SOREL AND THE NEW SCHOOL

It was Georges Sorel who first linked revolutionary syndicalism to Bergsonism. The awareness of Sorel's linkage propelled the notion's promulgation. We must, then, understand Sorel, and understand how his contemporaries understood him. Sorel's interest in syndicalism was sparked by his disillusionment with the varieties of Marxism prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century. He argued that neither of the dominant alternatives of the day—orthodoxy or revisionism—served Marx's original revolutionary purposes. The orthodox camp, Sorel maintained, had made historical materialism into a pretext for inaction by construing the collapse of the capitalist system as a scientific inevitability. The revisionists, as he saw it, attempted to restore a measure of agency to the proletariat but restricted its exercise to political forms authorized by the existing system: party building, parliamentary politics, and incremental reform.Footnote ¹⁷ Sorel rejected both approaches, resting his apostasy on the claim to have discovered Marxism at its purest, a breakthrough he attributed to the rise of revolutionary syndicalism.Footnote ¹⁸

Recovering what Sorel called the “Marxism of Marx” required a particular kind of epistemological radicalism. Marx's “mere text” was of no use here.Footnote ¹⁹ Marx's method, not his theory, pointed the way to the true “spirit” of his teachings. Sorel believed that Marx's most profound insights derived from the penetrating empiricism to which he subjected the “observable facts” of the class struggle, an empiricism that anticipated the intuitionist approach of Bergson.Footnote ²⁰ Sorel's adoption of the Bergsonian method, then, was an attempt to apply a mode of inquiry that Sorel thought Marx himself had extemporized. He brought this approach to bear on the zone of social reality that had yielded Marx his greatest insights: the movement of the proletariat in its most potent manifestation. Sorel's claim to have “completed” Marx's doctrine stemmed from his subordination of the Marxist corpus to the Marxist gaze.Footnote ²¹ Sorel felt that the intuitive empiricism he learned from Bergson and imputed to Marx revealed a social dynamic whose elucidation would prove far more fruitful than the abstract theorizing he believed had heaped sophistry after sophistry upon the pile of “official” Marxism.

Just as Sorel's encounter with the spectacle of militant syndicalism enabled his intuitive grasp of “pure” Marxism, so too could the workers themselves acquire an intuition of revolutionary practice by witnessing this “true current of the proletarian revolutionary movement.”Footnote ²² In contrast to the “lying socialism” of parties and politicians, revolutionary syndicalism crystallized the essence of the class struggle by conveying what Sorel described as “a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before any considered analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments” roused by socialism's war “against modern society.”Footnote ²³ The locus of this “body of images” was the general strike: the sudden and total withdrawal of labor by the proletariat, followed by its seizure of the means of production. For Sorel, the significance of the general strike lay in its emotional efficacy as a “social myth” with the power to mobilize the latent energies of the proletariat. These energies subsisted in what Bergson called the “profound self ”—the pre-discursive level of consciousness in which quantified time dissolved into the ineffable flow of becoming termed durée reéle (or pure duration) by Bergson.Footnote ²⁴ Where Bergson described the realization of the profound self as a matter of individual introspection, however, Sorel portrayed it as a product of collective volition, a defiant act of creation fueled by a galvanizing vision of the future.Footnote ²⁵

Sorel made no pretense to definitively explaining the obscurities behind the mobilization of revolutionary will. Indeed, he believed it was the definitive thinking of those who sought to make Marxism scientific that had debilitated the proletarian movement. The intellectual expression of bourgeois “mediocrity, pride, and pedantry,” scientific rationalism had infected Marxist theory with delusions of objective certitude.Footnote ²⁶ The result was a kind of creeping paralysis of the instinctive militancy of the working class. Sorel prescribed a tonic of persistent revolutionary agitation. Only the implacable opposition of the classes could bring about the catastrophic conflict that would usher in the new epoch. Every strike and skirmish in advance of this would vitalize the proletariat, filling it with “warlike spirit” and “revolutionary strength.”Footnote ²⁷ Violence, Sorel maintained, was intrinsic to this process, for it alone possessed the regenerative power to concentrate the unity, intensify the fervor, and stimulate the heroic virtues of the revolutionary class. The proletariat's “apprenticeship in struggle,” guided by the social myth of the general strike, would foster a “new culture” of producers, entirely incompatible with that of the bourgeoisie.Footnote ²⁸ This process would be nourished by, and itself sustain, a “morally and doctrinally pure” Marxism—a Marxism cleansed of rationalist illusions and thus reconstituted in the cause of epic struggle against the established order.Footnote ²⁹

Marxism's contamination by scientific rationalism was epitomized, for Sorel, by historical materialism, the doctrine that social progress was a function of the evolution of the material conditions of production plotted across linear stages in abstract time. This was precisely the sort of intellectualist imposition of system; causality; and predictability on a complex, mobile, and contingent reality that Bergson delighted in discrediting. It severed theory from life and change from agency. In Sorel's purified Marxism, by contrast, consciousness supplanted material existence as the propulsive agent of revolution, a possibility intuitively “framed” in an indeterminate future rather than scientifically predicted; in turn, the theory of the social myth replaced economic determinism with an activist social psychology.Footnote ³⁰ The move was at once an attempt to purge Marxism of bourgeois rationalism and to restore something of the opacity that Sorel believed inherent in the creative freedom of human beings. Bergson's “psychology of the deeper self” offered glimpses of “that region [of mind and soul] which,” Sorel averred, “is impossible to describe … with clearness.” Indeed, “no effort of thought, no progress of knowledge, no rational induction will ever dispel the mystery” of human agency.Footnote ³¹ The rational faculties, in this view, barred the way to insight and action. The intellect could neither grasp nor rouse the revolutionary will—hence the need for an intuitive hermeneutics of revolution, and for an emotive construct, an “image” beneath the discursive mind, to evoke a future “undetermined in time” as the generator of conviction, solidarity, and action.

