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Title: A disappointed revolutionary
Author: Sidney E. Parker
Date: 1963
Language: en
Topics: individualism, Victor Serge, review, Anarchy, Freedom Press
Source: Retrieved 07/06/2022 from https://archive.org/details/AnarchyNo.33
Notes: Published in Anarchy 33 (Vol. 3 No. 11) November 1963. Freedom Press UK.

Sidney E. Parker

A disappointed revolutionary

MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONARY, by Victor Serge. Translated by Peter

Sedgwick. (Oxford University Press, 42s.).

These memoirs trace the life of Victor Lvovich Kibalchich—alias Victor

Serge—“revolutionary, novelist and poet”, who began his political life

as a young socialist in Belgium, became active in individualist

anarchist circles in Paris, worked with the syndicalists in Barcelona,

joined the Russian Communist Party just after the 1917 Revolution, was

expelled for belonging to the Left Opposition, left Russia after a

period of exile in Central Asia, and died a revisionist Marxist in

Mexico in 1947. Serge writes well and the poet is present in many

passages (particularly in his evocations of Paris), but the book left me

with a sense of emptiness, a feeling of sadness that so much talent

should have been wasted in useless politicking.

The chapter I found the most interesting—and the most disappointing—was

the first, the bulk of which is devoted to Serge’s anarchist activity

before World War I. Repelled by the academic anarchism preached by Jean

Grave, Serge became prominent—under the name of Le Rétif—among the

individualists inspired by Albert Libertad (1875–1908) and was a close

friend of two of the so-called “Bonnot Gang” who, despairing of peaceful

propaganda, waged their war against society by means of armed bank

robberies. Serge gives only the sketchiest of descriptions of the ideas

he held at this time and the merest hints of his activities. Reviewing

the first French edition of the “Memoirs”, E. Armand remarked that Serge

was

“... a memoir-writer with a short memory who forgets the rôle he played

in regard to ‘l’anarchie’ (an individualist weekly—S.P.) with which he

collaborated from September, 1909 to January, 1912. If he tells us in

detail of the private life of Libertad ... he guards himself from saying

that he (Serge) was the man who searched for ‘rare sensations’, the man

of the unbounded ‘I deny’, the glorifier of the ‘Bandits’ on the morrow

of the rue Ordener affair (‘l’anarchie’, January 3, 1912), the exalter

of ‘the unsubmissive, deserters, thieves, because they are not adapted

to slavery ... for us (he wrote) they are the only men who dare to

revindicate life.’ Kibalchich has forgotten the endless Stirnerian,

Nietzschean and Ibsenian litanies that he gladly reeled off. As he

forgets rather indelicately that Rirette Maîtrejean was his companion

and that he did not stop writing to her for a long time ... “ (This last

omission is made good by a note by the translator in the English

edition—S.P.)

In addition, Serge makes the almost traditional misrepresentation of

Stirner and attempts, in usual Marxist style, to link conscious egoism

with “the most brutal bourgeois individualism.” He also tries to give

yet another death sentence to anarchism : “Between the copious

theorizing of Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Réclus, and the rage of Albert

Libertad, the collapse of anarchism in the bourgeois jungle was now

obvious.” Unfortunately this rather contradicts what he had written

earlier about Libertad being “the heart and soul of a movement of such

exceptional dynamism that it is not entirely dead even at this day (i.e.

30 years later.—S.P.)”. A case of “he’s dead, but he won’t lie down”?

The remainder of the book retells the now well-known and wearying tale

of the fate of enthusiastic idealists who supported the Bolshevik

seizure of power in 1917. Once more the tragic farce of the biters being

bit is unfolded and the ghosts of persecutors who fell victims to the

machine they helped to create are paraded before us. Serge sees these

men as the iron cohort of the Revolution. Actually they appear to be

more possessed men who drove themselves and others to pointless

destruction. He quotes “certain French individualists” who said to him:

“Revolutions are useless. They will not change human nature. Afterwards

reaction sets in and everything starts all over again. I’ve only got my

own skin; I’m not marching for wars or for revolutions, thank you.”

These words he dismisses as “cynical stock phrases”, but in view of the

evidence he himself provides one is led to the conclusion that “certain

French individualists” were not all that wrong.

In spite of his earlier individualist associations and his youthful

enthusiasm for Stirner, Nietzsche and Ibsen, Serge seems always to have

wanted to serve something greater than himself. He claims that even in

his individualist days “other influences were at work on me and there

were other values which I neither could nor would abandon: basically,

the revolutionary idealism of the Russians.” Outlining his conception of

the purpose of writing, he states that “Individual existences were of no

interest to me—particularly my own—except by virtue of the great

ensemble whose particles ... are all that we ever are.” Even when, in

his final summing-up, he says that “I view human personality as a

supreme value”, it is so “only integrated in society and history.” And

while disclaiming “any yearning for self-effacement” he nonetheless

concludes “nothing of us is truly our own unless it be our sincere

desire to share in the common life of mankind.”

From all of this his abandonment of anarchism for Bolshevism becomes

understandable. Russian “revolutionary idealism”, like other idealism,

was founded on the idea that the individual should give “all for the

Cause.” If “individual existences” are only of interest insofar as they

are particles of the “great ensemble of life”, and the “supreme value”

of human personality is dependent on being “integral in society and

history” and desirous of sharing “the common life of mankind”, then

individual uniqueness is at a discount and the forces that really matter

are abstractions like “society”, “history”, and “mankind”. Enraptured by

these spooks Serge left the clear-eyed shown by Libertad and other

“cynics” and stuck his head into the Marxist-Leninist noose. He paid the

price with his suffering, his despair at the betrayal of his hopes, his

agony at the deaths of his friends. So did thousands of others. The pity

of it is that the lesson taught by his life will only be learned by

those who have tasted at least a few of the bitter ashes which are all

that remains of a once searing fire.

SID PARKER.