"The Theatrical Party" by April Miller
Aesthetic Intervention in the Epoch of Communicative Omnipotence
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
April Miller, is a writer, organizer, and food-service worker in Olympia, WA.
Preface
The present work is, generally speaking, a weaving together of disparate fragments into the shell of a position, and this fragmented character necessitates the provision of a few points of contextualization and explanation.
Firstly, on structure. The text moves from an attempt to extrapolate traces of the fantastic in Marx’s work into a conceptualizing of capital as a totalizing entity to which a generative countertotality termed the “New Myth” may be conjured; to a discussion of the capturing of present developments in communications by capital and commensurate generalization of the market and the commodity to the social field and discussion of the reactionary yearning for the authentic in the wake of its withering; to an explanation of the whole of bourgeois superstructure as a site of conflict and violence through the framework of a “generalized social war” which takes place even in communicative and expressive sites which appear innocuous or passive; to a consideration of aesthetic intervention as a form of political intervention given the dual processes of aestheticizing politics and politicizing aesthetics, raising the question of the development of an organ for the direction of aesthetic interventions; to the positing of the “Theatrical Party” as such an organ; and finally to an angular expression of contempt for what is broadly considered “the left.”
Secondly, a series of disclaimers.
The present work makes continued reference to the ongoing war in Ukraine. The discussion of the Ukraine conflict has multiple elements. It is a recent and significant example of the whole weight of the capitalist media apparatus being thrown into war fever, and one which has made extensive use of social media and social justice rhetoric common to social media platforms; the media strategy of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is an exemplary illustration of Walter Benjamin’s comments on the performance of the politician before the camera-public; it is an instance wherein information posted on social media has directly aided the conducting of military operations; and it is one of several examples in recent memory of wide sections of “the left” are taking what could be described as a “social-imperialist” or “State Department Socialist” line on a war instigated by imperialism, or in other words, are standing on the wrong side of the barricades. At the time of writing the position of the author is for defeat on both sides of this squalid nationalist war, in internationalist opposition to the capitalist rulers in Moscow and Kiev. A developed exposition of the position revolutionary Marxists ought to take as pertains to Ukraine is beyond the purview of this work.
Discussed at length is the performative element in political action as well as military action. In describing such actions as performative or as performances, the intent is not to diminish the material impacts thereof. What is being discussed is the situation of such actions in the context of their presentation, of how they are addressed to an audience. Such an analysis is directed at the development and extension of a serious understanding of their social function, and more specifically an understanding which is useful to revolutionary Marxists in pursuing political action by the proletariat for the transformation of society.
Criticism is directed at an archetypal caricature of “the Activist” and the role of political optimism. This is reflective of an analysis informed by critiques of activism from a Marxist perspective and from personal experience in spaces animated roughly by the paradigm described. The objective is not to condemn those pursuing political action, to condemn those with what Marxists term “mixed consciousness,” or anything of the sort. The purpose of the critique of activism and of optimism is to facilitate greater theoretical and political clarity in the pursuit of such action, to move towards the development of a programmatic and strategic framework capable of intensifying the class struggle.
A demarcation is made between the communist movement and “the left.” The tone with which this demarcation is expressed is, in mild terms, angular. The section “Hack Leninists and Hack Writers” serves a dual purpose. It reiterates that the orientation of revolutionaries is to the revolutionary class and not a section of bourgeois public opinion, and it rejects wholly and vigorously the “death of communism” and “the end of history.” It situates “the left” as the subject of such venom because it desires the cleaving of Marxism from the politics of class-collaboration which are intrinsic to “left” combinations, popular frontism, and other strategies the author believes to be recipes for defeat.
Finally—the expression of authorial intent for the purpose of contextualization is not done to diminish the sociality and interpretive flexibility of the text. It is hoped that areas of “confusion” will become areas of generative interpretation and reinterpretation, that points of “disagreement” become points of departure, that struggling to understand generates new understandings. Some explanatory footnotes are provided, but may be ignored. The illustration of the Theatrical Party by way of this text is aimed at its realization through the text’s use as a prop in its procession.
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For the Death of Moloch, for Proletarian Autotheosis
The suggestion that human existence is presided over by a dark god is, understandably, regarded as an anachronism relegated to the imaginations of the eccentric or unwell.
We are all unwell.
A powerful force pervades every interaction in the current epoch. This force is infinitely consumptive and productive. It swallows continents. It savors the depletion of the body and spirit. It is incapable of stopping its own hunger, save for bouts of violent illness. There is no plan or pathology behind the motions of this invisible being, no method to its mode of existence. Accumulate! Accumulate! This is the spell whose anarchic rhythm propels the beast. It does not search for or identify its objects of devouring. The procession is animated only by hunger, its shape is an irregular and frenzied lockstep: devour, produce, devour, produce, DESTROY, devour, produce. This ouroboros has a name. M-C-M’! The accumulation of capital! So Marx and Engels named the beast in the 19th century. Still before the invocation of the god of our times took root in each and every facet of life it was known—Moloch. The sage Allen Ginsberg well captured the adjustment of this beast to its new habitat. “Moloch the incomprehensible prison!...Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!...Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!...Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog!...Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!” Moloch—this is the mechanism beyond living which shapes life. Moloch—this is Capital, the dark god of our age.
