Everything is possible: The Strange Journey of Georges Valois

"From Fascism to Libertarian Communism: Georges Valois against the Third Republic" by Allen Douglas is a book about Georges Valois (1878-1945), a French political activist with a very colorful career. Valois started out as an anarchist, turned to monarchism and fascism, only to rejoin the far left later in life. Indeed, he is one of the few people I'm familiar with who evolved from right-wing to left-wing activism at a fairly advanced age. Valois died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II.

As a young man, Valois saw himself as an anarchist rebel, but was soon drawn to the more constructive side of anarchist ideology in the form of Kropotkin and anarcho-syndicalism. His first political mentor was Ferdinand Pelloutier, his second (more ominously) was Georges Sorel. When breaking with leftist syndicalism, Valois would join the monarchist and proto-fascist Action francaise headed by Charles Maurras. He also became a Catholic. Sorel, too, expressed some sympathy for Maurras. During the 1920's, Valois founded an explicitly fascist party, La Faisceau, which seems to have clashed with the Action francaise even more often than it fought leftist. I mean that quite literally: both Valois and Maurras had access to impatient young men functioning as stormtroopers... 

During the 1930's, Valois went back to a form of revolutionary syndicalism and libertarian communism, while maintaining an ecumenic outreach to all leftist currents except the most reformist ones. He also left the Church and seems to have become an atheist. 

Douglas is clearly fascinated by Valois, but can't really explain his peculiar political gyrations. Perhaps no explanation is readily available. He describes Valois as a "utopian", constantly working on blueprints for a future society. Did he think too much? Like many other utopians, Valois had a tendency to "take an idea and run with it", in his case currency reform. He was something of a "money freak", obsessed with the gold standard, although I have to admit that I often don't understand what on earth the man was talking about! And while Douglas paints Valois as a fairly conservative family man, he did have a mercurial streak in his personality. Why would a young anarchist travel to Russia and work as a tutor in an aristocratic family? Why did he abdicate leadership responsibility in order to work at a plantation in Reunion, or in order to walk on foot from Paris to Lourdes as a Catholic pilgrimage? His whole approach to politics and coalition building was unpredictable and eclectic. He was also a litigious person, but so where his opponents. Perhaps this is typically French? 

Interestingly, Valois was for the creation of Red-Brown blocs as a right-wing activist. As a leftist, by contrast, he warned against all forms of collaboration with fascism, and perceptively realized that some reformist "neosocialists" (such as Henri de Man) could end up becoming fascists - which they indeed did. Valois thus wasn't a "Red-Brown leftist". He really did change almost his entire worldview when returning to the left. As a monarchist reactionary, he had opposed the French revolution, while extolling the virtues of hierarchy, war and tradition. And yes, he was anti-Semitic. His philosophy had been a pessimistic one. Humans are by nature lazy, and all progress is therefore the result of stern leadership (including the whip) over the mediocre masses. As a leftist, by contrast, Valois was optimistic, dreaming of progress and a coming space age. He opposed war, militarism and hierarchy in favor of a society based on mutual aid. 

Yet, there was *some* kind of continuity even in the mind of this strange Frenchman! One was the fixation with monetary reform. After abandoning the pro-gold "deflationist" position when he turned left, he actually went back to a gold bug position while still a leftist. Another constant was an orientation to winning the working class, something Valois never seem to have accomplished in any of his political incarnations. Still another common theme is the idea that the state shouldn't direct the economy. During his right-wing period, he certainly saw the state as necessary, but economic life should be in the hands of "corporations" (in the corporativist sense). As a libertarian communist, he would rather dispense with the state altogether in favor of syndicates (labor unions), cooperatives, etc. By contrast, state planning was "plutocratic" and opened the door to fascism (and Stalinism). It's also interesting to note that Valois used biological metaphors both during his far right and far left phases. As a leftist, he argued that the human body functions "democratically" due to energetic factors. 

Final point about my copy of this book. It's apparently a print on demand edition, and it seems the printer made a weird mistake. Under the same cover, there are two books, the other one being "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy" by none other than Nikola Tesla! I'm sure Georges Valois would have approved of the sentiment... 

Sorelian syndicalists found?

Syndikalisternas Förbund (the League of Syndicalists) was a small left-wing radical group in Sweden. Formed during the 1950´s by Rudolf Holmö, they seem to have become dormant after his death in 1963, only to be resurrected around 1979. Their next date of expiry is unknown, but some members or perhaps ex-members of the group were still around circa 1992. I briefly corresponded with one of them. The publication of SF (or S-F) was called Våra Idéer.

