy...
...He is more concerned !about the conquistador spirit of the proletariat than about the prospecits of a socialist triumph...
...I do not know ‘any ‘more indisputable truth...
...LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI of desperation, a desire for a great “total” transformation, a disenchantment with democracy, a ‘lack of possibilities in the frame work of reforms of present society, and a need for an undefined but radical break with the existing order...
...Engels did not escape such thinking, because he too believes (that “the world is reduced to a single man...
...But it was a matter of political separation, of the independence of working-class parties, of developing the working-class movement according to its own interests and guided by its own aims...
...Marx regarded such notions as a pettybourgeois utopia, explaining that workers’ self-government in itself is not capable of abrogating the law of competition and production anarchy, and that the Proudhonian ideal, if it could be realized, would immediately bring back all the disasters of capitaliism connected with accumulation and anarchy...
...The myth of the proletariat is the general strike...
...The optimists include hrates, the Jesuiits, Enlightenment philosophers, ideologists of the French Revolution, utopians, believers in progress, socialist politicians, and Jaurbs...
...Utopias are blueprints for the future...
...The general strike as the real goal of the proletarian struggle consequently must be distinguished from political revolution...
...Hence also his attachment to the tradistion of radical Christianiity, thait is, to the Christianity of the 64 LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI other words, Sorel treated Marxism as the tool that in his age could most effectively further the realization of man’s higher values -although those values, for Sorel, were independent of Marxism, both genetically and in content...
...The proletariat will never liberate itself if it attempts to model itself on the bourgeois pattern...
...the so-called social sciences attemptin illusion-to predict the future, but myth is an act of creation without prediction...
...Yet his tie with fascism is not simply based on misunderstanding, even if we take into account the difficulty of seeing in 1912 the germs of Italian fascism with the eyes of people who have lived through World War 11...
...He opposed reformism, not because it was a failure, for he knew that it was successful, but because it lacked greatness and was prosaic and unheroic...
...The source and place of application of this new morality are the family, war, and production...
...In the evolution of the doctrine he could pass as an accidental extravagance...
...As a writer who avowed Marxism and at the same time became a source of fascist philosophy, Sorel is particularly important in that the fate of his idea discloses the convergence of extreme forms ofrightwing and left-wing radicalism...
...16 Ibid., p. 189...
...Protestantism was an 'attempt to renew Christian pesisimism, but it failed when it 'tried 'to imitate Renaissance humanism and in Ithe end 'accepted its values...
...It is ricorso in the sense Vico gave to the word...
...it negates not only the governments of capitalist bourgeoisie, but also any hierarchy more or less similar to the bourgeois one.11 Syndicalism does not care about doctrine or “scientific” pEparation: . . . it advances in accordance with chance and circumstance, indifferent to dogma, guiding its forces onto a road condemned by sages...
...If we are grateful to the Roman soldiers for having replaced abortive, strayed, or impotent civilizations by a civilization whose pupils we are still in law, literature, and monuments, how grateful will not the future have to be to the Russian soldiers of socialism...
...he lauded Lenin as the harbinger of the Great Destruction and extolled Musvolini from the same viewpoint...
...Marxism is the truth of its time in the same sense bhat early Christianity was the truth of its own time...
...History develops, as Bergson noted, by creating the unforeseeable...
...He subscribed to Bergson’s theory of spontaneity and called for a total destruction of cultural continuity, simultaneously declaring the sanctity of tradition, but only of the tradition that is entwined in the values of tribal solidarity and the family...
...Sore1 died in 1922 in Boulogne-sur-Seine, where he had lived for ‘s1orn.e time...
...This formula does not recognize any human rights, absolute justice, or political constitutions and parliaments...
...It too is a repetition of something that ‘was: it is a rejuvenation of (the world through the {breaking of all ties with tlhe dominant culture...
...That Marxism is true means, for Sorel, that it is the ideological articulation of a movement that can liberate mankind and bring it rejuvenation...
...70-71...
...But he conceived of the proletariat as la militant sect, which must above all guard its own nonallegiance to existing society...
...In 1910, however, Sorel came it0 the conclusion that syndicalism had been excessively oorrupted by reformist influenceq he then put his hopes on the French land Ibalian nadical nationalist movements and for a tlime collaborated wiith Action Frangaise...
...This idea shows that the time of political revolutions is over and that the proletariat refuses to establish new hierarchies for itself...
...On the contrary, the basic task of the revolution is the moral transformation of the working class in a spirit that will restore its full dignity, its awareness of its uniqueness in the world, its pride, and its independence...
...However, the first Italian Communislt weekly, Ordine Nuovo,edited by Gramsci in Turin from 1919 on, regarded Sorel as an ideologist of the proletariat...
