‘Georges Sorel’ by Marcel Ollivier from International Press Correspondence. Vol. 2 No. 80. September 19, 1922.    

Georges Sorel has just died at the age of 76. He was the man who indisputably exercised the greatest influence upon the revolutionary ideas of France in the course of the last fifty years. This influence outweighed even that of Jules Guesdes. One can perhaps compare it to that which Proudhon once wielded over his contemporaries.

For the rest, Sorel did but continue the work commenced by Proudhon. If Proudhon was the theoretician of reformist syndicalism, Sorel was the spiritual mouthpiece of revolutionary syndicalism, of the syndicalism of direct action. Today, the mutual connection between the two is clear. Both had the special conditions of the economic development of France, the special structure of the French proletariat in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the intellectual traditions of the French Revolution as a foundation and starting point. And for this reason the work of Sorel constitutes a wonderful supplement to the work of Proudhon, and one can scarcely be understood without the other.

George Sorel first saw the light at Cherbourg (France) in the year 1846. After he had completed his studies at the Gymnasium of Rolling, he entered a Polytechnic Institute which he left later with the title of engineer of Public Highways. He practised this profession until the year 1891. From that time onwards he devoted himself exclusively to his literary activities.

These were very far-reaching and important. He established, one after the other, the Ere Nouvelle and the Devenir Social, was collaborator on the Mouvement Socialiste, of Hubert Legardelle as well as on a whole series of social and philosophical periodicals both at home and abroad.

He published a great number of works of social criticism which found a great response both in France and abroad. We cite amongst others the Réflexions sur la Violence (Reflections on Violence) which today is translated into all languages, Les Illusions du Progrés (The Illusions of Progress) the Materiaux d’une Théorie du Proletariat (Material to a theory of the proletariat) etc. Written in classical French, all these works bear witness to a strong, philosophically trained, mind of rare intellectual strength and profound scholarship.

Sorel was the real spiritual leader of revolutionary syndicalism. It is due to him that revolutionary syndicalism acquired its own theory and practice. He established the theory of force as a necessary factor of social development, and direct action and the general strike as the means of the proletarian class struggle. In a country and at a time when the Socialist movement lay completely in the hands of the reformists and pacifist petty bourgeois intellectuals, this was an incalculable service which he rendered to the working class. Nobody so sharply and so vigorously chastised the petty bourgeois aberrations of Parliamentary Socialism in France during the first fifteen years of the twentieth century as Sorel. His vehement attack against the “intellectuals” in the French Socialist Party contributed to the withdrawal of a great number of revolutionary workers from this Party.

In contradistinction to the great majority of “Socialist leaders” Georges Sorel in no way howled with the wolves during the War. Whilst the “Marxist ” Jules Guesde, accepted a portfolio in the Ministry of National Defense, Georges Sorel withdrew into proud retirement, waiting till the storm was spent. Immediately after the outbreak of the October Revolution in Russia, he allied himself definitely on its side. His Plaidoyer pour Lénine (Speech in Defense of Lenin) which was printed in the fifteenth edition of the Reflections on Violence, met with the greatest response both in France and abroad. The article which he published in the Revue Communiste bears witness to his glowing love for Soviet Russia whom today all “Socialists” of the Second and 2 1/2 Internationals are dragging through the gutter.

Compared with the parliamentary professional politicians against whom he waged a life-long fight, Georges Sorel appears not only as an intellectual but as a moral giant. It would be a prodigious error if one were to judge his work and the influence he exercised without taking into consideration the time and the environment in which he lived. His ideas were certainly far removed from Communism, but they contributed none the less powerfully to the creating of a wide breach in the petty bourgeois ideology: reformism, pacifism, and idealism, which were poisoning the labor movement of his time. In reality he was not able to free himself from the petty bourgeois traditions which he had inherited from his predecessors. But, his work as such, forms a powerful reaction against the errors of Parliamentary Socialism. Whilst the “non-compromising” Marxist Guesdes, in fact and deed capitulated before the Parliamentary Reformism of Jaurés, only to end finally in open betrayal, the Revolutionary Syndicalism of Sorel contributed to the calling back of the proletariat to its revolutionary class duty. If Revolutionary Syndicalism today seems to exhibit a reactionary character, it is due to the fact that it has grown to be a hindrance to the proletarian movement. But at the time when the proletariat was not yet in possession of its ideological equipment and its methods of warfare, and in a country where the slowness. of economic development had not yet allowed the proletariat to. clearly recognize the preliminary conditions to its victory, the emergence of Revolutionary Syndicalism was a great advance upon the road to the proletarian revolution.

It is from this point of view that we Communists must make our estimate of the work of Sorel.

International Press Correspondence, widely known as”Inprecorr” was published by the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) regularly in German and English, occasionally in many other languages, beginning in 1921 and lasting in English until 1938. Inprecorr’s role was to supply translated articles to the English-speaking press of the International from the Comintern’s different sections, as well as news and statements from the ECCI. Many ‘Daily Worker’ and ‘Communist’ articles originated in Inprecorr, and it also published articles by American comrades for use in other countries. It was published at least weekly, and often thrice weekly. Inprecorr was a major contributor to the Communist press in the U.S. and is an invaluable English-language source on the history of the Communist International and its sections.

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