Sorel insisted that his identification of syndicalism with Bergsonism was not his own contrivance. He did not view himself as the author of this affiliation, but as its discoverer and emissary. Certain of Bergson's key insights, he believed, were already reflected in the practice of revolutionary syndicalism. Sorel sought merely to draw forth and elaborate this correspondence. Such assertions were emblematic of Sorel's paradoxical relationship with syndicalism as a social movement. He insisted that his role was merely a supporting one, a matter of observing and interpreting rather than inventing or influencing.Footnote ³² This was the distinction that separated his own work from that of doctrinaire socialist intellectuals, whom he viewed as dogmatists bent upon exploiting the proletariat. Sorel, by contrast, repudiated the desire to have any impact on the syndicalist movement.Footnote ³³ It had discovered the means to regenerate the social struggle not by following learned “authorities,” but spontaneously, through instinct and experience. “This method,” Sorel maintained, “has all the advantages which ‘integral’ knowledge has over analysis, according to the doctrine of Bergson.”Footnote ³⁴

Sorel was, however, hardly a dispassionate observer. His investigations, whatever their pretensions to objectivity, were not disinterested. Sorel liked to construe the social myth of the general strike as a “discovery” extracted from the brute reality of syndicalist militancy, but there was nonetheless a distinctly hortative quality to his articulation of it. He and his new school comrades, Lagardelle and Edouard Berth, were regular contributors to syndicalist periodicals that enjoyed broad circulation among European workers. The most significant organs of Sorelian syndicalism, Lagardelle's Paris-based Le M ouvement Socialiste and Enrico Leone's Le Divenere Sociale in Rome, published new school theory but also hosted regular contributions from organizers and spokesmen of the movement itself.Footnote ³⁵ Such convergences occurred in the flesh as well as in print. In Paris, for example, Sorel, Lagardelle, and Berth regularly discussed the class struggle with the leaders of the Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT). Lagardelle's apartment became something of a revolutionary salon between 1903 and 1907, “a meeting place and point of conviviality, in which ideas were expounded and contacts made, friendships established” between the principals of the new school and militant worker-intellectuals.Footnote ³⁶

All of this points up something of the precariousness of Sorel's balancing act along the axis of theory and practice. He wanted the contributions of the new school to occupy a space between scientific analysis and partisan engagement. The former, he believed, was a figment of intellectualist hubris; the latter would privilege advocacy over insight.Footnote ³⁷ Sorel thus foreswore the role of ideologist, and sought to fashion a new métier as a kind of “clerc” of syndicalism—as Sorel scholar Richard Vernon describes it, a man “preoccupied with the processes of contemporary change but denying that his own preoccupations could or should enter into the processes themselves.”Footnote ³⁸ But Sorel's disclaimers on such matters stand in uneasy juxtaposition to his record of publication, his personal connections with syndicalist leaders, and indeed, much of his own writing, all of which suggest that he wanted his ideas to have an impact on the social movement he derived them from. And there is considerable evidence that Sorel's theory did serve an ideological function for significant elements of the anarcho-syndicalist left. This rather incongruous state of affairs has generated an abiding dissonance in the interpretation of Sorel's place in the history of revolutionary syndicalist thought and practice. Do we, in short, read Sorel as observer or ideologist? If the former, we must approach his writings as empirical delineations: testimonials derived from the examination of an autonomous social movement. If the latter, we are obliged to ponder the practical consequences of Sorel's ideas—to consider, that is, their impress on the convictions and conduct of militant workers themselves.

LIBERALS AND SOCIALISTS

I pursue both lines of inquiry in my analysis of the activity of Sorelian, and hence Bergsonian, ideas in the explication of revolutionary syndicalism in the United States. The prevailing understanding of this activity in 1913—the one Levine tried to debunk—was produced by a discourse that shifted between the two interpretive patterns. Sorel figured as an ideologist, but an ideologist with an astute grasp of the social movement he was thought to inspire; his writings were taken to be indispensable, both as specimens of propaganda and as illuminations of the movement's inner dynamics. In either capacity, Sorel loomed large in the accounts of syndicalism available to Americans in the late 1900s and early 1910s, helping to produce a dominant interpretation organized around three main propositions: (1) revolutionary syndicalism was Sorelian; (2) Sorelism was Bergsonist; and (3) the Industrial Workers of the World was a revolutionary syndicalist, and hence Sorelian and Bergsonian, organization.

The first proposition was established by the earliest, and for a time the most influential, portrayal of syndicalism to appear in the United States: that contained in the sixth edition of German social scientist Werner Sombart's Socialism and the Social Movement (1909). Sombart described revolutionary syndicalism as a peculiarity of those “Latin races” that produce men with “vast fund[s] of emotion” but “little application, perseverance, calm or steadiness.” These sorts were especially susceptible to the seductive appeals of Sorel, whom Sombart dubbed “the Marx of the new doctrines.”Footnote ³⁹ Sombart's chapter-length exposé of the “new revolutionary gospel” described Sorel, Lagardelle, and Berth, as its “apostles,” their Le Mouvement Socialiste as its sacred text, and “Sorelism” as a rising force in France and Italy.Footnote ⁴⁰ His analysis drew heavily from the new school. The generative power of violence, the spontaneity of revolutionary action, the ideal of the general strike, and the commitment to a proletarian morality of heroic self-sacrifice were portrayed as the guiding principles of the movement at large.