...It must be planned and consequently can be criticized in its details...
...It appeals to wretched feelings of envy and vengeance and not to lofty feelings of heroism, which inspire the warriors of the people...
...La ruine du mode antique [1888...
...He was also repelled by those anarchist groups, of Bakuninist pmvenance, Which engaged in conspiratorial work on authoritarian principles...
...Absurd in its very premise (the leaders of the Revolution attempted to solve economic difficulties with bloody repressions land were obviously doomed to fail), this terror was justified by Rousseau’s doctrine of the social contract, kause the Jacobin’s lost all their scruples at the very moment when they declared themselves the embodiment of the general will...
...Its oharacteristk trait-in accordance with the tradition of Proudhonian ideology-was the complete negation of political activity, refusal to participate in bourgeois social institutions, and subordination of the proletariat’s economic struggle to the coming revolution, This revolution will not replace one set of political and state institutions with anotlher, but it will completely abolish them in favor of productive associations governed exclusively by workers and connected in a loose federation...
...It is the myth in its entirety which is alone important: its parts are only of interest insofar as they bring out the main idea.4 AIS we see, Sorel, as long as he cniticizes rationalism of the Cartesian or Enlightenment provenance, does not oppose it from a clearly irrationalist viewpoint, for he prosecutes the rationalist illusion as la manifestation of historical dilettantism and an attempt to replace social realities with consistent speculative models...
...72 LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI be pushed into the rut of bourgeois science or philosophy...
...He could be a Marxist or a nationalist and yet be faithful to his guiding idea, for which Marxism was merely a historically relative tool...
...He opened his eyes to the proletariat-a clearly individualized class of ‘direct producers who are forced to sell <their labor power and embody the htope of a toltal revolultilon that would liberate mankind...
...Sorel defends-as a Marxistcertain values that were tradiltionally associated with conservative and right-wing ideologies: the dignity of marriage and the Family, instinctive tribal sdidarilty, honor, the greatness of tradition and of religious experience, and the slanctity of law formed spontaneously as custom...
...Thanks to Mcarxism, socialism breaks off with utopian thinking...
...The same is true of Sorel’s critique of parliamentary democracy...
...78 18 Ibid., p. 380...
...63 Kolakowski Georges Sorel: Jansenist Marxist In what sense is Georges Sorel’s writing part of the history of Marxism...
...Cantesi’anism was la m&od that made science suiaablr: for sal’on cunversations, hence its success...
...AI1 our efforts should tend to prevent the bourgeois ideas from coming to poison the rising class...
...But the later history of the Church also gives evidence of the degree to which its development defied prediction: doomed by scholars to an early downfall, the Church was periodically renewed in impetuous ex.pansion, which was born in an abrupt movement of spontaneous initiative by the great reformers, or by founders of new monastic orders...
...Ricorsi occur when the human spirit returns to imts primeval state, where everything in society is instinctive, creative, and poetic, as in the age of early Christilanity or in the decline of the Middle Ages...
...Write to Newsletter of the Democratic Left, 31 Union Square West Room 1112 New York, N.Y...
...In morality the clear and rational layers refer to relations of reciprocilty, similar to commercial trade, whereas sexual life is a shadowy domain that is very difficult to reduce to slimple formulas...
...thus it is a spirit of total opposition land for this reason cannot be criticized the way reformist projects or plans for a future society can be criticized...
...I11 Rationalism Against History...
...slorel’s arbitrary handling of the Marxian heritage can be easily recognized in his definition of class, which he puts forth as Marx’s own thought: a community of families united by traditions, interests, and political views, families that have acquired such a degree of solidarity that the whole can be ascribed personality and treated as a being reasoning or acting according to its own interests.lT Sorel did not acknowledge anarchism, because the anarchism of his time lacked a clearly defined profile in respect to class and traditionally enlisted in its ranks the lumpenproletariat or the declassed intelligentsia...
...Proudhonian is the concept of (the proletariat as a kind of primitive tribe, which is forced to divide the world into itself and all the rest...
...Certain utopian nai’vetb that occur in Marx-in the Critique of the Gotha Program, for example -are incompatible with the spirit of Marxism, which does not appeal (to a universal feeling of justice and docs not attempt to form societies in a logically ordered schema, but takes inlto account the actual forces that 2 Mate‘riaux d‘une the‘orie du proletariat, 3rd ed., p. 26...
...If, as in Sorel’s case, the Great Catastrophe passes for an independent and even superior value, instead of deriving its value from the hoped-for consequences, then thle proletariat appears chiefly as a possible bearer of catastrophic transformations...