Holmö´s version of syndicalism is most similar to the revolutionary syndicalism of the CGT in France during the decades immediately preceding World War I. Holmö certainly regarded various CGT leaders as the “fathers” of syndicalism. Holmö was more critical of anarcho-syndicalism, seeing it as a breach of the “non-partisan” character of syndicalism, the “party” taking over the syndicates of course being the anarchists. To Holmö, all forms of anarchism save one were incompatible with syndicalism since they didn´t really support full socialization of the economy. The sole exception is Kropotkin´s anarcho-communism. Holmö had a special animus against those anarchists who moved “to the right” after World War II, essentially becoming a kind of Cold War liberals. Or perhaps Cold War libertarians! In Holmö´s worldview, there was no contradiction between being an “anarchist” and working for the CIA. He opposed both. The Swedish syndicalist organization, the SAC, supported the new course and expelled Holmö and the S-F leadership when their factional activities became too annoying. In 1981 (I think), SAC rescinded the expulsions – this was at a time when the organization was moving back towards more leftist positions, albeit a strong Cold Warrior faction still remained. Ironically, the S-F didn´t attract much support among the 70´s radicals who had joined the SAC. The group was seen as strange, anachronistic and cultish. It still insisted that the main inspirator of the Cold War course, Helmut Rüdiger, must of course literally have been a CIA agent…

The pamphlet I´m reviewing contains two articles, “Georges Sorel: Kort biografi” by Leif Björk and “Den syndikalistiska rörelsens historiska bakgrund” by Fritz Jonsson. My copy of the pamphlet was published in 1979, but the two articles seem to be from the 1920´s. Jonsson´s text is a history of the French CGT, showing the CGT-fixation of this group. The real blockbuster is the first article. Yes, it really is a surprisingly good exposition of Georges Sorel´s basic ideas. Indeed, this is what prompted me to procure the pamphlet in the first place. To S-F, Sorel was the leading theoretician of revolutionary syndicalism in France circa 1900-1910, but everyone who knows his intellectual history knows that Sorel, of course, was more than this. Much more. Today, Sorel is often regarded as a forerunner of fascism and Red-Brown blocs, also having strong affinities to Bolshevism, or rather the “left” Bolsheviks who were often criticized by Lenin. Philosophically, Sorel is often paired with Bergson. However, neither Holmö nor the S-F had any fascistic or vitalistic tendencies, being by all accounts a left-wing socialist group which eschewed violence in the here and now, instead concentrating on publishing rather boring theoretical texts (the only “violence” from their quarter being their often acerbic polemics). At the same time, S-F must have been aware of Sorel´s more peculiar ideas, since several of them are mentioned in Leif Björk´s article! I´m not sure how to square this little circle.

Björk´s identity is unknown to me, but based on internal evidence, the article must have been published in some Swedish syndicalist magazine during the 1920´s. The author clearly likes Sorel, at one point calling his works “EPOCHAL IN SIGNIFICANCE” (caps in original). Since Björk is a leftist, he studiously avoids Sorel´s connections to the Catholic conservatives and proto-fascists. However, he does expound on other distinctly Sorelian notions. There is the idea that proletarian violence is good for society since it forces the bourgeoisie to abandon its pacifism and resist, the admiration of the capitalists for developing science and the productive forces, the fear of “degeneration”, and the notion that the general strike is really a “myth”. Björk does a good job explaining these peculiar notions, and I get the impression that he believes in them himself. He also ably summarizes Sorel´s more typically syndicalist ideas. Finally, he mentions Sorel´s qualified support for Lenin´s Bolsheviks after the 1917 October revolution in Russia. The really interesting question is of course how much the S-F believed of this “left Sorelianism”. It would have been piquant to discover a Swedish left-Sorelian group, but as I have already indicated, I don´t think S-F were really Sorelians at all. But if so, why on earth this pamphlet?

