EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: The Old Mole of Individual Freedom

VICTOR SERGE IS BEST KNOWN AS AN OPPONENT OF STALINISM, AN ALLY OF Trotsky who was sent to a Soviet prison camp and who, thanks to a western campaign in his favor, was able to leave the Soviet Union, where he carried on his fight against the Soviet dictator. Far less well known is Serge’s anarchist period, which began in an embryonic form in Belgium in 1906 and lasted at least until his departure for the Soviet Union in 1919. The lessons he learned as an anarchist, and more particularly the anarchist defense of individual freedom, would not only play a key part in Serge’s thought and action during his directly anarchist period but would also inflect his Bolshevik activity. The continuity in his thought, the way—to paraphrase Marx—the old mole of individual freedom burrowed through his writings in various guises, means that any attempt to analyze Serge’s life by giving his openly anarchist years short shrift, as Susan Weissman does in her Victor Serge: A Political Biography, misses the core of his political life.

Still known as Victor Kibalchich, Victor began his political activity in the Young Guard of the Belgian Workers’ Party (Parti Ouvier Belge, or POB) in his native Brussels in 1905 when he was only fourteen. An immediate indication of the continuity between the socialism of his adolescent years and his later anarchism is that two of his closest friends and comrades were Raymond Callemin and Jean De Boë, both of whom would, like Victor, move to Paris where they would run in the same individualist circles, and both of whom, like Victor, would be defendants in the trial of the Bonnot Gang in 1913. Callemin received the death penalty, De Boë was sent to a penal colony, and Victor, found guilty of complicity, was sentenced to five years.

Though nominally socialist, Victor and his friends, because of their exuberance, were referred to as “anarchists” within the party, and they in fact spent time at an anarchist commune outside Brussels, where Victor not only got a chance to witness a form of anarchy in action but also learned the printing trade that would enable him to earn a living through his hardest times, and where he also began his career as a journalist.

The radicalism of the Young Guard led them to walk out of a Workers Party special conference on the question of the Congo, where the POB supported the annexation of the Congo while the vocally anti-imperialist Young Guard opposed it. The party began a campaign against the anarchists in their midst, and Victor and his friends would eventually leave the POB and establish themselves as the Revolutionary Young Guard of Brussels, changing the name of their newspaper from Le Communiste to Le Révolté—the rebel. By early 1908, even as the anarchist community he had been part of collapsed, Victor identified himself as an anarchist and wrote in defense of “illegalism,” the adoption of theft as a political and economic tactic by anarchists. Though he was still writing articles against imperialism and in support of striking workers in Italy, class struggle anarchism soon disappeared completely from Serge’s writings as he became increasingly individualist and increasingly doubtful of working-class activity, calling the Belgian working class a “mass of cowards” in an article published in September 1908.

There would be no turning back for Victor now, and he increasingly marked out a position at the extreme end of anarchist individualism, defending in his article “Anarchists-Bandits” the London illegalists who had killed two people in what became known as the Tottenham Outrage of January 1909 and praising them as exemplars of the revolutionary spirit, men who lived by the motto “Anarchists Never Surrender!”

Among his final activities in Belgium was his defense of the Russian terrorist Hartenstein, tried and found guilty of killing a policeman who had come to arrest him for planting a bomb. Victor served as a character witness at Hartenstein’s trial and wrote glowingly about the defendant in his article “A Man” in Le Révolté. But the stagnation of the Left in Belgium, dominated by the reformist POB, along with disputes with other anarchists in Brussels led Victor, despairing of any change in Belgium, to move to the heart of anarchist individualism, Paris. There he immediately began writing for, and eventually editing, the movement’s principal organ, l’anarchie (all letters lowercased to signify that none was more important than any other), founded by the great Albert Libertad in 1905.

As an active journalist at the heart of Francophone anarchism, only occasionally were his writings commentary on news of the day, events like the Liabeuf Affair, the arrest and execution of an apache (street tough) for murdering two policemen trying to arrest him, and the early career of the Bonnot Gang. For the most part, instead, his writing revolved around more general themes common to individualist anarchism since the first appearance of the movement in France around 1890.

