Toward the Theatrical Party
WE ARE irrealist because we take up the utopian and revolutionary aspiration to transform life; because we desire the full flourishing of the critical, creative, and subjective faculties of human beings; because our hearts seethe with hatred at the regime of alienated labor which holds humanity in chainsreal and invisible; because we refuse to stop dreaming; because we are insubordinate and irreconcilable; because we are implacably opposed to the bourgeois and philistine world; because we embrace the subversive fantastic; because we are against this imposed reality; because revolt alone is the bearer of light; because we are locked in mortal struggle against the Moloch of capital, the Leviathan of the capitalist state, and the putrid haze of capitalist realism which relegates the future to a place of obscurity or oblivion.
We are in COMBAT because everyday life in the epoch of imperialist decay is moved by the engine of inconceivable violence and fueled by centuries of congealed blood and sweat; because we aim to mobilize the fire and iron of the human spirit; because in every battle it is imperative to take a side; because in each reactionary war a revolutionary class must fight for the defeat of “its own” government; because as artist-agitators and worker-intellectuals our task is to be tendentious, to enter the fray in the ranks of the proletariat; because we loathe hack writers, opportunists, revisionists, bureaucrats, and deserters; because it is useless to wait; because it is impossible to live as human beings worthy of the name without struggle to the end against all forms of exploitation with no illusions in the certainty of triumph; because we see the world for what it is and our unalterable conclusion is the necessity of the proletarian revolution; because we do not fear obstacles; because we are not content with mere resistance; because alienated labor is death in slow motion; because we are iconoclasts against the cult of accumulation; because the emancipation of the working class by the workers themselves is the cause for the emancipation of all humanity; because we ask with candor if these gentlemen have ever seen a revolution; because we reject the “autonomy of the artist” and enlist with enthusiasm in the class struggle; because we are against all forms of spiritual collapse; because we are sick of being unwitting conscripts; because we are tired; because the proletarian dictatorship is the consummation of liberty; because life is beautiful; because what we are starting is a war.
We have formed a LEAGUE because a war necessitates the formation of battle lines and the issuance of marching orders; because the historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership; because the resolution of this crisis requires the forging of such a leadership; because such a leadership is not built through self-proclamation but through consciousness and organization; because we reject all self-interested and self-proclaimed toy vanguards; because there is no greater object of mockery than a general without an army deluding himself otherwise; because we are conscious of our nature as a toy vanguard; because we believe in the centrality of program; because we believe in open polemic; because we are for discipline and principle; because education is social; because we are for the political independence of the working class from all bourgeois parties and politicians; because wedesire the regroupment of revolutionaries around a correct political line; because the proletariat and its vanguard require organs of intervention; because every betrayal must be called out, every opportunist misleadership condemned, every mistake pointed out and corrected, and every experience in the class struggle reflected on with sober senses; because we must be bold when the hour of action arrives; because we are Communists; because the struggle educates; because we seek to deepen the struggle and deepen our education; because a tree must develop roots in order to grow; because the revolutionary organization is a working school of Marxism; because Communists must take part in all the elementary struggles and movements of the working class, must become intimately involved in the concrete questions of the lives of the workers and oppressed; because our desire is to become tribunes of the people; because we aim for a convergence of words and deeds; because Communism lives in every battle against exploitation and oppression, in every revolt, in every dream of a new world, in every vision of the abolition of the present state of things; because our task is to reforge the world party of socialist revolution, the Fourth International.
It is on this basis we convoke the Irrealist Combat League as an instance of the Theatrical Party.
The Irrealist Combat League is for the construction of performances — for aberrant departures from the motions of everyday life, for the active imposition of proletarian will on space and time, for the enrichment of the political-imaginative capacity of the revolutionary class. Our performances take the shape of aesthetic interventions and practical actions. Every creative work produced must be matched by a deepening of our implantation in the working class itself, and this creation-implantation must draw the class into its fold. From every shift on the picket line, from every study session, and from every moment of confrontation with the capitalist state must emerge works of art, generative instances of crystalized consciousness and directed dreaming. It is imperative to learn to think and dare to dream in tandem with daring to struggle and daring to win. As revolutionaries our hope is to become artist-agitators and worker-intellectuals. We hold that everyday life in the ranks of the working class, meeting the problem of alienation face to face, is the greatest illustrator of the radical weird. In the estrangement enforced and embodied by wage labor one finds the fuel for dreaming in the desire to escape drudgery. Being alienated facilitates a becoming-alien, a process whereby one becomes altogether other out of a refusal to cease being, and by cohering the collective alien the Irrealist Combat League concentrates irreconcilable opposition to the conditions which have forced it into being. The proletariat must become a class-for-itself to abolish itself, to unchain human creation and imagination from the logic of accumulation.
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.