Another curious thing is that the pamphlet was printed by Stockholms LS, the Stockholm branch of the SAC which had expelled Holmö and the S-F leaders back in 1953! What that means, is of course an interesting question, too…

Lineages, archetypes and the paranoid style

"The New Inquisitions" is a book attempting to explain 20th century totalitarianism (fascism and Communism) as an outgrowth of the medieval Inquisition. The author, Arthur Versluis, does pinpoint a number of very specific parallels between the Catholic Inquisition and the methods of modern police-states. Apart from the more obvious (secret evidence, the use of torture, etc), the main similarity is that inquisitions, medieval or modern, are directed against thought crimes. The crime to be exposed and punished isn't criticism of the regime or concrete acts of opposition, but wrong thought in the sense of having the wrong ideology (or the wrong version of the ruling ideology). In other words, the criminals are *heretics* and therefore, by definition, evil, beyond the pale and fit only for destruction - unless, of course, they repent of their wrong ideas and accept those of their torturers (usually by fingering other "heretics"). The author calls this type of authoritarian regime "ideocracy" and believes that it is a specifically Western phenomenon, the roots of which goes back to a literalist and "historicist" understanding of Christianity. When the Christian Church rejected the search for liberating mystical knowledge (gnosis), condemned the Gnostics as "heretics", and eventually acquired temporal power, ideocracy was born. The "heretic" became an enemy, both in this world and in relation to the next. Nothing similar has existed in Hindu or Buddhist civilizations, where some form of religious pluralism is the norm.

While the author does make a compelling case for ideocracy being a specific phenomenon different from other forms of authoritarianism, I don't think he has managed to establish a convincing lineage from the Inquisition to modern totalitarianism. The closest he comes is a number of writers on the far right who might have inspired modern fascism: Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés and Charles Maurras. But what about Communism? Here, Versluis comes up short. His purported link is George Sorel, but there is *zero* evidence that the Bolshevik leaders were influenced by Sorel's writings. Lenin seems to have mentioned Sorel exactly once in his collected works, referring to him as "that notorious muddle-head". The claim that Sorel influenced Lenin and the Russian revolution is an old anti-Communist canard, based on the notoriety of Sorel's article "Reflections on Violence" and his defence of the October revolution. Ironically, Versluis have found a statement by Mussolini in which *he* claims to be have been influenced by Sorel! There is another problem, too. I'm not sure whether Sorel really fits the bill as a budding inquisitorial totalitarian. Sorel was more of a radical millenarian. The two phenomena may be overlapping, but they are different, something Versluis seems to acknowledge (of course, he rejects both the Inquisition and the pursuit of the Millennium). Sorel did preach violence, but was he really a Grand Inquisitor hunting for "heretics"? Somehow, I doubt it. Sorel regarded revolutionary violence as chivalrous, ennobling both sides in the conflict. This is a weird notion, and a far cry from the Inquisition (or the Russian Civil War, for that matter - or even from classical millenarianism). Note also that Sorel's vision of socialism was syndicalist, not Leninist. Thus, the lineage from Inquisition to Communism has not been established.

But perhaps Versluis doesn't need to establish it. In the second half of the book, he puts forward a slightly different argument: ideocracy is really an archetypical phenomenon, which appears on the stage of human society on a disconcerting, semi-regular basis. Thus, the Romans (while generally pluralist in religious matters) persecuted the Christians, often with arguments strikingly similar to those later used by the Church to persecute heretics. Versluis also believes that the Neo-Conservatives around George W Bush have totalitarian tendencies of the ideocratic type. Interestingly, he doesn't attempt to connect the "Neo-Cons" to Trotskyism or Leo Strauss/Carl Schmitt, although he could have. This would have given him some kind of lineage, although perhaps a problematic one. Thus, Bush was presumably possessed by the inquisitorial archetype independently. But where does this ever-recurrent archetype come from?

Versluis strongly supports the esoteric current which sees salvation as other-worldly, to be reached by mystical contemplation and union with the Divine. As already mentioned, the author believes that Christianity at a relatively early point abandoned this perspective in favour of a literalist understanding of Scripture and (de facto) emphasis on this-worldly salvation. The author points out that the early Church Father Tertullian supported the (pagan) Roman Empire politically, thus perhaps laying the conceptual foundations for later imperial Christianity. Of course, heresy-hunting came even earlier, and can arguably be found already in the Bible. When this-worldly salvation and fear of heretics meet, the result is ideocracy. At least I think this is the author's point - the book isn't consistently well-argued through-out. The author implies at one point that monotheism might be the original culprit, but then seems to backtrack. What is clear is that the inquisitorial meme exists in both "right" and "left" versions. The rightist version is based on the dream of an organic, unified, hierarchic and above all purified "community" or state. The "leftist" version is, I suppose, based on the confluence of secularized millenarianism and inquisitorial heresy-hunting. Nazism seems to combine both versions! Versluis have some problems with the occult influences on Nazism, but I suppose he could have solved them by introducing a new category, which we may call "this-worldly occultism". The Nazi occultists, after all, craved temporal power (and human sacrifice).

