227. Training the classes

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Cafes

Another Cafe is the only cafe at my level of my hill. I've written about it in the past, and I do like it, but it's a little more expensive (and I'm cheap) and it's often over-crowded. Today it's raining but I still needed to go out and do some shopping and thought I would give it a try. Alas, it was too crowded for me to get a seat. I am happy for them -- they are not in an obvious location for a cafe, so it's good to see them getting so much trade. I just wish I could get a seat too.

I had to walk three more blocks to this Starbucks.

Chapter 2

Violence and the Decadence of the Middle Classes 

Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel

Dear God! That wasn't what we covered in the last chapter?

p81  ...Civil war has become very difficult since the discovery of the new firearms, and since the cutting of rectilinear streets in the capital towns. [The end of effective barricades.] The recent troubles in Russia seem even to have shown that Governments can count much more than was supposed on the energy of their officers. Nearly all French politicians had prophesied the imminent fall of Czarism at the time of the Manchurian defeats, but the Russian army in the presence of rioting did not manifest the weakness shown by the French army during our revolutions; nearly everywhere repression was rapid, efficacious, and even pitiless. The discussions which took place at the congress of social democrats at Jena show that the parliamentary Socialists no longer rely upon an armed struggle to obtain possession of the State. [The Great War YouTube series has recently covered the 100th anniversaries of both Russian revolutions in 1917, so Sorel was only right about this up to a point. All governments have tipping points.]
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p82 Everything becomes a question of valuation, accurate estimation, and opportunism; [he's talking about Jean Jaurès here] much skill, tact, and calm audacity are necessary to carry on such a diplomacy, i.e. to make the workers believe that you are carrying the flag of revolution, the middle class that you are arresting the danger which threatens them, and the country that you represent an irresistible current of opinion. The great mass of the electors understands nothing of what passes in politics, and has no intelligent knowledge of economic history; they take sides with the party which seems to possess power, and you can obtain everything you wish from them when you can prove to them that you are strong enough to make the Government capitulate...
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p85 Jaurès, who was very much mixed up in all the ups and downs of Dreyfusim, had rapidly judged the mentality of the upper middle class, into which he had not yet penetrated. He saw that this upper middle class was terribly ignorant, gapingly stupid, politically absolutely impotent; he recognized that with people who understand nothing of the principles of capitalist economics it is easy to contrive a policy of compromise on the basis of an extremely broad Socialism... [Édouard] Vaillant does not possess those remarkable qualities of suppleness of mind, and perhaps even peasant duplicity, which shine in Jaurès, and which have often caused people to say that he would have made a wonderful cattle-dealer.
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I'm assuming this isn't a charming Gallic complement.

He restates what Marx has to say about the end of capitalism and the evolution to the proletarian stage,

p88 Socialists should therefore abandon the attempt (initiated by the Utopians) to find a means of inducing the enlightened middle class to prepare the transition to a more perfect system of legislation; their sole function is that of explaining to the proletariat the greatness of the revolutionary part they are called upon to play. By ceaseless criticism the proletariat must be brought to perfect their organizations; they must be shown how the embryonic forms which appear in their unions may be developed , so that, finally they may build up institutions without any parallel in the history of the middle class; that they may form ideas which depend solely on their position as producers in large industries, and which owe nothing to middle-class thought; and that they may acquire habits of liberty with which the middle class nowadays are no longer acquainted. 

This doctrine will evidently be inapplicable if the middle class and the proletariat do not oppose each other implacably, with all the forces at their disposal; the more ardently capitalist the middle class is, the more the proletariat is full of warlike spirit and confident of its revolutionary strength, the more certain will be the success of the proletarian movement.

p89 The middle class with which Marx was familiar in England was still, as regards the immense majority, animated by their conquering, insatiable, and pitiless spirit, which had characterized at the beginning of modern times the creators of new industries and the adventurers launched on the discovery of unknown lands. When we are studying the modern industrial system we should always bear in mind this similarity between the capitalist type and the warrior type; it was for very good reasons that the men who directed gigantic enterprises were named captains of industry. This type is still found today in all its purity in the United States...

...If... the middle class, led astray by the chatter of the preachers of ethics and sociology, return to an ideal of conservative mediocrity, seek to correct the abuses of economics, and wish to break with the barbarism of their predecessors, then one part of the forces which were to further the development of capitalism is employed in hindering it, an arbitrary and irrational element is introduced, and the future of the world becomes completely indeterminate.

p90 This indetermination grows still greater if the proletariat are converted to the ideas of social peace at the same time as their masters... 

