VICTOR SERGE: A REVOLUTIONARY HUMANIST
Insightful writers shed light on the burning issues of their time and help people to navigate the forces surrounding them. But the issues of one generation are not always those of succeeding generations. When I first read Victor Serge in the 1960s, I was impressed by his attempt to combine a realist appreciation for the realities of power with an idealist focus on achieving justice without sacrificing liberty. During the era of my youth, the question of social revolution seemed like a very real one, but in the early decades of the 21st century, such concerns have almost totally receded. Yet, we continue to face the dilemmas that Serge struggled with: the relation between means and ends, the role of violence in bringing about social change, and the power of the people to alter the course of history.
Victor Serge was a participant in many of the revolutionary movements of the early 20th century, including the Russian Revolution. Author of political novels, essays, and the uniquely insightful Memoirs of a Revolutionary, he commands great respect and even affection from those who appreciate his lifelong efforts to combine socialism and liberty.
Serge’s writings tell us what we most want to know about the European revolutions of several generations from an insider’s view. In so doing, Serge enables us to draw political conclusions from a solid familiarity with people, events, and ideas. This historical dimension accounts for some of the attraction that Serge’s writings continue to hold for us even today. His novel Last Times, a first-hand account of what it was like to experience the fall of France and the Nazi takeover, was just reissued, and it combines Serge’s acute observations with his unique understanding of these events based on his vast experience.
Serge’s writings also continue to hold our attention because of their underlying syndicalist philosophy, which seems even more relevant to our future than it was in the early twentieth century. In those days before World War I and the Russian Revolution, syndicalism was the strongest movement on the left and commanded a large following among intellectuals and workers. Today, there is still a need to counteract the power of the capitalists and managers over workers and to initiate a self-managed economic system, the basic tenets of syndicalism. That hasn’t changed since Serge’s time. But what has changed is that there is a need today for decentralized production which will facilitate greater worker involvement in decision-making, since much of the economy must shift to human-scale production from economies of scale in order overcome the extreme division of labor. Peer-to-peer relationships must replace hierarchical ones.
It has long been commonplace to use the history of revolutionary movements in the 20th century as the basis for deflating leftwing utopian politics. Solzhenitsyn has claimed that a direct line runs from communist ideology to the horrors of Stalinism and the gulag archipelago. However, Serge’s account of the revolution and its aftermath tells us how it looked through the eyes of an actual participant. We come to understand the intentions of the revolutionaries and the choices they faced within a particular set of circumstances. In other words, Serge gives us much valuable material from which we can form our judgment of the Russian Revolution and its course.
Serge maintained that the Social Democrats and the anarchists were incapable of taking power when it became clear that the constitutional government in Russia was going to fall in 1917. The Social Democrats were sentimental about the prospects for democracy in Russia, while the anarchists were emotionally attached to the principle of liberty and lacked an appreciation of the realities of power. If the Bolsheviks had not seized power and instituted a dictatorship, the White forces of counter-revolution would have been victorious and instituted a reign of terror against all those suspected of being Red. And this is what in fact did happen in those areas controlled by the Whites.
The Whites with the support of the capitalist powers had blockaded the country causing a famine; they also posed a military threat to the survival of the Communist regime. Under such circumstances, it was very difficult for the more democratic elements within Bolshevism to assert leadership. There were no alternatives to intolerance, the suppression of dissent, and the use of terror. An enlightened democracy led by elected representatives and supported by a free press could only be a dream in the face of what Serge calls “the ruthlessness of history.”
In response to the common argument that the seeds of Stalinism were already present in Bolshevism from the very beginning, Serge emphasized that the Bolsheviks were not united behind a single ideology. There was a spectrum of opinion from libertarian to authoritarian socialism. The bureaucratic centralism of Stalin was by no means the inevitable outcome of the Russian Revolution. Serge shows how at many different points along the way in those early years, it was poor choices that led to the degeneration of the revolution.
The formation of the secret police, the Chekas is an example of a terrible choice that had devastating consequences over the years. The Communist Party was supposed to control the Chekas and to ensure that they were led by incorruptible people. But, as Serge points out, the threat from the blockades, various interventions, and all kinds of conspiracies was so grave that the Bolshevik leaders failed to sufficiently control the secret police. Consequently, the Red terror became a reality and many executions without trial took place.