Capital is a cosmic horror of man’s own creation. Its process of being, awesome and immense, is a congealment of blood and sweat which has come alive and established invisible dominion over the minds and motions of the objects of its birthing and chains them to its unending crisis, growth, and transformation. Moloch-Capital reigns as the real god of dead labor. It is the Suzerain to which all institutions are farcical tributary bodies, instruments of obfuscation and active appendages which continue the unyielding sacrament of accumulative sacrifice. Labor and time yield to its living process of undeath, acting as raw material in the foundry of its becoming. All that is solid melts into air! Bow before the alien mediator! The titans of industry conjured something beyond their control, and now stand as a gaggle of avatars.
Attack and dethrone God! This is the task of Moloch-Capital’s billions of subjects.
“Carried to its furthest extreme, the black magician’s ambition is to wield supreme power over the entire universe, to make himself a god,” wrote foundational historian of the occult Richard Cavendish. In Aleister Crowley’s words, “Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” What a poetic description of the development of a rational plan of production! Through such an apparatus, a universal human subject born from the overthrow of class society could, in its ritual of soviet democracy, constitute a new dominion over nature consisting of the withering away of dominion and of the distinction between man and nature, between town and country.
Theosis, in Eastern Christianity, is the transformative process by which likeness to, or union with, the divine is attained. This process is expounded by St. Paul in Philippians 2:12-13, wherein the Philippians are recommended to “with fear and trembling work out [their] salvation,” for “it is God who worketh in you, both to will and to accomplish, according to his good will.” In Ephesians 4:15, Paul writes, “we may in all things grow up in him who is the head, even Christ.”
To dethrone Moloch-Capital is an act of proletarian autotheosis. Away with all phantasms! For the creation of heaven on earth! Transform life! Become as gods!
Integral to the romantic-revolutionary Surrealist movement was the generation of the “New Myth.” Andre Breton once declared, “Let’s demolish the churches, starting with the most beautiful, so that no stone remains unturned. Then the New Myth will live!” The totality of capitalist civilization stands as an immanent cathedral to Moloch. The autotheosis of the revolutionary subject will commence upon its razing.
The New Myth, the autotheosis of the proletariat, is not a fixed Golden Age or an idyllic return to precapitalist yeomanship. Nor will it be a veneration of the deified worker whose strong arms animated the old Socialist Realism. The self-emancipation and self-abolition of the proletariat, the destruction of the rubbish which was life under the regime of alienated labor, is an infinitely generative and transformative act. The New Myth, the living conjuration of the human subject as a really human subject, is a myth of perpetual motion. It lacks definite shape, and this lack is a triumph. The New Myth is a myth of horizons, of advance, of approaching the New itself. In the wake of the slow cancellation of the future, the death of Moloch-Capital is an act of resurrection. The proletarian autotheosis is not merely immortal but beyond mortality. It is the utopian light of the future, whose bearing brings about the apocalypse, a lifting of the veil, a revelatory end. Immanentize the eschaton!
Communicative Omnipotence
In The Storyteller, Walter Benjamin distinguishes between intelligence (data which comes from a spatial or temporal distance) and information (data which “supplies a handle for what is nearest” and appears “understandable in itself”). Benjamin posits that commensurate with the decline of storytelling was an increase in the dissemination of information—a result of changes in the mode of production. With the development of capitalism, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind,” wrote Marx in The Communist Manifesto. Traditional methods of conveying data and meaning are among the innumerable solids melted in the exhaust of the bourgeoisie’s bellows.
Even “journalism,” the profession of disseminating information, has been transformed since the time of Benjamin. Gone are the Villemessants, the distinguished critics and investigators, with their respectable publications. Their work is now dispersed over innumerable blogs, platforms, podcasts, and subscription services. Some pieces of reporting are condensed to 280 characters, which may or may not be accompanied by a single image or video clip. Some images and phrases in and of themselves convey information, in the form of the creatively reproduced and intertextual internet meme. The omnipotence of access to information has further decomposed and displaced the narrative element of its delivery. The auratic element of the recounting of events has receded to new levels of obscure dormance. The anecdote, textual or visual, has displaced both reporting and the story.
