The two souls of Trotskyism?

The art of this epoch will be entirely under the influence of revolution. This art needs a new self-consciousness. It is, above all, incompatible with mysticism, whether it be frank, or whether it masquerades as romanticism, because the Revolution starts from the central idea that collective man must become sole master, and that the limits of his power are determined by his knowledge of natural forces and by his capacity to use them. This new art is incompatible with pessimism, with scepticism, and with all other forms of spiritual collapse. It is realistic, active, vitally collectivist, and filled with a limitless creative faith in the Future.

- Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 1924

The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realizes that the role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him. This fact alone, insofar as he is conscious of it, makes the artist the natural ally of revolution. The process of sublimation, which here comes into play, and which psychoanalysis has analyzed, tries to restore the broken equilibrium between the integral “ego” and the outside elements it rejects. This restoration works to the advantage of the “ideal of self,” which marshals against the unbearable present reality all those powers of the interior world, of the “self,” which are common to all men and which are constantly flowering and developing. The need for emancipation felt by the individual spirit has only to follow its natural course to be led to mingle its stream with this primeval necessity: the need for the emancipation of man.

The conception of the writer’s function which the young Marx worked out is worth recalling. “The writer,” he declared, “naturally must take money in order to live and write, but he should not under any circumstances live and write in order to make money. The writer by no means looks at his work as a means. It is an end in itself and so little a means in the eyes of himself and of others that if necessary he sacrifices his existence to the existence of his work....The first condition of the freedom of the press is that it is not a business activity.” It is more than ever fitting to use this statement against those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of end foreign to itself, and prescribe, in the guise of so-called “reasons of State,” the themes of art. The free choice of these themes and the absence of all restrictions on the range of his explorations--these are possessions which the artist has a right to claim as inalienable. In the realm of artistic creation, the imagination must escape from all constraint and must, under no pretext, allow itself to be placed under bonds. To those who would urge us, whether for today or for tomorrow, to consent that art should submit to a discipline which we hold to be radically incompatible with its nature, we give a flat refusal, and we repeat our deliberate intention of standing by the formula: complete freedom for art.

- Leon Trotsky and André Breton, Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, 1938

Trotskyism and the aesthetic of rebellion

A Brazilian friend told me recently of a proverb that is apparently widely known in his home country, about a Spanish sailor who being shipwrecked on a foreign shore came up the beach to inquire of the locals "is there a government here?" and upon being answered in the affirmative declared automatically "then I am against it!"

I was thinking about this story recently while reading the debate over on British journalist Dave Osler's blog about the links between Trotskyism and the American neo-conservative right, one of whose intellectual godfathers - Irving Kristol - died just over a week ago.

Kristol was not the only Trotskyist to make the transition from one extreme of the political spectrum to the other - others include literary commentator Stephen Schwartz (formerly a member of the dissident current associated with ex-Spanish Trotskyist leader Grandizo Munis) and of course the inimitable Christopher Hitchens.

As a former Trotskyist (who still retains a great deal of sympathy for Trotsky himself, if not necessarily for his followers) I am skeptical of claims regarding the existence of some kind of causal link between anti-Stalinism and neo-conservatism.

However, I do think that Trotskyism because of its marginalised, heterodox status has throughout its history always appealed to people of a certain psychological predisposition, namely those who (like myself) instinctively rebel against the cultural and political consensus in society at any given point in time, those who like our proverbial Spanish sailor feel the need to be siempre en contra.

Michael Weiss, a New York blogger who appears to be part of the same milieu as Schwartz and Hitchens makes a similar point in a recent article entitled "Pilgrim of Doubt" on the life of American Trotskyist Irving Howe (originally drawn to my attention by Poumista), whose greatest influences were the seemingly unlikely pairing of Karl Marx and the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Weiss' point is that what attracted Howe to these two authors (and presumably to Trotsky as well) was their status as rebels and outcasts - the message while important was initially at least secondary to the aesthetic imperative of rebellion (what Weiss refers to as "their fondness for the Promethean").

