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Reflections on Violence
Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence (1908) remains a controversial text to this day. It unashamedly advocates the use of violence as a means of putting an end to the corrupt politics of bourgeois democracy and of bringing down capitalism. It is both dangerous and fascinating, of enduring importance and interest to all those concerned about the nature of modern politics. This new student edition of Sorel's classic text is accompanied by notes, chronology, and bibliography, as well as a concise introduction to the context and content of this work.
307 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1908
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November 16, 2007
I read this in the middle of having a nervous breakdown. It quickly (and disturbingly) became one of my favorites. It is a book that pacifists and non-pacifists should read alike because it brings up issues (involving tactics) that must be faced.
Also makes you wonder how much the whole 'revolutionary' process actually deceives the masses. After reading this, you will be better equipped to view with suspicion any and all calls for sweeping revolutionary change. Still, it promotes without any hesitation the belief in a complete commitment to the class war--something that todays radicals seem to want to push aside in favor of liberal change through institutions.
The fundamental questions you will ask yourself after reading this book: What role does violence play in creating revolutionary change? Do we need it, or does pacifism work? FInally, while it was not Sorel's intent to propose this question, are we all being deceived by the power of 'myth'.
Everyone should read this book. You know, especially if you are barricaded up in a certain liberal-white-utopian-northern state where non-violent left wing pacifism is oh so easy.
Also makes you wonder how much the whole 'revolutionary' process actually deceives the masses. After reading this, you will be better equipped to view with suspicion any and all calls for sweeping revolutionary change. Still, it promotes without any hesitation the belief in a complete commitment to the class war--something that todays radicals seem to want to push aside in favor of liberal change through institutions.
The fundamental questions you will ask yourself after reading this book: What role does violence play in creating revolutionary change? Do we need it, or does pacifism work? FInally, while it was not Sorel's intent to propose this question, are we all being deceived by the power of 'myth'.
Everyone should read this book. You know, especially if you are barricaded up in a certain liberal-white-utopian-northern state where non-violent left wing pacifism is oh so easy.
May 21, 2012
I don't know why I have such an aberrant affection for this esoteric, polemical book of Western, French philosophy. Georges Sorel, to be blunt, died as a royalist anti-Semite who wasn't too kind to women intellectuals, either.
But there are some truly tide-changing aspects to his Reflections. Before reading them, I had never considered epistemological "violence" as a generative, galvanizing strategy that might disrupt "ideas" unquestioningly inherited from scholars and calcified to such an extent that they've become stagnant forces of habit. I appreciate Sorel's conviction in being his own scholar, independent from and historically without access to a university education. Even though many of the primary examples he gleans for tracing his perception of violence through history-- in Antiquity, his racist stereotype of "the Wandering Jew," his seeming fervor for Calvinism and Christianity, etc.-- may seem outdated and often offensive, the general precepts he presents really did change my way of thinking about how I've learned what I supposedly know.
The book is much more specifically about the phenomenon of the general strike as it pertains to proletarian class consciousness and politics. However, if you want a precis of Sorel's thesis for many of the essays included here (which formerly appeared as separate, non-sequential reflections in a radical socialist journal around the 1900s-1910s), read the curious personal memento that he includes as an introduction, "The Letter to Daniel Hálevy." It more than adequately justifies many of his pivotal views on myth, class culture, history, and knowledge production.
But there are some truly tide-changing aspects to his Reflections. Before reading them, I had never considered epistemological "violence" as a generative, galvanizing strategy that might disrupt "ideas" unquestioningly inherited from scholars and calcified to such an extent that they've become stagnant forces of habit. I appreciate Sorel's conviction in being his own scholar, independent from and historically without access to a university education. Even though many of the primary examples he gleans for tracing his perception of violence through history-- in Antiquity, his racist stereotype of "the Wandering Jew," his seeming fervor for Calvinism and Christianity, etc.-- may seem outdated and often offensive, the general precepts he presents really did change my way of thinking about how I've learned what I supposedly know.
The book is much more specifically about the phenomenon of the general strike as it pertains to proletarian class consciousness and politics. However, if you want a precis of Sorel's thesis for many of the essays included here (which formerly appeared as separate, non-sequential reflections in a radical socialist journal around the 1900s-1910s), read the curious personal memento that he includes as an introduction, "The Letter to Daniel Hálevy." It more than adequately justifies many of his pivotal views on myth, class culture, history, and knowledge production.
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March 31, 2021Georges Sorel’s “Reflections on Violence” holds a unique place in twentieth century political theory. Ostensibly a work of the anarchist left, it’s influence was greatest on what would become the fascist right.
It should be remembered that, in 1907 when this work first appeared in book form, the distinction between “Marxist” and “Anarchist” was not nearly as definitive as it has since become. With the exception of the then tiny Bolshevik Party, the overwhelming majority of official socialist parties had become dominated by what is today remembered as “Bernsteinian revisionism”, the notion that expanded democracy would lead inevitably to the gradual implementation of socialism through parliamentary reform. (Bernstein is perhaps unfairly singled out as the embodiment of such “revisionism”. Engles himself paved the way for this line of thinking in the years following Marx’s death.) Only a few voices from within such parties, such as that of Rosa Luxemburg, then still in the German Workers Party, or Leon Trotsky, then still in the Russian Menshevik Party, challenged this notion. For an observer such as Sorel, (and despite a lot of tough talk on his part, Sorel was indeed mostly, if not entirely, an observer) those activists who called themselves “Anarcho-Syndicalists” were simply the line of Marxists that rejected parliamentarism in favor of direct action as envisioned by Marx himself. They were the front-line, violent revolutionaries of the proletarian struggle.
Sorel was mildly critical even of Marx for sometimes adopting the ruling class’s concept of societal control. “Force” was Sorel’s term for that which the capitalist class used against the proletariat. In its focus on the proletariat seizing control of the state to exude its own force against its opponents, traditional Marxism risked turning the revolution into simply a bureaucratic switching of the guards. Only violence, opposed to force, could ever be truly liberatory, and violence could only be exerted from below, not from a state controlled by whatever class.
Indeed, Sorel, a self-appointed “theorist of anarcho-syndicalism”, was never a conventional Marxist. He wrote very little on the conditions of the working class under capitalism or the potential of workers’ democracy under socialism. Instead, Sorel looked to the class struggle as a way to reignite the savage creativity of humanity. This savagery had been tamed, according to Sorel, in passages clearly indebted to Nietzsche although Sorel tries unpersuasively to distance himself from the German, by bourgeois morality as it had come to dominate under capitalism. Indeed, Sorel praises the founding robber-barons of capitalism for being savagely creative in their invention of new forms of domination. And, in a striking reminder to today’s reader that the early European commentators on socialism were not necessarily anti-racist, Sorel repeatedly praises the spirit of “Yankee ingenuity” in the colonists’ take over of the New World. In one particularly harrowing passage, Sorel cites American “lynch-law” as an example of authentic, proletarian violence!
According to Sorel’s historiography, the Jacobin Terror was in fact the beginning of modern liberalism, in which the state thought of itself as the “servant of, rather than the master of the people.” But, thought Sorel in 1907, before the rise of the systems that would today, constructively or not, be labeled “totalitarian”, the Terror was also the last gasp of the all-powerful state. Liberal capitalism had weakened the state and empowered the individual, but this had only resulted in a coddled populace that had, by an large, lost it’s capacity for invention and fallen, ironically, more and more under the sway of a parasitic Catholicism. While claiming to be “civilized” in its abhorrence of violence, liberal capitalism gives a free pass to financial crimes by the minority of capitalists towards the majority of proletarians. But this same society describes as monstrous violent crimes of survival perpetuated by the desperate working class. However, Sorel also believed that capitalism’s weakening of the state and those who control it, and strengthening of the individual might lead to the downfall of capitalism.
Sorel writes that the best thing that could happen to revive the potential of the contemporary European would be a great, continent wide war. But, in one of the most retrospectively ridiculous passages of the book, he surmises that nothing like that was imminent in 1907 since the ruling bourgeoisie displayed a horror of war. Calls for “social duty” in inter-class and international cooperation and trade were mere excuses by weaklings to avoid the violence of their nightmares.
Who wasn’t, indeed couldn’t, be afraid of war and violence in Sorel’s view, was the European proletariat. The systematically exploited workers had no capital with which to influence policy. Their only means with which to better their lot was to instill fear through organized violence. The class struggle was, for Sorel, the road to redemptive war. Class war would delineate humans into an “us” versus “them”, and only such an inspirationally violent bifurcation could reinvigorate Europe.
But what would push the majority of the proletariat away from the sophisms of parliamentary “socialism” and towards violent action? Sorel’s answer would be by far the most influential aspect of his thought.
Transformative social action could only be inspired by what Sorel terms “myths”. Myths are the constructed belief of social actors that their cause is certain to ultimately triumph. Sorel turns to Henri Bergson’s notion of movement-as-becoming to illustrate the creative energy of social violence. Social action creates and projects an imaginary world (the “ultimate triumph”) ahead of the present but consisting of the actor’s movements in the present. When such an imaginary is embraced by the social majority (a mass that can constitute an “us”), an authentic myth has been established.
Sorel offers examples throughout history of what he considers galvanizing myths that have altered the course of civilization. The primary example he turns to is the Christian apocalyptic myth, which borrowed from its inception from already ancient Jewish notions of redemption to instill in its followers a projected certainty about their renewal in the future. Despite failing to materialize on a tremendous number of occasions, the myth of the apocalypse continues even today to inspire Christians to organized action. However, like the contemporary class struggle was in danger of becoming, the message of Christianity, the creatively liberating potential of its myth, had been fatally compromised by bureaucratization. The ancient hermit-martyrs of Christianity lived lives of war against the elements out in the desert. This existence of struggle against the forces of nature was chosen by them in order to give reality to a well defined myth. But gradually, the monastery replaced the desert and “sacrifice” became only another privileged profession.
Similarly, Rousseau’s writings spoke of a society of the future that would recapture the “virtue” of an imagined past. This myth inspired the French Revolution. Not many, admits Sorel, would today say that the Terror and the Napoleonic wars manifested what Rousseau had in mind. But, Sorel revealingly points out, they probably transformed reality more than Rousseau himself would have imagined or even desired. It is irrelevant for Sorel if the content of a myth ever becomes reality. It only matters that the myth compels action that leads to some kind of transformation. Sorel values myths for the quantity, not quality, of transformation they inspire.
Sorel believed that the myth that would compel the European proletariat to embrace full class war was that of the general strike. The workers could be made to believe that they were all powerful if they imagined a continent wide shut down of society through work stoppage. The strike would confront society with a catastrophe without putting forth a vision of the disaster’s end by way of making any definite demands. This would give the strike a terrifying “character of infinity” in which “normality” could not be retrieved. Sorel again readily acknowledges that an actual continent-wide, industry-wide general strike would, in all likelihood not be possible. But it would be the myth of class invincibility that would spur the proletariat forward.
As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, “Reflections On Violence” was ultimately more influential on the radical right than the left. If there is a historical figure who seems to have tried to implement Sorel’s theories most literally it would be Benito Mussolini, who indeed is said to have loved the book and had great admiration for Sorel as a thinker. As is well known, Mussolini started his political career as the type of anarcho-syndicalist leftist that Sorel wished to inspire. Mussolini went from a class-based notion of violent struggle to conceiving of Italy as the “proletarian (which is to say exploited and marginalized) nation” of twentieth century Europe. What was needed was not struggle between different classes in Italy, but an identification by all Italians as a nation-class that could, through its unity, recover its past greatness. Like a Sorelian myth, Mussolini offered a vision of the future that referenced longing for the Classical cultural past. He also offered a vision of social action, violence against all those who did not go along with his national vision, that made no political promises other than the supposedly liberating potential of participatory action.
The Neo-Classical aesthetics of Mussolini’s regime greatly influenced those of Adolph Hitler, who also referenced the German historical past in his vision of a messianic national future. While it is unlikely that Hitler read “Reflections on Violence”, Mussolini’s politics were too much of an influence on Hitler’s that Sorel must also be considered an indirect influence on the Nazi regime.
In general, fascist politics were those that most borrowed from Sorel’s thinking. A mythical vision of the past as the national future would spur the masses into an “us versus them” nationalist thinking that would galvanize them into a violent struggle that was its own goal. The promised reward was not some specific vision of the future, as with communism, but the rekindling of a “warrior spirit” that would remold humanity, in this sense in a modernist spirit, but remold it in an image of the past, in this sense in a romantic spirit.
But it was not only fascists that Sorel inspired. At least one major thinker associated with the left was directly influenced by “Reflections on Violence”: Walter Benjamin. The angel of history described in Benjamin’s essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” was inspired by a sketch by Paul Klee, but it clearly serves as an allegory for some very Sorelian themes. Flying into the future but facing the past, Benjamin’s angel seems intended to warn his readers of the dangers of ignoring the past that eternally impregnates the present. Benjamin recognized that it was the fascist right that had learned Sorel’s lesson, and he feared that gave fascism an ideological edge over the Marxist left, with its one-sided obsession with mechanized modernity and futurism.