The development of publishing as a capitalist enterprise imbued contained data and narrative—be it in the form of the journal, the newspaper, the novel, or any others—with the form of the commodity. The printed text retained, as a finished work, an element of the art object. Ink and paper gave these bodies of text and image a tactility the saturation of explanations and consequent limiting of interpretation has removed on the level of psychological connection. And, as being portals to another world (or angle of perception), an artistic fetish is present in the textual landscape as much as the painted one. Looming over this was the specter of sales, the prison of profit: the simultaneous role of art object and commodity is a site of contradiction.
The digital world, animated by RGB, sees this contradiction shift. The commodity-form further displaces the element of the art object remaining in the printing of text. The digital image is infinitely tactile in its intangibility; it becomes possible for the reader or viewer to see the pixels and binary code behind what is before their eyes, and with this knowledge an immense process of appropriation and reproduction can commence. Representations are subsumed into the knowledge of their simulation; the viewer, like the interfacing apparatus, processes data inputs. Disembodied from the flesh of print, access to these inputs becomes the site of commodification. Advertisements and subscriptions, once asides to the story reported, now stand as prerequisites to viewing. A commercial failure in print publishing still leaves printed copies, for digital publishing commercial failure is to drown in the deluge of the digital, to simply vanish. As a means of survival, as a necessity for circulation, the individual creator themselves propels their work into the capitalist market by means of paid platforms and sponsorship deals. The digital gesamtkunstwerk, like Moloch-Capital which has captured it, is all-consuming, all-changing, and all-expanding.
Once a liberating decentralization, the world wide web has been enclosed in the name of the information superhighway. To post and to publish stand demarcated. The artistic fetish gives way to the cult of personality; with the penetration of mechanical equipment into reality once confined to studio productions entering into the bedroom of billions, every human being now stands as simultaneous star and prisoner, all facing the camera and thus the market, looking upon one another in a buying frenzy for an “authentic” reality likely to have never existed, scrolling between transfixions and lost in the panopticon of the parasocial. Text and image stand nigh-inseparable, and everyday life has thus entered the realm of the caption. The digital projection and its ubiquity have rendered the revolutionary functions of film and photography instruments of superstructural warfare, agents for the swallowing of being and representation by Moloch-Capital. What remained of art, craft, and storytelling in the dissemination of information has been swept up by pixel-grains in the desert of raw data.
Such absence, the ability to stare into the abyss of capital, generates a hunger for storytelling. This hunger becomes bestial, enraged—its cry is blood and soil. The whirlwind of accumulation, sweeping away everything in its wake, compels man to hide below ground, in the pockets of Mother Earth. In his besieged pocket, one proclaims to have rediscovered the Old Gods. Compared to the whirlwind the mythic appears material. In terror, barbarism claims the mantle of reason. Reaction appears as reality to the desperate soul. Death on the inescapable battlefield against perceived agents of this immense and seemingly nameless enemy becomes a protective embrace for the newborn crusader-fascist against the white-hot flames of value, and in this embrace he becomes one with the abyss he so fears. The reactionary mystic, in his hurried clinging to the folly called Eternal Truth, places yet another nail in the coffin of the fantastic. The cult of the essential and natural provides blood sacrifices not on the altar of Odin but of Moloch-Capital.
Generalized Social War
...in the modern forms of domination, the imposition of war onto the whole of social life is an implicit one precisely because economic competitiveness is war, and war and the economy share the common denominator of speed. As Walter Benjamin writes, “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.” The aestheticization of life is one aspect of this mobilization of social energies. The aestheticization of war is functional to the subjugation of everyday life to the rule of history. War forces the global masses to partake in the process of self-realization of the Hegelian Spirit, or, perhaps more realistically, to become part of capitalist global accumulation. Captured in the dynamics of war, everyday life is ready to be subjected to the unlimited rule of the commodity.
— Bifo Berardi
World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between civilian and military participation.
— Marshall McLuhan
In every pocket sits a door to the battlefield of world imperialism’s third Great War. A great mass of unwitting conscripts enter the fray on a daily basis. This war is fought as much, if not primarily, on the terrain of information and ideology as it is with bombs and bullets.
The end of the 20th century brought about a revolution in communication which has reached its Thermidor in the 21st. The internet, which at its outset enacted a decentralization and democratization of the informational terrain wherein visions of digital utopia flourished, has given way to the panopticon of the parasocial upon its conquest by the commodity form and the laws of capital accumulation. This apparatus, thoroughly interpenetrated into everyday life, renders the diffusion of ideological socialization near-inescapable. Tech giants loom over the “global village” and hold the means of communication and expression in their hands.
