Socialismes nationaux

Cahiers de la Quinzaine

PARIS

8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor

The very day our subscribers received the twelfth cahier, the performances of the 14th of July were suspended at the Theatre de la Renaissance. The receipts had fallen at the beginning of the week. Gemier immediately posted popular performances at excessively reduced prices. This was to create panic. Yet it did not occur. Up to and including the Sunday evening performance, the audiences were warm. The play disappeared from the playbill in full stride. Neither the author nor the publisher had been consulted, nor even warned. Thus we were preparing for performances that already were no more. For a week the acting had slackened, Gemier had somewhat abandoned his role.

I shall return to these performances as soon as I can. I wish to say today that Gemier did not defend the play as much or as well as he should have. I have said and I maintain that in staging it he made a vigorous effort. We must not forget that he received it in a quarter of an hour and staged it in three weeks. And the acting of the people, in the first act especially, remains almost a model of the genre. But Gemier lacked constancy. He dismounted in ten minutes.

The situation of Gemier at the Theatre de la Renaissance is not without analogy with the situation we have at the Cahiers. We are told that he wants to form a public of spectators as here we form a public of readers. More constancy is needed. One must not abandon oneself.

A popular performance is not at all an ordinary performance at reduced prices. A popular performance is a performance where arrangements have been made to have the people present. A popular performance is prepared well in advance. It requires patience. It requires the collaboration of the few popular institutions we already have: cooperatives, unions, popular universities.

We must prepare ourselves for the elections. We ask our subscribers kindly to send us the programs, posters, interesting circulars that may come into their hands. We shall compile dossiers from them. Our subscribers will know how to choose, to inform us without overwhelming us.

One must walk about, these weeks, through the streets and roads. One must read the posters. One must read the newspapers carefully. One must read the circulars. One must collect the programs. One must even, as much as one can, attend the meetings, listen to the spiels. This commerce is of formidable instruction.

Whatever one thinks and whatever one may think of the electoral duty, in fact it is impossible to deny that the exercise of universal suffrage in France has become, save for rare and honorable exceptions, a still untested overflow, an overflow of unprecedented vice. Exactly like barbarous nationalism, exactly like alcoholism, exactly like barbarous antisemitism, exactly like a certain militarism, like a certain colonialism, like Africanism, like industrial overwork, like prostitution, like syphilis, like horse racing, like and as much as all parliamentarisms, electoral parliamentarism is a disease.

All theoretical speculations about universal suffrage being reserved, in fact it has become incontestable that the exercise of universal suffrage in France has become, save for rare and honorable exceptions, a game of falsehood, an abuse of force, a teaching of vice, a social disease, a teaching of injustice.

We shall study this disease as soon as we can; and when we study it we shall no doubt perceive that it presents a singular analogy with prostitution. For if it is true that prostitution is the degradation, the vulgarization of body and soul, the legislative election by universal suffrage has become the degradation, the vulgarization of mind and soul, and of body itself, in the sense in which the gaze, the voice, the smile, the handshake, the bearing, the clothes, the nervous system, and the rest, are of the body.

We shall study this disease as soon as we can; we shall seek, we shall study the remedies, if there are any. It is grave. Prostitution is grave because it is the degradation of love. Electoral prostitution is grave because it is the degradation of an institution that was loved by generous men; of an institution for which two centuries of thinkers have thought, for which two centuries of workers have labored, for which they have suffered, for which many men of preceding generations died. Electoral prostitution is fundamentally the degradation of a great human love.

Electoral prostitution is truly the degradation of an ancient great love. When we read in the newspapers the rare news we receive from Russia, the repeated news we receive from Belgium, we measure with what love, with what effort our fathers conquered for us, acquired for us the good that we have prostituted. Today still men think, work, suffer, die, as our fathers died, to obtain what they believe to be the freedom of suffrage; and we who have this good, we have made of it an ignominious feast.

These old words receive a prodigious extension, now that so many thinkers have announced, so many workers have prepared, so many soldiers have installed, so many poets have sung, so many historians have told the story of democracy, the sovereign people, the people-king.

A CITATION

I read in the Mouvement Socialiste, number 79, of Saturday February 15, 1902, under the signature of M. W.-H. Vliegen, Amsterdam, February 1, 1902, Foreign, Holland, The Ministry and Militarism:

Holland is a country that resists terribly the moloch of militarism, because, like France, it must bleed from two sides. It has an army and a fleet. The army and the fleet of the metropolis cost per year about 40 million florins, or 80 million francs. The “Christian” ministry immediately increased the war budget by a million florins, and one of the youngest and most “democratic” members of the majority, Dr. Talma, for the first time in the Dutch parliament, made the apology of militarism as a beneficent and Christian thing. Among other things, he cited Jaures, who, in his book L’Action Socialiste said that it was not true that Europe was crushed under the burdens of militarism; that on the contrary “Europe has had, under its armor, years of marvelous prosperity,” and that “modern States can, without peril, bear enormous budgets of national defense.”

