A Blaze in a Desert

by Victor Serge

  Ironically, Serge returned to writing upon his release from a GPU prison in Soviet Russia, where he was arrested as an anti-Stalinist subversive in 1928. He completed Men in Prison (and two other novels) in “semi-captivity” before he was rearrested and deported to the Gulag in 1933. Serge’s classic prison novel has been compared to Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead, Koestler’s Spanish Testament, Genet’s Miracle of the Rose, and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch both for its authenticity and its artistic achievement.

  This edition features a substantial new introduction by translator Richard Greeman, situating the work in Serge’s life and times.

  “No purer book about the hell of prison has ever been written.”

  —Martin Seymour-Smith, Scotsman

  “There is nothing in any line or word of this fine novel which doesn’t ring true.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Birth of Our Power

  Victor Serge

  ISBN: 978-1-62963-030-4

  256 pages

  Birth of Our Power is an epic novel set in Spain, France, and Russia during the heady revolutionary years 1917–1919. Serge’s tale begins in the spring of 1917, the third year of mass slaughter in the blood-and-rain-soaked trenches of World War I, when the flames of revolution suddenly erupt in Russia and Spain. Europe is “burning at both ends.” Although the Spanish uprising eventually fizzles, in Russia the workers, peasants, and common soldiers are able to take power and hold it. Serge’s “tale of two cities” is constructed from the opposition between Barcelona, the city “we” could not take, and Petrograd, the starving capital of the Russian Revolution, besieged by counter-revolutionary Whites. Between the romanticism of radicalized workers awakening to their own power in a sun-drenched Spanish metropolis to the grim reality of workers clinging to power in Russia’s dark, frozen revolutionary outpost. From “victory-in-defeat” to “defeat in victory.”

  “Nothing in it has dated… It is less an autobiography than a sustained, incandescent lyric (half-pantheist, half-surrealist) of rebellion and battle.”

  —Times Literary Supplement

  “Surely one of the most moving accounts of revolutionary experience ever written.”

  —Neal Ascherson, New York Review of Books

  “Probably the most remarkable of his novels… Of all the European writers who have taken revolution as their theme, Serge is second only to Conrad… Here is a writer with a magnificent eye for the panoramic sweep of historical events and an unsparingly precise moral insight.”

  —Francis King, Sunday Telegraph

  “Intense, vivid, glowing with energy and power… A wonderful picture of revolution and revolutionaries… The power of the novel is in its portrayal of the men who are involved.”

  —Manchester Evening News

  “Birth of Our Power is one of the finest romances of revolution ever written, and confirms Serge as an outstanding chronicler of his turbulent era… As an epic, Birth of Our Power has lost none of its strength.”

  —Lawrence M. Bensky, New York Times

  Anarchists Never Surrender: Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on Anarchism, 1908–1938

  Victor Serge

  ISBN: 978-1-62963-031-1

  256 pages

  Anarchists Never Surrender provides a complete picture of Victor Serge’s relationship to anarchist action and doctrine. The volume contains writings going back to his teenage years in Brussels, when he was already developing a doctrine of individualist anarchism. The heart of the anthology is the key articles written during his subsequent period in Paris, when he was a writer and then an editor of the newspaper l’anarchie. In these articles we see the continuing development of his thought, including most crucially his point of view concerning the futility of mass action and in support of the doctrine of illegalism. All of this led, of course, to his involvement with the Bonnot Gang.

  His thought slowly but most definitely evolved during the period of his imprisonment for his association with Bonnot and his comrades. The anthology includes both his correspondence with his comrade Émile Armand and articles written immediately after his release from prison, among them the key letters that signify the beginning of his break with his individualist past and that point the way to his later engagement alongside the Bolsheviks. It also includes an essential article on Nietzschean thought. This collection also includes articles that Serge wrote after he had left anarchism behind, analyzing both the history and the state of anarchism and the ways in which he hoped anarchism would leaven the harshness and dictatorial tendencies of Bolshevism.

  Anarchists Never Surrender anthologizes a variety of Serge texts nowhere previously available and fleshes out the portrait of this brilliant writer and thinker, who has reached new heights of popularity and interest.

  “Serge is not merely a political writer; he is also a novelist, a wonderfully lyrical writer… He is a writer young rebels desperately need whether they know it or not… He does not tell us what we should feel; instead, he makes us feel it.”

