On the one-man Politburo - Ian Penman in TLS:

‘Mark Polizzotti’s Why Surrealism Matters is timed to coincide with the movement’s 100th anniversary, but are we really so sure when Surrealism began? The inaugural event is now taken to be the first Surrealist Manifesto, written by André Breton and published in October 1924. But there were anticipatory skirmishes and screwball portents aplenty. Breton and his circle acknowledged a broad church of precursor angels, including the Marquis de Sade and Dean Swift, Marx and Freud, Poe and Rimbaud. This matter of precedence can feel tricky and decidedly theological. Here are just a few contenders: First, for a few months in 1916, in a small back room in Zurich, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings run the Cabaret Voltaire. On July 14 that year Ball publicly declaims his Dada Manifesto. Dada later relocates to Paris and lays most of the groundwork for the emergence of Surrealism.
Second, in May 1917 Guillaume Apollinaire first used the term “surrealist” in programme notes for the Sergei Diaghilev ballet Parade, a collaboration between Erik Satie, Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso; he also applied it to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias), subtitled a drame surréaliste.
Third, in the spring of 1912 Marcel Duchamp, accompanied by Apollinaire and the artist Francis Picabia, spent a night at the theatre enjoying Raymond Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique. It had been advertized in Paris with a poster featuring, among other oddities, an earthworm playing a zither. Duchamp later acknowledged Roussel as a key influence on his “Le Grand Verre” (1915–23). Roussel also coined the memorable formula: “Revis tes rêves en éveil” (“Relive your dreams awake”).’

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‘Breton still reads like a one-man Politburo. He excommunicated other Surrealists for not being the right kind of Surrealist. He execrated anyone with an interest in the occult, before effecting a 180-degree turn and making esotericism mandatory. He proclaimed a utopian creed, but was routinely slighting and irascible: you’re barred! Artaud was expelled for being too druggy and not political enough. René Crevel killed himself over a perceived failure at political strategising. Then there was the matter of Salvador Dalí and the shit-stained pants, as featured in his painting “Le Jeu lugubre” (“The Lugubrious Game”, 1929). For Breton the matter of Surrealism definitely didn’t include this particular alchemical substance; he also condemned Dalí for his wrong sexuality and rightist politics.’

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‘When everything is surreal, nothing is surreal. The poet Louis Aragon, for one, was unconvinced: “If you write deplorable twaddle using Surrealist techniques, it will still be deplorable twaddle”.’

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‘Something more in the spirit of Breton might be to label him a fraud, a chancer, a petty tyrant, more Citizen Smith than Citizen Sade. Perhaps, if Surrealism is to reclaim its power, it might lie in how radically out of date it is. Walter Benjamin saw in early Surrealism a revolutionary spark in the way it harnessed the outmoded: “[T]he first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photographs, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos …” Any attempt at a Surrealist revival might equally honour not just its democratic utopianism, but also instances of negativity, uselessness, the untimely.
The founding myth of Surrealism was, in Benjamin’s words, its attempt to locate “the constellation of wakefulness”. Awaken yourself, then rouse the masses.’

Read the article here.

Nowadays we have two-men-politburos, three-men-politburos and even four-men-politburos, living next to each other, for the time being rather peacefully.

I prefer dadaism to surrealism, but I’m willing to accept dada as subsection of surrealism.