GEORGES SOREL
From Reflections on Violence
Although Marxist socialism was the dominant political ideology of workers, syndicalism was widely preferred in areas of France, Spain, and Italy. Syndicalism grew out of trade union associations that espoused the utopian vision of one day controlling their industries and, eventually, the political state. The strike became the central weapon of syndicalism, but it was the general strike that made syndicalism revolutionary. The thousands of strikes in Europe at the end of the century offered the potential of one mighty, total work stoppage that would ruin capitalism and dismantle the state. Georges Sorel (1847-1922) wrote his treatise on syndicalism in 1908. The following excerpt includes Sorel's important notion of the general strike as a mythic belief, the widespread acceptance of which would prompt collective action by workers as well as soften employers' resolve against concessions.
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Against this noisy, garrulous, and lying Socialism, which is exploited by
ambitious people of every description, which amuses a few buffoons, and which
is admired by decadents-revolutionary Syndicalism takes its stand, and endeavours,
on the contrary, to leave nothing in a state of indecision; its ideas are
honestly expressed, without trickery and without mental reservations; no attempt
is made to dilute doctrines by a stream of confused commentaries. Syndicalism
endeavours 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. Oppositions, instead
of being glozed over, must be thrown into sharp relief if we desire to obtain
a clear idea of the Syndicalist movement; the groups which are struggling
one against the other must be shown as separate and as compact as possible;
in short, the movements of the revolted masses must be represented in such
a way that the soul of the revolutionaries may receive a deep and lasting
impression.
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 modern 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; and perhaps it would
not be possible to cite another example which would so perfectly demonstrate
the value of the famous professor's doctrines.
The possibility of the actual realisation of the general strike has been much discussed; it has been stated that the Socialist war could not be decided in one single battle. To the people who think themselves cautious, practical, and scientific the difficulty of setting great masses of the proletariat in motion at the same moment seems prodigious; they have analysed the difficulties of detail which such an enormous struggle would present. It is the opinion of the Socialist-sociologists, as also of the politicians, that the general strike is a popular dream, characteristic of the beginnings of a working-class movement; we have had quoted against us the authority of Sidney Webb, who has decreed that the general strike is an illusion of youth, of which the English workers-whom the monopolists of sociology have so often presented to us as the depositaries of the true conception of the working-class movement-soon rid themselves.
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. We know, moreover, that these social myths in no way
prevent a man profiting by the observations which he makes in the course of
his life, and form no obstacle to the pursuit of his normal occupations.
The truth of this may be shown by numerous examples.
The first Christians expected the return of Christ and the total ruin of the pagan world, with the inauguration of the kingdom of the saints, at the end of the'first generation. The catastrophe did not come to pass, but Christian thought profited so greatly from the apocalyptic myth that certain contemporary scholars maintain that the whole preaching of Christ referred solely to this one point. The hopes which Luther and Calvin had formed of the religious exaltation of Europe were by no means realised; these fathers of the Reformation very soon seemed men of a past era; for present-day Protestants they belong rather to the Middle Ages than to modern times, and the problems which troubled them most occupy very little place in contemporary Protestantism. Must we for that reason deny the immense result which came from their dreams of Christian renovation?
In our own times Mazzini pursued what the wiseacres of his time called a mad chimera; but it can no longer be denied that, without Mazzini, Italy would never have become a great power, and that he did more for Italian unity than Cavour and all the politicians of his school.
The myth must be judged as a means of acting on the present; any attempt
to discuss how far it can be taken literally as future history is devoid of
sense. It is the myth in its entirety which is alone important: its parts
are only of interest in so far as they bring out the main idea. No useful
purpose is served, therefore, in arguing about the incidents which may occur
in the course of a social war, and about the decisive conflicts which may
give victory to the proletariat, even supposing the revolutionaries to have
been wholly and entirely deluded in setting up this imaginary picture of the
general strike, this picture may yet have been, in the course of the preparation
for the Revolution, a great element of strength, if it has embraced all the
aspirations of Socialism, and if it has given to the whole body of Revolutionary
thought a precision and a rigidity which no other method of thought could
have given.
To estimate, then, the significance of the idea of the general strike, all
the methods of discussion which are current among politicians, sociologists,
or people with pretensions to political science, must be abandoned. Every-thing
which its opponents endeavour to establish may be conceded to them, without
reducing in any way the value of the theory which they think they have refuted.
The question whether the general strike is a partial reality, or only a product
of popular imagination, is of little importance. All that it is necessary
to know is, whether the general strike contains everything that the Socialist
doctrine expects of the revolutionary proletariat.
To solve this question we are no longer compelled, to argue learnedly about
the future; we are not obliged to indulge in lofty reflections about philosophy,
history, or economics; we are not on the plane of theories, and we can remain
on the level of observable facts. We have to question men who take a very
active part in the real revolutionary movement amidst the proletariat, men
who do not aspire to climb into the middle class and whose mind is not dominated
by corporative prejudices. These men may be deceived about an infinite number
of political, economical, or moral questions; but their testimony is decisive,
sovereign, and irrefutable when it is a question of knowing what are the ideas
which most powerfully move them and their comrades, which most appeal to them
as being identical with their socialistic conceptions, and thanks to which
their reason, their hopes, and their way of looking at particular facts seem
to make but one indivisible unity.
Thanks to these men, we know that the general strike is indeed what I have
said: the myth in which Socialism is wholly comprised, i.e. a body of images
capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the
different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against modern
society. Strikes have engendered in the proletariat the noblest, deepest,
and most moving sentiments that they possess; the general strike groups them
all in a co-ordinated picture, and, by bringing them together, gives to each
one of them its maximum of intensity; appealing to their painful memories
of particular conflicts, it colours with an intense life all the details of
the composition presented to consciousness. We thus obtain that intuition
of Socialism which language cannot give us with perfect clearness-and we obtain
it as a whole, perceived instantaneously.
We may urge yet another piece of evidence to prove the power of the idea of
the general strike. If that idea were a pure chimera, as is so frequently
said, Parliamentary Socialists would not attack it with such heat; I do not
remember that they ever attacked the senseless hopes which the Utopists have
always held up before the dazzled eyes of the people.
They struggle against the conception of the general strike, because they
recognise, in the course of their propagandist rounds, that this conception
is so admirably adapted to the workingclass mind that there is a possibility
of its dominating the latter in the most absolute manner, thus leaving no
place for the desires which the Parliamentarians are able to satisfy. They
perceive that this idea is so effective as a motive force that once it has
entered the minds of the people they can no longer be controlled by leaders,
and that thus the power of the deputies would be reduced to nothing. In short,
they feel in a vague way that the whole Socialist movement might easily be
absorbed by the general strike, which would render useless all those compromises
between political groups in view of which the Parliamentary r6gime has been
built up.
The opposition it meets with from official Socialists, therefore, furnishes
a confirmation of our first inquiry into the scope of the general strike.