  —Stanley Reynolds, New Statesman

  “I can’t think of anyone else who has written about the revolutionary movement in this century with Serge’s combination of moral insight and intellectual richness.”

  —Dwight Macdonald

  Everyone Has Their Reasons

  Joseph Matthews

  ISBN: 978-1-62963-094-4

  528 pages

  On November 7, 1938, a small, slight seventeen-year-old Polish-German Jew named Herschel Grynszpan entered the German embassy in Paris and shot dead a consular official. Three days later, in supposed response, Jews across Germany were beaten, imprisoned, and killed, their homes, shops, and synagogues smashed and burned—Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

  Based on the historical record and told through his “letters” from German prisons, the novel begins in 1936, when fifteen-year-old Herschel flees Germany. Penniless and alone, he makes it to Paris where he lives hand-to-mouth, his shadow existence mixing him with the starving and the wealthy, with hustlers, radicals, and seamy sides of Paris nightlife. In 1938, the French state rejects refugee status for Herschel and orders him out of the country. Soon after, the Nazis round up all Polish Jews in Germany—including Herschel’s family—and dump them on the Poland border. Herschel’s response is to shoot the German official, then wait calmly for the French police. June 1940, Herschel is still in prison awaiting trial when the Nazi army nears Paris. He is evacuated but escapes and seeks protection at a prison in the far south of France. Two weeks later the French state hands him to the Gestapo. The Nazis plan a big show trial, inviting the world press to Berlin for the spectacle, to demonstrate through Herschel that Jews had provoked the war. Except that Herschel throws a last-minute wrench in the plans, bringing the Nazi propaganda machine to a grinding halt. Hitler himself postpones the trial and orders that no decision be made about Herschel’s fate until the Führer personally gives an order—one way or another.

  “A tragic, gripping Orwellian tale of an orphan turned assassin in pre-World War II Paris. Based on the true story of the Jewish teen Hitler blamed for Kristallnacht, it’s a wild ride through the underside of Europe as the storm clouds of the Holocaust gather. Not to be missed!”

  —Terry Bisson, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author of Fire on the Mountain

  Voices of the Paris Commune

  Edited by Mitchell Abidor

  ISBN: 978-1-60963-100-4

  128 pages

  The Paris Commune of 1871, the first instance of a working-class seizure of power, has been subject to countless interpretations; reviled by its enemies as a murderous bacchanalia of the unwashed while praised by supporters as an exemplar of proletarian anarchism in action. As both a successful model to be imitated and as a devastating failure to be avoided. All of the interpretations are tendentious. Historians view the working class’s three-month rule through their own prism, distant in time and space. Voices of the Paris Commune takes a different t
ack. In this book only those who were present in the spring of 1871, who lived through and participated in the Commune, are heard.

  The Paris Commune had a vibrant press, and it is represented here by its most important newspaper, Le Cri du Peuple, edited by Jules Vallès, member of the First International. Like any legitimate government, the Paris Commune held parliamentary sessions and issued daily printed reports of the heated, contentious deliberations that belie any accusation of dictatorship. Included in this collection is the transcript of the debate in the Commune, just days before its final defeat, on the establishing of a Committee of Public Safety and on the fate of the hostages held by the Commune, hostages who would ultimately be killed.

  Finally, Voices of the Paris Commune contains a selection from the inquiry carried out twenty years after the event by the intellectual review La Revue Blanche, asking participants to judge the successes and failures of the Paris Commune. This section provides a fascinating range of opinions of this epochal event.

  “The Paris Commune of 1871 has been the subject of much ideological debate, often far removed from the experiences of the participants themselves. If you really want to dig deep into what happened during those fateful weeks, reading these eyewitness accounts is mandatory.”

  —Gabriel Kuhn, editor of All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919

  “The Paris Commune holds a place of pride in the hearts of radicals—heroically created from the bottom up and tragically crushed by the forces of reaction. Yet, as this collection illustrates, the lessons of the Commune, as debated by the Communards themselves, are as enduring and vital as that briefly liberated society was inspiring.”

  —Sasha Lilley, author of Capital and Its Discontents

  Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here: Poets and Writers Respond to the March 5th, 2007, Bombing of Baghdad’s “Street of the Booksellers”

  Edited by Beau Beausoleil and Deema Shehabi

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-590-5

  320 pages

  On March 5th, 2007, a car bomb was exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. More than thirty people were killed and more than one hundred were wounded. This locale is the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, a winding street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls. Named after the famed 10th century classical Arab poet al-Mutanabbi, it has been the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community. This anthology begins with a historical introduction to al-Mutanabbi Street and includes the writing of Iraqis as well as a wide swath of international poets and writers who were outraged by this attack.

