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

by Victor Serge

“Better to err with the party than to be right against it!” I heard this repeated many times.

The essential problem: you have to choose sides, there’s always a truth to be sought, to find, to defend, an imperative truth that binds.

Nietzsche was right to consider the “possession of the truth” to be connected to the will to dominate.

I glimpse a solution. Combative intransigence controlled by a rigor as objective as possible and by an absolute rule of respect for others, respect even for the enemy . . . (The totalitarians render respect for the enemy difficult if not impossible.)

Socialism is no longer up to date, rendered outmoded by the sciences, technology, and the obscured class struggle. True, it’s possible that it can be made current, since what is essential about it remains infinitely more valid than the other ideologies. It seems destined to dilute itself throughout the whole of society and social consciousness. As I wrote in 1937, Marxism has so thoroughly entered modern consciousness (several of its main principles) that it can no longer be distinguished within it as a separate doctrine capable of giving rise to enthusiasm.

No real interest in fairy tales and the marvelous, which Lunacharsky and many others asserted correspond to a child’s needs.

the retraction with mental reservations in order to win time, to serve the party, and to be there (instead of in prison) for history’s next turn. Along with a handful of Trotskyists, I condemned this disintegrating moral gymnastics and advocated the Don Quixotism of resistance in broad daylight, and we were told we were pursuing a politically suicidal tactic, which appeared to be the case. The malady spread to all of Europe and a large part of Asia. How many people serve or collaborate with totalitarian regimes despite themselves, finding inner salvation only in mental reservation: sometimes hateful, sometimes despairing, most often (simply?) cowardly.

In reality the system appealed to destructive instincts, to sadism, to the castration complex in choosing a few thousand brutes ready to do anything. It’s not difficult to find one hundred thousand out of sixty-five million inhabitants, and these hundred thousand are largely sufficient for all tasks. In addition, the totalitarian machinery (inconceivable for anyone who has not experienced it) offers the average man—neither good nor bad, more or less sociable, more or less molded by one or two thousand years of civilization—no choice. Sent to Poland in uniform, posted not far from an extermination factory, the average man can only resist through suicide, the suicide of revolt, or mental reservations (which is manifested by a neurotic, sometimes explosive, passivity).

Until now this crime, unique in the annals of man, has given rise only to insignificant reactions, even among the Jews. It is rather poorly known and it has been little spoken of, as if it was surrounded by a vast complicity. Political and psychological reasons? The anti-Semitism latent everywhere in the backward and reactionary world? Yes, but also the (healthy) repression34 of monstrous and dangerous images and thoughts. The divulging of such a crime brings with it involuntary contagions whose consequences are unforeseeable. The sole wise attitude to adopt would be, if possible, to destroy even its memory. That the truth about man today cannot always be spoken; that a part of him must be annihilated in order to save that man.

The Nazis have marched against the current of all of human evolution, which was advancing from bestiality to humanism. In this sense they have created something new and begun the destruction of the gains of thousands of years of history.

Socialist congresses spoke out for the abolition of the death penalty. There is no Victor Hugo today to write The Last Day of a Million Men . . . No civilized man is certain he won’t be either murdered or executed or killed by a rocket-propelled bomb.

1944—Many socialists continue to pose problems in strictly traditional, if not routine terms. The schemas they have in mind are those of 1917–1918, and even of 1871! As if events were going to repeat themselves. (They could reproduce themselves fragmentarily, but the entire context being different the big picture will be profoundly different.) The extraordinary power of tradition, attaining a kind of blindness; also take into account the painful difficulty of mastering a new situation, full of pitfalls and disappointments; the spirit of objective investigation retreats and gives up rather than advancing towards discoveries it is not certain of being able to master and which, it foresees, may put in question the former foundations of its faith. But

In the meanwhile, the socialist left contents itself with illusions and involuntary demagogy, its eyes blindfolded by grand principles. The comrades I see here dream of a little Comintern of their own; dream of being carried along by the waves of the masses. They remain isolated and the most clear-sighted see no alternative to the blackest pessimism while affecting a “Marxist” optimism. Dialogue

This conversation reminds me of what Bukharin said to Kamenev about Stalin in 1928: “If we follow him he’ll drag the country into the abyss and we’ll perish, and the revolution will perish along with him. If we denounce him he’ll accuse us of treason and we’ll perish.” Bukharin and Kamenev chose to follow while denouncing, to denounce while following, to acclaim—obligatorily—while grumbling, and suffered ten years of psychological torture before perishing, as they predicted.

All you are doing is repeating the Nietzschean assertion that ‘man must be overcome,’ the wretched and distraught man of today’s chaos. He will be; a poet may emerge as a precursor, perhaps there are already among us many unknown precursors who will overcome.”

Leon Trotsky was mistaken concerning the present for having not known the full power of the totalitarian state (Hilferding saw much more clearly on this point). This power is such that the USSR is capable of dominating, channeling, and crushing the revolutionary movements of Western Europe, Asia, and to a certain extent Latin America. It can nip in the bud those that stand in its way and can effectively support, foment, and arm the others. L. T.’s thesis can become true again only if the totalitarian Russian state, internally exhausted by its prodigious efforts, weakens.

It must also be considered that in the era of grand planned technology no mass means has any serious chance of imposing itself if it doesn’t in its turn have this technology at its disposal, beginning with the means of propaganda, information, and organization.

