Egalité et Réconciliation
https://www.egaliteetreconciliation.fr/
 

Class struggle within socialism (1830-1914)

Everyone knows the class struggle opposing the labour movement to the bourgeoisie. Less known is, and for good reason, the struggle opposing within the socialist movement, the International socialism to the libertarian socialism. And within the national movement : the parliamentary socialism, of masonic inspiration, to the anarcho-syndicalism considered as pre-fascist.

Struggles that seen from their class origin, was broadly opposing two sections of the bourgeoisie : the cosmopolite upper and middle bourgeoisie, with a “scientist socialism” (Marx, Lassalle...) striving hard to discredit, on behalf of concept and proletarian messianism, an empiricist national petty bourgeoisie (Proudhon, Sorel...) that was deeply rooted in the reality and the working world.

Silent struggle, but fight to death which will result in the victory of internationalists over nationalists and, above all, the victory of a socialism boiled down to the question of purchasing power - so to the market - over a socialism that radically wanted to change life.

Social classes have always existed

Determined by the evolution of productive forces – or the history of technical progress – and the relations of production which follow this evolution (no relations bourgeoisie/ proletariat without invention, like the steam engine necessary to the industrial revolution), the social classes have always existed.

Alway existed or, more exactly, existed since the homo faber, emerging from a mythical “primitive communism”, started the necessary and disastrous path of the specialisation of tasks, to generate by the division of labour, the first social divisions.

A social division into classes that dates back to the beginning of historic times.

Class through practice and class mentality

Social classes determined by their praxis : the laboratores through farming, craft industry and commerce, the bellatores through the profession of arms, the oratores through studying and transmission of knowledge, in this tripartite old world.

Praxis that also generates class culture and mentality : a dominant trading mentality nowadays, a popular mentality being the majority although always despised and an aristocratic mentality logically endangered.

A class culture and mentality which furthermore, neither exhaust the question of the ethno-culturel group leading to another order of conscience and solidarity ; or the persistence of animal in mankind and the reflex behaviours that go with : individual survival instinct, concern about their offspring...

Class antagonism, class collaboration and “class conflict”

But during the time of royal power, notably under the theocratic monarchy which came before our merchant and masonic democracy, class antagonism were either stamped out or transcended – depending on whether it is seen as a good or bad thing – through general submission to divine order.

The ethno-cultural solidarity of all the majesty’s subjects, for instance, in the kingdom of France, surpassing in the last instance and despite tensions, class antagonism and class solidarity.

An acceptation of God’s law – and the fatum – that prevented this “class conflict”, denonced by Charles Peguy as the modern evil, and which will inevitably characterize the world of immanence that came after.

A “classe conflict” that can only be blocked, in our bourgeois society of immanence and profit, through national solidarity as a replacement for divine order ; or on the contrary, by promoting an exacerbated individualism destroying then all solidarity...

The working class, incarnation of lie and bourgeois betrayal

In the world of immanence having come after the French revolution, the class struggles became then the new motor of history. A struggle firstly resulting from the end of trans-class solidarity, that existed previously in the divine right monarchy ; But a struggle resulting then and mostly from the breach of promise of the enlightenment.

The seizure of power by the third-estate, once evicted the nobility and the clergy, having not led to social equality of all citizens and national fraternity, but instead to exploitation within the third-estate of and industrial proletariat by a new entrepeneurial and capitalist bourgeoisie, even harder on their staffs that the nobility was on their peasants.

The proletariat and its misery being, literally, the incarnation of lie from this bourgeoisie and its so-called enlightenment

A new situation of violence and lie within the progressive camp, which from 1840 will pave the way for the socialist adventure...

The dream of a proletarian messianism Once erased, through the failure of history, the claim of Marxism to scientism, the big idea of socialism can be resumed like this :

The proletariat created, like the golem, by the bourgeoisie itself – and that is the fruit of its contradiction - will be, due to its lucidity drawn on its misery and moral qualities that are meant to result from : respect and solidarity towards workers... the class in charge to punish the capitalist bourgeoisie exploiter and untruthful, through a seizure of power dispossessing this same bourgeois class of its power over this fake democracy called liberal democracy.

A seizure of power by the proletariat that will end at the same time, the progressist political work undertaken by the French revolution – and betrayed by the bourgeois – to finally effectivelly produce, and not only formally, this fraternal society without classes promised by the citizen equality of enlightenment...