The main heretical enemy, the one constantly lurking in the background, is the "Gnostic", the mystic who rejects all dreams of this-worldly salvation and progress, be they right or left. A large part of Versluis' book is a polemic against various 20th century writers who saw "occultism" and "Gnosticism" not just as the main enemy, but as the cause of...totalitarianism! Thus, the Marxist Theodor Adorno regarded occultism as responsible for Nazism, while conservative Eric Voegelin blamed Communism on Gnosticism. The author has little problem showing that many of these literati had almost literally no idea what they were talking about. Versluis also believes that something more sinister is going on, as the traditional victims of heresy-hunts (the Gnostics) are blamed for the evils of the 20th century, really a result of the ideocracy of their opponents!

The author also discusses conspiracy theory. The idea of an evil and sexually deviant conspiracy, hell bent on undermining our entire society, is common throughout Western history. It has been applied to Roman Christians, medieval heretics, Jews, 19th century Catholics and 20th century Satanic ritual abusers (who are largely imaginary, according to the author). He could have added homosexuals, Muslims and even Jehovah's Witnesses. The author makes the interesting observation that those who claim to fight evil conspiracies often mimic the supposed conspiracy they are opposing. Thus, Pat Robertson and other Christian Illuminati-phobes in the United States are organized in the Council for National Policy, a semi-secret and well-funded elite cabal which attempts to influence the top echelons of the administration, a group whose antics and very name mimics that of the supposedly Illuminati-controlled Council on Foreign Relations! In an extensive footnote, Versluis attacks the Swedish feminist group ROKS for their belief in Satanist-inspired ritual abuse. Unknown to the author, the *opponents* of ROKS sound just as conspiratorial (or even more so), claiming that Swedish psychoanalysis was controlled by a "secret cult" for decades! The author could also have mentioned the John Birch Society, an anti-Communist, minimal government group organized in the same authoritarian manner as the evil reds they are seeing behind every bramble bush.

It's obvious that the "paranoid style in politics" can easily be connected with the ideocratic archetype. Yet, I nevertheless want to register some dissent here. Does Versluis really believe that there are no secret cabals in the midsts of our democratic society? Or that none of them are sexually deviant? After all, he does seem to think that the conspiracist meme can *cause* real conspiracies to happen. Totalitarian conspiracies, perhaps? Finally, I noticed that Arthur Versluis himself isn't entirely purified from the demons he is fighting. When pressed to give the ultimate explanation for the new inquisitions and heretic-hunting, he resorts to "the metaphysics of evil": some humans have been possessed by cosmic evil to such a degree that they are, in effect, no longer human. But this idea, that some humans are really demons incarnate, is - of course - exactly the inquisitorial-conspiracist archetype which Versluis have devoted the entire book to expose...

The Red-Brown Bloc comes to Paris

Charles Maurras 

"The Action Francaise and Revolutionary Syndicalism" is an extremely interesting study about the complex interface between two seemingly opposite movements in pre-war France: the revolutionary syndicalism of the CGT and the proto-fascism of the royalist Action Francaise. The author, Paul Mazgaj, has made extensive use of declassified reports from police agents informing on the two movements, both of which militantly fought the French Republic. From these and other sources, Mazgaj concludes that some leading syndicalists and other leftists in France secretly collaborated with the anti-democratic "neo-royalists". An early example of what we would today call a "Red-Brown Bloc"!

The initiative came from the right. Before World War I, Action Francaise (henceforth called AF) attempted to broaden its support base by appeals to the working class, specifically the leftist revolutionary forces in the labor federation CGT, many of whom came out of anarchism. The rationale was simple: both the far left and the far right wanted to bring down the democratic republic by force. The AF activists hoped that workers would rally behind their nationalist, anti-Semitic attacks on "the plutocracy", the Jews or the Freemasons. When striking workers at a railway line owned by the Rothschilds were attacked by government troops, AF launched a support campaign. For a few years, AF's somewhat idiosyncratic brand of "royalism" was the dominant far right position, and even enjoyed quasi-official sanction from the Duke of Orléans, the pretender to the (abolished) French throne. The attempts to create a Red-Brown bloc against democracy had strong support in the most militant section of the AF, the Camelots de roi, who acted as the storm troopers of the movement. By contrast, AF leader Charles Maurras took a more cautious position, and seems to have accepted the pseudo-socialist line mostly as a temporary expedient or tactical ploy. Shortly before the war, Maurras engineered expulsions of the Red-Browns (some of whom had formed the "national socialist" Cercle Proudhon). After the war, the AF moved towards more traditional conservative positions. Yet, I think it's obvious that the early AF was in many ways a precursor to interwar fascism, with its populist and pseudo-socialist appeals, its street fighters and its cult of violence and the deed.