It was Benjamin’s essay “Towards a Critique of Violence” that directly addressed “Reflections on Violence”. Benjamin’s notion of “sovereign violence”, that wielded by the self against the power of the law, is almost directly lifted from Sorel’s distinction between the violence of the oppressed versus the force of the oppressive state. In this context, Benjamin sounds almost troublingly Sorelian, as we have seen how easily this line of thinking can lead to fascistic conclusions.
I would distinguish Benjamin’s “sovereign violence” from Sorel’s “proletarian violence” by pointing to Benjamin’s extremely unconventional religiosity. Benjamin always looked towards the messianic potential of every historical moment. Every constellation of circumstances had the potential to deliver redemption (in, yes, a Sorelian way of the redemption of the past into the present) and justice. But where as Benjamin looked for a (perhaps violent!) redemption through the unspoken potential of contingency, Sorel looked for it through beating the crap out of someone.
Sorel perhaps negatively influenced Benjamin’s friends Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno. They conjectured that enlightened modernity (most specifically in the form of Weimar Germany) perhaps led inevitably to barbarism (most specifically in the form of the Nazis) in part due to the ease with which modern technology allowed seductive myths to be spun by the culture industry.
The fact that a theorist of the radical left was ultimately a defining influence for the radical right will inevitably be used as ammunition by those championing the Arendtian notion of the “democratic versus the totalitarian” that equates communism and fascism, that is, by virtually all apologists for liberal-capitalism. In response I would only say that the fact that ideas have unpredictable lines of influence does not imply some inner connection between liberating versus oppressive traditions. The champions of “democratic” liberalism almost inevitably trace the birth of “democratic” tendencies to the American revolution (and, I suppose, lynch law) and the “totalitarian” to the Jacobins and the French Revolution. They seem to want to forget that the French revolutionaries, including the Jacobins, were directly influenced by the supposedly democratic ideals of the American revolution. Influence is, indeed, complicated and unpredictable.
It should be remembered that, in 1907 when this work first appeared in book form, the distinction between “Marxist” and “Anarchist” was not nearly as definitive as it has since become. With the exception of the then tiny Bolshevik Party, the overwhelming majority of official socialist parties had become dominated by what is today remembered as “Bernsteinian revisionism”, the notion that expanded democracy would lead inevitably to the gradual implementation of socialism through parliamentary reform. (Bernstein is perhaps unfairly singled out as the embodiment of such “revisionism”. Engles himself paved the way for this line of thinking in the years following Marx’s death.) Only a few voices from within such parties, such as that of Rosa Luxemburg, then still in the German Workers Party, or Leon Trotsky, then still in the Russian Menshevik Party, challenged this notion. For an observer such as Sorel, (and despite a lot of tough talk on his part, Sorel was indeed mostly, if not entirely, an observer) those activists who called themselves “Anarcho-Syndicalists” were simply the line of Marxists that rejected parliamentarism in favor of direct action as envisioned by Marx himself. They were the front-line, violent revolutionaries of the proletarian struggle.
Sorel was mildly critical even of Marx for sometimes adopting the ruling class’s concept of societal control. “Force” was Sorel’s term for that which the capitalist class used against the proletariat. In its focus on the proletariat seizing control of the state to exude its own force against its opponents, traditional Marxism risked turning the revolution into simply a bureaucratic switching of the guards. Only violence, opposed to force, could ever be truly liberatory, and violence could only be exerted from below, not from a state controlled by whatever class.
Indeed, Sorel, a self-appointed “theorist of anarcho-syndicalism”, was never a conventional Marxist. He wrote very little on the conditions of the working class under capitalism or the potential of workers’ democracy under socialism. Instead, Sorel looked to the class struggle as a way to reignite the savage creativity of humanity. This savagery had been tamed, according to Sorel, in passages clearly indebted to Nietzsche although Sorel tries unpersuasively to distance himself from the German, by bourgeois morality as it had come to dominate under capitalism. Indeed, Sorel praises the founding robber-barons of capitalism for being savagely creative in their invention of new forms of domination. And, in a striking reminder to today’s reader that the early European commentators on socialism were not necessarily anti-racist, Sorel repeatedly praises the spirit of “Yankee ingenuity” in the colonists’ take over of the New World. In one particularly harrowing passage, Sorel cites American “lynch-law” as an example of authentic, proletarian violence!
According to Sorel’s historiography, the Jacobin Terror was in fact the beginning of modern liberalism, in which the state thought of itself as the “servant of, rather than the master of the people.” But, thought Sorel in 1907, before the rise of the systems that would today, constructively or not, be labeled “totalitarian”, the Terror was also the last gasp of the all-powerful state. Liberal capitalism had weakened the state and empowered the individual, but this had only resulted in a coddled populace that had, by an large, lost it’s capacity for invention and fallen, ironically, more and more under the sway of a parasitic Catholicism. While claiming to be “civilized” in its abhorrence of violence, liberal capitalism gives a free pass to financial crimes by the minority of capitalists towards the majority of proletarians. But this same society describes as monstrous violent crimes of survival perpetuated by the desperate working class. However, Sorel also believed that capitalism’s weakening of the state and those who control it, and strengthening of the individual might lead to the downfall of capitalism.
Sorel writes that the best thing that could happen to revive the potential of the contemporary European would be a great, continent wide war. But, in one of the most retrospectively ridiculous passages of the book, he surmises that nothing like that was imminent in 1907 since the ruling bourgeoisie displayed a horror of war. Calls for “social duty” in inter-class and international cooperation and trade were mere excuses by weaklings to avoid the violence of their nightmares.
Who wasn’t, indeed couldn’t, be afraid of war and violence in Sorel’s view, was the European proletariat. The systematically exploited workers had no capital with which to influence policy. Their only means with which to better their lot was to instill fear through organized violence. The class struggle was, for Sorel, the road to redemptive war. Class war would delineate humans into an “us” versus “them”, and only such an inspirationally violent bifurcation could reinvigorate Europe.
But what would push the majority of the proletariat away from the sophisms of parliamentary “socialism” and towards violent action? Sorel’s answer would be by far the most influential aspect of his thought.
Transformative social action could only be inspired by what Sorel terms “myths”. Myths are the constructed belief of social actors that their cause is certain to ultimately triumph. Sorel turns to Henri Bergson’s notion of movement-as-becoming to illustrate the creative energy of social violence. Social action creates and projects an imaginary world (the “ultimate triumph”) ahead of the present but consisting of the actor’s movements in the present. When such an imaginary is embraced by the social majority (a mass that can constitute an “us”), an authentic myth has been established.
Sorel offers examples throughout history of what he considers galvanizing myths that have altered the course of civilization. The primary example he turns to is the Christian apocalyptic myth, which borrowed from its inception from already ancient Jewish notions of redemption to instill in its followers a projected certainty about their renewal in the future. Despite failing to materialize on a tremendous number of occasions, the myth of the apocalypse continues even today to inspire Christians to organized action. However, like the contemporary class struggle was in danger of becoming, the message of Christianity, the creatively liberating potential of its myth, had been fatally compromised by bureaucratization. The ancient hermit-martyrs of Christianity lived lives of war against the elements out in the desert. This existence of struggle against the forces of nature was chosen by them in order to give reality to a well defined myth. But gradually, the monastery replaced the desert and “sacrifice” became only another privileged profession.
Similarly, Rousseau’s writings spoke of a society of the future that would recapture the “virtue” of an imagined past. This myth inspired the French Revolution. Not many, admits Sorel, would today say that the Terror and the Napoleonic wars manifested what Rousseau had in mind. But, Sorel revealingly points out, they probably transformed reality more than Rousseau himself would have imagined or even desired. It is irrelevant for Sorel if the content of a myth ever becomes reality. It only matters that the myth compels action that leads to some kind of transformation. Sorel values myths for the quantity, not quality, of transformation they inspire.
Sorel believed that the myth that would compel the European proletariat to embrace full class war was that of the general strike. The workers could be made to believe that they were all powerful if they imagined a continent wide shut down of society through work stoppage. The strike would confront society with a catastrophe without putting forth a vision of the disaster’s end by way of making any definite demands. This would give the strike a terrifying “character of infinity” in which “normality” could not be retrieved. Sorel again readily acknowledges that an actual continent-wide, industry-wide general strike would, in all likelihood not be possible. But it would be the myth of class invincibility that would spur the proletariat forward.
As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, “Reflections On Violence” was ultimately more influential on the radical right than the left. If there is a historical figure who seems to have tried to implement Sorel’s theories most literally it would be Benito Mussolini, who indeed is said to have loved the book and had great admiration for Sorel as a thinker. As is well known, Mussolini started his political career as the type of anarcho-syndicalist leftist that Sorel wished to inspire. Mussolini went from a class-based notion of violent struggle to conceiving of Italy as the “proletarian (which is to say exploited and marginalized) nation” of twentieth century Europe. What was needed was not struggle between different classes in Italy, but an identification by all Italians as a nation-class that could, through its unity, recover its past greatness. Like a Sorelian myth, Mussolini offered a vision of the future that referenced longing for the Classical cultural past. He also offered a vision of social action, violence against all those who did not go along with his national vision, that made no political promises other than the supposedly liberating potential of participatory action.
The Neo-Classical aesthetics of Mussolini’s regime greatly influenced those of Adolph Hitler, who also referenced the German historical past in his vision of a messianic national future. While it is unlikely that Hitler read “Reflections on Violence”, Mussolini’s politics were too much of an influence on Hitler’s that Sorel must also be considered an indirect influence on the Nazi regime.
In general, fascist politics were those that most borrowed from Sorel’s thinking. A mythical vision of the past as the national future would spur the masses into an “us versus them” nationalist thinking that would galvanize them into a violent struggle that was its own goal. The promised reward was not some specific vision of the future, as with communism, but the rekindling of a “warrior spirit” that would remold humanity, in this sense in a modernist spirit, but remold it in an image of the past, in this sense in a romantic spirit.
But it was not only fascists that Sorel inspired. At least one major thinker associated with the left was directly influenced by “Reflections on Violence”: Walter Benjamin. The angel of history described in Benjamin’s essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” was inspired by a sketch by Paul Klee, but it clearly serves as an allegory for some very Sorelian themes. Flying into the future but facing the past, Benjamin’s angel seems intended to warn his readers of the dangers of ignoring the past that eternally impregnates the present. Benjamin recognized that it was the fascist right that had learned Sorel’s lesson, and he feared that gave fascism an ideological edge over the Marxist left, with its one-sided obsession with mechanized modernity and futurism.
It was Benjamin’s essay “Towards a Critique of Violence” that directly addressed “Reflections on Violence”. Benjamin’s notion of “sovereign violence”, that wielded by the self against the power of the law, is almost directly lifted from Sorel’s distinction between the violence of the oppressed versus the force of the oppressive state. In this context, Benjamin sounds almost troublingly Sorelian, as we have seen how easily this line of thinking can lead to fascistic conclusions.
I would distinguish Benjamin’s “sovereign violence” from Sorel’s “proletarian violence” by pointing to Benjamin’s extremely unconventional religiosity. Benjamin always looked towards the messianic potential of every historical moment. Every constellation of circumstances had the potential to deliver redemption (in, yes, a Sorelian way of the redemption of the past into the present) and justice. But where as Benjamin looked for a (perhaps violent!) redemption through the unspoken potential of contingency, Sorel looked for it through beating the crap out of someone.
Sorel perhaps negatively influenced Benjamin’s friends Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno. They conjectured that enlightened modernity (most specifically in the form of Weimar Germany) perhaps led inevitably to barbarism (most specifically in the form of the Nazis) in part due to the ease with which modern technology allowed seductive myths to be spun by the culture industry.
The fact that a theorist of the radical left was ultimately a defining influence for the radical right will inevitably be used as ammunition by those championing the Arendtian notion of the “democratic versus the totalitarian” that equates communism and fascism, that is, by virtually all apologists for liberal-capitalism. In response I would only say that the fact that ideas have unpredictable lines of influence does not imply some inner connection between liberating versus oppressive traditions. The champions of “democratic” liberalism almost inevitably trace the birth of “democratic” tendencies to the American revolution (and, I suppose, lynch law) and the “totalitarian” to the Jacobins and the French Revolution. They seem to want to forget that the French revolutionaries, including the Jacobins, were directly influenced by the supposedly democratic ideals of the American revolution. Influence is, indeed, complicated and unpredictable.
January 6, 2021
This book is extremely flawed. Like, very much so. Sorel, while heavily influenced by Marx, abandons Marxism at a fundamental level every other position. It is thus wrong on countless topics. Some of the most egregious:
-Considering that because all the Second International parties were now led by middle-class statesmen, so all Party organizations would be made up of middle class statesmen; thus unions must be the revolutionary political organ;
-That proletarian revolution wouldn't lead to revolutionary terror, the reason why that happened in the French revolution was due to its middle-class, bourgeois character;
-That the proletariat wouldn't assume State power;
-That general strikes are not done for the sake of the economic well-being of the whole class, but are rather "Napoleonic battles" that are perfect for "weeding out the pacifists who would spoil the elite troops" of the proletarian fighting force;
-That no historical path can be predicted, that there is no scientific way to analyze history, even stating that "The errors [in predicting the future] committed by Marx are numerous and sometimes enormous" - when Marx predicted so much so accurately! When the biggest mistake of Marx, to think that Russia would pass over capitalism, was argued against correctly by the Russian Marxists, meaning it was always a matter of methodology!;
-The notion that the "general strike" will bring down capitalist society - rather than the insurrectionary proletarian coup taking down the State and putting in place its own;
Amid many others.
