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RESTLESS WITNESS

Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary

by Mitchell Abidor

Pluto Press 2026 ISBN: 978 0 7453 4885 8

Reviewed by Howard Slater

The truth is never fixed; it is constantly in the process of
becoming and no absolute border sets it apart from error

- Victor Serge

Who was he? Victor-Napoléan Kibalchich? Le Rétif, Ralph, Yor, R. Albert? What was he? Individualist Anarchist? Illegalist? Syndicalist? Libertarian-Bolshevik? Left-Oppositionist? POUMist? Personalist? Anti-Communist? Cosmic-Poetist? Whilst this may read like the resumé of a shape shifting police spy it could be said to present any biographer with a host of problems. We are not dealing with a straightforward biography that can be easily pieced together by a visit to the Party archives, but with a border-hopping transience that entails lost manuscripts, lost comrades, lost sanity and the murk of a polemical warfare that carries with it not just befuddled duplicity and doctrinal self-exemption but continual threats of arrest and assassination.

However, Mitch Abidor has another problem. Victor Serge, as he came to be lastingly known, used his life-experiences as the basis for a series of novels, historic works and a well-known memoir, that make the work of a biographer challenging in that the story to be told has already been written. Abidor mitigates this early on in this book by saying that Serge, especially in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, made “retrospective modifications” of his past and so promises his readers a more objective take on Serge’s life than that provided by the novels which can, perhaps, be seen as smoothing over the contradictions of what – from the point of view of our expectation that a person take up a life-long political position – are offered up by some as deliberate occlusions that mark out Serge as untrustworthy.[1]

Abidor provides enough evidence to suggest that Serge romanticised the revolutionary credentials of his Russian parents and fleshes out the accusations from former comrades that befell him as he moved away from illegalism (armed robbery for the cause) during his five-year stretch for his ‘involvement’ in the Bonnot gang. More damaging than this fallout was the accusations from anarchist circles of his role as a “paid liar and slanderer” for his work under Zinoviev in the Comintern; especially in the immediate aftermath of the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion. It is here that Abidor’s research into the French anarchist response to Serge’s writings for Bulletin Communiste comes up with myth-busting criticisms that depict Serge as towing the Bolshevik party line to a quite disturbing degree.

Whilst Abidor offers mitigating circumstances here (a large family to feed, a sense of security after much displacement) and documents Serge’s own sense of betrayal which he articulated in private (for instance to the visiting Emma Goldman and Alexander Berman), there is a sense that in order for this book to function as a political biography then there has to be some caution employed when dealing with Serge as a novelist. Are his novels the site in which a fabulist is engaged in those “retrospective modifications?” Are his character’s too idealistically drawn to be taken as empirically real? When the novels are cited they are so as corroborating evidence and not so much for their psychological and affective import. In this light, Abidor, citing the harsh words of Sahagian, seems to have some truck with the latter when he offered that as Serge “grew older, the scoundrel child continued his misdeeds by giving himself over to the activities of a writer, at first in service to the party, and then in service to his imagination.” What we have here is a demonisation of ‘writing’ and ‘imagination’ as ill-fitting for politics proper.

This might seem like ‘finical criticism’ but it highlights that Abidor’s book is a political biography and not a literary biography. So what? Well, aside from the reifying separations of publishing categories, it does suggest that much in Serge’s novels remains superfluous to politics if by ‘literary’ we mean more than just artful asocial fabulation and if, conversely, by ‘politics’ we mean more than just ideological coherence. “Psychology exists” says Serge, and even though this is an often-repeated refrain in his Notebooks (co-translated by Abidor), it seems that the psycho-social discernments made realisable by this plea are not to be taken up here as an element of Serge’s political thinking. It is in this light that Serge’s speaking of an “inner counter-revolution” relates not just to bureaucratic power-plays within organisations, but to the fallback onto a conditioned inner-life, an “inner complicity,” that Serge’s novels do much to counteract.

