Victor Serge Read online

  Much had changed in the years since 1917. The actuality of the revolution had emboldened workers in the West, radicalized by war, revolution and the deepening capitalist crisis. Labour movements in the West were active and Communist Parties grew in membership, supported financially by the USSR. In the inter-war period, the threat to capitalism’s very survival was so great that Germany and Italy resorted to fascism. The New Deal in the United States was capitalism’s response to a militant labour movement, using concessions to incorporate the working class rather than try to crush it. After World War II the welfare-state reforms, including capitalist nationalization of key sectors of industry, were accommodations to the threat represented by a radicalized working class and the continued existence of the Soviet Union.

  Stalinism – in the guise of Russian socialism – was degenerate and intolerant, according to Serge. European socialists, tainted by Stalinism, could not see the roots of racism and anti-Semitism, nor the appeal of fascist reactionary nationalism – and they were weakened by their inattention to the changes brought about in the state and the economy by technological innovation.9 It was undeniable that the Soviet regime, fascism, Nazism and the New Deal shared common traits that reflected the collectivist tendencies of the modern economy. Trotsky, writing in 1939, also noted these similarities. The socialist movement needed intellectual rigour, an understanding of political economy, a living philosophy – which could point the way for workers to transcend bureaucratic statism if they were to achieve democratic control of society, organize a rational economy and realize a higher dignity.10

  In essence, socialist thought needed updating to keep current with developments in the economy, discoveries in science and advances in the understanding of human psychology. Stalinism had retarded intellectual development with its state dogma, directed thought and ‘ownership’ of philosophical truth. The Marxist method of analysis and interpretation of history had been degraded as a consequence. Even on its own terra firma of political economy, European socialists had ignored the changes wrought by advances in technology that increased productivity but reduced the importance of manual labour. The developments in industry upset the traditional class proportions and relations, giving increased importance to governing bureaucracies as well as intermediary layers of administrators, technicians, managers and an intelligentsia of sociologists, economists and psychologists. The existing analysis of the class struggle was too schematic, Serge wrote, in that it did not take into account the role of the shareholders and tycoons, or the civil employees of the totalitarian state.11

  The USSR represented a new, negative force in the world, influencing and altering the nature of current struggles. It was now an obstacle to socialism – and this made the question of democracy even more important. Much of what Serge was writing at this time is the product of his efforts to come to grips with a world where totalitarian collectivism, as he called it, dominated both the Soviet Union and, during the war and its immediate aftermath, appeared to be increasingly influential in Western Europe as well. For Serge this foreboded a dark future, where the economy would be subject not to the democratic control of workers and their organizations, but run by technocrats and totalitarians who strangle democracy, even as they organize production ever more efficiently.

  It was sobering to realize that collectivism was not synonymous with socialism (as Serge and his comrades had previously thought) and could in fact be anti-socialist, manifesting new forms of exploitation. For Serge this revealed the extreme weakness of socialist movements and socialist thought. The defeats suffered in Europe were partly due to this theoretical as well as organizational debility. Lacking energy and foresight, the European socialists were ‘brutally overtaken by events’. Serge added that ‘the subjective factor was not equal to the objective circumstances’, that the socialists were not clearly aware of the dangers they faced nor of the opportunities offered to them. Likewise, the Bolsheviks were responsible in part for the march toward totalitarianism in the Soviet Union: Serge blamed their psychology, their ignorance of democratic values and the methods they employed. The Bolsheviks compensated for their ideological insufficiency with will and authority – and also terror.12

  American socialists (Sidney Hook, Dwight Macdonald, James Burnham et al.) and liberals were more concerned with freedom and liberty than their European counterparts, but Serge noted their ideas were based on the ideals of bourgeois liberal humanism and the traditions of parliamentary democracy – honourable but out of date, Serge warned, because the role of the state and its executive had increased so radically in the era of nationalized economies. On the other hand, the extended functions of the modern state, Serge believed, made obsolete the notion of the abolition of the state. The libertarian commune state of the Bolsheviks in 1917, theorized in Lenin’s State and Revolution, went bankrupt, and the withering away of the state died during Lenin’s lifetime.13 The Stalinist scourge nearly eradicated the notion that socialism is full democracy and rendered it equivalent in the popular mind with anti-democracy. For Serge it was crucial to realize that ‘Wherever totalitarian communism prevails, nothing progressive will be able to be done. On the contrary, we will see the stifling of thought and strangulation of oppositions.’14

  There were grounds for optimism, according to Serge: the rebuilding of the European economy after the war would strengthen the working class, and the interdependence of nations could result in an internationalization of societies that Serge believed would promote the growth of socialist struggle. At the same time, the totalitarian regimes spawned a vigorous and deeply anti-totalitarian reaction, and no matter how tragically difficult the immediate situation was, socialism might still have a great future in front of it. But the intellectual weakness of the socialist movement (sapped of its energies by the formidable Stalinist machine) could only be remedied by an ‘epoch of uprising’.15

  Serge misjudged the tendencies he noted, believing the world was in transition away from capitalism towards some form of statist bureaucracy. He was trying to define the characteristics of a world still in the process of becoming, and he couldn’t see past the period he lived in. Unlike other thinkers of the time, Serge did not proclaim socialism a failure, but called for its rebirth. Democracy must mean democracy at work and in the economy as a whole; liberty must mean personal and political freedom.

