Myths and Mobilization

Myths are always part of politics, but the current moment appears to be unusually suffused with them. In Reflections on Violence, the French social theorist Georges Sorel advanced the idea that political myths “are not descriptions of things but expressions of a will to act.” In that sense, a myth is not the same thing as a lie. Whether it is true or not is not as important as its capacity to engender an esprit de corps and a commitment to collective action among its devotees.

Sorel was a strange sort of revolutionary syndicalist when he wrote Reflections on Violence, and his archetypal myth was the idea of the revolutionary general strike. Whether such a strike would ever actually occur was, for him, beside the point. Myths, Sorel insisted, are “a means of acting on the present,” of sustaining revolutionary enthusiasm amid the absence of an actual revolution. By keeping workers in a constant state of agitation, he argued, this myth would serve as a prophylactic against bourgeois influences and prevent the workers’ class hatred from being dissipated by feckless parliamentary socialists.

As a feckless parliamentary socialist myself, I find Sorel’s sectarianism and his penchant for violence, which he praised as a creative and regenerative force, to be repulsive. He flirted with the arch-reactionary Charles Maurras and his Action Française, and while Sorel admired Vladimir Lenin, it’s no surprise Benito Mussolini once remarked, “Georges Sorel has been my master.” He had no real conception of the transition from capitalism to socialism, which he conceived as a “catastrophe whose development defies description,” with new institutions springing spontaneously from the welter of violent upheaval.

Sorel’s politics were preposterous in many ways, but he was not wrong to sense the power of myth, the power of the passions, to mobilize people in modern mass politics. Fascists picked up this intuition and ran with it, into the abyss. Antifascists picked it up too, and their countermobilizations against the fascist menace were also suffused with a romance of mass action.

As Fronczak shows in Everything Is Possible, countermobilization allowed emergent antifascists to convert their fear of marauding Blackshirts into a politics of popular unity across partisan and national lines — a collective conviction that fascism shall not pass. In doing so, they redefined the very meaning of what it meant to be on the Left and established a moral-emotional basis for a new global politics of solidarity. That is the myth of the Popular Front.

We on the socialist left have become very uncomfortable with these sorts of notions. Jacobin’s project, for example, is largely grounded in a conception of politics that puts an appeal to people’s material self-interest front and center. I’ve made arguments along these lines myself, and there is ultimately no viable socialist politics without an appeal to such interests. I fear, however, that we have too often responded to the eclipse of an older kind of class politics — or of an abstract and idealized version of it, at least — by becoming socialist Gradgrinds. Sticklers for interests, interests, nothing but interests! — somewhat like Thomas Gradgrind’s passion for facts in the Charles Dickens novel Hard Times.

In doing so, we’ve sometimes lost sight of the fact that socialist and workers’ movements have picked fights for dignity and rights as often as fights for more bread. “This could not have happened,” Michael Harrington contended, “without moral solidarity as well as rational economic calculation.”

Today’s working class is, as the late Erik Olin Wright put it, “fragmented with divergent interests” from one segment of the class to another. “Many people still experience class as a salient identity, but it does not provide the universalizing basis for solidarity for which progressives once hoped.” The Right has a politics of passion based on an exclusionary conception of who counts as a person. Its appeal crosses class lines and constitutes, in its perverse way, a moral basis of solidarity. It was on display at the Republican National Convention, where the likes of J. D. Vance invoked the idea that membership in the national community issues from the mystical unity of blood and soil, not allegiance to a civic ideal. It’s a powerful brew, and a progressive version of “What’s in it for me?” won’t top it. How can we embed the demand for bread in a broader idea of who counts as a person? How can we reconcile the passions and the interests in a way that motivates millions?

The 2020 Sanders campaign groped in that direction with the slogan “Fight for someone you don’t know.” But it was awkward and didn’t really catch on. You can’t put it on a ball cap; it has no blood, no jouissance. Its awkwardness reflected Sanders’s unease with the emotional, theatrical, mythic dimensions of politics, and the Left’s general inability to capture the imagination the way “Make America Great Again” has for so many. “Not Me, Us,” was a far better slogan that highlighted the need for collective subjectivity, but we do not yet seem to know how to construct that subject.

To that end, we need a mass politics of antifascism, one that goes beyond both the subcultural street militancy of antifa and tactical voting to keep the Right out of the halls of power. Even ¡No pasarán!, as powerful and inspiring a call to action as it is, is a defensive and reactive formulation. Blocking the far right’s further advance is essential, but the territory they’ve won needs to be recovered too.

Fascism grows in the tainted soil of cynicism, from the wounded lament that politics changes nothing and politicians are all the same. An effective antifascist politics wouldn’t be simply an alliance of organizations and movements at the top, or a lowest-common-denominator defensive front against the Right, but a vehicle for restoring people’s faith in their ability to shape their lives through collective action and democratic participation. Perhaps the creative ideas left behind by fascism’s original antagonists — like the Italian Giustizia e Libertà movement, which called on socialists to reject sectarianism and embrace a politics of passion, action, and civic-republican renewal — could offer resources for building that kind of project. Keeping the Right out of power is job one, but the overarching fight is to make democracy great again.