Actually, the three examples that you gave don't come out of the same milieu. Italian futurism and russian futurism have almost nothing in common. The russian branch was really focused on the creation of poetic language and debates with other Russian schools of art. When you come to Surrealism, it was a movement produced about two decades after the manifesto (even more significantly, WWI had occurred). If you were going to look at a parallel movement, it would have to be Dada, which has some of the fascination with shock and theatricality of futurism, but not much else.
In reality, Marinetti wrote the manifesto before there was anything called futurism. I've always felt that he could be compared to Malcolm McLaren in many ways (actually, he's much more successful than McLaren). But I am still skeptical about calling it 'proto-fascist.' I've never gotten the sense that Marinetti was anything other than an opportunist in this situation (with the biggest opportunist of course being Mussolini)
robert wood
> 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
>
>
>
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