  What then may be salvaged from his writings, given so much has changed? The fact that the revolution took place, despite what it turned into, changed the nature of the world, and the influence of the revolution’s promise was felt in the industrialized capitalist democracies. Important elements of a more advanced political democracy, such as universal franchise, representative democracy, free speech and other basic rights, were won and conceded to in response to the existence of the Soviet Union and to contain radicalism at home. After 1918 and again after 1945 the radicalized working class demanded and gained social protections and democratic advances. The concessions provided a springboard for further demands. The democratic gains of the second half of the twentieth century, brought by the labour, civil rights and women’s movements, significantly deepened democracy leading to substantial changes in advanced industrial democracies without appreciably deepening the struggle for ‘economic democracy’ or workers’ rights.16 These reforms strengthened democracy, and democracy in turn brought the welfare state. Yet the latter cut into the profitability of capitalism at a time – after 1973 – when capitalism seemed increasingly stagnant. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the concessions to social democracy became less necessary, and increasingly difficult to deliver in the age of finance capital. It is no surprise, then, that the collapse of the Soviet Union hastened the decline of social democracy. At the same time, we are seeing the hollowing out of bourgeois democracy, perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the United States itself, and caricatured in the so-called new democracies of the former Soviet bloc. The decline of bourgeois democracy is directly tied to the weakened labour
and socialist movements.

  The fine principles of liberal democracy are not enough – their forms of democratic governance cannot solve economic crisis, nor can elections halt the downward slide in the standard of living, much less empower workers. Still, the promise of democracy is potent and even risky, as more and more people demand the genuine article, not managed electoral shams.17

  Today the struggle for democracy is a direct fight for new forms of democratic decision-making, exercised from below. Authentic democracy – control from below – requires a sufficient level of understanding and education, and is impossible if money has influence in the process. In many ways the struggle for this bottom-up democracy is a revolutionary struggle that involves coming up with better forms than the soviets promised. We can’t presume in advance what they will look like, as the political form will be determined by the struggle itself, though without a high level of participation and control from below, substantive democracy remains but a dream.

  The world faces a bleak landscape brought about by economic collapse and careless disregard of the environment (both natural and human). Preliminary responses came from the right in religious, nationalist, terrorist and populist forms. One decade into the new century the discontent and disillusion with dysfunctional or deceptive democratic forms has not led to despair, but to massive mobilizations of profoundly democratic social movements toppling dictators in the Arab Middle East, protesting and striking against an unjust economic system throughout Europe, and occupying cities and towns across the US by the ‘99%’ against the financial elites who were blamed for drowning the population in debt while destroying their chances for a decent economic future. Disaffected by a politics that only serves the rich and the powerful, people are reclaiming democracy and revitalizing political protest against the ravages of capitalism. Their demands may not constitute a call for socialism, but the protestors have given the elites notice that they refuse to continue with the status quo. Repression has been swift, but has not suppressed the workers, students, unemployed and foreclosed, who invent new forms, fighting to reclaim their autonomy and be heard. They lack the intellectual armour of the revolutionary generation a century ago, but they share their hope that the economy and society can be organized to serve humanity and the community. The human impulse for freedom, dignity and self-organization emerges over and over again – and is cause for great hope. Serge’s epoch of uprising may be upon us.

  Since the publication of this book, both Vlady (2005) and Jeannine Kibalchich (2012), Serge’s son and daughter, have left us, as did his wife Laurette Séjourné in 2003. This new edition contains an extensive biographical glossary at the end, identifying some of the many characters and organizations Serge encountered or mentioned in his writings, and publications that carried his articles. The sources for these entries were too numerous to cite. It should also be noted that a new edition of Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary was published in 2012 by the New York Review of Books, containing the complete, unexpurgated text, which had been cut by an eighth as a condition of publication by Oxford University Press in 1963. The references in this work pertain to the earlier edition.

  I am grateful to the late Clara Heyworth for helping bring about this Verso paperback edition, and to Verso’s Jacob Stevens, Audrea Lim and Mark Martin. Thanks are also due to translators Michel Vale, Patrick Silberstein, Patrick Le Tréhondat and Francisco Sobrino for their conscientiousness and commitment. There aren’t adequate words to express my gratitude for the gift of Robert Brenner’s probing questions, editorial refinements, steadfast support and love.

  Preface

  Julian Gorkín called his friend Victor Serge an ‘eternal vagabond in search of the ideal’. Serge’s life’s journey was rather in search of justice, for a higher dignity for humanity than either Soviet Stalinism or capitalism could allow. In setting ‘the course on hope’ he pursued truth, struggled against privilege, and sought social justice and dignity. He chose to participate in the making of history by involving himself in the daily struggles of ordinary people. In Serge’s time, these struggles were heroic.

