Georges Sorel and the proper context for production

Georges Sorel’s trajectory was very different from Malon’s. As an engineer trained at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique and the Ponts-et-Chaussees, he was head of the water administration of the department of Pyrenees-Orientales before he became a socialist publicist.

In the 1890s, Sorel stopped working as a civil engineer, and he embarked on a series of studies exploring the social and historical state of modern societies.

In his strictly economic writings, Sorel abandoned theoretical discussions and the debate over the scientific status of Marxism,^[257] drawing principally from Marx a suggestive way for describing economic reality. He considered that although Marx empirically described the dynamics of the capitalist economy, he struggled to account for it in theoretical terms. Marx’s theory, moreover, ignored the superprof­its which “play a huge role in contemporary society” (Sorel 1900, 10). In Sorel’s eyes, it was the environment in which labour was accomplished rather than labour itself which deserved special attention since the milieu of production was precisely what could explain the emergence of superprofits. The quest for more efficient economic organisation - already at the heart of Sorel’s practical rural economics - became the common thread of his conception of a modern economy in which, in contrast to Malon’s, the rural fabric and its organisation anchored in age-old cus­toms seemed to be the catalyst for a modern socialist economy.

Labour as creation

Sorel’s 1903 Introduction a l’economie moderne can be considered an overview of different labour environments whose ideal model could be found in agricultural work. The idea that workers should be the masters and possessors of their labour was no longer dependent on a labour theory of value. “[I]nspired by Proudhonian principles” (Sorel [1903] 1922, ii), Sorel’s Introduction was made up of three parts. The first was an in-depth examination of the rural economy and jurisprudence in which law was understood not only to be the guardian of ancient practices and local knowledge validated in positive legal form but above all an attempt to synthesize these practices and knowledge in light of their economic efficiency.

The foreword to the third edition (1919) of his Introduction shed greater light on the intentions which originally inspired Sorel in 1903. In his foreword, Sorel asserted that the law was not just a set of codified rules which made it possible to organise social life but also the legal sentiment specific to a given activity and to a group of men who act as its spokespersons. The right to work - a concept debated at length during the Revolution of 1848 in France - was, for the proletarian con­sciousness, the equivalent of what property rights had been and still were for bour­geois consciousness. Property rights implied a certain kind of relationship with productive activity and a particular form of commercial organisation (the market) in relation to bourgeois public institutions (the state). It was likely that a different kind of division of labour would result from the institutionalisation of the right to work as the new pivot for the social order (one in which labour exchanges and trade unions would replace the market and the state). Sorel’s concern with labour as the catalyst for individual and social life, described in the book’s appendix, “Theorie de la douleur”, addressed the material processes at work in production - that which Sorel called “the concrete economy” (1922 [1903], 31).

Sorel shared Le Play’s vision of productive society as a living organism whose creative dimension was especially worth studying. Unlike the approach then domi­nant in economics, he refuted the idea that large-scale industry could serve as a model: the latter implied mechanised, homogenised production, a realised abstrac­tion which could give the illusion of a natural functioning of the economy, but only if by “nature” one meant something “mechanical”. This kind of functionality might become the norm in the future, but it was not yet a reality in actual economic practice.

Economics understood as a “social physics” (Sorel [1903] 1922, 33) was a path to be avoided. On the other hand, farming (especially intensive farming)^[259] included certain key components of a “biological industry” far better able to take into account the specific requirements of productive activity (Sorel [1903] 1922, 36):

To study the concrete economy, it is necessary... to turn to what is most complex, to agriculture which has long been neglected: we should ask what is full of variety for an explanation of reality.... Research should begin with agriculture, even if it means completing the picture by looking for any spe­cific differences in factories.

(Sorel [1903] 1922, 37)

These “specific differences” presume that the model for measuring “creative labour” would be based on the example of agricultural labour.

