This Way to the Revolution: A Memoir

This Way To the Revolution

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Victor Serge's life is worse. Starting from an immensely deprived childhood, it proceeds to a brief heyday of optimistic identification with the Russian revolution and work in the Comintern, followed by decades of persecution, first in the Soviet Union, as an Oppositionist in Leningrad, and then a deportee in Orenburg, and finally outside it.

Even the Trotskyites made him an outcast, although Serge retained an admiration for the Old Man, and died, like him though not by an assassin's hand , in exile in Mexico. This is a republication of the Oxford University Press edition prepared and translated by Peter Sedgwick from Serge's original French text, and the new edition retains Sedgwick's introduction, along with a post-Soviet essay on Serge by Adam Hochschild, a usefully expanded glossary of short biographies, and a number of charming and accomplished pencil sketches of Serge and his friends by his artist son, Vladimir.

Vlady, who survived the travails of Europe and ended up with his father in Mexico, also contributes a moving paragraph on Serge's death by heart attack in Mexico City in at the age of Independent non-conformist though he was, Serge knew everyone who was anyone on the European revolutionary and left-intellectual scene in the s. A child of itinerant and impoverished Russian revolutionaries, Serge was born in Belgium in and spent his adolescence in Paris, doing various manual jobs and consorting with other angry and despairing youths in a "world without possible escape", as Serge characterises Europe on the eve of the first world war.

Interned as a foreign revolutionary during the war, Serge was plucked from a French concentration camp in and sent to Russia — where he had never been — under an exchange negotiated by the new Soviet regime. Though inclined to anarchism and independent judgment, Serge joined the Bolsheviks, becoming close to a number of the leaders, as well as the writer Maxim Gorky, and stayed in the party despite his anguish at the suppression of the Kronstadt rising at the end of Stalin was never one of Serge's intimates, though he makes a brief early appearance "trying to catch Zinoviev's attention" at a Comintern meeting — "frightening and banal, like a Caucasian dagger", in Serge's memorable phrase.

Word quickly circulated that Pizzey would help victims of abuse with shelter and food, and Pizzey writes that streams of abused women and their children began to arrive at the center. The small house could not withstand the pressures of an increasing full-time population. She describes many of the experiences of the shelter victims in graphic detail—including the beatings and deaths of some of the residents.

Pizzey describes the effects of domestic abuse on the populations of children who passed through the doors, and the desperation of some fathers who were accused of horrific crimes that they did not commit. Pizzey does not isolate herself from their stories; she recalls her own feelings, shortcomings, and failures as she struggled to devote her time to the shelter, and her family and marriage.

Her sometimes tragic personal story is bared upon a backdrop of community service that lasted over a decade and ultimately resulted in the establishment of shelters all across the world. How does she feel it has matured? What dreams ultimately went unfulfilled when Pizzey relinquished control over her creation? From my perspective, she leaves these questions frustratingly unanswered.

As a memoirist, though, Pizzey is well within her privileges to refrain from addressing my concerns. She closed the door on her struggles against the health officials, social service workers, and council politicians; she turned away from the protestors and political feminists who consistently heckled her. Pizzey also acknowledged the toll that was exacted upon her health and her family, but she recalled the pride she felt in knowing that her labors had resulted in helping countless victims of domestic violence.

Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge – review

As such, the text of This Way to the Revolution rises up to meet its title. Her mission was to offer care, support and practical assistance to anyone escaping family violence, including men and boys. She was immediately at odds with and rejected by most feminists who refused to see that males too suffered abuse and harm. The legal system and local councils also often worked against her. But be in no doubt that what she achieved and held together in the form of a therapeutic community for around a decade was simply remarkable.

She made a point of not turning anyone away. It makes for riveting reading, shocking at times, but always hearty and often humorous. She is my people. I highly recommend watching her speak via YouTube videos. Jan 06, Mairi Byatt rated it it was amazing. Utterly stunning, read it 20 years ago and it just scared me how little we have learned, and how much we have regressed as a society! May 12, Matthias rated it really liked it. Jul 23, Marshall rated it it was ok Shelves: It's weird to rate a memoir. Do I rate it based on the quality or writing, or the quality of the life lived, of which the writing is based?

If it wasn't engaging, is that indicative of uninteresting writing, or an uninteresting life? It must be hard to write a memoir, knowing some of your readers only care about the juicy melodrama. I don't want to be one of those readers, and yet, I was pretty bored with this book.

Erin Pizzey opened the first domestic violence shelter in the 70's.

She's a revol It's weird to rate a memoir. She's a revolutionary figure in women's liberation, and yet she's been shunned by the feminist establishment from day one because they were more interested in pushing an ideology about fighting Patriarchy, while all she ever really cared about was helping actual women. Many of the women she helped were also quite violent, and in some cases she was tasked with protecting them and their children from their violence. She also opened a shelter for men, but struggled to get funding and media attention for it. She found that men needed help just as much as women.

