Notebooks: 1936-1947 (New York Review Books Classics)

by Victor Serge

I carry away the impression of an extremely scrupulous man, troubled to the depths of his soul, who wanted to serve a great cause and no longer knows how.

Our long, disjointed conversation turns to the relationship between masters and disciples. I quote the words of Zarathustra-Nietzsche: “If you want to follow me, deny me.” Him: Buddha says: “If you encounter me, kill me.” Me: Don’t repeat that too often. They’ll do it. They won’t miss . . .

; it’s part of the wave of terror that’s unfurling. I explain that having killed some they can no longer look the others in the eye or put up with their silence. The old guard of the party understands that it must disappear; it will disappear.

No, Stalin isn’t mad. He has something grand in mind, and he sometimes loses his head. It’s terrible. I will make no revelations. I’ll do nothing that could harm the USSR. There is nothing else but the cause of the USSR. He noted that when he put his hand in his pocket to take out a cigarette I watched him closely. You distrust me, and it’s only natural. Yet we’d be happy, you and I, to die for the same cause. Me: “Not exactly the same.” I speak of socialism. He answers that the road to socialism passes through the might of the Soviet state. I’m worn out. I could be killed on any street corner, and one day I will be. All of this is unspeakably absurd.

Despairingly. We speak of the errors of L. T. [Leon Trotsky], who’s trying to establish the Fourth International without local parties worthy of the name. We conclude that it is harmful to play with the ideas either of a party or an International.

The book was recently reissued under an incorrect title: In Defense of Terrorism. In it Trotsky in no way defends what is currently understood as terrorism, but rather demonstrates the working class’s absolute need, in those revolutionary periods where it must either win or die, to show itself strong and capable of using all the harshness of war . . . In it he refutes Karl Kautsky’s criticisms of Bolshevism in the name of a democratic socialism that refused to accept any form of

Vienna they would construct the most beautiful working-class housing in the world, the wealthiest cooperatives, the best-designed swimming pools, the shiniest village halls . . . Dead men piled on dead men. The Weimar Republic is dead, socialist Vienna is dead, Karl Kautsky has just died in exile in Amsterdam, Otto Bauer just died in exile in Paris, ravaged by the sentiment of defeat; the Third International has been shot by a thousand bullets in the back of the neck . .

Years passed. Dark years, years growing darker and darker. The face of the Revolution, eaten away by incurable internal illnesses, was changing. It had become nothing but persecutions, ever-growing proscriptions, and the extirpation of heresy.

The Trotskyists were already directing all their fire at the POUM. I took the floor to justify the POUM’s participation in the Generalitat’s government in Catalonia, based on the need to monitor and influence the government from within and to facilitate the arming of the masses.

returned from Amsterdam saddened and dismayed: the impression of a sectarian movement controlled by maneuvers from above, suffering from all the mental depravities we’d fought against in Russia: authoritarianism, factionalism, intrigues, maneuvers, narrow-mindedness, and intolerance. Sneevliet and his party had had enough, finding the atmosphere unbreathable. They were honest and ponderous Dutch proletarians, used to fraternal mores. Vereecken, who adored the Old Man, said to me, “I give you less than six months before you break with him. He doesn’t put up with any objections.”

Our disagreements grew increasingly numerous, but the Old Man’s letters were affectionate—and I admired him beyond measure. When he wrote about the strikes of June 1936 that “the French revolution has begun” I responded: “Not at all. It’s just the beginning of the French working class’s recovery.” I advised him not to constantly intervene as he was doing in the internal affairs of every single group, no matter how small, and to limit himself to grand intellectual labors. Finally,

“An International can’t be founded without parties. . . . No party can be founded based on such bad political morals and with a Russian ideological language no one understands.” He responded: “Y...