...Jaurès is as enthusiastic as the clericals about measures which turn away the working classes from the idea of the Marxian revolution... he founds his own hopes on the simultaneous ruin of the capitalistic and revolutionary spirit.

I haven't invoked Naphtha, but I have been thinking about him, and also the monks of The Brothers K. Naphtha would not be with Jaurès on this point, but, as keen as he was to see the fall of the middle class, I don't think the Marxist revolution depicted here would suit him either, as it would seem to preserve the machinery of the industrial/scientific age. I don't believe the Soviet Union was what he was hoping for.

...how can they hope to give back to the middle class an ardor which is spent?

It is here that the role of violence in history appears to us as singularly great, for it can, in an indirect manner, so operate on the middle class as to awaken them to a sense of their own class sentiment...

p91 To repay with black ingratitude the benevolence of those who would protect the workers, to meet with insults the homilies of the defenders of human fraternity, and to reply by blows to the advances of the propagators of social peace... is a very practical way of indicating to the middle class that they must mind their own business and only that.

I believe also that it may be useful to thrash the orators of democracy and the representatives of the Government, for in this way you insure that none shall retain any illusions about the character of acts of violence. But these acts can have historical value only if they are the clear and brutal expression of the class war: the middle classes must not be allowed to imagine that, aided by cleverness, social science, or high-flown sentiments, they might find a better welcome at the hands of the proletariat.
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...Must we believe that the Marxian conception is dead? By no means, for proletarian violence comes upon the scene just at the moment when the conception of social peace is being held up as a means of moderating disputes; proletarian violence confines employers to their role of producers, and tends to restore the separation of the classes...

Proletarian violence not only makes the future revolution certain, but it seems also to be the only means by which the European nations -- at present stupefied by humanitarianism -- can recover their former energy... A growing and solidly organised working class can compel the capitalist class to remain firm in the industrial war; if a united and revolutionary proletariat confronts a rich middle class, eager for conquest, capitalist society will have reached its historical perfection.

...Let us add... if properly conducted... [proletarian violence] will suppress the Parliamentary Socialists, who will no longer be able to pose as the leaders of the working classes and the guardians of order.


In terms of class identity, Sorel reminds me a bit of Foucault, except that I'm not sure if Sorel is always saying what he really means. He's laying down the rules for propagating class war, but isn't he also giving away too much if that's the outcome he really wants? You can also take what he says here as a guide to undermining class war. 

And I'm particularly confused about his attitude towards his own, middle, class. Is he trying to buck it up or destroy it?

226. Middle-class cowardice

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The Glory of France

Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel

p72 [Discussing the social/political arbitration of labor disputes] ...Conciliators stake their vanity on succeeding, and they would be extremely hurt if industrial leaders prevented them from making social peace. The workmen are in a much more favorable position, because the prestige of the peacemakers is very much less with them than with the capitalists... It is noticeable that these proceedings very rarely succeed when the matter is in the hands of workmen who have become rich: literary, moral, or sociological considerations have very little effect upon people born outside the ranks of the middle class.

...In the course of conciliation meetings more than one revolutionary has shown that he aspires to become a member of the middle class, and there are many intelligent people who imagine that socialistic and revolutionary conceptions are only accidents that might be avoided by establishing better relations between the classes... they imagine that harmony would be established if a better social education were given to the citizens.

Or today it would seem that the strategy is to simply uproot and disperse the working class. To destroy, in the name of progress and redevelopment, the community in which they previously thrived.

Capitalists resolve disputes by finally agreeing to terms they had first claimed to be impossible, which leads to, ...the notion of the inexhaustibly of production, which is one of the postulates of the theory of class war in the Socialism of Marx.

p74 Why then speak of social duty? Duty has some meaning in a society in which all the parts are intimately connected and responsible to one another; but if capitalism is inexhaustible, joint responsibility is no longer founded on economic realities and the workers think they would be dupes if they did not demand all they can obtain; they look upon the employer as an adversary with whom one comes to terms after a war. Social duty no more exists than does international duty.
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This is very similar to the thinking behind the Japanese car unions which (I think I recall this correctly) are not industry wide but specific to a corporation. They see themselves as, if not an ally, at least a parasite with a keen sense of self-interest. Like a lamprey concerned to not undermine the feeding of the fish it's living off of.