These themes were antirevolutionism, contempt for the masses, the obligation that individuals make their own revolution immediately, and illegalism. All of these themes are intertwined and flow together naturally: the contemptible masses make a successful revolution impossible, making it necessary for individualists to make the revolution now in whatever way they can, with the most brutal and direct way being illegalism. These were not the only themes current in Victor’s individualist milieu, but it is significant that they were the ones for which he showed the greatest concern. The fact that he ignored other common anarchist individualist issues like neo-Malthusianism, diet and general health-faddism, free and plural love, and the extreme biological determinism that played so important a part in the movement, speaks volumes. So strong was this latter current that he would later speak about a split between “scientifics” and “sentimentals”—the latter allowing feelings a role in human activity and development and the former believing that virtually everything was biologically determined. Victor was a “sentimental,” while the members of the Bonnot Gang, with whom he was for a period allied, were almost all “scientifics.” Herein lies much of the original tension between Victor and his comrades, which would manifest itself at their trial in 1913, when Serge separated himself from the bandits with whom he was on trial. None of these forms of lifestyle anarchism held any particular attraction for Victor, and he didn’t expend much energy on them.

When reading his anarchist writings, what is striking is something that is very much a part of the individualist tradition: the lack of references to authorities. If Marxists and, later, Leninists involved themselves in Talmudic disputes over passages in the works of the masters, individualists almost completely eschewed this practice. All of anarchist individualism grew out of Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, which was originally published in France in 1890, but Stirner’s name is never used to back up any of Victor’s arguments. To do so not only would have meant abdicating his individuality but also would have constituted erecting Stirner into a hero, an idea that was anathema in his circles. While still in Belgium, in an article written on the anniversary of the death of Émile Henry, a man he clearly admired, Victor issued this caveat: “Let them not reproach me for glorifying a man, making him into a banner. We want neither tribunes nor martyrs nor prophets.”[17] Instead of relying on specific passages in Stirner’s writings, it is his weltanschauung that serves as the foundation for almost all of Victor’s positions.

A thinker who was clearly of great importance to young Kibalchich was Gustave Le Bon, whose 1895 work “The Psychology of Crowds” demonstrated that crowds subsume the individual and obliterate the identity of the individuals within it, ideas which Victor sometimes credited to Le Bon in his articles and other times simply paraphrased. Just as Stirner was necessary for Victor in establishing the primacy of the One, Le Bon was needed to demonstrate the dangers of the Many.

In this regard another writer, one far less known, influenced Victor: the uncompromisingly pessimistic individualist Georges Palante. Palante posited not just the need for the Self to affirm itself but also established that there was a clear antinomy between the individual and society, that they were eternal enemies. “Individualism,” he wrote, “is the sentiment of a profound, irreducible antinomy between the individual and society. The individualist is he who, by virtue of his temperament, is predisposed to feel in a particularly acute fashion the ineluctable disharmonies between his intimate being and his social milieu.” If most anarchists, indeed most revolutionaries, contented themselves with viewing the state as the enemy, one that could be defeated because it was a specific entity, for Palante society itself, a far larger and more nebulous foe, was the true adversary, one whose aim was the grinding down of the individual. Indeed, the same pessimism that Victor often expressed concerning the possibilities and even desirability of social change also appeared in the pages of Palante: “In the name of his own experience and his personal sensation of life the individualist feels he has the right to relegate to the rank of utopia any ideal of a future society where the hoped-for harmony between the individual and society will be established. Far from the development of society diminishing evil, it does nothing but intensify it by rendering the life of the individual more complicated, more laborious and more difficult in the middle of the thousand gears of an increasingly tyrannical social mechanism.”