A world vision and hope that makes Marxists, whatever they say, moralists and idealists.

A vision striving to renew with Christian eschatology of sharing and love, in the materialist world generated by the merchant immanentism, by leaning on a prophetic messianism, drawn from Judaism.

Socialist vision pretending to lean on logos to realise the reconciled Jewish messianic and Christian missionary vision and resulting without doubt from Karl Marx’s triple culture (Jew, Greek and Christian), main theorist of scientist socialism...

The proletarian messianism, vision of intellectuals

A vision of socialist revolution, by and for proletarians, not thought and desired by them – proletarians having rarely, due to their praxis, the necessary conceptual baggage – but by intellectuals coming from two sections of the bourgeoisie :

- The national petty bourgeoisie, for libertarian socialists and revolutionary syndicalists, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Georges Sorel.

Thinkers often self-educated and deeply rooted into the working world.

- The Ashkenazi upper and middle bourgeoisie, for the international socialists such as Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle.

Theorists unfamiliar to laborious classes and opposing to the petty bourgeoisie empirism, the arrogance of a conceptual abstraction drawn from the Helleno-European philosophy ; a philosophy excitedly embraced since their recent emancipation from Talmudic thinking and the ghetto.

The best example of this absolute difference between the thinking subject and the object of thought is undoubtly Georg Lukacs’s history and class consciousness. Huge historico-philosophical book where this son of banker from the Hungarian Jewish upper bourgeoisie tries to demonstrate with a virtuose conceptual flight of fancy, the messianic and anti-bourgeois destiny of an idealized proletariat that he was never in contact with. A theorical involvement that will bring this cultivated man of letters to take part to Bela Kun’s blood thirsty government and then to support Staline’s work until his last breath !

An ideal proletariat coming out of the mind of an intellectual, used against his own class by the cadet of the bourgeoisie filled with culpability for the betraying of enlightenment perpetrated by his peers.

Proletariat presumed revolutionary, also used as a weapon of revenge and conquest by the declassed and the cosmopolitan against the wealthy elites : this national and Christian bourgeoisie, whose place wants to be taken on behalf of the proletariat...

No class autonomy without class culture

Antic Theater, chevaleresque gesture, bourgeois novel... the conscience and autonomy of a social group are first shown by their cultural productions. A specific culture where this group express in front of history what they know and what they want.

But, like Edith Piaf, splendid interpreter but interpreting songs written by others, the revolutionary proletariat has only followed leaders that were not from its own class, and played in front of history a sheet music that were not from its own hands.

Lucid about it, Louis Ferdinand Céline, cultivated petty bourgeois who has best expressed suffering and popular soul, derived an ironic pride from Staline’s compliment – another cynical declassed – who considered “travel to the end of the night” (translated in Russian by Elsa Triolet who was also perfectly stranger to the labour class) as the only proletarian novel ever written.

Irony, shared by those two minds of bitter realism, to notice that the proletarian individual, that the intellectual 19th century had done the hero of history, was in fact a silent hero ; The famous messianic class, a class having never produced any specific culture nor expressed its conscience and project – The “socialist realism” imposed by the party being here to prove it- unless confusing a bit fast proletarian culture and popular culture...

People or proletariat ?

From Francois Villon to Dieudonné through Louis Ferdinand Céline, Michel Audiard and Coluche, the popular culture perpetuates through centuries, a debonair genius that is the antipode of “socialist realism” formulating through decrees the proletarian art.

A people’s culture for the people which oblige us, to define the human group from which it is the expression, precising first what the people is not. The people is neither the nobility or the clergy, but this “excluded third” constituted of unprivileged under the ancien régime, and which theoriticaly access – as third-estate – to full power after the French revolution.

A people that we should still define, at the hands of superior classes’ exploitation and parasitism – nobility and then bourgeoisie within the third-estate – as the working and production world ; Or, this class of laboratores assuming and carrying out – according to the Freudian terminology – the “reality principle” : farmers, artisans, traders, workers and small businessman... at which must be aggregated the useful civil servants and artists expressing this sensibility.

A people that can be defined in term of classes as the addition of the proletariat and the middle class

A people constituted of the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which moreover rub elbows with each other in real life, like the pub owners controlling their means of productions and their customers, the salaried workers.

Two social groups attached and mixed that the scientist socialism, on behalf of intellectual abstractions contradicted by reality – starting with the social and urban reality of the pub in the district – has always striven to divide and opposed.