The war in Ukraine has provided Marxists with a glaring example of the ideological-informational war which has raged for several decades and now reaches a fever pitch. The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, exhorts the American and European imperialists to launch a cataclysmic war on Russia by way of Twitter. Reddit serves as a hub for foreign adventurers who yearn to serve as accomplices to Azov. Online photographs have enabled Russian and Ukrainian forces to attack enemy positions. A war frenzy has been diffused through social media, allowing this fratricidal nationalist war to paint itself in the sheep’s clothing of social justice. Poor little Ukraine, with the second largest land army in Europe, is being picked on by “fascist” Russia. The lens of pop culture is imposed as a frame of reference for the conflict, with all manner of fictional parallels to Harry Potter and superhero movies circulating on the information superhighway. Youth who in the summer of 2020 poured into the streets against racist police terror now use the same infographics to popularize protests for atomic fire.
Berardi writes that “The bio-info machine is no longer separate from body or mind, because it’s no longer an external tool, but an internal transformer of body and mind, a linguistic and cognitive enhancer. Now the nanomachine is mutating the human brain and the linguistic ability to communicate. The machine is us.” The digital, a terrain which has been captured by capital, has become an extension of the self. Or, as expressed in the 1983 body horror film Videodrome, “The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye.”
The battlefield of the war between classes has been rendered omnipotent. We are living in the time of generalized social war.
War is a moment of contestation over the future. Until the dust has settled in such an arena, “the future” cannot come into being. The profound sense of “the slow cancellation of the future” is demonstrative of this fact. The future as anything other than the passage of time has faded into obscure dormance. There are no frontiers, no unknown spaces to explore—both because of the spatial colonization of the planet and the commodification of cognition and perception by the commodified infomachine. Expanding beyond this state of affairs requires moving beyond this planet or beyond this mode of perception and production. Neither are possible in the fog of the third world war, the haze called capitalist realism.
To pierce the veil, to open the road to the future, to bring victory to our class in this war, it is necessary to convert unwitting conscripts to willing combatants. In other words, there is a need for revolutionary intervention on the terrain of ideology and information, on the level of superstructure.
Superstructure is the whole host of outgrowths from the base of material forces and relations of production. It constitutes the totality of culture and ideology, every facet of understanding and expression. Antonio Gramsci, a historic leader of the Italian Communist Party, wrote extensively on superstructural questions, first and foremost cultural hegemony. Cultural hegemony is the “spontaneous acceptance of the moral and cultural values, as well as the general world outlook and its influence on various practical activities, of the ruling class by the majority of the people and of the subordinate classes.” Gramsci’s work was, in essence, to explore in greater depth the Marxist understanding that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” and that “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” The question of hegemony is of evermore importance when the means of its diffusion are to a greater degree than any previous epoch a deciding element of lived existence.
The principal method of intervention is political intervention. By extension and in tandem with political intervention is aesthetic-cultural intervention.
On Aesthetic Intervention
Human kind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art. —Walter Benjamin
To intervene aesthetically is to intervene politically.
Aesthetics, the realm of human creation and sense-perception, is molded by social relations. Paraphrasing Marx, it is the conditions of human existence which determine consciousness, and not the other way around. Or, in Benjamin’s words, “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by nature but by history.” Benjamin’s vital effort in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility to chart such transformations are the bedrock on which the present work rests.
To Bolshevik, Left Oppositionist, and literary theorist Aleksandr Voronsky, the work of art is “the cognition of life.” Voronsky posits that “Science cognizes life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensuous contemplation.” And, “Since in this instance the true artist cognizes life, the foundation of his work is experience.”
Lived experience in class society entails socialization into its ideological terrain—”The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” wrote Marx in The German Ideology. In the realm of aesthetics, Voronsky notes, “...the artist always colors his works with a corresponding ideology, sometimes consciously or unconsciously distorting the types, portrayals, events, and so on. Then the work becomes tendentious.”
For Voronsky, for Benjamin, and for any revolutionary who takes the problems of human culture seriously, the development of tendentious works is desirable, beneficial, and necessary. Tendentious material is everywhere. In fact, all material is tendentious. From the heights of the old “high art” to the depths of what we know as “pop culture,” all manner of aesthetic works operate in the political-ideological terrain, and contribute to the class struggle on that terrain on the side of one or the other class force. The default side is, of course, that of the ruling class and its ruling ideas. The big-budget superhero in text and subtext is a partisan of empire, venerating the role of the uniquely talented in “neutralizing domestic security threats.” The politics of subtext and the unconscious are a powerful force despite and more precisely because they appear at first glance invisible.
Benjamin was a strident opponent of “hack writers” who allowed the bourgeois publication apparatus to assimilate ostensibly revolutionary or progressive themes. This position’s validity has only intensified with time. In the epoch of “woke brands,” wherein overtures to a vague notion of social justice are so imbued in the commodity fetish that Gillette lays claim to opposing toxic masculinity and Coca-Cola pinkwashes the murder of Colombian peasants, the necessity of revolutionary intervention on the terrain of aesthetics and culture is all the more imperative.