L’Action Socialiste is not a book by Jaures. When I founded the librairie Georges Bellais, I asked Jaures for permission to collect in a propaganda volume as many as I could of his earlier articles. With his very great liberality, not only did he permit us to do what we wished; but to do it he left us complete latitude. He left us to make the selection, the arrangement, the composition, the proof corrections. I scarcely need say that he did not touch a sou in the operation. Nor did I. I even lost money. That was when I had a little. The volume sold poorly. But is the public so good that poor sales are the condemnation of a book.

The edition was costly. I do not regret it. I regret on the contrary that the Societe Nouvelle de librairie et d’edition did not continue L’Action Socialiste in subsequent series. The newspaper and magazine articles that Jaures had published on political action, on domestic politics, on the play of parties, on strikes and union action, on socialism in theory and in idea, on cooperative action, deserved to be collected in several volumes.

I could collect only the first series. This first volume contains the articles on Socialism and Education, on Socialism and the Peoples. I have put it back on sale at the Librairie des cahiers, for three francs fifty. It is in the second part that M. Vliegen went to find some truncated quotations.

If it is Dr. Talma who interpreted the quotations from L’Action Socialiste in the sense that Jaures had made the apology of militarism, Dr. Talma was the first to commit a forgery. If M. Vliegen endorsed M. Talma’s interpretation, as seems to result from the text we have reproduced, M. Vliegen endorsed a forgery. Finally it is regrettable that the Mouvement Socialiste did not warn its correspondent.

GEORGES SOREL

NATIONAL SOCIALISMS

There are in the world many theses that maintain themselves by the force of routine and that are no longer founded on facts: thus it is not accurate to say today that national socialist parties are merely fractions of a great proletarian army, spread throughout the world, animated by a single spirit, pursuing an identical goal for all. When one wishes to bring out the resemblances that exist among the various socialisms, one is obliged to content oneself with formulas devoid of practical import or to come back to purely democratic declarations.

In reality, there are at least as many socialisms as there are great nations; to study them, one must not only know the industrial development of each country, one must also know what are the dominant political views and the various ways of understanding social relations, that is to say the juridical sentiments of the people. It has been possible to say that there are as many socialisms as races, and M. G. Le Bon has endeavored to bring to light the great differences that exist, from this point of view, between the Latins and the Anglo-Saxons; his study is insufficient, because it is based on the qualifications of classical psychology; and we know that the latter was conceived to describe the life of the upper classes; explanations of history by psychology are always superficial because they suppose that almost everything in history depends on the sentiments of people of the world.

It is admitted, as an evident thing, that socialist ideas are closely connected with the organization of labor; but this means nothing so long as one does not specify what is meant by this term. In a first sense, one may say that the way of living and acting of workers is connected to their trade; but it is not only a matter of knowing the tools used by the workers: the trade is, in a way, a living technique, which makes man an element of the mechanism of production.

Man is not a passive instrument, whose movement is given by a geometric definition; one must know in what manner he adapts to his work; one is thus led to pose questions that connect to the psychology of attention and that must not be examined in a general manner, but in connection with each kind of occupation. Marx considered race as an essential factor in the history of human industry; but few researches have been made by Marxists in this order of ideas; this omission on their part should not too greatly astonish, for they have, generally, greatly neglected technological differentiation in economics and reasoned too much following the democratic tradition, which levels all things.

Social ideas appear only when the worker reflects upon himself to judge the relations that have been realized in the workshop: it is thus that the juridical consciousness of the people fills with notions that are in close connection with the constitution of classes and that frequently persist for centuries, long after the primitive conditions have disappeared.

What is called, rather inaptly, municipal socialism in England is based on old ideas relative to the role of municipalities. If this kind of administration functions passably on the other side of the Channel, it is because it has been possible, in certain cities at least, to conduct municipal affairs like private affairs; this supposes a set of traditions that do not exist in our country.

The old trade-unionism, which could develop fully only in England. In England, the organization of labor was, until a recent period, subject to principles of the Middle Ages. It is not long since the law designated the entrepreneur and the worker by the terms master and servant, which carried a quasi-feudal sense: the English worker was truly enslaved; one must always think of this when reading Capital. It is not by a metaphorical abuse of words that Marx compares the capitalist to a private legislator, drafting a code which is “only a caricature of the social regulation that the cooperation on a large scale and the use of common means of labor demand.”