The same contrarian spirit is alive and well in a 2004 article by Stephen Schwartz that appeared in the Weekly Standard (prop. the late Irving Kristol) entitled "Bad Poet, Bad Man", in which Schwartz takes issue with the literary eulogising/mythologising of the Chilean Pablo Neruda at the expense of some of his contemporaries such as Gabriela Mistral and Vicente Huidobro. Schwartz writes:

In 1938, two singular men sat down to compose a statement about the situation of the global intellect as they then saw it. They wrote, among other things, "The totalitarian regime of the U.S.S.R., working through the so-called 'cultural' organizations it controls in other countries, has spread over the entire world a deep twilight hostile to every sort of spiritual value. A twilight of filth and blood in which, disguised as intellectuals and artists, those men steep themselves who have made servility a career, of lying for pay a custom, and of excuses for crime a source of pleasure." Nobody more embodied the phenomenon described in these lines than Pablo Neruda. The description was written by the surrealist André Breton and the exiled Leon Trotsky.

While I think Schwartz "bends the stick" too far in his blanket condemnation of Neruda, he hits on an essential truth which is that from the 1930s onwards many avant-garde poets like Neruda (along with Rafael Alberti, César Vallejo, Louis Aragon and others) renounced their revolutionary if fragmented and often contradictory vanguard aesthetics under the baleful influence of the Stalinist Comintern and Lukaçs' "dialectical realism", which was grouned on Hegelian assumptions about the need for reconciliation and unity. Thus in Neruda's case the experimental poetics of Tentativa del hombre infinito and the first two cycles of Residencia en la tierra were followed up by crudely didactic works such as España en el corazón and Canto general.

Those few avant-garde writers who continued to defend the possibility of autonomous art within the context of anti-capitalist politics became for a time (André Breton, Octavio Paz) sympathetic to Trotskyism - or else broke with Marxism altogether (Huidobro).

However the same compulsion to question and to doubt everything, while it provided a steady stream of recruits to Trotskyism over the years, proved less valuable as a stable basis for building a coherent, united political movement. This can be seen clearly in Isaac Deutscher's portrayal of Trotsky as an essentially Romantic figure in his classic 3-volume biography of the Russian revolutionary leader - (The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, The Prophet Outcast). This was at once the source of Trotsky's appeal and his downfall, since critical heterodox figures tend to attract similarly independent-minded and critical followers.

However, perhaps we should be grateful that Stalin ousted Trotsky from the leadership of the Bolshevik Party - in the same way that we should be grateful Che Guevara died at the hands of the CIA in Bolivia instead of living on to become a career bureaucrat like Castro.

Recalling Genet's remarks on the justness of the Palestinian national struggle, we could perhaps say that the only revolutionary movement worth supporting is one that has almost no chance of actually conquering state power...

Oliverio Girondo

My interest in the Argentine vanguardist poet Oliverio Girondo began after coming across a few months ago - quite by chance - a brilliant film entitled El lado oscuro del corazón (The dark side of the heart), which was Argentina's official entry in the Oscar category for best Foreign Film in 1992.

In the film we see the young protagonist - Oliverio - attempting to live his life in late 20th century Buenos Aires according to his own absurdist manifesto.

He refuses to get a job because, he says, his true vocation is that of a poet. When economic necessity compels him, he goes into the streets reciting poetry (of Girondo, Gelman and Benedetti) to random passers-by in return for money:

He also embarks on an impossible quest to find the ideal woman - but they all ultimately disappoint him since they lack what for Oliverio is the absolutely essential quality, the ability to fly.

In 1932 the original Oliverio (Girondo) rented a funeral coach and horses, and, accompanied by footmen dressed all in black and a giant papier-maché scarecrow, drove through the streets of Buenos Aires selling copies of his new volume of prose poems, Espantapájaros (Scarecrow).