  This book seeks to show where al-Mutanabbi Street starts in all of us: personally, in our communities, and in our nations. It seeks to show the commonality between this small street in Baghdad and our own cultural centers, and why this attack was an attack on us all. This anthology sees al-Mutanabbi Street as a place for the free exchange of ideas; a place that has long offered its sanctuary to the complete spectrum of Iraqi voices. This is where the roots of democracy (in the best sense of that word) took hold many hundreds of years ago. This anthology looks toward al-Mutanabbi Street as an affirmation of all that we hope for in a more just society.

  “This anthology celebrates the exquisite relationship between the book and the reader, humanity and culture, writing and life and love. It is a tribute to a street that grows into a large and archetypal symbol and spatial metaphor for books.”

  —Muhsin al-Musawi, professor of Arabic and Comparative Studies at Columbia University and editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature

  “The collection of materials in this anthology is astounding and harrowing. Beausoleil and Shehabi have put together a book that will be adored by lovers of poetry, essays, journalism, and testimony. It will also be required reading for anyone interested in social justice.”

  —Steven Salaita, associate professor of English, Virginia Tech University

  A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings: On the Sovereignty of Life as Surpassing the Rights of Man, Second Edition

  Raoul Vaneigem

  ISBN: 978-1-62963-155-4

  129 pages

  “A declaration of rights is indispensable in order to halt the ravages of despotism.” So wrote the revolutionary Antoine Barnave in support of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). Over two centuries after the Great French Revolution, Raoul Vaneigem writes that today, “in a situation comparable to the condition of France on the eve of its Revolution,” we cannot limit ourselves to demanding liberties—the so-called bourgeois freedoms—that came into being with free trade, for now the free exchange of capital is the totalitarian form of a system which reduces human beings and the earth itself to merchandise. The time has come to give priority to the real individual rather than to Man in the abstract, the citizen answerable to the State and to the sole dictates of God’s successor, the Economy.

  Sometimes playful or poetic, always provocative, Raoul Vaneigem reviews the history of bills of rights before offering his own call, with commentary, for fifty-seven rights yet to be won in a world where the “freedoms accorded to Man” are no longer merely “the freedoms accorded by man to the economy.” Every human being has the right, for example: to become human and to be treated as such; to dispose freely of his or her time; to comfort and luxury; to free modes of transport set up by and for the collectivity; to permanent control over scientific experimentation; to association by affinity; to reconciliation with his or her animal nature; to bend toward life what was turned toward death; to the flux of passions and the freedoms of love; to a natural life and a natural death; to stray, to get lost and find him or herself; to hold nothing sacred; to excess and to moderation; to desire what seems beyond the realm of the possible.

  Readers of Vaneigem’s now-classic work The Revolution of Everyday Life, which as one of the main contributions of the Situationist International was a harbinger of May 1968 in France, will find much to savor in these pages written in the highest idiom of subversive utopianism.

  “All opponents of globalization should carry it in their luggage.”

  —Le Monde

  The Revolution of Everyday Life

  Raoul Vaneigem

  Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-678-0

  288 pages

  Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the “society of the spectacle” from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord’s masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the time with theory, Vaneigem’s book described their feelings of desperation directly, and armed them with “formulations capable of firing point-blank on our enemies.”

  “I realise,” writes Vaneigem in his introduction, “that I have given subjective will an easy time in this book, but let no one reproach me for this without first considering the extent to which the objective conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity day after day.”

  Vaneigem names and defines the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the Economy. And in the second part of his book, “Reversal of Perspective,” he explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity, spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and participation.

  For “To desire a different life is already that life in the making.” And “fulfillment is expressed in the singular but conjugated in the plural.”

  The present English translation was first published by Rebel Press of London in 1983. This new edition of The Revolution of Everyday Life has been reviewed and corrected by the translator
and contains a new preface addressed to English-language readers by Raoul Vaneigem. The book is the first of several translations of works by Vaneigem that PM Press plans to publish in uniform volumes. Vaneigem’s classic work is to be followed by The Knight, the Lady, the Devil, and Death (2003) and The Inhumanity of Religion (2000).