Free the Middle East! Free Algeria! Free Lybia! Free Tunisia! Free Egypt! Free Iraq! US out of the Middle East! No Justice, No Peace!

The Manifesto of the 121

From International Socialist Review, Vol.22 No.1, Winter 1961, p.24.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.



A very important movement is developing in France, and it is necessary that French and world opinion should be better informed about it at a time when the new turn in the Algerian war must lead us to see, and not to forget, the depth of the crisis which opened six years ago.

In greater and greater numbers French people are being prosecuted, imprisoned and condemned for refusing to take part in this war or for going to the aid of the Algerian fighters. Distorted by their enemies, but also watered down by those whose duty it is to defend them, the reasons for their action remains generally misunderstood. It is insufficient merely to say that this opposition to the authorities is respectable. As the protest of men who feel their honor and their idea of truth attacked, it has a significance which passes beyond the circumstances in which it takes place and, it is important to stress, whatever the outcome of events may be.


FOR the Algerians there is nothing equivocal about the struggle whether carried on by diplomatic or by military means. It is a war for national independence. But what is its nature for French people? It is not a foreign war. The soil of France has never been threatened. What is more: the war is being carried on against men whom the State pleases to consider as Frenchmen, but who, for their part, are fighting precisely in order not to be. It is not enough to say that it is a war of conquest, an imperialist war, accompanied in addition by racialism. There is this in every war and the confusion continues.

In fact, by a decision which constitutes a basic abuse, the State first of all mobilized entire age groups of young male citizens for the sole purpose of what it described as a "police action" against an oppressed population, which only revolted through concern for its elementary dignity, since it demands to be at last recognized as an independent community.

Neither a war of conquest, nor a war of "national defence," nor a civil war, the Algerian war has little by little become a war specific to the army and to a caste which refuses to give way before a rising which even the civil power, recognizing the general collapse of colonial empires, seems prepared to understand.

Today it is mainly the army's will which keeps this criminal and absurd conflict going. This army, as a result of the political role which a number of its top representatives make it play, acts at times openly and violently outside all legality, betraying the ends with which it is entrusted by the entire nation. It compromises and threatens to pervert the nation itself, by forcing its citizens under orders to make themselves accomplices of a factious and degrading activity. Is it necessary to recall that, fifteen years after the destruction of the Hitler regime, French militarism, as a result of the exigencies which such a war imposes, has been led to resort to torture and to make torture once again an institution in Europe?

It is under these conditions that many Frenchmen are being led to put in the balance the meaning of the traditional values and duties. What is loyalty when, in certain circumstances, it becomes a shameful submission? Are there not cases when refusal to serve becomes a sacred duty, where "treason" means a courageous respect for truth? And when, by the will of those who use the army as an instrument of racial and ideological domination, the army places itself in open or latent revolt against democratic institutions, doesn't revolt against the army take on a new sense?

The question of conscience was posed from the beginning of the conflict. As the latter lengthens out it is normal that the question of conscience should be resolved in more and more cases by acts of insubordination and desertion as well as protection and help to the Algerian fighters. New movements have developed outside all the official parties, without their assistance, and finally, despite their disavowal. Once more outside the established cadres and slogans a resistance movement has been born, by a spontaneous growth of consciousness, seeking and inventing forms of action and means of struggle in relation to the new situation whose true sense and objects the political groupings and journals have agreed, by inertia, doctrinal timidity or national or moral prejudices, not to recognize.

THE undersigned, considering that everyone must take a stand on acts which it is no longer possible to present as individual acts of adventure; considering themselves, in their place and according to their means, as having the right to intervene, not to give advice to those who have to take a personal decision in the face of such grave problems, but to ask those who judge them not to allow themselves to be deceived by the ambiguity of words and values declare:

* We respect and consider justified the refusal to take up arms against the Algerian people.

* We respect and consider justified the conduct of the French people who consider it their duty to bring aid and protection to the oppressed Algerians in the name of the French people.

* The cause of the Algerian people, which is contributing in a decisive way to ruin the colonial system, is the cause of all free men.