Serge maintains that revolutionary tribunals operating publicly and allowing the accused to defend themselves could have achieved the same degree of security without the fear, arbitrariness, and injustice caused by secret police abuses. Serge notes that the secret police at the lower levels attracted people of the worst kind, those with deep feelings of social inferiority who had experienced much suffering and humiliation in the jails of the Tsar’s regime. Such people filled with bitter resentment saw conspiracies everywhere.
At this historical juncture, Serge makes it clear that the Party was still relatively open and democratic. Behind the scenes, he and others like the writer Gorky were able to intercede with secret police leaders that they knew personally in order to save individuals who were the victims of injustice.
Serge also gives a poignant example of just how powerful the secret police became within a few years. Once the civil war was about to end, the time seemed right for the Communist Party to end summary executions. However, before the order could be given, the Chekas massacred hundreds of prisoners and justified the slaughter by saying they were counter-revolutionaries. The Politburo made up of Lenin and Trotsky and several others who had brought about the revolution was unable to decisively move against the secret police and break their power. Serge attributes this reluctance to a combination of fear and the power of the Chekas. Then, Russia was invaded by Poland and the death penalty was reinstated and secret police powers were enhanced. Trotsky justified the use of terror under such dire circumstances and said that the dictatorship of the proletariat would have to last for several decades.
Serge’s reputation as a defender of liberty has suffered due to his failure to publicly attack the dictatorship under Lenin for its suppression of dissent and use of terror against real or imagined opponents. In response to criticisms, Serge stated his belief that only the Bolsheviks had the conscious will and ability to prevent the restoration of the old order in Russia. To withdraw support for the Bolsheviks was the same as supporting the counter-revolution during a time of civil war.
Serge refused to take such a step due to his complete lack of respect for the old order in Europe. He held capitalism directly responsible for the terrible class exploitation that he experienced firsthand growing up and for the ghastly casualties of World War I. Serge alludes to Lenin’s remark about how unfortunate it was that the first socialist revolution took place in the most backward of European nations. Then he goes on to say: “Nevertheless, within the current situation of Europe, bloodstained, devastated, and in profound stupor, Bolshevism was, in my eyes, tremendously invisibly right. It marked a new point of departure in history.”
Like Trotsky, Serge held out the hope that the Russian working class would ultimately force Stalin out and bring back the old revolutionary ideals. In spite of the thaw that took place after Stalin’s death, the betrayal of the revolution was not, in fact, reversed. Serge never considered the possibility that revolutionary Russia could be a force for evil.
No doubt, the sensitivity that Serge showed to the personal dimension of politics is highly attractive. For him, there were no shortcuts to action that allowed him to bypass ethical considerations in the relation of means to ends. In addition, he refused to take refuge in notions of historical fatalism that would obviate choice.
Although Serge was not a systematic theorist of politics, The Memoirs of a Revolutionary brings his time alive politically in a way that few authors can match. In the process, he offers much food for thought as he addresses the tough political questions of his time that remain difficult challenges in our time. Serge dealt with the role of the intellectual in politics by emphasizing the need for both intransigence and respect for those whose views differ from our own. Intransigence is needed so that we can put our convictions into action. For example, the leaders of the Russian Revolution often possessed the conviction of being in the possession of absolute truth. This enabled them to take decisive and timely action in the practical sphere of politics, but also produced intolerance and refusal to modify their doctrines in the face of reality. They were lacking a self-critical spirit toward their own beliefs and did not respect the beliefs of those with whom they disagreed. They saw their rivals and opponents as abstractions and failed to recognize the person, the living human being.
In Serge’s work, we can see the strengths and limitations of a revolutionary tradition that at its best shined a bright light on political and economic oppression and held out hope that human suffering could be diminished. First of all, Serge was a humanist, that is, he believed that all human beings had great value. Serge’s humanism is evident from his belief that the strength and clarity of the socialist revolution depended on humanitarian treatment of the Whites, the defeated enemy. Another important aspect of humanism is a critical spirit. But, as Serge recognized, the critical spirit did not survive due to the absolute power of the Communist Party and the prestige attached to the Soviet government as head of the movement of international socialism. Instead, there was complacency among the leadership and reliance on “official truths” that were often outright lies. By 1920, the revolution was doing nothing to restrain the abuses, excesses, crimes, and reactionary ideas that constituted the enemy within.
