Book review: - The Conscience of a Revolutionary

The “cowardice of intellectuals,” as he writes in an entry from 1943, defies reason. Its roots, he decides, are a fear of “taking a firm stand and seeing clearly.” Beneath all their posturing, writes Serge, is a fear of commitment - something from which intellectuals recoil...

NOTEBOOKS: 1936-1947: BY VICTOR SERGE. 
EDITED BY CLAUDIO ALBERTANI et al.. reviewed by Alex Press

“I often feel like I’m being suffocated in my magnificent desert.” So wrote Victor Serge to Dwight Macdonald of his exile in Mexico. For Serge, exile was nothing new; he’d been a persecuted militant for most of his life. But his simultaneous opposition to Stalin and refusal to renounce the revolution left him isolated in the stifling hothouse of the country’s left-wing exile community. Macdonald tried to find Serge publishers in the United States, but with little luck. (Of the editors who rejected his manuscripts, Macdonald wrote, “There’s nothing here but cowardice on the part of these sheep.”) Cowardice; it’s a word Serge felt perfectly described many of his fellow exiles. In the collection of his notebooks from Mexico recently published by NYRB Classics, the word shows up more than once. The “cowardice of intellectuals,” as he writes in an entry from 1943, defies reason. Its roots, he decides, are a fear of “taking a firm stand and seeing clearly.” Beneath all their posturing, writes Serge, is a fear of commitment—something from which intellectuals recoil.

By contrast, Serge is all commitment, though of a particular type. He is committed to revolution, of course (Claude Lévi-Strauss, on the boat from France to Mexico with Serge, calls him an “incorrigible Marxist”). But underlying this militancy is a commitment to the individual seen as a collective hero and the product of generations of struggle. “In Serge’s world,” his longtime translator Peter Sedgwick once wrote, “politics is composed not of statements but of persons.” If people, not just revolutions, are centuries in the making, bearing the traces of prior social relations, of political domination and uprisings, it’s important to chronicle them as flesh and blood. Serge’s writing - pamphleteering, poetry and novels, histories, an invaluable memoir - composed as he ranged from one revolution to the next, unsettled enough to earn the name “conscience of the revolution,” is defined by this commitment. An awkward fit within the strictures of Bolshevik discipline, it’s this principle that makes Serge’s worlds so full, a record of the masses of militants he’d known.

Socialists who valued abstract ideas over concrete people were, for Serge, the mocking inverse of this ethic. In the claustrophobic exile community, he was forced into close quarters with people he felt fit this description, and trained his invective on them... read more:

https://www.bookforum.com/culture/victor-serge-s-commitment-to-the-individual-as-collective-hero-23579

see also

Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge – life in the Stalinist Soviet Union // Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge – review