Iluze pokroku – Sorel Georges (2022)

Georges Sorel (1847–1922) was a French political thinker, primarily regarded as a theorist of revolutionary syndicalism. He is famous for his book Reflections on Violence, in which he presented his defense of revolutionary violence. In the short essay The Decomposition of Marxism (1908), Sorel aims to free the Marxist doctrine from the rigidity and dogmatism into which it had fallen during his time. To this end, he seeks to uncover the true core of Marx's thinking and cleanse it of foreign elements inherited from older socialist teachings. He defines Marxism both in relation to utopianism and to blanquism. While the former attempts to advise society's leaders, Marxism is solely concerned with the organization of the proletariat; and while the latter seeks to seize state power through a political party, Marxism remains committed to the idea of class struggle and absolute revolution. Therefore, Sorel considers contemporary revolutionary syndicalism to be the truest realization of Marx's ideas. The work Illusions of Progress (1908) represents an attempt to examine the idea of progress using Marx's historical methods, according to which the interpretation of ideas must be based on an understanding of class relations. Sorel traces the history of the concept of progress and criticizes it as a bourgeois ideology from which the proletariat must liberate itself.