"The critique of Marxist economics was the real starting point of Sorelian revisionism and the criterion of all of revolutionary revisionism. As a good Marxist, Sorel made a considerable effort to understand his master’s economic conceptions. In 1897 he set out to study “the Marxist theory of value,” and he immediately discovered a “major deficiency”—that to treat this theory as something universal was an error. He agreed with Pareto that one cannot treat “economic problems, as provided by experience, in a strictly scientific manner.”36 Three years later, in the midst of the Bernstein debate, whose main lines he summarized for the benefit of the French public, the future author of La Décomposition du marxisme very clearly questioned the main principle of Marxist economics. “The Marxist theory of value,” he wrote, “no longer has any scientific usefulness and . . . gives rise to a great many misunderstandings.”37 GEORGES SOREL 43 We should also draw attention to another point, which does not seem to have been sufficiently noticed. Although Sorel rejected the theories of value and surplus value, he also rejected the idea of the socialization of property. In an article in La Revue socialiste published in March 1901, he praised rural cooperation and then came to the conclusion that “socialization could not be accepted by the peasants if it were not given a new form. . . . One must therefore necessarily revise the doctrine.” Sorel attacked the subject by going straight to the point. “For a very long time,” he wrote, “the schools of socialism failed to pay attention to the great differences that exist between the socialization of production and the socialization of commerce.”
"Thus, the first stage of Sorel’s revision of Marxism naturally took the form of a revision of Marxist economics. It seems that at the time he wrote his work on economics, he was seeking to remove all possible doubt. “To reform in a bourgeois society is to affirm private property,” he wrote. “This whole book thus presupposes that private property is an unquestionable fact.”41 Farther on, he reaffirmed his attachment to Proudhon’s economic conceptions, and there too, as in the case of Marx, he wanted to complete Proudhon’s work: “It is one of Proudhon’s chief claims to fame to have determined, better than anyone had done hitherto, the domain of property and that of the economic sphere. I do not, however, believe he exhausted the question. . . . I am taking it up, and I will show how t
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