Wilson Honório da Silva, of the PSTU’s National Education Secretariat
On August 21, 2024, 84 years after his assassination, we celebrated the life and legacy of Leon Trotsky. The synthesis of his life and work is the unrelenting struggle against capitalist society, the rescue of the true Marxist tradition, the defense of the global and permanent character of the Revolution and, consequently, the fight against Stalinism.
It was from this same perspective, and based on the understanding that Marxism can and must respond to all aspects of human experience, that Trotsky also discussed a wide variety of topics. Among them are his writings contained in Questions of the Way of Life (from 1923, in which he discusses the “reconstruction” of culture in a socialist society), as well as various texts on racism, resulting from debates with South African, North American, and Caribbean black activists and groups.
In 1938, while in exile in Mexico and staying with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Trotsky dedicated part of his time to synthesizing his conceptions and concerns about one of his greatest passions: art.
And, as always, he didn’t limit himself to theoretical analysis, but aimed to intervene concretely in reality. He did this by launching a manifesto, signed together with the French surrealist André Breton, which served as the basis for the construction of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (FIARI) which, at the time, here in Brazil, gained the support of such luminaries as Patrícia Galvão (Pagu), Oswald de Andrade, and Mário Pedrosa.
No Constraints: ‘The independence of art, for the revolution. The revolution, for the definitive liberation of art’
This phrase sums up the Manifesto’s profound meaning, since it is, on the one hand, a response to the mediocre and repressive artistic conceptions imposed by Stalinism from the 1930s onwards presented under the label of “socialist realism” and defined by Trotsky as the “crudest expression of the profound decline of the proletarian revolution.” And on the other, it is a means of reflection and an instrument of struggle against the constant attempts by capitalism to manipulate, curtail, commodify, or place art and culture at the service of ideologies which go on to serve super-exploitation and propagate prejudices and different forms of oppression.
This is also why one of his best-known phrases is “every license in art,” a synthesis of the idea that “in matters of artistic creation, it is essentially important that the imagination escapes any coercion, that no pretext is allowed to impose any costume (…) no authority, no coercion, not even the slightest trace of command!” says the Manifesto.
And, so that there is no doubt, the text also stresses what the stance of revolutionary Marxists should be in a socialist society: “If, for the development of the material productive forces, it is up to the revolution to erect a socialist regime with a centralized plan, for intellectual creation it must, right from the start, establish and ensure an anarchist regime of individual freedom.”
This obviously doesn’t mean that Trotsky advocates “political apathy” on the part of artists; or, worse, the transformation of art-making (or reflection on it) into the exercise of individualistic, petty and self-centered selfishness that has characterized postmodern production. The latter, of course, in many ways echoes the neoliberal worldview, especially in its commercial aspects and its opposition of the “I” to collective needs and desires.
On the contrary, the text advocates the fullest artistic freedom so that the artist’s “I” can meet the yearnings of his people, pointing out that “the artist can only serve the emancipatory struggle when he is subjectively aware of its social and individual content, when he makes the meaning and drama of this struggle pass through his nerves, and when he freely tries to give an artistic incarnation to his inner world.”
‘Not just the right to bread, but also to poetry’
In Trotsky’s career, the “FIARI Manifesto” is the highlight of a corpus that also includes the collection of articles in Literature and Revolution (1924), where he discusses topics such as proletarian art and culture, Futurism, and other avant-garde movements of the 1920s, as well as the role of the revolutionary party in this field.
The book later received two appendices. The first has to do with the intertitle above, the entirety of which says, “It will come, the revolution, and it will bring the people not only the right to bread, but also to poetry.” This was written in January 1926 in a tribute to the poet Sergei Essenin, who committed suicide on December 27 of the same year. The other is a tribute to Mayakovsky, who also committed suicide in 1930 after being branded “inconceivable and incomprehensible” by a congress of writers already under the censorious and criminal control of Stalinism.
All these texts have in common the teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin who, although they didn’t dedicate work specifically to the subject, left important contributions on Aesthetics (i.e. the “science of perception” or “philosophy of Art”) and dedicated writings to artists as diverse as those of Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Maxim Gorky, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
These are writings that, like Trotsky’s, start from the principle that everything to do with human subjectivity, intellectual and creative potential, and sensitivity are a fundamental part of what Marx called “total man.” By this he meant the human being endowed with all of their capacities and potential, something that can only be realized when this same human being has control over the objective aspects of reality.
That’s why this “totality” can only be experienced through revolution, when “art will merge with life, when life will be enriched to such an extent that it will be modeled entirely on art,” as he argued in “Literature and Revolution.”
Learn More
Literature and Revolution, Leon Trotsky, 1926
Trotski: a paixão segundo a revolução, Paulo Leminski, 1986
Breton e Trotsky: Por uma arte revolucionária e Independente, Valentim Facioli, 1985
Originally published 5 September, 2024 by Opinião Socialista
Translated from Portuguese by John Prieto
