The Serge of the NotebooksВ saw that freedom and democracy were not mere bourgeois tricks: they were the essence of the radical project, the preconditions without which no permanent, positive change could occur. In doing so, he found himself isolated within the world of European exiles in Mexico.

Unlike many on the left, both Stalinist and anti-Stalinist, Serge insisted that the nature of socialism had to be rethought. But Serge never wavered in his belief that socialism was necessary. In his final years, hatred of the Communists, who attacked him mercilessly and who he believed blocked publication of his novels, and who he feared wanted to assassinate him, became one of his central tenets.

The Notebooks 1936вЂ“1947В offer the clearest account of this shift and of just how radical it was read along with his correspondence and articles of the period, they provide us with a complex picture. SergeвЂ™s politics changed with every change of country, and it was in Mexico that he undertook his final political shift. Seven years later, the term of his burial plot having expired, he was disinterred and reburied in a common grave. Serge died poor and stateless, and a Spanish fellow-exile arranged for him to be buried in the French cemetery of Mexico City as a Spaniard alongside other Г©migrГ©s. The ship he took from France included among its passengers the leading Surrealist AndrГ© Breton, the German writer Anna Seghers, and the French intellectual Claude LГ©vi-Strauss, who in Tristes Tropiques described Serge as having the presence of вЂњa prim and elderly spinster.вЂќ In 1941, with the assistance of Varian FryвЂ™s Emergency Rescue Committee, Serge left France for Mexico, which opened its doors to political exiles of his stripe. This was exemplified by his backing in the Spanish Civil War of the anti-Stalinist POUM, the opposition Communist group George Orwell fought for. He then abandoned Trotskyism, which had by then hardened into a dogma, and adopted an independent revolutionary socialist line. Serge sided with Trotsky against Stalin after LeninвЂ™s death, which resulted in his internment in a camp in the Urals and his expulsion to the West in 1936, thanks to a protest campaign of intellectual and political activists. Instead, he was arrested for violating his banishment order, and was deported to Soviet Russia in 1919, where he became an apparatchik of the Communist International. In 1917, after some initial hesitation, he supported the Russian Revolution and returned to France illegally in an effort to find his way to Russia and participate in the young revolution. Released, he left for Spain, where he was active in revolutionary syndicalist circles. He then took his first steps as an anarchist, and in 1909, either expelled from Belgium or leaving of his own accord (no one is certain which), he took up residence in France, where he became a central figure in the individualist anarchist movement, writing for its main journal, lвЂ™anarchie.ДЄrrested as an associate of the murderous anarchist Bonnot Gang, he was imprisoned from 1912 until 1917, rejecting individualism while in prison. The rise of right-wing populism, which has taken over the leftвЂ™s former base, the emergence of the mixed left- and right-populism of the yellow vests in France, which rejects political parties, as well as the upsurge of a firmly democratic socialism in the US, all point to the need for the re-examination of leftist verities in which Serge engaged throughout his life, but particularly in the final years while in exile in Mexico.Д«orn Victor Kibalchich in 1890 in Belgium to a family that was heir to the Russian revolutionary tradition, he belonged as an adolescent to the left wing of the youth organization of the Belgian WorkersвЂ™ Party-from which he was expelled when he opposed the partyвЂ™s call for the annexation of the Congo. They spoke of the poverty of his last six years in Mexico, but they also symbolized the peripatetic life of this perpetual exile.Д«ut it is a life with lessons, for Serge and his rethinking of socialism and the left have a particular resonance today. When Victor Serge died of a heart attack in the back of a Mexico City cab on November 17, 1947, there were said to be holes in the soles of his shoes. Victor Serge, with Dadaist poet Benjamin PГ©ret and his lover, the artist Remedios Varo, and AndrГ© Breton, France, circa JanuaryвЂ“March 1941

French revolutionary calendar 2019