  Nearly invisible to history, Serge stood on the side of the defeated, with those who refused to compromise with capitalism or surrender to Stalinism. Neither was acceptable. The cost was high: Serge’s eloquent voice and mighty pen could not prevent him from being sidelined by history. The general ignorance of this man – in all but the smallest circles of the far left and among Soviet specialists – is at once perplexing and frustrating.

  This aura of invisibility made my own discovery of Serge all the more remarkable. One of my professors in graduate school at Glasgow University’s Institute of Soviet and East European Studies hinted to me as I walked out of his room that I must read Serge’s Memoirs. His hushed tone intrigued me, and that weekend I took the train to London, with Serge’s Memoirs as company. The six-hour, bumpy journey passed in a moment and when I arrived I simply moved from the bench on the train to a bench in the station, where I sat until I finished the book. I never looked back.

  The trail from there to here has been long and interrupted, and the research has taken me from Scotland to California, New York, Mexico, France, Belgium and the then Soviet Union. Along the way there were too many frustrating misses because I had started this project nearly forty years after Serge’s death. Many who knew him were also now dead. Some died just months or weeks before I found them. One was murdered just days before our appointment!

  Serge’s son Vlady and his wife Isabel welcomed me into their Mexico City home as if it were my own, and I left exhilarated after finding so many file cabinets and boxes filled with Serge’s unpublished writings. It was clear that his unpublished œuvre was easily as large as what had been published, and there was much to discover.

  I returned to Mexico City the following year to give a talk on Serge and Trotsky at a conference. Afterwards a woman in the audience approached and hugged me – then whispered in my ear that she was Serge’s daughter Jeannine. She bears an uncanny resemblance to her father.

  Political passions drew me to Serge, and it was his political sense that sustained what some might call a mission to rescue from the margins of history a voice important to the twenty-first century. Familiar with the political milieu from which Serge had broken, I shared his scepticism about organizations certain they alone possessed ‘the truth’. It perplexed me that the mere mention of Serge’s name could arouse hostility. It made me curious to get at the heart of the controversies, to find out what, exactly, Serge stood for.

  Once into the work, my original questions seemed less important, yet whenever I mentioned I was working on Serge I faced these queries: did Serge, at the end of his life, support de Gaulle and renege on revolution?i Did Serge veer toward the right wing Menshevism of the original Cold-War liberals? The questions revealed much more about the axes those asking had to grind than about Serge.

  Victor Serge was one of the few Bolsheviks from the revolutionary generation who refused to surrender and who struggled so that their ideas would survive Stalin’s attempt to exterminate them. Serge let his literary voice speak for those Stalin silenced. Amazingly Serge did not succumb to pessimism, despite the horrors of the period. He was alert to the danger Stalin represented throughout the world. In Mexico, Serge cautioned the ‘fossilized dogmatists’ who believed that European revolution was inevitable at the end of the war:

  A dark age is opening up before Europe and the world. The best revolutionaries have been destroyed by past defeats and the war. Time will have to elapse before new cadres are formed. The old socialist programmes and routines have been superseded and must be renewed. Stalinism, victorious thanks to the unconditional support and concessions made by the Allies, will be more dangerous than ever. If we want to save Europe we have to start by bringing together all free democratic forces in order simply to practice the art of not dying away.

  The world has changed in unimaginable ways since Serge wrote those lines. The Soviet Union disintegrate
d, and its satellite states fell like a row of dominoes. Stalinism is dead, and the anti-Stalinist Left Serge knew is tiny and nowhere capable of influence. Serge’s star is rising nonetheless: his ideas are read and discussed in the former Soviet Union, where a library has been founded in his name. In the West, his work is receiving new attention. The aura of invisibility seems to be disintegrating.

  Serge scholarship began to get off the ground in 1991. Several international conferences marked the centenary of his birth, new editions of his work were printed, critical articles appeared in journals devoting special issues to Serge, and Bill Marshall’s analytical study of Serge and the uses of dissent was published. It is my hope that this modest first examination of Serge’s political, social, literary and economic writings on the Soviet Union will inspire others to mine the riches contained in Serge’s life and voluminous writings.

  Primary sources for this work have been Serge’s published and unpublished writings plus extensive interviews and correspondence with surviving comrades and relatives in several countries. Vlady Kibalchich – Mexico’s well-known artist and Serge’s son who shared most of Serge’s experiences with him, including deportation in Orenburg – has been a valuable and treasured resource. I have also conducted interviews with his daughter Jeannine Kibalchich, his third wife Laurette Séjourné, and with surviving Left Oppositionist comrades in Mexico, Russia and the United States. Serge’s archive left in Mexico has been the richest source of material.1 I have also had access to the thick FBI and Military Intelligence files on Serge obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA);2 and the Hoover Institution’s Trotsky collection within the Boris Nicolaevsky Papers. Additional primary source material came from the enormous quantity of journalism Serge produced in more than twenty publications in France, Belgium, Spain, the United States, Ukraine, Mexico and Chile. Serge’s articles are written mainly in French, but also in Russian, Spanish and English. Secondary sources include the works of Serge’s contemporaries, much of the vast memoir literature, and the important secondary literature on the Soviet Union and Comintern for the years covered.