It should be noted that these extracts from Palante’s “La Sensbilité Individualiste” were published in 1909, the year Victor Kibalchich arrived in Paris, and appeared in the chapter of the book titled “Anarchism and Individualism.” Victor was certainly aware of these writings and quoted or cited Palante on several occasions, including in one of his final articles before leaving for Red Russia in 1919. Palante’s influence can be seen up to the end of Victor’s spell as editor of l’anarchie. A talk he gave on January 28, 1912, at the Causeries Populaires lecture series was titled “The Individual against Society,” and his notes for the talk show that his opening remarks on the subject were, “It’s rather the contrary that should be said: ‘society is the enemy of any individuality.’”[18]

The figure of Friedrich Nietzsche floats over Victor’s writings as well. Victor settled accounts with the philosopher of the Übermensch in a recently rediscovered essay written in 1917 while he was living in Barcelona, “A Critical Essay on Nietzsche” (in this collection, 135). Nietzsche was one of the tutelary figures of anarchist individualism, and Victor examined Nietzsche’s writings in order to establish the ways in which he was at one with or in opposition to the anarchists. Zarathustrian overtones can be found throughout his newspaper writings, with their call to live a free and full life. This is most glaringly clear in his article “By Being Bold,” a dithyrambic piece on the Peruvian aviator Jorge Chávez, who died in 1910 while attempting to become the first man to fly over the Alps. Victor wrote that “having reached these heights, gliding over the snowy Alps, he lived minutes that were worth many lives.” In a decidedly Nietzschean mode he continued: “Only those who were capable of risking all in vertiginous flights; those who had the strength to conceive the accomplishment of the impossible and to desire it—the thinkers, apostles, and adventurers—were the demolishers of old civilizations and the builders of new lives.”

All of these influences, cited or not, fed into the themes that serve as the heart of his anarchist writings.

Contempt for the masses, for the “herd,” drips from his writings of the “l’anarchie” period from 1909–12, and if there are any Rétifian adjectives they are spineless (veule) and cowardly (lâche), which recur frequently in his articles. But already in Belgium, at the time of the Hartenstein Affair, he complained of the common run of men, “how ugly they are, how petty, wicked and hypocritical they are toward each other … can this be called living? Can these pitiful beings be called men?”

Everything the masses enjoy is subject to his scorn. From the time of Libertad individualists had demonstrated ridicule for festivals and anniversaries, and following in Libertad’s footsteps Victor would write that “joy on command is unhealthy, grotesque and stupid, like those who savor it,” and the festivities the people engage in are “the apotheosis of the stupidity, the illogic, and the cowardice of vast human herds.” Mere contact with this gutless mass is repellent to Kibalchich: “The men I rub shoulders with wrong me at every moment. Their limpness, their rapacity, their foolishness prevent me from living.”[19]

When France was in an uproar over the first crime of the Bonnot Gang, the robbery and shooting on the Rue Ordener of a messenger for the Société Générale, Victor felt no sympathy, rather contempt and satisfaction at his fate: “This poor wretch, through his submissive weakness and his stupid honesty was the accomplice of criminals of a far higher caliber than the ones they are hunting down.”[20]

Despite countless comments similar to these, Victor claimed not to hate the people: “We love you, for we love men.” What he hated was not “men” but what they did with their potentially exalted human status: “We deeply detest your vegetative and bestial existence, your pitiful lack of intelligence.”[21]

The sources of this misanthropy and elitism are varied. None of Victor’s comrades were of the leisure class; none had received university educations, and Victor had received virtually no formal education. To a large extent all were autodidacts, and their feeling that if they were able to rise above their original muck the others could do so as well is clear in the writings of the time. Since all the individual needs do is will something for it to change, the men of the herd were complicit in the continuation of an absurd society and were worthy of scorn, if not worse.

The next logical step in this idea chain is the denial of the possibility of a successful revolution. This idea is entirely consistent with the preceding one, and is far more logical than the revolutionary hopes invested in the masses by syndicalists and socialists. All of these schools acknowledged the degraded state of the worker under the current social system. Only the individualists, and Victor first among them, asked the question: How can we expect people who accept such a fate to be capable of making a revolution, of building a radiant tomorrow?

