/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

"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 the socialization of the milieu can give rise to a great number of reforms that do not harm prope"
"For Sorel, however, a deep knowledge of Marxist philosophy and economics was never really necessary in order to understand the value of Marxism as a weapon of combat. “The theory of surplus value is useless” for the purpose of waging “a ceaseless war” between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, he wrote in 1909.67 In Saggi, he had already questioned the feasibility of turning socialism into a science.68 There was a clear reason for this attitude: at the beginning of the century, Sorel saw that science did not activate the masses. People do not sacrifice themselves for surplus value! This was why he sought to minimize the scientific aspect of Marxism "
"Where the correction and completion of Marxism were concerned, Bergson’s teachings were very convenient, for they enabled the rationalistic content of Marxism to be replaced by “revolutionary myths.” It was no longer a question of economic or sociological laws or of historical or political analysis. Myths, wrote Sorel, “are not a description of things, but expressions of will,”114 and “groups of images that can evoke as a totality through intuition alone, before any reasoned analysis, the mass of sentiments that correspond to the various manifestations of the war waged by socialism against modern society.”115 Later, the same formula was repeated word for word, although in an abbreviated form, to describe the general strike in terms of myth.116 Again, the myth was described as “identical with the convictions of a group,” convictions of which it was “the expression in the language of movement,”117 and it presented itself “to the spirit with the insistence of instincts in all circumstances of life.”118 It was thus logical that it permitted an “intuition of socialism that language was unable to provide with perfect clarity.”119 Sorel was aware of the analogy between “revolutionary socialism” thus conceived and religion. He knew that anything that claimed to be above science and beyond criticism was comparable to religion. Here Sorel once again had recourse to what he called the “new psychology”: Bergson, he wrote, “taught us that religion was not alone in occupying the depths of the consciousness. The revolutionary myths have a place there to the same degree.” By a suitable employment of this method, Sorel hoped to make possible the “apprenticeship, preparation, and reconstruction of the individual in view of a gigantic operation.”120
Sorel thought that precisely this mysterious and obscure aspect of a system of thought or of a social phenomenon constituted its greatness. It enabled one to avoid having to take one’s stand “on utilitarian grounds,” and it allowed one to have, for instance, a total faith in the general strike “even while knowing it is a myth.”125 The obscurity of socialism did not prevent it from being easy to represent the proletarian movement in a complete, exact, and compelling way by means of the great construction that the proletarian soul conceived in the course of social conflicts and that is called the general strike. 64 CHAPTER ONE One should always remember that the perfection of this form of representation would immediately disappear if one sought to split the general strike into an accumulation of historical details. It must be regarded as an undivided whole; and the passage from capitalism to socialism must be conceived as a catastrophe whose process defies description. 126 Sorel believed that by evolving within this mythical and irrational sphere socialism would succeed in overcoming the “crisis of Marxism” that “petty science” had “greatly contributed to creating.”127 The “characteristic of infinity” of the myth of the general strike at one and the same time gave socialism “such a high moral value and inspired so great a loyalty,”128 and gave it that absolute confidence in the future which constitutes the greatness of true revolutionary movements, for ever since it had become a work of preparation, ever since it had been nurtured by the myth of the general strike, “a failure,” he wrote, “could not prove anything against socialism.”129 Ever since it had expressed itself in the myth of the general strike, socialism had ceased to be a mere model or an intellectual construction or abstraction.
For Sorel, deeply influenced by Eduard von Hartmann,169 pessimism represented the spearhead of the great struggle against decadence. Pessimism had three aspects. First, it was “far more a metaphysics of morals than a theory of the world”; it was “the conception of a path toward deliverance.” Second, it was an awareness of objective obstacles “to the satisfaction of our imaginations.” Third—and this was its substance—it was the expression of “a profound conviction of our natural weakness.”170 Only a civilization steeped in pessimism could achieve greatness, for it embodied the great historical forces and the great human virtues: heroism, sacrifice, and asceticism. Pessimism gave birth to the idea of apocalypse and originated the idea of myth. In early Christianity, wrote Sorel, “we find a pessimism that is wholly developed and fully armed.” The consciousness of “belonging to a sacred army . . . produced many heroic actions, created a courageous propaganda, and gave rise to serious moral progress.” Greek pessimism, steeped in heroism, was the product of “poor, warlike mountain tribes,” while the optimism of the philosophers came into being among rich, commercial urban populations “that could regard the world as a huge emporium full of 72 CHAPTER ONE excellent things with which to satisfy their cupidity.” Sorel pointed out that oriental asceticism is often considered a remarkable manifestation of pessimism, while sixteenth-century Calvinism “offers us a spectacle that is perhaps even more instructive”; the dogmas of sin and predestination “correspond to the two primary aspects of pessimism: the wretchedness of the human race and social determinism.”17
"True to his objectives of 1897, Sorel thus decided to correct and complete Marxism. In 1914, when very little remained of his Marxist beliefs, he recalled in his foreword to Matériaux the days when he had hoped “to be able one day, using the facts revealed in recent inquiries, to complete the brief guidelines that Marx and Engels had provided on the development of the working class. Ten years earlier, Sorel would never have dared to couple the expression “brief guidelines” with the name of Marx, even if, already at that period, he felt that “these last years” had been sufficiently “rich in unexpected facts” to “invalidate those syntheses which seemed to be the best founded.”84

"Sorel referred to Proudhon and the distinction between property and the economic sphere.39 This distinction had already appeared in Introduc- 44 CHAPTER ONE tion à l’économie moderne, a work to which he referred in Insegnamenti in a chapter entitled, precisely, “Socialization in the Economic Sphere.” Sorel not only took up the classic Proudhonian positions (“the negation of property is a matter for weak minds”), but dissociated himself from Engels’s famous preface of 1895 to La Lutte des classes en France, 1848–1850. In this preface, Engels insisted that the appropriation of the means of production was the characteristic that distinguished the form of socialism he called “modern” (by which he meant Marxist) from other varieties. The extension of this formula to the appropriation of the channels of commerce was for Engels a necessary consequence of this fundamental proposition. Sorel declared himself in total disagreement with Engels’s conclusion.40 In reality, he was opposed to a fundamental principle of Marxism and one of its major distinguishing feature "
" why did Sorel not participate personally in the launching of these Cahiers, which were identical in intention to La Cité française? They were, after all, exactly in his line of thought. Indeed, he had some doubts about the Maurrassians’ sincerity with respect to Proudhon, and at a certain moment he advised Berth not to have anything to do “with an affair that cannot yield good results.”241 Nevertheless, as Pierre Andreu noted in his introduction to Sorel’s unpublished letters to Berth, after these first guarded reactions, Sorel “seems to have been won over by the antidemocratic fervor of the Cercle.”242 This being the case, why the reserve? "

" For the Sorelians, it was a question of adapting “to our time Proudhon’s ideas on the socialization of commerce and the State,” but—and this was of prime importance—all this had to be done “without touching private property.”50 This axiom was never again questioned."