Few of the numerous disquisitions on revolutionary syndicalism to circulate among the American public between 1909 and 1913 failed either to draw upon Sorel's analysis of the movement or to allege the centrality of Sorelian theory for syndicalist practice. Sorel's Bergsonism figured prominently in this discourse. Bergson was frequently identified as Sorel's inspiration, with his philosophy construed as a kind of taproot feeding syndicalist revolutionism. In a profile appearing in a 1909 issue of The Forum, for example, Ernest Dimnet argued that Sorel's profuse “intellectual antipathies” derived from the Bergsonian notion that “modern enervation [is] the immediate offspring of the supremacy of the intellect over the will.”Footnote ⁴¹ From this standpoint, Dimnet observed, thundered the whole train of Sorel's denunciations: his scorn for the dream of an “inevitable mechanically obtained progress,” his contempt for the liberal faith in “impossible rights founded on the absurd conviction of the fundamental goodness of man,” his disgust with the “self-satisfied … materialism of the Third Republic.”Footnote ⁴² Essayist and novelist Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) produced the most sophisticated English-language analysis of the Bergson-Sorel connection in Vital Lies: Studies of Some Varieties of Recent Obscurantism (1912). For Lee, Sorelian syndicalism was the social expression of the “applied obscurantism” she associated with William James's “will-to-believe pragmatism” and Bergson's anti-intellectualist vitalism. Sorel's social myth, Lee sniffed, was “your thoroughly up-to-date myth, psychologically correct, Bergsonian withal, for Monsieur Sorel is an avowed follower of the great vitalist psychologist, [or] philosopher, as they call him, of action.”Footnote ⁴³

Such early elucidations notwithstanding, syndicalism's Sorelism and Sorelism's Bergsonism would no doubt have remained a marginal concern for American readers were it not for the apparently sudden spread of the movement from the Latin to the Anglo-Saxon world in 1911 and 1912. Americans were first made aware of this development through coverage of the 1911 strike wave in England, a surge of labor unrest that seemed definitive proof, as one reporter put it, of the displacement of “the old trade unionism” by “continental syndicalism.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The new unionism's westward tide reached the United States early in 1912, signaled by the dramatic struggle of the IWW-led textile workers in their strike against the “wool barons” of Lawrence, Massachusetts. The IWW was little known to the American public before the Lawrence strike. Reports of some of its more sensational activities, such as the 1909–1911 free speech fights in Spokane and Fresno, had circulated nationwide before Lawrence; but media coverage tended to be sparse and cursory.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Lawrence strike compelled attention of a different magnitude. The strike was joined by over 20,000 unskilled immigrant workers hailing from some twenty different foreign nations; IWW organizers bridged a multitude of linguistic and cultural barriers to foster discipline and unity among this diverse assemblage; and the strikers stood their ground for nine weeks against the threats of the mill owners, the bayonets of the state militia, and the hostility of native-born locals. These workers demonstrated a solidarity that the establishment, from business and political leaders to the skilled tradesmen of the American Federation of Labor, had considered impossible of the putatively ignorant and racially inferior immigrant masses. Lawrence put the error of this supposition on vivid display. Rather than reconsidering the prejudices behind such assumptions or reflecting upon the conditions against which the workers revolted, however, most commentators seized upon an external factor—the syndicalism of the IWW—as the key to deciphering the puzzle of the strike.

“Seldom has publicity come so suddenly and so lavishly to any movement as to the Syndicalist movement,” began a May, 1912 editorial in The Nation: “Before the Lawrence strike … there must have been very few people in this country who knew what the Syndicalist theory stands for and what was this I.W.W. organization in which the Syndicalist philosophy is embodied in this country. Today there is little excuse for ignorance on the topic.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Central to this now common knowledge was the proposition that the IWW was, in fact, a revolutionary syndicalist organization—a point already so obvious that it warranted no commentary from The Nation's editorialist. After all, the majority of Lawrence strikers were of Southern European origin, so it seemed entirely plausible that a foreign ideology was at the root of the uprising given the well-established tradition of associating immigrants with subversive activities. Identifying the disturbances at Lawrence with revolutionary syndicalism, moreover, simply extended the analysis that had already served in the explanation of the labor unrest in Great Britain; the “contagion's” jumping of the channel in 1911 thus became the precursor to its transatlantic journey the following year.

The first explicit correlation of the IWW with European syndicalism to appear in the mass-circulation periodical press was that of progressive journalist Walter Weyl, whose piece in the Outlook was published in mid-February, 1912, less than a month after the Lawrence strike had begun. Weyl sought to distinguish the revolutionary motives of IWW organizers from the “bread and butter” concerns of rank-and-file Lawrence workers. Hence Weyl's description of IWW leader William “Big Bill” Haywood emphasized the “explosive” idealism that set his “fundamental philosophy” radically at odds with both the “pure and simple unionism” of the AFL and the gradualist “electoralism” of the Socialist Party. Haywood approached “more nearly,” in Weyl's words, “the ideal of the revolutionary syndicalists of France and Italy …. What he desires is not a treaty of industrial peace … [but] the creation of a proletarian impulse which will eventually revolutionize society.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Haywood's “ardent enthusiasm” stood in stark contrast to the “temperate objective attitude” Weyl discerned among the strikers. A sturdy, sensible, and fundamentally inert mass, their concern was nothing more than a fair day's work at a fair day's pay. Haywood thus played the role of the man outside the mass, a figure with the capacity to incite it, to focus its energies on causes rather than symptoms, to activate, in Weyl's words, an “impulse” aimed at revolution.Footnote ⁴⁸ The story here, of course, adhered to a conventional trope of mob and demagogue familiar to all in 1912. What was new at this juncture was the ideological weapon in the hands of the inciter, an instrument largely unknown, and thus particularly menacing to defenders of the existing social order.