These realities were all very inconvenient for the feminist establishment. This book did somewhat show me an ugly side of human nature, how flawed and damaged people are. Some of the run-ins with the feminists were both sad and amusing to read about. But otherwise, I didn't really get much from this book. It was scarcely worth reading. But I'll share one quote from it that I really liked. It's at the very end of the book, and it felt like the perfect summary: I believe that you cannot punish individuals to make them better people, but you can create conditions where those who have been hurt and damaged are given a chance to grow and change.

Jan 14, Ume rated it really liked it Shelves: This review was originally posted on Waterstones. There's a reason for that - but I'll leave you to ponder that yourselves after reading this book. This book is a memoir, not just of the woman who set up the first women and children's shelter in the world - but also a vivid, detailed vivisection of the feminist movement of the s and 70s - and her run-ins with it. It won't be an This review was originally posted on Waterstones. It won't be an easy read for the ideologically inclined.

But it's an important one. For anyone, but specifically for those interested in helping victims of violence and abuse. You'll find your preconceptions challenged and your limits tested. This was not unusual to me. Many of the guys in my graduating class married their girlfriends while still in high school or just after graduating, often because the girls were pregnant. We both studied English, we both worked, and we shared the housework. We were partners, equals in pursuit of a better life. Then she fell in love with our best friend and went off with him.

I was hurt and sad, but also relieved: Soon after Winnie left me, I met Barbara, an art student at Southwestern College who played the guitar. She was open and loving, funny and imaginative, a victim of sexual abuse and suffering from mental illness, a radical and a rebel. She might stay home from work and lie in bed eating candy or ride off with a guy on a motorcycle for the day, she might leave the house with the iron on, burning the clothes on the ironing board, or leave the water running in the bathtub. She found it hard to stay on track to achieve her own goals. One night the women gathered at our place.

I had been out at a bar, and when I came home and started to open the door someone slammed it in my face, practically knocking me down the stairs. I was no paragon of feminism.

Barbara and other women challenged me for my sexist stereotypes or sexist language, for my male presumption. Yet at the same time, I felt proud of Barbara and the other women, who were part of our movement and building their own movement, sometimes within and sometimes in parallel. We were creatures of the society in which we had been raised, attempting to become better people. And the women were definitely leading us in that process, which was often difficult and sometimes painful. This was just after the PL had played a decisive role in destroying SDS nationally, though out on the West Coast we had been oblivious to that disaster.

PL transformed our friends. Once a typical group of southern Californians of the late s or early s, the men with long hair and beards, t-shirts, and blue jeans, and the women with their long, loose hair and folksy homespun style dresses, they suddenly changed. The men now got crew cuts, put on suits, and told us that the PL was sending them into the working class.

The women adopted more conservative attire as they too headed into the proletariat. We could no longer talk with them casually as we once had. They had become robotic, looking at us as if we were strangers, and spouting a party line to us. Those who joined PL had become Third Period Stalinist sectarians, sure that the revolution was around the corner, that they were the only revolutionaries, and that we were not of their ilk.

We had known them in SDS, which had been so open, so democratic, so vibant. We felt both sad and disappointed that our friends had joined what appeared to be a left cult where leaders directed followers in the old Stalinist style. Now on our own, Barbara and I and a couple of friends organized within the local anti-war organization a study group on Vietnam. Sitting on the floor of our married student apartment with half a dozen others, we threw ourselves into the study of Vietnam. As Third Camp socialists, we attempted to convince those in the reading group that one could oppose the U.

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We read and discussed the history of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, whose leader had been assassinated and party destroyed by the Communists. We won over a couple of people, but in truth we had little success. The student movement had become uncritical supporters of Ho, and in many cases also of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. We were being taught a dogma, and that attitude made the course unattractive and uninteresting to us. As suggested by our IS comrades, we read things by and about Trotsky.

Clearly the question of how a Marxist-inspired workers revolution went wrong was a problem that deserved our attention if we hoped to make a revolution in our country and prevent it from also going astray. The UFW had a strike going on down near Imperial Beach, so I drove down there and went to the meetings and picket lines, sometimes with my mother. We held national discussions about the nature of the labor union officialdom and the role of rank-and-file workers.

Unlike the PL members who went off to lead the working class, we went off to immerse ourselves in it, sure that we had important ideas to offer, but also anxious to learn from the workers themselves. At the age of 26, I had never traveled to a foreign country, except just over the border to Tijuana, but in I took my first real trip abroad. We went to the campus but found it occupied by troops and largely abandoned. So we went to the meeting. We found the workers at that meeting looking anxious and fearful following the police murder of the students.