The main conduits of AF influence among the syndicalists were Georges Valois, a former anarchist, and Edouard Berth, a disciple and friend of Georges Sorel, a pro-syndicalist intellectual who would later turn towards nationalism. Surprisingly, Sorel himself plays only a minor role in the story. Despite repeated attempts by the AF to recruit him, Sorel remained mostly aloof from the Action Francaise. Yet, his curious blend of revolutionary syndicalism, conservative morality and historic pessimism, coupled with his later turn towards right-wing patriotism, obviously forms the ideological backdrop to the developments detailed by Mazgaj.

The AF never managed to reach the blue collar working class. However, they certainly did try. They *did* establish close relations with a number of leftist leaders and publishers, some of them syndicalist. One of them was Emile Janvion, a prominent supporter of the "ultra" faction within the CGT, i.e. the most anarchistic, ultra-left grouping within the unruly labor federation. Another was Emile Pataud, the leader of the electrical workers' syndicat in Paris and a prominent person on the French left-wing. Pataud was also the co-author of the popular syndicalist book "How we shall bring about the revolution". Outside CGT ranks, the AF cultivated Gustave Hervé and his magazine La Guerre Sociale. At the time, Hervé was an anarchist, anti-militarist firebrand. The AF also had influence agents at the editorial board of Bataille Syndicaliste, a leading CGT publication. For a time, Bataille received secret funds from the AF, funds which originally came from the Duke of Orléans! However, the main editors (who opposed the royalists) weren't informed where the money came from...

AF used their leftist contacts in various ways. The most obvious was to spread anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and crypto-royalist ideas among radical workers through meetings featuring AF's syndicalist contacts as prominent speakers. The AF's ultimate goal was to saw dissension within the left, thereby breaking apart the "Dreyfusard coalition" of leftists and "bourgeois" Republicans. (The Dreyfusards were the leftist and centrist supporters of the Republic, named after Alfred Dreyfus, the French army captain of Jewish descent framed for treason by an anti-Semitic tribunal. The right-wingers were known as the Anti-Dreyfusards. The Dreyfus Affair was easily the most notorious political scandal in pre-war France.) Sowing dissension between the parliamentary socialists and the direct action-oriented syndicalists was probably pretty easy. The AF was also interested in internal factional struggles inside the syndicalist CGT itself, where they backed the "ultras" (ultra-lefts) against the more pragmatic "politiques". Are we to believe the police informers, the AF had more ulterior motives, too. A secret source within the CGT informed the AF about a certain bakery in Paris, which would be used by the government to provide the city with food in the event of a crisis. Had a revolutionary situation developed, the AF would presumably have tried to cut off this vital link with the help of syndicalist militants!

A political crisis, the "Bernstein affair", did develop in 1911, when the AF and its thugs took over the streets of Paris, demanding the cancellation of a Jewish theatre play. The police was forced to instruct the theatre to actually do so. Meanwhile, AF's leftist assets were trying to whip up anti-Semitic sentiments among workers. However, these dramatic events proved to be the high point of the Red-Brown bloc against the Republic. Unexpectedly, Hervé and his supporters got cold feet, and in a dramatic turnaround called on the left to preserve the Dreyfusard alliance. The Hervéists also organized their own, leftist street fighters to challenge the Camelots du roi! It was pretty much downhill from there. The bulk of the left, including the CGT, rejected the anti-Semitism of Janvion and Pataud. Meanwhile, CGT secretary-general Leon Jouhaux gradually steered the CGT away from revolutionary syndicalism towards more reformist positions. The approaching world war created a rift between the anti-militarist "ultras" and the militarist, pro-nationalist Action Francaise. Despite its anti-Republicanism, the AF decided to support the Republic against Germany (a monarchy). In a final ironic twist, Hervé and the CGT also fell in line behind the French fatherland during World War I, thereby creating an unexpected "bloc" with the royalists, their political opponents...

