.:. Anarchism & Surrealism .:.

[cl...@columbia-center.org]

From:
http://burn.ucsd.edu/~acf/org/issue44/surr.html

Anarchism and Surrealism

IN THE FOLLOWING article, as part of our regular ongoing series on
culture we look at the links between Surrealism and Anarchism. It's
noticeable how bourgeois writers writing about Surrealism play down the
politics. For example in the massive book on Breton, Revolution and the
Mind: The Life of Andre Breton the author Mark
Polizzotti passes over the links beween Surrealism and Anarchism in a
couple of sentences . This despite the signal devotion of Breton in
showing solidarity, as one of a few intellectuals to support the
libertarian movement in a period of repression. and despite the fact
that the Surrealists wrote a weekly column for Le Libertaire, a paper
with not an inconsiderable readership.

"It was in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first
recognised itself."Thus wrote unequivocally the "Pope of Surrealism"
Andre Breton in 1952. Breton had returned to France in 1947 and in April
of that year Andre Julien welcomed his return in the pages of Le
Libertaire the weekly paper of the Federation Anarchiste.

But why had not the Surrealists associated themselves before 1947 with
the ideas of revolutionary anarchism? This radical art movement which
had a fierce hatred of authority and religion was a natural ally. Indeed
the art movement of Dada, in many ways a precursor and influence on
surrealism, had emerged in Zurich in 1916 as a reaction to the savagery
and slaughter of the World War. Breton himself was influenced by the
poet Jacques Vache whom he met in 1919. Breton was to note in the same
1952 article that :" At that time, the surrealist refusal was total, and
absolutely incapable of allowing itself to be channelled at a political
level. All the institutions upon which the modern world rested-and which
had just shown their worth in the first World War- were considered
aberrant and scandalous to us. To begin with, it was the entire defence
apparatus of society that we were attacking: the army, "justice", the
police, religion, psychiatric and legal medicine, and schooling". He
went on to demand : "Why was an organic fusion not operated at this
moment between anarchist and surrealist elements?" and explained " It
was undoubtedly the idea of efficiency, which was the delusion of that
period, that decided otherwise. What we took to be the triumph of the
Russian Revolution and the advent of a workers' state led to a great
change in our outlook. The only dark spot in the picture- which became
an indelible stain- was the
crushing of the Kronstadt insurrection of 18 March 1921".

Solidarity
The surrealists had not hesitated in 1923 in showing solidarity with the
young anarchist woman Germaine Berton who had killed an activist of the
extreme right nationalist party L'Action Francaise and who was
aqcquitted in a jury trial! Another member of the surrealist group,
Robert Desnos, had associated with the individualist anarchist
circles of Victor Serge and Rirette Maitrejean, whilst according to a
police record, the surrealist poet Benjamin Peret had been active in an
anarchist group in the Paris region and had contributed to the anarchist
paper Le Libertaire. All the surrealists attentively read the anarchist
press in this period. However, they were put off by
the incoherence of the French movement and remembered how some had
supported the Allied effort in the World War. When Breton took over as
editor of the review La Revolution Surrealiste from Antonin Artaud he
wrote most of the collective texts like the revolutionary Open the
Prisons! Disband the Armies!

The Surrealists also leapt to the defence of the young woman Violette
Noziere who had poisoned her father. Violette accused her father of
having systematically raped her from the age of 12. The Surrealists used
the trial to denounce the bourgeois family and bourgeois hypocrisy.

In January 1927 5 members of the Surrealist group joined the Communist
Party: Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Unik and Peret. Others, like Desnos and
Miro refused to join. Even with Breton, Party membership was with
qualifications. 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". 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. 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. 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!

Trotsky
By now some of the Surrealists were allying with Trotskyism and
oppositional Bolshevism. Peret made contact in France and Brazil with
the Communist Union and the Internationalist Workers Party. 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. 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.
No constraint, not the least trace of command". 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. It is not clear when Trotsky helped write this document what
he thought he was doing, as it went against everything he had ever done
or said.

Durruti
Peret for his part had gone as delegate of the Internationalist Workers
Party to Spain. Here he worked as a radio broadcaster for the POUM, but
left this post when he criticised this organisation for participating in
the Catalan government. He joined the anarchist Durruti Column on the
Aragon front. "All collaboration with the POUM was
impossible, they wanted very much to accept people to their right, but
not to their left. I have decided to enter into an anarchist militia,
and here I am at the front, at Pino de Ebro", he wrote to Breton. Two
years later he paid tribute to Durruti. "I have always seen in Durruti
the most revolutionary Anarchist leader, whose attitude was
most violently opposed to the capitulations of the Anarchists who had
entered the government and his killing moved me very much. I think that
the lesson that was the life of Durruti should not be lost." Returning
to France, he was called up at the start of the war. He was arrested for
distribution of leaflets of "an anarchist character"
and after a prison term managed to escape to Mexico. Here he undertook a
thoroughgoing critique of Trotskyism and distanced himself from its
organisations. Writing later in a letter to Georges Fontenis, the French
libertarian communist militant, he remarked:"If the disappearance of the
State can not be envisaged in the immediate, it is no less true that the
proletarian insurrection must mark the the first day of the death agony
of the State".

