Reflections on Violence

Thesis: Sorel in this passage asserts the necessity of the myth of the general strike to overthrow the bourgeois society and violence if the workers are to fulfill their rightful place in the world.

• Economic progress profits future generations, but does it give the working class any glory?
• Workers see religion as a middle-class luxury, since the emotions it calls up are not those which inspire workmen.
• Does there exist among workmen forces capable of producing enthusiasm to lead society on the path of economic progress.
• Literature of the professors of rhetoric is mere chatter, and the attempt by scholars to find institutions in the past to use to discipline their contemporaries is a vain attempt.
• Morality is not doomed to perish as long as it can strengthen itself by an alliance with an enthusiasm capable of conquering all obstacles and prejudices.
• But this sovereign force will not be found among the paths of contemporary philosophers, inventors of reforms, and experts in social science.
• There is only one force, and that is the one resulting from propaganda in favor of a general strike.
• The idea of a general strike produces an entirely epic state of mind, and bends all energies for the realisation of better life for workers
• In the total ruin of institutions and morals there remains something powerful, the soul of the revolutionary proletariat.
• It will not be swept away in the general decadence of moral values, if the workers bar the road to middle-class corrupters with plainest brutality.
• Conditions necessary to allow the development of proletarian forces are violence enlightened by the idea of a general strike.
• It is to violence that Socialism owes those high ethical values by means of which it brings salvation to the modern world.