THE UNVANQUISHED MESSIANIC

On Victor Serge’s Notebooks 1936-1947, New York Review of Books, 2019 

Our generation has learnt the hard way that the only image we shall leave is that of a vanquished generation. That will be our legacy to those who follow.

-          Walter Benjamin 

As the author of Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge is in little need of an introduction. These memoirs, both non-sectarian and non self-aggrandising, are a testament to a lifetime of commitment to the overthrow of capitalism. Whilst, in the70s, Serge was claimed for the Trotskyite camp it takes only a little delving into his essays and novels to realise that he began life as an individualist anarchist and was first imprisoned for his refusal to turn evidence against members of the infamous Bonnot Gang – a loose group of anarchist illegalists who decided that their anti-capitalist contribution would be to rob banks to finance worker’s causes. Whilst Serge’s eventual relocation to Soviet Russia and his support and work for the fledgling Bolshevik government may see like an inconsistent turnaround, this is in part due to the rigid and partisan historiographies of the times that since the 70s have been enriched to reveal anarcho-syndicalist currents in operation at the time as well as the better-known presence of Makhno in Ukraine. The very title of Voline’s rich history of this post-1917 tendency – The Unknown Revolution – bears testament to this. Indeed, the very notion of a ‘soviet’, developed in 1905 by the practical activity of the worker’s themselves, is more or less apposite to notions of anarchist self-determination and of autonomy from the state-form. That Serge, with tens of thousands of others, eventually found himself interned in a Gulag is more than suggestive of a dissident Bolshevik current, given formal shape by the Workers Opposition, and, as Serge attests, that was more or less wiped out in the Stalinist purges. 

However, there is a deeper, forward-dawning, strain that undermines any accusation of Serge’s ‘inconsistency’ in that, in an essay on Nietzsche dating from 1917, Serge addresses this very issue himself: “But every personality is multiple. It would be more correct to say that in each of us there are diverse potentials or active personalities that successively dominate […] It is thus under the pressure of exceptional circumstances [that] unexpected characteristics reveal themselves, incoherent and logical, paradoxical and necessary.” This proto materialist-psychology is a far cry from what Georg Lukacs, several years later, would develop in his theory of class consciousness; an important book, but one that its own author, decades later, described as a book informed by “messianic utopianism.” This self-critical assessment is not the shameful indictment that Lukacs seems to be levelling against himself, especially if we consider the crucial importance of a ‘social imaginary’ in the struggle against capitalism. What Serge is pointing to in this early essay of his, is not only an idea of revolutionary struggle that he here refers to as “a combat for the most intense life,” but that, via Nietzsche and before the popularisation of Freud, Serge is explicitly presenting the left milieu with a psychological dynamic of a decentred and contradictory ‘subject’ before writers such as Ernst Bloch and others coined the phrase ‘subjective turn.’ 

But it is not a matter of precedence here as there had been a strain of ‘psychologising’ in the individualist anarchist milieu of which Serge was a part (hence the ‘No Psychologising!’ refrain that he heard frequently in Bolshevik circles?) Furthermore, the wider social-historical dynamic of the 30s seemed to make this ‘subjective turn’ inevitable: from the rise of Fascism and its hatred of the other, to the Stalinist purges and the concomitant Stalinisation of communism through to the defeat of the Spanish Revolution and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact leading into World War II, the sense of defeat, expressed in Benjamin’s header quote, was palpable enough for Serge to title one of his books ‘midnight in the century’ and look towards underlying reasons for theses betrayals and defeats. Whereas many of his contemporaries committed suicide, Serge, perhaps being more robust after experiences of revolutionary combat, jail, gulags and penury, and as a prolific novelist, chose to document these years in novels like Unforgiving Years and Last Times. For what is palpable in these late novels is that Serge, never a propagandist or author of ‘proletarian novels’, gave voice not only to despair and defeat, but to the tenor of his comrades’ commitment, self-less dedication and mutual-aid. Serge honours the fallen in a manner that Benjamin describes as their being redemptively rescued from oblivion when the victors (be they Capitalist or Stalinist) write their redacted histories. 