So, why did Serge choose to write novels? These are novels chronicling his life yet they are more than just the subjective reportage of a roman-à-clef. They are novels in which ‘inner experience’, the sub-vocal, comes to threaten its detractors by being transformed into what Lacan called ‘full speech’ (Abidor reports how, after death, Serge’s mouth was held shut by a bandage.) These are novels in which Serge himself is either decentred or multiplied into characters that, by means of empathic identification, create hybrid personalities for himself. These are novels in which, to repeat, “psychology exists,” for in its absence we are left with a lack of psychical nuance that disables us from not only “mastering the threats we bear within ourselves,” but, as our times readily display, hinders our ability to diagnose the hypnoid states and historical amnesias of those in power.[2]

It can’t be said that Serge was a revolutionary theorist. Whilst he was a friend to Trotsky, was aware of the writings of Karl Korsch, Walter Benjamin and Benjamin Fondane and spent time with André Breton and Otto Rühle in Mexico (a quite eclectic bunch) he chose to write novels (and some poetry) rather than engage in discursive exegesis. A reason for this is perhaps provided by Abidor: having translated Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours, Serge picks up on its domineering tone which is “something of great importance, for this tone is essentially one of intolerance” that “implies the claim to the monopoly of truth, or, to speak more accurately, the sentiment of possessing the truth.” That such writing leads to an off-putting smugness cannot be brushed aside as a diversionary matter of style and bourgeois aestheticism nor, in its convincedness, can it be seen an undoubted sign of commitment.[3]

To speak of ‘tone’ is to speak of the unconscious of a text, the affective infrastructure of writing, and, in this way, Serge as novelist offers his more theoretically inclined readers the underside of abstraction as the concrete of an everyday life of struggle in which an overlooked “private existence in the mundane” reveals psychological vicissitudes, emotional contours, that “escape all dialectical recovery.”[4] If Blanchot means by this a form of identitarian resolution then such a straightening of emotional contouring relies upon the prop of accustomed categories. On the other hand what is felt, the ongoing psychical dynamism of the everyday, can often not be expressed by means of distinct attributes, so the tone that Serge objects to is one that adopts the position of a ‘true subject.’ Such a silencing of the psychical remainder is a means of attracting an authority to oneself in that there is an apparent resolution of those emotional vicissitudes that beset most people.

It could be said that Abidor sidesteps these avenues in turning to an investigation of Serge’s attraction to ‘personalism.’ Once more Abidor’s research brings to light a little-known aspect of Serge’s intellectual life: “I do not think of myself as at all an individualist: rather as a ‘personalist,’ in that I view human personality as a supreme value, only integrated in society and in history.” Abidor provides a geneaology of this concept that is associated with Emmanuel Mounier and the Left-leaning Catholic journal Esprit, but for Serge, who mainly espoused his ‘personalism’ in correspondence, the underlying factor in this set of ideas is the “defence of the human person” or, as he states in a notebook entry: in the depths of defeat what is left to us is non-consent to the inhuman.” [5] Is this not so much a later intellectual conversion as a continuity with Serge’s earlier sense of Anarchism as “to strive to be, to – despite it all – realize your own personality, your own personal ideal, and our common ideal.”

As theorists, from Freud to Lefebvre, demonstrated, the everyday would soon come to figure as just as fertile a socio-historical terrain as institutional politics and it is here that the novel, often castigated as a bourgeois form, came, often beside itself, to politicise this domain of the everyday as ‘personalist,’ as a psychological reality and not as the banal space where “nothing happens.” Is it this take on the everyday, with its sense of the subject as “anyone whatsoever,”[6] that gives rise to both a commonality and to those emotional vicissitudes that defy the ‘I’ in its authoritarian claim to be the purveyor of stable truths? Is it Serge as novelist who can thus eschew both the “dogmatic revolutionism” and “self-satisfied political purity” that he discovers in Trotsky’s tone and which some of his revolutionist characters espouse?