A gigantic part of the book is dedicated to Sorel's critique of the middle class (which is often times on point), but this ideology, syndicalism, was itself the ideology of a reactionary middle class of technicians, which were just as guilty of what Sorel hated in the Second International.
So why am I giving it three stars?
Because, quite simply, its topics are still relevant. The insipid character of reformism, how it's the politics of the middle classes, how reactionary these middle classes are, the rejuvenating effect that proletarian violence has on a degenerating culture, the importance of building a myth around which the whole class can rally, etc. All of this is just as relevant now as it was in the fin de siécle, when Sorel was writing it.
Our culture has degenerated due to capitalism an untold amount, due to the cult of the commodity. It is a culture that breeds loneliness, alienation, sadness, rage, anger, etc. In France, a study published today by the Fondation de France claims that there are already 7 million people living in isolation, 3 million higher than in 2010. That is, the percentage of the French population without ANY emotional relationships and family and community support increased from 9% to 14% of the population - an enormous percentage. It continues to grow. Teleworking, which was supposed to improve reconciliation and encourage collaborative work in teams, has finally been implemented in such a way that 54% of those who adopted it during the pandemic in France claim to suffer from a feeling of isolation and loneliness.
The braindead middle-class in service of the abhorrent bourgeois states keeps blaming this on "individual choices" - but these are not the consequences of individual acts, they are socially developed.
The solution to this is the proletarian movement, the COMMUNIST movement - which means the old people's houses, the working class spaces, the culture of fraternal help and struggle. And above all, the working class violence, the final insurrection that takes down the disgusting democratic States and put in its place the regime of workers', peasants' and soldiers' councils.
So, Sorel's points about proletarian violence are quite correct. It is correct there. And that is why I give it three stars.
This book ends with an appendix where Sorel defends Lenin. Lenin, who goes against many of the things in this book - Lenin the extremist partisan, Lenin the master of terror, Lenin the statesman, Lenin the fundamentalist Marxism which, contrary to the popular myth that he created "his own" variant of Marxism, he was in fact, a fundamentalist to the bone. Sorel ends the book in an appendix written far after the first edition, he defends Lenin and does so quite rightly.
But that only condemns the wrong parts of the book more - he has to defend Lenin, who really fought for proletarian violence - strikes, insurrections, coups, civil war and terror - despite the fact that Lenin went against much of what the book just said.
At the same time, it is now all the more time to remember the "myths" from the past which are in reality nothing but historical truths that bourgeois history has purposefully erased - always remember the German revolution, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the Gilan Republic, the Shanghai Commune, that the Red Wave was what gave most of us Europeans our 8-hour working day, remember, remember, remember! The workers' insurrections of the past may have failed, but the future ones will walk all over the modern States, just like the Napoleonic armies once did.
As for the democratic condemnation of proletarian violence, there is nothing more disgusting.
What is 200k dead from the Red Terror, mostly in self-defense, compared to the 7 to 8 million dead by starvation caused by the blockades of the disgusting democratic nations, and of their outrageous amount of aid given to White armies in order to raise Russian infrastructure to the ground?
How can there be talk of a small dictatorial clique imposing its will on the Russian population, when, several times, Bolshevik control was reduced to Moscow and St. Petersburg, when 30 different armies entered Russian territory, with only a single one of them ever being friendly to the Bolsheviks (and this was a rarity), when the White armies received more foreign support, all from the "democratic" nations, than any other force in human history? Is one really meant to believe that a "small clique" managed to force the population to fight for such hardships rather than giving in, all against the population's wishes?
And never forget that all these States are against all proletarians of every state! You don't have to go to Russia to see the White Terror in the days of 1917-1923! It appeared in every democratic nation where the workers' rose up.
The Shanghai massacre in China, pistolerismo in Spain, the Freikorps murder and rape sprees in Germany, the fascist terror in Italy (which was defended by the democratic government), the white terror in Hungary after the soviet republic ended (which was far more brutal, involving pogroms, killing around 5 times more people, largely innocent workers in Budapest - and yet about this nobody ever hears a word compared to the red terror, which was always in self-defense!), the murderous treatment of the workers in Finland after the civil war, etc etc.
One does not even need to look abroad to see the obvious massacres committed by the smugly triumphant democracies with its very undemocratic proxies, which it pretends to oppose - the moment there is a serious threat to the democratic regime, the White terror comes.
All the democracies today laugh triumphantly, as even if they didn't manage to destroy soviet power, they managed to destroy Russia so thoroughly that the soviet regime fell within a few years anyway. But the power of the workers', peasants' and soldiers' councils will survive forever as the lessons that will guide the future working class forwards. They will never be forgotten.
-Considering that because all the Second International parties were now led by middle-class statesmen, so all Party organizations would be made up of middle class statesmen; thus unions must be the revolutionary political organ;
-That proletarian revolution wouldn't lead to revolutionary terror, the reason why that happened in the French revolution was due to its middle-class, bourgeois character;
-That the proletariat wouldn't assume State power;
-That general strikes are not done for the sake of the economic well-being of the whole class, but are rather "Napoleonic battles" that are perfect for "weeding out the pacifists who would spoil the elite troops" of the proletarian fighting force;
-That no historical path can be predicted, that there is no scientific way to analyze history, even stating that "The errors [in predicting the future] committed by Marx are numerous and sometimes enormous" - when Marx predicted so much so accurately! When the biggest mistake of Marx, to think that Russia would pass over capitalism, was argued against correctly by the Russian Marxists, meaning it was always a matter of methodology!;
-The notion that the "general strike" will bring down capitalist society - rather than the insurrectionary proletarian coup taking down the State and putting in place its own;
Amid many others.
A gigantic part of the book is dedicated to Sorel's critique of the middle class (which is often times on point), but this ideology, syndicalism, was itself the ideology of a reactionary middle class of technicians, which were just as guilty of what Sorel hated in the Second International.
So why am I giving it three stars?
Because, quite simply, its topics are still relevant. The insipid character of reformism, how it's the politics of the middle classes, how reactionary these middle classes are, the rejuvenating effect that proletarian violence has on a degenerating culture, the importance of building a myth around which the whole class can rally, etc. All of this is just as relevant now as it was in the fin de siécle, when Sorel was writing it.
Our culture has degenerated due to capitalism an untold amount, due to the cult of the commodity. It is a culture that breeds loneliness, alienation, sadness, rage, anger, etc. In France, a study published today by the Fondation de France claims that there are already 7 million people living in isolation, 3 million higher than in 2010. That is, the percentage of the French population without ANY emotional relationships and family and community support increased from 9% to 14% of the population - an enormous percentage. It continues to grow. Teleworking, which was supposed to improve reconciliation and encourage collaborative work in teams, has finally been implemented in such a way that 54% of those who adopted it during the pandemic in France claim to suffer from a feeling of isolation and loneliness.
The braindead middle-class in service of the abhorrent bourgeois states keeps blaming this on "individual choices" - but these are not the consequences of individual acts, they are socially developed.
The solution to this is the proletarian movement, the COMMUNIST movement - which means the old people's houses, the working class spaces, the culture of fraternal help and struggle. And above all, the working class violence, the final insurrection that takes down the disgusting democratic States and put in its place the regime of workers', peasants' and soldiers' councils.
So, Sorel's points about proletarian violence are quite correct. It is correct there. And that is why I give it three stars.
This book ends with an appendix where Sorel defends Lenin. Lenin, who goes against many of the things in this book - Lenin the extremist partisan, Lenin the master of terror, Lenin the statesman, Lenin the fundamentalist Marxism which, contrary to the popular myth that he created "his own" variant of Marxism, he was in fact, a fundamentalist to the bone. Sorel ends the book in an appendix written far after the first edition, he defends Lenin and does so quite rightly.
But that only condemns the wrong parts of the book more - he has to defend Lenin, who really fought for proletarian violence - strikes, insurrections, coups, civil war and terror - despite the fact that Lenin went against much of what the book just said.
At the same time, it is now all the more time to remember the "myths" from the past which are in reality nothing but historical truths that bourgeois history has purposefully erased - always remember the German revolution, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the Gilan Republic, the Shanghai Commune, that the Red Wave was what gave most of us Europeans our 8-hour working day, remember, remember, remember! The workers' insurrections of the past may have failed, but the future ones will walk all over the modern States, just like the Napoleonic armies once did.
As for the democratic condemnation of proletarian violence, there is nothing more disgusting.
What is 200k dead from the Red Terror, mostly in self-defense, compared to the 7 to 8 million dead by starvation caused by the blockades of the disgusting democratic nations, and of their outrageous amount of aid given to White armies in order to raise Russian infrastructure to the ground?
How can there be talk of a small dictatorial clique imposing its will on the Russian population, when, several times, Bolshevik control was reduced to Moscow and St. Petersburg, when 30 different armies entered Russian territory, with only a single one of them ever being friendly to the Bolsheviks (and this was a rarity), when the White armies received more foreign support, all from the "democratic" nations, than any other force in human history? Is one really meant to believe that a "small clique" managed to force the population to fight for such hardships rather than giving in, all against the population's wishes?
And never forget that all these States are against all proletarians of every state! You don't have to go to Russia to see the White Terror in the days of 1917-1923! It appeared in every democratic nation where the workers' rose up.
The Shanghai massacre in China, pistolerismo in Spain, the Freikorps murder and rape sprees in Germany, the fascist terror in Italy (which was defended by the democratic government), the white terror in Hungary after the soviet republic ended (which was far more brutal, involving pogroms, killing around 5 times more people, largely innocent workers in Budapest - and yet about this nobody ever hears a word compared to the red terror, which was always in self-defense!), the murderous treatment of the workers in Finland after the civil war, etc etc.
One does not even need to look abroad to see the obvious massacres committed by the smugly triumphant democracies with its very undemocratic proxies, which it pretends to oppose - the moment there is a serious threat to the democratic regime, the White terror comes.
All the democracies today laugh triumphantly, as even if they didn't manage to destroy soviet power, they managed to destroy Russia so thoroughly that the soviet regime fell within a few years anyway. But the power of the workers', peasants' and soldiers' councils will survive forever as the lessons that will guide the future working class forwards. They will never be forgotten.
September 13, 2021
We moderns abhor violence and only allow the state a limited monopoly on violence. But what if violence is morally, historically, socially, tactically, and so on necessary – as Sorel makes the case here in a limited Marxist and class struggle context? Sorel's reflections on violence inspired revolutionaries and dictators like Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler.
These reflections stand in the aftermath of Dreyfus affair and are mainly engaged with the French events and politicians around 1900. As such, the “reflections on violence” are quite secondary to the author's wide interests in political affairs and Marxist reflections that are of little interest to us today.
These reflections stand in the aftermath of Dreyfus affair and are mainly engaged with the French events and politicians around 1900. As such, the “reflections on violence” are quite secondary to the author's wide interests in political affairs and Marxist reflections that are of little interest to us today.
March 12, 2022
Despite writing on the sidelines as an advocate for "revolutionary syndicalism", as far as I can tell Sorel is essentially a figure of the radical right. Imagine you had an uncle who sat at home, reading books about the decline of the west, and writing Tweets about how the Starbucks workers going on strike ought to 1. be more violent and 2. reject all aid from corrupt politicians like AOC. This is how I imagine Sorel, although unfortunately he has been much more influential than this straw-uncle would be.
He grounds his argument on the idea that society has entered an era of decadent values, harmful to the vigor of the bourgeoisie and proletariat alike, and most importantly harmful to "production" and economic progress. He thinks that a violent worker's movement is needed, hostile to all socialist politicians and attempts at reform. Without this violent mentality on the part of the workers, the bourgeoisie might forget their own historic role and attempt to create "social peace" with welfare reforms that harm the vitality of production. And this hostile mentality in the Worker's Movement can only be founded on an irrational, integral Myth, a la Bergson, which he calls the myth of the General Strike, the strike to end all strikes.
What does his mythical "general strike", his irrational rupture, look like? He hardly tells us! And he tells us not to plan for its aftermath, because it doesn't matter if it actually occurs, it's mostly just way to create new moral values! But he also tells us that the workers need to be sure to be able to take over the production process immediately and make it more productive than before, in order not to frighten off the lower middle classes who might otherwise cleave to them. In other words, the myth of the "general strike" is also a myth of economic miracle, where the workers take the machines and utilize them more productively than ever before. (A prophecy of Stakhanovism?!)
The one redeeming feature of this text is his critique of the French parliamentary socialist Jaures, who seems to have been trying to create a patriotic socialism that glorified the Jacobins.
He grounds his argument on the idea that society has entered an era of decadent values, harmful to the vigor of the bourgeoisie and proletariat alike, and most importantly harmful to "production" and economic progress. He thinks that a violent worker's movement is needed, hostile to all socialist politicians and attempts at reform. Without this violent mentality on the part of the workers, the bourgeoisie might forget their own historic role and attempt to create "social peace" with welfare reforms that harm the vitality of production. And this hostile mentality in the Worker's Movement can only be founded on an irrational, integral Myth, a la Bergson, which he calls the myth of the General Strike, the strike to end all strikes.