The nature of this weapon elicited a sustained outpouring of commentary in the wake of the March 14 victory of the strikers at Lawrence. “Let us all get acquainted with the Industrial Workers of the World,” declared Willis Thompson in the New York Times: “Since Camille Desmoulins climbed on that table at the Palais Royal in 1789 and unloosed the French Revolution, there has been no movement about which it behooved conservative citizens to be more thoughtful.”Footnote ⁴⁹ An editorial in The Independent predicted that “collective action” would continue to “break out in irregular and unexpected ways.” “The more abundant the overflowing energy,” it warned, “the more radical … the actions.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The Nation’s explication of the “new syndicalist philosophy” remarked on the Bergsonism of its “most eminent theoretician … M. Georges Sorel” who was deemed to preach “trust [in] the stream of life [where] creative evolution, working in the domain of industry, will work out the salvation of society.”Footnote ⁵¹ J. H. Harley furnished a more thorough analysis of Sorel's Bergsonism in The Contemporary Review. “It is impossible,” Harley maintained, “that all … who have been influenced to unrest by Syndicalism have read and appreciated the subtle distinctions of Sorel's Bergsonian philosophy. [Yet] it remains true that the ideas of Sorel … lie very near the animating source of the labor unrest.”Footnote ⁵² Harley pronounced Sorelian syndicalism the inevitable consequence of Bergson's “depreciation of reason,” an idle conceit on paper, but a “Frankenstein” spawning “menace to the future of civilisation” in the “daily practice” of society.Footnote ⁵³ At the cutting edge of this “menace,” according to The Independent, was the mobilizing myth of the general strike, where syndicalist militancy “connects up … with the intuitive philosophy of Bergson” to reassert “the claims of actuality and activity against the barren formalism of the Marxian socialists.”Footnote ⁵⁴

By the end of 1912, the Sorelian syndicalist IWW was well established in mainstream American periodical literature. The appearance that year of the first book-length studies of revolutionary syndicalism in English offered little to interfere with this interpretation. Sir Arthur Clay's Syndicalism and Labour, Arthur D. Lewis's Syndicalism and the General Strike, J. Ramsay MacDonald's Syndicalism: A Critical Examination, and Louis Levine's The Labor Movement in France: A Study of Revolutionary Syndicalism all devoted at least a chapter (Lewis gave two) to Sorel, and all stressed Sorel's Bergsonism.Footnote ⁵⁵ Developments in North America, however, garnered little attention in these works. The Englishmen Clay, Lewis, and MacDonald were most concerned to account for the rise of revolutionary syndicalism in Europe and its subsequent invasion of the British Isles; the American, Levine, focused exclusively on France. Of the four, it was British Labor MP MacDonald who offered the most substantive comments on the “Syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World.” Haywood, he noted, was “its chief apostle … the embodiment of the Sorel philosophy [and] … a bundle of primitive instincts.” “He is useless on committee,” MacDonald averred, but “a torch amongst a crowd of uncritical and credulous workmen.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Only Levine distinguished Sorel the interpreter from Sorel the ideologist, underscoring Sorel's own abjuration of the latter role in an analysis he would reprise for his New York Times piece the following year.Footnote ⁵⁷ No such subtleties, however, graced the accounts of Clay, Lewis, and MacDonald. Here as elsewhere, commentators reviled the new school as a cabal of extremist agitators even as its writings supplied its critics with essential insight and information.

As in Britain, where Labor MP MacDonald established himself as an authority on syndicalism every bit as hostile as the leading liberal commentators, the most bitter enemies of the movement in the United States were political socialists. “Strange, indeed, is the whirligig of time,” marveled journalist Ray Stannard Baker, “it may be yet that the Socialist Party will become a great conservative party in this country opposed to those forces of anarchy and discord which are bound up in the name of syndicalism.”Footnote ⁵⁸ As the IWW surged in notoriety and popularity in the months following the victory at Lawrence, conservative socialists lashed out against what they perceived as its reckless deviation from the true path to social transformation: “the long road,” as one put it, “of pacific evolution by political methods.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Such denunciations fixed upon the IWW's ambivalence about electoral politics and concomitant promotion of direct action, the latter invariably represented at its most extreme: as sabotage and violence. “Syndicalism” became a derisive epithet for the IWW's socialist critics, used both selectively, to describe specific practices of the union, and generically, to designate the ideology that seemed to pervade and define it. On the one hand, such methods as sabotage and the general strike were depicted as foreign “syndicalist” accretions to the fundamentally sound doctrine of American industrial unionism. On the other, critics proclaimed the IWW, as SP pundit John Spargo put it, to simply be “the American Syndicalist movement,” and thus an irrevocable enemy of true socialism.Footnote ⁶⁰