Signed by:

* Arthur Adamov, writer
* Robert Antelme, writer and former deportee in Buchenwald
* Georges Auclair, journalist
* Jean Baby
* Hélène Balfet
* Marc Barbut
* Robert Barrat
* Simone de Beauvoir, philosopher
* Jean-Louis Bedouin
* Marc Beigbeder, philosopher and journalist (close to the personalists)
* Robert Benayoun, film-maker and film critic
* Michèle Bernstein, situationist
* Maurice Blanchot, writer
* Roger Blin, actor and dramaturgist
* Arsène Bonnefous-Murat
* Geneviève Bonnefoi
* Raymond Borde
* Jean-Louis Bory, writer, journalist and film critic
* Jacques-Laurent Bost, journalist
* Pierre Boulez, music composer
* Vincent Bounoure
* André Breton, surrealist
* Guy Cabanel
* Georges Condominas, anthropologist
* Alain Cuny, actor
* Jean Dalsace
* Jean Czarnecki
* Adrien Dax
* Hubert Damisch, philosopher
* Guy Debord, situationist
* Bernard Dort
* Jean Douassot
* Simone Dreyfus
* Marguerite Duras, writer
* Yves Ellouet
* Dominique Eluard
* Charles Estienne
* Louis-René des Forêts, writer
* Théodore Fraenkel
* André Frénaud, poet
* Jacques Gernet, sinologist
* Louis Gernet, philologist and sociologist
* Edouard Glissant, writer
* Anne Guérin
* Daniel Guérin, historian
* Jacques Howlett
* Édouard Jaguer, poet and art critic
* Pierre Jaouen
* Gérard Jarlot
* Robert Jaulin, ethnologist
* Alain Joubert
* Henri Krea
* Robert Lagarde
* Monique Lange
* Claude Lanzmann, film-maker
* Robert Lapoujade, painter and film maker
* Henri Lefebvre, sociologist
* Gérard Legrand
* Michel Leiris, writer and ethnologist
* Paul Lévy
* Jérôme Lindon, publisher of Les Éditions de Minuit
* Eric Losfeld
* Robert Louzon
* Olivier de Magny, poet
* Florence Malraux

* André Mandouze, academic
* Maud Mannoni, psycho-analyst
* Jean Martin, actor
* Renée Marcel-Martinet
* Jean-Daniel Martinet
* Andrée Marty-Capgras
* Dionys Mascolo, writer
* François Maspero, editor of Maspero Ed.
* André Masson
* Pierre de Massot, writer and journalist
* Jean-Jacques Mayoux
* Jehan Mayoux
* Théodore Monod, naturalist and explorer
* Marie Moscovici
* Georges Mounin
* Maurice Nadeau, publisher
* Georges Navel
* Claude Ollier, writer (Nouveau Roman)
* Hélène Parmelin, writer, journalist and art critic
* José Pierre, writer
* Marcel Péju
* André Pieyre de Mandiargues, writer
* Edouard Pignon, painter
* Bernard Pingaud
* Maurice Pons, writer
* Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, philosopher and psychoanalyst
* Jean Pouillon, ethnologist
* Madeleine Rebérioux, historian
* Denise René, art gallerist
* Alain Resnais, film-maker
* Jean-François Revel, journalist
* Paul Revel
* Alain Robbe-Grillet, writer (Nouveau Roman)
* Christiane Rochefort, writer
* Jacques-Francis Rolland
* Alfred Rosmer, trade-unionist
* Gilbert Rouget
* Claude Roy, writer
* Françoise Sagan, writer
* Marc Saint-Saëns, tapestrist
* Nathalie Sarraute, writer
* Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher
* Renée Saurel
* Claude Sautet, scenarist and film-maker
* Catherine Sauvage, singer and actress
* Laurent Schwartz, mathematician
* Jean Schuster
* Robert Scipion, journalist and writer
* Louis Seguin, engineer and industrialist
* Geneviève Serreau, actress
* Simone Signoret, actress
* Jean-Claude Silbermann, painter and writer
* Claude Simon, writer
* René de Solier
* D. de la Souchère
* Jean Thiercelin
* François Truffaut, film-maker
* René Tzanck
* Vercors, writer
* Jean-Pierre Vernant, historian
* Pierre Vidal-Naquet, historian
* J.-P. Vielfaure
* Claude Viseux, painter and sculptor
* Ylipe
* René Zazzo, psychologist

What is free will?
Does it exist?
Does anything exist?
Cogito ergo sum.
That's what Descartes said right?
What does Marx say about free will?
"Although some critics have claimed that meant that Marx enforced a strict social determinism which destroyed the possibility of free will, Marx's philosophy in no way can be reduced to such determinism, as his own personal trajectory makes clear."
What about Existentialism?
Here's what Sartre had to say.
I haven't read enough Sartre to understand it. To me existentialism and Marxism conflict.

I. Capitalism: A Society Without Culture

1

Culture can be defined as the ensemble of means through which a society thinks of itself and shows itself to itself, and thus decides on all aspects of the use of its available surplus-value. That is to say, it is the organization of everything over and beyond the immediate necessities of the society's reproduction. All forms of capitalist society today are in the final analysis based on the generalized and (at the mass level) stable division between directors and executants: those who give orders and those who carry them out. Transposed onto the plane of culture, this means the separation between "understanding" and "doing," the inability to organize (on the basis of permanent exploitation) the continuously accelerating domination of nature toward any goal whatsoever. For the capitalist class, dominating production requires monopolizing the understanding of productive activity, of work. To achieve this, work is on the one hand more and more parcelized, i.e. rendered incomprehensible to those who do it; and on the other hand, it is reconstituted as a unity by specialized agencies. But these agencies are themselves subordinated to the real directorate, which alone possesses the theoretical comprehension of the whole since it dictates the direction of production in accordance with its general directives. However, this comprehension and these objectives are themselves subjected to a certain arbitrariness since they are cut off from practice and even from all realistic knowledge, which it is in no one's interest to transmit. The total social activity is thus split into three levels: the workshop, the office and the directorate. Culture, in the sense of active and practical comprehension of society, is likewise cut apart into these three aspects. These aspects are reunited (partially and clandestinely) only by people's constant transgression of the separate sectors in which they are regimented by the system.

2

The formative mechanism of culture thus amounts to a reification of human activities, a reification which fixates the living, which models the transmission of experience from one generation to another on the transmission of commodities, and which strives to ensure the past's domination over the future. This cultural functioning enters into contradiction with capitalism's constant need to obtain people's adherence and to enlist their creative activity, within the narrow limits within which it imprisons them. In short, the capitalist order can survive only by ceaselessly fabricating a new past for itself. This can be seen particularly clearly in the cultural sector proper, whose publicity is based on the periodic launching of pseudoinnovations.

3

Work thus tends to be reduced to pure execution and thereby made absurd. As technology evolves, its application is trivialized; work is simplified and becomes more and more absurd. But this absurdity also extends to the offices and laboratories: the ultimate determinations of their activity come from outside them, from the political sphere that runs the whole society. On the other hand, as the activity of the offices and laboratories is integrated into the overall functioning of capitalism, the necessity to fully exploit this activity requires the introduction into it of the capitalist division of labor, that is, of parcelization and hierarchization. The logical problem of scientific synthesis then intersects with the social problem of centralization. The result of these changes is, contrary to appearances, a general lack of culture at all levels of knowledge: scientific synthesis is no longer carried out, science no longer comprehends itself. Science is no longer a real and practical clarification of people's relation with the world; it has destroyed the old representations without being able to provide new ones. The world as unified totality becomes undecipherable; certain specialists are the only people who possess a few fragments of rationality -- fragments which they themselves are incapable of communicating, even to each other.

4

This state of things gives rise to a certain number of conflicts. The technical advances that are a natural tendency of the development of material processes (and largely even a natural tendency of the development of the sciences) often conflict with the technologies that selectively apply those advances in strict accordance with the requirements of exploiting the workers and thwarting their resistance. There is also a conflict between capitalist imperatives and people's elementary needs. Thus the contradiction between present nuclear practices and a still generally prevalent taste for living is echoed even in the moralizing protests of certain physicists. The alterations that man can now bring about in his own nature (ranging from plastic surgery to controlled genetic mutations) also demand an alteration of the society: its self-managed transformation through the abolition of all specialized directors. Everywhere the vastness of the new possibilities poses the urgent alternative: revolutionary solution or science-fiction barbarism. The compromise represented by the present society is contingent on the preservation of a status quo which is in fact everywhere constantly out of its control.

5

Present culture as a whole can be characterized as alienated in the sense that every activity, every moment of life, every idea, every type of behavior, has a meaning only outside itself, in an "elsewhere" which, being no longer in heaven, is only the more maddening to try and locate: a utopia, in the literal sense of the word, dominates the life of the modern world.

