The Glory of France
Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorelp72 [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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