Commentators of this ilk portrayed syndicalism as a reversion both to the romantic anarchism of Proudhon and Bakunin and to the impulsive insurrectionism of the Luddites. It was a “fusion of Anarchism and unionism” in their most irrational, belligerent, and utopian forms. An “abortion” of Marxism rather than a “rebirth” of it, exclaimed SP pamphleteer James Oneal, syndicalism exalted the atavism of “instinctive, blind resentment” over modern socialism's “cool, intelligent … knowledge of the evolution of capitalist society.”Footnote ⁶¹ The IWW's refusal to take a definitive position on electoral politics, and the fact that many of its members remained on the rolls of the SP, was evidence not of the union's ecumenism, but rather of the “tangle of conflicting views and cross purposes” that served to cloak its essentially anarchistic nature.Footnote ⁶² For Spargo, there could be no compromise with such an aberration. Wobblies within the ranks of the SP, accordingly, had to be recognized as the “fundamentally antagonistic element” they were, “more dangerous,” Spargo declared, “than any of the forces which are arrayed against it on the outside.”Footnote ⁶³ The ideology behind their heresy, moreover, had to be relentlessly discredited. In this regard, Sorel and his disciples proved as useful to the socialist as to the capitalist foes of syndicalism. Declamations from the left, as from the right, bristled with references to the most provocative articulations of the new school.

Levine's repudiation of the connection between Sorel and revolutionary syndicalism thus bucked the prevailing trend in both liberal and socialist discourse. Making this link was simply too convenient for too many of those who sought to explain—and excoriate—the new labor militancy. For alarmed upholders of the status quo, socialist and capitalist alike, Sorel was the source of the “pestilence” that was infecting workers in the United States. Construing him as architect and inciter of the direct-action unionism of the IWW, moreover, helped to marginalize local and systemic causes of unrest. The Sorelism of revolutionary syndicalism was made to account for its most disturbing characteristics: its visceral class-consciousness, its unrelenting militancy, its ideal of total revolution, and its anti-bourgeois counter-morality.

RADICALS AND BOHEMIANS

It is no surprise, then, that by the time of Bergson's arrival in early 1913, some of the supporters of the IWW anxiously sought to distance the organization from European syndicalism in general and from Sorel in particular. Left-wing socialist William English Walling, for example, decried the tendency to confuse “the semi-anarchistic and semi-conservative ‘Syndicalism’ of the French … [with] the Industrial Socialism of Wm. D. Haywood and the IWW.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The syndicalist movement, Walling maintained, was so anti-political that it functioned as a rival, if not an out and out enemy, of the socialist parties; “the IWW, on the other hand, denies that it is anti-political, though it leaves to politics a merely incidental part.”Footnote ⁶⁵ For Walling, as for other socialists who supported direct action on the industrial field yet remained convinced of the continuing relevance of electoral politics, this was a distinction of great importance.Footnote ⁶⁶ Fellow SP radical Robert Rives La Monte corroborated the point: “There was nothing in the preamble [of the IWW constitution] inconsistent with participation in politics.” And indeed, not only Haywood but “most of the active workers of the New Socialism in this country are dues-paying members of the Socialist Party.”Footnote ⁶⁷ La Monte held that what distinguished the “new” (direct actionist) from the “old” (political) socialists was the refusal of the former “to be narrow or dogmatic” in their use of the ballot. The “new socialists” were happy to make whatever gains they could through politics, despite their belief that “the political machinery of the present State is by its very nature unfitted to be used for revolutionary social transformation.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet while La Monte and Walling concurred in their insistence that the divide between Wobblies and socialists on politics was more a matter of emphasis than of first principles, they differed over the semantic issue of the part “syndicalism” should play in their attempts to reconcile the two. Walling viewed “syndicalism” as a liability, and sought to disassociate it from the IWW. La Monte, for his part, was bewildered by Walling's “strange anxiety to differentiate,” and asserted the “essential identity” of the American and European movements.Footnote ⁶⁹

La Monte was not the only SP direct actionist who supported the inclusion of the IWW within the category of revolutionary syndicalism. Yet if analysts of this persuasion were willing to concede the congruence of syndicalism in Europe and the United States, they were far less disposed to countenance the possibility of a descent from the ideas of the movement's theorists to the activities of its practitioners. It was above all the absence of such a connection, for these expositors, that constituted the common ground of this tendency in proletarian temperament and behavior. Thus, for La Monte the IWW emerged “from the actual experience of the working class in its daily struggles.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Author André Tridon, in his 1913 survey of international labor, The New Unionism, portrayed a syndicalist movement shaped by “practical experiments” in resistance. Syndicalist militancy had nothing to do with theory, it was rather “a product of life, modified and renewed from day to day.” “Not only have the unions ‘nothing to do’ with the various philosophers whom the press is wont to characterize as ‘the prophets of syndicalism,’” Tridon declared, “but in the majority of cases the workers are totally unfamiliar with the names of those intellectual worthies.” He took pains to emphasize the point with respect to Bergson:

Ironically, however, such “all-practice” renditions of syndicalism arose from an empiricism entirely compatible with the Bergsonian analysis of Sorel. Talk of its spontaneous efflorescence, the unfolding of a vital impulse germinated in the hothouse of industrial struggle, certainly sounded Sorelian. Indeed, the denial of theoretical influence could be read as a species of the very anti-intellectualism that Bergson and Sorel had done so much to propagate.

