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Understanding of Karl Marx
The earliest critical reactions to the official Marxian orthodoxy manifested themselves in France. Here the traditions of Blanqui, Proudhon and Bakunin still flourished. They were strengthened at the turn of the century by the existence of a socialist party whose left wing revealed the same divided soul between the revolutionary phrase and the reformist deed which possessed the German party, and a right wing which regularly fed ministers to a bourgeois coalition government. The republican form of government, the existence of a radical strata of the bourgeoisie which led the fight against clericalism, the hang-over of the democratic ideology of the French Revolution and the petty-bourgeois socialism of 1848, obscured in the minds of many socialists the fundamental practical difference between a party of the proletariat and all other parties.
The trade unions, however, battling on the economic front, were compelled perforce to keep the main issue of the class struggle clear. They sought to free themselves from admixture with non-working-class elements and to produce a pure proletarian socialist movement (le socialisme ouvrier). Syndicalism was the theory and practice of that movement. So fearful were they of the dangers of parliamentarianism that they restricted themselves to organising direct economic action which arose in the spontaneous struggle of the class-conscious trade unions. All political activities were renounced. Power was to be won by the single weapon of the general strike. Anti-intellectualist in principle, as a protest both against the careerist leadership of the socialist party and the whole conception of political and theoretical guidance from without, they developed no systematic theory. They sought unity in the empirical practice of the defensive and offensive strike. Before long, however, they unofficially accepted the formulations of their position drawn up by a group of anti-intellectualist intellectuals of whom Sorel, Lagardelle and Pelloutier (who was also an important functionary) were the most outstanding. It was Sorel, an ‘old’ Marxist, who attempted to lay the theoretical foundations of the movement.
If Bernstein was led to a revision of Marxism by an acceptance of the actual politics of socialist parties, Sorel undertook to revise Marx on the basis of a blank rejection of that politics. Even before Bernstein’s criticisms had been noised abroad, Sorel had resolved to ‘revise Marxism with its own methods’ (‘renouveler le marxisme par des procédés marxistes’) [1], a task which suffered temporary interruption during the Dreyfus affair but to which Sorel again ardently devoted himself with the resurgence of political opportunism in France at the turn of the century.
The relation of Sorel and his followers to Marx has been sadly misunderstood. The current impression (circulated by the ‘orthodox’ interpreters of Marx) that syndicalism was avowedly anti-Marxian in origin, intent and practice, is ungrounded. Its opposition was not so much to Marx but to what was being done in his name. Sorel for many years shared with Antonio Labriola the reputation of being the leading philosophic spirit among Marxists. Appalled, however, by the excesses of parliamentary ministerialism in France on the one hand and by the wave of trade-union reformism in Germany on the other, Sorel repudiated both the pacifist illusions of Jaurès and the sleepy, ambiguous formulæ of Kautsky as equally foreign to the meaning of Marxism. Especially did he combat the fetishism of non-violence to which all the leaders of Western Social-Democracy, with the exception of the Russians, were wedded. Marxism, he said, was the theory and practice of the class struggle. Since outside of the syndicalist movement the principle of the class struggle had been practically abandoned, only revolutionary syndicalism could be regarded as the true heir of Marxism. To be sure, there were minor criticisms of Marxian theory scattered throughout all of Sorel’s writings; but wherever Sorel speaks of la décomposition du marxisme he explicitly refers to the reformist practices and the apologetic literature of official Marxism. Of Marx himself Sorel wrote in his most important work:
No better proof perhaps can be given of Marx’s genius than the remarkable agreement which is found to exist between his views and the doctrines which revolutionary syndicalism is today building up slowly and laboriously, keeping always strictly to strike tactics. [2]
In his attack upon parliamentarians and state socialists on the right and the anarchist groups with their denial of the principle of authority on the left, Sorel could with justice claim some continuity with Marx; but his disregard of Marx’s continued criticisms of the ‘no politics’ cry of the Bakuninists and Proudhonians was so open that it bordered on quaintness. Since the latter were anarchists, Sorel claimed, what was true against them could not also be true for those who, like himself, condemned them.
Even more interesting in this connection is the note of cultural iconoclasm which Sorel sounds in his practical emphasis upon the class struggle, a note which was taken up by the international working-class movement only after the Russian Revolution. The economic and political conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat are at the same time cultural conflicts. Arrayed in mortal combat are two civilisations whose fundamental values cannot be arbitrated by an appeal to objective social duty. There is not even a significant common interest in the light of which these conflicting claims may be disinterestedly surveyed as partial interests. Duty, Sorel reminds those who have flown above the battle to get a larger view, has a meaning only ‘in a society in which all parts are intimately connected and responsible to one another’.