Mazgaj's book raises disturbing questions. Is the extreme left the natural bedfellow of the extreme right? Can fascists appeal to labor unions or militant segments of the working class? And where *does* the money come from? Janvion, Pataud and Hervé seems to have been Machiavellian opportunists, rather than sincere believers in a leftist-monarchist ideological convergence. However, the AF militants who took the initiative in creating a Red-Brown bloc did believe that a synthesis of right-wing nationalism and socialism was possible. The Cercle Proudhon, where Valois and Berth rubbed shoulders with the young savages from the Camelots, is sometimes seen as the inventor of fascist ideology. Indeed, fascism - with its blend of "integral" nationalism and pseudo-socialist populist appeals - can be seen as "Red-Brown" in itself.

Personally, I don't think a fully-formed Red-Brown bloc between the CGT and the AF was ever possible. Fascism, after all, strives to smash the independent labor movement. It also believes in a strict (and traditional) social hierarchy. However, if leftism is declutched from the independent labor movement, becoming a freely floating satellite in search of a new social base (or easy money), anything can happen. It's probably not a co-incidence that the most successful Red-Brown Bloc is the one in Russia, where "the left" is really the old, hierarchic, Greater Russian bureaucracy of the Soviet period and thus can easily blend with royalists and outright fascists. I predict more left/fascist combinations in the future, involving leftists with little or no support within the organized working class...

As for Paul Mazgaj's book, I recommend it as an intriguing study of a little known episode in the history of both revolutionary syndicalism and far right politics.

Between red and black

"The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism" is a scholarly study of a layer of Italian intellectuals who started out as revolutionary syndicalists and then evolved towards fascist positions. During Mussolini's regime, they formed a somewhat heterogeneous "left" wing of the fascist movement, which could be called "national syndicalist" or "neo-syndicalist", emphasizing the corporatist and seemingly pro-worker character of fascism. The book is incredibly detailed, and hardly for the general reader. I happen to know a few things about revolutionary syndicalism, but the author lost me when deep-diving into the factional disputes within the Italian fascist movement. But sure, if you want to take the plunge...

I did notice a few interesting things.

I always assumed that Italian syndicalists were influenced by Georges Sorel's irrationalist philosophy. Roberts claims that it was the non-syndicalist Mussolini who emphasized this side of Sorel's thinking. The revolutionary syndicalists (such as Labriola) were rationalists, and hence more interested in the earlier, constructive side of Sorel: the notion that socialism is at bottom a moral project, that the working class is the bearer of the new morality, and that the "syndicates" or socialist labor unions can take over and regenerate society. They weren't interested in "myths", nor did they have a narrow insurrectionist or catastrophic view of the socialist transformation. The author claims that the syndicalists, despite their "petty bourgeois" class background, had a very modern conception of the Italian future. They envisaged a unified Italy with modern industry and free trade (sic), not some kind of semi-anarchist decentralized artisanal idyll.

According to Roberts, the Italian revolutionary syndicalists (who were mostly of middle class origin) gradually lost faith in the revolutionary character of the working class. The Italian workers had been co-opted by the corrupted, democratic republic through the reformist Socialist Party, and became just another interest group around the trough of the protectionist state. Therefore, the workers couldn't function as a new revolutionary "elite" (the syndicalists believed in Pareto's elite theory). A new elite and a new revolutionary concept must therefore be found. However, industrial workers could still play a role as part of a broader alliance of all productive classes, which would include engineers and even "the captains of industry".

The syndicalists reached the conclusion that a war might "wake up" the Italian people and turn it towards modernity. Some syndicalists supported Italy's colonialist war with the Ottoman Empire over Libya. During World War I, the syndicalists opposed Italian neutrality (Italy did join the Allies in 1915). However, the syndicalists didn't support the predatory "proletarian nations" theory of Corradini, instead picturing the war in liberal or Social Democratic terms as a conflict between modernizing democracy and German autocracy! They even criticized those who supported war for irrationalist reasons, such as the Futurists. Even so, since most Italian workers probably opposed Italian intervention in the war, the syndicalists became more and more isolated from the socialist labor movement. Meanwhile, Mussolini had also expressed support for Italian participation in the world war...

The final break between ex-revolutionary syndicalism and the traditional left came after the war, during the "Red Biennium" 1919-20 when socialist-minded workers occupied factories and formed soviets. Rather than seeing this as a splendid example of the revolutionary capacity of the working class, the neo-syndicalists saw it as an immature attempt to mimic the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which was doomed to failure anyway. The opposition of the workers to the war, and their perceived hostility to modernization, were other arguments used to dismiss them. Instead, the neo-syndicalists joined with Mussolini (whose fascist movement was initially pseudo-leftist) or discovered D'Annunzio, the poet-adventurer whose short-lived "republic" at Fiume was based on corporatist, neo-syndicalist principles (at least on paper).