From 1937 I completely cut myself off from this “movement” and wrote to Sneevliet: “This isn’t a beginning, it’s an end.” But I abstained from any controversy and tried to render any services I could to the militants and to L. D. Ugly stories, like the Trotskyists’ attempt to lay hands on funds belonging to the POUM, sickened me (a special commission, made up of Rosmer,* Lazarevich,* and Hasfeld straightened the affair out with great difficulty). The grand and noble movement for which we had given so many lives in Russia degenerated overseas into impotence and sectarianism. I continued to translate the Old Man’s books, The Revolution Betrayed, Stalin’s Crimes, Their Morals and Ours, and to defend him. In the public’s eyes I remained the best known “Trotskyist” writer, while the “Bolshevik-Leninists” were doing their best to discredit me.

would have been so simple to say that we are in disagreement on this and that point, but the Old Man and his supporters had become completely incapable of speaking in such forthright language. The terrifying atmosphere of persecution in which they—and I—lived inclined them to persecution mania and to the exercise of persecution.

1917, Spain, crisis. War and the self-centered egotism of everyone. Desire to go under fire at the front. “Life is not so grand a thing that it would be a misfortune to lose it or a crime to take it”

1928, meeting of the Opposition circle at the Ozet in Leningrad, Nevsky, I spoke openly and clearly of the degeneration of the Comintern. (No one yet dared admit this, Trotsky persisted in a formal fidelity and deep loyalty to an organization that it was already high time to think of replacing.

A propos of the Surrealist survey: “Is suicide a solution?” I was right in saying in Literature and Revolution (1930) that proletarians and revolutionaries think of conquering the world, of fighting, and not of the solution of suicide, which is that of young, maladjusted, or desperate bourgeois or petit bourgeois.

it’s the way a life was lived that defines the value of the period placed at its end.)

The hammer and sickle pain me inside this tomb: for me it is no longer the glorious symbol of the revolution, but the insignia of an inhuman fraud. Nevertheless, I understand why the Old Man was attached to it, and one day this emblem will perhaps recover its purity. I have my doubts. New departures require new symbols and words, as well as a profoundly new content. It’s only through renewal that we move forward.

When I tell her that the future will show who it was that carried on the Old Man’s work for socialism, we or the sectarian groupings of the Fourth International whose incompetence is obvious, she lowers her head, making a bitter sign of denial. I realize that I’m hurting her and change the subject.

Men need a sense of history comparable to the sense of direction of migratory birds.

With Hegel and Marx historical vision suddenly acquired a kind of plenitude. In Marx it is coupled with a will to dynamic, objective, and passionate action, and one might ask if the enormous spiritual magnetism of Marx’s work can’t to a large extent be explained by this revelation of the historical sense.

Compare in this regard Marx’s fertile power with the healthy and sometimes vigorous mediocrity of historians of the French Revolution like Thiers, Guizot, and Louis Blanc, who made what were, all in all, the same discoveries as Marx in the realm of historical methodology, but without passion, without dynamism in action; in a word, as men of the library for whom history is a scholarly autopsy and not the study of a living continuity.

The wars and revolutions begun in 1914 will give, indeed, are giving a probably colossal impetus to this form of lucid consciousness, despite—or even because of—the partial and momentary obscuring they provoke. 1. A remarkable historical sense tends to crystallize in a few educated men, a few men who are thus exceedingly dangerous. 2. A vague, diffuse, tendentious, and groping historical sense gradually and broadly penetrates the spirit of the growing masses. The spirit of reaction, the narrow interests and cultural ties among the masses, mental inertia, fear of reality—all these exercise a countervailing effect, while thought control seeks to coordinate these regressive tendencies.

The Moscow Trials were dramas cooked up by a visionary and courageous fear in the same way a man prey to panic turns around and furiously confronts a danger amplified by his imagination.

Trotsky was a characteristic example of a man who, in order to live, strove to integrate himself into history and whose intelligence never ceased subordinating itself to the sense of history. He says this clearly in the final pages of My Life. That at the end this doctrine and this voluntarism confounded his thought at a moment when real—historical—lucidity perhaps ceased to be possible, with neither analyses nor syntheses being doable in the rush of events, changes nothing in the case. He carried on the fight with weapons that had become insufficient. It must be noted that he was brave; that is, he had overcome fear in himself.

Impossible to separate knowledge from activity, knowledge is action, domination of nature and even human nature, utilitarian dynamism even in its most disinterested aspects, those furthest from practical activity. In this sense Nietzsche’s proposition that what is true is what serves life is profoundly correct: the search for truth is a combat for life; the truth which is never settled once and for all, being forever in the process of becoming, is a conquest ceaselessly recommenced through a more useful, more stimulating approximation to an ideal truth that is perhaps inaccessible.

