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<h1 class="css-19v093x">Leon Trotsky and Revolutionary
Art</h1>
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<div class="css-1890bmp">Michael Löwy
<div class="date">26 August 2020</div>
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<p>Eighty years ago, in August 1940, Leon
Davidovitch Trotsky was assassinated in
Mexico by Ramon Mercader, a fanatical
agent of the Stalinist GPU. In this
article acclaimed historian and thinker
Michael Löwy looks at his writing on
revolutionary art and assesses their
contemporary relevance.</p>
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src="https://pocket-image-cache.com//filters:no_upscale()/https%3A%2F%2Fcdn-ed.versobooks.com%2Fblog_posts%2F000004%2F838%2FLeadImage-Trotsky-.png"
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<p><br>
</p>
<p>First published at <a
href="https://blogs.mediapart.fr/michael-lowy/blog/100820/leon-trotsky-et-l-art-revolutionnaire">https://blogs.mediapart.fr/michael-lowy/blog/100820/leon-trotsky-et-l-art-revolutionnaire</a></p>
<p>For the eightieth anniversary of the
death of Lev Davidovitch Bronstein
(1940-2020).</p>
<p>Eighty years ago, in August 1940, Leon
Davidovitch Trotsky was assassinated in
Mexico by Ramon Mercader, a fanatical
agent of the Stalinist GPU. This tragic
event is now widely known, far beyond the
ranks of Trotsky’s supporters, thanks in
part to the novel <i>The Man Who Loved
Dogs</i> by Cuban writer Leonardo
Padura.</p>
<p>A leader of the October Revolution,
founder of the Red Army, inflexible
opponent of Stalinism, founder of the
Fourth International, Leon Davidovitch
Bronstein made essential contributions to
Marxist thinking and strategy: the theory
of permanent revolution, the transitional
program, the analysis of uneven and
combined development, among others.</p>
<p>His <i>History of the Russian Revolution</i>
(1930) became an essential work of
reference: it was found among the books of
Che Guevara in the Bolivian mountains.
Many of Trotsky’s writings are still read
in the twenty-first century, while those
of Stalin and Zhdanov lie forgotten on the
dustiest shelves of libraries.</p>
<p>One can criticize some of his decisions
(Kronstadt!), and challenge the
authoritarianism of some of his writings
from the 1920-21 period (such as <i>Terrorism
and Communism</i>); but no one can deny
his role as one of the greatest
revolutionaries of the twentieth century.</p>
<p>Leon Trotsky was also a man of great
culture. His little book <i>Literature
and Revolution</i> (1924) is a striking
example of his interest in poetry,
literature and art. But there is one
episode that illustrates this aspect of
the character better than any other: his
authorship, together with André Breton, of
a manifesto on revolutionary art. This is
a rare document, of ‘libertarian Marxist’
inspiration. In this brief tribute on the
anniversary of Trotsky’s death, I would
like to recall this fascinating episode.</p>
<p>In the summer of 1938, Breton and Trotsky
met in Mexico, at the foot of the
Popocatepetl and Ixtacciuatl volcanoes.
This historic meeting was prepared by
Pierre Naville, a former Surrealist and
leader of the Trotskyist movement in
France.</p>
<p>Despite a heated controversy with Breton
in 1930, Naville had written to Trotsky in
1938 recommending Breton as a courageous
man who had not hesitated, unlike so many
other intellectuals, to publicly condemn
the infamy of the Moscow Trials. Trotsky
had therefore agreed to receive Breton,
who had taken the boat to Mexico along
with his partner Jacqueline Lamba.</p>
<p>Trotsky was living at that time in the
Blue House, which belonged to Diego Rivera
and Frida Kahlo, two artists who shared
his ideas and who had received him with
warm hospitality (they would sadly fall
out a few months later). It was also in
this large house located in the Coyoacán
district of Mexico City that Breton and
Lamba stayed during their visit.</p>
<p>This was a surprising meeting between
seemingly opposite personalities: the
revolutionary heir to the Enlightenment
and a fantasising romantic; the founder of
the Red Army and the initiator of the
Surrealist adventure.</p>
<p>Their relationship was rather unequal:
Breton had enormous admiration for the
October revolutionary, while Trotsky,
though respecting the courage and lucidity
of the poet – one of the rare French
left-wing intellectuals to oppose
Stalinism – had some difficulty
understanding Surrealism. He had asked his
secretary, Jean van Heijenoort, to obtain
for him the main documents of the movement
and Breton’s own books, but this
intellectual universe was foreign to him.
