Monday, May 01, 2006

Sorel & The General Strike   [Jonah Goldberg]

I see that Lee Harris has beaten me to the punch in calling attention to the smirking ghost of Georges Sorel in the Day Without Immigrants protests (I just wrote up a somewhat similar piece for elsewhere). He makes many excellent points and I am very reluctant to argue with Lee because if smarts were people, Lee Harris would be China.

Nonetheless, I think he muddies or misses an important distinction in his discussion of Sorel and the General Strike. He seems to be working from the assumption that Sorel believed the General Strike would in fact bring down capitalism and bring about true socialism if it were successful. He writes, for example, that "Sorel argued that the general strike was the utlimate weapon in the arsenal of revolution, one that would lead to an apocalyptic transformation from capitalism to socialism." It's my understanding — subject to correction — that Sorel did not actually take a firm position on whether or not a General Strike would, in fact, work. Rather he argued that it was the Myth of the General Strike which was all important. The Myth was a form of Plato's noble lie. The masses needed to have a religious faith that the General Strike would usher in utopian socialism, but whether or not it would in fact be successful in doing that he remained at best agnostic. He rejected "social scientific" Marxism as a fool's errand and was generally unconvinced by literal Marxist prophecy. Rather, he wanted such prophesies to be seen through a secular religious prism.

“[T]o concern oneself with social science is one thing and to mold consciousness is another” he wrote. Sorel had contempt for socialists who wanted to make their case with facts and reason. Sorel called the prominent Italian socialist Enrico Ferri, one of those “retarded people who believe in the sovereign power of science” and who believed that socialism could be demonstrated “as one demonstrates the laws of the equilibrium of fluids.” True revolutionaries needed to abandon "rationalistic prejudices" in favor of the power of Myth.

I think Harris is entirely right that the spirit of Sorel's General Strike is manifest in many of the protest organizers. And Sorel would certainly celebrate the newfound currency of the Myth (though he'd probably be bummed by the non-violent nature of the demonstrations). But he would secretly believe that many of these organizers were useful idiots if they actually thought a General Strike would usher in a utopia.

05/01 05:36 PMShare