Was he the grandfather of fascism? Did fascism originate from marxism + proudhonism?
Or is this just a myth. A over exaggerated one
(sorel was stupid tbh)
>>2402797>sorel was stupid tbhHow dare you insult the shining red sun in our hearts Georges Eugène Sorel, may the swift and moral sword of Sorelianism strike you down where you stand.
>Did fascism originate from marxism + proudhonism?Fascism, excluding the ephemeral time when it was a general term for a group of Italian left-interventionists, is just an ultranationalist form of corporatism with Proudhonist diction. It has nothing substantively in common with either Marxism, Sorelianism, National Syndicalism, or Proudhonism.
>>2402974Good litmus test for whether someone knows literally anything about Sorel or if they're just regurgitating whatever they've heard secondhand is whether they think Sorel was a natsynd (he wasn't) or an integralist (he really wasn't, in fact even warning Berth to not too closely associate with the monarchists in the Cercle)
>>2404869>>2415996I mean ᴉuᴉlossnW did claim Sorel as his mentor but him and the Fascists kind of claimed everyone as theirs funny enough. Stalin, FDR, Sorel, Keynes, etc. I believe Sorel himself saw some kind of proto-fascist groups emerging before he died and his response was that the Socialists should maybe ally with them to overthrow the Italian Monarchy if I recall correctly.
Now personally I consider Sorel to be a fairly smart guy and worth a read, but I think arguing what role he played in Fascism is kind of—well, I don’t want to say pointless, but I see it as distracting. It ruins analysis and may dissuade people from engaging seriously with his ideas because Fascism is to Communism what Satanism is to Christianity. I think it’s a better exercise to just look at Fascism itself and say what, specifically, we oppose in it. If those ideas exist in Sorel’s thought than critique it, if not… ehhh?
Zeev Sternell wrote a lot drawing a thread between Sorel and fascism. There's some debate about this, but I found a summary.
>I’m reading Zeev Sternhell’s The Birth of Fascist Ideology (it is is excellent). Sternhell argues that fascism should be understood, in the first place, as a cultural movement – an ideology; the formation of this ideology precedes fascism’s formation as a set of organised political movements. For Sternhell, fascism’s origins should be seen as a synthesis between:
>a) an idealist revision of Marxism>b) nationalism
>Sternhell discusses Georges Sorel at some length – Sorel is, for Sternhell, an important figure in the idealist revision of Marxism. Marxist theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was (generally) characterised by: a) an emphasis on an ‘economistic’ science of society: historical materialism; b) revolutionary opposition to bourgeois society / capitalism; c) a conviction that the proletariat were the revolutionary agents of history, as part of a class-struggle analysis of that history; d) opposition to private property: a commitment to the socialisation of central aspects of economic life.
>In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Western Marxism splintered. The social democrats abandoned – in practice and subsequently in theory – the commitment to revolutionary seizure / overthrow / command of the state. Instead, the proletariat became agents of history via the effectiveness of labour movement parties within the democratic system. Revolutionary socialism was successful in Russia, but Leninist-style revolutionary parties became minority interests in most of Western Europe. This was, Sternhell argues, the dominant response on the left to the apparent unwillingness of the Western European proletariat to engage in revolutionary overthrow of the state – the goals remained the same, but reform, rather than revolution, became the means. [This associated with the wrought but successful transformation of liberalism into liberal democracy – the expansion of the vote transformed revolutionary Marxism into Social Democracy in most states where liberal democracy was instituted.]
>The Sorelian revision of Marxism, by contrast, maintained the commitment to revolution, but abandoned, instead, historical materialism; commitment to socialisation of property; and a belief in the proletariat as agent of history. Instead, Sorelian ‘Marxism’ emphasised the important of market economies and private property; emphasised voluntarily willed culture, instead of economistic or historical determinism; and abandoned the belief that the proletariat were the class that would effect revolution against bourgeois society.
>This ‘revision’ of Marxism became fascism when conjoined with the nationalism that was coalescing in the same period. If the proletariat was no longer the revolutionary agent that would destroy bourgeois society, who was? For the emerging fascists, the nation state as organic unity became the revolutionary agent. Bourgeois society, no longer understood as principally an economic concept, but instead as a cultural one – a society of decadence and corruption – could only be overcome by the unified action of the organically homogenous people of a given (national) cultural unit. This organically unified people became the agents of revolutionary change – within the state (against those corrupting forces that sought to undermine the state’s organic unity), and internationally (against other states). The Marxian narrative of class conflict was transformed: violence became the driving force of history, but now it was the violence of the unified people against their enemies. Where Marxian economism had been rationalist (as it claimed objective grounding in a science of society), fascist nationalism was irrationalist (as connection to the underlying unity of the nation-organism was pre- or anti-rational).
>In Sternhell’s words:
<Having to choose between the proletariat and revolution, they chose revolution; having to choose between a proletarian but moderate socialism and a nonproletarian but revolutionary and national socialism, they opted for the nonproletarian revolution, the national revolution. (p. 27)https://duncanlaw.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/the-birth-of-fascist-ideology/Unique IPs: 26