What does his mythical "general strike", his irrational rupture, look like? He hardly tells us! And he tells us not to plan for its aftermath, because it doesn't matter if it actually occurs, it's mostly just way to create new moral values! But he also tells us that the workers need to be sure to be able to take over the production process immediately and make it more productive than before, in order not to frighten off the lower middle classes who might otherwise cleave to them. In other words, the myth of the "general strike" is also a myth of economic miracle, where the workers take the machines and utilize them more productively than ever before. (A prophecy of Stakhanovism?!)
The one redeeming feature of this text is his critique of the French parliamentary socialist Jaures, who seems to have been trying to create a patriotic socialism that glorified the Jacobins.
December 10, 2019
A mixed bag, really.
Unabashedly affirming his anarchist influences, Sorel claims to have distilled of the entire socialist movement (that is to say, English political economy, German philosophy and French Socialism) to the notion of a syndicalist general strike. This proletarian-lead general strike is to be distinguished at all costs from the political general strike favored by the "parliamentary socialists" in which the place of power is only evacuated, not abolished. Rather, Sorel wants to do away with the aspirations for leadership or power, to the point of scolding Kautsky for daring to sketch a plan for the post-revolutionary society. Indeed, rabidly anti-centralist, Sorel wants to act now and leave all the subsquent dealings to the spontaneous ingenuity of the free producers of tomorrow. The vehicle for immediate action is, of course, the general strike, invested with all the mythic significances of the revolutions past.
Violence will rejuvenate the moribund bourgeosie and rekindle their class interests. For Sorel, the bourgeosie have strayed too far from their historical destiny by being duped into thinking they could broker a progressively long lasting peace with the proletarian. Sorel wants nothing less than to FORCE the objective conditions of the revolution by subjective means. Through the general strike, the affects become a material motive force that seizes hold of the masses.
Unfortunately for Sorel, injecting the proletarian masses with the much needed spiritual and moral enthusiasm of the Bergsonian sort secures immediate intelligibly of praxis at the price of deeply idealizing and therefore impoverishing the science of class struggle.
Curiously enough, despite his professed hostility to political general strikes, Sorel wholeheartedly endorsed Lenin and Bolsheviksm, even recognizing the "backward" conditions of Russia.
Unabashedly affirming his anarchist influences, Sorel claims to have distilled of the entire socialist movement (that is to say, English political economy, German philosophy and French Socialism) to the notion of a syndicalist general strike. This proletarian-lead general strike is to be distinguished at all costs from the political general strike favored by the "parliamentary socialists" in which the place of power is only evacuated, not abolished. Rather, Sorel wants to do away with the aspirations for leadership or power, to the point of scolding Kautsky for daring to sketch a plan for the post-revolutionary society. Indeed, rabidly anti-centralist, Sorel wants to act now and leave all the subsquent dealings to the spontaneous ingenuity of the free producers of tomorrow. The vehicle for immediate action is, of course, the general strike, invested with all the mythic significances of the revolutions past.
Violence will rejuvenate the moribund bourgeosie and rekindle their class interests. For Sorel, the bourgeosie have strayed too far from their historical destiny by being duped into thinking they could broker a progressively long lasting peace with the proletarian. Sorel wants nothing less than to FORCE the objective conditions of the revolution by subjective means. Through the general strike, the affects become a material motive force that seizes hold of the masses.
Unfortunately for Sorel, injecting the proletarian masses with the much needed spiritual and moral enthusiasm of the Bergsonian sort secures immediate intelligibly of praxis at the price of deeply idealizing and therefore impoverishing the science of class struggle.
Curiously enough, despite his professed hostility to political general strikes, Sorel wholeheartedly endorsed Lenin and Bolsheviksm, even recognizing the "backward" conditions of Russia.
February 3, 2022
Sorel, 1908-Fransa gündemindeki sosyalist parti politikalarını, genel grev fikrini ve proleter şiddeti Marx'ın tezlerini yeniden yorumlayarak, Devrim mitine duyulan ihtiyacı dile getirerek makalelerinin merkezine taşıyor. Özellikle iki yüzlülük ve burjuva kaypaklığı sergileyen sosyal demokrat/sosyalist parti eleştirisi bugün için de önemli.
Bugünlerde Türkiye'de yayılmaya başlayan ve öznesi doğrudan işçilerden oluşan grev hareketleri belki Sorelvari bir genel greve işaret etmese de işçi sınıfının politika belirlemede düzen partilerine ihtiyaç duymadığını göstermesi bakımından kritik bir önemde.
Son olarak Telemak'a bu edisyon için teşekkür etmekle birlikte, metinde oldukça çok baskı hatası olması okuru yorucu ve üzücü bir konu. Bu hataların birinci baskıya has kalması ve olası yeni baskılarda düzeltilmesi dileğiyle.
Bugünlerde Türkiye'de yayılmaya başlayan ve öznesi doğrudan işçilerden oluşan grev hareketleri belki Sorelvari bir genel greve işaret etmese de işçi sınıfının politika belirlemede düzen partilerine ihtiyaç duymadığını göstermesi bakımından kritik bir önemde.
Son olarak Telemak'a bu edisyon için teşekkür etmekle birlikte, metinde oldukça çok baskı hatası olması okuru yorucu ve üzücü bir konu. Bu hataların birinci baskıya has kalması ve olası yeni baskılarda düzeltilmesi dileğiyle.
April 26, 2018
It is a sad fact that this work usually goes unread by every generation. It seems to be the most creative work in the radical tradition since Marx (up to that point). While his metaphysical description of the general strike may not be convincing, his epistemological critique of elites within socialism and hierarchical structures via the inconsistency and façade of their knowledge systems is profoundly rich. His critique of positivism and the way he manages to connect bourgeois scientism with liberalism's position in society is underappreciated. What the book lacks, however, is a tempered look at anarcho syndicalism that doesn't deify the abstract event in the general stike. His conversation of the sublimity of morality could have developed further, for example, had he not reduced it with a Deus ex machina in the general strike. Lastly, his ideological purity is perhaps his other shortcoming, seeing in liberalism (middle class ideology) something to be extirpated, without ever immanently critiquing its development. The Dreyfus Affair looms large over this work, and in this sense he seems to be too tied to the peculiarities of French politics to appreciate the potential within his work. The tragedy of this collection of essays then lies in the fact that they are inchoate, and yet Sorel's point is to leave more questions than furnished systems, so perhaps that is their brilliance.
August 7, 2016
He does waffle on a bit
May 3, 2020
64 years before Anti-Oedipus saw Deleuze and Guattari suggest we "accelerate the process", Georges Sorel demanded we do so in the name of progress, civilisation, and all things True, Good and Beautiful. Taking up the accelerationist current in Marx's thought and using it as a sledgehammer against the parliamentary socialism of his day, Sorel manages a more convincing fusion of Marx and Nietzsche than we've seen since, while managing to be a more honest and worthy successor to Marx than any of the humanist moralisers who call themselves Marxists today.
(I read the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition, by the way, just in case anyone wants to chase up my page references.)
Reflections on Violence really has a simple message: The capitalist class has become weak-willed and stupid thanks to the activities of the parliamentary socialists. The latter, Sorel says, are playing both sides to their own advantage: they win small concessions from the bourgeoise by leveraging their fear of the proletariat, while disparaging insurrectionary thinkers like Sorel and lulling the masses into believing the best way to achieve their goals is through the advocacy of the party elite. This ultimately serves no-one but the parliamentary socialists, who dream of nothing more than growing rich and successful off the back of the worker's movement. But not only is this behaviour disgraceful to Sorel, it's also antithetical to Marxist doctrine: capitalism is a fundamentally progressive economic system only when the class struggle is vigorous and open. Open antagonism between the classes is the engine of progress, as the capitalists seek to marginalise the power of the proletariat by developing the productive forces, while the proletariat grow ever more organised and determined in asserting themselves. What Sorel fears is that the coming-together and cross-class solidarity envisioned by the parliamentary left will lead to economic decline and stagnation, where Nietzsche's Last Man, who dreams only of a comfortable life, reigns forever over a herd of workers with no ambition and a property-owning class who are no better than slaves.
Sorel is a perceptive reader of Marx, and understands that socialism is not a return to a pre-capitalist unitary body, nor the creation of a peaceful utopia, on the contrary socialism "picks up where capitalism left off..." (129) The proletariat "has no need to make plans for utilizing its victories: it counts on expelling the capitalists from the productive domain and on taking their place in the workshop created by capitalism." (161) It is common enough today, every time capitalism shits the bed, to hear leftists say 'Marx predicted all this... this is why socialism must replace capitalism...' but as Sorel notes, "the crises Marx had in mind must not be confused with economic decline; crises appeared to him as the result of a too-risky venture on the part of production, which creates productive forces out of proportion to the means of regulation which the capitalist system automatically brings into play." (127) The reason that socialism must succeed capitalism is not so that the economic system can be kinder, less brutal (though it may well be); it is not a question of decelerating the process to prevent catastrophe, but rather putting the means of production in the hands of the workers, who know what they're doing far better than the capitalist who merely funds the ventures. Competency and stability comes second to the daring, discipline, and technical ability of the fully-developed proletariat.
Sorel, again in full agreement with Marx, stresses that what capitalism has built up, socialism will inherit. The capitalists are the enemy, but they are not to be robbed of the master morality which drives them to prepare the world for socialism. As Marx said in the Poverty of Philosophy, "in existing society, in the industry based upon individual exchanges, the anarchy of production, which is the source of so much poverty, is at the same time the source of all progress..." Sorel, warning of what happens if capitalism is straightjacketed by slave morality, adds: "If, on the contrary, the bourgeoisie, led astray by the nonsense of the preachers of ethics and sociology, returns to the ideal of conservative mediocrity, seeks to correct the abuses of the economy and wishes to break with the barbarism of their predecessors, then one part of the forces which were to further the development of capitalism is employed in hindering it, chance is introduced and the future of the world becomes completely indeterminate." (76) But, and this is important to stress, it is not a question of simply waiting around until the capitalists have developed industry enough and then letting them disappear. The class struggle must be continually fought by the worker's movement. Everybody must play their role. Then, and only then, does socialism come about with the necessity that Marx predicts.
Sorel views socialism as a heroic leap into the unknown (74; 129; 251), where selfless workers strive towards excellence, assuring "the continued progress of the world" (248). Details are scarce, but it's basically Capitalism 2: Capitalism Harder. The master morality of a strong and self-confident proletariat will bring about changes we can't even imagine. Like Marx, Sorel sees little point in speculating about a future that will be guided by material necessity, instinct, ambition, and unheard of technological advances. Social theorists and utopian technicians will have little say in the way things go.
As far as I'm concerned, this is really the direction that Marxism logically goes in. Sorel, like Marx, worships at the altar of technological progress and assigns central importance to the proletariat on the basis of its importance to the functioning of the economy. But the dream of indefinite progress is no longer tenable today. You can't help but feel a sense of amusement when you read Sorel: socialism will not rescue industrial society from barbarism. Industrial society is barbarism. Finite planet, finite resources, finite time. The story of the rise of the proletariat is not an epic. It is, in truth, quite tragic. But mostly it's a farce.
Socialists as much as capitalists belong to an ideological tradition that ecology quietly made a fool out of decades ago. If leftists must persist in their attacks on capital, they ought to be Sorelists (that is, actual Marxists): ruthless, uncompromising, continually demanding concessions and never on the defence, sustained by heroic myths and motivated by a cold, conquering mindset. But this is to remain irrational and religious. This is perfectly fine with Sorel. But how much longer can utopians avert their gaze from the abyss?
(I read the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition, by the way, just in case anyone wants to chase up my page references.)
Reflections on Violence really has a simple message: The capitalist class has become weak-willed and stupid thanks to the activities of the parliamentary socialists. The latter, Sorel says, are playing both sides to their own advantage: they win small concessions from the bourgeoise by leveraging their fear of the proletariat, while disparaging insurrectionary thinkers like Sorel and lulling the masses into believing the best way to achieve their goals is through the advocacy of the party elite. This ultimately serves no-one but the parliamentary socialists, who dream of nothing more than growing rich and successful off the back of the worker's movement. But not only is this behaviour disgraceful to Sorel, it's also antithetical to Marxist doctrine: capitalism is a fundamentally progressive economic system only when the class struggle is vigorous and open. Open antagonism between the classes is the engine of progress, as the capitalists seek to marginalise the power of the proletariat by developing the productive forces, while the proletariat grow ever more organised and determined in asserting themselves. What Sorel fears is that the coming-together and cross-class solidarity envisioned by the parliamentary left will lead to economic decline and stagnation, where Nietzsche's Last Man, who dreams only of a comfortable life, reigns forever over a herd of workers with no ambition and a property-owning class who are no better than slaves.