For Victor this was not a subjective viewpoint but rather an objective fact settled by science: “In all areas impartial science demonstrates to us the inferiority of the working class.” What did Victor see before him but “the degenerates, the hereditary slaves, the pitiful mass of working stiffs that we know de visu are physiologically incapable of living in harmony.” For the ouvrieristes the answer to the question of whether or not the workers can change society was “‘Yes’ (without ever explaining why)”; for Victor, given the degenerate state of the men who make up the working class, “organizing the working class in order to carry out social transformation means wasting time and energy.”[22]

Le Rétif proved his case by attacking the most sacred of working-class cows, the Paris Commune of 1871, and in fact did so in two articles entirely dedicated to scathing attacks on its folly. The uprising was pointless, for “crowds are fickle, puerile, credulous…. They are capable of heroism, but they can also commit monstrosities. And in all cases they need masters.”[23] No, there was no point in ever seizing power, for “to think that impulsive, defective, ignorant crowds will have done with the morbid illogic of capitalist society is a vulgar illusion.”[24] Indeed, even though the defeat of the Commune erased all the positive changes it had made, “their victory would have annihilated them, since they’d preserved the essence of the system of social oppression through private property and the law.”[25]

Not only did the Commune fail, but all revolutions have failed: “They have neither destroyed what they wanted to destroy nor constructed anything better.” Again Victor returns to the root cause of this inevitable failure: “Lacking in education, not used to thinking, not knowing how to count on themselves … could the workers of 1912 do any better?”[26]

None of this, of course, implies that a rebel should sit idly by while the vulgar herd does nothing or foolishly attempts to rise up. There must be a change to the rotten world that created the degenerate humanity that surrounds and inhibits Victor. In answer to the question of who should be counted on, mass action being worthless, “the anarchists will answer with individual revolt.”[27]

This will be done in several ways, for “from this day on anarchists liberate minds.” Even the lone anarchist living his free life has great revolutionary ramifications, for “all men profit from the act of revolt of one.” Unlike those who think the masses will lead the way, like the socialist Jean Jaurès and his anarchist rival Jean Grave, Victor tells us that “there is no more consistent element of progress than individual initiative”[28] and that “in every social grouping the individualist will remain a rebel.”[29]

The anarchist, in young Victor’s eyes, echoing the Nietzschean notion of the blond beast “is above all a person who challenges…. In decadent civilization he is the salutary barbarian, the only one still capable of creating, of erecting his individuality above the pestilence.”[30]

In his memoirs, Serge would later write that “Anarchism swept us away completely because it both demanded everything of us and offered us everything,”[31] and during his youth he had written that “we consider anarchism to be, above all, a way of life.” Anarchists are creatures of pure will, in this sense again disciples of Nietzsche: “anarchists formulate neither wishes nor vows: they want and immediately act according to their will.”[32]

Freedom, individual freedom, is the be all and end all of anarchist individualism, and even in the unlikely event that a mass revolution were to succeed, that success would do nothing for the free individual since “the hypothesis of a collectivist tomorrow presages a ferocious struggle between the state and the few individuals desirous of preserving their autonomy.”[33] Note the use of the word “few,” the implicit elitism in the phrase, since the rest will be quite content to accept the new yoke of the new order.

Victor’s individualist anarchist is not only one who challenges, he is also and primarily one who fights, and for whom “not to resist means not to exist.”[34] Not just the conquering but the preservation of the little freedom allowed the individual today is a duty, and any challenge to it must be reacted to forcefully.

In Belgium, Victor had been extremely vocal in support of the accused anarchist bomb-maker Hartenstein—giving him the highest praise, that of calling him “a man” for having shot down the policemen who’d come to arrest him—and had not only written about him in Le Révolté but also served as a character witness at his trial. He had also defended the Russian anarchists who died fighting after the Tottenham Outrage. “The mere act of a policeman putting his hand on your shoulder, because it signifies an attack on the human personality, is sufficient reason to justify any form of revolt,” he wrote in defense of Liabeuf.[35]

For Victor and for individualists in general it is not only political rebels who are worthy of support, leading us inevitably to the vexed subject of illegalism, which had been a part of anarchist individualism for years before Victor’s arrival on the scene. The belief that anarchists, recognizing no laws, were self-evidently bound by no laws found its justification in the movement’s foundational text, Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, where he writes that “since the state is the ‘lordship of law’ its hierarchy, it follows that the egoist, in all cases where his advantage runs against the State’s, can satisfy himself only by Crime.”[36] Illegalists had been particularly fond of counterfeiting, but a new breed of illegalists was appearing on the scene, a breed far more violent than ever previously seen, their avatar being what came to be known as the Bonnot Gang.

