Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Those banished from a church are always its elite. They are ahead of their time.  ERNEST RENAN  I In the eyes of many, Victor Serge, the Belgian-born writer and anti-Stalinist militant, has come to stand for political probity in a time of cowardice and falsehood. The child of exiles from Tsarist Russia, from whom he inherited an admiration for lone fighters against oppression, Serge’s political evolution saw him travel large distances: a young socialist, then a fervent individualist anarchist, then a revolutionary syndicalist, and then, with the Russian Revolution, an orthodox Bolshevik. With Lenin’s death, Serge sided with Trotsky against Stalin, before ending his days in exile in Mexico City as an independent socialist of an eccentric type. His ideological shifts were not a demonstration of political fickleness, but rather of his recognition that no fixed ideology can meet changing circumstances, that it is necessary for ideas and people to evolve politically as the world situation itself evolves. He paid dearly for the transformations of his beliefs, living in almost constant exile and statelessness. He was imprisoned twice in France and twice in the Soviet Union, before being expelled from the latter in 1936 after spending three years in forced internal exile. He faced political isolation and poverty, and at the end of his life, in his final exile in Mexico, his poverty was so bleak that when, in 1947, he died in the back seat of a taxi in Mexico City, the soles of his shoes were found to be worn through.  Writing on the margins of politics and history, a citizen only of what he called “the invisible international,” Serge’s independence and foresight have earned him the recognition that he lacked in his lifetime. After languishing in oblivion in the English-speaking world, he was rescued by the scholar Richard Greeman, who translated most of his novels and over the course of half a century campaigned tirelessly to ensure that all of Serge’s essential works were published. In 2004 Serge’s consecration was complete, when Susan Sontag wrote an impressive overview of his career, saying of him that “I can’t think of anyone who has written about the revolutionary movement in this century with Serge’s combination of moral insight and intellectual richness.” He has been deservedly rescued from the margins. We may even need his example. But who, exactly, was he? He was born Victor-Napoléon Kibalchich in Brussels in 1890, and always believed that he was related to Nikolai Kibalchich, one of the assassins of Tsar Alexander II in 1882, who died on the gallows with his fellow assassins. The heroism and the self-abnegation of the members of Narodnya Volya, or the People’s Will, the socialist revolutionary organization whose members included the assassins of the Tsar, served as Serge’s inspiration, which he invoked throughout his life. His family relationship with one of the heroes of the movement to free Russia made this identification an essential part of his being. But alas, Richard Greeman’s research into Serge’s family history revealed that there was no family tie between Serge and his hero. Serge was also certain that his father had been involved in the Russian Narodnik movement, but the evidence for this, too, is weak.  Victor grew up in an impoverished and dysfunctional family, though “grew up” is not quite accurate: he left home when he was twelve and supported himself from that time on. This claim, made in his memoirs, may sound improbable, but it is confirmed by residency records in the files of the Brussels police. With a group of friends, some of whom would play a crucial and tragic role in his later life, the young Kibalchich joined the youth organization of the Belgian Worker’s Party, which he and his friends soon quit, frustrated by its tepid politics. Anarchism called him — a form of anarchism that reflected his youthful disgust with the world. In his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, which was published posthumously in France in 1951, Serge recalls his years as an anarchist, saying that “anarchism swept us away completely because it both demanded everything of us and offered us everything.”  And yet he downplays his actual beliefs and writings in those same memoirs. The days of bomb-throwing anarchists were gone when Serge became an anarchist around 1907, but he adopted a form of individualist anarchism that in many ways grew from that violent phase of anarchist history. At eighteen he wrote in the newspaper published by his circle of friends and comrades in Belgium an essay in praise of Emile Henry, who was notorious for throwing a bomb into the Café Terminus in Paris in 1894, and for declaring at his trial that he regretted only that he had not killed more than one person. Serge, under his pen name of Le Rétif, spoke of Henry’s heroism; and of his death on the guillotine he rhapsodized, “It was a death whose memory will live on. A death that free men will later remember with gratitude. For alongside the people of our century, the arrivistes, crushers, deceivers of all kinds; the immense mass of imbecilic followers and serfs, this young man marching towards death when everything in him wanted to live, this young man dying for the ideal is truly a luminous figure.”  In 1908 Serge moved to Paris, the capital of this school of anarchism, where he wrote and edited the newspaper l’anarchie, whose founder, uncannily named Albert Libertad, published it entirely in lower case so that all of the letters would be equal. Serge’s articles for l’anarchie expressed a consistent worldview, one that scorned the working class as a herd of sheep interested only in getting drunk. He was a revolutionary who dismissed the utility of mass revolutions and upheld a firm belief in the power of the individual, writing that “the evil illusion is that of waiting for the revolt of the crowd, of the organized, disciplined, regimented masses. In fact, the only fertile acts are those committed by individuals knowing clearly what