Sorel is a perceptive reader of Marx, and understands that socialism is not a return to a pre-capitalist unitary body, nor the creation of a peaceful utopia, on the contrary socialism "picks up where capitalism left off..." (129) The proletariat "has no need to make plans for utilizing its victories: it counts on expelling the capitalists from the productive domain and on taking their place in the workshop created by capitalism." (161) It is common enough today, every time capitalism shits the bed, to hear leftists say 'Marx predicted all this... this is why socialism must replace capitalism...' but as Sorel notes, "the crises Marx had in mind must not be confused with economic decline; crises appeared to him as the result of a too-risky venture on the part of production, which creates productive forces out of proportion to the means of regulation which the capitalist system automatically brings into play." (127) The reason that socialism must succeed capitalism is not so that the economic system can be kinder, less brutal (though it may well be); it is not a question of decelerating the process to prevent catastrophe, but rather putting the means of production in the hands of the workers, who know what they're doing far better than the capitalist who merely funds the ventures. Competency and stability comes second to the daring, discipline, and technical ability of the fully-developed proletariat.
Sorel, again in full agreement with Marx, stresses that what capitalism has built up, socialism will inherit. The capitalists are the enemy, but they are not to be robbed of the master morality which drives them to prepare the world for socialism. As Marx said in the Poverty of Philosophy, "in existing society, in the industry based upon individual exchanges, the anarchy of production, which is the source of so much poverty, is at the same time the source of all progress..." Sorel, warning of what happens if capitalism is straightjacketed by slave morality, adds: "If, on the contrary, the bourgeoisie, led astray by the nonsense of the preachers of ethics and sociology, returns to the ideal of conservative mediocrity, seeks to correct the abuses of the economy and wishes to break with the barbarism of their predecessors, then one part of the forces which were to further the development of capitalism is employed in hindering it, chance is introduced and the future of the world becomes completely indeterminate." (76) But, and this is important to stress, it is not a question of simply waiting around until the capitalists have developed industry enough and then letting them disappear. The class struggle must be continually fought by the worker's movement. Everybody must play their role. Then, and only then, does socialism come about with the necessity that Marx predicts.
Sorel views socialism as a heroic leap into the unknown (74; 129; 251), where selfless workers strive towards excellence, assuring "the continued progress of the world" (248). Details are scarce, but it's basically Capitalism 2: Capitalism Harder. The master morality of a strong and self-confident proletariat will bring about changes we can't even imagine. Like Marx, Sorel sees little point in speculating about a future that will be guided by material necessity, instinct, ambition, and unheard of technological advances. Social theorists and utopian technicians will have little say in the way things go.
As far as I'm concerned, this is really the direction that Marxism logically goes in. Sorel, like Marx, worships at the altar of technological progress and assigns central importance to the proletariat on the basis of its importance to the functioning of the economy. But the dream of indefinite progress is no longer tenable today. You can't help but feel a sense of amusement when you read Sorel: socialism will not rescue industrial society from barbarism. Industrial society is barbarism. Finite planet, finite resources, finite time. The story of the rise of the proletariat is not an epic. It is, in truth, quite tragic. But mostly it's a farce.
Socialists as much as capitalists belong to an ideological tradition that ecology quietly made a fool out of decades ago. If leftists must persist in their attacks on capital, they ought to be Sorelists (that is, actual Marxists): ruthless, uncompromising, continually demanding concessions and never on the defence, sustained by heroic myths and motivated by a cold, conquering mindset. But this is to remain irrational and religious. This is perfectly fine with Sorel. But how much longer can utopians avert their gaze from the abyss?
January 19, 2020
You would image that a book that argues for the morality of revolutionary violence would be at least exciting to read, but it is not. This book is so boring. Boring because of the highside of actual communist revolutions.
It is difficult to take seriously philosophical arguments that the real world have showed to be terrible wrong. This book is also boring, because it argues against events and people that the history gave almost entirely forgotten. With out the context of the time, this book is a very hard understand.
The only thing that makes this book remotely interesting to read is that Sorrel invented many of the philosophical ideas that would become the foundations of fascist thought.
The writer is kind of a weird authoritarian anarchist and it is so ironic that his arguments for a violent general strike are the same that even current Neo-Nazis use to justify their horrible world view. Only thing that this book lacs is a racist argument. There is some antisemtic stereotypes here and there, but the writer is not trying to argue for the purity of the white race. The fascism of this book are the esoteric arguments for total war that will "purify" a nation, by destroying the old elites and the idea of ancient heroes and myths as vehicles to mobiles the workers.
The mythic elements are the thing that i was interested, because Sorrel was the first thinker to propose that people do not embrace a ideology because it makes logical sense, but because it has a good story to explain the world. For this book the story is the idea of a great general strike that would shatter the capitalist world and kickstart a communist revolution.
It is difficult to take seriously philosophical arguments that the real world have showed to be terrible wrong. This book is also boring, because it argues against events and people that the history gave almost entirely forgotten. With out the context of the time, this book is a very hard understand.
The only thing that makes this book remotely interesting to read is that Sorrel invented many of the philosophical ideas that would become the foundations of fascist thought.
The writer is kind of a weird authoritarian anarchist and it is so ironic that his arguments for a violent general strike are the same that even current Neo-Nazis use to justify their horrible world view. Only thing that this book lacs is a racist argument. There is some antisemtic stereotypes here and there, but the writer is not trying to argue for the purity of the white race. The fascism of this book are the esoteric arguments for total war that will "purify" a nation, by destroying the old elites and the idea of ancient heroes and myths as vehicles to mobiles the workers.
The mythic elements are the thing that i was interested, because Sorrel was the first thinker to propose that people do not embrace a ideology because it makes logical sense, but because it has a good story to explain the world. For this book the story is the idea of a great general strike that would shatter the capitalist world and kickstart a communist revolution.
June 10, 2025
I am very conflicted about this book. Perhaps I am not sure what I was expecting, and I am uncertain as to the purpose the author set out for himself when writing it, but it was not what I thought it was going to be.
As he himself admits, he doesn’t practice the rules of writing and his thoughts are sometimes scrambled and incoherent with the onus on the reader to do the work and ascertain the meaning - fine.
The problem is he spends so much time engaging in the petty political squabbles of his day that it takes away from the central point of the book.
Jaures - Sorel loathes Jaures in every possible way. However, I am still confused about what that has to do with any reflection on violence, syndicalism, or the general strike.
This book reminds me of many books of the present era that also take away from the central point of their books, wading into whatever political or ideological controversy exist today.
However, there are passages of brilliance and genius that make this book a worthwhile read. Even as a historical document highlighting a period in time the book is worthwhile.
My favorite passages were his comparisons of the ancient Greek sailors to the Yankee Americans of his day, optimists and pessimists and Nietzsche. Would that they still had that same spirit….
But the best and where he is at his greatest was in trying to figure out a way to fix a severe lack of energy in Europe at that time. He felt that this could only be done by some massive action brought about towards a worthy higher ideal Very much like what animated the spirits of the soldiers of the French Revolution to such glorious achievements.
Of course, the problem with all of this is he focuses so much on the general strike that there’s no program for what would happen if his wildest dream came true. We are left supposing that it would sort of work itself out, which we know was naïve.
As he himself admits, he doesn’t practice the rules of writing and his thoughts are sometimes scrambled and incoherent with the onus on the reader to do the work and ascertain the meaning - fine.
The problem is he spends so much time engaging in the petty political squabbles of his day that it takes away from the central point of the book.
Jaures - Sorel loathes Jaures in every possible way. However, I am still confused about what that has to do with any reflection on violence, syndicalism, or the general strike.
This book reminds me of many books of the present era that also take away from the central point of their books, wading into whatever political or ideological controversy exist today.
However, there are passages of brilliance and genius that make this book a worthwhile read. Even as a historical document highlighting a period in time the book is worthwhile.
My favorite passages were his comparisons of the ancient Greek sailors to the Yankee Americans of his day, optimists and pessimists and Nietzsche. Would that they still had that same spirit….
But the best and where he is at his greatest was in trying to figure out a way to fix a severe lack of energy in Europe at that time. He felt that this could only be done by some massive action brought about towards a worthy higher ideal Very much like what animated the spirits of the soldiers of the French Revolution to such glorious achievements.
Of course, the problem with all of this is he focuses so much on the general strike that there’s no program for what would happen if his wildest dream came true. We are left supposing that it would sort of work itself out, which we know was naïve.
to-keep-reference
May 30, 2017Gramsci discute con Sorel. Comentado en clase de Filosofía política e historia de las ideas políticas. Clase 9.
May 4, 2025
Groundbreaking.
May 12, 2025
Georges Sorel var en fransk historiker, samfunnsviter, og politisk tenker, som har inspirert andre tenkere på tvers av det politiske spekteret. Sorel selv var syndikalist, støttet Lenin, støttet Dreyfus i den affæren, men hadde og tilknytninger til Action Francaise og var en inspirasjonskilde for fascistisk teori.
Denne boken kom ut i 1908, og mye av innholdet fremstår for meg som utdatert, eller baserer seg på hendelser som var aktuelle da, men som for meg er ukjent og følgende blir irrelevante. Det er dog flere gode innsikter som enda er aktuelle. Jeg likte godt hans refleksjoner rundt politiske optimister:
Hans refleksjoner rundt samfunnets aversjon mot vold er og aktuelle enda, vil jeg si. Samfunnet i dag er kanskje enda mer "kuet" enn det var i 1908, men jeg mistenker jo at dette er i ferd med å endre seg av ymse årsaker.
Han reflekterer og rundt aksept rundt korrupte politikere, og har noen interessante betraktninger rundt amerikanerne:
(...)
Alt i alt et verk som kanskje er mer av idehistorisk interesse enn dagsfersk aktualitet i dag, men det er fascinerende å se hvor profetisk Sorel var på noen områder. Husk som sagt at boken kom ut i 1908:
Sorel døde i 1922, samme år som Italia tok opp nettopp denne voldsforsvarende filosofien som sin statsreligion.
Vold var for Sorel på ingen måte ensbetydende med å skade et annet menneske. Han var da også kategorisk i sin fordømmelse av
void mot vergeløse fanger, eller mot personer som ikke kunne for-svare seg. Hans voldsbegrep - violence er først og fremst preget av viljen til å utsettte seg for fare i væpnet strid, samt å utholde strabaser. Dette står i klar motsetning til begrepet force vold eller tvang i statlig og politimessig regi. For Sorel var vilje til kamp uunnværlig for proletarisk identitet en identitet som ble skapt i selve kampprosessen. Men han håpet at direkte blodsutgydelse kunne reduseres til et strengt minimum i den kommende generalstreik som han - som syndikalist - gikk inn for.
Denne boken kom ut i 1908, og mye av innholdet fremstår for meg som utdatert, eller baserer seg på hendelser som var aktuelle da, men som for meg er ukjent og følgende blir irrelevante. Det er dog flere gode innsikter som enda er aktuelle. Jeg likte godt hans refleksjoner rundt politiske optimister:
I politikken er optimisten en ustadig eller til og med farlig person, fordi han ikke gjør seg klar over de store vanskelighetene som hans planer nødvendigvis medfører; for ham synes disse planene å eie en iboende kraft, som fremtvinger deres virkeliggjørelse. Og han er desto tryggere på at det vil skje, som det etter hans opp-fatning er klart at det vil skape lykke for så mange flere mennesker.
Hans refleksjoner rundt samfunnets aversjon mot vold er og aktuelle enda, vil jeg si. Samfunnet i dag er kanskje enda mer "kuet" enn det var i 1908, men jeg mistenker jo at dette er i ferd med å endre seg av ymse årsaker.
Lovene reiser så mange barrièrer mot volden, og vår oppdragelse går i så høy grad ut på å svekke våre voldstendenser, at vi instinktivt oppfatter enhver voldshandling som uttrykk for en regresjon til barbariet. Når man, som det så ofte har vært gjort, stiller de industrielle samfunnene opp som et motstykke til de militære, er det fordi man betrakter freden som det høyeste gode, og som den grunnleg-gende betingelse for ethvert materielt fremskritt; dette siste syns-punktet forklarer hvorfor økonomene nesten uten avbrudd siden det 18. århundre har vært tilhengere av en sterk statsmakt, og har brydd seg nokså lite om de politiske frihetene. Condorcet retter denne bebreidelsen mot Quesnays elever, og Napoleon III hadde kanskje ingen større beundrer enn Michel Chevalier.
Man kan spørre seg selv om det ikke ligger en smule naivitet i den beundringen våre samtidige nærer for mildheten. Faktisk kon-staterer jeg også at enkelte forfattere, som gjør seg bemerket både ved sin skarpsynthet og sine dype moralske interesser, ikke synes å frykte volden fullt så meget som våre offisielle læremestre.
P. Bureau ble slått av hvor dypt bondebefolkningen i Norge frem-deles er preget av kristendommen. Ikke desto mindre går bøndene med kniv i beltet; og når en trette ender med at kniven blir trukket, kommer politiet som regel ingen vei, ettersom det ikke finner vidner som er villige til å forklare seg.
Forfatteren konkluderer med å si: "Når mennene blir bløtaktige og kvinneaktige, er dette et farligere fenomen enn deres uavhengighetsfølelse, selv om denne kan være overdreven og brutal; og et knivstikk av en mann som nok kan være voldsom, men ellers er en rettskaffen kar, er et mindre alvorlig samfunnsonde, og lettere å hel-brede, enn den tøylesløse usedeligheten blant unge mennesker fra miljøer som påstår å være mer siviliserte."