The zone of contact with the diffusion of bourgeois ideology has increased immeasurably in the digital age. The internet’s decentralizing-democratizing power, now subject to the commodity form and the laws of capital accumulation, has been rendered a convenient disguise for atomization, which appears as community and individuality. As gentrification has torn apart the old physical spaces to which once-radical subcultures once clung in their semiconscious quest for an organic counterhegemony, the shell of oppositional culture now graces the contours of the subreddit, and what once connoted confrontation in one sense or another with the capitalist system is rendered a cluster of disparate enthusiasts. In most pockets lies a vague semblance of bygone dissidence, contained within a portal to commodified interaction.
The broad acceptance of “alternative” styles and tendency to form sprawling social cliques shows a hunger for community and an impulse to cast off conventional social mores. Despite its limitations and subjection to accumulation, social media plays a significant role in contemporary political organizing, from the Arab Spring to the Summer of 2020 to the campaign to unionize Starbucks.
The task at hand, like with the aforementioned examples, is to move from broad sentiments to concrete action, from gestures of vanished spaces to a vibrant atmosphere surrounding the class struggle.
The purpose of an aesthetic intervention of whatever medium is to “turn the symphony into a political meeting,” to use recognizable forms to convey messages overt or subtle that may be hard to grasp, or to present such messages in a new way. More than that, there is a tactility to the aesthetic work in the relationship one has to its experience and interpretation that is absent from the direct slogan or statement of program. When the experience and interpretation of aesthetic works takes a further step and assumes an educational and organizing function, imbues itself with a participatory character, it then becomes an organ of action.
Benjamin saw the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht as an exemplar of an artistic apparatus capable of transforming spectators into collaborators. From this I take my impulse for a new method of directing aesthetic-political interventions: that of the Theatrical Party.
The Theatrical Party
Political action is a form and method of performance.
For the vast majority of political actors, this fact is unknown or unacknowledged. The figure of the Activist is dependent on the belief that his 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, the beautiful, the utopic Jerusalem.
Such dissonant belief, the total fusion of the political actor and his role, is cause for neurosis and propulsion. It propels because the ideology of optimism fuels the motion of the act. It is neurotic because the impotent perpetuity of the performance without end is cause for frustration at defeat, depression at one’s perceived ineptitude in the absence of victory, and the phenomenon of “burnout” as a muted expression of disillusionment. It is precisely the certainty of the Activist in the inevitability of triumph which precludes its emergence. The dynamism of newfound hope erodes with the pavement underfoot the street demonstration, and with it the energy of transformation.
To recognize oneself as a political Actor is the precondition for shedding the Activist archetype and assuming the function of a revolutionary. The recognition of political action as a form and method of performance opens the way to its effective application. These recognitions in tandem reveal a new organ of intervention: the Theatrical Party.
Political action is a form of performance in that it is a recognizable mode. One easily registers the picket, the petition, the protest. Political speech is understood as such. The routines of this work—study groups, debates, educationals, paper sales, and local meetings shape a common body, a living act.
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 line or program, shapes the scope and contents of the performance. The audience, construction, content, and staging of the performance are dependent on political orientation, class composition, and strategy. A revolutionary political actor, as this text aims to cultivate, operates differently than the figures of the Activist, the Crusader, and the Politician. A revolutionary political actor is a cadre, a Communist. A Communist is rooted in and oriented to the proletariat and the wider mass of the oppressed. A Communist aims to destroy the existing system of property and power and ultimately property and power themselves. Communists thus differ strategically from those on the opposite side of the barricades. For political actors in the ranks of the bourgeoisie, for Politicians, a sensible performance may be a conference of fellow actors addressed to their constituency wherein fanciful plates are served to gentlemen whose funds are raised in the name of the subjugation of the event’s wait staff. A political actor from the ranks of the proletariat, a Communist, may wish to put on the performance of a strike by the wait staff to shut down such a dismal affair.
Political action is a performance in that it presents a work of art to an audience. The proposition of political activity as an art work may seem inaccurate, especially from the referential frame of maneuvering Politicians and naive Activists animated by cynicism, self-delusion, or both. These exhibitions ring hollow because their content generally lacks a compelling element in program or participation and thus their character as the routine mounting of static objects becomes apparent. This does not diminish their performative character—rather, it is supporting evidence. Walter Benjamin, in a footnote to The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, observed that with the advent of film, photography, and sound recording, “priority is given to presenting the politician before the recording equipment” as it expanded the public addressed from an immediate gathering, such as a parliament, to the “general public,” a potentially unlimited number of persons. This generates “a new form of selection—selection before an apparatus—from which the champion, the star, and the dictator emerge as victors.” Hence, a comedian holds the office of the Ukrainian Presidency he once imitated before the camera, and now before the camera he exhorts the world’s talking heads to the idyllic war-performance of Marinetti, an atomic crescendo, and he is cheered on social media for doing so, becoming venerated as a democratic superhero. Only the fever-pitch of events has elevated such an exceptional circumstance—in every televised debate the audience calls bullshit on the performance and many more simply don’t bother with the spectacle, and in every choreographed protest-pleading the participants stand dormant in their collective prostration before power.
