Theses on the Theatrical Party
1. POLITICAL ACTION is a form and method of performance.
2. Political action is a form of performance in that it is a recognizable mode. Pickets, speeches, banners, leaflets — these and many others evel the political genre of performance, its contours, the means by which it is understood.
3. Political action is a method of performance because it is a framework for its execution as form. Thinking of oneself as a political actor, someone who carries out a political program, develops the scope and content of the performance. For revolutionary political actors, for Communists, the audience is the revolutionary subject, the proletariat and the wider masses of the oppressed. The content of our performance emerges from this point of departure.
4. Political action is a performance in that it is the presentation of aesthetic work before an audience. The epoch of the digital gesamtkunstwerk has interpenetrated the aesthetic element into the whole of everyday life. Whether the trend of aestheticization or politicization predominates is left to the subjective element —leadership. As Communists, our aim is to relentlessly politicize aesthetics and with it every moment of lived existence.
5. For the majority of political actors, the performative element of their activity stands unknown or unacknowledged. This lends itself to the cult of formal optimism — the belief that one’s mission is real and just, that there will be a triumphant climax, that the human audience will erupt in applause at the consummation of the new or rebirth of the old.
6. Such dissonant belief, particularly among revolutionary-minded activists, constitutes the total fusion of the political actor and their role. This lends itself to a neurotic propulsion. It propels because the ideology of optimism fuels the act. It is neurotic because the frustration of this world-historic mission and its “inevitable” triumph lends itself to burnout and disillusionment at the impotent perpetuity of the activist paradigm, the paradigm which pervades the opportunist and sectarian left. The dynamism of newfound hope erodes with the pavement underfoot the street demonstration, and with it the energy of transformation.
7. The Theatrical Party embraces the organization of pessimism in contrast to the false optimism of the left. To be a revolutionary pessimist is to separate the political actor from their role. It is this separation which, in the epic theater of Brecht, invited a critical outlook on the performance from its participants and spectators — the first step in the transformation of spectators into collaborators, a task integral to both theater and the forging of a revolutionary party.
8. Revolutionary pessimism is not a propensity to surrender nor a smug condescension but an intransigent commitment to carry out the class struggle to completion, be that in victory or defeat. The revolutionary pessimist is not animated by belief in divine salvation but by an unyielding class hatred for the bourgeoisie, by feverish contempt for exploitation and oppression: revolutionary pessimism is a commitment to destroy what destroys you.
9. The destruction embarked upon by the Theatrical Party must be a creative one, a making of room. Thus its revolutionary pessimism is fused from the outset with revolutionary irrealism. Communists are opposed to this world, all it represents, and every day of life within it. This hatred, one which fuels the iron battalions of the proletariat, must be matched at every step by a flourishing of the radical imagination.
10. The irrealism of revolutionaries is a concrete commitment to re-enchanting the world, a total rejection of capital’s iron laws and algorithms. The task of the revolutionary irrealist is to reverse the slow cancellation of the future, to conquer dreams alongside the conquest of freedom.
11. It is in the context of the merger of revolutionary pessimism and irrealism that awareness of the performative element in political action becomes an instrument of the social revolution. The old maxim “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” becomes “pessimism of the intellect, persistence of the imagination.” From this point the Theatrical Party embarks on its task—the construction of performances.
12. The performances of the Theatrical Party can be defined threefold, as a) aberrant departures from the normal and expected, b) deliberate and organized actions which impose themselves on space and time, and c) generative experiences which enrich the political-imaginative capacity of the revolutionary subject.
13. These performances tend to be reproductive, preparations for the hour of action. The picket line, capture-the-flag derivé which brings one close to the streets on which there will one day stand
barricades, the line rehearsal of the study group — all such activities are staging for the final performance of the conquest of power. Momentary confrontations too are preparatory: every routing of the enemy is the triumph of the class in the process of becoming.
14. In its performances the Theatrical Party constructs itself as an entity of the radical weird — a regiment for self-instrumentalized otherness, for active disruption of the order of things. It responds to the problem of alienation by cohering the collective alien: a body irreconcilably “out of” and opposed to systems of domination.
Toward a DIY Vanguard
15. Above all, the struggle for the Theatrical Party is a struggle to render revolutionary politics tactile. The call for the Theatrical Party is a call to abandon all high-minded pretense, doctrinairism, abstentionism, opportunism, condescension, and hack writing. So long as Marxism stands divorced by one means or another from the revolutionary class, the real movement, and the motions of lived existence it is not Marxism but a philosophy of the inert. The same must be said for art.
16. Learn to think, dare to dream! That is the line of march of the Theatrical Party. There is no better start for thinking than laughter, and no greater comedy than the death of the old and the first awkward advances of the new.
The Irrealist Combat League is an association of revolutionary communists who aim to construct the Theatrical Party through aesthetic-political intervention in the class struggle. They haunt the South Puget Sound.