Concrete economics therefore paid special attention to three orders of reality (Sorel [1903] 1922, 68): “equipment”, or concrete material including the resources and tools used in production; “uses” (usages), or the moral code implied within the customary practices of productive labour; and “legal dispositions”, or the posi­tive legislative forms framing the previous two orders (through inheritance laws, professional laws or regulations, etc.). The description of mechanised labour in factories, particularly that found and popularised in Marx’s account, separated this customary productive activity from any moral code. What Sorel wanted to promote were precisely those internal feelings and ideals attached to productive activity itself: namely a work ethic based on the activity of labour, one which was more noticeable in agriculture than in modern industry. This ethic, ubiquitous in the rural class of peasant freeholders, revealed itself in “the care he [the worker] invests in his work, the love he has for a job well done, and the desire he feels in becoming an independent force” ([1903] 1922, 69). For Sorel, there was a world of difference between the creative, independent peasant and the “unskilled factory labourer per­forming predetermined actions” ([1903] 1922, 70): it was the former who should serve as the general model for any “producer interested in perfect manufacturing success” ([1903] 1922, 70).

Popular legal sentiment was none other than this positive perception that the worker could have of himself. It was very different from the identities assigned by social (and sometimes socialist) observers who believed they understood the nature of the work better than workers themselves. It was up to “serious social­ism” (Sorel [1903] 1922, 131) not to lose sight of its mission to rehabilitate labour and the work ethic. The economic basis for the “popular legal consciousness” which Sorel underscored was “a set of conditions that put the worker in a position to consider himself as the entrepreneur"' ([1903] 1922, 95). The essence of this awareness was not private property but the right to work, as Sorel pointed out in a footnote ([1903] 1922, 95, note 1) he added in the 1919 foreword to his Introduc­tion. It did not necessarily imply purely and simply abandoning private property, although Sorel did redefine private property within a framework prioritising the right to work rather than the acquisitive preoccupations with exclusive ownership found in bourgeois law.

An economic milieu free from domination

Sorel was not hostile to private property so long as it was directly used by its owner and not rented out. To this extent, he embraced the distinction suggested by Proud­hon between possession and ownership. In accordance with the Proudhonian defi­nition of possession, Sorel redefined legitimate ownership as “concrete property”, the object of which was “the concentration of efforts towards an inner goal" (Sorel [1903] 1922, 163). He believed it was important to differentiate clearly between production and the milieu in which it was conducted ([1903] 1922, 163):

The milieu seems to be best constituted when there is such a combination of diverse powers that no domination can emerge; equilibrium is then assured, and neutralisation achieved. The State must not intervene to pursue an ideal, nor to create profits for itself; it intervenes to remove [particular] wills that are hindering movement, and not to substitute its will for others. Neutralis­ing the economic milieu can be likened to eliminating friction in a machine.

([1903] 1922, 149)

Sorel advocated neutralising the economic environment in the name of freeing labour from any form of domination. He understood domination in the very classic sense of the arbitrary intervention of another in one’s labour. This was why Sorel combined the term with the expression “private masters" when writing of “the dom­ination by private masters” (Sorel [1903] 1922, 163). The absence of domination required a rigorous regulative administration aware of its role in safeguarding the public interest. One form of regulation was socialising the environment most req­uisite for facilitating unhampered production and preserving the forms of property most associated with that kind of production. Sorel thus specified that it was neces­sary to make distinctions, clearer than those previously made by various socialist schools of thought, between what was liable or not liable to be socialised: “it is cru­cial to distinguish very clearly between that which involves transport, which is so easily socialised, from that which involves production, whose socialisation raises problems of a completely different kind" ([1903] 1922, 255, n. 1). It was on this specific level that the state could legitimately intervene. The state’s role and func­tion Sorel intended to minimise in order to prevent private masters - actors of the dominium - being replaced by a single overarching master - an actor of the impe­rium. Sorel’s idea stressed the need for flexible regulation of economic life through law. Guided by his ethics of the virtuous civil servant, such regulation should be preserved and granted relative independence from the fluctuations of public opin­ion and mercurial electoral outcomes in order to prevent administrative functions from being transformed into elective functions. Instead, one should rely on citizens and their legal capacity to control administrative action: “popular actions” in court and “citizen monitoring” ([1903] 1922, 159) were thus the tools of a decentralised political life seeking to preserve a functional economic environment for production. This essentially regulative monitoring role would be the same as the one entrusted to “administrators” for private economic activity ([1903] 1922, 160).