...Immunizing mytholugy against any rational criticism, Sorel thus justified beforehiand the social movements that programmatically appealed to irrational “instincts,” land in this respect his reception by the Fascists Is not based on a misunderstanding...
...Sorel declam ‘that he loves the Russian Revolution because he sees it as the embodiment of a dramatic apocalypse, bause it portends the extermination (of the intellectuals, GEORGES SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST 79 desperation, a desire for a great “total” transformation, a disenchantment with democracy, a ‘lack of possibilities in the frame work of reforms of present society, and a need for an undefined but radical break with the existing order...
...Sorel defends-as a Marxistcertain values that were tradiltionally associated with conservative and right-wing ideologies: the dignity of marriage and the Family, instinctive tribal sdidarilty, honor, the greatness of tradition and of religious experience, and the slanctity of law formed spontaneously as custom...
...But even an accurate oriticisn of democracy that fails to articulate an opposition to democracy, or pushes its own ideas into the dark realm of myth, cannot help being an apology for what is either the opposite of democracy or the absence of democracy...
...Because of Proudhon, Sorel apprehended socialism as being above all a moral matter, that is, a matter of educalting a new {type of man (the ethics of the producers...
...He involved himself, to be sure, in all the great theoretical polemics of his age, but he did so from the outside, and the guardians of orthodoxy paid him scant polemical attention...
...Sorel’s study L’avenir socialiste des syndicats ( 1898), llater included in Mate‘riaux d’une the‘orie du proletariat (3rd ed...
...4 Ibid., p. 144...
...they are conscious of the narrow limits in which our social schemes are tackled-limijts determined by human frailty, the weight 'of tradition, and the inadequiacy of science...
...The question is not merely one of organizational purity, but even more of spiritual purity...
...He had an unquestionable influence on such early ideologists of Italian communism as Antonio Gramsci, and also on Angelo Tasca and Palmiro Togliatti...
...As soon as he opposes the mythopoeic [act to social planning, however, his criticism ceases to be an attack d historical Reason against a priori abstraots and becomes an iattack of sentiment against analytical reason in general...
...Its oharacteristk trait-in accordance with the tradition of Proudhonian ideology-was the complete negation of political activity, refusal to participate in bourgeois social institutions, and subordination of the proletariat’s economic struggle to the coming revolution, This revolution will not replace one set of political and state institutions with anotlher, but it will completely abolish them in favor of productive associations governed exclusively by workers and connected in a loose federation...
...Sorel particularly stresses this last point...
...they were the first to supply him wilth information about early Christianity, revolutiaon, and the ancien rkgime...
...Contribution 2 l‘e‘tude profane de la Bible [1889...
...therefore it follows the rules of plitical struggle and allows tactical alliances, but it does not divide society into two and only two armies...
...It no longer wants to be a “scientific” plan of the coming society or to replace the bourgeoisie in the organization of pmduction: it wants to be the ideology of radical class warsare...
...at the end of the year 1917, the former spokesman of the Black Hundreds said that the Bolsheviks had “proven that they were more Russian than the rebels Kaledin, Roussky, etc., who betrayed the Czar and the country...
...His criticism of Marx at certain points is like Blakunin’s or is stated from a Praudhonian perspeotive...
...His disdain of Jesuitic conciliation stems from the same source...
...Rationalism is a formula of simplified thought, a reduction of the world to the simplest schemata bomed from legal reaming, which naturally reduces people to legal units...
...doctrine differently, but because he saw its historical significance differently and was not afraid to interpret Marx in the light of principles drawn from completely different sources-Proudhon or Tocqueville, Bergson or Nietzsche...
...In the class war, the proletariat must ‘be 0 The Illusions of Progress...
...it negates not only the governments of capitalist bourgeoisie, but also any hierarchy more or less similar to the bourgeois one.11 Syndicalism does not care about doctrine or “scientific” pEparation: . . . it advances in accordance with chance and circumstance, indifferent to dogma, guiding its forces onto a road condemned by sages...
...Proudhon also imagined ‘the future order as a loose federation of industrial-agricultural associations, with a concentration of public life in communal and provincial a3sociations, with full freedom of assembly and the press, and without a sttanding army...
...It seems that Sorel approves of everything in human history that emerges from authentic impetuous desires, disinterested fervor, great incentives, and great hopes...
...72 LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI his sense of the proletariat’s distinctiveness and independence is different from that of tlhe orthodox believers...
...Contemporary democracy has a marked similarity to the stock exchange, whereas the democracy of the future will be analogous to cooperative manufacturing...
...The discerning critic of rationalism became in the end a worshiper of the Great Dragon, to whom the blind, fanatical mob voluntarily throws itself to be devoured in the tumult of a war dance...