Sorel, after all, was the first to insist on the practical irrelevance of ideas, his own included, to the development of the movement. As with Sorel, moreover, the empiricism of left-wing American analysts inclined toward a kind of masculinist vitalism. La Monte, for instance, claimed that it was not “economic conditions” that united syndicalist workers, but the “living spirit of revolutionary purpose” these conditions produced. At its most “vital and virile,” this “living spirit” inspired “a vividly keen consciousness of the necessity of the spiritual re-birth of the proletariat.” Neither outside circumstances nor organizational form counted for much, in La Monte's brief, next to the cohesive force that animated, and was animated by, the moral “revolution within each individual worker.”Footnote ⁷² Radical editor and publisher Gaylord Wilshire likewise invoked vitalist imagery in his distinction between the top-down construction of socialism and syndicalism's organic blossoming from the soil of actual experience:

Because “feelings” rather than “thoughts” guided the workers, Wilshire remarked in good Sorelian fashion, they understood “sub-consciously, perhaps, that in striking for their union they are working for a living organism of which they are an integral part; whereas in sending their man to Parliament they are forcing him into a decaying organisation which nothing can successfully galvanise into renewed life.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The galvanization of the proletariat “into renewed life” was precisely the promise that many on the revolutionary left thought they saw in the syndicalist movement. “Action,” it appeared, was the currency of regeneration, and “thought” a liability that would rigidify the dynamic and enervate the vital.

Such notions were nowhere more congenial than among the anarchists associated with Emma Goldman and her iconoclastic monthly, Mother Earth. Goldman was an influential proponent of revolutionary syndicalism beginning in 1900, when she first encountered it at an anarchist congress in Paris.Footnote ⁷⁵ She was keenly aware that the main tenets of the “new unionism”—direct action, economic organization, the general strike, the renunciation of politics and the state—were far from new, but were in fact long-standing bones of contention on the left. These were the issues that had polarized the First International in the 1860s, finally precipitating its collapse in 1872 and the subsequent formation of two irreconcilable revolutionary blocs: “the one,” Goldman explained, “under Marx and Engels, aiming at political conquest; the other, under Bakunin and the Latin workers, forging ahead along industrial and Syndicalist lines.” Since then the Marxian socialists had occupied themselves with the construction of a “huge machine” engineered for the task of “conquering political power within the existing capitalist State.” It was left to the anarchists and syndicalists to carry on the class struggle directly, “an ever more vital revolutionary factor, dreaded by the enemy as the greatest menace to its rule.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Goldman was an advocate of the IWW from the beginning.Footnote ⁷⁷ And she took every opportunity to accentuate its association with international revolutionary syndicalism. If Goldman complained about the union it was generally on the grounds that it was too timid and parochial—not, that is, revolutionary or internationalist enough. Goldman's idea of syndicalism, like Sorel's, was of a movement independent of theory and theorists; for her, promoting the militancy of the IWW meant encouraging the anti-authoritarian self-activity of its rank and file:

Syndicalism's promise for Goldman lay precisely in the fact that it was created “in the actual struggle and experience of the workers themselves,” the natural elaboration of the decisions, deeds, and discoveries of countless individuals of the exploited class.Footnote ⁷⁹

The empiricism behind such advocacy derived in part from the long-standing romantic tradition in anarchist criticism that sought to disrupt the conceptual underpinnings of social hierarchies. The privileging of primary experience over secondary interpretation operated in this context as an epistemological corollary to the privileging of individual liberty over the power of the state.Footnote ⁸⁰ Received truths were suspect because of their vulnerability to the manipulations of authorities; they posed a threat to the sovereign autonomy of individuals insofar as they legitimated existing power relations and depreciated lived experience. Conversely, the experience of oppressed workers was imagined as a crucible of solidarity and revolt. It was here, however, that vitalist vagary tended to eclipse observable reality. Goldman herself, though an avowed materialist, wrote of the “glimmering light” on the “horizon of American life” ignited by the struggle of the Lawrence workers, and of the “burning fever” that fueled it with a “newly awakened impelling force.” The “fever” originated in life, and just as “life creates life,” so shall the fever spread to “lick the blood as fire.”Footnote ⁸¹ Such language was commonplace in the anarchist propaganda of the day. Mother Earth even quotes Peter Kropotkin, anarchism's most scientific expounder, describing syndicalism as the raw yield of life: “The ideas which now constitute … Syndicalism … are nobody's invention. Life itself had dictated them … and upon us now lies the duty of realizing them in life.”Footnote ⁸² This “all-practice” interpretation of syndicalist militancy, rendered in a vitalist key, exemplified the naturalistic strain of life metaphysics that resonated through Mother Earth. Syndicalism was construed as a manifestation of the “natural force” of an anarchism whose function was the eradication of the “parasitic growths that feed on the life's essence of society.” This philosophy was regenerative, its purpose to clear away “the wrong and the foolish,” to rise from “the stagnant waters of the old, [to] build [and] sustain, new life.”Footnote ⁸³ Anarchism, in this sense, signified the insurgency of “the new” against the accumulated obstructions of custom and tradition. The syndicalist movement was the social face of an immanent “living force” whose function was to extend liberty in the organic world.

