Our guest this month is Alex McIntyre from the Irrealist Combat League, Revolutionary Education Distro, and formerly the Cooper Point Journal. We discuss the idea of politics as theater, the irrealist rejection of the world as-is, Leninist fan-fiction, theatrical action (in a Brechtian sense) vs. a capitalist digital gesamtkunstwerk, sectariana, “paper sales,” reactionary vs. revolutionary suicide, the unity of popular front opportunism and third period ultraleftism, the organization of pessimism vs. cultic optimism, weird socialism, not being a humorless leftist, Dadaism, the disruption of order, and more.
Music in this episode: Pet Mosquito’s “I Hate Illinois Nazis” (2021), “Don’t Shoot” (2020) and Omnia Sol’s “Walking Around Money” (2022)
Readings in this episode: Stink Ape Resurrection Primer’s “Ello’s Unheard Plea” by Tish Turl and Adam Turl, and Mike Linaweaver’s “Long Hours Away from Home,” both in Locust Review 8 (Summer 2022).
Check out Pet Mosquito’s bandcamp and Instagram, and Omnia Sol’s bandcamp and Instagram. And subscribe to Locust Review.
Other texts and works discussed in this episode: Isaac Babel, Red Calvary (1926); Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character” (1931); Bertolt Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theater” (1950); Alexander Billet and Adam Turl, “Critical Irrealist Reading List,” Imago #1 (2021); Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog (1925); Jodi Dean, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (2019); Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (2009); Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009); Fyodor Gladkov, Cement (1925), Irrealist Combat League, “Theses on the Theatrical Party,” forthcoming in Imago #2 (2022); Irrealist Combat League, “Towards the Theatrical Party,” forthcoming in Imago #2 (2022); Vladimir Lenin, “Where to Begin?,” Iskra No. 4 (1901); Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848); Alex McIntyre, “Irrealism, Imagination, Intervention: The Locust Review in Their Words and Mine,” Cooper Point Journal (March 2022); Alex McIntrye, “The Theatrical Party: Aesthetic Intervention in the Epoch of Communicative Omnipotence” (paper, 2022); Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (1973); Leon Trotsky, Results and Prospects (1906); Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program (1938); Adam Turl, “The Art Space as Epic Theater,” Red Wedge Magazine (2015); Adam Turl, “Commune vs. (Cathedral vs. Bazaar),” forthcoming in Imago #2 (2022); Tish Turl and Adam Turl, Born Again Labor Museum (BALM) (2019-present); Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (2011).
Locust Radio is hosted by Tish Turl, Laura Fair-Schulz, and Adam Turl. It is produced by Alexander Billet and Omnia Sol. Theme music by Omnia Sol.
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