In reality, Marxism remained a philosophy while losing from sight the fact that the world can’t be transformed without a constant renewal of its philosophy, without a permanent updating of the most general ideas in keeping with growing scientific gains.

The theory of ideological superstructures essential to historical materialism, based, in the final analysis, on the economic structure of societies, cannot survive without a major updating. Corollary: the understanding of the role of the individual in history can no longer content itself with the Marxist vision of the last century.

The ideological (and psychological) superstructures have become so complex, so weighty, so rich in the more than two thousand years of continuous Western civilization, that they have acquired considerable involuntary creative or destructive autonomy in relation to the economy; to a large extent they live on themselves (a striking example: religion in Russia). (Other examples, nationalities and their traditions.) 2. Psychology highlights the fact that although man obeys social determinism, he bears within him mental burdens accumulated since his origin. (All in all, civilizations are recent.) 3. Certain of these burdens, whose power is incommensurable, predate humanity, date back to the animal state. 4. A correct vision of history must take into account the psychology of societies and individuals, even in the analysis of specific events. In daily life we must take into account the characteristics and mentality of groups, of masses, of personalities, and each of us of our own personality, which is difficult but not impossible, and in any case necessary.

Men are psychological beings. Impossible to act with them or on them without taking this fact into account—in the most serious sense of the word. Socialist schematicism strived to understand only productive man at a time when capitalist development was pulling along and grinding up, in different ways, both bosses and employees, failing to take their souls into account, and when scientific technique, producing machines, had not yet produced psychological analysis. “No psychology!” I heard this phrase in Russia thousands of times.

Just as political economy was the revolutionary science of the capitalist era, psychology will perhaps be the revolutionary science of totalitarian times. Socialism can no longer ignore it without degrading itself and reducing itself to a kind of sterility.

if Hitler is keeping the kolkhozes it is because he finds in them a nearly perfect apparatus for the exploitation of the peasant; it is that he realizes he couldn’t do better in exploiting the labor of the people of the land. The conqueror is rendering homage not to the socialist principle, but rather to the perfecting of tyranny.

Our socialist emigration lives on an elementary socialism, summarily Marxist, that hasn’t been brought up to date for twenty years and which ignores the transformations of both the economy and psychology.

People have a tendency to reproach me for it; the past, the work accomplished, and present tasks displease, bother, offend. All of this is part of psychology of defeat among men lacking the means to know and observe themselves, who don’t even know that they should try to know and observe themselves.

Problems no longer have the same beautiful simplicity of the past. It was easy to live on antinomies like socialism or capitalism. We are now in the midst of a total transformation of the world, in a shifting chaos, surrounded by falsifications, complex facts, uncertain ideas, transitory interests, and violence. How to find one’s place? Nothing obscures consciousness more than interests of the moment, when they are involved in deadly struggles.

Writing then becomes a search for polypersonality, a way of living several destinies, of penetrating the Other, of communing with him. All the characters in a novel, even the trees of a forest, even the heavens are integrated into the life of the author, since they spring from him. The writer becomes conscious of the world he brings to life, he is its consciousness and in this way he escapes the ordinary limits of the Self, which is both intoxicating and enriching in lucidity. (There are doubtless other types of writers, individualists, who seek only self-affirmation and can view the world only through themselves.)

The trial is absurd, the mechanism of justice turning in a void, always with reasons, as conscious and aberrant as an immense paranoia that embraces the social world.

This could be the visionary satire of an era yet to come. Kafka seems to have foretold totalitarian machinery, its perfect crushing of man, its throat-cuttings, and in this sense his novel is that of a visionary prophet.

His curiosity: in Spain during the bombing he would come out of the ambulance shelter to see it, “the desire to see predominated over the instinct of self-preservation by a long shot.”

Over the course of our discussions about Marxism he helped me understand the anticipatory and creative role of intelligence, the freedom that is part of the intelligence, the complexity of the problem of superstructures, and that the work of a Freud is equal to Marx’s, with new discoveries about man which can no longer be ignored in any circumstance. (Our discussions of the role of personality and personal psychology at the outset of the Trotsky-Stalin conflict.

people are angry with him for having seen through the dark secrets around which their mediocre or vacillating personalities turn.