All this and more is present in the 600 page tome that is Serge’s Notebooks 1936-1947 which document the last decade of his life; a decade which saw him leave Paris at the onset of the Nazi invasion, travel south to Marseilles and cross the Atlantic with such luminaries as Andre Breton and Claude Levi-Strauss to eventually settle in Mexico. The Notebooks are at once a private record of his thoughts and feelings; a chronicle of the lives of his fellow political exiles in Mexico (e.g. Otto Rühle, Julian Gorkin) as well as a roll-call of the suicided and the imprisoned; a means for Serge to develop his ideas on capitalism as well as make a critique of a fragmented left and maintain his unbending opposition to Stalinism. Whilst such entries are not dryly written there is, in the Notebooks, passages of prose-poetry as Serge, fascinated by the daily life of Mexico describes his surroundings which included touring ancient sites with his partner, the ethnologist Laurette Séjourné, and visits to Volcanos with the painter and veteran of the Mexican Revolution, Dr Atl. These latter descriptions, as well as those in which he describes his ocean crossing,  take on an unexpected cosmic grandeur as Serge seems to align the seismic military ructions of Europe with the deep span of a geological time which is seen as conferring a vastness and enlivenment to life. He writes: “Renewal of contact with the hot and violent earth, the earth that is part of a constellation, which the civilized forget” (73) and that “we need these small cosmic experiences to round out our social experiences.” (230) Not only does this have ecological implications it bears out why his son, Vlady, described his father as having a “materialist spirituality.” 

Such a depiction of Serge may come as a shock (or sound like an irrational phrase: Serge himself attests that he has “walked the borderline of madness”), but there is something uncannily akin to Walter Benjamin’s notion of a redemptive horizon to revolutionary thought and action in Vlady’s description of his father, which, as with Benjamin, enables Serge to inject a spirit of open-ended hope into such unforgiving years. Moreover, for the two authors, it is maybe the need to search for new revolutionary openings in the future that, as ‘dialectical leaps’, can prise open the word ‘spiritual’ and look beyond its mystical and monotheistic meanings. Serge writes: “The immaterial is not in the least unreal, but on the contrary an essential form of the real (thought) completely unexplainable by yesterday’s scientific rules.” This is one of the ways that we can appraise Serge’s growing interest in psychology over the course of his last decade. For him psychology was a “revolutionary science” and as such an indispensable factor in any coming revolution (two of his closest associates in Mexico were psychoanalysts: Fritz Frankel and Herbert Lenhoff). With ‘spirit’ as ‘psyche’, or as some sort of ineffable, hard to describe, affect – “one is so full of thoughts that they are no longer thoughts, but rather waves and winds of the spirit” (55) – this spirituality takes on a political efficacy in conditions in which, as he wrote, “everything must be begun again.”(104) 

As well as noting down his inklings as to how capitalism would transform after World War II, Serge obviously casts a glance back at his revolutionary experiences and offers some criticisms of the Left. His abhorrence of Stalinism has been well documented across many of his books, but he takes them up again here in an atmosphere of suspicion and fear – “assassinations are being prepared against us” (144). The reach of the Soviet state extended far and wide: Trotsky’s assassin had wheedled his way into “the old man’s” trust; spies and informants attended meetings of the non-authoritarian socialists that Serge was close to; a press censorship and Stalinist ‘takeover’ of journals closed down Serge’s publishing opportunities to the point that Serge remarked he was writing for the top drawer of his desk. In one scathing assessment of Stalinism, amongst many, can be read the following: “The face of the Revolution, eaten away by incurable internal illness, was changing. It had become nothing but persecutions, ever-growing proscriptions, and the extirpation of heresy.” (39) Refusing to endorse a Trotskyist Fourth International or join groups he described as a “leaderism of minorities” (348), Serge even cast doubt upon the future role of the workers movement: “perhaps,” he muses, “its grandeur was tied to that of capitalism.” (104) But, whilst thoughts like this are not pursued in any depth, one consistent thread weaving itself into a prominent theme is the Left’s lack of engagement in social psychology. 

