The Poetry of Trotskyism

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Trotsky talking with Andre Breton (left and Diesn Rivern What is less often remembered is that, under their French leader Andre Breton, they formed the backbone of the Trotskyist opposition to French Stalinism during the 1920s and 30s. How is this strange paradox to be explained?

In 1916, at the heart of the first imperialist world war, an outrageous new movement was born in a small Zurich nightclub.

Dadaism

Known as Dadaism-the name was chosen because it was meaningless-it launched merciless assault on bourgeois culture, religion, politics and philosophy, breaking up concerts, staging street demonstrations, throwing exhibitions of 'shocking' art and scandalising the bourgeois adherents of 'high culture' Dadaism spread rapidly throughout Europe, and in Germany in particular was to merge with Marxist politics: a revolutionary declaration was published from Berlin over the unlikely signature of The Central Dada Council of World Revolution', and one of the founders of the Rhineland Communist Party was a leading Dadaist artist.

Infantile, anarchistic and iconoclastic, Dadaism was more a symptom of the exhaustion of bourgeois ideology brought about by the imperialist war than a constructive response to it.

By 1920 Dadaism was itself exhausted; but in 1924, with the publication in Paris of the Surrealist Manifesto, it was to give birth to a new movement of considerably greater political substance.

Surrealism sprang from a group of French artists-most notably, the poets Andre Breton and Louis Aragon -who believed in the destruction of the 'culture' cherished by the bourgeoisie.

Uncompromisingly radical and bold, the surrealists denounced books, museums, concert halls and art exhibitions in the name of a theory of the creative imagination which would drive beyond the narrow confines of 'art' and contribute to the revolutionising of daily life itself.

Less an 'artistic movement' than a vanguard dedicated to the destruction of the barriers between 'art" and life', the surrealists flaunted their experimental poetry and painting in the face of a hostile bourgeoisie; they understood 'surrealism' not as ah escape from reality, but as an intensifying of real awareness, a revolutionary' expansion of consciousness which would call the whole of bourgeois society into question.

'In revolutionary times' wrote Lenin, 'the limits of the possible increase a thousand. fold, and what the Bolsheviks sonatArIs indenair tarkled in the nolitinal cashion davaru m me poncar spnere the surrealists attempted in the realm of everyday life.

Internationalists

As dedicated internationalists, they spread throughout the 1920s and 1930s until surrealist groups existed all the way from England to Egypt, Chile to Japan, Haiti to Yugoslavia.

By 1925, the French surrealists had moved close to the French Communist Party; and two ycars later their leaders announced their conversion to the PCF. Their sojourn within. the party, was not, as might be predicted, a happy one.

Critical of its growing dogmatism and bureaucratisation, scornful of its brutal suppression of free discussion and of its abysmally low level of theoretical development, Breton and his fellow-surrealists sided from the outset with the Trotskyist Left Opposition within the Soviet Union.

In pamphlet entitled Surrealism in the service of the Revolution, they dedicated their art to the cause of international proletarian uprising; their poetry celebrated the virtues of iron revolutionary discipline and relentless struggle against bourgeois values.

For this they were to win the praise of Anatole Lunarcharsky, first Soviet Minister of Culture, and a notably cultivated, cosmopolitan thinker.

From the PCF, however, they won little but suspicion, 114I C U sneering and distrust. A threat to both its political Stalinism and cultural philistinism, the surrealists stood firm by their revolutionary cultural programme and defence of traditional Bolshevism.

From the beginning, they had grasped the transformative potential of the Freudian theory of the unconscious. Determined to break down the barriers between art and lite, s, yuluse red ever day hard-and-fast division between social consciousness, and the explosive, unconscious forces which it repressed.

Their artistic aims were to give these unconscious forces a voice-to let them rip through the stable, sedate forms of bourgeois society and challenge its crur f'ej/ unu wiego nivera one-dimensional vision.

Luis Bunuel, one of the greatest film directors of the period, was an avowed surrealist: his films exploited 'unconscious' imagery to remorselessly satirise bourgeois ideology, and in 1931 a showing of a Bunuel film in Paris was raided by fascist gangs.

"Today's authentic art' wrote Breton, 'goes hand in hand with revolutionary social activity. Like the latter, it leads to the confusion and destruction of capitalist society'.

Idealist though the surrealists' belief in the imagination may have been, it was more than the Stalinists could politically take.

In 1934, Breton was expelled from the Stalinist Association of Revolutionary