Theory of Immediate World Revolution:A Handbook for the Avant-Garde

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.

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.