This meeting between radical left and right became more pronounced when Sorel’s leading disciple Édouard Berth joined with a cohort of Maurras named Georges Valois. Formerly an anarchist and associate of Pelloutier, Valois shifted toward the social monarchist tendencies identified with Barrès and Maurras. With Berth, he founded the Cercle Proudhon, a reading group chaired by Maurras. This group would continue to recast the Proudhonist tradition as violently antiparliamentary, as opposed to the nominal reading of Proudhon as a progressive in his early years (and even during his later, explicitly anarchist stage, as a believer in the natural progression of the state toward anarchy).75
The Cercle Proudhon acknowledged the democratic and anticlerical side of Proudhon, avoiding his more egalitarian followers like Joseph Déjacque, while effectively transforming his revolutionary aspects into what they described as a “counterrevolutionary” trend in his thought. Their writings included this urgent “Declaration”: “Democracy is the greatest error of the past century. If we want to live, if we want to work, if we want to possess the highest human guarantees for Production and for Culture, if we want to conserve the accumulation of moral, intellectual, and material capital of civilization, it is absolutely necessary to destroy the institutions of democracy.”76
Capitalism breaks down nations, families, societies, and individuals in decadent service to modern life, the Cercle Proudhon insisted. The Cercle’s new state would would take on a kind of municipal virtue through the resurgence of a natural citizen whose membership in the alternative ultranationalist community subverted commercialism and consumerism. In the “Declaration” of their side project, La Cité française, the circle stated that “one must therefore organize society outside the sphere of democratic ideas; one must organize the classes outside democracy, despite democracy, and against it.”77
This radical program of extrastate social organizing was joined to an elitist belief in hierarchical order. As disagreements within the left between revolutionary syndicalists and reformist socialists intensified, the reaction persisted in drawing the former away from the latter and toward a possible revolutionary collaboration against liberalism and parliamentarism. By stacking elitism on top of a class analysis, statism could remain in the form of national solidarity and personal excellence. Thus, the fusion (or confusion) of collectivism, individualism, and mutualism allowed the Cercle to reason that syndicalist direct action, and particularly the general strike, could establish a popular system of national unity through stratified classes conscious of their place within an organic state. Sorel increasingly abandoned class as anything but an abstract concept, while the political consolidation of the left against anti-Semitism was increasingly undermined and replaced by a call to left-right revolution against the Republic.78 While it is debatable as to whether or not Sorel can be considered a protofascist or fascist, he would later express admiration for Mussolini’s party, and his intellectual interventions produced an ideal space for the “fascist creep.”79
In Italy, Sorel was at the same time lauded as an anti-Marxist syndicalist by elitist thinker Vilfredo Pareto and labeled “an eminent French Marxist” by influential liberal Benedetto Croce.80 As Sorel’s work pushed away from Marx and parliamentary reformism, he delved into a world of vitalism and myth where only revolution could save civilization from collapse, decadence, and the terminal crisis of intellectual optimism. Between 1907 and 1911, the anarchist newspaper La demolizione—edited by an acquaintance of Mussolini’s named Ottavio Dinale, as well as Sorel himself—hosted important discussions between Sorelian revolutionary syndicalists and anarchists, and included the writings of influential futurist poet and painter Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.81 Mussolini would later identify Sorel as “our master,” although speculation exists regarding Mussolini’s actual adherence to national syndicalism.82
Il Duce took on the reputation of a Blanquist or some kind of individualist, and he remained relatively intellectually irrelevant as the synthesis of nationalism and revolutionary syndicalism took place. In his youth, he had translated two works by Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin into Italian, championed the anarchist Haymarket Martyrs, and defended the reputation of Gaetano Bresci, assassin of King Umberto I in 1900. In a valedictory 1904 article on Kropotkin in the Socialist Vanguard, Mussolini would write that after the revolution, “the State—the committee of defense of the interests of the propertied classes—will have no more reason to exist.”83 Believing in the revolution of the workers and the liberation of rural people, Mussolini operated as a radical socialist in Switzerland. He scolded the revolutionary Carlo Tresca for being too moderate when the two were brief roommates, and he also attempted to befriend Leda Rafanelli, all the while maintaining a deep respect for Errico Malatesta.84 His youthful declarations included such statements as “We acknowledge our heresy. We cannot conceive of a patriotic socialism”85 and an incitement to clear the way for “the elemental forces of individuals, because another human reality outside of the individual does not exist! Why should Stirner not make a comeback (tornerebbe d’attualità)?”86 As he increased in notoriety, Mussolini would settle for a syncretic fusion of Nietzsche and Marx, which he sometimes associated with anarchism, but mostly with socialism.
Statements like these seem to illustrate Mussolini’s egoism in relation to the nationalism, militarism, and syndicalism discussed in increasingly important journals like La Lupa and La Voce.87 This growing movement of national syndicalists remained relatively consistent in calling for a devolution of state authority to syndicates, which would be organized according to a meritocracy that some likened to an aristocracy. However, for fear of overthrowing capitalism only to pave the way for something even worse, these deeply compromised syndicalists increasingly maintained that capitalism and market forces would be built upon through a solidarity based on cultural-linguistic nationality rather than class.
One of the most important connections between Sorel and the growing movement of Italian nationalists was Marinetti, with whom he would remain in close contact. Marinetti’s followers supported the “destructive gesture of the anarchists,” while also establishing a fierce, violent order based on revolutionary ethics that could overcome the boredom and incompetence of everyday bourgeois life. Marinetti’s warmongering support for imperialism, his stark misogyny, and his aestheticization of politics were fueled by an energy and dynamism that obscured his lack of theoretical rigor and made him “the point of connection between all the rebels and dissidents who were organizing themselves at that period in order to overthrow the existing order.”88 Thus, fascism arose from the dissident movement of right and left elements fusing aspects of collectivism, individualism, nationalism, and syndicalism into a kind of aestheticized politics of power, elitism, and authority.
The Red Week and Its Fallout
In 1914, Sorel advanced Croce’s slogan, “Socialism is dead,” after declaring class an abstraction.89 Later in the year, the prime minister of Italy Giovanni Giolitti enacted reforms that conceded to some moderate reformist demands of left-leaning syndicalists. Syndicalist leaders refused to relinquish their demands, leading to a general strike and a mass insurrection, but the state cracked down and the “Red Week” was suppressed.90 The outbreak of apparently Sorelian violence brought an instant excitement to the revolutionary syndicalist ideal but left many further disillusioned with what was viewed as either premature measures of anarchists or the selling-out of spontaneous revolution by syndicalist leaders. Following the failed revolution, many syndicalists came to believe that the vital struggle of the proletariat should take a mythic national form against materialism.
For national syndicalists breaking away from the Italian Syndicalist Union, the violence of revolution had to be tested in “national war” before it could be used effectively against the bourgeois state. For Mussolini, these movements were advantageous but somewhat beyond his peculiar brand of socialism and its rural focus.91 At first, Mussolini seemed, as usual, equivocal about whether or not to support the war (or even nationalism).