When violence between socialists and fascist storm troopers erupted all over Italy, the neo-syndicalists sided with the latter, but simultaneously used the violence to force workers into joining fascist labor unions set up by the neo-syndicalists themselves as an instrument for a hoped-for fascist "revolution". Initially, the fascist unions weren't all sham - as late as 1925, they actually organized major strikes. However, the increasingly conservative Mussolini subsequently incorporated these unions into the fascist state structure. Interestingly, Roberts claims that the Italian fascist regime was never really corporatist. The corporative, quasi-syndicalist structures advocated by the neo-syndicalists were either non-existent or easily controlled by the state bureaucracy. The national syndicalists finally settled down as a kind of "loyal opposition" within the system. (A few went into exile, but still called for national syndicalism rather than anti-fascism!)

"The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism" raises a lot of interesting questions (and perhaps a few eye brows). If fascism can have a "leftist" wing, how "rightist" is fascism, exactly? Aren't there similarities between Mussolini (seen by the left as reactionary) and, say, Peron in Argentina (often seen by the left as progressive)? Isn't Peronism actually a kind of national syndicalism? Isn't the fascist theory of "proletarian nations" similar to some forms of Maoism? And are the trains really running on time in modern, liberal Italy...?

Although David D Roberts's book is probably mostly of interest to really advanced students of political science (early 20th century Italian political science, to be exact), I nevertheless give it four stars.

Reflections of a notorious muddlehead

Today, Georges Sorel is virtually unknown. A century ago, this French political thinker was quite notorious. Shortly after the October Revolution in Russia, a Swiss newspaper accused Sorel of being responsible for it. The aged philosopher took it as a compliment, and wrote an article called "In Defence of Lenin". What Lenin himself thought of the episode is less clear, but in a work published long before the revolution, he called Sorel "a notorious muddlehead". Now, you don't get a reputation like *that* without reason!

Sorel's ideas are difficult to summarize in a short review. Indeed, many scholarly works have been published on the man, who considered himself to be a socialist, while being seen by many as a forerunner of fascism. Sorel claimed to be a Marxist, but his Marxism wasn't the Marxism of Marx, but rather a strange blend of revolutionary syndicalism and ideas adapted from a long range of "bourgeois" sources. While initially a supporter of the left-wing syndicalist CGT, he later collaborated with right-wing monarchists, and seems to have praised both Lenin and Mussolini at the time of his death.

"Reflections on Violence" was originally published in 1906, and later revised and expanded. It remains the most important text by Sorel, and the natural place to start for those interested in his thought. It should be noted at the outset that Sorel's text isn't particularly exciting, all the hype notwithstanding (as in the editorial review at this product page). Lenin and even Trotsky wrote worse things than this, and so did Nietzsche. Nor is Sorel's text an easy read, although it's better than its reputation. Sorel admitted that the text wasn't particularly systematic, and that it was really a collection of notebooks. He does loose the red thread a couple of times, but the main ideas are still easily discernible.

"Reflections" was written during Sorel's left-wing, syndicalist and ostensibly Marxist period. What immediately strikes a reader familiar with socialist texts, is that Sorel's booklet doesn't look very "socialist". There is very little of the rethoric typical of such texts, and Sorel frequently references works by non-socialist authors, including Tocqueville, Renan, Bergson and Cardinal John Henry Newman (!). It's clear that Sorel was an independent thinker, a "Sorelian" if you like.

In the introduction, Sorel explains that he is a historical pessimist. He believes that pessimism is the only truly revolutionary position. Optimists become reformists, in the vain belief that society can be reformed according to their hair-brained schemes, and when they realize that this is impossible, they simply stick to it, accomplishing nothing but corruption and decadence. A pessimist, on the other hand, realizes that society is rotten to the core, and must be revolutionized en toto, at a single stroke. Sorel compares the revolutionary labor movement to ancient Christianity and 16th century Calvinism, two other pessimistic movements. The introduction also deals with Sorel's theory about myths, also mentioned in the main text of "Reflections".

