Anarchists Never Surrender

Victor Serge

Description

Anarchists Never Surrender provides a complete picture of Victor Serge’s relationship to anarchism. The volume contains writings going back to his teenage years in Brussels, where he became influenced by the doctrine of individualist anarchism. At the heart of the anthology are key articles written soon after his arrival in Paris in 1909, when he became editor of the newspaper l’anarchie. In these articles Serge develops and debates his own radical thoughts, arguing the futility of mass action and embracing “illegalism.” Serge's involvement with the notorious French group of anarchist armed robbers, the Bonnot Gang, landed him in prison for the first time in 1912. Anarchists Never Surrender includes both his prison correspondence with his anarchist comrade Émile Armand and articles written immediately after his release.

The book also includes several articles and letters written by Serge after he had left anarchism behind and joined the Russian Bolsheviks in 1919. Here Serge analyzed anarchism and the ways in which he hoped anarchism would leaven the harshness and dictatorial tendencies of Bolshevism. Included here are writings on anarchist theory and history, Bakunin, the Spanish revolution, and the Kronstadt uprising.

Anarchists Never Surrender anthologizes Victor Serge’s previously unavailable texts on anarchism and fleshes out the portrait of this brilliant writer and thinker, a man I.F. Stone called one of the “moral figures of our time.”

Sujets

• Literature
• Communism
• Left-libertarianism
• Intellectual
• Socialism
• Crime
• Révolution
• Civil War
• Prison

