Manifesto of Libertarian Communism by Georges Fontenis

This contradictory and bizarre document seems to have been written by Breton and amazingly Trotsky, with Rivera substituting for Trotsky’s signature when he got cold feet. No constraint, not the least trace of command”. Together with Trotsky and the Mexican painter Diego Rivera he drafted For an Independent Revolutionary Art which announced that “The revolution is obliged to erect a socialist regime with central planning for intellectual creation it must, even from the start, establish an anarchist regime of intellectual liberty. Breton made contact in Mexico with Trotsky when he was put in charge of a series of conferences at Mexico University on Poetry and Painting in Europe in 1938. Peret made contact in France and Brazil with the Communist Union and the Internationalist Workers Party. Breton was expelled in 1933, and at a Party-controlled International Congress for the Defence of Culture the Surrealists were denounced and were only allowed to speak on the last day at 2 in the morning!īy now some of the Surrealists were allying with Trotskyism and oppositional Bolshevism. It was a stormy period for the Surrealists as they tried to participate as they saw it in the workers’ revolution, whilst at the same time safeguarding their own specific preoccupations, and fighting against the Party leadership’s attempts to keep them on a tight rein. Whilst Aragon transformed from the “most libertarian spirit of the Surrealist group” into a horrific Stalinist hack who wrote poems honouring the Russian secret police the NKVD, others who had joined the Party began to feel distinctly uncomfortable about the Moscow show trials. He saw the Communist programme as only a minimum programme, and criticised the Party paper as “Puerile, uselessly declamatory, cretinous, unreadable completely unworthy of the role of proletarian education that it tries to assume”. Even with Breton, Party membership was with qualifications. Others, like Desnos and Miro refused to join. “In January 1927 5 members of the Surrealist group joined the Communist Party: Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Unik and Peret. If these guys don’t sound interesting to you you are doing something wrong: Ignorance of your culture is not considered cool, as someone else once said. They are far more creditable as revolutionaries than many of the later Trotskyists who are casually lauded.

People should take the Surrealists far more seriously IMHO – they have a very honourable tradition as early interpreters of Hegel, early supporters of Trotsky and opponents of the bureaucratisation of the CP.

I find most of Trotsky’s writings on culture uninspiring despite their often being head and shoulders above the mainstream of Bolshevik opinion on the matter.

“Trotsky had nothing to do with any of the Surrealist Manifestos, but he did coauthor, with Breton, the excellent ‘Manifestoįor an Independent Revolutionary Art’.

Manifesto of Libertarian Communism by Georges Fontenis