I called Marinetti at this point a "proto-Fascist," though the Manifesto does have obvious resonances with Fascist ideology.
I was illustrating that they came out of the same milieu and had some common elements in worldview, despite winding up at polar opposites of the political spectrum. How could they not? They lived at the same time, reacted to the same events, had roughly the same educational backgrounds, read the same books, and sometimes personally knew each other. (To see this work itself out with Surrealism, look at the break between Breton and Dali over the latter's sympathy with Franco and Hitler.)
Similarly, there are obvious similarities between the modern-day right and the modern-day left (and center) that mark them as clearly early-21st-century political phenomena. Not many people of any political stripe are going around advocating absolute monarchy, for instance.
--- On Thu, 7/24/08, wrobert at uci.edu <wrobert at uci.edu> wrote:
> From: wrobert at uci.edu <wrobert at uci.edu>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Nietzsche, Mencken, and anarchism
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Thursday, July 24, 2008, 4:32 AM
> There's a basic teleological error being made here.
> Marinetti
> becomes a fascist a decade or so after this statement, but
> fascism
> literally doesn't exist when he makes the statement.
> Similarly,
> many of the Russian futurists will support the Bolsheviks
> in the
> revolution, but they are more interested in battling
> acmeists and
> symbolists at the point of the statement. Last, the
> surrealists
> only put their art 'in service of the
> revolution'(ie Marxism) with
> later statements.lk