[D66] [🇲🇽] Victor Serge Mexican Notebooks

[A.OUT]

https://newleftreview.org/issues/II82/articles/victor-serge-mexican-notebooks-1940-1947
https://newleftreview.org/issues/II82/articles/victor-serge-mexican-notebooks-1940-1947.pdf


Victor Serge (1890–1947) spent the last six years of his life in Mexico,
joining the exodus from Marseille in 1941 and remaining behind after the
War. Here he  completed  his  two  most  celebrated  works.  Memoirs  of
 a  Revolutionary  evokes his vagabond anarchist youth, passage to
revolutionary Russia, years as  assistant  to  Zinoviev  in  the
Comintern  and  Left  Oppositionist,  prison,  exile; a cast of
thousands from the Old Bolshevik generation recalled in vivid detail.
The  Case  of  Comrade  Tulayev  was  the  most  powerful  of  his
‘docu-mentary  novels’  on  the  turmoil  of  the  inter-war  years.
Extracts  from  Serge’s  1944, 45 and 47 diaries had appeared in Les
Temps modernes in 1949 and were collected in a 1953 French volume, which
also included notebooks from the 1930s. In 2010, three cardboard boxes
of his papers were discovered in the archive  of  his  late  widow
Laurette  Séjourné  in  the  small  Mexican  town  of  Amecameca. They
included letters, drafts, photographs and a bundle of exer-cise books,
tied up with string, covering the years 1941, 42, 43 and 46. Agone has
now published the entire collection as Carnets (1936–1947). nlr’s
selec-tion  takes  up  the  narrative  of  Serge’s  life  where  the
Memoirs end,  on  the  boat  from  Marseille.  The  notebooks  contain
thoughts  on  the  world-political  situation, impressions of Mexico,
often caustic portraits of fellow exiles. Peter Sedgwick, his English
editor, has pointed out the influence of Sorel in Serge’s
anarcho-syndicalist formation: the Sorelian notion of a moral elite,
alien to Marxism, informed his belief that the direction of history
‘depends to a very large extent on the calibre of individual human
beings’, hence his remorseless judgements on his fellow men, seen in
terms of their fitness for the revolution. His political assessments
were often wide of the mark. Early predictions of a Soviet defeat and
the collapse of Stalin’s regime give way to over-estimations of Moscow’s
power; cautious prognostications for a limited social-democratic
politics  in  post-war  Europe  are  followed  by  speculations  on  an
 ‘acceptable’  technocratic  collectivism.  Serge  boasted  of
conceiving  the  notion  of  parallel  ‘totalitarianisms’,  that  most
threadbare  of  Cold  War  liberalism’s  tropes,  yet  wrote in 1947,
‘If the Soviet regime is to be criticized, let it be from a social-ist
and  working-class  point  of  view’.  Of  his  comrades  in  the
Mexico  group  Socialismo y Libertad, the French left-socialist Marceau
Pivert would become a committed opponent of the Algerian War in the
1950s, while poum veteran Julián Gorkín enlisted with the Congress for
Cultural Freedom. Serge’s likely trajectory had he lived beyond 1947
must remain a matter for speculation