The lie of proletarian internationalism : the people is always patriot

Phantasmed and manipulated proletarians through abstraction of cosmopolit agitators, presented as internationalist, whereas it is historically demonstrated that the people is always patriot.

Patriot like the people of the “Paris commune” refusing, on behalf of French dignity, the defeat at Sedan and the submission to the Prussian occupier, agreed by the Versaillan bourgeoisie.

A patriotic people always acclaiming their national sports teams, at the hands of defiance or manipulation – when sports become a market – from this wealthy elite giggling of those simple and collective passions (e.g. Bernard-Henry Levy)

A people faithful to its nation, at the hands of the betrayal of their cosmopolit elites ; Whether the betrayayl of Louis the 14th, sacrifying France’s interests for the ones of his cousin, the King of Prussia, or the betrayal of Sarkosy “the American”, liquidator of the actual French independence...

Only the Capital is international

From the reigning families putting European cousinhood above national interests (explaining Louis the 16th’s flight to Varennes) to the bourgeoisie submitted to the interest of a Capital without borders, the internationalist mentality – in fact cosmopolit – is totally unfamilliar to the people.

An internationalism which is, on the contrary, the main characteristic of the travelling elites and the nomadic manipulators, doing their businesses above people’s head, who, due to their Praxis, are little mobile and rooted.

Thereby, the anti-nationalism uttered by Georges Sorel, on the eve of 1914, must not be understood as an elitist disdain for national solidarity, but rather like the refusal of a bourgeois manipulation pushing the French and German people, into a bloodbath for the interest of the Capital...

The labour internationalism well-understood, opposite of Troskyist anti-nationalism

Refusal of an aggresive nationalism manipulated – since Napoleon the 1st – by money forces and always leading to more suffering for the people, and that must not make us understand the labour internationalism as being the expression of an instinctive anti-patriotism, but rather as being the solidarity of the working-classes, for the sake of political efficacy, in the hands of stateless Capital’s manipulations.

An internationalism leaving the national to come back to it, like Georges Marchais’ anti-immigrationist French communist party, formulated during his famous speech in Montigny-les-Cormeilles.

Popular and patriotic speech diametrically opposed to the Troskyist internationalism expressing a quasi-religious hate of the nation. A disdain for the borders and for established people professed by professional agitators, rarely coming from the working people, and shared by the capitalist upper bourgeoisie. Hence, the interest for the big Capital in discretly promoting those anti-national agitators to the expense of legitimate representatives of the people, united and patriot...

A collusion between right-wing mondialist and left-wing internationalist – in fact all cosmopolit – made easier since they often come, as history demonstrates, from the same community...

Philosophy of misery against misery through philosophy

To return to the anti-capitalist theoric struggle led during the second half of the 19th century within the socialist movement, two camps will confront one another, both pretending to bring a good answer to this same central question :

“In the world of immanence where everything comes from the Praxis, what are the material, social and politic conditions to set the mankind free ? “

One question but two answers and two main groups to bring anti-bourgeois struggle to fruition :
On one side, Mikhail Aleksandrovitch Bakounine and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s libertarian socialism.
On the other side, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ scientist socialism.

The first ones endeavoring to answer this question through reason and empirism.

The second ones opposing to the trial and error of the first ones, an all-encompassing philosophical system invoking the “sense of history” taken from Hegel and that will treat the attempt to think practical remedies of misery from the firsts,as misery of philosophy.

A conceptual virtuosity so-called “historical and dialectical materialism” which unfortunately for them and the proletariat will retrospectively prove itself to be elucubrations, supposedly scientific, of arrogant bourgeois, whom like new rich played god with a philosophy farther from their inherited prophetico-messianic culture, to mock self-educated thinker coming from the working world, whose all anti-marxist-leninist suspicions turned out to be right.

Distrust the progress

The Progress, promoted on behalf of the “sense of history” by Marx, against Proudhon and Sorel’s insight and remarks – who were humbly acknowledging the rejection of mechanization expressed by the Luddites in England and the Canuts in France, and more generally by the bodies representing the labour aristocracy – leading to moronic state and fragmented work, supreme insanity of Taylorism and Fordism.

Towards generalized employment

This alienating machinist progress – moreover demanding in Capital – which necessarly require concentration and big production unit. Or, the generalization of employment, generator of submission, passivity and infantilism, like Proudhon and Sorel had predicted against Marx and Engel...