6

Having from the workshop to the laboratory emptied productive activity of all meaning for itself, capitalism strives to place the meaning of life in leisure activities and to reorient productive activity on that basis. Since production is hell in the prevailing moral schema, real life must be found in consumption, in the use of goods. But for the most part these goods have no use except to satisfy a few private needs that have been pumped up to meet the requirements of the market. Capitalist consumption imposes a general reduction of desires by its regular satisfaction of artificial needs, which remain needs without ever having been desires -- authentic desires being constrained to remain unfulfilled (or compensated in the form of spectacles). The consumer is in reality morally and psychologically consumed by the market. But above all, these goods have no social use because the social horizon does not extend beyond the factory; outside the factory everything is organized as a desert (dormitory towns, freeways, parking lots...) -- the terrain of consumption. However, the society constituted in the factory has the exclusive domination over this desert. The real use of the goods is simply as status symbols which, in accordance with an inevitable tendency of the industrial commodity, have at the same time become obligatory for everyone. The factory is symbolically reflected in leisure activities, though with enough room for individual variation to allow for the compensation of a few frustrations. The world of consumption is in reality the world of the mutual spectacularization of everyone, the world of everyone's separation, estrangement and nonparticipation. The directorial sphere also strictly directs this spectacle, which is composed automatically and miserably in accordance with imperatives external to the society, imperatives to which absurd values are attributed. (The directors themselves, as living persons, can also be considered as victims of this automated directorial machine.)

7

Outside of work, the spectacle is the dominant mode through which people relate to each other. It is only through the spectacle that people acquire a (falsified) knowledge of certain general aspects of social life, from scientific or technological achievements to prevailing types of conduct and orchestrated meetings of international political celebrities. The relation between authors and spectators is only a transposition of the fundamental relation between directors and executants. It answers perfectly to the needs of a reified and alienated culture: the spectacle-spectator relation is in itself a staunch bearer of the capitalist order. The ambiguity of all "revolutionary art" lies in the fact that the revolutionary aspect of any particular spectacle is always contradicted and offset by the reactionary element present in all spectacles. This is why capitalist society, in order to streamline its own functioning, must above all continually refine its mechanism of spectacularization. This is obviously a complex mechanism, for if its main role is to propagate the capitalist order, it nevertheless must not appear to the public as a mere capitalistic delirium; it must involve the public by incorporating elements of representation that correspond -- in fragments -- to social rationality. It must sidetrack the desires whose satisfaction is forbidden by the ruling order. For example, modern mass tourism presents cities and landscapes not in order to satisfy authentic desires to live in such human or geographical milieus; it presents them as pure, rapid, superficial spectacles (spectacles from which one can gain prestige by reminiscing about them). Similarly, striptease is the most obvious form of the degradation of eroticism into a mere spectacle.

8

The evolution and the conservation of art have been governed by these lines of force. At one pole, art is purely and simply coopted by capitalism as a means of conditioning the population. At the other pole, capitalism grants art a perpetual privileged concession: that of pure creative activity -- an isolated creativity which serves as an alibi for the alienation of all other activities (and which thus also makes it the most expensive and prestigious status symbol). But at the same time, this sphere reserved for "free creative activity" is the only one in which the question of what we do with life and the question of communication are posed fully and practically. In this sense art can reflect the basic antagonisms between partisans and adversaries of the officially dictated reasons for living. The established meaninglessness and separation give rise to the general crisis of traditional artistic means -- a crisis linked to the experience of alternative ways of living or to the demand for such experience. Revolutionary artists are those who call for intervention, and who have themselves intervened in the spectacle in order to disrupt and destroy it.

II. Culture and Revolutionary Politics

1

The revolutionary movement can be nothing less than the struggle of the proletariat for the actual domination and deliberate transformation of all aspects of social life -- beginning with the management of production and work by the workers themselves, directly deciding everything. Such a change would immediately imply a radical transformation of the nature of work and the development of a new technology designed to ensure the workers' domination over the machines. This radical transformation of the meaning of work will lead to a number of consequences, the main one of which is undoubtedly the shifting of the center of interest of life from passive leisure to the new type of productive activity. This does not mean that overnight all productive activities will become in themselves passionately interesting. But to work toward making them so, by a general and ongoing reconversion of the ends as well as the means of industrial work, will in any case be the minimum passion of a free society. In such a society, all activities will tend to blend the life previously separated between leisure and work into a single but infinitely diversified flow. Production and consumption will merge and be superseded in the creative use of the goods of the society.

2

Such a program proposes to people no reason to live other than their own construction of their own lives. This presupposes not only that people be objectively freed from real needs (hunger, etc.), but above all that they begin to develop real desires in place of the present compensations; that they refuse all forms of behavior dictated by others and continually reinvent their own unique fulfillments; and that they no longer consider life to be the mere maintaining of a certain stability, but that they aspire to the unlimited enrichment of their acts.