In his exposition, Marx endeavored to penetrate, as completely as possible, the English ideas, to bring them from the confused state they have in popular consciousness to a higher state and thus to give them a juridical aspect. This creates very great difficulties for superficial readers of Capital who, often, do not reflect upon the very particular conditions of the society upon which the author was reasoning.

For America, this research is not very difficult; it is clear that it is in the study of the American Federation of Labor that one finds the most specifically American elements.

While the old English law is as venerated on one side as on the other of the Atlantic, it is far from the case that the content of the popular consciousness is the same in America and in England; while in the latter country, under the influence of strong feudal survivals, of legal domicile and of long apprenticeship, each qualified worker considers himself as attached to his trade and his place --- the American is a nomad, for his profession as for his residence.

The social questions are no longer posed starting from the idea of a partition to be established between competing classes, but as questions of education interesting every American --- whether worker, employer or merchant.

The American system has greatly favored the progress of production; it has therefore proved itself.

For studying what is particularly French in labor organization we shall take as type the groups whose functioning has long motivated the policy of our governments. If unions were simple agencies for the affairs of a trade, one would not understand why they have been treated with such distrust under the most diverse regimes.

The demagogic character of the law of 1884 appears above all in the abolition of article 416 of the Penal Code.

The government has made great efforts to make contact with the unions. There is nothing more important for the future of a country than the progress of the juridical education of the people; workers must come to understand that there are reasons of law before which sentiments must yield.

The men who speak in the name of socialism should always have present in their minds these strong words of Proudhon:

“In the struggles of coalitions between workers and masters, interests of a higher order are at stake; I mean the realization of law in the social body, manifested by the observance of legal forms and the progress of mores which does not permit that violence, even if it were a hundred times right, prevail over the law.”

The conflicts connected with the liquidation of the Dreyfus affair have given great development to demagoguery in France; strikes tend to become less and less economic questions to pass into the domain of politics.

It must be hoped that present accidents will not have a definitive influence on the future of the labor movement; but the demagogic danger must not be lost from sight. Demagoguery has ruined every country it has governed.

Italy is, even more than France, a great agricultural country. The agricultural associations have taken on an enormous development among us.

The association that most completely realizes the notion is the agricultural association. The most perfect society is not, in effect, the one that brings together men, but the one that places the will in the second plane to bring to the first the common interests existing among properties.

Socialism is going through, at this moment, a great crisis, which troubles the best minds; the people who content themselves with grand words and formulas as empty as they are pompous are the only ones to deny this crisis. The theses that were once regarded as classical do not apply to the needs of current practice; there is a dissociation between doctrine and conduct; socialism leads to a casuistry permitting all compromises.

To restore the accord between doctrine and conduct, that is what socialism should realize in order to overcome the crisis. It would not be impossible for Italy to be called to resolve the conflict, thanks to the practice of its rural institutions.

GEORGES SOREL

November 1901

We publish below the travel journal that Felicien Challaye brought us back from Vladivostok.

RUSSIA SEEN FROM VLADIVOSTOK

JOURNAL OF AN EXPELLED PERSON

Friday, June 21, 1901

I arrive before Vladivostok, coming from Japan, and wishing to cross Siberia and Russia to return to France. Sent on a study mission by the University of Paris, furnished with official letters of introduction from the Rector of the University of Paris and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the French Republic, I am quite sure of being able to travel without difficulty in the friendly and allied empire. However, to be altogether correct, I obtained at the French consulate in Yokohama a passport in due form which I had visaed at the Russian consulate of that city; and I willingly accepted letters of introduction offered by the Russian ambassador in Tokyo for the highest officials of Siberia.

The German boat on which I find myself, the Tsintau, arrived in port early. But passengers must wait, before going ashore, for the Russian police to have examined the passports. Toward eight o’clock a launch surmounted by the Russian naval flag approaches; we see a certain number of uniforms come aboard: a “harbor-master,” police agents of various ranks. We cannot help remarking the brutal and almost sinister expression of the policemen’s faces; and all of us feel invaded by a vague unreasoned terror. Where does this anguish without reason come from?

One after another, I see the passengers leave, Russians, Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans. Why am I the only one whose papers have not yet been returned?

I am asked to go to the commander’s cabin. The harbor-master is there. He tells me in English in a low voice that he has orders to inform the governor of Vladivostok of my arrival; until the governor is informed, I cannot go ashore.