Sorel was not content with underscoring the instrumental efficacy of revolutionary sentiment. He proceeded to develop a ‘logic’ of sentiment on the Bergsonian model. It was this anti-intellectualistic current in Sorel which not only made éclat in the Catholic salons of the Third Republic but soon cost him the support of the syndicalist rank and file in whose presumable interests it had been elaborated. The classic expression of Sorel’s irrationalism is to be found in his theory of the ‘myth’. A myth for Sorel is any general notion, belief or fancy which drives men to great social action:
Men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is to triumph... These constructions, a knowledge of which is so important for historians, I propose to call ‘myths’ ... the syndicalist ‘general strike’ and Marx’s ‘catastrophic revolution’ are such myths. [3]
But how are such myths to be understood? By careful analysis? By distinguishing between what is description and what is prophecy? By disentangling the probable consequences of action from the desired consequences? Intuition forbid! A myth is not something which can survive analysis. It betrays a lack of intelligence even to try to analyse it. ‘It must be taken as a whole, as an historic force.’ Is not this equivalent to characterising the myth of the general strike as Utopian? No, Utopian construction is the third member of the trinity of vicious abstractions whose other two members are socialist compromise and anarchist intransigence. Utopias operate with ideas which can be discussed and refuted; a myth, however, is an emotion which can only be enacted. It was upon this phantasy in a Bergsonian key that the socialist movement was invited to stake its life.
By sheer intellectual violence Marx is transformed from the theorist of social action into its poet; his rational analyses are translated into romantic insights; his attempt to explain the processes of production into an indirect confirmation of the mysteries of creation:
No effort of thought, no progress of knowledge, no rational induction will ever dispel the mystery which envelops socialism; and it is because the philosophy of Marx recognised fully this feature of socialism that it acquired the right to serve as the starting point of socialist inquiry. [4]
This glorification of the violence incarnate in the general strike was a clarifying influence in the foggy atmosphere of parliamentary talk. It brought the ‘legalists at any price’ to self-consciousness and forced them openly to avow what they had already secretly confessed to themselves; viz., that they desired to constitute a new administration, not to create a new state. But syndicalism itself provided no specific way by which the old state could be destroyed except by professing to ignore it. The general strike which it offered as a tactical panacea was a highly abstract conception. The general strike was regarded as a technical weapon which could be used at will instead of a controlled politico-economic reaction arising within a concrete historical situation. It was taken as an isolated single economic act instead of a phase of a political revolutionary process. The syndicalists did not realise that a general strike could never of itself produce a revolutionary situation; that, on the contrary, its efficacy depended on whether it was itself produced within a revolutionary situation. Again the failure to think dialectically avenged itself upon them by driving them into a position which practically was no different from that of the orthodox Marxists whom they opposed. Their end was not linked up with their means.
Until 1914 the positive accomplishment of the syndicalist movement was to keep the French trade-union movement free from the views of parliamentary reformism. But like the IWW in America, instead of building a revolutionary party, they proclaimed the slogan of ‘no party’; instead of relying upon their high fever of revolutionary sincerity to cure them of the infections of ‘dirty politics’, they used as protection only the formula of ‘no politics’; instead of distinguishing between the legitimate organisational independence of trade unions from all political parties, and the inescapable acceptance of a political philosophy, they lumped both together, in the Charte D’Amiens of 1907, so that organisational independence in their minds meant political independence. But it really meant nothing of the kind. The economic struggle is always a political struggle. Even before the war it was clear that the state could not be snubbed out of existence because the syndicalist theory and programme refused to recognise the necessity of fighting it on the political front. And during the war when the state smashed the syndicalist unions in America and corrupted the syndicalist movement in France, a classic demonstration was offered that the maxim, to be is to be perceived, was no more valid in politics than in philosophy.
Syndicalist philosophy had a twofold motivation. Politically it sought to convert a war of attrition for petty reform into a campaign of direct action for social revolution. It was a protest against the heterogeneous composition of the socialist parties, so many of whose leaders were arrivistes, indigent professionals, eloquent shopkeepers, and personalities from the fringe of hobohemia. Indicate that the ‘general strike’ was a serious, perhaps a bloody business, and with one clean stroke you would sweep away all those intellectuals who had ‘embraced the profession of thinking for the proletariat’. Theoretically, by denying that the future was predictable no matter how much scientific data might be at hand, it focused attention upon the necessity of risking something in action. The usual Bergsonian grounds were offered in denying that analysis could ever adequately render existence, especially in its dynamic aspect. Change could only be grasped in feeling; feeling could only be expressed in action. Thought followed action and derived its canons of validity from the successes registered. Any thinking is valid which gets you where you want to go. But since ‘where you want to go’ is a feeling which defies description, the question ‘whether you have got to where you wanted to go’ can only be decided after action, and then only by another feeling. The whole position runs out into a vicious variety of Jamesian pragmatism. [5]
The syndicalist movement was an embryonic revolutionary party. Because it did not recognise itself for what it was, it went to pieces and its revolutionary energy and zeal were dissipated. The most the syndicalists could do was to scare the state, not to conquer it. One critic aptly characterised them as ‘headless horsemen of the revolution riding furiously in all directions at once’.
1. Georges Sorel, Matériaux d’une Théorie du Prolétariat (Paris 1919), p. 253.
2. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (Glencoe 1900), translated by Hulme, p. 153. [1915 edition available at here. – MIA]
3. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 22.
4. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 164.
5. Consistently embraced in Sorel’s De l’Utilité du Pragmatisme (Paris 1921).
Last updated: 20 February 2020