3

Such demands today are not based on some sort of utopianism. They are based first of all on the struggle of the proletariat at all levels, and on all the forms of explicit refusal or profound indifference that the unstable ruling society constantly has to combat with every means. They are also based on the lesson of the fundamental defeat of all attempts at less radical changes. Finally, they are based on the extremist strivings and actions appearing today among certain sectors of youth (despite all the efforts at disciplining and repressing them) and in a few artistic milieus. But this basis is indeed utopian in another sense of the word, in that it involves inventing and experimenting with solutions to current problems without being preoccupied with whether or not the conditions for their realization are immediately present. (It should be noted that this utopian sort of experimentation now also plays a key role in modern science.) This temporary, historical utopianism is legitimate; and it is necessary because it serves to incubate the projection of desires without which free life would be empty of content. It is inseparable from the necessity to dissolve the present ideology of everyday life, and therefore the bonds of everyday oppression, so that the revolutionary class can disabusedly discover present and future possibilities of freedom. Utopian practice makes sense, however, only if it is closely linked to the practice of revolutionary struggle. The latter, in its turn, cannot do without such utopianism without being condemned to sterility. Those seeking an experimental culture cannot hope to realize it without the triumph of the revolutionary movement, while the latter cannot itself establish authentic revolutionary conditions without resuming the efforts of the cultural avant-garde toward the critique of everyday life and its free reconstruction.

4

Revolutionary politics thus has as its content the totality of the problems of the society. It has as its form the experimental practice of a free life through organized struggle against the capitalist order. The revolutionary movement must thus itself become an experimental movement. Henceforth, wherever it exists, it must develop and resolve as profoundly as possible the problems of a revolutionary microsociety. This comprehensive politics culminates in the moment of revolutionary action, when the masses abruptly intervene to make history and discover their action as direct experience and as festival. At such moments they undertake a conscious and collective construction of everyday life which, one day, will no longer be stopped by anything.

PIERRE CANJUERS, GUY DEBORD 20 July 1960

Pierre Canjuers (pseudonym of Daniel Blanchard) was at this time a member of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.

I'm just a little sick of liberals and others who focus on issues that are biproducts of capitalism (sexism, homophobia, racism etc.) without looking at the root cause. It's not that I'm against opposing these forms of oppression, I'm just against trying to fix them while completely ignoring the fundamental basis for these oppressions. Please comment, because I know there are going to be some who disagree with me. I don't have a problem with working within the system. I just find that there are a lot of people who are single-issue, whether it be abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action etc. Again, I'm not opposed to working toward changing these ...things, but I feel they can sometimes be divisive distractions from the things that we have in common. 90% of us (whether pro-life/pro-choice, pro-gay/anti-gay, racist/anti-racist etc.) are oppressed under capitalism. Maybe even more than that. I think identity politics divide people. Martin Luther King said in his anti-Vietnam speech, "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." There's a saying that the only color that matters is green ($) and you either have it or you don't. Of course, classism does interact with other forms of oppression, but the root is class-inequality. I guess that brings up another good point, which has been hotly debated in leftist circles: is class more important than race/gender/sexual-orientation etc.? I don't really want to address that question here, but it's worth thinking about. Maybe I already have addressed that question....I also wanted to mention another question I brought up in my Gender in Islam class the other day. I asked, "Do you think that there is more gender equality as you go up the socio-economic ladder?" A few WGS students in my class said no, t...hat it's either the same or opposite. I held my tongue, but I really feel that that is wrong. I think the more economic privilege you have the more respect you get, whether you're black, female, gay etc. I think about people like women CEOs of large corporations. They have more power than the average blue-collar working man. Maybe that's beside the point. I guess my point is, I do see more divisiveness in the lower-class community based on demographic lines. Racism, sexism and homophobia seem to be largely working-class problems. I suppose this is because of the divide-and-conquer tactics that the bourgeoisie use to keep working-class people down.I don't think it's a conspiracy. I think it's very blatant albeit maybe a de facto thing. It comes from a history of divide and conquer that goes back to the very beginnings of capitalism. Slavery, of course, was one of these tactics. Others include over-emphasis on identity and individualism, over-emphasis on "moral" political issues and de-emphasis on economic issues, depoliticization of youth through consumerism etc.Capitalism began around the same time colonialism and industrialism began; around the 18th century. Prior to that there were two other modes of production (according to anthropologist/historian Eric Wolf): the tributary mode (what we know o...f as feudalism/mercantilism) and the kinship mode (what has also been called gift economy/hunter-gatherer/egalitarian; what Marx describes as "primitive communism" etc.). The earliest mode - kinship - encompasses 99% of human history. It was based on kin, whether adopted or biological, and meant that all things were to be for the good of the tribe as a whole. Thus, gift-based economy, reciprocity and sharing were the order of the day. This all changed when agriculture entered the picture. According to Jared Diamond this is when social-stratification, gender inequality and disease came into the picture. People also started to live closer together and become more sedentary. This lasted for a couple of thousand years and eventually became the proto-capitalist system we know of as mercantilism. Mercantilism was the system of exchange under the tributary mode of production. The difference between mercantilism and capitalism is that the merchants did not reinvest their wealth in the means of production, whereas capitalists did. This investment in the means of production meant that the bosses were able to siphon off profits from the fruit of other people's labor. This is the main distinction between mercantilism and capitalism and it is why, in general, people had less agency under capitalism.I don't think there's anything "natural" about capitalism. I think it's in fact against human nature. We are a cooperative species, as Kropotkin makes clear. Capitalism makes us compete with one another. If we worked together more then ...we could accomplish much more. A good post-modern example is open-source software or the various Wiki sites. To go back to your point about the Forest People, many of these kinship-based peoples are going extinct because of global capitalism's need to incorporate everything and everyone into the marketplace. Nobody profits from egalitarian, nomadic tribes and if they're subsisting in traditional ways they're not buying anything and they don't need to earn a wage. Most of these peoples live in areas that were until recently considered untouchable for various reasons. Now with newer technology these peoples' land is being dug up for minerals, timber etc. and they are being told to get jobs and become consumers. There is currently an indigenous rights movement that is trying to keep the last vestiges of pristine living in tact. Many of the tribes who today live traditional lifestyles only live that way because they have fought for it, whether legally, violently or otherwise. A good example of violent indigenous resistance to capitalism is the Ogoni and the Ijaw in the Niger Delta fighting against Shell.Ok, so what's the moral of all this that I've just written? Marx described the modes of production along a unilinear evolutionary timeline. Clearly there are problems with this, particularly the unilinear part. There are so-called "primi...tive-communist" societies that still exist today. China evolved from a tributary economy to a communist economy without ever going through industrial capitalism. That said, Marx I think was right in saying that mankind had to go through these stages to get to anything resembling industrial communism. Many scholars describe the current period as "late capitalism." I like that. Maybe it's naive, but the idea that this period is just the warm up to the inevitable revolution makes me warm and tingly inside. We can't go back to the kinship mode (as green anarchists/primitivists would have us believe) because there are too many people on the earth. We need to progress into something new and I think that next step is something resembling socialism or one sort or another.