I recall Fritz’s emotion at the meeting we held to commemorate the dissolution—the death; or, more precisely, the slow murder—of the Comintern, to which, like me, he had given his youth. The Ibero-Mexican Center, an unswept room in a restaurant. There were about twenty of us. The nasty mugs of the M.s, yawning and picking their teeth, and Fritz, upset, red, reading his notes. And myself, on edge, meditating on so many dead and so much wasted hope and energy.

While finishing the work on Fritz Fränkel’s manuscripts with Herbert Lenhoff, I remarked that what is most tragic about death, what is most unacceptable for the intellect, is the complete disappearance of a spiritual grandeur, made up of experience, intellectual elaboration, knowledge, and understanding, in large part incommunicable. The means of transmitting the achievements of a fine mind are almost derisory in comparison with the value and profundity of that achievement. One must continuously start afresh, reinvent: how much of the essential is lost! We wonder if the belief in the immortality of the soul, so tenacious in educated societies, is not called upon to provide psychological compensation for the devastating feeling of this destiny. —Life has its continuity, its new beginnings, and the intellect, which is its most precious fruit, ends in annihilation, whatever its treasures . . . Perhaps this is also one of the sources of civilization: a colossal social effort aimed at making up for this obliteration. The individual seeks to ensure his durability by his works, by the influence of his activity (accomplishing of a mission, pursuit of glory, the need to fix the moment, to express, to teach for the writer and the reformer; the need to “integrate oneself into history”). H. L. considers that the theory of “the destructive or death drive” (Totentrieb) to be one of the two fundamental bases of Freudian psychology (libido, Totentrieb), even though Freud only formulated i...

A short time later Mandelstam stupidly attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself out of too low a window. And he “had problems.” One evening, at my house, he was strained and embarrassed. “It’s that you’re a Marxist,” he admitted. When I showed him a volume of photos of Paris by night, the strain between us quickly evaporated before these images. “Thanks to these photos I feel confident again.

say that the nature of the state is changing and that it is no longer “the armed band of one class for the domination of another,” according to Engels, except under the totalitarian regimes. The modern state is also

the organization of communication, schools, public hygiene, etc. Indignation on the part of M. P., Gironella, and Jean Malaquais. For a moment, I feel they’re going to accuse me of breaking faith!

The psychological phenomenon of the politburo repeats itself to infinity. (At bottom: idealists hemmed in by the sclerosis of doctrines and circumstances, and dominated by their convictions and their emotional attachments; in short, by fanaticism. Under such conditions the person who disturbs the inner security of the others is a hateful heretic.) Molins i Fàbregas, Gorkin, and Pivert reproach me for calling into question convictions that they for their part don’t question, hence their feeling of superiority.

My theses: that this war is profoundly different from that of 1914– 1918, of which it is the continuation, and that it entails elements of international civil war. (Strong protests by M. P.)—That the economic structure of the world has changed, traditional capitalism making way for a planned and controlled economy, thus collectivist in tendency, which could be that of monopolies and totalitarian parties—or of democracies of a new type, if the latter succeed in being born. (Strong protest by M. P.)—That the defeats of European socialism cannot be imputed solely to the failures of leaders, though this counts, but are rather explained by the decadence of the working class and of socialism as a result of modern technology (chronic unemployment, declassing of the unemployed, immense increases in the productive capacity of machinery with less need for workers; increased influence of technicians). (M. P. rejects these views as a whole without attempting to refute them, and to speak of a weakening of the working classes as a class seems to them all to be a sacrilege. What can I do about this if it’s the truth? A good Old Bolshevik, one of those who expelled and arrested us before himself being executed, would answer me: There is no truth that can prevail over the interests of the party.) —That we are well and truly being carried along by the current of an immense revolution, but that there will not be a repetition of the Russian Revolution unless as secondary episodes. That social...

Whoever “thinks differently,” according to Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase (“freedom is freedom for those who think differently”) immediately is taken for an enemy. Or at least a heretic whose heresy contains a large dose of betrayal.