Greatly intrigued by this mystery, I wait two hours walking on deck. Toward ten o’clock, the harbor-master returns. Again, he speaks to me in a low voice --- in German this time: “The governor,” he says, “received a month ago a telegram from the minister of police ordering your entry to Russian territory to be forbidden. There is no doubt that it concerns you; the order gives your surname and first name, even your title of doctor of philosophy.” Stupefied, I ask the reason for the decision taken against me; my interlocutor smiles: “It is not the custom in Russia to give any explanation in such a case.”

I am a prisoner on board.

All afternoon, walking on deck, I try to explain my adventure. I have never had the occasion to say publicly or to write what I think of Russia. The only explanation I can conceive is a letter I wrote, a few months ago, to a Russian student friend to announce my approaching arrival. Since then, there have been new university disturbances in Petersburg and Moscow: my friend must have been arrested; my letter must have been seized, and in this purely friendly letter, without political content, mysterious and compromising undertones must have been discovered.

Sunday, June 23

The harbor-master comes to inform me that Petersburg has confirmed the order of expulsion. He is a charming man, full of politeness, and even cordiality. Regarding my hypothesis about the letter to the student, he considers this explanation acceptable and quickly adds: “You know that the university troubles are completely over now; the emperor has pardoned everyone, lifted all punishments, authorized students to meet whenever they wish…” Russian officials have a strange faculty of optimism: they see in the political situation of their country only what they wish to see.

Tomorrow I shall be embarked on a Russian boat leaving for Japan, the Mercure.

Monday, June 24

This morning, a police agent comes to fetch me and conducts me ashore. Same animation on land: officials in uniform, officers, soldiers, moujiks in red shirts, very dirty, Russian women with light eyes, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans. It is a strange cosmopolitan swarming, a prodigious confluence of all the nations of Asia. The city seems to be rising from the ground, so much building is going on everywhere.

The abundance of military and police uniforms symbolizes well what tyranny crushes this unhappy country; nowhere is the yoke that the State imposes on the individual as visible and palpable; this feeling ends by being unbearable and physically painful: one feels one’s head heavy and one’s heart constricted.

The amiable official sees me off. “Do not keep too bad a memory of this adventure,” he says; “personally I have done everything I could…” The launch takes me to the Mercure. Until departure, the policeman attached to my person remains standing on the quay. At the moment the ladder is raised, my passport is returned to me. Melancholically I reread it: “In the name of the French people, we, Consul of France at Yokohama, pray the civil and military officers of countries friendly or allied to the French Republic to let pass freely M…”

Finally the boat sets off. In a few days we shall be in Shimonoseki. This Japan that I left with regret, I shall find again with delight. What joy to see again these Japanese so seductive, clean, gay, polite, of so accomplished a civilization, of an art so marvelously strange, after having had contact with the barbarous Russians, dirty, coarse, sad, cruel, with their tyrannical regime, their military servitude, their all-powerful police. In these few days spent before Vladivostok, I have acquired a more exact and profound feeling for Russian things --- for the real Russia --- than if I had lived for months in the salons of Petersburg.

But the last word was said to me, several days later, by the French Minister in a great Asiatic power fairly near Vladivostok. I had dared to ask him whether he could not try to learn, through our Minister in Petersburg, the reason for the discourteous treatment used toward an envoy of the University of Paris furnished with an official introduction from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the French Republic; he answered that I should address myself to that Ministry; that he himself could do nothing. Then, seeing me out, he added on the threshold: “You know, since the attacks against the tsars, there is great fear of anarchists in Russia.” --- “Mr. Minister,” I said with a deep farewell bow, “I assure you that upon my arrival in Vladivostok I had bombs neither in my pocket nor in my valise.” --- “Oh! I am persuaded of that,” replied the Minister, trying to correct his gaffe.

Felicien Challaye

Felicien Challaye is preparing a dispatch from Japan for us.

Rene Salome is preparing a dispatch from Belgium for us.

We are being prepared a dispatch from Madagascar.

Several authors have brought us copy. One can well imagine that the final cahiers of the third series are irrevocably fixed. I am very tired, much more than I expected. I must husband my working strength to finish this series. We still have considerable cahiers to give. I therefore ask the authors kindly to give me time to read them at leisure. Reading demands total attention, unfatigued application.

We ask our friends to continue to support us as much as they can until the receipts of the fourth series. Precisely because we are moving forward, and growing, we need working capital, and even growth capital. The months we have entered are particularly difficult. All the money for propaganda goes to electoral showmanship. This rush of an entire people into falsehood and excess hurts us more than I expected. Then will come the national hangover, sad aftermath of the binge we are witnessing. It will take some time for this people to give serious work some attention again.