In the introduction to Victor Serge’s era-defining book about the Stalinist purges, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Susan Sontag contextualizes the moment in history that made the life of Victor Serge what it was. After all, Serge was thrust into the world of living by and for revolution. His parents were Russian political exiles, fleeing from the systematic state terror following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya (the revolutionary socialist organization who conducted a series of assassinations to overthrow Tsarist autocracy. The group embraced being seen as terrorists, referring to their members killed in action as ‘martyrs’.)
So this is the world Serge came from, and he lived his life in such a way that death or imprisonment was almost certain. “Revolution entailed danger,” Sontag wrote, “the risk of death, the likelihood of prison. Revolution entailed hardship, privation, hunger.” She continues. “To read Serge’s memoirs is to be brought back to an era that seems very remote today in its introspective energies and passionate intellectual quests and code of self-sacrifice and immense hope.” Serge did spend a number of years in prison for his political activism. He advanced the Bolshevik cause, translated a number of Trotsky’s works, and was eventually sent to internal exile near Kazakhstan. This exile, in turn, catalyzed further protests in Paris, led by fellow French writers André Malraux and André Gide who opposed the Stalinist regime.
Reading Sontag’s introduction, and then Serge’s book with the historical context of what demands are churning inside a person to make them live so passionately, you become almost envious. Not necessarily envious of their plight of imprisonment or exile, not even necessarily of their political ideation and framework, but for their capacity of living so strongly for something. There is a reason—however illusory and quixotic—to continue steadfast in the direction of these dreams. You don’t want to toss around the word ‘romantic’, with all its lawless gestural flippancy, because there’s an obvious air of naiveté attached to this word, a young and ill-informed perception of the world mostly reliant on some emotional torrent of despair. And yet still, there is an enviable romance about the lives people like Serge lived. Perhaps there’s a romance because you’re removed from it, and can consume it vicariously the way you do a movie or piece of literature, photoshopping yourself into their resolvable calamity, the neatly packaged drama that somehow always finds a resolution after about two hours. Or, if your reading, quite a bit longer.
There have been a few notable times in my life when I did things out of the naiveté of its perceived romance, and was shaken by how unromantic it actually was: I went sailing from northern Scotland down to France, and was caught in a storm, and could never have imagined a worse sickness. It turned out the skipper only wanted to fuck, and here I was, completely broke, in the middle of a raging storm. Or, after college, I went hitchhiking around Europe, working on farms, and some days I’d be walking along the highway for several hours with thousands of cars passing me by, honking, yelling obscenities, flipping me off, and I’d be left alone, crying in a field somewhere, sleeping under a tractor, wanting so bad to call my parents to just bring me home. But these were solely selfish affairs, living only for my own memories. Perhaps Nietzsche’s attempts to cure himself of all notions of a romantic life were pure. But then again, perhaps living an honorable life—living for something larger than yourself—doesn’t have to be an act of such delirious will.
I realize I am removed from the hardship that is usually attached to this romance. After all, I am reading about Serge’s struggle while I’m huddled cozily in my studio warmed with an electric heater with a fake fireplace flame. I’m wedged inside this quiet beach canyon in Southern California. My wife brought me down some eggs and coffee. There isn’t another house in sight. And although my bank account is getting exceptionally low yet again, I’m sure it will all work out somehow. It always does. So, I can read about important literary figures from history who did more than just write laboriously through the sedation of an otherwise empty life, who lived also as disciples of advocacy, and paid the price, and I can agree haughtily, without doing the work myself.
This isn’t to say I didn’t try. I was by no means a heavily involved activist, and was definitely never an organizer, but I dipped my toes in a few times to see if the warm embrace of acting upon your young idealism was indeed the lividity the heart needed. I moved to San Francisco to work with Greenpeace’s activist network for several months after college. I tried a few times to get onto a boat with Sea Shepherd, but never succeeded. I participated in a handful of environmental protests while hitchhiking around Europe, once shutting down a coal-fired power plant in Copenhagen preceding the 2009 COP15 climate conference. I befriended some other radicals that took the Deep Green Resistance seminars with author Derrick Jensen, which necessitate a fringe portion to actually engage in property destruction, basically following the frantic failures of the Earth and Animal Liberation Fronts’ form of action. But I chickened out, and purposefully lost contact with them, because I realized I didn’t actually want to blow up a Hummer dealership. And most recently—just a few years ago, in fact—I participated in a few actions with the activist group Extinction Rebellion, once getting arrested for shutting down a busy intersection in front of Chase bank. I forget why we did it. They’re probably one of the biggest private investors into the fossil fuel industry or something. And yet, sullenly, after all of these attempts to achieve some sort of private virtue, I was left empty, perhaps even a bit ashamed, as if this sort of thing is just some embarrassing emotional catharsis, like the tantrums of a nightmare performed by spoiled children who don’t know how to behave in public.
I don’t exactly know why I was left feeling this way. Maybe I got involved with the wrong groups. Maybe activism today should be served differently than how it used to be. Maybe the internet changed things, or maybe it was just my own debilitating self-criticisms that have halted me so many times in the past. Because by every calculation, it seems that there should be organized mass movements, there should be widespread revolt in pursuit of a litany of causes, but especially around environmental causes. As with Victor Serge, we respond to the world we are born into, upon realizing that the systems in place can be better.
If you spend any time scrolling through the infinite doldrums of social media, flipping through its countless neatly packaged reels that somehow manage to consume the bottomless hollow void, then you’ve probably seen the Just Stop Oil demonstrations. They throw a bucket of soup or paint onto a famous painting that is usually protected with glass. Then the activists usually sit or stand in front of the splattered ejaculate of their performance piece and scream something about how we need to stop consuming oil. The reception of these actions are virtually unanimous: fuck these kids.
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