Serge accurately saw that Communist Party members in the Soviet Union had complete faith in the correctness of Marxist doctrine. Such certainty enabled them to act with great energy and intensity but also made them intolerant of any deviations. A further difficulty was an unwillingness to allow facts and reality to disrupt the theoretical fantasies that they derived from Marxist theory. Serge thought this tendency to ignore reality in favor of theory exemplifies theoretical intoxication that borders on delusion.
The Party’s corruption accelerated as many of the new people who joined were only interested in money, career, or adventure. This led to the greater bureaucratization of the Party against which the only safeguard was the dictatorship of the old Bolsheviks who were honest and incorruptible. But by 1936, Stalin had wiped out or forced into exile (Serge’s case) the entire cadre of revolutionary leaders who could have wielded power selflessly.
In summary, Serge attributed the decline of the revolution to both historical circumstances and human psychology. Soviet democracy had been destroyed by the Civil War and the attempts to defeat the counter-revolution, and by the famine that led to the rationing of goods by a bureaucracy. But he also explained its demise as due to Lenin’s emphasis on rigid discipline and emotional detachment that attracted activists of authoritarian temperament who had been formed by the fight against the despotic old regime. The workers and ordinary people who had been exploited and beaten down under Tsarist autocracy supported institutions that gave them power and enabled them to experience the satisfaction of revenge. These people who increasingly made up the government embodied the spirit of totalitarianism.
Serge’s explanation for the sad outcome of the revolution is good as far as it goes, but does it go far enough? I would go a little farther and say that the revolutionary movements, including the Bolsheviks, lacked sufficient understanding of the importance of human psychology. Like Serge, they saw a focus on the psychological dimension as individualism and an expression of bourgeois ideology. So the revolutionaries did not provide an educational means by which people could learn to keep their impulses for power and revenge under control. Without the development of psychological awareness, the chances of holding down the baser human impulses through appeals to ideology or morality are dim. Politically engaged people need to become aware of their strong inclinations toward egoism, self-righteousness, and anger and then work on such impulses in order to be their master rather than their servant.
The political class should be made up of self-aware people of action who are capable of standing back from and reflecting upon their own outlook. In addition, political leaders need to be open to other ways of thinking and able to revise their worldviews in light of new experience and information. Serge was highly aware of the need for political leaders to possess such capabilities, but he made no provision for mechanisms that would facilitate their attainment.
Until the habits of looking inward, managing one’s emotions, and empathic communication become more widespread in society, democratic institutions have a rather bleak outlook. They will either fail or, if they survive, it will only be through the existence of countervailing powers. In such cases, the power of the capitalist class can be offset by the power of government or the power of citizen movements so that gross inequality and injustice does not exist.
The struggles for power that exist within even democratic institutions are the reflection of popular psychology as much as they are its cause. Radical left and socialist thinkers such as Serge see the causation as more one-way from social structure to the individual. But social pathologies also reflect individual ones. Social institutions change in ways that are enduring when individuals make breakthroughs that enable them to let go of the habitual patterns of thinking and feeling with which they were socialized.
Both the attractiveness and limits of Serge’s perspective on historical change and development are clear from his 1943 article, “In Memory of Leon Trotsky” that appeared in Partisan Review. He saw Trotsky as representative of the highest type of person that has appeared in modern times, the selfless revolutionary. Personally disinterested and without egoism, such revolutionaries were dedicated to serving the common good and capable of personal sacrifice, while integrating thought and action. Surfacing in Russia between 1870 and 1917, this type “was a broad social phenomenon, not the sudden flashing of a comet.” From Serge’s standpoint, Trotsky was the product of history more than a great man, unique and individual.
Where I disagree with Serge concerns his insistence that history overshadows the individual. The great figures like artists, thinkers, saints, and servants of the people have shaken free from conventional ideas and use their creative gifts to propose new ways of being and doing that enable humanity as a whole to evolve. Of course, social conditions may not be right for their message to be heard. Think of Stendahl or Vico. But such people are the ones most responsible for bringing in the new ideas that enable humanity to address the challenges of the era and to release latent potentials and energies.