At the gang’s trial in 1913 Victor denied ever having advocated illegalism; indeed he claimed to have opposed it. There can be no question that he came to oppose it, and that at the time of his trial his condemnation of the “waste” of men and energies it entailed was sincere. What is difficult to pin down is when he became an opponent of illegalism, for no serious reader of his articles on the subject written during the years 1908–12 could find any opposition to this natural outgrowth of the insistence on the primacy of individuals and their will.

Particularly telling is another of his favorite negative epithets: “honest,” used as a pejorative against those anarchists opposed to illegalism, those “honest men,” and the general use of the adjective against anyone who condemns rebels.[37] Paradoxically, even criminals can be smeared with that brush: “The apaches in general don’t interest me. They differ too little from honest people.”[38]

In some cases he exercised small feats of legerdemain to disguise his support of illegalism. While still in Belgium he claimed that “every revolt is in essence anarchist. And we should stand alongside the economic rebel the same way we stand beside the political, antimilitarist and propagandist rebel.”[39] All rebels, thus are equal. He did, however recognize that illegalists “remain far from us, far from our dreams and wishes. But what difference does that make?” If existing means resisting, and crime is a form of revolt, then the illegalists exist “and they aren’t part of the herd.” The logic of their acts is patent. “An intellectual and moral rebel, it is on fact only logical that the anarchist doesn’t fear becoming, whenever the circumstances seem favorable, an economic rebel.[40]

In the immediate aftermath of the first acts of the Bonnot crime wave he praised the bandits for their “daring,” which was one of Victor’s favored positive characteristics. And if he didn’t advocate crime as an anarchist act, he nevertheless said, “I am with the bandits. I find their role to be noble. Sometimes I see in them men,” the last word here too being a term of praise in the Rétifian lexicon.[41]

He perhaps came closest to open advocacy of crime in his article “Against Hunger,” an article considered important enough to be issued as a pamphlet almost immediately after appearing in l’anarchie. In it he declares that “individual re-appropriation—theft—is the logical opposite of the monopolizing of wealth, just as individual revolt is naturally opposed to the arbitrariness of the law and its agents.[42]

Nor should we think that it was only in his writings that Kibalchich defended illegalism and illegalists. In the notes for what must have been his final talk at the Causeries Populaires he says of crime that “we think this is logical/ineluctable/necessary,” and ended his talk by saying of the illegalist anarchists that “along with us, they are the only men who dare demand life.”[43]

Thus we can see that within Victor Serge’s anarchist writings there is a natural and consistent flow, that the connections between the four themes common to individualist anarchism are logical, ineluctable, and necessary. Richard Parry, in his excellent and essential book on the Bonnot Gang, comes to the erroneous conclusion that Victor so loudly praised illegalism because “he simply wanted to make a name for himself as the most ‘combative’ writer in the milieu.”[44] As we have seen, far from this being the case, Victor was being utterly sincere and totally consistent when he defended illegalism in the abstract and the Bonnot Gang in particular. His subsequent condemnation of it was the first step along the road to the break that would lead him to abandon anarchism while maintaining its essence, but the process, contrary to the picture painted in his Memoirs, was an extremely slow one.

The break appears to have begun during the year he spent in prison between his arrest on January 31, 1912, and the trial of the surviving members of the Bonnot Gang members. His reflections on the folly of illegalism resulted in his refusing to accept responsibility for the acts of the Tragic Bandits, who for their part denied their guilt. He was sincere in saying he didn’t support illegalism at the trial, for by that time he appears to have come to condemn it; he went too far in claiming that he had always opposed it.

