Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary (NYRB 2012) left me with the strong urge to write. Indeed among its strongest implicit lessons is that writing is a moral and political task. In the final, hurried chapter Serge defines “intellectual work” as “understanding and expression” (437)—the clarity and force of this makes me think it must be a well-worn line drawn from some classic author unknown to me. It’s an excellent, if capacious, definition. Here, in any case, are some extremely disorganized reactions to this extraordinary book.

           

Serge tells his own story from when he was a boy in Belgium in the pre-war years, up to his arrival in Mexico from Vichy. His memory is almost incredibly prodigious. How can he recount all these things, all these names, with such confidence? Doubtless he make some mistakes, but perhaps we can say this is what you get when you combine a novelist’s eye for detail and character with the time to think that prison can give a person, and with the necessity, born of political chaos and danger, of carrying everything in your head. And in any case, especially once the narrative arrives in Russia, there is a clear work of memory or witness going on. Serge has known many extraordinary people, almost all of them on one loosing side or another. The Old Bolsheviks he knew, in particular, were actively erased from history. Not even history will be safe if we loose (or, rather, if they win). Indeed. 

           

I picked this book up almost by chance. The milieu of Serge’s early life, French-language radical and anarchist, is one I know a little. And it is a compelling read. Serge’s family background—Russian and very political—profoundly shaped his engagement with French and Belgian milieu, of course, but the language of pure revolt, the instinct, the vital necessity of revolt, this is all familiar. And it seems to me that Serge never gives up certain aspects of this early world. For instance an almost biological approach to revolutionary possibility matched with a capacious and idealistic humanism. And he seems to have been an unusually acute participant-observer of the revolutionary years in Russia. I hedge here only because I feel myself radically unequipped to pass judgment on his judgments.

           

The central question, for Serge at least, in writing about 1917-20 is, what went wrong? His answer, at bottom, is simple: the Cheka. Serge recognized the political realities of the civil war, the necessity for rapid, summary justice in certain cases. In places he suggests that the Cheka had from very early on de facto independence, was essentially uncheckable by the political authorities, even when they sought to do so. Thus when the central committee decides to end capital punishment for political crimes, the Checka ‘liquidates their stock’ just before the new policy comes into effect, and this without repercussion. This interacts with other explanations, of course. Serge suggests for instance that if the Red Army had taken Warsaw in 1920 (126ff), then the domestic situation might have been quite different. But other conjunctural and psychological explanations for the Bolshevik choice for Terror are also offered. My own preference is usually for institutional or meso-level explanations for this sort of thing.

In any case, life and death, critical intelligence and fatal necessity, are at war everywhere in the Memoire (and these are basically 19^th century categories). For instance there is the (to me) surprising question of suicide, which returns at many points in the narrative. Does a Bolshevik have the right to take her or his own life? Does this not belong to the party? Is it not for the Party to decide when your usefulness has ceased? And then during the discussion the Moscow trials, we get the chilling line: “In any case, it was not a matter of persuasion: it was, fundamentally, a matter of murder” (394). But can this be entirely right? What about the spectacle of it all? Without claiming to understand better than Serge, it is nonetheless possible to say that, writing in 1940, the Terror of the late 1930s did not make sense to him (although perhaps it is only to me that it does not make sense?). It could not be explained in the way that some earlier episodes of terror could be. Even much of the systemic violence of these years, the destructive, criminal, inefficiencies of agricultural collectivization, this can be rationally understood on the basis of the relative powers and incentives of the various actors. How Stalin’s bureaucracy could fool itself at the expense of the peasant makes sense. But the Terror? Perhaps not. Interestingly, one line of analysis that he does not seem to pursue is the pathological-Stalin line. Neither the Terror nor anything else is laid entirely at Stalin’s door.

The critical intelligence, the free individual, has political prediction as one great and dangerous task. Many of Serge’s predictions seemed uncannily accurate. Almost untrustworthily so. Indeed some lines are very remarkable for being written in the early 1940s. For instance, “the most atrocious and tragic crime of our age: the extermination by the Nazis of the Jews of occupied Europe. Nothing at the present can measure the political, social, and psychological consequences of this crime. Even the idea of the human, acquired over thousands of years of civilization, has been put in question” (444). Also from late in the book, I was surprised to see a reference to Walter Benjamin’s suicide (and that he is described as a “poet” (427). In any case, the point for me is that Serge’s clairvoyance has very little or nothing at all to do with any reading of Marx he has done. Of course this vocabulary is important for him, and he is perfectly capable of class analysis when it is useful, but his background is anarchist and his politics are left-Bolshevik. And here I’m thinking less of the—in themselves very interesting—remarks at the end of the book, for instance the struggle with pessimistic conclusions about the value, never mind utility, of critical intelligence, but of the actual substance of his life as he recounts it.

