SOURCE: "The Evolution of Anarchism and Syndicalism: A Critical Review," in European Ideologies: A Survey of 20th Century Political Ideas, edited by Feliks Gross, Philosophical Library, Inc., 1948, pp. 328-342.

[In the following excerpt, Nomad examines Sorel's philosophical history, identifying Sorel's links with Marxism, democratic socialism and Bolshevism as key to understanding his body of work.]

It is a truism that in all political movements a distinction must be made between what their participants profess and believe, on the one hand, and what subconsciously they are actually striving for, on the other.

This distinction is rendered somewhat complicated with regard to anarchism. For there are various schools of anarchism differing from each other on many essential points. Some of them accept the principle of private property, (the "mutualist" and the "individualist" anarchists), while others reject it. Among the latter there are those who believe in renumeration according to performance (the "collectivist" anarchists), and those who advocate the right of unrestricted enjoyment of all good things without compulsion to work (the "communist" anarchists). The latter believe in the essential goodness of man, while their "collectivist" predecessors took a more realistic view. And there are also differences of opinion as to the methods to be used for the attainment of the goal: the believers in peaceful persuasion were opposed by the advocates of violent revolution; and even among the latter there were those who, like the followers of Bakunin, believed in methods of conspiracy, and those who saw, or see, in the revolution a spontaneous process. And last but not least, there were and are those who believe in the class struggle, and those who reject it.

They all agree on one point only: the negation of the state, i.e., the rejection of all forms of government. But even on this point there is no uniformity in the concepts of the various anarchist thinkers. Proudhon's "anarchist" rejection of the state was at bottom merely an advocacy of a "federalist", or decentralized form of state administration; his concept of an "anarchist" France did not go beyond the idea of breaking up his country into twelve small administrative entities. Bakunin's "collectivist anarchism" was compatible with the idea of a revolutionary dictatorship by his own group, which apparently was to constitute the first phase of his classless and stateless ideal. On the other hand, there is no such dictatorial or governmental transition period in the "communist-anarchist" concept of Kropotkin. The realization of his ideal consequently recedes into the mists of a distant future. In a still later variant of anarchism, known as anarchosyndicalism, the various local and regional federations of trade unions are to assume the tasks entrusted to the state under the systems of democratic collectivism.

At the time of their vogue each of these variants of anarchism represented the current interests or aspirations of certain social groups. Proudhon's "mutualist anarchism", with its panacea of a "People's Bank" granting free credit to all in need of it, championed the cause of the small producers and skilled workers anxious to attain economic independence at a period when modern large scale industrialism was still in its infant stage. His "anarchism" or "anti-statism" was at bottom only an Utopian or paradoxical formulation of the small producer's hostility to a voracious, ubiquitous and all-powerful bureaucracy swallowing up a substantial part of the national income. It was also in line with Proudhon's championship of this social group that he was opposed to labor unions and to the class struggle. For these had no meaning to a group of aspiring independent producers. With the growth of large-scale industrialism which demonstrated the futility of the skilled workers' hopes for economic independence, the followers of Proudhon gradually turned either to Bakuninism, or to Marxism or to plain trade-unionism. (The individualist anarchism of Max Stirner, the fame of his Ego and His Own, notwithstanding, never gave rise to a movement properly speaking. His complete rejection of all ethical obligations, coupled with a few sympathetic remarks about the underdogs' violent resistance to their masters, occasionally served as a theoretical justification to stray groups of marauders who had chosen a life of outlaw parasitism and banditism.)

BAKUNIN—A PRECURSOR OF LENIN

It was different with the anarchism of Bakunin. His collectivism—at that time the panacea of nearly all radical schools—coupled with the conspiratorial and insurrectionist tactics of Blanqui and invigorated and embellished by the class struggle concept of Marx and the "anti-statist" verbiage of Proudhon, expressed the aspirations of a stratum then very numerous in all economically and politically backward countries. These were the declassed professionals, intellectuals and semi-intellectuals, the then proverbial lawyers without clients, physicians without patients, newspapermen without jobs and college students without a future. At that time these elements were anxious for an immediate revolution leading to the seizure of all power by their own respective group. Unconsciously, their profession of anarchism served both as a blind for concealing their ambitions and for outdoing in revolutionary radicalism their competitors on the Left: the Blanquists whose open championship of a revolutionary dictatorship had discredited them, as mere office-seekers, in the eyes of many radical workers and the Marxists whose "proletarian" radicalism was drifting towards parliamentary and trade-unionist gradualism, particularly in the economically more advanced countries.