He spent a further four years in jail, serving a total of five full years, and during that time he began to seriously reflect on his entire belief system up until then. So by February 1917, immediately upon his release from prison, he wrote to Émile Armand that “I no longer believe that the anarchist formula can be contained in one formula alone; I grant much less importance to words than realities, to ideas than to aspirations, to formulas than to sentiments and acts. I am thus ready to collaborate with all those who will show a fraternal goodwill without attributing great importance to secondary divergences in ideas.” He continued in the same mode a month later, again in a letter to Armand, stating that he had “lost the sectarian intransigence of the past” and was “capable of working with all those who, animated by the same desire for a better life—one clearer and more intelligent—advance toward their future, even if their paths are different from mine, and even if they give different names I don’t know to what in reality is our common goal.”[45]

In his exile in Barcelona he worked with syndicalists and participated in a (failed) mass uprising, but in his lengthy settling of accounts with Nietzsche, “A Critical Essay on Nietzsche,” he points out the similarities of Nietzsche’s ideas to the most reactionary ideas then current, and speaks dismissively of Nietzsche’s effect on anarchists. He says that when an anarchist reads Nietzsche, “a kind of puerile pride seizes hold of our comrade and isolates him in a sterile and limited ‘cult of the self.’” That cult of the self was the basis for all of Victor’s activity until that point.

While in Spain he wrote for the anarchist newspaper Tierra y Libertad, and though he later claimed in his Memoirs that he had been immediately seized with enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution, his contemporary writings don’t bear that out. In the April 4, 1917, issue of the paper he was still saying that “one mustn’t expect great results from political revolutions…. And so true political power has hardly changed.”

After the failure of the July uprising in Barcelona in 1917 he went to France in an effort to join the Russian army and be sent to his parents’ homeland. Arrested in October 1917 for violating his expulsion order, he spent over a year in French detention camps but was still able to write occasionally for the anarchist press, where his praise of the Russian Revolution remained muted. But it was around this time that his anarchism and individualism sought their fulfillment in mass activity, which alone would allow them to flourish. As he wrote in his final article in the anarchist paper La Mêlée before his departure, anarchists must “interest ourselves with all our might in the social life that surrounds us and which will finally allow us to more generously, more humanely realize ourselves.”[46] Both ideas—individualism and anarchism—continued to play a part in his thought, writings, and activities, but in a radically different way than formerly.

Though this is not the place to discuss Serge’s actions in the Soviet Union, his response to Kronstadt and the defeat of the Makhnovists, anarchism continued to play a role in his life and in inflecting his thought. In fact, it served as a leavening to his Bolshevism, serving as a corrective to the harshness of the ideology of the ruling party.

In 1921, two years after his arrival in the USSR, he would write that “I am only a communist—of libertarian philosophy and ethics—because I see no possibility for the future liberation of the individual outside of a communism called on to evolve a great deal (once it has emerged victorious.)”[47] This passage from “New Tendencies in Russian Anarchism” is of enormous importance. The first and most obvious element is Serge’s definition of himself as a schismatic communist. That it was allowed to appear in an official Comintern journal, Bulletin Communiste, is in itself significant, since dissident works were even then not common, though not as impossible as they would soon become. The Bolsheviks were clearly using Serge as a way of projecting their openness, as a way of attracting support from the anarchists. That he also said that the communism of the Bolsheviks had to evolve greatly is also a bold statement. The parenthetic remark that ends this sentence is significant: he makes it clear that in whatever way Bolshevism will evolve, this evolution can only occur after victory. Until then, he implies, the methods currently in place—harshly repressive ones that do not liberate the individual—can and must continue. His support of the Cheka is here explained.

But this brief passage contains a statement of his new view of the individual, an idea that will henceforth dominate his thought. The individual here is viewed as a part of society, a part of a movement, someone to be liberated through common action and whose needs are not opposed to society but are an integral part of it. There is no longer an antinomy between the individual and society. For Serge the individual can now only be liberated along with others, not against others. Elsewhere in this article he recognizes the difficulties of handing over the liberation of the individual to the Communists: “What is too often lacking in communist ideology is a philosophy of the individual for the individual’s sake.” He knows to fear the total subsuming of the individual by the (worker’s) state. But he was confident that once victory over the Whites was ensured, the anarchists (who in this same article he insists are not that different from the Bolsheviks) would play a vital role in reshaping society.

His optimism was misplaced. And just as his defense of illegalism played a role in his being considered so dangerous by the French authorities that he was given as harsh a sentence as possible after the Bonnot trial, it is certain that his hopes for the individual under Bolshevism, this time under the form of Trotskyism, would contribute to his fate there. The road from French detention camps to Soviet ones was twisted, but direct.

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