Georges Sorel Quotes

It is very difficult to understand proletarian violence as long as we try to think in terms of the ideas disseminated by bourgeois philosophy; according to this philosophy, violence is a relic of barbarism which is bound to disappear under the progress of enlightenment.

Everyone explains that discussions about Socialism are exceedingly obscure; this obscurity is due, to a large extent, to the fact that contemporary socialists use a terminology which no longer corresponds to their ideas.

Lenin may be proud of what his comrades are doing; the Russian workers are acquiring immortal glory in attempting the realization of what hitherto had been only an abstract idea…..

Revolutionary keeps alive the desire to strike in the masses and only prospers when important strikes, accompanied by violence, take place.

Thus proletarian violence has become an essential factor in Marxism. Let us add once more that, if properly conducted, it will have the result of suppressing parliamentary socialism, which will no longer be able to pose as the leader of the working classes and as the guardian of order.

Mussolini is a man no less extraordinary than Lenin. He, too, is a political genius, of a greater reach than all the statesmen of the day, with the only exception of Lenin…

Engels feared that the Socialists, in order to gain adherents in the electoral struggles rapidly, would make promises which were contrary to Marxist doctrine. The antisemites told the peasants and the small shopkeepers that they would protect them from the development of capitalism. Engels thought that an imitation of this procedure would be dangerous, since, in his opinion, the could only be realised when capitalism had almost completely destroyed the small proprietors and small industries; if the Socialists, then, endeavoured to hinder this evolution, they would ultimately compromise their own cause.

Proletarian violence, carried on as a pure and simple manifestation of the sentiment of class struggle, appears thus as a very fine and heroic thing; it is at the service of the immemorial interests of civilization; it is not perhaps the most appropriate method of obtaining immediate material advantages, but it may save the world from barbarism.

As the State formerly played a most important part in the revolutions that abolished the old economic systems, so it must again be the State that should abolish capitalism.

[Myths] are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act… A myth cannot be refuted since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement.

It seems that it was the Jews who had entered the who are primarily responsible for the terroristic measures blamed upon the bolsheviks. This hypothesis appears to me to be all the more reasonable given that the intervention of the Jews in the has not been a happy one.

All the future of socialism resides in the autonomous development of workers’ .

And so I am not concerned to justify the perpetrators of violence but to enquire into the function of the violence of the working classes in contemporary socialism.

We must not always attach too much importance to violent attacks on the bourgeoisie; they may be motivated by the desire to reform and to perfect capitalism.

I have no reason to suppose that Lenin gained his ideas from my books; but if that were true, I should be not a little proud of having contribute to the intellectual development of a man who seems to me to be at once the greatest theoretician of socialism since Marx and a statesman whose genius recalls that of Peter the Great.