Marcel Mariën Theory of Immediate World Revolution

About this event

City Lights and Verso Books present A panel discussion with Anna O’Meara, Abigail Susik, and Isaac Cronin celebrating the publication of Theory of Immediate World Revolution: A Handbook for the Avant-Garde by Marcel Mariën Edited by Anna O’Meara Translated by Nadège Lejeune, Anna O’Meara and Ian Thompson Contributions by François Coadou and Abigail Susik Published by Verso Books In 1958, Belgian surrealist Marcel Mariën drafted a plan to topple capitalism on a global scale—achievable in a single year, in any place, at any time. The catch? It required three hundred accomplices, and it was destined to fail. Mariën’s text dares to imagine the unimaginable, offering a blueprint as much for play as for politics. By fusing the spirit of surrealism with the urgency of the atomic age, Mariën exposes the thin line between theory and performance, reality and fiction. This book captures one of his boldest gestures: a proposal not to succeed, but to alter the very way we think about revolution. Marcel Mariën (1920-1993) was a writer, artist, and filmmaker immersed in a wide breadth of criticism and philosophy. His publications and writings included essays, journalism, fiction, poetry, histories, autobiography, scripts, and genre-bending experiments. The youngest member of the Belgian Surrealist movement, Mariën would become both a critic and a historian of the group, publishing prolific oeuvres and correspondences of Belgian Surrealism in its aftermath. While Mariën’s political alignments shifted over the course of his life, he consistently upheld the necessity to reject fascism, dedicating many of his writings to understanding fascism’s ideological functionalities. Born in Antwerp, Mariën fought for Belgium during World War II. For nine months, he was held in Görlitz as a prisoner of war. Mariën spent most of his life in Brussels and he also spent significant time in New York City and Communist China. Anna O’Meara received her Ph.D. in Art History & Visual Studies from the University of Victoria in 2025. She is currently a research fellow at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. Research interests include the 20th Century avant-garde, the Situationist International, and Belgian Surrealism. In terms of recent publications, in 2022, she co-edited On the Poverty of Student Life with Mehdi El Hajoui for Common Notions. Abigail Susik is Joint Editor of Bloomsbury’s Transnational Surrealism Series and author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester UP, 2021). She is the editor of several volumes, including Surrealism and Film after 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries (Manchester UP, 2021) and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (Penn State UP, 2022). Isaac Cronin is a writer, editor, and videographer who has published several books under the LBC imprint Cruel Hospice. His work spans various creative projects and publications. He is the author of Nothing Happened: A Situationist Memoir. What has been said of Theory of Immediate World Revolution “What if the path to world revolution lay through the actions of an invisible committee pulling the strings through an advertising and marketing company? What if you could fund the revolution with a line of credit which, after it succeeds, you wouldn’t need to repay? Marcel Mariën’s delirious, surrealious, Swiftian text from 1958 remains a delightful manual for the meme wars in and against the disintegrating spectacle.” – McKenzie Wark, author of Leaving the Twentieth Century: Situationist Revolutions “Published in 1958 by Les Lèvres nues, this book was written against the specific backdrop of the threat of nuclear destruction that then pitted the Eastern Bloc against the Western world. For Marcel Mariën, it was nothing more and nothing less than proposing a method for seizing power aimed at “overthrowing capitalism across the entire world it controls, within a fixed timeframe of one year—a programme that could be implemented at any moment and everywhere at once ”, by turning one of its own weapons against it: advertising. Political fiction, joke, or real-life manual for a short-term revolution, this work—which met with no success at the time—is one of the most astonishing documents produced by Surrealism in Belgium, demonstrating its inseparable link to political action. – Xavier Canonne, author of René Magritte: The Revealing Image Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation

Who

• Marcel MariënAuthor
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The book

• Theory of Immediate World Revolution: A Handbook for the Avant-GardeMarcel Mariën

Venue

CCSF North Beach / Chinatown Bookstore

CA

Venue website

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