...The idea of itatal revolution, which the proletariat would clarry out alone with its own forces and on its own initiative after a complete break wiith the rest of society, the idea of class war, the liltorally understood idea of tearing down the state, and disdlain folr utopian thinking-these are the fundlamental motifs in Sorel’s Marxism...
...Criticism of the corruption that corrodes the democratic systems, of abuses, hypocrisy, petty quarrels, and struggles for positions disguised as struggles for an idea-all these are traditional motifs that can be found in extremely similar forms in the anarchists, communists, and fascists...
...Sorel, by the way, #attaches particular importance to sexual discipline and family virtues, regarding sexual dissolution and the weakening of family ties, which he ‘sees as the basic source of morality, as the natural ally of bourgeois society...
...nor did it mean a break with existing culture...
...He did not take an active part in the movement (in accordance with his own position that middle-class intellectuals could only hamper working-class organizations), but he was its external ideologist...
...This idea shows that the time of political revolutions is over and that the proletariat refuses to establish new hierarchies for itself...
...Nor should one be deluded by conjectural historical necessities that would guarantee victory, as “so-called ‘scientific swialism” promises...
...Criticism of the Enlightenment What Sorel contends with under the nlame of rationalism is not a defined philosophical thesis...
...iit is a force that #organizes the militant consciousness of a closed group...
...Sore1 had an extremely vague notion of Lenin’s doctrine...
...From Bergson, Sorel also took his conviction about the inexpressibility of (the concrete, which allowed him to protect his ideia of “myth” From rational argument...
...on this point Sorel agrees with Vandervelde, when the latter says that a victory by the workers unaccompanied by a radical moral transformation would plunge the world into such suffering, cruelty, and injustice no less terrible than that which reigns at present...
...With this perspective he enithusiastically welcomed the Russiian Bolshevik Rwolution, in which he ialso saw a turningamy from “Occidentdism” and la return to Musco&e natbnal sources...
...it is true as the only and irreplaceable too1 history has given the proletariat to use, although history does not guarantee that the proletariat will use it...
...In the later histories of the doctrine his name is hardly mentioned...
...influence history in all their complexity...
...Pessimists do not clontemplate any universal 'theory of the world Ithat would establislh rational order...
...He was also one of the few who attempted to mold Marxism according to the philosophical style of neo-Romanticism, to conceive of it pragmatically, activistically, with an emphasis on psychological conditions, recognizing the independent role of tradition, in a radically antipositivist and antirationalist spirit...
...But the same can be said abut the critique of democracy contained in Hitler’s writings...
...Marxism is humanity’s hope for rejuvenation, and not a “scientific” explanation of history, an instrument for effective forecauting, or a collection of reliable data about the world...
...The entire ideology of the 18th century was tone of men at the service of a monamhy...
...Sorel did not participate in any political movement that laid claim to Marx’s inheritance...
...So, instead of dTawing up abstract Mueprints of the perfect swial order, it is more proper to consider the way in which social insltituitions are sponltaneously formed in hisbory and to explain their significance by the totality of productive and psychological conditions...
...IV Ricorsi...
...In 1918 he wrote, The bloody lesson of the events that have occurred in Russia impresses on the workers that a contradiction is developing between democracy and the mission of the proletariat...
...In Reflections on Violence, Sore1 pays particular attention to those aspects of social life that lare most resistant to radonalization and form-are, so to speak, a layer of mystery in the social development as a whole and, at the same time, determine such developmenlt more than those aspects that are amenable to rationalization...
...Sorel declam ‘that he loves the Russian Revolution because he sees it as the embodiment of a dramatic apocalypse, bause it portends the extermination (of the intellectuals, GEORGES SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST 79 because it is a triumph of freedom over alleged economic necessities, and because it is a protest against the tradition of Russian “occidentalism” in the name of Muscovite national traditions...
...In contrast to the merchant class, the proletariat possesses a morality of producers...
...Marx was a rationalist at least in the sense that he believed in scientific socialism: he believed that a rational analysis of the capitalist economy can show its inevitable replacement by social forms of economy...
...Despite his fundamental hostility toward reformism, however, he retained his res@ and appreciation for Bemstein, regarding him a3 an honest critic who1 aimed above all lat showing ithe German socklists that their revolutionary programs had nothing in common with their tactual ‘politics-to which Sorel subscdxd without resematim...
...This is what Savigny did, opposing the rationalist doctrine of the social contraa with a historioal investigation of law, arising at first las local custom and stratifying by degree in the course of consecutive ‘adaptations...
...Bergsgon...