With regards to industry, Sorel echoed this understanding of what constituted a healthy milieu for production based on agricultural activity and applied it to the network of Labour Exchanges. These were then promoted by Fernand Pelloutier (1867-1901), for whose posthumously published study, Histoire des bourses du tra­vail. Origine - Institutions - Avenir (1902), Sorel wrote a preface. Pelloutier’s path among the various socialist schools of thought was fairly similar to Sorel’s. Having been a militant in Jules Guesde’s Parti Ouvrier for a time, Pelloutier became involved in organising workers’ autonomy, particularly in Labour Exchanges (Bourses du travail), whose activities he coordinated for several years as their general secretary (1895-1901). In the organisation of Labour Exchanges, Pelloutier believed he had found the best way to combat forms of domination existing in the economic world and thereby to republicanise labour by making the absence of domination part of social relations themselves. In this, he was aligned with the ideals conveyed by the Chevalerie Franςaise du Travail (less popular and influential in France than the Knights of Labour in the United States or its affiliate group in Canada) of which Pelloutier was an active member (Dommanget 1967; Gourevitch 2015). Sorel was convinced that Labour Exchanges were conducive to fostering the decentralised administration of productive activities. They constituted places focused on reappro­priating the emancipatory possibilities of labour since they offered relief assistance, employment offices, workers’ libraries and evening classes. In his preface, Sorel explained that “the Exchanges can easily become administrations of the developing Commune Ouvriere” (1902, 32).

Sorel situated this limited milieu in the broader one of the general circulation of goods and wealth including both transport and credit. Here, again, he underscored criterion of neutrality, synonymous with the absence of domination. The same end goal applied to the state’s takeover of the railway companies, insofar as they “are not always sufficiently stimulated to promote the progress of traffic” (Sorel [1903] 1922, 168-9). Favourable tariffs transporting people rather than goods belonged to a similar register of obstacles to productive development ([1903] 1922, 170). An analogous juxtaposition between parasitic “masters of credit” and useful pro­ducers could be observed in Sorel’s critique of usurious capitalism - whose ten­dency to persist, even in a capitalist regime, was significant ([1903] 1922, 171). For Sorel, both credit and money issuance were instruments of production which needed to be socialised and placed under public control short of socialising produc­tion as a whole. Thus transformed, they would cleanse the productive environment by allowing workers better access to those means of production most conducive to exercising their free activity as labourers. The “means of transport, credit and sale” were included in the “means of exchange” and were part of Sorel’s attempt to outline how to develop a healthy economic environment most conducive for production ([1903] 1922, 223; 225 contd.). This would be one in which the state could legitimately intervene in order to encourage or facilitate production only, and herein Sorel echoed many of the ideas found in Proudhon’s mature work.

The society described in Sorel’s vision of a “concrete” economy was a society centred on localised spaces of production made up of real connections between individuals and guided by their cooperation: “the idea of a bronze chain binding everything in an absolute manner is replaced by the idea of islands, of independent cells, each having its own life floating in a milieu” (Sorel, [1903] 1922, 189). In favour of the meticulous study of experiments, going so far as to reject “anything that is not the product of reflection on institutions, customs, and empirical rules that have acquired well-defined forms in practice” ([1903] 1922, 390), Sorel did not always suggest a clear boundary distinguishing between what related to the milieu of production and what related to production - a boundary which neverthe­less seemed intrinsic to his concrete approach and in the spirit of the very definition of the sort of socialism he always championed: “Socialism is not a doctrine, a sect or a political system; it is the emancipation of the working classes which organise themselves, educate themselves and create new institutions” (Sorel 1898, 612). However, Sorel presented a theory faithful to this pragmatic definition, one com­mitted to demonstrating that the milieu in which labour was exerted must be social­ised so that fully emancipated spaces of production could emerge. Although he criticised the labour theory of value, he did not lose sight of the fact that socialism should defend the value of labour. As shall now be shown, despite very different theoretical resources combining abstract economics and mathematical formalisa­tions, Adolphe Landry’s approach was somewhat similar.

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