It was my first experience at a labor union meeting. These books became the foundation of my Mexican history library and of my now nearly fifty-year interest in the country and its history. In late and early , I was becoming unmoored. Back in graduate school, I became a semi-dropout. Emotionally and intellectually, I had begun to leave graduate school, though it would take me another year to completely abandon ship. My life was turned upside down at this time. In part, it was the turbulent times. In part it was the seething social movements.

Formats and Editions of This way to the revolution : a memoir [www.farmersmarketmusic.com]

In part, it was just me. Barbara and I were young. We had really been in love, but we had grown apart. We separated and divorced when our son was just approaching three years old. I took custody of Jake. We in the IS — there were about three hundred of us — had all become convinced of the importance of taking socialist ideas into the working class, though there had been great differences about our strategy. All were different obstacles to union democracy and militancy.

At the same time, Miners for Democracy provided an example of workers challenging a conservative, corrupt, and violent leadership and winning. What were we to do? Some of our older members worked in the labor bureaucracy, like Anne Draper wife of our leader Hal Draper. A few of our members had jobs as teachers or social workers and were active in their unions. A couple had gone off to get industrial jobs as an experiment.

We debated the nature of the labor unions: Were they inherently conservative? Or could they be reformed? And if so, how? How could we take socialist ideas into the working class? We decided that we ourselves would have to get industrial jobs, would have to become active in the union, and would have to build rank-and-file movement like the MfD in the industries.

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So Barbara went off to Detroit to work in an auto plant and I and my new companion both dropped out of the university, and then she with her child and I with Jake, went off to Chicago to join the IS branch there. I worked in a number of jobs in the first couple of years, first as a librarian and then as a social worker until I eventually found a job in a steel mill and later as a truck driver. I would spend about six years as an activist in the Teamsters union and later in the reform movement Teamsters for a Democratic Union TDU.

Once I was in Chicago, our reading changed as our group began to orient to the labor movement. We had only a few old timers to guide us — Stan Weir, a longshoreman on the West Coast, and Steve Zeluck, a schoolteacher on the East Coast — so reading about the history and the contemporary situation of the unions was essential. The purpose of that reading was to prepare us to work in industry and to develop strategies for struggle in the unions.

Reading the Revolution: A Memoir of 1968

I know that with the privilege of graduate school, I may have read more widely than many of my comrades. On the other hand I also know that the IS had many members who were better educated than I. Our political tendency definitely had a set of central texts — Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Shachtman, Draper — and many of us also read Victor Serge and considered him the moral compass of the left.

I found that people in the IS tended to read more broadly than many of those in other groups who kept to the straight and narrow path of their group, whether that was Stalin, Mao, or Trotsky. Dogma has its attractions: It is, of course, an illusion. A reading of our history — and we read a lot of that — suggests that there is no clear path and no assurance of victory, but such reading also suggests that the difficulties we face are worth the fight to achieve a truly human society. I had many friends who read in order to better make the revolution and to make the revolution better.

Our reading in and thereabouts, done in the context of mass movements of social protest, helped to transform us into revolutionaries. Many of us, committed to building a socialist movement based in the working class, later became telephone workers, autoworkers, steelworkers, and truck drivers, some for decades, some for only a few years. Others were leaders in the anti-war movements or in community movements, and later in the LGBTQ and environmental movements.

After the movements subsided in the mids, some returned to graduate schools to take academic degrees in philosophy, history, or literature, and some also studied law. Even after they left their industrial jobs, many continued to put their intellects and their knowledge at the service of the working class. We continued to be activists, and we continued to read, always reading toward the revolution.

He is the author a ten other books on labor and social movements and politics in the United States, Mexico, and Indonesia. We use cookies to enhance your experience. Dismiss this message or find out more. Don't have an account? Sign up here for discounts and quicker purchasing. Dan La Botz 23 August A Memoir of "Our reading in and thereabouts, done in the context of mass movements of social protest, helped to transform us into revolutionaries.

UCSD undergraduate library, A Family of Readers Everyone who entered into the great reading revolution of , of course, came to it from different places. Reading Before — Kerouac and Ginsberg A teacher at my high school, Leroy Wright, heard from another teacher that I liked to write, and so he stopped me one day at school to ask about my poetry. A First Generation College Student I was the first person in my family to go to college, my mother having dropped out of school in eighth grade to go work in a factory and my father having dropped out in tenth grade to work on a vegetable truck.

Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson One day an older friend, Helen Rowan, invited me to accompany her to a series of lectures at the University of California San Diego that she thought might interest me. Joining the International Socialists After hearing all of the groups, our little collective split, a few joining the Communist Party and several others, Walt and Madeleine, and Barbara and I among them, joining the International Socialists.

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