Han reflekterer og rundt aksept rundt korrupte politikere, og har noen interessante betraktninger rundt amerikanerne:
I et rikt samfunn, som er opptatt med store forretninger, og hvor alle står klar til å forsvare sine interesser, slik som i det amerikanske samfunn, får ikke svik og bedrag de samme følger som i et samfunn som må pålegge seg den strengeste sparsomhet. Det er faktisk meget sjelden at slike forbrytelser kan medføre dyptgripende og varige vanskeligheter for landets økonomi; og derfor godtar også amerikanerne uten altfor mange klager sine politikeres og finansmenns ekses-ser på dette område. P. de Rousiers sammenligner amerikaneren med en skipskaptein som er ute i hårdt vær og ikke har tid til å holde øye med kokken som stjeler, mens han styrer skuta. «Når en sier til amerikanerne at deres politikere stjeler fra dem, svarer de gjerne: Det vet jeg vel! Men så lenge forretningene blomstrer, så lenge ikke politikerne stiller seg midt i veien, slipper de gjerne uten særlige vanskeligheter unna den straffen de fortjener.
Siden det er blitt lett å tjene penger i Europa, har idéer lik dem som er gjengs i Amerika også begynt å bli utbredt blant oss.
(...)
Jeg tror at om Nietzsche ikke hadde vært så sterkt preget av minnene fra sin tid som professor i filologi, ville han ha sett at herren fremdeles ekisterer for våre øyne, og at det er han som i dette øye-blikk skaper De forente staters eksepsjonelle storhet. Han ville blitt slått av de påfallende likhetene som finnes mellom yankee'en, klar til å ta fatt på hva det skal være, og oldtidens greske sjømann, snart sjørøver, snart nybygger eller kjøpmann; og særlig ville han ha sett parallellen mellom antikkens helt og mannen som drar ut for å erobre the Far West.6 P. de Rousiers har på en fremragende måte tegnet bildet av herremennesket: «For å bli og forbli amerikaner. må en betrakte livet som en kamp, ikke som en fornøyelse, søke den seierrike innsats, den energiske og effektive handling, mer enn et behagelig liv, en fritid forskjønnet av sysling med kunst, og de raffinementer som andre samfunn ellers kan by på. Overalt... har vi konstatert at det som får amerikaneren til å lykkes, det som utgjør hans type det er den moralske kraften, den personlige, handlende, skapende energien.»
Alt i alt et verk som kanskje er mer av idehistorisk interesse enn dagsfersk aktualitet i dag, men det er fascinerende å se hvor profetisk Sorel var på noen områder. Husk som sagt at boken kom ut i 1908:
Jeg gjør ustanselig mine unge venner oppmerksomme på de problemene sosialismen byr på, når den betraktes under produsent-sivilisasjonens synsvinkel; jeg konstaterer at det idag er i ferd med å utarbeides en filosofi i samsvar med dette, en filosofi man knapt hadde anelse om for få år siden, og som er nær knyttet til et forsvar for volden.
Sorel døde i 1922, samme år som Italia tok opp nettopp denne voldsforsvarende filosofien som sin statsreligion.
Read
December 22, 2012OK, so this was written before Marxist revolution was truly put to the test, and, while this perhaps makes me a weak-spined reformist, the Soviet experience if anything emboldened the case for what Sorel would have condemned as "parlimentary" socialism. This isn't to say that revolution is an impossibility, but I can't think a successful revolution would follow Sorel's blueprint.
Sorel makes some very valid points-- the symbolic value of the general strike, for instance, is very compelling-- but the total argument falls apart. The idea that violence is good because the bourgeoisie is pacifist strikes me (PUN TIME) as logically invalid and seriously wrong-headed. The notion of eternal violence as invigorating and masculine seems grotesquely proto-fascist, and there's a reason some of Mussolini's state intellectuals were quite taken by Sorel. Look out for this one, kids.
Sorel makes some very valid points-- the symbolic value of the general strike, for instance, is very compelling-- but the total argument falls apart. The idea that violence is good because the bourgeoisie is pacifist strikes me (PUN TIME) as logically invalid and seriously wrong-headed. The notion of eternal violence as invigorating and masculine seems grotesquely proto-fascist, and there's a reason some of Mussolini's state intellectuals were quite taken by Sorel. Look out for this one, kids.
August 19, 2017
First I think it is important to give a review by Ludwig von Mises on Sorel: “Although Marxians considered themselves solely interpreters of Marx, one Marxian, one writer, added something and had a strong influence, not only on the small group of his followers, but also on other authors. Georges Sorel [1847–1922] […] developed a philosophy in many respects different from the Marxian philosophy. And it influenced political action and philosophic thinking. Sorel was a timid bourgeois intellectual, an engineer. He retired to discuss these things with his friends at a bookshop owned by Charles Péguy [1873–1914], a revolutionary socialist […].
Sorel belonged psychologically to the group of people who dream of action but never act; he didn’t fight. As a writer, however, Sorel was very aggressive. He praised cruelty and deplored the fact that cruelty is more and more disappearing from our life. In one of his books, Reflections on Violence, he considered it a manifestation of decay that Marxian parties, calling themselves revolutionary, had degenerated into parliamentary parties. Where is the revolution if you are in Parliament? He also didn’t like labor unions. He thought the labor unions should abandon the hopeless venture of seeking higher wage rates and should adopt, instead of this conservative pattern, the revolutionary process.
Sorel saw clearly the contradiction in the system of Marx who spoke of revolution on the one hand and then said, “The coming of socialism is inevitable, and you cannot accelerate its coming because socialism cannot come before the material productive forces have achieved all that is possible within the frame of the old society.” Sorel saw that this idea of inevitability was contradictory to the idea of revolution. This is the contradiction all socialists ask themselves about—Kautsky, for one. Sorel completely adopted the idea of revolution.
[…]
Syndicalism can mean ownership of the industry by the workers. Socialists mean by this term ownership by the state and operation for the account of the people. Sorel wanted to attain this by revolution. He didn’t question the idea that history leads toward socialism. There is a kind of instinct that pushes men toward socialism, but Sorel accepted this as superstition, an inner urge that cannot be analyzed. For this reason his philosophy has been compared with that of Henri Bergson’s élan vital (myths, fairy stories, fables, legends). However, in the doctrine of Sorel, “myth” means something else—a statement which cannot be criticized by reason.
1. Socialism is an end.
2.The general strike is the great means.
Most of Sorel’s writings date from 1890 to 1910. They had an enormous influence on the world, not only on the revolutionary socialists, but also on the royalists, supporters of the restoration of the House of Orange, the “Action française,” and in other countries the “Action nationale.” But all these parties gradually became a little bit more “civilized” than Sorel thought they should be.
” From Marxism Unmasked My thoughts: Sorel is a very confusing author with a very confusing work. In the end I think the main thing that he has a frustration with the current development of the world in his time. He wants a revolution that for him appears to have an erotically and nihilistic mythos to it. Thus he criticizes a few major trends of socialism and the liberals and bourgeoisies; bouth sides with the same passion, for not being antagonistic enough to bring the revolution he wants… The socialists and proletarians seek social reforms through strikes, the bourgeoisie are week and do not follow their class interests in exploiting the proletarians to the max… Thus for him history will enter into an un deterministic path, not on the dialectical path set by Marx. Basically the path to socialism/communism (which he perceives as anarcho-syndicalism) can be maintained and fueled by violence that will stop the amelioration of economical and political gap between the proletarians and bourgeoisies achieved through liberalism, capitalism (not in the socialist conception) and social reform… One thing I said and I want to clarify, I find him very nihilistic. Because he rejects the benefits of the amelioration of economical and political gap between the classes and the achieving of social harmony… It is like he rejects the morality of peace and understanding and choses the morality he wants, that of class antagonism. This guy deserves his fame, his ideas are dangerous. He clearly demonstrated in a number of passage his understanding of the many errors of socialism and/or Marxism. But he rejects all of this, basically proposes a myth to direct the workers towards his beloved revolution. A few notes from Sorel: “Against this noisy, garrulous and lying socialism, which is exploited
by ambitious people of every description, which amuses a few buffoons
and is admired by decadents, stands revolutionary syndicalism,
which endeavours, on the contrary, to leave nothing in a state
of indecision; its ideas are honestly expressed, without trickery and
without insinuation; no attempt is made to dilute doctrines by a
stream of confused commentaries. Syndicalism strives to employ
methods of expression which throw a full light on things, which
put them exactly in the place assigned to them by their nature, and
which bring out the whole value of the forces in play. Opposition,
instead of being glossed over, must be thrown into sharp relief if
we are to follow syndicalist thinking; the groups that are struggling
against each other must be shown to be as separate as possible;
finally, the movements of the revolting masses are presented so as
to make a deep and lasting impression on the souls of the rebels”
Sorel belonged psychologically to the group of people who dream of action but never act; he didn’t fight. As a writer, however, Sorel was very aggressive. He praised cruelty and deplored the fact that cruelty is more and more disappearing from our life. In one of his books, Reflections on Violence, he considered it a manifestation of decay that Marxian parties, calling themselves revolutionary, had degenerated into parliamentary parties. Where is the revolution if you are in Parliament? He also didn’t like labor unions. He thought the labor unions should abandon the hopeless venture of seeking higher wage rates and should adopt, instead of this conservative pattern, the revolutionary process.
Sorel saw clearly the contradiction in the system of Marx who spoke of revolution on the one hand and then said, “The coming of socialism is inevitable, and you cannot accelerate its coming because socialism cannot come before the material productive forces have achieved all that is possible within the frame of the old society.” Sorel saw that this idea of inevitability was contradictory to the idea of revolution. This is the contradiction all socialists ask themselves about—Kautsky, for one. Sorel completely adopted the idea of revolution.
[…]
Syndicalism can mean ownership of the industry by the workers. Socialists mean by this term ownership by the state and operation for the account of the people. Sorel wanted to attain this by revolution. He didn’t question the idea that history leads toward socialism. There is a kind of instinct that pushes men toward socialism, but Sorel accepted this as superstition, an inner urge that cannot be analyzed. For this reason his philosophy has been compared with that of Henri Bergson’s élan vital (myths, fairy stories, fables, legends). However, in the doctrine of Sorel, “myth” means something else—a statement which cannot be criticized by reason.
1. Socialism is an end.
2.The general strike is the great means.
Most of Sorel’s writings date from 1890 to 1910. They had an enormous influence on the world, not only on the revolutionary socialists, but also on the royalists, supporters of the restoration of the House of Orange, the “Action française,” and in other countries the “Action nationale.” But all these parties gradually became a little bit more “civilized” than Sorel thought they should be.
” From Marxism Unmasked My thoughts: Sorel is a very confusing author with a very confusing work. In the end I think the main thing that he has a frustration with the current development of the world in his time. He wants a revolution that for him appears to have an erotically and nihilistic mythos to it. Thus he criticizes a few major trends of socialism and the liberals and bourgeoisies; bouth sides with the same passion, for not being antagonistic enough to bring the revolution he wants… The socialists and proletarians seek social reforms through strikes, the bourgeoisie are week and do not follow their class interests in exploiting the proletarians to the max… Thus for him history will enter into an un deterministic path, not on the dialectical path set by Marx. Basically the path to socialism/communism (which he perceives as anarcho-syndicalism) can be maintained and fueled by violence that will stop the amelioration of economical and political gap between the proletarians and bourgeoisies achieved through liberalism, capitalism (not in the socialist conception) and social reform… One thing I said and I want to clarify, I find him very nihilistic. Because he rejects the benefits of the amelioration of economical and political gap between the classes and the achieving of social harmony… It is like he rejects the morality of peace and understanding and choses the morality he wants, that of class antagonism. This guy deserves his fame, his ideas are dangerous. He clearly demonstrated in a number of passage his understanding of the many errors of socialism and/or Marxism. But he rejects all of this, basically proposes a myth to direct the workers towards his beloved revolution. A few notes from Sorel: “Against this noisy, garrulous and lying socialism, which is exploited
by ambitious people of every description, which amuses a few buffoons
and is admired by decadents, stands revolutionary syndicalism,
which endeavours, on the contrary, to leave nothing in a state
of indecision; its ideas are honestly expressed, without trickery and
without insinuation; no attempt is made to dilute doctrines by a
stream of confused commentaries. Syndicalism strives to employ
methods of expression which throw a full light on things, which
put them exactly in the place assigned to them by their nature, and
which bring out the whole value of the forces in play. Opposition,
instead of being glossed over, must be thrown into sharp relief if
we are to follow syndicalist thinking; the groups that are struggling
against each other must be shown to be as separate as possible;
finally, the movements of the revolting masses are presented so as
to make a deep and lasting impression on the souls of the rebels”
May 1, 2014
El tema era interesante, pero me resultó bastante aburrido en algunos puntos. No sé si tener que hacer la lectura crítica en un hotel a las 3 a.m. cuando debería estar disfrutando de unas mini-vacaciones tendrá algo que ver con eso. De igual manera, tengo que volver a encontrarme con este libro para el final de la materia, así que ahí le daré otra oportunidad. Y aprobé el trabajo práctico, así que eso suma algunos puntos a favor por el buen resultado de la lectura.