His literary tastes lay more towards the
great realist classics of the nineteenth
century than the strange poetic
experiments of the Surrealists.</p>
<p>The encounter was initially very warm,
according to Jacqueline Lamba, in an
interview with Arturo Schwarz: ‘We were
all very moved, even Lev Davidovitch. We
immediately felt welcomed with open arms.
L. D. was really happy to see André. He
was very interested.’</p>
<p>However, this first conversation almost
went badly wrong. According to van
Heijenoort's testimony: ‘The old man
quickly began a discussion about the word
Surrealism, to defend realism against
Surrealism. By realism he meant the
precise meaning Zola gave to the word. He
started talking about Zola. Breton was at
first somewhat surprised. But he listened
attentively and found the words to bring
out certain poetic features in Zola's
work’ (interview of Jean van Heijenoort
with Arturo Schwarz).</p>
<p>Other controversial subjects arose,
notably about the ‘objective chance’ dear
to the Surrealists. This was a curious
misunderstanding: while, for Breton, it
was a source of poetic inspiration,
Trotsky saw it as a questioning of
materialism. But, despite this, the
Russian and the Frenchman found a common
language: internationalism, revolution,
freedom.</p>
<p>Jacqueline Lamba rightly speaks of
elective affinities between the two. Their
conversations took place in French, which
Lev Davidovitch spoke fluently. They went
on to travel together through Mexico,
visiting the magical places of
pre-Hispanic civilizations, and wading
into rivers to try out fishing by hand. In
a famous photo we see them in friendly
talk, sitting next to each other in the
undergrowth, barefoot, after one of these
fishing trips.</p>
<p>This meeting, the rubbing of these two
volcanic stones, gave rise to a spark that
still shines today: the Manifesto for an
Independent Revolutionary Art. According
to van Heijenoort, Breton presented a
first version which Trotsky then edited,
inserting his own contribution (in
Russian).</p>
<p>This is a libertarian communist text,
anti-fascist and hostile to Stalinism,
which proclaims the revolutionary vocation
of art and its necessary independence from
states and political apparatuses. It
called for the creation of an
International Federation for Independent
Revolutionary Art (FIARI).</p>
<p>The idea of the document came from Leon
Trotsky, and was immediately accepted by
André Breton. It was one of very few
documents, if not the only one, that the
founder of the Red Army wrote jointly with
anyone else. The product of long
conversations, discussions, exchanges and
some likely disagreements, it was signed
by André Breton and Diego Rivera, the
great Mexican muralist painter, at the
time a fervent supporter of Trotsky (they
would soon fall out).</p>
<p>This harmless little lie was due to the
old Bolshevik’s conviction that a
manifesto on art should be signed only by
artists. The text had a strong libertarian
tone, especially in the formula proposed
by Trotsky, proclaiming that, in a
revolutionary society, the regime of
artists should be anarchist, i.e. based on
unlimited freedom.</p>
<p>In another famous passage of the
document, it proclaims ‘every license in
art’. Breton had proposed adding ‘except
against proletarian revolution’, but
Trotsky chose to delete this addition.
André Breton’s sympathies for anarchism
are well known, but curiously, in this
Manifesto, it was Trotsky who wrote the
most ‘libertarian’ passages.</p>
<p>The Manifesto affirms the revolutionary
destiny of authentic art, art that ‘pits
the powers of the inner world’ against
‘the present, unbearable reality’. Was it
Breton or Trotsky who formulated this
idea, seemingly drawn from the Freudian
repertoire? It doesn’t matter, given that
the two revolutionaries, the poet and the
fighter, managed to agree on the same
text.</p>
<p>The fundamental principles of the
document are still surprisingly topical,
even if it suffers from certain
limitations, perhaps due to the historical
context in which it was written. For
example, the authors denounce very clearly
the obstacles to the freedom of artists
imposed by states, particularly (but not
only) totalitarian ones. Curiously,
however, there is no discussion and
critique of the obstacles resulting from
the capitalist market and commodity
fetishism.</p>
<p>The document quotes a passage from the
young Marx, proclaiming that the writer
‘must not under any circumstances live and
write just to make money’; however, in
their commentary on this passage, instead
of analysing the role of money in the
corruption of art, the two authors limit
themselves to denouncing the ‘constraints’
and ‘disciplines’ imposed on artists in
the name of ‘raison d’état’.</p>
<p>This is all the more surprising given the
visceral anti-capitalism of each author:
didn’t Breton describe Salvador Dali in
his mercenary turn as ‘Avida Dollars’?<a
title="" name="_ftnref1"
