JUMPSTARTING THE CLASS STRUGGLE

"The art of reconciling opposites by means of nonsense." It was with this characteristically heretical zeal that Georges Sorel denounced the dialectic in Reflections on Violence, earning him the accusation of "abuse" by a more recent defender of the dialectical method. When this strange French autodidact, trained as a civil engineer in the provinces but recently transplanted to the capital, stepped into the fray of Marxist debates at the end of the nineteenth century, he proved eminently capable of dishing out abuse to enemies, Right or Left. If my goal is to salvage dialectics, why begin with a thinker so abusive of the approach? Because it is not dialectics per se that Sorel despises, but rather an abusive practice in its own right, in which the dialectic — here uniformly singular — is deployed as a method for "resolving all contradiction." What Sorel calls the "dialectical illusion" is in fact an antidialectical masquerade, which emphasizes not rupture and conflict, but their resolution through moderation — a sort of Aristotelian golden mean. Rather than an abuser of the dialectic, might Sorel, like Foucault, therefore be counted among the best defenders of dialectics in the plural? In what follows, I wager that it is precisely from the jaws of such a ferocious critique of "nonsense" masquerading as dialectics that a radicalized dialectics might be snatched and put to use.

The ferocity of Sorel's critique was an eccentric product of an equally eccentric moment, the overlooked historical interlude after Marx but before Lenin, after the rise of socialism as an electoral force but before the cornerstones had been laid for what would come to be called Western Marxism — central among these what Sorel devotee Antonio Gramsci would name hegemony. Only decades after Marx's death, Marxism was an expanding and ambitious political force. This was not yet a time of Winter Palaces, however, but instead of party building and elections, in which the legacy of Marx was very much up for debate. Was Marxism a doctrine of unrestrained class struggle or reasoned debate? Was it — in Rosa Luxemburg's famous opposition — about reform, or was it about revolution? Was it a moral or an economic force? And was its communist consummation an inescapable destiny or a product of willful intervention?

Surveying this political context, Sorel saw more unity than struggle, more stasis than dialectical motion. He found a dialectic blocked not only by material developments, but crucially by an ideology of social harmony to which his contemporary socialists were not immune, and in which many were even willing participants. Thus when dialectics was trotted out as a prop toward compromise, Sorel seethed. But sharp words for the dialectic notwithstanding, I argue that he did not abandon the task of rethinking dialectics, even if he rarely granted the word a positive valence. Against both dogmatic revolutionary mantras and the reformist politics of social reconciliation with which they were complicit, Sorel radically reformulated a Marxian dialectics of class struggle that would remain faithful to Marx's spirit rather than his word — foregrounding the moment of subjective intervention, in which the working class presses its shoulder to the stalled wheel of history, re-creating itself as a class in the process.

It was through oppositional combat and deepening enmity toward the bourgeoisie, Sorel argued, that class identity could be reestablished and consolidated, ultimately pressing into motion a conspicuously open-ended dialectic. In the process of centering conflict and willful intervention, Sorel abandoned the determinism, teleology, and "necessary order" that made an illusion of dialectical movement. Against all such illusions, Sorel instead forged a dialectics that, while still grounded in European class oppositions, was nevertheless freed of many internal fetters and available for subsequent decolonization. But if Sorel's radicalized dialectic was the heterodox product of a heterodox moment — forged in the crucible of Parisian Marxist debates at the turn of the century — it had its roots in pre-Marxist reveries penned far off in the provinces.

Myths of Totality

Like Frantz Fanon and Enrique Dussel after him, Sorel was an unwilling conscript into the cause of revolutionary dialectics. In fact, his earliest works were not dialectical at all, and much less were they characterized by the unmitigated rupture and conflict he would later embrace. Instead, like the angel of history described by Walter Benjamin — another heterodox Marxist who later drew upon this maligned source — at first, Sorel faced stubbornly backward, glorifying a mythically harmonious ancient past as the "wreckage upon wreckage" of the present began to pile around his feet. Like the angel, Sorel would have preferred to "make whole what has been smashed," but he first had to embrace the wreckage itself — which took an active form in the concrete struggles of the French proletariat — eventually turning to face the future by embracing the present. Like Fanon and Dussel after him, the very process whereby Sorel abandoned his own nostalgic illusions of harmony would shape his dialectics to come.

This mythical, harmonious past was pre-Socratic Athens, the heavily idealized backdrop for Sorel's The Trial of Socrates (Le Procès de Socrate), published in 1889. This polemical account of the downfall of Athenian virtue at the hands of philosophy casts Socrates himself not as victim but as culpable. Socrates's guilt was symptomatic of broader class transformations, however, and Sorel's indictment was therefore "a sociological study of Socratism ... as itself a social phenomenon." In Sorel's idiosyncratic view, pre-Socratic Athens was a unified and harmonious society rooted in a sort of equality among warriors —"All are equal: this is the ideal of Attic democracy." The cement binding this social totality together was none other than Homeric poetry, the unrecognized original source for Sorel's theory of the myth. Sorel found a direct correlation between the egalitarian content of the poetry and its mythopoetic form: poetry imparted a simple virtue that required no specialized schools, only the traditional family structure. Heroism and love alike were available to all, and both — grounded as they were in enthusiasm — resisted intellectualization: one can neither fight nor love in a wholly rational way.

Socratic philosophy, in Sorel's peculiar reading, interrupts the egalitarian simplicity that Homeric myth taught and the family nourished, introducing into both love and war the pernicious principle of hierarchical expertise. In terms of love, Sorel accused Socrates of denigrating everyday, material love in favor of an abstract and cerebral love available only to the properly trained, thereby weakening the family as the primary vehicle for transmitting Athenian equality to the next generations. In the martial...