In the conclusion to this book, Abidor asserts that it is impossible to define Serge politically, but by this are we still not posing the possibility of his being politically encapsulated, are we not still in pursuit of some ‘true subject’ and its concurrence with a ‘true politics’? So, Serge’s later stance and public polemics as he grew distant from his comrades, as political disagreements were exacerbated by personal differences, are seen as his final word. That Serge, like many others, fell foul of taking up identifiable political positions amidst a dearth of possibilities, is more a testament to the reductive and de-psychologising nature of politics proper, that, as Serge wrote in his Notebooks, had lost the powers of imagination. To this end, Serge’s hopes for a post-war democratic socialist Europe, a bulwark against Soviet totalitarianism, has him cast as ending his days as a “reformist social democrat.”[7]

As with what is called his ‘anti-communism’ this turn to social democracy begs the question of the content of these descriptors. A refounded democracy has often been called for by those identifying as revolutionaries in that ‘democracy’ can still wield some sense of ‘socialism and liberty’ as went the name of an exiled group that Serge was involved in along with Benjamin Péret, George Munis, Julián Gorkin, etc. The hope, however dashed, that “traditional democracies can become revolutionary” was perhaps seen by Serge as a realistic option in light of the paranoid terror meted out to the former revolutionists of a Stalinist Russia that brought the word ‘communism’ into protracted disrepute.[8] Whether this should lead to support for a US-led West, as Serge’s disagreements with Jean Malaquais brought forth, is there to be consulted and unpicked in this book.

These disagreements occurred at the time of Serge’s resignation from the International Socialist Commission and Abidor unearths a letter from the leaders of this grouping to Serge, in which, amongst other hard-hitting points, they suggest that Serge “has the right to prefer snobbish intellectual gab sessions where great psychological and even spiritual problems are discussed.” It may well be that Serge was aloof and cantankerously defensive, but these words of rebuke can also be seen as indicative of Serge’s move away from socialist dogmas towards psychological study (“considering the person from within,” “internal censor” etc.) that, just as it surpasses ‘personalism,’ had no possible outlet in a political group outside of the active curiosity of a “small milieu of trustworthy non-sectarian comrades.” Serge himself commented on these disagreements in a way that speaks of his long term interest in Nietzsche: “The ‘possession of the truth’ to be connected to the will to dominate.”[9]

It’s highly likely that these “gab sessions” were attended by Herbert Lenhoff and Fritz Fränkel, two trained psychoanalysts who Serge considered as close friends. In an entry in his Notebooks, Serge, mourning and commemorating the latter’s death, mentions that he was intending to collaborate with him on a project around the “psychology of the militant” and had been so taken with him that he proposed taking dictation from Fränkel “who had sounded the depth of so many extraordinary cases.” Indeed, as his Notebooks gradually illustrate and bearing in mind the existence of an extensive correspondence with Lenhoff, Serge could be seen to be moving in the direction of those Frankfurt school-style investigations that focused in on the ‘authoritarian character’ in an ‘administered world’: “Just as political economy was the revolutionary science of the capitalist era, psychology will perhaps be the revolutionary science of totalitarian times.”

In an article that parallels the concerns of this review, Martha Sonnenberg cites Trotsky as suggesting to Serge that his novels are too psychological and insufficiently political. She goes on to offer that Serge’s novels “allows us to appreciate revolutionary contradictions at a level of complexity that logic alone cannot reach.”[10] It is the dynamism of such contradictions as these that, coming into conflict with the ‘ideological coherence’ and that ‘knowing tone’, encourage us to be witness to the ‘illogical’ psychical conflicts of his characters (and by extension those of his readers identifying with them) as these reach out to something as yet unformed. Rather than the psychological, like the writing of novels, be seen as solipsistic self-reflection, is it not rather Serge’s presentation of inner experience as ‘revolutionary thinking’, as a process of becoming, as idiomatic concurrence, that makes his novels function as political documents? Albeit, after Adorno, a politics that takes on board “the subjective conditions of objective irrationality.”[11]