MANIFESTO
51
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 make money in order to live and write, but he should not
under any circumstances live and write in order to make
~oney
...
The writer by no means looks on
his
works 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 ends foreign to itself, and prescribe, in the guise of so-called "reasons
of State," the
th~mes
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 to–
morrow, to
c~nsent
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 rewolutionary State has the
right to defend itself against the counter-attack 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
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