Serge describes a dishevelled non-Stalinist left as one of “petty interests”, of “verbal maximalism” and “intellectual inertia” that is burdened by the weight of old ideologies such as ‘a scientific socialism’ that showed little interest in the “role of the individual in history.” (379) Serge is here, not talking of the Great Men of History, but of that “uncountable crowd” of anonymous comrades who were the fibre of the mass movements of which he was a part and which feature as characters in his books. More than this, and informed by his work as a novelist, he is extending an existential tenor to each and every individual life beyond its homogenisation in a proletarian class. For Serge, not only is this psychological being “social by definition” (101), he also offers that “psychological and moral motives” are material facts that are “inseperable from real facts and every bit as objective.” (143) Is this psycho-social dimension a call for a reshuffling of what we know as history? To “brush history against the grain” of its supposed incontestable objectivity as Benjamin once remarked? Is it a matter, as Serge said of his own writerly ethos, of seeing the (micro) political efficaciousness of those “communions” that a “glimpse into the inner world of another” brings us? Is it that the ‘subjective factor’ has always resided in works of literature and that Serge, not explicitly, is hinting could come more to the fore in unsettling the “mental inertia” he detects in the remnants of the Left? That Serge shows an interest in Surrealism and attended some of their gatherings in Mexico (Breton is given short-shrift) is not an altogether disconnected fact to these musings and sits uncannily with Benjamin’s notion that the history of culture should be integrated into the history of the class struggle. 

Like Benjamin and Bloch, with their notion of the “not-yet-conscious”, Serge’s view of history as our acquiring an “historical sense” (302) akin to that of the sense of migratory birds is striking in that it is suggestive of a sensuousness, a suppleness to a history that, unlike the history of the victors, can continually reveal its hidden treasures as spurs to social change: a coming to consciousness, a re-dynamism, of the still latent effusions of the past. All is not lost these authors seem to say as in linking history to the senses, a reified history becomes a history, a site of ‘living labour’, once more imbued with corporeal life. This also reveals a Nietzschean notion of becoming, a sense of living in a transductive continuity with a past which implies our participation in a becoming across the span of history. Ideas such as these give rise to at least two further musings. The open-ended view of a sensualised history, with its existentialist component, is essentially unfinished and, as he writes, “history is also made up of the unforeseen” (514) by which he implies that the ‘subjective factor’, if not simply taken as individualism but an ‘irreducible factor’, had, in his time, barely impacted on the revolutionary left and, in our time, is still a pressing factor that has not been played out. In this Serge is close to Benjamin’s almost surrealistic phrase: “revolutionary chance.”  But, the flipside of this is that Capital too has not been played-out; it too is in a process of becoming and, dotted throughout these Notebooks, Serge attempts not so much to prophesise but mark out some lineaments of developments we have since become familiar with. 

As well as drawing attention to command economies and an ever-growing technocracy, one such lineament is his foreseeing the rise of consumer society in the post-war ‘reconstruction’ – “capital will impose production for consumption” – which he suggests will have a seductive power that may be an attempt to stimulate us and put pay to the penury of the 30s, but, he adds, will in no way bring about an awakening, or, as he puts it, a “breakthrough to the human.” (408) Quite the opposite. In entries reminiscent of the Situationists and the Frankfurt School, Serge all but names the ‘spectacle’ and the ‘cultural industry’ when he has it that “spiritual production” will be “subject to the laws of the market place” and render us up to a “proliferation of degraded products and fakes.” (265) In Last Times Serge asks “are industrialised societies going to become immense rationalised prisons? It seems they are headed towards this paranoiac perfection”. So, culture itself will become totalitarian as the mass propaganda of the Nazi state shifts over to the big screen of popular entertainment with its aim of “thought control” as Serge refers to it, which gives rise, or seeks to maintain “mental inertia”, and a sense of a presentism, the treadmill effect of capital’s homogeneous time, with its “penchant for bowing before concrete, immediate facts and refusal (fear) of questioning them.” (363) Here, again, we have that “materialist spirituality” that seeks to question notions of empiricism and statistical determinism, that have been mainstays of a Left that long ago demonised any utopian impulse as impractical dreaming.  