...Sorel’s study L’avenir socialiste des syndicats ( 1898), llater included in Mate‘riaux d’une the‘orie du proletariat (3rd ed...
...And although Sorel’s best known work is in large part an apology for violence, violence is morally important in as much as it educates morally those who resort to it...
...THE AIM OF THE NEW REVOLUTION is not prosperity, affluence, or an easy life...
...He opposed reformism, not because it was a failure, for he knew that it was successful, but because it lacked greatness and was prosaic and unheroic...
...He is not afraid -following Gustave Le BonAo recognize the religious and charismatic character of socialism, differing in this respect from Marx, at least the Marx of Capital...
...In contrast to the merchant class, the proletariat possesses a morality of producers...
...Like the scholastics, Desaartes placed be tween man and reality ingenious reduotive machines that make the Itrue use of intelligence impossible...
...Sore1 scoffs at Destriie and Vandervelde for imagining socialism as a land of roasted pigeons, like the abbey of ThClhme in Rabelais...
...Yet Sorel differed from other contemporary Marxislts, not merely because lhe had his own interpretation of Marx and criticized him now and then, since that happened even with such fanatics of orthodoxy as Rosa Luxemburg...
...He believed in the class nature of the socialist movement and emphasized the absolute separateness of the class of producers as the carrier of revolution...
...Everything that concerns revolution and the free postrevolutionary SOciety in Sorel’s writing lies in the sphere of “myth,” which in principle is not amenable to discussion, does not require explanation, and cannot even be explained...
...It is apparent that the most impoverished sections of the proletariat tare not those most imbued with revolutionary spirit...
...For example, because they failed to disclose the plurality of forces, papticularly plebeian ones, undercutting the ancien rkgime, the rationalists vied the Great Revolution as the triumph of idea over historioal reality...
...Myth is nolt a description of the future perfect reality...
...Thus in Bergson’s view rational1 and analytical thinking aibout social matters is not at all wur8hless, dthough it cannot comprehend and grasp the historiwal discontinuities that arise from spontaneous creation...
...We know the war that the proletariat should conduct against its masters is suited to developing in it noble sentiments that are today completely lacking in the bourgeoisie...
...He is an enthusiast of the working-class movement insofar as he sees in it a movement of revolt in the name of the great myth of renewal, but he scorns parliamentary measures and modest reformist efforts...
...task-all those things that socialist politicians kill off when they coax the exploiters into making paltry concessions at the cost of working-class demoralization...
...Next to Nietzsche, Sorel is the most passionate enemy of that society and in this respect appears as the heir of romantic philosophy...
...A movement led by students, journalists, and lawyers obviously had nothing in common with revolutionary syndicalism, as he understood it...
...Thus in Bergson’s view rational1 and analytical thinking aibout social matters is not at all wur8hless, dthough it cannot comprehend and grasp the historiwal discontinuities that arise from spontaneous creation...
...The spirit of radicalism and intransigence is more important to him than the content of what this radicalism and intransigence refer to...
...He combats nationalism insofar as it is an attempt to deprive the proletariat of its absalute distinctiveness, but when he is discouraged by syndicalism and turns to nationalist radicalism, he is governed by the same motives that made him a Marxist: he expects that national radicalism may give rise to the hope of restoring to the world its youth...
...Proudhon also had an influence on Sorel...
...Socialism is not a collection of piecemeal reforms, but a way of reinterpreting all human life...
...7 Ihid., p. 157...
...The Italian national-syndicalist gou ups, from which the fascist movementt in part derived, were under Sorel’s influence...
...The revolutionary movement is indeed turned toward the future, but it foresees it only to the extent of its own spontaneous action and is led by a single irreducible, unanalyzable great idea-the myth of total transformation of the wold in a final apocalyptic battle...
...Utopia and Myth...
...He began his literary career at a time when he had nothing in common with Marxism...
...Sorel, though in line with his disregard for any planning of the future, did not plan any details of the “perfect order,” and he surely imagined it the way Proudhon did, whose doctrine he presents...
...4 Ibid., p. 144...
...But even in this oase he was less concerned about the nation than about “total revolution...
...His ladhesion to the pmletarian movement is not a union with the oppressed $or ‘the sake of improving Itheir lot, bult an adhesion ito a hisitorical wave tbat promises the rebirth of greatness...
...From the Renaissance on, utopias beoame a lilterary genre that simplified questions of economics, politics, and psychology to the extreme and had a deleterious effect on the formation of the revolutionaries’ spirit...
...Accession to myth is not an act of reasoning...
...His critiques of reformism are often rmarkably simillar to those that can be found in the orthodox left wing of social democracy...
