131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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Sorel sought to retain the purely economic basis of the proletarian standpoint, and despite
some disagreements, he clearly always began with Marx. He hoped that the proletariat would
create a morality of economic producers. The class struggle is a struggle that takes place in
the economic sphere with economic means. In the previous chapter it has been shown that
Marx followed his opponent, the bourgeois, into economic territory out of systematic and
logical necessity. Here, therefore, the enemy had determined the terrain on which one had to
fight and also the weapons, that is, the structure of argumentation. If one followed the
bourgeois into economic terrain, then one must also follow him into democracy and
parliamentarism. Moreover, without the economic-technical rationalism of the bourgeois
economy, then at least in the short term one would not be able to move about within the
economic sphere. The mechanism of production created by the capitalist period has a
rationalist regularity, and one can certainly create the courage to destroy it from a myth. But
should this economic order develop even further, should production intensify even more,
which Sorel obviously also wants, then the proletariat must renounce its myth. Just like the
bourgeois, it will be forced, through the superior power of the production mechanism, into a
rationalism and mechanistic outlook that is empty of myth. Marx was also here in an
important sense more consequential because he was more rationalist. But looked at from the
irrational, it was a betrayal to be even more economic and more rationalist than the
bourgeoisie. Bakunin understood that completely. Marx's education and way of thinking
remained traditional, bound down by what was then bourgeois, so that he always remained
intellectually dependent on his opponent. In spite of that, it was exactly in Marx's
construction of the bourgeois that his work was indispensable to Sorel's understanding of
myth.
The great psychological and historical meaning of the social theory of myth cannot be
denied. And the construction of the bourgeois by means of Hegelian dialectic has served to
create an image of the enemy that was capable of intensifying all the emotions of hatred and
con-
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