Wisconsin Strike
Student Walkout
We are entering a period of revolution throughout the world. From Libya to Wisconsin! Long Live Revolution! The youth of the nation have always been the advance guard of freedom and liberation. Things are changing in the Middle East because the youth are through with it. The youth in Wisconsin are also quite aware of the evils of capitalism. Of course, the protests throughout the Middle East are not quite anti-capitalist. In fact, Hugo Chavez said we must not beat the war drums. However, many leftists have been looking at what is going on in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Algiers etc. and being encouraged. Perhaps this is a new era. Of course some idiots in the Tea Party are not taking the situation very seriously and the US government seems to have an ambivalent and cautious attitude toward the turmoil going on in the region. This is because they are not yet sure what kind of regime will replace the current ones. Could it be a socialist regime per chance? Maybe not, but time will tell.

Soviet Montage:
Eisenstein;


Lev Kuleshov;


Vsevolod Pudovkin;


Dziga Vertov;

Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art: Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky (1938)

We can say without exaggeration that never before has civilization been menaced so seriously as today. The Vandals, with instruments which were barbarous, and so comparatively ineffective, blotted out the culture of antiquity in one corner of Europe. But today we see world civilization, united in its historic destiny, reeling under the blows of reactionary forces armed with the entire arsenal of modern technology. We are by no means thinking only of the world war that draws near. Even in times of “peace,” the position of art and science has become absolutely intolerable.

Insofar as it originates with an individual, insofar as it brings into play subjective talents to create something which brings about an objective enriching of culture, any philosophical, sociological, scientific, or artistic discovery seems to be the fruit of a precious chance, that is to say, the manifestation, more or less spontaneous, of necessity. Such creations cannot be slighted, whether from the standpoint of general knowledge (which interprets the existing world), or of revolutionary knowledge (which, to change the world for the better, requires an exact analysis of the laws which govern its movement). Specifically, we cannot remain indifferent to the intellectual conditions under which creative activity take place, nor should we fail to pay all respect to those particular laws which govern intellectual creation.