...The society in which “everything is for sale”-in which all traditional ties of solidarity, familial, tribal, and local, consequently sundered-was subjected to criticism by all the romantic philosophers, including the young Marx...
...Hence he bows to religious faith insofar as it is a passion, but he scorns religion insofar as it is scholasticism or politics, or is contaminated by calculation, conciliation, or rationalization...
...The opposition batween Ithe nationalist and the historically rooted menftalities is nearly the same a3 the opposition between optimism and pessimism...
...In the renewal of this morality, as opposed to mmmercial morality, he sees the most legitimate sense of the socialist idea...
...But the later history of the Church also gives evidence of the degree to which its development defied prediction: doomed by scholars to an early downfall, the Church was periodically renewed in impetuous ex.pansion, which was born in an abrupt movement of spontaneous initiative by the great reformers, or by founders of new monastic orders...
...So, instead of dTawing up abstract Mueprints of the perfect swial order, it is more proper to consider the way in which social insltituitions are sponltaneously formed in hisbory and to explain their significance by the totality of productive and psychological conditions...
...Blanquism or Jacobinism is the idea of a revolution of the poor against the rich, and not the Marxian idea of a revolution of producers, guided entirely by themselves...
...Sorel actively defended Dreyfus, but he felt la revulsion when Ithe case was ova, realizing thlat the socialist Dreyfusards were using the whole afiair purely for party aims...
...They are convinced that legal reforms can easily bring about a paradise on eapth, and when it comes to actions based on these illusions they resopt to terror, which has to substitute for knowledge of real social cmdittions, as 'the leaders of 'the Revolution in fact did...
...But] revolution does not hold 11 Mate‘riaux, p. 58...
...LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI 74 In distinction to force, which strives to replace existing systems of power with GI different type of authoritarian rule, proletarian violence does not wish to establisth a rule of a new type...
...These conditions will foster an unyielding consciousness of the absolute separation of the classes, the heroism of the struggle, the solidarity of the oppressed, the feeling of greatness and seriousness of the historical 12 Ibid., p. 64...
...Sorel actively defended Dreyfus, but he felt la revulsion when Ithe case was ova, realizing thlat the socialist Dreyfusards were using the whole afiair purely for party aims...
...Myth is not a kind of utopia, but its precise opposite...
...One may speak as a historian of the process of revolutionary repression in on Violence we read: 19 Matkrriaux, Introduction, and Afterword added in 1918...
...It is, rather, an intellwtual afttitude that, in his opinion, beoame widespread thanks to (the Cartesitan dwtrine, bl’osisomed in the salons of (the Enlightenment, and hlad a pernicious influence on contemporary interpretations of Marxism...
...it was nothing more than a colleotion of dilettantish information intended for use in worldly comersations...
...Myth demands total acceptance or total rejection, and the believer in the myth is indifferent to arguments intended to militate against its feasibility...
...In this respect he is unique...
...He was differenit, primarily, because all the orthodox believers regarded Marx’s doctrine as scientific truth in the same sense that the quantum theory or the theory of evolution is or can be true...
...Sorel dreamed of a morally and theoretically pure Marxism...
...It was dangerous to criticize abuses in the mines, but praising communism, preaching theories of natural right, extolling republican virtues, or attacking {traditions in the name of paradisaical utopias-all this could easily be tolel-ated by the monarchy...
...His most important GEORGES SOREL Was born in 1847 at CherMarxist wntings are conhained in Re‘flexiom sur la violence (1908, expanded in subsequent ediitions...
...The history of the idea of democracy 14 MatCriaux, p. 70...
...But] revolution does not hold 11 Mate‘riaux, p. 58...
...he attempted to develop his line of thought wlithouft a preconceived plan, as if grqingly, buit the GEORGES SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST 65 and hence his disbelief in the inexorability of progress...
...Iit is clear, finally, that in Solrel the Nietzschean tradition touch& upon the culit of greatness, upon the hatred of all mediocrity and of a politicial life dominated by party bargaining...
...Sorel’s anti-intellectualism, it must be noted, is far more radical than Bergson’s...
...Marx was a rationalist at least in the sense that he believed in scientific socialism: he believed that a rational analysis of the capitalist economy can show its inevitable replacement by social forms of economy...
...As a wrilter Sorel belonged to Ithe breed of aposltles rather than the breed of reasoners...
...Thus the syndicalist movement must strive to inculcate in the working class an awareness of its complete estrangement from bourgeois society, break off all moral and intellectual ties with bourgeois culture, refuse to participate in party and parliamentary contests, reject the supremacy of ideologists and parliamentary speakers, and preserve proletarian purity...