September 24, 2013
I ended up reading this book when I found it in a give-away library in one of Amsterdam’s social centers. I had heard of the book before, it’s one of those influential classics that probably almost nobody reads. As I’m quite interested in the question of violence for achieving social change, Sorel’s book on the functions of violence seemed relevant. Plus Sorel wrote about the role of myths in converting and motivating people, which sounded quite intriguing. And also the fact that Georges Sorel was supposedly Benito Mussolini’s favourite philosopher actually made me only more curious.
Now after reading it seems to be a hard one to review. I do think it was certainly worth the effort of reading. It is written in 1906, before the world wars and before the Bolshevik revolution, but it is still easy enough to follow, especially after reading up Wikipedia on the Dreyfus Affair and characters as Jaurès. Sorel is also rather convincing. In fact, I’m quite sure this book may have turned me into a syndicalist from one day to the other if I had read it somewhere between 1900 and1930, but the world has drastically changed and we live under completely different conditions now. Sadly, there are (for as far as I know) no books around now that would have such a convincing answer of what needs to be done in order to achieve lasting social change. For me, the struggle with this book is determining in which ways Sorel’s ideas and concepts can be made relevant to today’s world. Consider this review to be an attempt.
Let me first start by explaining why Sorel may have turned me into a revolutionary syndicalist before 1930. It is actually the purity of his revolutionary strategy that I really like. There is nothing like it today. The puritanism of Vaneigem seems just to be about following his own egoistic individual desires, while for Sorel there are also no compromises, but there is still a coherent strategy that is logically deduced from Marxist theory. It is the myth of the general strike that reflects the fundamental principles of Marxism. Firstly, it intuitively shows how society is divided into two antagonistic blocs, namely the proletariat (the producers) and the bourgeoisie. No philosophical explanation is necessary, the general strike makes all oppositions extraordinary clear. Secondly, it entails that rebellion is necessary for capitalism to disappear. Workers could be tempted to the capitalist order of things, through capitalist philanthropists and parliamentary socialist promises, but the myth of the general strike will keep them in a state of revolt, plus the class war perspective will prevent the masses from turning to other reactionary forms that could help them loose their anger. Thirdly, to partisans for the general strike, even the most popular social reforms will look silly. Finally, the brilliant thing is the anti-elitist implications. With the myth of the general strike there is no need for intellectuals thinking for the masses, no party line, no leaders.
"These results could not be produced in any very certain manner by the use of ordinary language; 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 modem society. The Syndicalists solve this problem perfectly, by concentrating the whole of Socialism in the drama of the general strike; there is thus no longer any place for the reconciliation of contraries in the equivocations of the professors; everything is clearly mapped out, so that only one interpretation of Socialism is possible. This method has all the advantages which "integral" knowledge has over analysis, according to the doctrine of Bergson."
A problem for relating Sorel’s myth of the general strike to the Netherlands in 2013 is that for Sorel the proletariat is only the producers. And what Sorel in 1906 categorizes as producers does not include retailkeepers, and also not the foremen that are less likely to join the strike. I certainly don’t think that class analysis is no longer relevant. You can certainly still divide society into two antagonistic blocs, those who control the wealth and means of production and those who have no control over the means of production and have to work for a wage. But limiting the possibility for social change (through the general strike) to what Sorel uncompromisingly and narrowly defines as ‘producers’ is no longer relevant for 21st century developed nations. It’s hard to imagine how syndicalism on itself can lead to revolutionary change. As for the historical record, revolutionary syndicalism did have quite the impact and potential. Having recently read a bit on Gramsci’s involvement in post-WW1 Italy, Turin was a hotbed of lengthy general strikes that were beyond control of the Italian Socialist Party (and subsequent Communist Party) or intellectuals that wanted to think for the masses. Similar events transpired all over Europe. But everywhere, they were in fact beaten down by the freikorps and similar paramilitary fascist organizations. It seems that the myth of the general strike and proletarian violence was not enough for the producers to actually win the revolution. Unfortunately, if we look in history (with some exceptions) it seems that labour militancy at best achieved social reforms and led to fascist reaction every time the masses demanded more than just a piece of the cake.
Now let’s progress to the question of violence. It is first worthwhile to remark that Sorel makes a distinction between violence and force. Force is what the governing minority uses to impose the social order, violence are the acts of revolt to destroy that order. He then notes how violence is also useful for parliamentary socialism. Without exceptional circumstances created by striking and rioting, the parliamentary power of socialists is reduced. It is in these exceptional circumstances that parliamentary socialists (/social-democrats) take up the role of peace-makers, scare the middle-classes into conceding reforms to restore order. Also without the consent of socialist leaders*, "[workers] endeavour to intimidate the prefects by popular demonstrations which might lead to serious conflicts with the police, and they commend violence as the most efficacious means of obtaining concessions. At the end of a certain time the obsessed and frightened administration nearly always intervenes with the masters and forces an agreement upon them, which becomes an encouragement to the propagandists of violence. "
Violence for Sorel is not about achieving some sort of military victory/control, the role of violence can be better understood in its emancipatory potential. Violence can lead to self-confidence and political independence, the development of skills and abilities necessary for self-management of workers. Violence helps to separate the classes, firstly by making existing conflicts between them clear and out in the open, and secondly by increasing antagonism between them. At one point, Sorel actually encourages violence specifically against philanthropic employers and upper-class do-gooders in order to show them that workers are ungrateful and that the social peace cannot be maintained. These things may sound rather unsettling, Sorel is controversial for a reason, but there’s obviously something to it. There is a reason that some groups opt for terrorist tactics; it’s not just desperation, they can work as well. Just watch Battle of Algiers for a good illustration. The FLN brutally blowing up innocent French citizens did convince many that there was no future for them in Algeria.
One of the most interesting things of Sorel is his writing on the need for “social myths” for inspiring the masses to action. Considering our current inability to get the masses out on the streets this is highly relevant. It’s not objective facts and rational arguments that bring the masses into action; you have to strike some emotional chord. Sorel looks back in history and notes that “men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph.” He calls these constructions “social myths” and outlines myths constructed in the past by for example primitive Christianity, the Reformation, the French Revolution and the followers of Mazzini.
Social myths help to frame a possible future and help to reform the desires and passions of the masses: “And yet without leaving the present, without reasoning about this future, which seems for ever condemned to escape our reason, we should be unable to act at all. Experience shows that the framing of a future, in some indeterminate time, may, when it is done in a certain way, be very effective, and have very few inconveniences ; this happens when the anticipations of the future take the form of those myths, which enclose with them all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party or of a class, inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of instincts in all the circumstances of life ; and which give an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which, more easily than by any other method, men can reform their desires, passions, and mental activity."
Myths of catastrophe worked out in Christian faith to inspire many. “Catholics have never been discouraged even in the hardest trials, because they have always pictured the history of the Church as a series of battles between Satan and the hierarchy supported by Christ; every new difficulty which arises is only an episode in a war which must finally end in the victory of Catholicism.” And, as he notes, when look in Catholic history there appear not to be many martyrs at all. It’s not that much violence is actually necessary for myths to do their work. When the myth of the general strike is maintained for revolutionary socialism, small conflicts can be enough to maintain the notion of class war**.
“As long as there are no myths accepted by the masses, one may go on talking of revolts indefinitely, without ever provoking any revolutionary movement; this is what gives such importance to the general strike and renders it so odious to socialists who are afraid of a revolution; they do all they can to shake the confidence felt by the workers in the preparations they are making for the revolution ; and in order to succeed in this they cast ridicule on the idea of the general strike — the only idea that could have any value as a motive force. One of the chief means employed by them is to represent it, as a Utopia; this is easy enough, because there are very few myths which are perfectly free from any Utopian element.”
But there is an enormous difference between utopias and myths according to Sorel. Myths not only describe an ideal, but try to reach it. While utopias detach yourself from the world, myths help to transform it. The question is of course where our myths are and what could they be?
* History shows that reforms have often been preceded by rioting. Mainstream history may talk of wise and benevolent Monarchs making social reforms, but usually these masses did not give them much of a choice. In regard to rioting in for example London 2011, you could argue that due to the lack of political leadership on the Left (of both social-democratic parties and trade-unions) that gives a voice to social grievances, rioting while political remains politically incoherent.
** That 21st century Islamic fundamentalism could just as well be used as an example is of course again rather unsettling.
Now after reading it seems to be a hard one to review. I do think it was certainly worth the effort of reading. It is written in 1906, before the world wars and before the Bolshevik revolution, but it is still easy enough to follow, especially after reading up Wikipedia on the Dreyfus Affair and characters as Jaurès. Sorel is also rather convincing. In fact, I’m quite sure this book may have turned me into a syndicalist from one day to the other if I had read it somewhere between 1900 and1930, but the world has drastically changed and we live under completely different conditions now. Sadly, there are (for as far as I know) no books around now that would have such a convincing answer of what needs to be done in order to achieve lasting social change. For me, the struggle with this book is determining in which ways Sorel’s ideas and concepts can be made relevant to today’s world. Consider this review to be an attempt.
Let me first start by explaining why Sorel may have turned me into a revolutionary syndicalist before 1930. It is actually the purity of his revolutionary strategy that I really like. There is nothing like it today. The puritanism of Vaneigem seems just to be about following his own egoistic individual desires, while for Sorel there are also no compromises, but there is still a coherent strategy that is logically deduced from Marxist theory. It is the myth of the general strike that reflects the fundamental principles of Marxism. Firstly, it intuitively shows how society is divided into two antagonistic blocs, namely the proletariat (the producers) and the bourgeoisie. No philosophical explanation is necessary, the general strike makes all oppositions extraordinary clear. Secondly, it entails that rebellion is necessary for capitalism to disappear. Workers could be tempted to the capitalist order of things, through capitalist philanthropists and parliamentary socialist promises, but the myth of the general strike will keep them in a state of revolt, plus the class war perspective will prevent the masses from turning to other reactionary forms that could help them loose their anger. Thirdly, to partisans for the general strike, even the most popular social reforms will look silly. Finally, the brilliant thing is the anti-elitist implications. With the myth of the general strike there is no need for intellectuals thinking for the masses, no party line, no leaders.
"These results could not be produced in any very certain manner by the use of ordinary language; 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 modem society. The Syndicalists solve this problem perfectly, by concentrating the whole of Socialism in the drama of the general strike; there is thus no longer any place for the reconciliation of contraries in the equivocations of the professors; everything is clearly mapped out, so that only one interpretation of Socialism is possible. This method has all the advantages which "integral" knowledge has over analysis, according to the doctrine of Bergson."
A problem for relating Sorel’s myth of the general strike to the Netherlands in 2013 is that for Sorel the proletariat is only the producers. And what Sorel in 1906 categorizes as producers does not include retailkeepers, and also not the foremen that are less likely to join the strike. I certainly don’t think that class analysis is no longer relevant. You can certainly still divide society into two antagonistic blocs, those who control the wealth and means of production and those who have no control over the means of production and have to work for a wage. But limiting the possibility for social change (through the general strike) to what Sorel uncompromisingly and narrowly defines as ‘producers’ is no longer relevant for 21st century developed nations. It’s hard to imagine how syndicalism on itself can lead to revolutionary change. As for the historical record, revolutionary syndicalism did have quite the impact and potential. Having recently read a bit on Gramsci’s involvement in post-WW1 Italy, Turin was a hotbed of lengthy general strikes that were beyond control of the Italian Socialist Party (and subsequent Communist Party) or intellectuals that wanted to think for the masses. Similar events transpired all over Europe. But everywhere, they were in fact beaten down by the freikorps and similar paramilitary fascist organizations. It seems that the myth of the general strike and proletarian violence was not enough for the producers to actually win the revolution. Unfortunately, if we look in history (with some exceptions) it seems that labour militancy at best achieved social reforms and led to fascist reaction every time the masses demanded more than just a piece of the cake.
Now let’s progress to the question of violence. It is first worthwhile to remark that Sorel makes a distinction between violence and force. Force is what the governing minority uses to impose the social order, violence are the acts of revolt to destroy that order. He then notes how violence is also useful for parliamentary socialism. Without exceptional circumstances created by striking and rioting, the parliamentary power of socialists is reduced. It is in these exceptional circumstances that parliamentary socialists (/social-democrats) take up the role of peace-makers, scare the middle-classes into conceding reforms to restore order. Also without the consent of socialist leaders*, "[workers] endeavour to intimidate the prefects by popular demonstrations which might lead to serious conflicts with the police, and they commend violence as the most efficacious means of obtaining concessions. At the end of a certain time the obsessed and frightened administration nearly always intervenes with the masters and forces an agreement upon them, which becomes an encouragement to the propagandists of violence. "
Violence for Sorel is not about achieving some sort of military victory/control, the role of violence can be better understood in its emancipatory potential. Violence can lead to self-confidence and political independence, the development of skills and abilities necessary for self-management of workers. Violence helps to separate the classes, firstly by making existing conflicts between them clear and out in the open, and secondly by increasing antagonism between them. At one point, Sorel actually encourages violence specifically against philanthropic employers and upper-class do-gooders in order to show them that workers are ungrateful and that the social peace cannot be maintained. These things may sound rather unsettling, Sorel is controversial for a reason, but there’s obviously something to it. There is a reason that some groups opt for terrorist tactics; it’s not just desperation, they can work as well. Just watch Battle of Algiers for a good illustration. The FLN brutally blowing up innocent French citizens did convince many that there was no future for them in Algeria.