...it must be noticed that our Latin countries present one great obstacle to the formation of social peace; the classes are more sharply separated by external characteristics [?] than they are in Saxon countries; these separations very much embarrass Syndicalist leaders when they abandon their former manners and take up a position in the official or philanthropic circles...  their comrades distrust them. In France this distrust has become much more definite since a great number of anarchists have entered the Syndicalist movement; because the anarchist has a horror of everything which recalls the proceedings of politicians -- a class of people devoured by the desire to climb into superior classes, and having already the capitalist mind while yet poor.[Footnote: Some years ago Arsène Dumont [slighted by both the English and the French Wikis] invented the term social capillarity to express the slow climbing of the classes. If Syndicalism submitted to the influence of the pacifists, it would be a powerful agent of social capillarity.]
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It seems that the leadership of the lower classes is indistinguishable in nature from the other classes while I seem to recall that he thinks the lower classes as a whole are entirely different? I know I'm jumping way ahead here, but I can't help speculating that it would be the leaders, and not the average workers, that Sorel would have most come into contact with.

p77 One of the things which appears to me to have most astonished the workers during the last few years has been the timidity of the forces of law and order in the presence of a riot; magistrates who have the right to demand the services of soldiers dare not use their power to the utmost, and officers allow themselves to be abused and struck with a patience hitherto unknown in them. It is becoming more and more evident every day that working class violence possesses an extraordinary efficacity [sic] in strikes... [This could have been written this year with regard to the violence of anarchists and White Supremacists in America.]

Trades union leaders have not been long in grasping the full bearing of this situation... They endeavor to intimidate the prefects by popular demonstrations which might lead to serious conflicts with the police, and they commend violence as the most efficacious means of obtaining concessions...

p78 I cannot refrain from noting down here a reflection made by Clemenceau with regard to our relations with Germany, which applies equally well to social conflicts when they take a violent aspect (which seems likely to become more and more general in proportion as a cowardly middle class continues to pursue the chimera of social peace): "There is no better means," he said (than the policy of perpetual concessions), "of making the opposite party ask for more and more. Every man or every power whose action consists solely in surrender can only finish by self-annihilation. Everything that lives resists; that which does not resist allows itself to be cut up piecemeal" (Aurore, Aug 15, 1905).

...every conflict which gives rise to violence becomes a vanguard fight, [he means this in the military sense. The engagement between Union cavalry and the left wing of the Army of Northern Virginia on the first day of Gettysburg is a prime example of a vanguard engagement.] and nobody can foresee what will arise from such engagements; although the great battle never comes to a head, yet each time they come to blows the strikers hope that it is the beginning of the great Napoleonic battle (that which will definitely crush the vanquished); in this way the practice of strikes engenders the notion of a catastrophic revolution.

Very interesting. Napoleon (and Nelson) invented a new approach and language for modern war that, as the Japanese endlessly announced, required a decisive battle of annihilation. This was especially true for Imperial Japan because success had to come quickly as their resource base was so modest -- Germany had the same basic problem in both World Wars. But I had never thought of a political use of this terminology.

Sorel is describing class war as a form of what we would today call asymmetric warfare. The war in Vietnam was a good example of exactly what he's talking about here. And the history of the downfall of the Romanov Dynasty in Russia is a good example of the political equivalent Sorel sees. Except that I don't see that as being the spineless, middle class, Sorel was talking about. I'm beginning to think that the middle classes are for Sorel what the Germans were for Clemenceau. I wonder if Sorel would have been able to make peace with the middle classes to the extent that Mussolini did? 

A keen observer of the contemporary proletarian movement has expressed the same ideas: "They, like their ancestors (the French revolutionaries), are for struggle, for conquest; they desire to accomplish great works by force. Only, the war of conquest interests them no longer. Instead of thinking of battles, they now think of strikes; instead of setting up as their ideal a battle against the armies of Europe, they now set up the general strike in which the capitalist regime will be annihilated.[" Ch. Guieysse. There's no end quote in the text but I think that's where it belongs.]
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p79 Middle-class cowardice very much resembles the cowardice of the English Liberal party, which constantly proclaims its absolute confidence in arbitration between nations: arbitration nearly always gives disastrous results for England. But these worthy progressives prefer to pay, or even to compromise the future of their country, rather than face the horrors of war. The English Liberal party had the word justice always on its lips, absolutely like our middle class; we might very well wonder whether all the high morality of our great contemporary thinkers is not founded on a degradation of the sentiment of honor.

This is certainly not what I was expecting from Sorel. Mussolini had to at least to struggle with his socialistic and nationalistic impulses when the Great War came, but Sorel seems to be entirely a nationalist who is open to allying himself with socialists in the war against the middle classes.