In these poems Girondo reveals the revolutionary yet irreverent aesthetic which led fellow ultraísta Jorge Luis Borges to dub him "the Peter Pan of Argentine literature".

Art and revolution

In recent weeks there has been an interesting debate taking place on various left blogs on the question of the relationship between art and revolutionary politics. The debate was initiated by Jared Davidson of the Christchurch Garage Collective in a posting on indymedia provocatively titled "Give up art and save the starving?" which you can find here.

The arguments Jared puts forward (summed up in the statement that "Any artistic practice short of advocating the abolition of capitalism and replacing it with logic, frankly, should be left to die" have drawn heavy criticism from Scott Hamilton over at Reading the Maps as well as from fellow Christchurch-blogger Ross Brighton. Below is my belated foray into the debate, originally posted as a comment on Ross's blog (edited for spelling errors!):

I understand where Jared is coming from in his impatience with the failure of successive artistic movements and artists to mount a challenge to the relations of capitalist exploitation which does not merely end up being co-opted by capitalism itself. However I think he may be expecting too much of art, which in the absence of revolutionary movements in wider society can hardly be expected to bring the system crashing to its knees.

Moreover, in a period of protracted political downturn such as we are living through at the moment (at least in the Anglophone countries) where the basic social and economic conditions that would make an anti-capitalist revolution objectively possible *simply do not exist* it seems to me that "giving up art to save the starving" is not only a counsel of despair, but also accomplishes absolutely nothing in practical terms.

As someone who is currently writing a dissertation on the poets of the Latin American vanguardista movement of the period from roughly 1916-1935 (which was at various points influenced by Cubists such as Apollinaire and Reverdy, the Surrealist school, Futurism and Dadaists such as Tristan Tzara) I have quite a keen interest in the political possibilities and limitations of avant-garde art.

It is certainly true that many of the avant-garde had a fairly exalted idea of the role of the individual artist - the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro's characterisation of the poet as a "little god" springs to mind - however I do not think this should be read as evidence of some kind of "will to power over" their fellow human beings or denial of their right to participate in the creative process.

Rather they (the vanguardistas) were concerned to assert their autonomy in the face of hegemonic political and literary ideas. While some avant-garde schools (such as the school of creacionismo founded by Huidobro) could be read as containing elitist tendencies, one of the most problematic aspects of the rival surrealist school was its promotion of "automatic writing", based on the idea poetry amounted to nothing more than tapping into the unconscious - an egalitarian idea surely if ever there was one (although it proved to be less than successful!).

But what we should really ask ourselves is how realistic is it to expect art in bourgeois society to escape the social pressures and contradictions inherent in that very same society? Surely you cannot abolish the distinction between artist and non-artist without first overcoming the division in bourgeois society between intellectual and physical labour and between individual and collective consciousness - something which can only happen in a classless, communist society. And to believe that we can expedite this process simply through artists renouncing art nothing more than idealism pure and simple!

Bear in mind too that in the mid-1930s a large number of avant-garde writers (Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Louis Aragon for example) renounced their earlier work in accordance with the diktat of Stalin and those in the Comintern who argued that everything (including art) must now be subordinated to the anti-fascist struggle!

However I am sure that even Jared would not claim that this was a progressive move.

In the end I guess it comes back to the question of what is the purpose of art - to express a political message in crude didactic form or to enliven and enrich human experience? I would argue that it is the latter.

This is why I can enjoy the work of a reactionary writer such as (say) Miguel de Unamuno or TS Eliot - because despite their subjective prejudices they still manage to encapsulate in their work some essential facet of that underlying material reality.

The alternative view put forward by Jared - that it is whether or not the artist stands for or against revolution that is the sole arbiter of their work - concedes I feel too much power and status to the individual artist and perpetuates the kind of elitism that he is so keen to avoid in the first place.