A short installment from the “Anarchist Current,” the Afterword to Volume Three of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, discussing some of the post-World War II artistic movements that embraced anarchist ideas.

Refusal Global/Global Refusal



Given the difficult political circumstances faced by anarchists in the aftermath of the Second World War, it should not be surprising that there was a resurgence of anarchist attitudes in the arts, for it was on the cultural terrain that anarchists had the greatest freedom of action. In Quebec, the Automatistes, who were loosely affiliated with the Surrealists, issued their “ Global Refusal” manifesto in 1948, in which they foresaw “people freed from their useless chains and turning, in the unexpected manner that is necessary for spontaneity, to resplendent anarchy to make the most of their individual gifts” (Volume Two, Selection 22).

The Surrealists recognized their affinity with the anarchists, sharing their “fundamental hostility towards both power blocs,” and seeking with them to bring about “an era from which all hierarchy and all constraint will have been banished” (Volume Two, Selection 23). André Breton (1896-1966) noted that it was “in the black mirror of anarchism that surrealism first recognized itself,” but admitted that the surrealists, along with many others on the left, had for too long supported the Soviet Union, mesmerized by “the idea of efficiency” and the hope for a worldwide social revolution. Now it was time “to return to the principles” which had allowed the libertarian ideal “to take form,” arriving at a conception of anarchism as, in the words of Georges Fontenis (1920-2010), “the expression of the exploited masses in their desire to create a society without classes, without a State, where all human values and desires can be realized” (Volume Two, Selection 23).

Robert Graham