This is the kind of book I want others to read and think about. I’m not sure that I would assign it to undergraduates—although perhaps it would be possible to excise a really useful 15 pages from it on the early Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War. Serge as a character is on the one hand appealing—intelligent, human, strong-willed in the best possible way. And on the other hand, one wonders. I had to consult the notes before I realized that he’d had three wives—this is how little a part they play in the narrative. At least one is also from, as it were, radical stock, but it’s still difficult to read about the in-laws being made to suffer for the sins of the son-in-law. Serge’s son is a much more fully-drawn character than anyone else in the narrative, certainly than the various wives. But this moral problem—the commitment to uncompromising truth versus the obligation to family—is not something Serge is willing to entertain. Nor indeed could he possibly have done for very long in his own life without wavering much more than he did. Nor are all of his political formulations ones it would be easy to accept today, for instance he is very, it seems to me oddly, aware of who looks Jewish.

Finally, a missed connection, unusual for someone like Serge who seems to have met practically every consequential person in his vicinity. For me one of the only really sour notes in the text was near the end, when he arrives in Martinique and finds “childlike Negroes” who are a “people...still in their infancy” and so unlikely to overthrow the “diluted form of slavery” that Serge quite rightly recognizes there (430). Serge knew André Breton quite well, and stayed with him in Marseilles waiting to get across the Atlantic. Breton does not seem to have been on the boat that took Serge to Martinique (unless I misremember). But Breton came to Martinique in the same period, and there seems to have wandered into a bookshop run by Aimé Césaire and his circle, where he picked up Tropiques and, looking through this locally-printed journal, declared it excellent. This was an important encounter because useful for Césaire and others. I wonder if Serge came into the same bookshop? The margins of empire and the gutters of war indeed.

Césaire marxisant

In the summer of 1935, the 22 year old Aimé Césaire published a short essay called “Conscience raciale et révolution sociale” in what was only the second and would be the last issue of L’Etudiant noir. By chance, I recently came across this essay—republished in 2013 by Les temps modernes—looking for a short piece of prose from Césaire suitable for anglophone undergraduates. “Conscience raciale” is probably not that piece, although it is very interesting. So interesting that I made a rough-and-ready translation of it and gave it to the students anyway, without great effect. Only later did I see that no less a scholar than Christopher Miller wrote about the essay in the PMLA a few years ago. The hook for Miller’s essay is that, thanks to the new availability of this short essay, we now know that Césaire used the word “négritude” for the first time not in the Cahiers in 1939, but in 1935, in quite a different context.

I don’t have very much to say about this here, but wanted to register a certain shock. The central point of Miller’s piece is that in “Conscience raciale,” Césaire is already engaged with a Marxist way of approaching the world, that his thought is already marxisante. Miller has other worthwhile observations, particularly linking this early text forward to the Cahiers and the Lettre à Maurice Thorez. And of course Miller is writing to tell people about this new Césaire text (and, as he does so, provide generous, translated, quotes). It seems that the relevant issue of the journal had been practically lost, and was brought to light only recently, reproduced in part in a 2008 book by Christian Filostrat. Hence the shock. Césaire is not a minor figure. How can this sort of material be, until recently, lost? How can there be the debate that, at least according to Miller, exists over Césaire’s relative awareness of Marxism in the 1930s?

Cesaire and postwar France

Césaire, Aimé. Discours sur le colonialisme. Présence Africaine, 1989. [1950?]

Reading Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme (1950) has affirmed my belief that products of the post-war Parisian intelligentsia need very much to be contextualized. I bought my copy of Césaire’s famous pamphlet used; they had several copies, probably it had been assigned in a class. The library has a similar edition. The original date of publication isn’t even to be found anywhere (instead we get a 1989 Présence Africaine copyright). The austerity of this edition should be compared to the more recent English-language translation, which has a flashy cover and an introduction.

This is an excellent opportunity to practice what I have recently come to think of as one of the main techniques, or perhaps the central imperative, of contextual intellectual history: to push back down into the muck of context any text that attempts to transcend the circumstances of its production and reception. One may say, generously, that it is only by assiduously contextualizing that it is possible to see the true value of any given work; the true value meaning the degree to which it is able to escape from its context. Put in more Lacaprian terms: certain texts resist the reader more than others, these are the texts to which we return, which challenge us—which are valuable. I’m a bit suspicious of this rarely-articulated valorization of transcendence and resistance.

At any rate, to Césaire. In 1950 Césaire was a member of the PCF, and this to me is the loudest voice in the Discours. His position is difficult, because he wants to demonstrate both the utter bankruptcy of European civilization, but also to save certain elements of it. This is, I think, typical both of the French-educated anti-colonialists of this period, and also for the most part of the Communists. Colonialism and racism aren’t put in a causal relationship here, as far as I can tell, but they are both barbarous; it is by way of the bridge-head of barbarism provided by colonial culture that racism enters Europe at its very heart, and leads, ultimately, to Hitler. Colonialism is a poison at the heart of European civilization, which has rendered it weak and decadent.

In a remarkable feat of historical parallelism, Césaire argues that just as Rome ultimately opened its gates to barbarians by destroying all the other civilizations around it, so Europe is failing because it has so relentlessly snuffed out the civilizations around it. I’m paraphrasing here, but the language of civilization, Europe, decadence, barbarism, poison...this is all very much Césaire’s. In the final pages, Césaire asserts that in order to save itself, Europe must put everything it has in the service of the proletariat Revolution that is in process in the areas it previously colonized. Save itself from what?

Et alors, je le demande: qu’a-t-elle fait d’autre, l’Europe bourgeoise? Elle a sapé les civilisations, détruit les patries, ruiné les nationalités, extirpé ‘la racine de diversité.’ Plus de digue. Plus de boulevard. L’heure est arrivée du Barbare. Du Barbare moderne. L’heure américaine. Violence, démesure, gaspillage, mercantilisme, bluff, grégarisme, la bêtise, la vulgarité, le désordre. (57)

That’s quite a list. So it’s the Americans, as the new avatars of capital, that must now be fought. Indeed, in the next lines we go directly from Wilson being asked what America will do now that it is about to control the world (in 1913!), to Truman’s generous offers of assistance to a ruined Europe. There’s a certain amount of controversy in the historiography right now about Truman, the Marshall plan, and American involvement in Europe in the postwar period. Did the Marshall plan really restart the European economy? In what sense? There is evidence that well before American capital began to flow into Europe, things had begun to get better—so perhaps it is hope that the US imported, before dollars? The relationship between hope and money is not, I think, likely to be understood soon, though perhaps closer attention to 1945-1955 in Europe isn’t a bad way of looking into it. This aside, it is possible to look, without much trouble, at the front pages of L’Humanité and other leftist newspapers in this period, and you’ll find plenty of anti-American vitriole. Graphs demonstrating how basic foodstuffs are becoming more expensive as a result of the Marshall plan, which was broadly accused of being a form of colonialism—after all, the story would go, we Europeans certainly know what economic domination looks like, having practiced it for long enough. So in this sense Césaire isn’t stepping very far from the PCF platform.

Much of the Discours is taken up by quotes or critiques of various writers, from Renan to Roger Caillois. (The former more or less equals Hitler, for Césaire—I wonder if Said draws much on Césaire for his treatment of Renan in Orientalism? Probably not). The critique of Caillois is interesting for several reasons, and a nice way to discuss the smallness of the Parisian world. Caillois is exactly the same age as Césaire, and also attended the lycée Louis-le-grand, though they may not have overlapped there. Caillois, in the 1930s, was a student of the cutting edge of academic ethnography in France (Dumézil, Mauss), and also (not coincidentally) with certain offshoots of the Surrealist camp. He was involved with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris in the creation of the short-lived Collège de sociologie. He was a hard-left anti-fascist, but (especially like Bataille) strange and scary, interested in limit experiences. During the war, Caillois goes to Argentina. He becomes something of a literary power-broker after the war, and is instrumental in bringing various South American writers to the attention of Paris, most notably Borges. But he also, after the war, repudiates the Communism of his younger years. In 1951, he published a pamphlet called Description du marxisme, that attacked Marxist dogmas of various kinds, generally accused it of being incoherent and, as a description of social reality, simply rendered obsolete by more recent sociological work. The young Roland Barthes wrote two extremely negative reviews of the booklet in leftist papers. (Barthes, by the by, may actually have been at Louis-le-Grand at the same time as Césaire).

So if one asks why it is that Césaire devotes 7 pages of a 60 page pamphlet to Caillois, we can perhaps respond by putting the Discours next to the broader policy of hard-left French intellectuals in the postwar of reflexively and viciously attacking anyone who criticized Marxism as a way of understanding the world. There are shades here—not everyone is actually PCF, and people still have differing views about what things are like in the USSR, but we can divide the great mass of the French intelligentsia in the years just after the war between the harder left (Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror) for whom the historical destiny of the Soviet Union must be defended unconditionally, and the softer left, for whom, at the very least, one can safely speak of the moral equivalency of the USA and the Soviet Union (Barthes, and others). It is this last position, really, that Tony Judt, for instance, is so intent on overturning. Cesaire should really be seen in terms of this debate, and his critique of colonialism should be seen as involved, at least instrumentally, with the ‘larger’ debate about Revolution and the Proletariat (both emphatically capitalized) going at this time.