Jacobinism

Jacobinism is a term referring to adherent to the "values" of the French Great Revolution including its heritages such as centralised republican state, strong state power or simply the most radical position. The use of this term very vary and often context-specific, especially as since the French Proletarian Revolution of 1919, it has been increasingly associated with the Jacobin movement and its "Marxist-Jacobinism" terminology.

## Marxist-Jacobinism

In the fervour of the revolutionary years of 1919 following the Great Russian Revolution of 1917, the term "Bolshevism" gained much use in France, among many opposing political left factions except the Right SFIO-Radicals coalition which formed the short lived Provisional Government, however as the Russian Revolution come to an end while the French Federation reorganise the remains of the Third International. The term Bolshevism lost its use as the Majority SFIO and Reformist CGT faction based around Leon Blum, Albert Bourderon and Alphonse Merrheim rejected both revolutionary war and the German peace. The revolutionary minority rapidly rising at the time calling for radical social revolution and revolutionary war was considered dangerous to the prospect of the revolution, they was often accused of taking the "Robespierre" position and "Jacobin", especially after the polemic by Kropotkin criticizing the "Jacobins" of Russia whose attempt to build communism with a warlike mentality of Jacobinists and a state dictatorship is bound to fail, it was much repeated by the moderate syndicalist leaders in France however it was soon used by the newly born PTRF (of the Left SFIO and Revolutionary Syndicalists) itself. By 1937, the party have adopted a programme dropping most of its Russian allegory althought maintaining the ideology, via leaders like Pierre Monette and Pierre Sermand citing the works by people such as Albert Mathiez and Maurice Thorez in reclaiming the Jacobinist ideology of both radicalism and patriotism.

> “Under the constitutional regime,” said Robespierre, “it suffices to protect individuals against the abuses of the public power. Under the revolutionary regime the public power itself is forced to defend itself against all the forces that attack it."( 5 Nivôse). Saint Just more crudely added: “What constitutes a republic is the total destruction of everything opposed to it” (8 Ventôse). Like an echo Lenin repeats, “It would be the greatest stupidity and the most absurd utopia to suppose that the passage from capitalism to socialism would be possible without constraint and dictatorship” (May 28, 1917). “It is impossible,” he continued, “to defeat and extirpate capitalism without the pitiless repression of the resistance of the exploiters, who cannot accept being suddenly deprived of their fortune, of their advantages in organization and knowledge, and who over a long period of time will consequently and inevitably attempt to shake off the domination of the poor.”
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> Robespierre had said that “the revolutionary government has nothing in common with anarchy. On the contrary its goal is to suppress it in order to ensure and solidify the reign of law” (25 Nivôse). Lenin is no more tender than he towards disorder: “If we aren’t anarchists we must accept the necessity for a state, i.e., of constraint, for the transitional phase from capitalism to socialism. Every large technical industry demands the most absolute unity of will and the most severe leadership of the work of hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of men. How can the most severe unity of will be ensured? By the submission of these thousands of wills to the will of only one” (May 28, 1918). He continues: “We don’t need any hysterical impulses. We need the cadenced march of the iron battalions of the proletariat.”
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> “Jacobinism” in Europe or on the boundary line between Europe and Asia in the twentieth century would be the rule of the revolutionary class, of the proletariat, which, supported by the peasant poor and taking advantage of the existing material basis for advancing to socialism, could not only provide all the great, ineradicable, unforgettable things provided by the Jacobins in the eighteenth century, but bring about a lasting world-wide victory for the working people.
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> It is natural for the bourgeoisie to hate Jacobinism. It is natural for the petty bourgeoisie to dread it. The class-conscious workers and working people generally put their trust in the transfer of power to the revolutionary, oppressed class for that is the essence of Jacobinism, the only way out of the present crisis, and the only remedy for economic dislocation and the war.
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But the party at large is not just Albert Mathiez and although he would be its great propagandist, Marxist-Jacobinism is at its theorical core, not a caricature of the past, not in mocking fashion would any Robespierre walk the earth, as would the French revolutionaries don the tricorn hat no more.