But utopianism, or the ‘social imaginary’, is surely a factor in recomposing the left that Serge urged back then. A recomposing that would be adequate to the dynamical changes of capitalism in the post-war years that Serge, from his vantage point in Mexico, could see no sign of. This did not stop Serge from speculating in this direction and, perhaps arising from discussions with Frankel he developed, however fragmented across these Notebooks, his own psychological theories which show a marked consistency with his essay on Nietzsche. We have already mentioned his notions on a de-centred subject that perhaps take its cue from Nietzsche when the latter hypothesised: “The subject as a multiplicity.”  Serge had his own phrases for this, “polypersonality” (399), and offered how as a writer he felt he had “escaped the ordinary limits of the self.” (399) This is far from Serge staking a claim to be some transcendental genius, far from it! For this brings with it notions of affective communication towards those who are ‘not like us’, the blurring of boundaries between ‘separate” people, when that ‘between’ of what he terms ‘communion’ gives rise to poetic effects that reside at a tangent to language: “To me it seems like the whole of our life, our communications with each other and the world at large, is woven from an infinite number of visible, invisible and partly invisible threads”. So, the ‘subjective factor’ in Serge, brings with it a sense of the unforeseen, of the still discoverable in ourselves and in others, as well as, as has been said of Freud, the human individual, as an efferent multiple, is no longer stood self-assuredly at the centre:  both a social world and a cosmos surround it. In Last Times he succinctly sums this up: “We exaggerate our own importance to the point of ridicule; we would be much more human turning away from ourselves the better to perceive the vastness of life […] of which we are only the tiniest fragment.”   

Rather than this be seen as Serge returning to the human as being dwarfed by an immensity that can do nothing more than summon up a monotheistic God, there is rather a subjective dialectic at play, or, rather, a modulation of the psyche, that, like a cat’s cradle, can have differing dynamics as they simultaneously act and interact within ourselves and with others and with the affordances of the social and cosmotic world. For Serge this leads to a vast opening to the other for as he writes “Psychological variability is infinitely more variable than the variability in physical types, the psychological substance being that which is most flexible and ductile.” (413) Being an obvious retort to the racism that more than shamed Europe, Serge suggests that his take on the power of imagination lies here: “The key to the imagination: admit that the other is profoundly different.” (533) Serge seems to be tired of the dogmas and exclusions of the Left as he had experienced it (at least in its institutional forms), and his offer of a ‘polypersonality’, whilst difficult to organise in the usual sense, has the impact of potentially multiplying the points of contact between a self and others, between history and the cosmos, between past and future. That this must necessarily imply a contradictoriness that can be seen as ‘inconsistency’ does not trouble Serge, for not only does it for him imply an expanded notion of intelligence “to include qualities of intuition and powerful feelings”, it is also the very stuff of revolution. Revolution is a “contradictory process” (356) that, as he wrote in 1917, must lead to a study of the “affinity of contraries.” 

Howard Slater 

References

 

Richard Greeman, introduction to Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years, NYRB, 1971/2008.

Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’, Verso, 2005/2016.

Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe, Verso, 1992/2017.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Vintage, 1968.

Victor Serge, ‘Essay on Nietzsche’ see the Victor Serge Archive at Marxists.org

Voline, The Unknown Revolution 1917-1921, Black Rose Books, 1975.