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Someone recently said of the American right that its Gramscian phase had come to an end and now it was in its Sorelian phase, meaning it no longer sought hegemony over institutions but was now animated by myths and the belief in redemptive acts of violence 1/
I think one can apply this frame also to a split beginning to develop on the left as well. On the one hander there's a Gramscian left, focused on gaining hegemony over mainstream institutions and there's a growing Sorelian left, which views those institutions as corrupt 2/
The Sorelian left wants instead a kind of spontaneous revolt against the system by the alienated mass of American workers, and views anything suggestive of that as actually or potentially legitimate 3/
As a result the Sorelian left can't accept the official, liberal account of the Capitol riots as something totally deplorable or dangerous, it has to defend some kernel of virtuous behavior in this popular mobilization and wish for a slightly different direction of the energy 4/
This belief is related to a certain myth of the alienated but heroic American worker (usually white, male) that's bolstered by Lasch, ad admirer of Sorel, among others and a curiosity on the Sorelian left about nationalism or other mobilizing forces for this alienated mass 5/
But the strange thing is the ambivalence many who have arrived at this position seem to have about other insurrectionary events in American society, like Black Bloc/Antifa or BLM. Besides obviously the racial issues, there's the fact that the goals of BLM are widely 6/
viewed as legitimate, (with some considerable hypocrisy, of course), within mainstream liberalism, which taints it with the corrupting influence of official culture in the eyes of this Sorelian left, I think, too, the perhaps the antifascism of the anarchists is too liable to 7/
be coopted by the broader mainstream rejection of fascism, ironic because the anarcho-syndicalist tradition is the natural home of Sorelian ideas. So the only thing that seems radical enough of a break with liberalism is the radical right, which has "antibourgeois 8/
authenticity" lacking on the left focused on elite persuasion or electoral campaigns, or the black protest movement or antifascist street fighters. This creates the need to insist on the core legitimacy or harmlessness of the Capitol riot, and say it's merely misdirected energy 9
In short, the animating myth, its "larp" if you will, of this Sorelian left is a spontaneous revolt of the alienated mass of American workers against the hypocritical structures of liberalism and its caretakers, the PMC /10
In this they are very close to the paleoconservative hopes for a revolt from the middle, a middle american revolution against managerial liberalism /11
Im gonna turn this into a blog posts thats clearer with less typos