> "In an important way – in the way Babeuf meant it when he invoked it speaking of Robespierre – we are the party of democracy and the Revolution. But we haven’t immobilized and frozen the latter. We don’t pretend to have fixed human society in the economic and social formulae that prevailed between 1789 – 1795 and responded to living and production conditions that are today abolished. Too often the bourgeois democratic parties limit themselves to picking out from the foot of the volcano a few fragments of cooled-off lava, to scooping up some extinguished ash from around the furnace. The burning metal should instead be poured into new molds."
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The theorists of the "Marxist-Jacobinism" takes from Marx and Engels the programme of socialism and democracy, and from the old heroes of the Great Revolution, the Jacobins in their great hour of glory.

> "In this way socialism is attached to the Revolution without being chained to it. And this is why we have followed with a free spirit and a fervent heart the heroic efforts of revolutionary democracy.
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> I pass to the hands of our friends the torch whose flames have been agitated by the storm winds and which half-devoured itself in tragically lighting up the world. A tormented but immortal flame which despotism and counter-revolutionaries would fight to extinguish and which, ever-revived, would expand into an ardent socialist hope. It was now in the troubled atmosphere of Thermidor that the clarity of the revolution would be debated."
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> "It was France which, with Babeuf, Fourier and Saint-Simon, began the elaboration of the socialist ideas to which Marx and Engels brought their scientific crowning.
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> It is France which, after having unleashed on the world the bourgeois Revolution, an indispensable preface to the proletarian revolution, was the great battlefield of the class struggle, putting its heroic insurgents at the service of the redemption of labor without counting the costs. from Lyon 1832, and from Paris 1848 and 1871.
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> It is France which, although decimated by the Versailles massacres, in 1889, in its immortal Congress of Paris, raised the flag of the International which had fallen into its own blood and initiated the May Day; it was she who was the first to plant the red flag of the proletariat on the march towards the conquest of its ultimate victory in 1919"
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To borrow the words of the great socialist Jean Jaures, the materialism of Marx and the memoiries of the Grande Revolution in the mythicalism of Jules Michelet.

## Neo-Jacobinism

### "Sorelians" or Valoisistes

Unlike the "Jacobins" who would not don the Tricorn hat, these are the true followers of the heroes of the Grande Revolution. A term that began the very moment Thermidor sent to the death the great Jacobin yet over the years the enduring spirits of the Revolution lives on in many ways, and 2 centuries after, the people considered to be Neo-Jacobinists would be ironically the followers of the late Sorel whose early history with the right-wing Maurras and traditional syndicalism means that the Jacobin state or the freemasonic "principles of 1789" was not viewed in a favourable position but as he turned away to the visions of Lenin after the war, his students carried on to the cartel of the late right-wing turned fervent leftist. Georges Valois, no more republican than he was syndicalist too saw the great coming of Bolsheviks Socialism overwhelming and fell to its spell. He founded the Republican Syndicalist Party which espouse nationalism and revolutionary state, bearing more reminscent of corporatism of his late teacher, for this reason the Jacobin Movement would vehemently reject them even after the party have decided to full on take on the patriotic stance, the nationalism and corporatist nature of the Valoisistes and its questionable understanding of Marxism and Communism made it the party's great enemy. In the wake of the Revolution, finding neither a home in the communist or the ruling labour democracy, many neo-jacobin and former-monarchist-turned-revolutionary joined the new party and soon the Neo-Jacobin current took over the party, especially with the inclusion of members like Marcel Deat. The party of the tricolour and the revolution would fight the "syndicalist democracy" to achieve the real syndicalist in the veins of Sorel and blessed with the tricolours of the Robespierre. The party moved close to the Jacobins after its patriotic slogan turns in an appeal to overthrow the parliamentary and corrupt state of union bureaucrats but this was a double edged sword, the Jacobins would accept the Sorellians struggle to fight the 5th Republic, but not to its existence in the state to come, thus as the Sorellians planned their coup using their positions in military officers, the Jacobins instead used this as the evidence of the weakness of the 5th Republic that failed to stop people like the Sorellians, right-wing counter-revolutionaries they are, to plot and scheme against the Republic and on the altar of the 6th Republic, the great conspiracy of the militarist-counter-revolutionary Gamelin and his supporters came to light resuilted in a ban of the Republican Socialist Party and the imprisonment of its members. The party was further reduced in the years of the Jacobin Party-State as the Bureau foreign offices tracked down its members living in exile.