Back to the Future

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944)

Up to now, literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. . .We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
— F.T. Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto, February 1909

Filippo Marinetti (1876-1944) was born in Alexandria, the son of a rich Italian merchant. For all his revolutionary nationalism, he was an international figure; educated in Egypt and France he published his first poems in French, and the Futurist Manifesto appeared for the first time in Le Figaro. Marinetti's energy, optimism and charm made him a great impresario; he spent his fortune on the movement he created.

It was in February 1909 that Marinetti, together with three painters, drew up the Futurist Manifesto. First identified as an artistic movement, Futurism quickly developed into an all-embracing worldview. There was Futurist music, painting, and architecture, even Futurist science and cuisine. Futurism advanced the love of energy, of dynamism, of speed, of instinct and intuition, of willpower and youth. It had absolute contempt for the old bourgeois world and praised the purity and beauty of violence.

Early in 1918 Marinetti took the Futurist Manifesto a step further by formulating a political programme for a revolutionary ‘Futurist’ state, the Manifesto of the Partito Politica Futurista [Futurist Political Party]. Uncompromisingly opposed to the Italian monarchy, he advocated, instead, a “technical government of thirty or forty competent young directors with no parliament, to be elected by the whole nation through the trade unions.” There was to be nationalisation of mines and water, confiscation of uncultivated or ill-cultivated land and its redistribution. Conscription was to be gradually abolished and a small volunteer army created. Workers were to have the right to strike and organise public meetings. Freedom of the press was stipulated, as was free education for all. The Manifesto demanded the eight-hour working day, equal salaries for men and women, collective bargaining, social welfare, “the gradual abolition of marriage through easy divorce, the vote for women and their participation in national activity.”

Marinetti’s political programme demanded a revolutionary transformation of every aspect of Italian political, social and economic life. Transcending both the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ of the political spectrum, the Futurists challenged all the accepted old ideas about Man and society. Marinetti also recommended the abolition of the police and prisons. “Prisons,” he wrote, “are ghastly traps which presuppose the most savage Cat-order directed against extremely agreeable and ingenuous Rat-temperaments.” And finally, he urged “the most intransigent anti-clericalism to liberate Italy from churches, priests, friars, nuns, candles and bells.”

The short-lived Futurist party was absorbed in 1919 by Benito Mussolini’s Fasci di combattimento. After standing as a candidate in the 1919 elections, however, Marinetti left the fasci in protest against their willingness to compromise with the Church and the monarchy. He strongly denounced the reactionary tendencies in Mussolini’s movement, in particular the failure to break with those jaded vestiges of the past. By 1920 Mussolini was courting conservative elements in the bourgeoisie and declaring opposition to “political Socialism”. In response many of the Futurists, along with former Socialists, syndicalists, anarchists and Republicans withdrew their support from Mussolini. To these revolutionaries and dissidents, Mussolini’s Fascist party in compromising with the ruling classes and the Church had forfeited any chance of overthrowing the existing order. In fact it had become an instrument, at the service of the reactionary bourgeoisie, used to safeguard the old order.

Mussolini’s rise to power saw the Italian Futurists, in the words of their 1924 congress, “more than ever devoted to ideas and art, far removed from politics…” Although Marinetti repeated his Futurist slogans and upheld the Futurist Manifesto, he accepted election to the Italian Academy created by Mussolini in 1929, declaring “it is important that Futurism be represented in the Academy.”

In 1938, hearing that Hitler wanted to include Futurism in an exhibition of “degenerate art” to be held in a railway carriage that would travel through Europe, Marinetti persuaded Mussolini to refuse to let the train enter Italy, and that December he protested publicly against anti-Semitism. In spite of his age, Marinetti volunteered for active service in the Second World War.

It is only with violence that we can restore the idea of justice…that hygienic, healthy idea which consists in the right of the bravest, of the most disinterested: only then can we restore heroism. 
— F. T. Marinetti