Arrogance
After the War the Surrealists began to collaborate with the Federation
Anarchiste. Fontenis and another militant of the FA, Serge Ninn,
maintained good contacts with the Surrealists, the former becoming a
friend of Breton. In 1951, the Surrealist started to write a regular
weekly column in Le Libertaire -Le Billet Surrealiste. A series of
articles by Peret were also published in Le Libertaire which
characterised the unions as counter-revolutionary organisms and put
forward workers councils as an alternative. The FA were in disagreement
with him on this and published a reply in the paper. Peret was certainly
in advance of French Anarchists on this question. The controversy here
was fraternal, but in a later Billet the Surrealist Jean Schuster
insisted that the Surrealists should take charge of the intellectual
struggle, whilst the Anarchists got on with the economic and social
struggle. This elitist arrogance stirred up a lot of trouble, and the
relationship between the Surrealists and the Anarchists began to cool
and the last Billet appeared in Le Libertaire in January 1953.

The article Poet, that is to say revolutionary written by Peret, the
most politicised and revolutionary of the Surrealists, that appeared in
the paper in 1951 said the essential . He showed up to what point poetry
is revolutionary but he added ; " It does not follow that the (the poet)
puts poetry at the service of political action, even if it is
revolutionary,"(Which was certainly never the wish of the Anarchist
militants of the period) . "But his quality of poet makes him a
revolutionary who must struggle on every terrain:that of poetry by his
own means and on the terrain of social action , without ever confusing
the two fields of action".

Synthesis
Apart from Breton and Peret the other Surrealists were never seen on the
field of social action.Breton was consistent in his support for the
Federation Anarchiste and he continued to offer his solidarity after the
Platformists around Fontenis transformed the FA into the Federation
Communiste Libertaire. He was one of the few intellectuals who continued
to offer his support to the FCL during the Algerian war when the FCL
suffered
severe repression and was forced underground. He sheltered Fontenis
whilst he was in hiding. He refused to take sides on the splits in the
French Anarchist movement and both he and Peret expressed solidarity as
well with the new FA set up by the synthesist Anarchists and worked in
the AntiFascist Committees of the 60s alongside the FA.

Some were able to synthesise Anarchism and Surrealism on an individual
level even if it had not happened on a collective level.The poet Jehan
Mayoux, great friend of Peret, the son of Anarchists and
anti-militarists, joined the Surrealists at the end of the 20s. Called
up at the start of the war, he went AWOL and was imprisoned. Escaping,
he was captured by the germans and sent to a concentration camp from
which he was liberated in
1945. He continued to take part in libertarian activity up to his death.
Jean-Claude Tertrais participated in Surrealist activities in the 50s
whilst Breton was still alive. Called up during the Algerian war, he
went AWOL and was sent to the hellish "Disciplinary Battalions". He
joined the FA on his release, contributing articles on
surrealism to the FA paper Le Monde Libertaire.

However, as Fontenis was to remark " It is true that, too often , poets
are just poets, without being really revolutionary ,no insult to B.Peret
intended, , and if sometimes they attach themselves to the movement of
the masses they often fixate on individual high deeds, on spectacular
subversion, on illegalist deeds, rather than on the hard daily
struggles....As much as it is preferable that the libertarian movement
stays intimately linked to the spirit of revolt of the poets, as much it
is prejudicial to subject its revolutionary views to the fantasies of
men of letters. Yes to implacable revolt, yes to insurrection, yes to
the libertarian spirit....but is this a reason to leave on the side the
anarchist thought and the class action that nourishes it and that it
inspires?".

Class Action
(Other criticisms can be made of Surrealism-the individual intolerance
and authoritarianism of Breton, the sexism and homophobia, the cod
Freudianism, the dubious celebration of sexual violence-but that would
require an article in itself).

Whatever you do read Breton's Claire Tour - his enthusiastic ode to
Anarchism. It's been translated into English as The Lighthouse in the
Drunken Boat, an anthology of writings on Anarchism and Art available
from Freedom and AK.

--
---------------------------------------------------
Dan Clore

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