An obituary to the Council Communist and Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret by the Anarchist "Noir et Rouge". Originally published in "Noir et Rouge, No. 14, Winter 1959".
“National Condolences,” “Died for France,” “Party of the Shot,” “Chicago Martyrs”-peoples, sects, tribes, parties have a taste for obituary. They know how to make the most profit out of the smallest corpse as soon as they can paste on it the controlled appellation “Frenchman,” “PCF,” “Veteran of the 121st Infantry...”
The libertarian press, in general, is no exception, alas! to this sentimental-political gymnastics, and the place it devotes to: “May your sacrifice not have been in vain, Albert...” and “The younger generations will know how to show themselves worthy of your example, Eugène...” to the detriment of propaganda and educational articles and studies, testifies more to the aging of the anarchist current than to its dynamism. This is, at least, our view on the subject.
Yet a man has just died whom we loved. Our readers who did not know him should know that they have just lost a comrade.
Benjamin Péret, revolutionary poet-militant, died at Boucicaut Hospital, Paris, on September 18, 1959.
Of course, Péret is better known as a Surrealist poet than as a revolutionary militant, but he was both -- inextricably.
Those of us who through Surrealism left the bourgeois shores and landed in Anarchy know who Péret the poet was.
Surrealism, discovered by Breton, Péret and someone else by risking an eye in the breach that the Dada bomb had made on the wall of bourgeois conformity, was born about 40 years ago.
Péret was 20 years old then, 20 years old.
After distancing themselves from nihilism, very soon the Surrealists are present in the revolutionary movement.
“Open the prisons! Fire the army!” they have been shouting since January 15, 1925 from the second issue of ”La Révolution Surréaliste.”
Péret is of those who, wanting a concrete application of their political positions, join the Communist Party in 1927.
He is also, along with Breton, of those, fewer in number, whose revolutionary ethics cannot accommodate themselves to the zigzags and compromises of the CP.
He will abandon the party, leaving behind Eluard and Aragon who will derive excellent business from it.
Péret, in parallel with his poetic texts, signs a large number of proclamations of the Surrealist group:
Since July 20, 1936, Péret has been among those who bring their total adherence to the Spanish workers' revolution, multiplying calls for the formation of proletarian militias, denouncing the betrayal constituted by “non-intervention.”
Finally, Péret will take his place in the Durruti Column, become a militiaman of the CNT-FAI.
After the war, the Surrealist group collaborated for a time with “Le Libertaire” of the Anarchist Federation. Jointly with Breton, Schuster, Valorbe, Legrand, etc., who brought us poetic texts or artistic criticism, Péret gave us a study La Révolution et les Syndicats (No. 321 to 326 inclusive), an important contribution to the understanding of postwar workers' problems.
Péret there analyzed the counter-revolutionary function of degenerated trade unions absorbed by capitalism and opposed to them the revolutionary function of workers' councils elected at the workplace and revocable at any time.
More recently, he had held out his criticisms to us in our No. 7-8 (Le Nationalisme), solicitous as he was for constructive collaboration of the various revolutionary tendencies (see his letter that appeared with the initials B.P. in No. 9 from pages 89 to 92).
Péret appealed to the Marxist “Council Communist” tendency.
This cannot in any way prevent us from considering him as one of ours (let us not put the insult in our mouths of seeing in this an attempt at annexation!).
Of ours, not so much because he had fought under the black and red flag in Spain, but because all his life, he was a militant of freedom, knowing at every moment in every field, to recognize it, to fight its errors, to denounce its shortcomings.
Péret was the very type of man the revolution needs most. Illusionless, lucid, he believed in Life, in “true life,” escaping the optimism of the fanatics as well as the despair of the nihilists. Solid.
Talk about the Revolution with Péret, and your pessimism or enthusiasm melted away, crystallized into a ingot of quiet but intractable conviction.
If Revolution and Poetry were for him inextricably linked, it is because Benjamin Péret saw poetry as “the true breath of man,” “the source of all knowledge and this knowledge itself”; “Here they call it love, there freedom, elsewhere science,” he said, and indeed it was thanks to this conception and the free exercise of his spirit, that as a true poet he was able to consistently and flawlessly give us the image of a man in whom all the creative and liberating power was able to manifest itself.
At a time when, for little or a lot of money, artists put themselves at the disposal of current fashions; when, for a little “honor,” militant workers sit on the green carpet of equal commissions; when, for a “permanent” position, revolutionaries deceive the Revolution by remaining in the Communist Party, a guy like Péret, is a breath of fresh air.
For if his modesty, his poverty, his dignity have deprived him of great resonance, that is not to say that his poetic work remains one of the finest there is.
And if it is still too little known, too little recognized, it is because the bourgeoisie and its press surrounded him with a wall of silence, knowing that Péret was not of the same wood that Aragon and Dali were made of...
Closer to us, within the libertarian movement itself, some “anarchist” “personalities” would do well to ponder Péret's example. He had genius; they do not even have talent. He did not cultivate the “I” as a precious plant. He was Worker of the Book (eh yes!) while they are sometimes masters or merchants. In the assemblies of militant workers he listened, he, and when he intervened, it was fraternally, with conciseness and clarity, like a comrade... while our little “thinkers” cultivate the paternalistic genre, choose their words in the vocabulary of the clerics of the noati, play the “elite,” strut their stuff...
Yes, Péret, what a lesson, for all those people! But more what a source for us where to go to find again, when hope abandons us, with the ripe taste of freedom, the strength to fight for it -- always and everywhere.
Truly, we say to you, comrades who have not had the good fortune to know Péret: was someone really the author of “Je ne mange pas de ce paiun-là” [Of that bread I eat none].
Never did he.
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