Surrealism wasn’t just about expressions of the unconscious mind. The movement encompassed an anti-work philosophy that is as relevant today as it was a century ago, writes art historian Abigail Susik

Forget the kitsch notion of a commercialised surrealism as a parade of melting watches, rapier sharp moustaches, and photographs of nude violin-women that now fetch millions of dollars on the auction block. In the era of labour and product shortages, steadily mounting inflation, debt, and seething anti-work sentiment, surrealism has more relevant things to show us.

Surrealism was an art, literary, and socio-political movement that spanned the globe for most of the 20th century. Consider, for instance, the extraordinary vision of an artist like the Spanish surrealist Remedios Varo. Her painted and sculpted vistas show an alternate world of arcane knowledge. At the same time, we must remember that, at its core, surrealism was also a resounding call to revolutionary consciousness that could have the potential to transform the world and change life for the better. This is the side of surrealism that is not so easy to display on a museum wall, and yet it speaks directly to some of the most urgent questions of our time.

A century ago, a group of young French poets emerged from service in World War I only to plunge headlong into the grim years of a worldwide pandemic. There were plenty of jobs available, but young workers like the surrealists didn’t want to sign up because the pay was so low, the hours were so bad, and there were no benefits of which to speak. French workers across sectors were striking intensively during these deadly years of influenza, fighting for shorter hours, a shorter week, and above all, higher wages.

Although most of the Parisian surrealists needed to work at least part-time to survive, most of them strove for shades of financial autonomy through gigging and precarious employment, and above all refusing work for a regular wage. They were disgusted by the French war effort that resulted in millions of deaths and wanted to desert the national economy and the project of reconstruction by refusing to contribute further as workers and consumers.

As poets and writers, members of what we now often call the “creative class”, they knew that the products of their intellectual labour were outrageously devalued in the market system, even though this exploitation was nothing compared to what workers on the factory floor faced. They sought ways to organise, unionise, and build autonomy for artists and knowledge workers alongside the solidarity that they declared for proletarian workers on the factory line. They experimented with the idea of the art strike, in which the art-worker withholds production and withdraws their “works” from the system of commodity exchange. Over the course of a few decades, they set up different artist unions and federations in collaboration with, and also independent from, political groups such as the French Communist Party.

André Breton and Louis Aragon, both veterans of the war who collaboratively fostered the surrealist brainchild with their friends, blithely dropped out of medical school. Offers of cushy editorial positions at literary magazines were turned down by surrealists with a lifted middle finger and plenty of choice words. The lure of careerism and ambition was obliterated by a principled refusal before the deadlock routine of the eight-hour day and the panacea of a regular paycheck ever had chance to take root. The struggle to get by without a regular wage was a hardship for many surrealists, but in a pre-gentrified post-war Paris, it was an achievable, if consistently fraught and contingent, goal.

Surrealists wanted to totally reimagine the role of work in modern life. They did so by spending copious amounts of time reading, writing, talking, drinking, and smoking in cheap Parisian cafés where they could loiter for very little money. In 1925 they declared a collective war on work. They began to advocate the idea of wage labour abolitionism, which was the demand for the demise of the alienated system of paid work in which a worker is conscripted into certain tasks by a boss, in an exchange of money for the worker’s time, energy, and production. They were anti-capitalists who, ahead of their time, imagined a post-work world.

It wasn’t the activity of creative work as such that the surrealists decried. The surrealists were constantly churning out artworks, texts, and collaborative events. It was the unavoidability of working for the boss, under the conscription of contract for bodily labour and the hours of one’s day (one’s life), that was the social evil they protested. They opposed capitalism’s coercive system of wage earning as a means of survival and deplored the colonialist and imperialist histories and practices that supported the oppression of people all over the world.

“There is no question of not making every effort to safeguard our imprescriptible rights not to work,” wrote surrealist André Thirion in 1929 in his magazine essay “Down with Work!”. “Human laziness is continually trampled underfoot by the need to work for the sole purpose of maintaining one’s own existence,” he continued. Although, as a communist activist, Thirion put some hope in the acceleration of technology to reduce the number of work hours required by humans, he was no techno-optimist. He knew that whether or not labour-saving machines reduced the need for human labour, workers would continue to struggle with the conditions of both necessary and voluntary servitude. In this sense, his Marxism differed from the workerist ethic of the French Communist Party at this time. His socialism was surrealist and utopian in character.

Thirion predicted the likelihood of future violent revolutions by dehumanised workers and railed against the widespread ethos of workaholism that fostered such desperation. Like work, death is an unavoidable part of the human condition, he pointed out, and yet most societies don’t submit to some systemised law that escalates the inevitability of mortality. Humans can never escape from the reality of work, he agreed, and yet why should a lifetime of imprisonment in unflagging and often miserable wage labour be the measure of a human life span? “And that’s why we say shit to those who would be ashamed to be the bad workers under this regime, shit to those who despise the temporarily unemployed… shit for them and all the counter-revolutionaries and their miserable idol, WORK,” Thirion exclaimed.

A few months after “Down with Work!” appeared, Thirion’s essay “Notes on Money” was published in the 12th and final issue of the journal La Révolution Surréaliste. Building on the denunciation of societal systems launched in his previous essay on labour, Thirion’s subsequent diatribe focuses on the subject of surplus value in capitalism. For Thirion, money is not merely an effect of this system but rather a primary agent of exploitation.

The compulsory act of earning money by trading one’s labour as a commodity and achieving accumulated wealth for the capitalist class is tantamount to collusion with those in power. “Not content with reducing almost all human beings to work, it [the capitalist class] steals from workers the ridiculous value it attributes to this work, enriching itself in the act and leaving its workers only the promise of recommencing their exhausting labours the following day,” Thirion explained. The unavoidable obligation of wage labour meant mandatory participation in the tainted systems of production and consumption via currency.

It was the collective nature of the Paris surrealist work refusal, along with the remarkably low cost of living in the French capital between the two world wars, that supported individual attempts at a life of permanent strike against the wage labour imperative. The shared ethos bolstered morale, and friendships often supported communal living situations, while collaborative organising and activist efforts forwarded their cause of principled unemployment in incremental stages.

Although it became clear after the rise of Stalinism in the 1920s and 1930s that the hoped-for communist revolution would not bring about the transformation of work and economy that the surrealists had formerly rallied behind, many surrealists remained steadfast in their rejection of compromise with the capitalist system and their vision of a world liberated from the strictures of waged labour. By the end of World War II, more and more surrealists around the world, far beyond Paris, were beginning to explore alternate utopian socialist and anarchist ideas of speculative futures, and envisioned horizons for classless societies.

During the 1960s, a young group of anti-war and civil rights activists formed the Chicago Surrealist Group, and their renewed demand for a transformation of work went hand in hand with their call for the downfall of racist America. The Chicago group is still active today, as are a number of surrealist groups in far-flung locations. A collection of the Chicago group’s pamphlets and posters are included in the Tate surrealism show, where you can see evidence of their anti-wage labour struggle.

At the turn of the new millennium, Chicago surrealist Penelope Rosemont wrote, “To be effective, the struggle to abolish work must become conscious, vocal, public, organised, and international.” Surrealists today are still fighting for a world in which work and pleasure are united.

Abigail Susik is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (Penn State University Press, 2022).

This article is from Idler #84.

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