...Contribution 2 l‘e‘tude profane de la Bible [1889...
...Beginning wiith Plato, utopian literature is a typical, fruitless product of rationalist illusions...
...Both wopds deviate from the ourrenit sense...
...But even in this oase he was less concerned about the nation than about “total revolution...
...The fourth edition of Re‘flexions sur la violence (1919) contains a supplement with Ian mchusi~astic apology for Lenin and the Bolshevik revolt in Russia (Lenin himself was not inkrested in Sorel...
...GEORGES SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST 71 But his sense of the proletariat’s distinctiveness and independence is different from that of tlhe orthodox believers...
...He was not in the least concerned with the petty question of bettering people’s living Conditions, but only with the question of what conditions will release more of the people’s explosive energy...
...His criticism of Marx at certain points is like Blakunin’s or is stated from a Praudhonian perspeotive...
...Translated by T. E. Hulrne and J. Roth, Introduction by Edward A. Shih (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), p. 140...
...I11 Rationalism Against History...
...In Sorel’s mind, however, mythic faith wi’ll completely replace the social sciences, and all practical actions must be sulbordinated to an expectation of an undefined and essentially undescibable apocalypse...
...starting in 1898, he contributed to many Iaalian slmialist periodicals...
...the so-called social sciences attemptin illusion-to predict the future, but myth is an act of creation without prediction...
...Its consolidation(, furthermore, is an absolute precondition of revolution...
...Lilbtle ‘by Me, Sorel began to mount ever more virulenit attacks against the swialist party movement, parliamentary democracy, and what he called political socialism in distinotion to syndicalism...
...But it was a matter of political separation, of the independence of working-class parties, of developing the working-class movement according to its own interests and guided by its own aims...
...1919), was (thefirst attempt at a itheoretioal genenalization of ithe experiences of ‘the syndicalist movement, which was developing independenltly and even in defiance of the socialist parties...
...thus it is a spirit of total opposition land for this reason cannot be criticized the way reformist projects or plans for a future society can be criticized...
...His disdain of Jesuitic conciliation stems from the same source...
...Slorel’s appeals were well suited to the spiritual situation in which fascism found its support...
...The revolutionary orthodoxy of the Second Internationlal always emphasized the necessity of a clear separation of the proletariat...
...optimism, on the other hand, was the faith of the prosperous commercial cities...
...Like Proudhon, Sorel never charaoterized socialism in terms of welfiare, but only in terms of dignity and justice...
...The Decomposition of Marxism,” in Irving Louis Horowitz, Radicalism and the Revolt against Reason: The Social Theories of Georges Sorel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), p. 249...
...The illusions of the determinists come from exaggerated hopes stimulated by the growth of natural science in the 19th century...
...THE AIM OF THE NEW REVOLUTION is not prosperity, affluence, or an easy life...
...nor did it mean a break with existing culture...
...not only does the party not lead to the liberation of the proletariat, but it effectively defeats that liberation and at most replaces one tyranny with the tyranny of party functionaries, parliamentary speakers, and clubs of newspaper reporters...
...He studied at the Gmle Polytechnique and worked until 1892 ias an engineer in the Department of Bridges and Roads...
...He is an enthusiast of the working-class movement insofar as he sees in it a movement of revolt in the name of the great myth of renewal, but he scorns parliamentary measures and modest reformist efforts...
...On the contrary, it wishes to do away with all rule...
...Bernstein is right when he says a social democratic take-over would not grant the people sovereignty but would merely make them dependent on professional politicians and newspaper owners...
...His ladhesion to the pmletarian movement is not a union with the oppressed $or ‘the sake of improving Itheir lot, bult an adhesion ito a hisitorical wave tbat promises the rebirth of greatness...
...However, the first Italian Communislt weekly, Ordine Nuovo,edited by Gramsci in Turin from 1919 on, regarded Sorel as an ideologist of the proletariat...
...From Bergson’s philosophy comes the opposition between intuitive, “global” perception and analytic thinking, which in Sorel is particularized in the contrast beltween “mylth” and “utopia...
...To some extent the Bernstein case prompted him to a criticism of orthodoxy, buit won his criticism went off in a complotely different direction...
...Contemporary democracy has a marked similarity to the stock exchange, whereas the democracy of the future will be analogous to cooperative manufacturing...
...The society of the future will inherit from capitalism its technology, but it cannot adopt any part of its spiritual culture...
...He combats nationalism insofar as it is an attempt to deprive the proletariat of its absalute distinctiveness, but when he is discouraged by syndicalism and turns to nationalist radicalism, he is governed by the same motives that made him a Marxist: he expects that national radicalism may give rise to the hope of restoring to the world its youth...