Bakuninism which, for almost a decade, from the late sixties to the late seventies of the past century, was attracting the same elements which Leninist communism attracts at present, eventually receded. Its decline was due to the economic upswing which during the last two decades of the past century gradually began to bring industrialism even to the backward countries. It is as a result of this upswing that those educated malcontents, who usually assume the leadership of the labor movement, eventually deserted Bakunin's insurrectionary anarchism for the gradualist socialism of Marx whose revolutionary professions had in time become a mere lip-service. It is only in Spain that anarchism (though not in its undiluted original Bakuninist version) has retained its hold upon a large section of the labor movement. This is due largely to the fact that in that country the followers of Bakunin had laid the foundations of the labor movement, thus securing for the anarchists a lasting reputation as champions of the workers' cause. It may be added that the anarchists of that country, whether they were conscious of it or not, to a certain extent represented the extreme left wing of the democratic-liberal opposition to clerical semi-absolutism.

Bakuninism, for all its anarchist verbiage, had been at bottom merely a sort of ultra-leftist variant of Marxism. (It must not be forgotten that Marx, too, accepted the idea of a stateless society, i.e. of anarchism, in a higher phase of socialism). A well-known Bolshevik historian, Y. Steklov, in a monumental four-volume biography of Bakunin, written during the early period of the Soviet regime, established beyond any doubt, on the basis of Bakunin's less known writings, particularly his correspondence, that the founder of revolutionary anarchism was in reality a forerunner of Lenin, and that his concept of revolutionary activity and post-revolutionary reconstruction really did not differ much from those of the Communist International and of the Soviet system, as established immediately after the November Revolution of 1917.

COMMUNIST ANARCHISM

The failure of Bakuninism to give rise to a successful revolutionary mass movement resulted in the conversion of many of its followers into a sect of millennial, if sometimes violent, dreamers. The outstanding theorist of this school, Peter Kropotkin, postulated the pure ideal of "communist anarchism" based on the principle of "to each according to his needs", as against Bakunin's collectivist anarchism based on the idea of "to each according to his works." For a certain period the outstanding feature of the Kropotkin school was its advocacy of terrorist acts of protest ("propaganda by the deed") which were intended to arouse the masses against existing injustices. Some outstanding representatives of this movement, such as the Italian Errico Malatesta, visualized the role of the anarchists in the revolutionary process as that of a sort of extreme-left wing of the anti-capitalist army, helping the Socialists in the task of overthrowing the capitalist system and, once democratic socialism was established, engaging in the task of winning over the majority by means of propaganda and experimentation. This was a recognition of the impossibility of establishing the anarchist ideal by the methods of revolution. The anarchists of that period can therefore be characterized as a group of intransigeant "nay-sayers" among the intellectual and self-educated manual workers who were dissatisfied with the slow progress of the anti-capitalist struggle and wanted to hasten the coming clash between democratic socialism and capitalism. They did not foresee that the violent clash they hoped for would lead to the victory of a totalitarian form of collectivism which would give the anarchists no chance to win over the majority through "propaganda and experimentation".

ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM AND REVOLUTIONARY SYNDICALISM, PURE AND SIMPLE

The futility of their propaganda, by "deed" and otherwise, caused many followers of the Kropotkin school of anarchism to revert to some of the concepts of Bakuninism and to seek a closer contact with the labor movement. The result was the emergence of what is known as "anarcho-syndicalism" with its emphasis upon such methods of the class struggle as direct action, sabotage and the general strike, and its substitution of the trade union to the "free group" as the basis of a free, state-less society. The class basis of this new departure was the antagonism of many French trade union militants to the influence exerted by socialist politicians over the labor movement. During a certain period the undeveloped rudimentary state of the French trade unions, coupled with the discredit into which socialist political leadership had fallen among many workers, enabled the anarchosyndicalists and the syndicalists without the anarchist prefix, to achieve ascendancy over the French trade unions and to inspire the emergence of similar movements in other countries as well. However, the very growth of the French trade union movement in which the anarchosyndicalists held the upper hand, spelled the eventual decline of anarcho-syndicalism. For that growth brought in its wake the formation of a self-satisfied trade union bureaucracy which eventually went the way of all tradeunionist flesh. The anarcho-syndicalist revolutionists became gradually trade-union bureaucrats, dabbling at the same time in politics, either of the gradualist socialist or of the radical "communist" brand. The French General Confederation of Labor (CGT), once the stronghold of anarcho-syndicalism, was until 1947 entirely under the control of the Communist Party. In those countries in which syndicalism was a minority group within the trade union movement, the revolutionary slogans and promises of Bolshevism easily won over many of the more temperamental anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist elements, both among the leaders and the following.

In this connection it may be also mentioned that the theory of revolutionary syndicalism, pure and simple, of those syndicalists who prefer not to attach the label of anarchism to their syndicalism, though otherwise they differed very little from the anarcho-syndicalists, has undergone a certain modification since the Bolshevik revolution. Previously they completely ignored the question of power, assigning in their concept, to the local and regional trade union federations, the function of production and distribution. After 1917 they coined the slogan of "(Political) Power to the Trade Union" (Au syndicat le pouvoir.)¹ Which implies the acceptance of state power—rejected by the original syndicalist theory—provided that power is wielded by syndicalist trade-union leaders, and not by Communist politicians.

THE SOREL INTERLUDE

The vogue enjoyed for a long time by Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence has had the effect that, to the uninitiated, the idea of syndicalism has become inextricably connected with his name. As a result many of his personal inconsistencies and theoretical vagaries have often been erroneously attributed to the movement of which he had become the self-appointed philosophical champion.

Now, in justice to Sorel it must be said that he himself never claimed to be the originator of revolutionary syndicalism. He frankly admitted his indebtedness to Fernand Pelloutier, an erstwhile while Marxist who later became an anarchist, and who, still later, formulated the basic concept of revolutionary syndicalism. A concept which can be condensed in two simple propositions: 1. The general strike is the method of the working class uprising that will overthrow the capitalist system. 2. The labor union (in French, syndicat) with its local and national federations, is the basis for building up a cooperative, non-exploitative commonwealth.

Sorel himself made no essential contributions to syndicalist theory. The "violence" which he glorified, was at bottom merely a sensational synonym for the "direct action" advocated and practiced during a certain period by the French syndicalist militant who ignored Sorel and his writings. And as for the general strike to which Sorel devoted so many pages, that idea had been in vogue in the French labor movement since the early nineties of the past century. And it is one of those curious twists of history that one of its first and most glamorous propagandists at that time was a man who in time was to become the embodiment of that democratic opportunism which Sorel so hated: it was a rising young socialist politician by the name of Aristide Briand who had borrowed the idea from Pelloutier, used it as a stepping stone in his career, and eventually, as Prime Minister, crushed the first general strike attempted by the French labor unions.

However, both concepts—that of violence and that of the general strike—assume under Sorel's pen a significance which they did not have in the minds of the militants and of the rank and file of the syndicalist movement. Sorel was at bottom a moralist. He saw in working class violence a means of disturbing the "social peace" which in his opinion was a corrupting influence both upon the workers and their capitalist masters; an influence which was bound to lead the world to decadence and barbarism. Application of violence would, in his view, reduce and discredit the influence of the parliamentary socialists who were trying to reconcile the working masses with the existing social order. It would also arouse the enthusiasm of the masses and thus lift the individual worker above the level of a purely animal existence. It would bring the element of beauty and heroism into his life. And, last but not least, it would serve as a healthy stimulus for the bourgeoisie. Under the impact of proletarian violence the employers themselves would become "class-conscious", they would abandon philanthropy and resort to an aggressive attitude both in repelling the attacks of the workers and in attempting to do their utmost in developing their own productive and organizational potentialities. The purely economic, or bread-and-butter, aspect of directaction violence, aiming at immediate results in terms of wages and hours, was in the eyes of Sorel not particularly important. Moral uplift of both workers and employers thus becomes the chief purpose of revolutionary violence as Sorel sees it.

