Victor Serge

Victor Serge: “Every revolution is a sacrifice of the present to the future”

Posted by Liam O'Ceallaigh on Saturday, November 16, 2013

 

“To all that is terrible in the words “civil war”, “dictatorship”, “intolerance”, “terror”, must be added the unleashing of anti-social instincts, the almost total cessation of scientific and artistic production, an apparent regression in morality, abuses of all sorts; just think of the victims, victims too many too count.

“But others have said it before us: the more violent the storm, the shorter it will be. How many are the victims of the social peace that exists under capitalism? By poverty, by social diseases (tuberculosis, syphilis, alcoholism, crime, prostitution), by economic and moral crises, how many lives does it sacrifice (imperceptibly, for we are used to living in a poisoned atmosphere) every single day to the domination of the rich? As for wars, an inevitable consequence of the capitalist system, how many victims do they create? Certain single days of slaughter in the recent war [World War I] may have cost humanity more lives than were lost by three years of revolution in a country of 140 million inhabitants.

“Every revolution is a sacrifice of the present to the future. What is at stake is the future of humanity. Made necessary by the previous economic and psychological revolution, this sacrifice conditions future progress. And it would be wholly accurate to say that it does not add to the total of the victims of what is called order, of what is in reality domination, both hypocritical and violent, by powers of conservatism. For none of those who fall on the road of revolution—none, except a few privileged people who belong to the ruling class—would have been spared by poverty, by war, by the calamities of the capitalist order.” – Victor Serge, “The Anarchists and the Experience of the Russian Revolution”

 http://www.walkingbutterfly.com/2013/11/16/victor-serge-every-revolution-is-a-sacrifice-of-the-present-to-the-future/