Sentiments such as these were not confined to far-left political discourse during the pre-war 1910s. They also found broad currency among the cultural avant-garde. “Syndicalism comes in industry,” noted radical editor Leonard Abbott, just as post-impressionism comes in art, “as Free Thought comes in religion, [and] as new standards come in sex, to supplant and transform the old.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Journalist Hutchins Hapgood underscored the point: “There seems a vague but real relationship between all the real workers of our day. Whether in literature, plastic art, the labor movement … we find an instinct to blow up the old forms and traditions, to dynamite the baked and hardened earth so that fresh flowers can grow.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Radicalism on the social as on the cultural front was animated by the impulse to smash the crust of convention and get “back to life—to instinct to feeling to expression to personality.”Footnote ⁸⁶ “Our ‘unrest,’” Hapgood declared, “is the condition of vital growth.”Footnote ⁸⁷

The tendency to correlate insurgencies was a defining characteristic of the impetuous bohemianism that had begun to coalesce in Manhattan early in the 1910s.Footnote ⁸⁸ Anarchistic less on the political ground of opposition to the state than in the wider expanse of culture, morality, and lifestyle, it was in this milieu that Bergson and the Wobblies were most earnestly, if enigmatically, associated. By 1912 Bergson's ideas were already part of the culture war that raged beyond the war of the classes.Footnote ⁸⁹ After Lawrence, they would help to effect the merger of the two conflicts in the minds of many. The allure of Bergsonism for middle-class rebels had much to do with the elastic utility of its two fundamental—critical and compensatory—aspects.Footnote ⁹⁰ The first authorized a wide-ranging campaign against intellectualism and its corollaries: mechanism and materialism and the array of institutional, conceptual, moral, and emotional structures these doctrines were presumed to produce and sustain. The second held forth the prospect of a more vital and dynamic reality just beyond the intellectualist matrix, a cage that seemed to imprison life's richest possibilities. Rebellion was thus invested with an existential, even spiritual, significance, and its scope made practically without limit, as big as life itself. From this vantage, the IWW's revolt seemed one of a range of insurrections, all spontaneous and autonomous, yet all implicated in a more comprehensive revolutionary impulse.

In a 1912 review of Creative Evolution, the young Walter Lippmann proclaimed Bergson “the most dangerous man in the world” because his philosophy challenged “the stand-pat intellect in all its forms,” thus imperiling “all institutions and theories.”Footnote ⁹¹ For cultural radicals such as Lippmann, revolutionary activism could seem a substantiation of Bergsonian vitalism. The apparently instinctive solidarity of the Wobblies, their contempt for the decadence and hypocrisy of bourgeois society, their renunciation of the dogmatism and gradualism of scientific and political socialists, their devotion to mobility, creative resistance, and extemporaneous direct action, all appeared to express something of the new wave of “life” heralded by Bergson. In the spring of 1913, a few months after Bergson's American debut at Columbia, Lippmann would join scores of other bourgeois renegades to make the pilgrimage from Manhattan to New Jersey in support of the IWW-led strike of the Paterson silk workers. This storied episode of cross-class solidarity, culminating with the collaboration of Greenwich Village radicals, IWW organizers, and hundreds of the strikers themselves in the famed “Pageant of the Paterson Strike,” suggests something of the assimilation of vitalist ideas on both sides of the class divide. The “fragile bridge” spanning the gap was supported by a scaffolding of associations derived from the eclectic life metaphysics that had infiltrated the intellectual culture of both cultural radicals, and, to a degree, that of revolutionary workers as well.Footnote ⁹²

Perhaps the most significant of the convergences facilitated by this accretive vitalism was that between social revolution and self-realization. Randolph Bourne, stirred by the Paterson tumult to compose the poem “Sabotage” soon after partaking in the Bergson events at Columbia, wrote that an “experimental life” celebrating the irrational over a “rationality that checks hope and stifles faith” could find its realization in social activism. The “modern mystic,” Bourne declared, knew that “an excess of radicalism is essential to the equilibrium of life.”Footnote ⁹³ John Reed, leading correspondent for the Masses, accounted for his own exertions on behalf of the Paterson strikers in similar terms. “Don't believe the papers that say I am tying up with the IWW, or any other limited, little bunch,” he wrote his mother in the midst of the strike, “I am not a Socialist any more than I am an Epicurean. I know now that my business is to interpret and live life, wherever it may be found.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The activist turn urged by Bourne and negotiated by Reed and other bohemian rebels was mapped by the vitalist empiricism through which they had come to understand the social struggle. Like Sorel, they looked to raw experience both as the datum for the explanation of revolutionary practice, and as the vehicle for its proliferation.Footnote ⁹⁵

Revolutionary activism attracted the rebels of Greenwich Village as an exercise in personal vitalization as well as a means to the transformation of society. Seeking to exchange malaise for intensity, alienation for engagement, self-absorption for self-sacrifice, diffidence for “real” experience, the radicals embraced an “image” similar to that articulated in Sorel's theory of the mobilizing myth. They fixed upon the masculine ideal of the Wobbly itinerant militant because they “sensed an affinity,” as Lasch put it, “between their own ideal of the emancipated individual, unburdened by the cultural baggage of the past, and the hobos and migratory workers glorified by the IWW.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Yet there was something anxious and self-involved about this fetish of the mobile proletariat. To the radicals, the defiant autonomy of the Wobbly seemed a fiercer and more authentic freedom than any they might achieve through rebellion against bourgeois convention. The IWW's social revolution seemed to contain something missing from their own.Footnote ⁹⁷ Here is where Levine's assertion of the incongruity between individualistic Bergsonism and syndicalist social practice runs aground. IWW militancy appealed to these Americans precisely because it articulated the crusade for a new society in a ruggedly individualistic idiom.Footnote ⁹⁸

WOBBLIES

In a 1913 article in The Forum, self-professed Wobbly Frank Chester Pease described IWW militancy as “a recurrence of what Bergson calls The Vital Impetus …. the elemental instinct of life in revolt against the latest enemy of life … the automatisms of a mechanistic age.”Footnote ⁹⁹ This tantalizing expression of IWW Bergsonism was, however, an isolated one. For the IWW literature of this period makes scant mention of Bergson, and rarely refers to Sorel. In contrast to France and Italy, where certain periodicals were known for their Sorelian proclivities and where there were distinct lines of Sorelian influence and discipleship, signs of Sorel in syndicalist propaganda in the United States are few and far between.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ What signs there are, moreover, offer little indication that the Wobblies themselves regarded their movement in the manner of their adversaries: as an outgrowth of the allegedly Sorelian syndicalism of Europe.