The general strike became the victim of a similar distortion under the pen of the revolutionary moralist. To him the grève générale is not the hoped-for reality of the future, envisioned by the dissatisfied workers eager for security, a fuller dinner-pail, shorter hours and more liberty. It is merely a social "myth" whose function it is to inspire the workers in their struggles. This concept was in keeping with Sorel's pessimistic disbelief in what is called the final emancipation of the working class, and with his approval of violence for the sake of moral uplift, so to speak. Critics were not slow in pointing out that nothing short of religious fanaticism could induce the masses to risk life or limb if no prospects of immediate benefits were beckoning to them.² Sorel was, no doubt, cognizant of this fact; and it was out of this realization that he advocated the "myth" of the general strike as a substitute for traditional religious fervor which no longer animated the modern industrial worker of France. Sorel's critics have very pertinently pointed out the fact that once the general strike was openly declared to be a "myth", the myth itself would lose all its religious, stimulating force; for mass enthusiasm could be aroused only by actual faith in the possibility of achieving their salvation by a practical method.

Sorel's later pro-medievalist and finally pro-Bolshevist enthusiasms can be explained by the basic psychological attitude on which his original pro-syndicalist position was based. It was his disgust with the corruption of bourgeois political democracy or democratic politics of France—as manifested in the orgy of profiteering indulged in by the victorious liberal "Dreyfusards"—which had turned his sympathies from democratic socialism to the revolutionary "a-political" labor movement, as expressed by syndicalism. In that movement Sorel saw a force openly at war with bourgeois democracy. In due time, however, he discovered that this movement was not measuring up to his expectations. The labor union militants were not exactly like the romantic heroes who, he felt, should be worthy of the name of a "proletarian elite". They were thinking in terms of material results; and they also believed in birth control and sex freedom. All these things were abominations to Sorel who, to quote a friendly Catholic critic, the Jesuit Father Victor Sartre, was "a tormented moralist, a non-believer in search of God". Yes, a moralist in the most vulgar sense of the word; for he could actually write that "there will be no justice until the world becomes more chaste" (in Sorel's volume entitled Matériaux d'une. Théorie du Prolétariat, p. 199).

As a result, Sorel turned to another group of men who, he felt, were fighting with real fervor against the corruption and the decadence of the bourgeois democratic republic. These men happened to be the pro-monarchist nationalists of the Action Française movement, who were the closest approach to what a decade later was to appear as Fascism.³

But they too failed to come up to his expectations, for they proved quite ineffectual in eliminating the corrupt politicians of the bourgeois republic. So in the end, a few years before his death, he turned to Lenin, though in the past he had nothing but scorn for those French revolutionists—they were called Blanquists during the Second Empire—who, in the name of socialism, advocated dictatorial rule by their party. For in Bolshevism he saw, at last, a force heroically and successfully opposing bourgeois democracy, and he gave vent to his new enthusiasm in his since famous "Plea for Lenin," a chapter added to a later edition of his Reflections on Violence.

Paradoxical as it may seem, Sorel's adherence to Bolshevism was not a mere whim of a wayward philosopher of violence. For at about the same time that he hailed Lenin as the embodiment of the proletarian revolution, most of the prominent old-time revolutionary syndicalist militants, such as Pierre Monatte, Robert Louzon and others, joined the French Communist Party whose appeal to the radical section of the French working class was proving irresistible in the early twenties—just as in the later forties, for that matter. Apparently both Sorel and the syndicalist militants who ignored him, saw in Communism the potentialities for a triumph of what they called the "proletarian elite", composed largely, if not exclusively, of ex-horny handed trade union leaders. They were all headed for a bitter disappointment; for, after a short honeymoon—Sorel had died in the meantime—the syndicalists realized that they were slated to play second fiddle to political adventurers in tow or in the pay of the Moscow oligarchy. Those who were not satisfied to play that role struck out for themselves by elaborating a sort of combination of syndicalism and communism, claiming, as mentioned before, all power for the syndicalist trade union leadership.