href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4838-leon-trotsky-and-revolutionary-art#_ftn1"><sup><sup><span><span>[1]</span></span></sup></sup></a>
We find the same lacuna in the prospectus
for the FIARI magazine (<i>Clé</i>), which
called for fighting fascism, Stalinism,
and religion: capitalism is absent.</p>
<p>The Manifesto concluded with a call to
create a broad movement, a kind of
Artists’ International, the International
Federation for Independent Revolutionary
Art (FIARI), embracing all those who
recognized themselves in the general
spirit of the document. In such a
movement, wrote Breton and Trotsky,
‘Marxists can walk hand in hand with
anarchists (...) on condition that both
break implacably with the reactionary
police spirit, whether represented by
Joseph Stalin or his vassal García
Oliver.’ A century later, this call for
unity between Marxists and anarchists is
one of the most interesting aspects of the
document as well as one of the most
topical.</p>
<p>In passing: the denunciation of Stalin,
described by the Manifesto as ‘the most
perfidious and dangerous enemy’ of
communism, was indispensable, but was it
necessary to treat as a ‘vassal’ the
Spanish anarchist García Oliver, Durruti’s
companion, the historical leader of the
CNT-FAI and hero of the victorious
antifascist resistance in Barcelona in
1936?</p>
<p>Certainly, Oliver had been a minister in
the first Popular Front government led by
Largo Caballero (he resigned in 1937), and
his role during the May 1937 fighting in
Barcelona between Stalinists and
anarchists (supported by the POUM) was
highly debatable, negotiating as he did a
truce between the two camps. But that did
not make him a henchman of the Soviet
Bonaparte.</p>
<p>FIARI was founded shortly after the
publication of the Manifesto; it succeeded
in bringing together not only supporters
of Trotsky and friends of Breton, but also
anarchists and independent writers and
artists. The Federation had a publication,
the magazine <i>Clé</i>, edited by
Maurice Nadeau, at that time a young
Trotskyist militant with a great interest
in Surrealism (he became the author of the
first <i>History of Surrealism</i>,
published in 1946).</p>
<p>The magazine’s publisher was Léo Malet,
and its committee brought together Yves
Allégret, André Breton, Michel Collinet,
Jean Giono, Maurice Heine, Pierre Mabille,
Marcel Martinet, André Masson, Henry
Poulaille, Gérard Rosenthal and Maurice
Wullens.</p>
<p>Contributors included Yves Allégret,
Gaston Bachelard, André Breton, Jean
Giono, Maurice Heine, Georges Henein,
Michel Leiris, Pierre Mabille, Roger
Martin du Gard, André Masson, Albert
Paraz, Henri Pastoureau, Benjamin Péret,
Herbert Read, Diego Rivera and Leon
Trotsky himself. These names give an idea
of FIARI’s capacity to bring together
quite diverse political, cultural and
artistic figures.</p>
<p>Only two issues of <i>Clé</i> appeared:
the first in January 1939 and the second a
month later. The editorial in the first
issue was entitled ‘No Fatherland!’ and
denounced the expulsion and internment of
foreign immigrants by the Daladier
government, a very topical issue.</p>
<p>FIARI was a beautiful ‘libertarian
Marxist’ experience, but of short
duration: in September 1939, the beginning
of the Second World War put a de facto end
to the Federation.</p>
<p>Postscript: in 1965, our friend Michel
Lequenne, at that time one of the leaders
of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste,
the French section of the Fourth
International, proposed to the Surrealist
Group a refoundation of FIARI. It seems
that the idea did not displease André
Breton, but it was finally rejected by a
collective declaration, dated 19 April
1966 and signed by Philippe Audoin,
Vincent Bounoure, André Breton, Gérard
Legrand, José Pierre and Jean Schuster on
behalf of the Surrealist movement.</p>
<p>Bibliographical note: the book by Arturo
Schwarz, <i>André Breton, Trotsky et
l’anarchie</i> (Paris, 1974) contains
the text of the FIARI Manifesto as well as
all Breton’s writings on Trotsky, along
with a substantial 100-page historical
introduction by the author (who was able
to interview Breton himself), Jacqueline
Lamba, Jean van Heijenoort and Pierre
Naville. One of the most moving documents
in this collection is Breton’s speech at
the funeral of Natalia Sedova Trotsky in
Paris in 1962. After paying homage to this
woman, an eye-witness to ‘the most
dramatic struggles between darkness and
light’, he concluded with this stubborn
hope: the day would come when not only
would justice be done to Trotsky, but also
‘to the ideas for which he gave his life’.</p>
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<p><a title="" name="_ftn1"
href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4838-leon-trotsky-and-revolutionary-art#_ftnref1"><span><span><span><span>[1]</span></span></span></span></a>
<span><span>An anagram of ‘Salvador
Dali’, pronounced in French as ‘<i>avide
à dollars</i>’ (greedy for
dollars) – Trans.</span></span></p>
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