One of the main themes of "Reflections on Violence" is that reformism actually works, and that this is a bad thing! The bourgeoisie, its politicians and the Church have become timid, cowardly and frightened. They no longer want to fight the proletariat. The labor unions and workers' parties can easily scare this cowardly bourgeoisie into making concessions. This benefits the reformist labor leaders and politicians, who will eventually become a corrupted establishment group amongst others. Meanwhile, both the economy and society at large degenerates. The solution to this unhappy state is proletarian violence. At one point, Sorel writes that such violence should be directed in particular against "good", philanthropic employers and other upper-class do-gooders, to show them that the workers are ungrateful. Violence separates the classes, the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, and it will force the bourgeoisie to become more war-like, heroic and dynamic, something Sorel considered a good thing. Curiously, for a very heterodox Marxist, Sorel actually accepted the most "pro-capitalist" part of Marx' thinking: the idea that the capitalists are historically progressive since they develop the productive forces, make the economy more efficient, while simultaneously creating their own grave-diggers (the proletariat). Thus, the revolution simply takes over a productive apparatus perfected by capitalism. Sorel feared that a timid, decadent bourgeoisie wouldn't fulfil this historic mission, and that all of society would decline as a result. He compares this to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Thus, the violence of the workers actually forces the bourgeoisie into completing the task assigned for it by history, a task that will inevitably lead to its destruction. And no, I haven't misinterpreted Sorel. He actually does say all this!

The revolutionary syndicalists in France called for a general strike to usher in socialism. Sorel supports the idea of the general strike, and he seems to suggest that it's a necessary corrective to the errors of traditional Marxism. Sorel admits that society haven't become polarized between two classes, something predicted in "The Communist Manifesto". What economic forces alone haven't accomplished, will be accomplished by the general strike. It will polarize society between workers and employers. Sorel also believes that workers lack a revolutionary impulse, and might be by nature conservative. Once again, the idea of the general strike is intended to cure this. Notoriously, Sorel calls the general strike a "myth". It doesn't really matter to George Sorel whether a general strike is possible or not, or perhaps only partially possible. What matters is the *idea* of a general strike, an idea that energizes and mobilizes the proletariat, turns it into a class of Homeric warriors, and spurs them on to heroic action. In passing, he even seems to admit that his concept of myth borders the religious, but doesn't seem to consider it such a bad thing. Indeed, Sorel seems fascinated by the power religion has over its adherents, Catholicism in particular. Since the myth cannot be rationally analyzed, this particular Sorelian notion has come under much criticism. What if the myth of the general strike is dropped in favour of another myth, say a nationalist one? Was this why Sorel so easily transitioned from the far left to the far right?

Sorel was, if not muddleheaded, at least very contradictory. There are many unresolved tensions in "Reflections on Violence". One is the tension between Sorel's elitism and ouvrierism. On the one hand, he feels nothing but contempt for vulgar, useless people. On the other hand, he eulogizes the workers, especially the poorer ones. He seems to have regarded the working class as potential heroes, while the intellectuals, politicians and philanthropists were worthy of nothing but scorn. Another, more serious, tension is between centralization and decentralization. Sorel admires the captains of industry, large-scale factories, and the industrial revolution, at one point scornfully calling England "medieval". But Sorel also has a libertarian, decentralist streak. He opposes the Jacobins, and believes that the French Revolution simply captured the centralized state apparatus of the ancient regime. (His main source for this analysis is Tocqueville.) Sorel opposes the centralization of the labor unions, since this would make them easier pray for reformist politicians. Indeed, Sorel's ultimate aim is to abolish the State, and it does seem that he wants to accomplish this task more or less immediately after the revolution (no gradual "withering away" here). But if the state is abolished, and the labor unions are decentralized, how can production and distribution still be centralized and large-scale? This is never explained.

But the most obvious tension concerns the view of violence itself. As already noted, Sorel actually opposed Jacobin terror, and hoped that the proletarian revolution would be less bloody than the bourgeois revolutions. Indeed, there is a strong streak of moralism in his text. Sorel clearly felt moral revulsion at the corruption of left-wing politicians who sold out their ideals, partisan patronage in the civil services, the use of police spies even by a "liberal" government, etc. He also believes that the task of the proletariat is to create a new, higher morality (which sounds like an idealized version of old, conservative morality). So where does violence fit in all this? Sorel tried to distinguish between two kinds of violence, the one heroic and Homeric, the other brutal and decadent. The former kind of violence, in combination with myths, gives the proletariat a sense of the sublime, and saves civilization. The second kind of violence is simply destructive. A century after the publication of "Reflections on Violence", it's easy to see the problem: "heroic" violence for a "sublime" "myth" very easily becomes brutality, terror and oppression.