A curious feature of both "Sorelism" and plain revolutionary syndicalism (without the anarchist prefix or adjective) was a mild—and not always very mild—sort of anti-Semitism pervading the utterances of some of their outstanding representatives, such as Sorel and his friends and followers Berth and Delesalle, as well as the top leader of the electrical workers' union, Pataud, and the editor and "angel" of the theoretical magazine, Revolution Proletarienne, Robert Louzon. It was a sort of throwback to the middle of the past century, when men like Marx, Proudhon and Bakunin—and the syndicalists as a rule were inspired by all three of them—found it possible to identify Jewry with capitalism and to indulge in generalizing, sweeping statements which made their followers of a few decades later blush with shame. That attitude of Sorel and of other syndicalists—not all of them to be sure—could be attributed to the fact that French Jewry was largely an upper middle class group with many financiers among them, and that French radicals, like many other Frenchmen, were, as a rule, altogether ignorant of political and social conditions outside their own country.

ANARCHO-BOLSHEVISM

For a while, during the early twenties, those among the "bolshevizing" anarchists in Russia who were either unable or unwilling to throw overboard all their anarchist past at one stroke, found a sort of ideological refuge in a theory called "anarcho-bolshevism" which openly advocated a revolutionary dictatorship by anarchists during the transitional period from capitalism to anarchist communism. It was a frank reversion to that aspect of Bakuninism which as a rule was ignored or denied by the later anarchists. In most cases, however, "anarcho-bolshevism" proved merely a short "transitional period" between anarchism and complete acceptance of official Russian "Communism."

In Spain both the Russian Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the Spanish revolution and civil war of 1931-1939, had a marked effect upon the anarchist movement. The bloodless revolution of 1931 which ushered in an era of political democracy, resulted in the breaking away of a powerful wing of anarcho-syndicalist trade-unionists who decided to abandon the old revolutionary tradition and to pursue gradualist tactics of typical trade-unionism while retaining the old slogans of syndicalism, very much as the gradualist socialists retained the old slogans of revolutionary Marxism. On the other hand, the same event, and the example of the Bolsheviks of 1917 led to the formation of a strong organization of insurrectionist anarchists called FAI (Federacion Anarquista Iberica) which was frankly out for an immediate anticapitalist revolution headed by anarchists, with a thinly veiled program of anarchist dictatorship, Bakunin style. These were the younger, more impulsive elements among the self-educated manual and "white collar" workers who were just as hungry for power as the corresponding elements which in other countries embrace the Communist "line". The subsequent events in Spain (1936-1938) led to the further abandonment by the Spanish anarchists of some of the traditional concepts of anarchist tactics: they voted for the democratic parties during the elections of 1936 (hitherto, voting was taboo with all anarchists); and, after the Falangist military uprising, they actively participated as cabinet members in the Loyalist Government. Anarchists in theory, the Spanish followers of the "antistate" gospel became hardly distinguishable from democratic socialists.

WACLAW MACHAJSKI OR THE REBEL'S DILEMMA

In conclusion, it may not be amiss to mention the curious story of a Russian revolutionary group which was usually classfied as "anarchist" even though it did not use that label. That group made its appearance about the turn of the century, at a time when Leninism as a distinctive theory was as yet non-existent. It centered around the person of the Polish-Russian revolutionist Waclaw Machajski (Makhaysky) who became known by his criticism of nineteenth century socialism as the ideology of the impecunious, malcontent, lower middle class intellectual workers. These, according to Machajski, were out to remove the capitalists, not for the purpose of emancipating the working class, but with a view to establishing a new system of exploitation: a system of government ownership under which well-paid office-holders, managers and technicians would take the place of the private owners. In short, he predicted what is now called the "managerial revolution" more than forty years before the appearance of the book of that title.

