Marcel Mariën, Theory of Immediate World Revolution: A Handbook for the Avant-Garde – ed. Anna O’Meara, trans. Nadège Lejeune, Anna O’Meara and Ian Thompson, Verso, September 2026

The Afterword to the German edition from 1989 is on the Verso site.

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.