If this is the state of affairs, what demarcates the political action of revolutionaries? How do Communists proceed in our performance? Why bother? Surely the drudgery of sect work isn’t made bearable upon learning its nature as role-playing.
The dread pervading the performance of political tasks can be conceived as a product of the overemphasis on the subjective element of leadership. In the struggle for social transformation, leadership (or lack thereof, or misleadership…) is paramount. But the ideology of formal optimism can spur substitution of the “revolutionary” organization for the revolutionary class, identification of the success or failure of the work of such organizations with one’s own person, and all manner of deficiencies and disorders. In recognition of the performativity of political action the Theatrical Party thus embraces the “organization of pessimism” in contrast to the false optimism of the left. It is on this basis that the cohering of a revolutionary leadership may occur.
The pessimism of revolutionaries is not a propensity to surrender. The pessimism of revolutionaries is a commitment to carry out the struggle to its completion, be that in victory or defeat. The revolutionary pessimist is not animated by a belief in divine salvation but by unyielding class hatred against the bourgeoisie, by feverish contempt for exploitation and oppression: revolutionary pessimism is a commitment to destroy what destroys you, to fight to the bitter end.
To be a revolutionary pessimist is to separate the actor from his 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 invitation of criticism is an invitation to the dispelling of illusion. In rejecting the certainty of triumph the revolutionary pessimist removes the oppressive expectation to, like Atlas, hold up the heavens. One can hardly hold up oneself, let alone the proletarian revolution, with such a weight on one’s shoulders. The attempt to assume an archetypal role, to imbue the world-historic task upon an individual (in the case of optimist sects, a collection of persons all believe themselves to be central leaders-in-waiting), is to self-inflict tunnel vision. At every step, political clarity must be followed by personal clarity.
Anyone who is honest with themselves and with the class will disabuse themselves of senseless grandeur.
The purpose of a revolutionary organization is to become the combat party of the proletariat. This means actually talking to proletarians, and working to bring them into such a formation. In other words, the struggle is to turn spectators into collaborators. It is one thing to have a protest in Union Square calling for workers action against the shipment of war materiel and another entirely to fight within the unions to make that program a reality. Both are integral, but it would be remiss to lack a sense of scope.
The revolutionary pessimist does not allow false certainty to get in the way of their task. In maintaining the atmosphere of optimism and losing themselves in their role, the “revolutionary” Activist resorts to broad platitudes to gain an immediate response from those they talk to. Anyone can agree that an exit from this state of affairs is desirable. It’s something else to ask why and how to get there. The aim of the Theatrical Party is, in the issuance of demands and the elaboration of program, to generate real engagement from its audience.
The Theatrical Party is not only an organization of revolutionary pessimism but of revolutionary irrealism. Communists stand opposed to this world, all that it represents, and every day of life within it. It is this seething hatred which fuels the iron battalions of the proletariat. So long as this is not matched at every step by a flourishing of the radical imagination, however, such fuel will remain leaded and the militants of the revolutionary organization will grow sick from the fumes. Some may degenerate into Activists, some may cross the class line and grow into Politicians and Crusaders, others may simply grow weary and turn to desertion. “Burnout,” while a hallmark of Activists and the left, can infect even those who disabuse themselves of self-importance if the work they embark on is rendered futile and if the generative element of the struggle is neglected.
The irrealism of revolutionaries is a concrete commitment to re-enchanting the world. It is a total rejection of the regime of alienated labor, of Moloch-Capital’s iron laws and algorithms. To be a revolutionary irrealist is to commit oneself to the flourishing of the human spirit, to the conquest of dreams alongside the conquest of freedom. The task of the revolutionary irrealist is to reverse the slow cancellation of the future. The Theatrical Party commences its own mode of creative destruction: the New Myth must live for Moloch-Capital to die.
The merger of revolutionary pessimism and irrealism is the essence of the Theatrical Party. It is in this context that awareness of the performativity of 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 there the red banner is raised in the generalized social war and the proletariat enters the fray. The work of the Theatrical Party is the construction of performances.
The most grand example of a performance is confrontation. Class struggle is a theater of war, and war is theater. The aesthetic relishing the Italian Futurists found in destruction and violence did not emerge solely as an abyssal creature of reaction—there is a dark and tantalizing beauty in the firing of artillery, the roaring of flames, and the spilling of blood.
The Theatrical Party does not aim to arbitrarily invent such a sanguine scene, as the ill-fated urban guerrillas of the 20th century perished attempting. Its performances before and within the class tend to be reproductive, it is the work of preparing 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.