Writing in the peaceful days of capitalism's upward trend, Machajski saw this change coming as a result of the gradualist policy of the Social-Democratic (Socialist) parties whose leadership in the Western democratic countries had become quite a respectable group of Leftist politicians averse to any revolutionary adventures. At that time the rebellious, declassed professional (or "intellectual") of the decades preceding and following 1848 was no longer a mass phenomenon outside of such politically backward countries as Russia (including Russian-Poland) and Spain. That phenomenon was to recur in the wake of the first world war when the hordes of unemployed or underpaid professional or white collar workers began to embrace, en masse, the Bolshevist gospel of immediate anti-capitalist revolution. Long before Lenin, Machajski, a conspirator by temperament, hoped to initiate an international, anti-capitalist revolution with the help of those then not very numerous, déclassés who, in Russia, were not satisfied with a mere democratic, bourgeois revolution, and who, in the democratic West, wasted their anti-capitalist intransigency in the Utopian protest of various post-Bakuninist anarchist sects. His criticism of the intellectual workers, as a growing middle class stratum whose more active members were heading the gradualist socialist movements, was the theoretical drawing card with which he was trying to attract those radical elements who were dissatisfied with the tempo of the anti-capitalist struggle.

Machajski's criticism of socialist leadership as the champions of a new rising middle class of would-be organizers and managers of a collectivist form of economic inequality, might have been inspired by a remark made by Bakunin in his Statism and Anarchy (in Russian) in which he accused the Marxists of aiming at such a new form of exploitation. The similarity of Machajski's views to those of Bakunin shows up in another respect as well. Bakunin operated with two contradictory theories, as it were: one, for the general public, which advocated the complete destruction of the state immediately after the victorious revolution, and another which was expressed in letters to members of his inner circle (and in other documents as well), in which he favored a revolutionary dictatorship by his own leading elite. Machajski, who may or may not have been aware of this dualism of Bakunin's, likewise had two theories: one was somewhat related to syndicalism, in which he advocated an exclusively non-political mass struggle for higher wages and for jobs for the unemployed—a sort of direct action movement against private employers and against the state; a struggle which in its further development would lead to the expropriation of the capitalists and to the complete equalization of incomes of manual and intellectual workers—thus bringing about the liquidation of the state by the process of the disappearance of economic inequalities. The other theory postulated the seizure of power in the form of a "revolutionary dictatorship." It was hidden away in some passages of his earlier writings; in the opinion of most of his followers it was considered abandoned by the teacher himself. But Machajski never explicitly repudiated that "outdated" view of his. And, thus, his non-political, direct-action, equalitarian semi-syndicalism, as it were,⁴ was allowed to exist side by side with a pre-Leninist form of Bolshevism, i.e. advocating a "world conspiracy and dictatorship of the proletariat," and seizure of power by his own group. This view was in contradiction to his basic sociological thesis about the exploitative, unequalitarian tendencies animating the owners of higher education with regard to the manual workers. For it implied that those members of the new middle class of intellectual workers who were to constitute the bureaucratic setup of a Machajski-controlled revolutionary government would be exempt from those tendencies. Thus the thinker's logic and consistency—because of their pessimistic, non-revolutionary implications—were sacrificed on the altar of the revolutionist's will to power.

The post-war period has seen the revival of traditional anarchism of the Kropotkin school, and of anarcho-syndicalism in some of the countries in which they had been in vogue before, such as France and Italy. But they seem doomed to remain small groups of "irreconcilables" unable, so far, to break the spell which the revolutionary anti-capitalist halo of official Russian Communism is still exerting upon most malcontent elements among white collar and manual workers.

¹ The anarcho-syndicalists too changed their attitude towards government power. During the period following World War I, the French anarcho-syndicalists in their organ, Le Combat Syndicaliste, carried on the front page the motto Toute l'Economic aux Syndicats! Toute Administration Sociale aux Communes! (All economic activity to the trade unions! All social administration to the municipalities) which actually implies the acceptance of a decentralized form of state administration.

² Race riots—also one of the forms of "proletarian violence"—have always an un vowed, subconscious economic motive, directed as they are against those who, rightly or wrongly, are hated as exploiters or job competitors.

³ It was this short phase of his spiritual wanderings, coupled with his "myth" theory and his glorification of violence, which gave the Italian Fascists—many of whom had come from the syndicalist camp—the pretext for claiming Sorel as one of the teachers of Mussolini.

⁴ Machajski himself did not apply any label to his views. His group which aspired to become an international secret organization of professional revolutionists was called the "Workers Conspiracy." The idea of seizure of power in the wake of a revolutionary mass struggle for the workers' bread-and-butter demands was a carefully guarded "top secret"—lest the group lose its appeal as a genuinely working class organization.