Myths are necessary because without them, revolts will not provoke revolution. Whether they bear any relation to future history is irrelevant to their power and their value. At the centre of the myth lies the experience of grasping the inner self, of becoming and possessing oneself more intensely than is possible in normal life. Utopias, on the other hand, are cognitive constructs, products of the intellect, of reason. As such they are divorced from the soul of the proletariat, have no real connection with anything, are at best impotent and at worst diversionary and reactionary. Myths emphasise process, utopias portray ends.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 78
Utopia, as defined by Sorel, embodies several distinct characteristics which are presumed to be inseparable. It includes plans for a future society and failure to grasp the real possibilities and processes of social change, thus eliding in a familiar way two elements which have no intrinsic connection. Utopias are also condemned for being abstract, and for being essentially products of the intellect rather than the will.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 75
“Experience shows that the framing of a future, in some indeterminate time, may … be very effective and have very few inconveniences; this happens when the anticipations of the future take the form of those myths, which enclose with them all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party or of a class, inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of instincts in all the circumstances of life; and which give an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which, more easily than by any other method, men can reform their desires, passions and mental activity.” [Sorel, Reflections on Violence, Allen and Unwin, p. 133.]
The particular myth which is central to revolutionary syndicalism is the myth of the proletarian general strike, construed both as a possible actual event in the future and more importantly as a myth which mobilises people to action. Sorel observes that ‘men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph’; it is to these images that he applies the term myth. The function of any such myth is to facilitate action and it must therefore be judged in these terms, not in terms of its empirical accuracy, so that it should not be taken seriously as a prediction. It operates intuitively rather than intellectually, and thus is fundamentally different from a utopia. The myth of the general strike is ‘a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against modern society’.
Revolutionary myths are thus expressions of will rather than descriptions of the future and as such ‘lead men to prepare themselves for a combat which will destroy the existing state of things’. A myth cannot be separated into its constituent parts and judged against reality, for it only operates as a whole, and it is not susceptible to refutation by empirical evidence:
"A myth cannot be refuted since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions.” [Sorel, Reflections on Violence, Allen and Unwin, p. 33.]
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 75-76
His [Sorel’s] identification of socialism as a movement rather than a state of society to be treated as a historical goal recalls Marx’s assertion that communism is the real movement which abolishes the present state of things:
"Socialism is the workers’ movement, the revolt of the proletariat against ruling institutions. It is the organization which is both economic and ethical at the same time, which we see forming before our eyes, and whose purpose is to struggle against bourgeois traditions.” [Stanley, From Georges Sorel, Oxford University Press, p. 147.]
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 76