By Terry Eagleton
Socialist Press1980 1980-06-04Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 8 →
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Most people today think of the surrealists-if they think of them at all-as a bunch of freaky bohemian artists who painted moustaches on the Mona Lisa and wrote unintelligible poetry. Writers and Artists for publishing a letter critical of a dreary Soviet film which celebrated the virtues of the nuclear family.
In the same year, Stalin was hatching his notorious dogma of 'socialist realism' in art, based on a naive, reactionary subordination of art to reality as it is' By 1935, as the PCF was swinging tamely into line behind the Popular Front sell-out of the working class to an alliance with "progressive" sections of the bourgeoisie, the break between Stalinists and surrealists became inevitable.
Seizure of power
Just as floods of fellowtravelling artists and intellectuals were rushing into the French Communist Party, enamoured of its new brand of class collaboration, Breton and others sickened by this betrayal of Bolshevism, were on the way out.
In the French general strike of 1936, the surrealists called for a workers' militia and seizure of power, while the Stalinist leader, Maurice Thorez, made his infamous pronounce ment that It is necessary to know how to end a strike'.:
Complacent in their class collaboration, the PCF was able to dismiss the surrealists as no more than a 'degenerate', ', decadent' group of ultra-leftist bohemians.
In 1938, now free of the PCF " Breion travellea to Mexico, where he had an historic meeting with the exiled Leon Trotsky.' Along with the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, the two men drafted out a manifesto calling for an International Federation of. Independent Revolutionary Art, which soon developed sections in a number of countries.
It was in the same year that