There is also the question of Trotsky’s ruthlessness, which Serge describes in the general case of Russian revolutionaries as toughness without any sadistic overtones in service to a cause. Since I advocate spiritual politics and the philosophy of nonviolence, I propose Martin Luther King as a political activist who demonstrated many of the qualities that Serge celebrates in the Russian revolutionaries. In terms of philosophy, though, King had a different notion of the relations between means and ends than is found in Trotsky.
For King, the use of means such as violence to achieve a political goal leads to the destruction of those very goals that the movement set out to achieve. Trade-offs are unavoidable. Either you endanger the ability of the movement to gain or maintain power or you weaken the movement’s ability to realize its stated goals. King unambiguously preferred to preserve the purity of his movement’s ideals by renouncing violence, while Serge with considerable misgivings defended the Communist Party’s resort to violence in order to preserve the revolution.
Trotsky believed that violence was necessary to overthrow the old unjust state and to wipe out opposition to the revolution, both internal and external. But, as Serge pointed out, the use of violence attracted an unsavory group of people often bearing grudges to the revolutionary cause. Furthermore, I doubt that there were ever enough selfless revolutionaries capable of acting with pure intentions within the vanguard party. Since the Communist Party was dominated by people acting egocentrically rather than idealistically, it was inconceivable that the Party would ever give up power, even after all opposition was destroyed. What I am saying is that Serge’s support of the Communist Party’s use of violence relies on a very optimistic assessment of its members’ psychology, one that is not based on a realistic evaluation of their propensities.
Let me reiterate that I find Serge’s attitude admirable in many ways. An important aspect of what makes Serge worthy of such admiration can be approached through reference to Robert Lifton’s idea of death and continuity as expressed in The Broken Connection. According to Lifton, although we are mortal in the sense that our body physically dies, we also experience life continuity through various forms of symbolic immortality such as biological and social continuity, religious notions of immortality, artistic and other forms of creation, closeness to nature, and experiential transcendence. Immortality through family is the most basic and universal way to symbolize continuity. But the biosocial mode of immortality also includes identification with cultural groups, organizations, nations, and the human species.
In Serge’s case, his primary identification is clearly with the human species and secondarily with the revolution as the means by which humans will realize their great destiny. He finds meaning in life only through taking part in the historical struggles to defend humanity against all threats to its full flowering and progress. By going beyond individual identity, he experiences himself at one with the rest of the world and with humanity. Even if he perishes, the struggle will continue as humanity strives to realize its vast possibilities. By identifying with humanity, Serge was capable of great sacrifice and courage. And socialism, in its anarcho-syndicalist version, was the great ideal that gave meaning to his life struggles. His own survival would only have value if it enabled others to escape their degrading captivity within an unjust world order.
The beauty of Serge’s mode of symbolic immortality is that it is inclusive. Since he integrates himself with humanity, no one is left outside. In many forms of symbolic immortality, the consequences are destructive due to attempts to triumph over other groups with whom one’s own group competes. It is true that Serge identifies socialism with humanity, thereby positing socialism as an absolute and as humanity’s future. Yet, he is not intolerant toward other ideologies. It is only out of self-defense that he supports violence against those who use violence to attempt to destroy socialism. But he espouses violence with much reluctance. And, unlike many Bolsheviks, he never believed that he possessed the absolute truth.
Serge’s background gives us a hint about sources of his identity. He grew up as an uprooted person, an exile, and later became a stateless person. Within the great diversity of peoples and places, he always recognized human beings and unique individuals. Even when he strongly identified with the Russian Revolution, he always kept his outsider status and critical perspective. He was aware that if the Revolution were safe and survived, then he would have to struggle against all the internal weaknesses and abuses that would destroy its moral capital. He never became a conformist, one who goes along with the prevailing system in order to reap its benefits regardless of the cost to others.
Despite his failure to adequately address issues of moral character in his political outlook, Serge was a humane, decent, and moral being who recorded the turbulence and upheavals of his time with outstanding powers of observation and an unwavering honesty.