The dictatorship of the proletariat is the dictatorship of the party

The dictatorship of the proletariat, theorized by Marx and accomplished by the Bolsheviks – Lenine noticing the formlessness of proletarian masses abandoned to themselves and their consciences, preferring to count on a “revolutionary angardism”, in order to seize power, or, on professionals who are not proletarians but who are trained for revolutionary actions rather than relying on a “revolutionary spontaneity” of masses accomplishing a “sense of history” which will bring the brillant academic but politically naive Rosa Luxembourg to failure and death.

In brief, the so-called “dictatorship of proletariat” that has not asked nor planned anything, leading in fact to the ineluctable dictatorship of the single party-state. Or, from Lenine, leading to the Stalinist bureaucracy and nomenklatura...

Socialism and populism : the conditions of conscience and liberty

At the hands of this regime based on division of labour and generalized employment under the exclusive authority of the party-state - Or, the machinist and police dictatorship of a “real socialism” justified and disguised by the arrogance of a philosophic science repeated and believed like a religion - The populist thinkers : Bakounine, Proudhon and then Sorel, more realist than materialist, more intuitive than conceptual, opposed from the beginning another track to salvation for the working-class.

Advocating a society of small owners and proprietors, from the labour aristocracy and working hand in hand in respect for human scales, in order to produce a world of conscience and liberty.

Or, the conscience eased by economic and social responsibility resulting from the property of their own means of production rather than the cathechism of the party on infantilised workers.

In other words, the liberty, not distributed by a centralist state, but concretely allowed by social and economic independence – therefore politic – also confered by the property, for the biggest number of their means of production.

A mutualist society of small producers, who do not express the desire for power and domination of a small group manipulating an exploited proletariat without objectives through state apparatus, but a society of concrete liberty, equality and fraternity, refering more to the Greek democracy than the Soviet socialism, but this time without slaves !

A society that is the exact opposite of the Marxist-Leninist socialism as well as bourgeois capitalism, both of them based on a technician fuite en avant, an extreme division of labour and a generalized employment dedicated to the Etat-patron (state as employer) for socialism, or, the Patron-état (employer as state) for capitalism which amount to the same thing.

Proximity of those two systems, both based only on material progress, which explains perfectly the smooth transition without contestation, from Mikhail Gorbatchev’s USSR to Boris Eltsin’s Russian federation ; How fast this so-called “new man” formed by seventy years of socialism converted to Occidental consumerism, since all that had to be done for it, was to replace at the head of a perfectly vertical edifice, the Red Star by Coca Cola !

An arrogant “scientific socialism”, ultra conceptual, in reality psalmodic and in fact vulgar (whose Louis Althusser’s abstruse work will be the ultimate caricature) masking fordist irresponsability, guided by the parasitism of the nomenklatura, behind a bureaucratic dictatorship.

Real socialism which will, at the end, not appear as the volition of emancipation of the working class, but rather as the volition of domination of bourgeois and declassed manipulating a legitimate working-class suffering against the guilty Christian bourgeoisie...

Neither Capital nor dictatorship of the proletariat : the solitude of George Orwell

A big political lie agreeing with the other in a same totalitarism, that the Englishman George Orwell had observed from the 40’s following his peregrination in France and then in Spain.

Masquerade of the “real socialism” denonced by Alexander Soljenistsyne in the 50’s, but this time from the reaction point of view.

Rehabilitation of a polulism refusing to come out in favor of capitalism or socialism, defended nowadays by the subtle Jean-Claude Michea, in reference to Christopher Lasch’s work...

The struggle for the right class struggle

Not a pursuit of salvation for Orwell and Michea, through the proletariat and the abstract opposition proletariat/bourgeoisie, but rather in the union of the proletariat and the middle class towards a generalized middle class. In this union of the people : workers, artisans standing up during the Paris commune against a “versaillan” Capital whose interest remains unfamilliar.

Populism accused by their bourgeois ennemies – as well as cosmopolit revolutionaries – of being “petty bourgeois” and that is quite unconnected with the verbose and emphatic French parliamentary democracy that outcame from the revolution.