Performances are distinct from (but related to) situations in that they are not only “momentary ambiances” one lives through but operations, deliberate and organized actions which impose themselves on space and time, a deployment of force. It is these generations of new experience that enrich the imaginative, and thus political, capacity of the revolutionary class. Incidentally, the constellation of dreams takes its cues from waking life.
Further, the performances of the Theatrical Party are aberrations, departures from the normal and expected. The Theatrical Party is thus an entity of the radical weird, a regiment for self-instrumentalized otherness, for active disruption of the order of things. So long as the diktat is capitalist realism, revolutionary irrealism is the weapon of the Theatrical Party. If there is not currently a future, it will bear the light of struggle along the road to create one. The greatest illustrator of the radical weird is everyday life in the ranks of the working class.
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 death of the old and first awkward advances of the new.
To lose oneself in the moment of preparation, in the movements of rehearsal, is to lose sight of the aim: the social revolution. Every minute action must be placed in a sense of scope, and that sense of scope must be apparent at every step to the revolutionary class and all the oppressed. The intoxicating ferment of revolt can only be cultivated with sober senses.
The protest marshals chant “the people, united, will never be defeated” at each May Day demonstration even as the police drive them out of the streets, and even as they know the line they recite is the line of defeat, of the Popular Front of Allende whose fate was sealed in blood. The self-awareness of this act is regrettably incidental but nonetheless instructive. Is it self-parody if the Activists aren’t self-aware?
The militant of the Theatrical Party, the Communist, is in the minority and will likely remain there for a long time. Lenin once wrote,
We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighboring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation.
If our minority advances along the path of struggle and grows in its procession, it may well cease to be a minority.
Hack Leninists and Hack Writers
Leninism is not dead.
The whole host of pretenders to its program, who drench the historical memory of October in opportunist and sectarian bleach, stand as a corpse whose stench rivals the putrefaction of world capitalism. But Leninism, the conviction of the necessity of a combat party which fights for the emancipation of all the oppressed, the conquest of freedom with the proletariat at its head, for the world socialist revolution, remains radiant.
Its traces can be found in the arson of the Minneapolis 3rd Precinct, in every picket line, on every barricade in the battle against Moloch-Capital. The supposed “death of Leninism” is in reality a vindication of Trotsky’s statement in the Transitional Program that the historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership. All manner of defeats lay at the hands of the falsifiers of the revolutionary program, whose misleadership renders their supposed politics mere aesthetic gestures, a champagne socialism whose beverage of choice is now hard seltzer and all manner of alien class ideas and reformist illusions.
Lenin implored the reader of State and Revolution not to laugh at the statement that all the social-chauvinists now called themselves “Marxists.” In our period, all the “Marxists” are now social-chauvinists dyed blue and yellow. The hue and cry over “poor little Ukraine,” the Banderite frenzy of the Maidan government given a Marvel movie makeover by the information warfare apparatus, has allowed a self-indictment of the social-democratic masquerade. In the name of Lenin and Trotsky these stooges call for imperialism to “save” the Ukrainian and Russian workers with Stinger missiles and F-16s, as they did over Syria, Libya, and Yugoslavia in recent memory.
In their muscle memory of anti-Sovietism which compelled these chibi-Kautskys and knock-off Noskes to cheer the Stalinist abandonment of Afghan women to Reagan’s “holy warriors,” the opportunist left now echoes NATO in demanding the departure of Russian troops, who appear to the social-imperialist swamp as Mongol hordes. This lockstep renders any platitudes towards internationalist solidarity between the victims of Yeltsin-Bush “shock therapy” and counterrevolution (which this same cadre of imposters also cheered) moot, and any call by such charlatans for the Ukrainian and Russian workers to turn the guns around on “their own” capitalist rulers a directive not for the defeat of both sides of this fratricidal nationalist war, but for victory to U.S. imperialism’s Kiev Station.
The Theatrical Party has nothing to do with “the left.” The subordination of the workers’ movement to the political dichotomies of the bourgeois epoch has animated the swamp of class collaboration and unprincipled combinationism. The Theatrical Party refuses to be the tagtail of any bourgeois party or politician and each and every one of its “left” adjutants.
Hack “Leninists,” like hack writers, are in the service of the class enemy. It is the task of the revolutionary irrealist to direct ceaseless aesthetic and polemical fire against these facilitators of the information warfare apparatus’ “[assimilation of] astonishing quantities of revolutionary themes” and “[propagation of] them without calling its own existence, and the existence of the class that owns it, seriously into question.”
An Introduction
The revolution must, from the very start, establish and assure an anarchist ideal of individual freedom for cultural creation. No authority, no constraint, not the slightest trace of influence! On this issue Marxists must march hand in hand with anarchists.
—Leon Trotsky
The conclusion is to begin.