I predict that Sorel is with Clemenceau when it comes to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. At least he didn't live to see the Battle of France.





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225. Class War

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Introduction

Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel

Introduction to the First Publication -- Sorel
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p58 Socialism is a philosophy of the history of contemporary institutions, and Marx has always argued as a philosopher of history when he was not led away by personal polemics to write about matters outside the proper scope of his own system...
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Each time an outrage occurs, the doctors of the ethico-social sciences, who swarm in journalism, indulge in reflections on the question, Can the criminal act be excused, or sometimes even justified, from the point of view of the highest justice. Then there is an irruption into the democratic press of that casuistry for which the Jesuits have so many times been reproached.
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p59 It is not the business of the historian to award prizes for virtue, to propose the erection of statues, or to establish any catechism whatever; his business is to understand what is least individual in the course of events... And so I am not at all concerned to justify the perpetrators of violence, but to inquire into the function of violence of the working classes in contemporary Socialism. 

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Chapter 1 - Class War and Violence
p65 A. To most people the class war is the principle of Socialist tactics. That means that the Socialist party founds its electoral successes on the clashing of interests which exist in an acute state between certain groups, and that, if need be, it would undertake to make this hostility still more acute; their candidates ask the poorest and most numerous class to look upon themselves as forming a corporation, and they offer to become the advocates of this corporation; they promise to use their influence as representatives to improve the lot of the disinherited. Thus we are not very far from what happened in the Greek states; Parlimentary Socialists are very much akin to the demagogues who clamoured constantly for the abolition of debts, and the division of landed property, who put all the public charges upon the rich, and invented plots in order to get large fortunes confiscated. "In the democracies in which the crowd is above the law," says Aristotle, "the demagogues, by their continual attacks upon the rich, always divide the city into two camps . . . the oligarchs should abandon all swearing of oaths like those they swear to-day; for there are cities in which they have taken this oath -- I will be the constant enemy of the people, and I will do them all the evil that lies in my power." Here certainly is a war between two classes as clearly defined as it can be; but it seems to me absurd to assert that it was in this way that Marx understood the class war, which, according to him, was the essence of Socialism.

I wonder that he references the Greeks and not the Roman Tribunes. But I'm not that familiar with Parliamentary Socialism at this time. And I wonder what Sorel (and Aristotle and Marx) would think of Trump's popular core constituency? The (economically) disenfranchised supporting a party furthering the interests of the wealthiest class. It is a sort of "class war," or at least a spite war, against the middle classes, which would make some kind of sense to Marx and Sorel except that the wealthiest class is itself the highest rung of the middle classes.

I believe that the authors of the French law of August 11, 1848, had their heads full of these classical reminiscences when they decreed punishment against all those who, by speeches and newspaper articles, sought "to trouble the public peace by stirring up hatred and contempt amongst the citizens." The terrible insurrection of the month of June was just over, and it was firmly believed that the victory of the Parisian workmen would have brought on, if not an attempt to put communism into practice, at least a series of formidable requisitions on the rich in favor of the poor; it was hoped that an end would be put to civil wars by increasing the difficulty of propogating [sic] doctrines of hatred, which might raise the proletariat against the middle class.

Nowadays Parliamentary Socialists no longer entertain the idea of insurrection... but the means of acquiring power may have changed without there being any change of mental attitude. Electoral literature seems inspired by the purest demagogic doctrines... It [Parliamentary Socialism] makes its appeal to workmen, to small employers of labor, to peasants; and in spite of Engels, it aims at reaching out to farmers; it is at times patriotic; at other times it declares against the Army... 

p66 In the end the term "proletariat" became synonymous with oppressed; and there are oppressed in all classes... Henri Turot... has written a book on the "proletariat of love," by which title he designates the lowest class of prostitutes. If one of these days the suffrage is granted to women, he will doubtless be called upon to draw up a statement of the claims of this special proletariat.

1848 was also at the heart of Dostoevsky's concerns in The Brothers K. I would guess that, as little historical knowledge as the average American has, he or she would be particularly in the dark about 1848. I would further guess this ignorance would extend even to the descendants of liberals who fled Europe for America at the time -- like me. In France, 1848 restarted the peculiar political dance the French kept performing in these years. In Germany 1848 began setting the stage for the even more disastrous 2nd and 3rd Reichs. And in America, applying what I'm learning from Sorel about Protestantism, it reinforced the state with a populous force of liberal, mostly non-Calvinist Germans -- like my Catholic ancestors. (The migration of Catholic Irish at this time was also important, though slightly less politically motivated.)