The most substantial evidence of a direct Sorelian influence on the American scene is found in the discourse of the Italian immigrant and transmigrant workers who comprised the union's largest and most zealous ethnic contingent. Il Proletario, the official organ of the New York-based Federazione Socialista Italiana (FSI), the leading Italian socialist organization in the United States, began to promote revolutionary syndicalism as early as 1904. Editor Carlo Tresca hailed the IWW at its founding in 1905 and tirelessly made the case for direct action over politics. At its 1906 convention in Boston, FSI syndicalists outvoted old-school socialists to make IWW membership compulsory. Delegate Arturo Culla later recalled this as a turning point, the moment when the Italian “socialist movement” in the United States “was taken in by the ideas of Sorel the Syndicalist.” Significantly, Culla noted that it was not only the propagandists of Il Proletario who embraced Sorelian principles, but “the majority of the comrades and sections” of the FSI. The “true socialists,” Culla lamented, were forced “to leave the Boston convention.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ The FSI thereafter became a champion of the IWW, officially declaring itself revolutionary syndicalist in 1911.Footnote ¹⁰² The next year FSI Wobblies began the Lawrence strike, marching through the mills, breaking windows, destroying machinery, and exhorting their fellow workers to get off the floor and onto the street.Footnote ¹⁰³

There can be little doubt that Sorel's ideas to some degree fueled the militancy of these workers. The influence of the new school, as Sorel and his comrades understood at the time and as since elaborated by historians such as Zeev Sternhell, Jack Roth, and David Roberts, ran deeper in Italy than any other European nation.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Sorel's 1898 essay, “L'Avenir Socialiste des Syndicats,” inspired radical intellectual Arturo Labriola to lead the anti-parliamentary revolt within the Italian Socialist Party in 1902 that began the syndicalist movement on the peninsula. Labriola subsequently established Avanguardia Socialista, the flagship journal of the revolutionary alternative to politics and gradualism. Sorel's “L'Avenir” appeared there in 1903, the first of many essays by Sorel, Lagardelle, Berth, and their followers published in the Italian radical press. Labriola became, as Roth puts it, “Sorel's foremost Italian disciple.” And the incendiary advocacy of direct action in the workplace found in Avanguardia Socialista helped to ignite Italy's first national general strike, sparked in Milan in 1904.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

This conflagration saw some five million workers walk off the job, leaving much of the country paralyzed for close to a week. The strike was a spontaneous uprising that Sorel might have scripted himself. The Socialist Party was sidelined, the workers turning instead to local labor organizations, exhibiting a level of solidarity that contrasted tellingly with the regional divisions within the party. The strike provided powerful self-justification for the cadré of syndicalists on the party's revolutionary wing. It dramatized the gulf between electoral socialism and what they viewed as the instinctive militancy of the proletariat itself, a revolutionary consciousness with which the party was hopelessly out of touch. This conclusion—eagerly corroborated by Sorel, Lagardelle, and Berth—attracted legions of workers to the banner of revolutionary syndicalism. Syndicalist publications multiplied. Labriola's Avanguardia Socialista was joined by Enrico Leone and Paolo Mantica's Il Divenire Sociale, where the essays that would become Reflections on Violence first appeared in 1905 and 1906, and by Angelo Olivetti's Pagine Libere and Paolo Orano's La Lupa. All of these periodicals published the work of the new school and adopted Sorelian editorial stances.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ According to Roth, “at least a dozen” of the left periodicals appearing in Italy between 1903 and 1910 spoke with a distinctly “Sorelian accent.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The inflection was also audible in the pages of Il Proletario. It would be remarkable were this not the case. As historian Michael Miller Topp explains in his groundbreaking study of the FSI, the evolution of the organization “not only paralleled that of the syndicalist movement in Italy … there were concrete links between the two.” Topp shows that most of the key leaders of the FSI were revolutionary syndicalist agitators before arriving in the United States. The ideological intensity of these radicals derived as much from their common history in the Italian movement, and their continuing contact with comrades and their writings in Italy, as from their new American circumstances.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Topp describes a vanguard community of “transnational radical migrants” who circulated back and forth between the home country and the Italian diaspora in the Americas.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Physical mobility coincided with the movement of ideas, passed through the mail and hand to hand in books, newspapers, pamphlets, letters, and face-to-face in the union hall, in the tavern, at the job, and on the street. If “Sorelismo,” in short, figured prominently in the radical political culture of early twentieth-century Italy, it assuredly played a role in Italian diasporic radicalism. Il Proletario editors and contributors Edmondo Rossoni, Nicola Vecchi, Flavio Venanzi, and the anarchist Libero Tancredi (also known as Massimo Rocca), all produced work reflective, in various ways, of the influence of the new school.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Their writings, moreover, sometimes appeared side by side with reprints of pieces by such prominent peninsula-based Sorelians as Labriola, Leone, Agostino Lanzillo, and Alceste De Ambris.Footnote ¹¹¹