In the contemporary world we must recognize the ever more widespread destruction of those conditions under which intellectual creation is possible. From this follows of necessity an increasingly manifest degradation not only of the work of art but also of the specifically “artistic” personality. The regime of Hitler, now that it has rid Germany of all those artists whose work expressed the slightest sympathy for liberty, however superficial, has reduced those who still consent to take up pen or brush to the statues of domestic servants of the regime, whose task it is to glorify it on order, according to the worst possible aesthetic conventions. If reports may be believed, it is the same in the Soviet Union, where Thermidorean reaction is now reaching its climax.

It goes without saying that we do not identify ourselves with the currently fashionable catchword: “Neither fascism nor communism!” a shibboleth which suits the temperament of the Philistine, conservative and frightened, clinging to the tattered remnants of the “democratic” past. True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and mankind in its time--true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which bind it, and to allow all mankind to raise itself to those heights which only isolated geniuses have achieved in the past. We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep clear the path for a new culture. If, however, we reject all solidarity with the bureaucracy now in control of the Soviet Union, it is precisely because, in our eyes, it represents not communism but its most treacherous and dangerous enemy.

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 ever 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 the palliation of crime a source of pleasure. The official art of Stalinism mirrors with a blatancy unexampled in history their efforts to put a good face on their mercenary profession.

The repugnance which this shameful negation of the principles of art inspires in the artistic world--a negation which even slave states have never dared carry so far--should give rise to an active, uncompromising condemnation. The opposition of writers and artists is one of the forces which can usefully contribute to the discrediting and overthrow of regimes which are destroying, along with the right of the proletariat to aspire to a better world, every sentiment of nobility and even human dignity.

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.

We recognize, of course, that the revolutionary State has the right to defend itself against the counterattack of the bourgeoisie, even when this drapes itself in the flag of science or art. But there is an abyss between these enforced and temporary measures of revolutionary self-defense and the pretension to lay commands on intellectual creation. If, for the better development of the forces of material production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be established. No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above! Only on a base of friendly cooperation, without the constraint from the outside, will it be possible for scholars and artists to carry out their tasks, which will be more far-reaching than ever before in history.

It should be clear by now that in defending freedom of thought we have no intention of justifying political indifference, and that it is far from our wish to revive a so-called “pure” art which generally serves the extremely impure ends of reaction. No, our conception of the role of art is too high to refuse it an influence on the fate of society. We believe that the supreme task of art in our epoch is to take part actively and consciously in the preparation of the revolution. But the artist cannot serve the struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates its social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.

In the present period of the death agony of capitalism, democratic as well as fascist, the artist sees himself threatened with the loss of his right to live and continue working. He sees all avenues of communication choked with the debris of capitalist collapse. Only naturally, he turns to the Stalinist organizations, which hold out the possibility of escaping from his isolation. But if he is to avoid complete demoralization, he cannot remain there, because of the impossibility of delivering his own message and the degrading servility which these organizations exact from him in exchange for certain material advantages. He must understand that his place is elsewhere, not among those who betray the cause of the revolution and of mankind, but among those who with unshaken fidelity bear witness to this revolution, among those who, for this reason, are alone able to bring it to fruition, and along with it the ultimate free expression of all forms of human genius.

The aim of this appeal is to find a common ground on which may be reunited all revolutionary writers and artists, the better to serve the revolution by their art and to defend the liberty of that art itself against the usurpers of the revolution. We believe that aesthetic, philosophical, and political tendencies of the most varied sort can find here a common ground. Marxists can march here hand in hand with anarchists, provided both parties uncompromisingly reject the reactionary police-patrol spirit represented by Joseph Stalin and by his henchman, Garcia Oliver.

We know very well that thousands of isolated thinkers and artists are today scattered throughout the world, their voices drowned out by the loud choruses of well-disciplined liars. Hundreds of small local magazines are trying to gather youthful forces about them, seeking new paths and not subsidies. Every progressive tendency in art is destroyed by fascism as “degenerate.” Every free creation is called “fascist” by the Stalinists. Independent revolutionary art must now gather its forces for the struggle against reactionary persecution. It must proclaim aloud its right to exist. Such a union of forces is the aim of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art which we believe it is now necessary to form.

We by no means insist on every idea put forth in this manifesto, which we ourselves consider only a first step in the new direction. We urge every friend and defender of art, who cannot but realize the necessity for this appeal, to make himself heard at once. We address the same appeal to all those publications of the left-wing which are ready to participate in the creation of the International Federation and to consider its task and methods of action.
When a preliminary international contract has been established through the press and by correspondence, we will proceed to the organization of local and national congresses on a modest scale. the final step will be the assembling of a world congress which will officially mark the foundation of the International Federation.