One of the most interesting things of Sorel is his writing on the need for “social myths” for inspiring the masses to action. Considering our current inability to get the masses out on the streets this is highly relevant. It’s not objective facts and rational arguments that bring the masses into action; you have to strike some emotional chord. Sorel looks back in history and notes that “men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph.” He calls these constructions “social myths” and outlines myths constructed in the past by for example primitive Christianity, the Reformation, the French Revolution and the followers of Mazzini.
Social myths help to frame a possible future and help to reform the desires and passions of the masses: “And yet without leaving the present, without reasoning about this future, which seems for ever condemned to escape our reason, we should be unable to act at all. Experience shows that the framing of a future, in some indeterminate time, may, when it is done in a certain way, be very effective, and have very few inconveniences ; this happens when the anticipations of the future take the form of those myths, which enclose with them all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party or of a class, inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of instincts in all the circumstances of life ; and which give an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which, more easily than by any other method, men can reform their desires, passions, and mental activity."
Myths of catastrophe worked out in Christian faith to inspire many. “Catholics have never been discouraged even in the hardest trials, because they have always pictured the history of the Church as a series of battles between Satan and the hierarchy supported by Christ; every new difficulty which arises is only an episode in a war which must finally end in the victory of Catholicism.” And, as he notes, when look in Catholic history there appear not to be many martyrs at all. It’s not that much violence is actually necessary for myths to do their work. When the myth of the general strike is maintained for revolutionary socialism, small conflicts can be enough to maintain the notion of class war**.
“As long as there are no myths accepted by the masses, one may go on talking of revolts indefinitely, without ever provoking any revolutionary movement; this is what gives such importance to the general strike and renders it so odious to socialists who are afraid of a revolution; they do all they can to shake the confidence felt by the workers in the preparations they are making for the revolution ; and in order to succeed in this they cast ridicule on the idea of the general strike — the only idea that could have any value as a motive force. One of the chief means employed by them is to represent it, as a Utopia; this is easy enough, because there are very few myths which are perfectly free from any Utopian element.”
But there is an enormous difference between utopias and myths according to Sorel. Myths not only describe an ideal, but try to reach it. While utopias detach yourself from the world, myths help to transform it. The question is of course where our myths are and what could they be?
* History shows that reforms have often been preceded by rioting. Mainstream history may talk of wise and benevolent Monarchs making social reforms, but usually these masses did not give them much of a choice. In regard to rioting in for example London 2011, you could argue that due to the lack of political leadership on the Left (of both social-democratic parties and trade-unions) that gives a voice to social grievances, rioting while political remains politically incoherent.
** That 21st century Islamic fundamentalism could just as well be used as an example is of course again rather unsettling.
April 13, 2024
C'est cool les premières parties, la dernière sur la morale des producteurs est terrible, genre c'est un recueil de stupidité et c'est clairement réactionnaire.
Le truc fun avec ce bouquin, c'est que l'on navigue constamment entre une analyse sociologique des mouvements de lutte et un essai politique, les idées de Sorel sont malheureusement assez confuses.
Celui-ci se place comme un élève de Marx mais dit clairement qu'il souhaite s'en éloigner dans un but scientifique, sauf qu'il s'en éloigne beaucouppp, il dit des trucs très limite collaborationnistes de classe, et surtout c'est assez chiant mais il est très idéaliste, a un moment il place oklm qu'en fait on peut pas prévoir le futur et ça se sent que c'est une de ses idées, d'ou son projet de grève générale révolutionnaire n'a fait que devenir plus flou pour tout le monde. Le processus avec lequel il en arrive a cette conclusion (je crois qu'il l'appelle Grève Générale Politique) est intéressant et comporte une critique des mouvements dirigés par une minorité, ce qui est cool si vous souhaitez faire une critique du blanquisme/léninisme. Mais il est profondément irréaliste, son projet fait vraiment peu de sens et ça se sentira dans les gens qu'il aura inspiré. La partie sur la violence est très intéressante, mais il fait trop peu de liens entre sa définition et l'usage commun du mot, les liens sont assez peu clair aussi, ce qui mènera a des compréhensions du texte assez... uniques.
Le truc fun avec ce bouquin, c'est que l'on navigue constamment entre une analyse sociologique des mouvements de lutte et un essai politique, les idées de Sorel sont malheureusement assez confuses.
Celui-ci se place comme un élève de Marx mais dit clairement qu'il souhaite s'en éloigner dans un but scientifique, sauf qu'il s'en éloigne beaucouppp, il dit des trucs très limite collaborationnistes de classe, et surtout c'est assez chiant mais il est très idéaliste, a un moment il place oklm qu'en fait on peut pas prévoir le futur et ça se sent que c'est une de ses idées, d'ou son projet de grève générale révolutionnaire n'a fait que devenir plus flou pour tout le monde. Le processus avec lequel il en arrive a cette conclusion (je crois qu'il l'appelle Grève Générale Politique) est intéressant et comporte une critique des mouvements dirigés par une minorité, ce qui est cool si vous souhaitez faire une critique du blanquisme/léninisme. Mais il est profondément irréaliste, son projet fait vraiment peu de sens et ça se sentira dans les gens qu'il aura inspiré. La partie sur la violence est très intéressante, mais il fait trop peu de liens entre sa définition et l'usage commun du mot, les liens sont assez peu clair aussi, ce qui mènera a des compréhensions du texte assez... uniques.
February 11, 2021
An interesting collection of articles on post-Revolutionary/post-Napoleonic France from a socialist/syndicalist perspective, though for someone who isn't familiar with French history it wasn't as interesting as I first hoped it would be.
One major take that I did find an interesting, however, was the way that Sorel differentiated the forms that violence takes according to the person(s) enacting it;
Violence enacted by the State is referred to as "force" because the violence committed by the State's enforcers has the weight of a collective government and all it's leviathan bureaucracy behind it. The State's enforcers are paid to dispassionately maintain a status quo without any obligatory sense of moral indignation... or hypocrisy when witnessing the State's laws not being enforced in equal measure.
Violence enacted by private individuals, or by disenfranchised groups, is simply referred to as "violence" because the lack of any of the aforementioned bureaucratic weight is replaced by the deep sense of moral indignation and/or heated passions found lacking in representatives of the State.
One major take that I did find an interesting, however, was the way that Sorel differentiated the forms that violence takes according to the person(s) enacting it;
Violence enacted by the State is referred to as "force" because the violence committed by the State's enforcers has the weight of a collective government and all it's leviathan bureaucracy behind it. The State's enforcers are paid to dispassionately maintain a status quo without any obligatory sense of moral indignation... or hypocrisy when witnessing the State's laws not being enforced in equal measure.
Violence enacted by private individuals, or by disenfranchised groups, is simply referred to as "violence" because the lack of any of the aforementioned bureaucratic weight is replaced by the deep sense of moral indignation and/or heated passions found lacking in representatives of the State.
October 25, 2021
Sorel's work here is very interesting, and certainly commendable in two notable aspects: his harsh critique of the parliamentary socialists and their use of their commanding of the revolutionary movement to "bargain" with the middle-class while ultimately stifling the revolutionary movement; additionally, he proposes the idea of the "myth," the revolutionary ideal to which the proletariat is beholden and propels them into revolutionary action.
However, aside from this, I find little of value in this work. He draws upon idealists like Renan and Bergson to make his case, and aside from his defense of proletarian violence from middle-class ideologists, his deification of the general strike and syndicalist ideals leaves much to be desired. Despite often drawing upon the political implications of the Dreyfus case, Sorel himself is quite anti-semitic, using the phrase "big Jew bankers," among other things in this work.
I plan to return to this work in the future, perhaps after reading some of his contemporaries or having more tolerance for his shortcomings.
However, aside from this, I find little of value in this work. He draws upon idealists like Renan and Bergson to make his case, and aside from his defense of proletarian violence from middle-class ideologists, his deification of the general strike and syndicalist ideals leaves much to be desired. Despite often drawing upon the political implications of the Dreyfus case, Sorel himself is quite anti-semitic, using the phrase "big Jew bankers," among other things in this work.
I plan to return to this work in the future, perhaps after reading some of his contemporaries or having more tolerance for his shortcomings.
December 5, 2025
I got this book during the surge of political upheaval that was going on during the month of October, but I finally finished it to incorporate it aptly into my thesis.
I think that Sorel describes the hypocrisy that politics does ultimately entail, which can still be applicable to this day and age and can also be seen in both sides of the spectrum. I also really like the dismantling of the Utopia that he presents as a thematic point throughout the majority of the book. Sometimes his writing style is a bit out of the ordinary (especially with the footnotes) but it is pretty digestible (even f you do not understand the specific political factions he analyzes).
give this book a try, just to open your eyes a little on how even people back then were privy to the immense flip flopping that occurs within our own political world.
I think that Sorel describes the hypocrisy that politics does ultimately entail, which can still be applicable to this day and age and can also be seen in both sides of the spectrum. I also really like the dismantling of the Utopia that he presents as a thematic point throughout the majority of the book. Sometimes his writing style is a bit out of the ordinary (especially with the footnotes) but it is pretty digestible (even f you do not understand the specific political factions he analyzes).
give this book a try, just to open your eyes a little on how even people back then were privy to the immense flip flopping that occurs within our own political world.
February 11, 2024
This is essentially a long polemical pamphlet, where Sorel criticizes a number of topics.
He untiringly attacks a number of contemporary politicians and intellectuals, while also enumerating abundant examples of historical relevance.
Needless to say, this is gibberish to anyone not possessing an intricate knowledge of late 19th/early 20th century French political discourse.
It also does not help that he is continually going back and forth from history to morality, from aesthetics to economics, from sociology to theology, etc.
It is often hard to understand what he is arguing for or against, or why he is mentioning some fact or another at all. There's little to be gained in reading this book in 2024.
He untiringly attacks a number of contemporary politicians and intellectuals, while also enumerating abundant examples of historical relevance.
Needless to say, this is gibberish to anyone not possessing an intricate knowledge of late 19th/early 20th century French political discourse.
It also does not help that he is continually going back and forth from history to morality, from aesthetics to economics, from sociology to theology, etc.
It is often hard to understand what he is arguing for or against, or why he is mentioning some fact or another at all. There's little to be gained in reading this book in 2024.
Read
April 19, 2022For an unseemingly innocuous obscure journalist, highly critical thought skills with techinical apparatus. He advocates the syndacalist general strike as the prime mover necessary required social violence to overthrow capitalism. Written in the early twentieth century, still an inspiration for the industrial technological slaves of today. Harcore committed purist Marxist; with anarchical bent. Historian, polemicist, critic, provacateur, journalist, and thinker, Sorel poses good arguments as to why social violence is necessary to confronting a violent system of capitalist exploitation demeaning and devouring us all!
I love these Cambridge texts on Political Thought.
I love these Cambridge texts on Political Thought.
September 13, 2020
Yazarın dünyasını kavramak kitapta bahsi geçen tarihi olaylara ve döneme hakim olmakla mümkün. Bu yönüyle kitap özel bir araştırmada detayla incelenmeyi hak ediyor. Çünkü Sorel'in sivri-alaycı dili, kışkırtıcı argümanları ve sarsıcı iddiaları insanı hayran bırakacak cinsten. Kitabı okuduktan sonra neden hem Lenin hem de Mussolini'nin kendisine hayranlık duyduğuna dair iddiaların gerçek olabileceğini anladım. Kitaptaki tartışmayı siyasal stratejilerden soyutlayarak okuyabilirsek şiddet-ahlak ilişkisine dair çok ciddi sorgulamalara yol açabilir. Sonuç olarak iyi bir kitaptı.
February 9, 2020
On the list of toxic stuff that's toxic: Holy pants, this stuff's insidious. Good in terms of tracking down some mindset source materials, but... yeah. Treated with the standard researcher's skim, because it pretty much hurt my brain to read straight, even selecting a portion and shooting for the segment.
Probably come back to it some once I've gotten some resistance, but the first dive was, "Set it on fire."
Probably come back to it some once I've gotten some resistance, but the first dive was, "Set it on fire."
November 29, 2020
The central thesis of the book seems to be that there's a difference between the force that keeps a regime and the violence that overthrows it. It also gives to the reader good insights on the post bonapartist french socialism. I found the author to be levelheaded and the arguments to be grounded in ancient greece and christian history. I will have to return to this book someday to do it justice.
The second part of the book is much better than the first.
The second part of the book is much better than the first.
June 25, 2022
"Everybody agrees that the disappearance of these old brutalities is an excellent thing. From this opinion it was so easy to pass to the idea that all violence is an evil, that this step was bound to have been taken; and, in fact, the great mass of the people, who are not accustomed to thinking, have come to this conclusion, which is accepted nowadays as a dogma by the bleating herd of moralists. They have not asked themselves what there is in brutality which is reprehensible."
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