The present work is not a clearly delineated program, nor a body of research. It is simply an attempt to channel intent into action.
The bestial totality of the capitalist system easily appears disarming. How can one begin to combat an immense and all-consuming entity, let alone one composed of a vast array of scarcely-visible laws and forces?
It is the hope of the author that the grasping of this immensity, of the scale of class conflict, of the wide expanse of the field of battle, and of the impossibility of escaping the reach of the enemy or ignoring its presence serves as an impetus to act.
This hope is concentrated into a medley of theoretical-political-poetic texts, constellated in a way which aims to facilitate the expanding or filling in of the gaps by the reader.
In its illustration of the Theatrical Party this text is aimed at the generation of two, three, many Theatrical Parties whose performances bloom throughout every upsurge in the class struggle, and whose blooming coalesces into a grand Theatrical Party capable of convoking the final, perpetual performance of the New Myth. On its banner is inscribed: For an unyielding offensive of performances! The emancipation of the imagination for the revolution; the revolution for the emancipation of the imagination! Death to Moloch-Capital, long live the Radical Weird!
Citations
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” in Collected Poems: 1947-1997, HarperCollins, 2006, 139.
“The essence of money is…the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself.” Marx, Comments on James Mill, 1844, in Ian Wright, “Capital as a Real God,” Dark Marxism, September 13, 2020, https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/.
Richard Cavendish, The Black Arts, TarcherPerigree, 2017, 1.
Here I am constellating a weird array of influences from The Housing Question by Engels, Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, and State and Revolution by Lenin.
Biblical citations in this text utilize the DRV.
Michel Beajour, “André Breton mythographe. Arcane 17,” in Marc Eigeldinger, André Breton (Neuchatel: La Baconiere, 1970) in Michael Löwy, Morning Star (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009), 16.
“Again it must be emphasized that Marx's aim is not limited to the emancipation of the working class, but the emancipation of the human being through the restitution of the unalienated and hence free activity of all men, and a society in which man, and not the production of things, is the aim, in which man ceases to be ‘a crippled monstrosity, and becomes a fully developed human being.’” Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1966, 50.
The visibility of brush strokes on a physical painting is part of their being as a distinct art object, something which fades into the illusion. With the digital image, even software which renders such motions visible cannot escape the character of the digital image as a representation, as an original-sans-original. This is not to say digital art works are wholly free from the aura. The passage of time, for example, gives the “old internet” an auratic character through temporal distance.
The ease with which one can edit a digital work renders an intangible representation infinitely tangible. The capacity of digital works to facilitate individual and group participation is a phenomenal advance. Video games stand as a striking example of the capacity for digital works to cultivate “absent-minded examiners” as per Benjamin, and to give way to the politicization of aesthetics in ways previously impossible. It would be wrong of anybody to write off in toto digital art because of its unfortunate imprisonment by capital, and such persons should be cast aside like those who rejected photography and film upon their emergence.
Again, video games stand as sites with the greatest concentration of exceptions. In particular Disco Elysium stands as an example of a digital work which evades both the aura and the erosion of storytelling. Analyzing Disco through the lens of Benjamin would be an enjoyable endeavor, and at this time one I will leave to others.
After the Future, AK Press, 2011, 36.
Culture is Our Business, Ballantine Books, 1970, 66.
For context, refer to preface.
Berardi, 23.
Neil Eriksen, “Popular Culture and Revolutionary Theory: Understanding Punk Rock,”
Theoretical Review no. 18, September-October 1980. Accessed via
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-6/punk.htm.
“The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” in Selected Writings Volume 3: 1935-1938, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University Press, 2002, 122.
Ibid., 104.
“Art as the Cognition of Life” in Art as the Cognition of Life: Selected Writings 1911-1936, Mehring Books, 1998, 98.
Ibid., 100.
Ibid., 101.
Referring to the William Blake poem sung as a hymn at conferences of the British Labour Party.
The figure of the reactionary, who seeks not just the defense of the present state of things but for a return by force to a mythologized past.
Someone who has ceased to even pretend at changing the world, the stalwarts of bourgeois politics.
Benjamin., 128.
Ibid.
Trotsky referred to strike pickets as the “nuclei of the proletarian army.”
“What is to be Done?” in Essential Works of Lenin, Dover Publications, 1987, 57.
Referring to the call by wide sections of the international left for the Soviet armed forces to cease their campaign of military assistance to the nationalist government led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which aimed at modest social reforms.
See “How the Soviet Workers State was Strangled,” Mundial Publications, 2011.
Of course, the call for defeat on both sides in the war as it stands is a correct one. What I am describing here is the attempt by the opportunist left to conceal war fever in the cloak of internationalism.
André Breton and Leon Trotsky, “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art,” in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, edited and introduced by Franklin Rosemont (New York: Monad, 1978) in Michael Löwy, Morning Star (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009), 25.