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629630533
• Langue: English

Extrait

Anarchists Never Surrender: Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on Anarchism, 1908–1938
Victor Serge. Edited and Translated by Mitchell Abidor.
Foreword by Richard Greeman
This edition copyright © 2015 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book has been made possible in part by a generous donation from the Anarchist Archives Project
ISBN: 978-1-62963-031-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014908074
Cover by John Yates/Stealworks
Interior design by briandesign
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Contents FOREWORD Meditation on a Maverick by Richard Greeman INTRODUCTION The Old Mole of Individual Freedom by Mitchell Abidor 1908 The Illegalists Émile Henry Apropos of the Congo Anarchists! 1909 Anarchists Bandits The Athletic Aberration Hatred The Festival of Lies and Weakness 1910 Our Antisyndicalism The Revolutionary Illusion The Religious or the Secular? A Good Example I Deny! A Head Will Fall Religiosity and Individualism By Being Bold Two Russians 1911 The Individualist and Society A Revolutionary Experience Impressions of the Holidays The Mona Lisa Was Stolen Against Hunger Demagogy and Anarchist Action Revolutionaries? Yes, but in What Way? 1912 The Bandits Expedients The Real Criminals Anarchists and Criminals Two Lectures The Communards 1913 Letter to Émile Armand on the Bonnot Trial Egoism 1917 Letters to Émile Armand Individualism, a Factor of Progress A Critical Essay on Nietzsche 1918 Letter from a Man behind Walls 1919 Bakunin’s Confession 1920 The Anarchists in Russia 1921 Letter from Russia New Tendencies in Russian Anarchism 1936 Call for an Alliance with the Anarchists in Spain 1938 Once More: Kronstadt Kronstadt 1921: Trotsky’s Defense, Response to Trotsky Anarchist Thought SERGE IN ENGLISH THE LIFE OF VICTOR SERGE BIOGRAPHIES
Meditation on a Maverick
by Richard Greeman
" ANARCHISTS NEVER SURRENDER! " WHAT AN APT TITLE MITCH ABIDOR HAS chosen for his beautifully translated anthology of the anarchist writings of Victor Lvovitch Kibalchich, aka Victor Serge (1890–1947), who up to the age of twenty-eight wrote and agitated under the pseudonym Le Rétif ("Maverick").
The phrase "Anarchists Never Surrender!" comes from a 1909 Maverick article, written at the age of eighteen, and the anarchists in question, like Kibalchich himself, were Russian exiles, resolute bandits who fought to the death against a whole squad of London policemen. Maverick’s dramatic declaration foreshadowed his own and his comrades’ doom in the ‘Tragic Bandits’ affair a few years later in Paris. Indeed, Victor Kibalchich may be said to have inherited that fate, as he bore the famous name of N.I. Kibalchich, a distant relative, the People’s Will terrorist whose bombs blew up the Czar, executed in 1881 and considered a martyr-hero by Victor’s parents.
Victor’s whole life was to be one of constant rebellion and constant persecution, and he already had a head start at birth. He spent more than ten of his fifty-seven years in various forms of captivity, generally harsh. He did five years’ straight time (1912–17) in a French penitentiary ("anarchist bandit"); survived nearly two years (1917–18) in World War I concentration camp ("Bolshevik suspect"); suffered three months’ grueling interrogation in Moscow’s notorious GPU Lubianka prison ("Trotskyite spy"); and endured three years’ deportation to Central Asia for his declared opposition to Stalin’s policies and for refusing to confess to trumped-up espionage charges (1933–36). Small wonder his first novel (written in French) bore the title Men in Prison . 1
Born of Russian exile parents camped out in Brussels, Victor was a stateless, undocumented alien from birth, destined to be expelled from nearly every country he ever lived in. He was thus vaccinated against the plague of nationalism and remained immune to the patriotic fever that swept away many socialists and anarchists at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Young Kibalchich inherited the revolutionary ethos of the Russian intelligentsia, and little else from his penniless parents when they split up, leaving him on his own in Brussels at the age of fifteen. There, he bonded with a gang of teenagers, idealistic underpaid apprentices like himself, "closer than brothers." The Brussels brothers started out as Socialist Young Guards but soon grew impatient with reformism and gravitated to anarchism, impressed with the free life at a short-lived anarchist Commune just outside of Brussels. There they learned the printing trades and eventually put out their own little sheet, The Rebel , where Victor first cut his teeth as a writer and adopted the name "Maverick," symbolizing his distance from the tradition of his Russian parents and his embrace of an angry new anarchist identity in the slum streets of Brussels. "Maverick" was the signature on the articles in the first part of this anthology, starting in 1908 and continuing throughout Victor’s young manhood to 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, when Kibalchich started signing "Victor Serge" and decided to go to Russia.
Meanwhile, as "Maverick" he moved to Paris in 1909 and eventually became the editor of the weekly organ of French anarcho-individualism, l’anarchie , which preached, among other things, the right of individuals to reappropriate property from the bourgeois bandits who had, after all, stolen it in the first place (Proudhon: property = theft). A perfect theory, until Victor’s band of brothers, in total revolt against society and unwilling to be either "masters" or "slaves," began to put it into practice in 1912 through a bloody series of "expropriations" (holdups) in which they pioneered the use of stolen automobiles as getaway cars (the police had only bicycles). Victor/Maverick, although appalled by the bloodshed, defended these "Tragic Bandits of Anarchy" in the pages of l’anarchie , declaring, "I am with the wolves!" He was soon arrested. Like the Russian anarchists in London, Maverick’s home-boys fought it out to the last, holding off small armies of police, troops, and armed civilians. In 1913, the survivors of what was known as the "Bonnot Gang" were put on trial. Victor’s oldest friend got the guillotine, and Maverick was sentenced to five years in solitary in the pen. He managed to survive, and years later wrote a great novel about the experience, Men in Prison . 2 That is the context of the early (1908–1913) articles in this collection.
Released in the middle of World War I and expelled from France, Victor ended up in Barcelona, Spain. There he got involved with the local anarcho-syndicalists and participated in the preparation of an insurrectionary general strike in July 1917, itself inspired by the February 1917 Revolution in Russia which seemed to beckon to Victor from across wartorn Europe. He laid to rest his individualist identity of "The Maverick," and began signing himself "Victor Serge," the identity that he would retain for the rest of his life. The Parisian individualist who scorned revolutions as ‘illusions,’ had now experienced a revolutionary movement in Spain and felt himself drawn to the Russian Revolution as to a flame. Yet we can see in the two articles from 1917 that he was still settling his scores with anarcho-individualism in his mind. And indeed, as "Serge" he retained the essence of his anarchism the belief in the primacy of the individual, in human freedom to his dying day.
Arriving in Petrograd, 3 the frozen, starving, besieged capital of Red Russia, Serge made the rounds of the anarchists and socialists before deciding to work with the Bolsheviks as the only practical way to serve the living revolution while hoping to influence it in a libertarian direction once victory was won. The newly founded Communist International immediately put to use Serge’s talents as a writer, translator, and printer, and at a crucial moment in the Civil War, when all seemed lost, he joined the Communist Party, the better to serve the cause. In this, he had much in common with other ‘Soviet’ anarchists, including the Americans Bill Chatov and Big Bill Haywood.
This was the period when Lenin was wooing the "best elements" among the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists of Europe to the Communist International, and Serge’s reports, published in France, were part of that Soviet propaganda campaign. For example Serge’s 1920 "The Anarchists and the Russian Revolution," 4 (like the "Letter from Russia" in this volume) is a passionately argued apology for the Bolshevik monopoly of power, necessitated by the Civil War, and the repression of Russian anarchists, an armed group whose disorganization and irresponsibility spelled a threat to the revolution. Serge concludes by calling upon his fellow anarchists to join with the Communists and to "strive to preserve the spirit of liberty."
They will be the enemies of the ambitious, of budding political careerists and commissars, of formalists, party dogmatists and intriguers, in other words to fight the illusions of power, to foresee and forestall the crystallization of the workers’ state as it has emerged from war and revolution, everywhere and always to encourage the initiative of individuals and of the masses, to recall to those who might forget that the dictatorship is a weapon, a means, an expedient, a necessary evil but never an aim or a final goa