...use must be made of a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before any considered analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against modern society...
...The general strike is a single integral idea, which cannot be divided into stages or conceived as a strategic plan...
...The entire ideology of the 18th century was tone of men at the service of a monamhy...
...That is why these utopias never actually threaitened established systems of power...
...He maintains that if socialism is to prevail, it must give humans all the values that they had found earlier in the teachings of the Church...
...the cry “death to the intellectuals,” which is so often imputed to the Bolsheviks, may in the end seize all the workers of the world...
...They also see ithe general interdependence of all aspects of life...
...THE SOURCES THAT SHAPED Sorel’s thinking are asltonishingly diverse, and yet in his writings they form a consistent wh’ole...
...On the contrary, it wishes to do away with all rule...
...Socialism is a moral question,” he writes in the introduction to the French translation of Saverio Merlino, “in the sense that it gives the world a new way of evaluating all human actions, in Nietzsche’s famous phrase, a transvaluation of all values.’’ 15 15 Ibid., p. 170...
...The pessimists include the early Christians, Protestants, Jansenists, and Marxists...
...In Sorel’s view, the general strike does not fit into the stereotyped opposition between “economic” and “political” strike...
...Translated by MARCOCARYNNYK Subscribe now to Michael Harrington’s “v?,mLtt,r o/ dQaemocratic JQ/iIf you haven’t been with us for the last two years, you’ve missed a lot-early and extensive coverage of the formation of the Coalition of Labor Union Women . . . continuing reports on a young insurgent’s challenge to the director of the Steelworkers’ largest district . . . news about organizing efforts among Harlan County miners and California domestics . . . Mike Harrington’s analysis of the energy crisis . . . Robert Lekachman’s argument that a tax cut is the last thing we need . . . 10 issues/year: Student rate $2.50 * Regular Subscription $5 Sustaining Subscription $10 * Foreign Subscription $6 minimum...
...hence they treat social conditions as interconneoted wholes, which clannoit be corrected in parts, but can only be removed all at once in a catastrophic explosion...
...The real life of history is GEORGES SOREL: JANSENIST MARXIST 69 the debauchery in the salons...
...In this respect he was certainly not a Marxistdven in the period of his most arctent allegiance to Marxian philosophyin the same sense that Kautsky or Labriola were Marxists, not because he perceived the content of the...
...Marxism is a caltmtrophic invocation, which the consciousness 'of the proletariat organizes, not in utopian programs, but in myth...
...In the beginnings of the fascist movement in 1912, as well (as after the war, in 1919, Sml declared his sympathy for Sascism, which, he was convinced, could prefigure la 3ockil rebirth oontained in the form of folk mythology...
...Marx showed Sorel the social place where a revolution of renewal would take place...
...We know the war that the proletariat should conduct against its masters is suited to developing in it noble sentiments that are today completely lacking in the bourgeoisie...
...According (to Bergson’s theory of personality and evolution, free creativity incessantly initiates the future...
...it can be apprehended only in la single act of intuitive perception, as Bergson described it...
...The coming revolution will “mark an absolute separation between two historical eras...
...and La De‘composirion du marxisme (1908...
...The Discontinuity of Culture ALTHOUGH THE SORELIAN MYTH is an organ for negating the existing world in the name of bhe coming cabastrophe, it also has certain roots in the past-but not like religious myths...
...He was prepared to support anything that appeared heroic and threatened to extinguish the world he hated-democracy, party struggles, compromises, negotiations, and calculation...
...76 LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI the impulse of the revolutionary movement is not misery, but class opposition, and the workers’ movement is not a movement of the poor trying to deprive the rich of their estates, but one of direct producers who want to be the organizers lof production, so the chief values of socialism are in the sphere of morality, not welfare...
...The just society, in Proudhon’s words, must accept the “law of poverty,” and a modest life is honest and happy...
...so do his general stance of intransigence, his striving for radical separation of ithe sect of the chosen from the rest of the world, his refusal to compromise, and his thinking in terms of “all or nothing...
...In Reflections on Violence, Sore1 pays particular attention to those aspects of social life that lare most resistant to radonalization and form-are, so to speak, a layer of mystery in the social development as a whole and, at the same time, determine such developmenlt more than those aspects that are amenable to rationalization...
...it is only a perspective on the final struggle...
...starting in 1898, he contributed to many Iaalian slmialist periodicals...
...he took an interest in Italian intellectual culture (articles on Vico and Lombroso) ;his books lappeared in Italian Itramlations, and prominent Italian !theoreticians commented sympathetically (Croce and Pareto) or aibtacked them (Labriola...
Vol. 22 • January 1975 • No. 1