Our aims:
The independence of art--for the revolution;
The revolution--for the complete liberation of art!

Andre Breton tried to form a surrealist wing of the Communist Party.
Socialism and Surrealism

Surrealist poetry (translated):

BENJAMIN PERET

1899-1958

The Staircase with a Hundred Steps

The blue eagle and the demon of the steppes
in the last cab in Berlin
Legitimate defence
of lost souls
the red mill at the beggars' school
awaits the poor student
With the housemaid Know huntsmen how to hunt on pay-day
Know huntsmen how to hunt
as papa speculates
with the smile
By the dagger the dagger the dagger
the tiger of the seas dreams of happiness
Avenged
The vestal virgin of the Ganges cries out Vanity
when the flesh succumbs
Stop look and listen
the famous turkey spends a day of pleasure
turning round in an enchanted circle
with the pluck of a lion
M'sieur the major
My Paris
my uncle from America
my heart and my legs
slaves of beauty
admire the conquests of Nora
while someone asks for a typewriter
for the black pirate
It is not possible
that a woman dressed as the Merry Widow
could become the wind's prey
because the millionairess Madame Sans-Gene
leads a wild existence
in another's skin
Her son was right
Patrol-leader 129 who wears an Italian straw-hat
and is the ace of jockeys
is abandoning a little adventuress
for a woman
It is the April-Moon which chases the buffalo
to Notre-Dame of Paris
Oh what a bore the indomitable man
with clear eyes
wishes to judge him by the law of the desert
but the lovers with children's souls have gone away
Ah what a lovely voyage



Making Feet and Hands

Eye standing up eye lying down eye sitting

Why wander about between two hedges made of stair-rails while the ladders become soft
as new-born babes
as zouaves who lose their homeland with their shoes
Why raise one's arms towards the sky since the sky
has drowned itself without rhyme or reason
to pass the time and make its moustaches grow
Why does my eye sit down before going to bed
because saddles are making donkeys sore
and pencils break in the most unpredictable fashion
the whole time
except on stormy days
when they break into zigzags
and snowy days
when they tear their sweaters to pieces
But the spectacles the old tarnished spectacles
sing songs while gathering grass for cats
The cats follow the procession
carrying flags
flags and ensigns
The fish's tail crossing a beating heart
the throat regularly rising and falling to imitate the sea surrounding it
and the fish revolving about a ventilator
There are also hands
long white hands with nails of fresh greenery
and finger-joints of dew
swaying eyelashes looking at butterflies
saddened because the day made a mistake on the stairs
There are also sexes fresh as running water
which leap up and down in the valley
because they are touched by the sun
They have no beards but they have clear eyes
and they chase dragonflies
without caring what people will say

Ballad of the Moon

translated by Will Kirkland

The moon came into the forge
in her bustle of flowering nard.
The little boy stares at her, stares.
The boy is staring hard.
In the shaken air
the moon moves her amrs,
and shows lubricious and pure,
her breasts of hard tin.
"Moon, moon, moon, run!
If the gypsies come,
they will use your heart
to make white necklaces and rings."
"Let me dance, my little one.
When the gypsies come,
they'll find you on the anvil
with your lively eyes closed tight.
"Moon, moon, moon, run!
I can feelheir horses come."
"Let me be, my little one,
don't step on me, all starched and white!"

Closer comes the the horseman,
drumming on the plain.
The boy is in the forge;
his eyes are closed.
Through the olive grove
come the gypsies, dream and bronze,
their heads held high,
their hooded eyes.

Oh, how the night owl calls,
calling, calling from its tree!
The moon is climbing through the sky
with the child by the hand.

They are crying in the forge,
all the gypsies, shouting, crying.
The air is veiwing all, views all.
The air is at the viewing.

- Federico García Lorca

Early experimental cinema

Why Hugo Chavez is my #1 hero

The Gospel According to Christian Atheism
Catholic Radicalism
Communists are not against religion. We are against capitalism. In fact, the Party has its own Religion Commission which seeks to build positive relations with religious people and communities in the struggle to make life better for working people. Most religious people believe in justice, peace, and respectful relations among the peoples of the world, and many are motivated by their faith to work for those goals.

Membership in the Communist Party is open to all who agree with our program, regardless of religious beliefs.
(CPUSA)