A libertarian and anti-authoritarian populism equally unconnected with the soviet socialism, continuator in many ways of the tsarist despotism – no offense to Soljenitsyne –

A populism referring more to the pioneer ideal, fighting both at the same time the bank and the state – embodied by the City and the English monarchy – for a mutualist democracy of small owner-producers, still embodied in the provincial America by a certain republican spirit...

The discreet strategy of the Empire, or the bank preventing, on behalf of socialism, the populist junction of the proletariat and the middle class (Marx against Proudhon)

From then on, the socialist struggle – starting with the opposition Bakounin-Proudhon against Marx-Engel – must not be understood as a binary opposition between socialist and capitalist bourgeoisie, but rather in a more pernisious and triangular way, as the struggle of the mondialist big Capital manipulating and financing professional revolutionaries, most of the time coming from the cosmopolit bourgeoisie : corrupt agitators, obscur dialiectitians, directing a so-called unitary struggle of workers against bourgeois, where upper bourgeois (stateless speculator) and petty bourgeois (rooted entrepeneur) are systematically confused – like in the cathechism of Arlette Laguiller – to prevent the popular junction of the petty bourgeoisie and the national proletariat, which is authentically revolutionary, in reference to the power of the Capital...

The history of this manipulation and this collusion, where cosmopolit socialism manipulates a phantasmed proletariat against a rooted middle class consistently defamed, being the hidden history of the labour movement.

A lie and a manipulation historically revealed, from the 70’s – by a final rallying of those so-called cosmopolit revolutionaries to globalized liberalism.

Rallying effected under the strict control of Troskyist, known as “liberatrian liberalism” in Europe and as “neo-conservative” in USA.

A whole load of social traitors from which enumerate names would immediatly evoke the shindler’s list...

The discreet strategy of the Empire, or the bank favouring the parliamentary left-wing over the revolutionnary syndicalism (Jaures against Sorel)

Once ensured the victory of scientist socialists over libertarian socialists, after an unequal struggle (in view of the sponsors) which will last the whole second half of the 19th century, another struggle of liquidation of the revolutionnary people will be done within the working class.

It will be, at the turn of the century, until world war one, the struggle of revolutionary syndicalism, enthusiast for general strikes and direct actions, against a parliamentary socialism under masonic influence ; Or, the second populist defeat of Georges Sorel against Jean Jaures...

A struggle boiled down to the struggle for purchasing power, or the lost struggle of people’s representatives against the manipulators of proletariat

Thereby, from 1840 to 1970, the struggle led within the left-wing must be understood as the slow defeat of popular forces against professionals of socialism.

The subtle and progressive transformation, by the left-wing forces corrupt by the Capital under the influence of masonic lodges, of an anti-bourgeois struggle to change life into a struggle for purchasing power.

Or, in the end, the democracy - liberal or socialist – limited to the market...

Conclusion : liquidate the middle class

A world governed by the drift of capital, of which the constancy, for whatever manipulations of the working world and its collaboration, will have been all the way – in addition to profit maximisation – to liquidate the middle class, in essence independent and recalcitrant to power.

First, isolte the middle classes, by the propaganda of cosmopolit socialist consisting in ideologically almagaming them to the upper bourgeoisie in order to expose them to the working-class condemnation, working-class with whom however since the “Paris commune”, they constitute the people.

Then substitute the middle class, using the absorbtion-acqusition imposed by the economies of scale, by the docile salaried middle-layers ; or, the independent small employers by the docile executives.

Finally, liquidate the middle class, purely and simply, using notably financial crisis, coordinated by the bank, to cut their bridging loans necessary to their functionning, at the hands of an overtaxing imposed by the conniving state.

This final destruction of the middle class – productive, lucid and rooted – corresponding to the Imperial project of liquidation of all disobedience to the capital, in essence stateless, so that no liberty, conscience and independence remains between the Imperial power of the bank and the salaried masses...

And i wil conclude by this eloquent and little known quotation from the anarchist Bakounine, contemporary opponent of Marx and fierce destroyer, into the revolutionary camp of the so-called scientist socialists :

“The state is not the homeland. It is the abstraction, the metaphysical, mystic, politic, juridic fiction of the nation. The popular masses of every country deeply love their homeland, but it is a true and natural love. Not an idea : a fact... and this is why i frankly feel being the patriot of all opressed nations.”

Mikhail Bakounine

Thank you for having listened to this short and dense lecture. I am waiting for your questions.

Alain Soral

Translation : Romain Redouin

 
 

Livres de Alain Soral (111)