Almost everywhere in Europe universal suffrage would result in socialist-leaning regimes able to bring about immense changes without civil war.

Abstract art exploded on the scene in the wake of World War I in an era of new progress in technology, industrial rationalization, and the first case of economic planning (Russia). This situates it. —Its sources: 1. The machine; 2. Scientific abstraction (connected to technology); 3. The spirit of destruction. That it is a destructive art.

I. Consider the new human environment created by the development of mechanization. Spengler’s beautiful pages on the modern city and the major alienation of man it creates. “Men only know each other experientially as the objects of an opaque process . . . between the sudden shock and sudden forgetting they are no longer capable of feeling the continuous sense of time. . . .” (summarized by T. W. Adorno, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, New York, 1941).

Abstraction is one of the great discoveries of intelligence. Human genius discriminates between the orange and the color of the orange. From concrete reality it passes to the general idea of color, the quality of the color. Seduction and fecundity of the process. (The realism of the Middle Ages.) Power of higher mathematics in the modern world. Penetration of the methods of scientific-technological thought into all of cerebral life, even as far as sensibility. Its effects: enriching of the intellect by an increase in the number of available signs; economy of symbolic thought; destruction or disintegration of the former concrete notions; decline (bitter) of the love of reality (concrete, the only kind). (Observe in this regard that Surrealism, proceeding from psychological surreality, is in contradiction with abstract art, but that it rejoins it because

orange and I begin the destruction of the orange. By inventing a fanciful geometry and perspective of the human face Picasso destroys it. Gordon Onslow Ford’s expression: “He discovered several ways of destroying the human form. . .

I thought of a Mexican Proust. Would one be possible? At first glance totally impossible. Proust describes a world that’s like an overheated greenhouse; here we’re in the open in the tropics, the earth burns and trembles. Proust analyzes beings who are refined and complex in the fashion of a certain Paris, for whom the adventure of living is social, sentimental, psychological, and conventional, filled with the charm of fine dining, petits fours pleasantly offered in a salon, loves as learnedly futile as the chatter . . . Here instincts prevail over psychology, of whose existence only professors are aware. The arid mountain is close to the city, the knife is hidden beneath the hand, anger beneath laughter. Here elemental passion kills without complication, faith causes delirium and ensures forgiveness, envy is a flame, love is a violence that relieves, and death isn’t bourgeois: it is near and dark with the laughing teeth of the calaveras, it revives the memory of Dürer’s danse macabre, and not that of a luxurious catafalque with plumed horses taking a beautiful coffin to Père Lachaise . . . Everything is torrid, brutal, vehement, simple—but simple like the life of carnal flesh, swollen with blood, which are nothing but meat and mystery: nothing is cerebral.

The delectable freedom of crime when one has repentance and forgiveness at one’s disposal. Prayer becomes the complement to killing.

I lived so many years endlessly learning the deaths of upright and decent men who wanted nothing but a better, more noble future, that the punishment of executioners astounds me, like something I could no longer believe in. Yet

From 1918 he was in the Ukraine with Nestor Makhno as the intellectual organizer of the vast movement of “rebellious peasants,” which Lenin and Trotsky considered granting local autonomy (this just and generous solution would have spared the Soviet regime many internal calamities), but which Bolshevik centralization ended by mercilessly smashing.

The wish to see better days, or at least the beginning of better days.

The painting has fulfilled its mission, it is no longer tragic (or it is less so) that the flames devour it. What is truly pathetic about human death is that there are men whose missions should never finish, never—apparently—being completed, as long as lucidity (a luminous soul) remains to them.

The conscious living person lacks objectivity by applying this certainty to himself: this means reducing duration to the present moment, life to one of those countless witnesses. Countless, minuscule, and fleeting. I have the absolute sentiment of the universality and eternity of life, while knowing the imperfection of these nonabsolute terms.

There was a shortage of every variety of manufactured article. The forced collectivization of agriculture resulted in the destruction of livestock and the worst famine Russia had ever known. Technicians warned the government in vain that it was committing errors and crimes against the nation and that the famine would cause millions of victims. They were arrested, often tortured, thousands were condemned without trial, and certain selected ones were given propaganda trials in order to demonstrate to the poor Russian people that the famine was organized by agents of France and England.

He invented a style of insult the likes of which had never been heard in a courtroom: “I demand that these mad dogs be executed!” The mad dogs were the greatest men of the Revolution . . . They die.

conclusion, let us stress an essential trait of this excellent orator. He never pronounced a single word that wasn’t dictated, word for word, by Stalin’s secretariat. Vyshinsky is nothing but a robot in whose throat the Politburo plays its records, be it a matter of executing Old Bolsheviks or denouncing the Americans.

“Dance of the Capitalist”: During the fiesta a character in a top hat, frock coat, boots, and the mask of a worried Spaniard, circulates around the square carrying his little attaché case, foreign to joy, to everything, nervous, grotesque, and in a hurry. He’s the ridiculous man—the White Man—who thinks only of his money. And he makes you think of the devil.

To the names of Old Bolsheviks, to the names of Trotsky and Andrés Nin, to the names Henryk Ehrlich and Victor Alter, let us now add the names of Avram Gots and Mikhail Liber. Crimes are piling up in an endless series. The piles of severed heads that Tamerlane had set up when he ordered the depopulating of a country would look pitiful compared to the pyramid of severed heads that the “Brilliant Leader” is building higher and higher every day.