Theory of Immediate World Revolution (Paperback)

A blueprint for revolution: part manifesto, part performance, and a provocation to rethink the very idea of change.

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.

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).

François Coadou teaches philosophy of art at the National School of Art and Design in Limoges, and art history at the University of Limoges. He is the author of studies on the Situationist International, Lettrism and Surrealism. He notably edited Guy Debord's Lettres à Marcel Mariën (La Nerthe, 2015) and edited a collective book on Mariën: “Il créait des choses désagréables”: Marcel Mariën et l’activité surréaliste (ABM, 2022).

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.

Ian Thompson is a musician and writer with a deep interest in 20th century avant-garde artistic/political groups, particularly the Internationale Situationniste and Lettrisme. In addition to producing a number of translations, he published the first English-language study of '70s French underground music, Synths, Sax & Situationists, in 2025.

Nadège Lejeune is a Comparative Literature PhD with a passion for languages and literature. Originally from France, she now lives in Western NY with her husband and her their two children and works as a freelance editor and translator.