As AI slop is weaponized into fascist aesthetics, as the ghosts of Stalin and Kautsky are resurrected on the left, as absurdities mount, has the mainstream prohibition on radical alternatives morphed into something else? To what degree have elements of capitalist realism — market Stalinism, business ontology, depressive hedonia, reflexive impotence — attenuated, allowing the return of “grand narratives,” however weakened? To what extent do these dynamics continue, including within the left itself? And what does it all mean for the working-class, the Left, and art?

Math and bigotry seem to be the main coping mechanisms of the US capitalist class. Math provides the utopia — through technology and AI — as well as fixes election results, fixes labor, fixes society. At the same time, bigotry is being used as a cudgel, in part, to obscure the shifting algorithms of capital. Altogether this is a response to climate disaster and imperial decline, creating concentric racist circles of automated fortress.

As the US empire declines, avenues for middle-class advancement, historically tied to racism and imperialism, have declined. Running out of its traditional gambling venues, the American middle-class -- and parts of the ruling-class -- bet on Trumpism, racism, and fascism.

As part of a reorganization at Locust, we are seeking art, poetry and fiction, but also non-fiction, essays and reviews for the upcoming issue. Fiction submissions should be less than 3,500 words. Poetry submissions should be less than four pages. Non-fiction submissions should be less than 5,000 words for essays and less than 2,500 words for reviews. Images should be submitted in jpg format at 300 dpi, and at least eight inches in one dimension, and be accompanied by the title, date, and materials used in creating the work.

The formation of the proletariat by capital’s historic crimes — and the ongoing recomposition of the class by imperialism, racism, heterosexism, and immiseration — is not unlike the creation of Frankenstein’s monster. The working-class, as a whole, is a disordered and chaotic body. Labor was (and is)  formed through the theft of forests, farms, continents, and people. It was (and is)  formed in the creation and displacement of entire industries, gender norms and the shifts in social reproduction, the invention of “races” and “nations.” The targets of capital’s crimes were (and continually are) fused together and torn apart in their relation to capital. Labor does not become a class “for itself” by pretending otherwise. It must study the journals of the “men who made it.” But the class becomes conscious when each disordered element of the class defends every other disordered element. 

I fell in love with Anupam’s work because it isn’t “what it is,” it's something more.  Anupam’s work is like slip healing fragments of broken clay.

Because Ed Sheeran doesn’t exist. Not really. He may have at one point, but the avatar that cried onstage in Philadelphia and wants you to cry for him isn’t, in the end, a human with their own wants and needs, separate from the system he’s spent so much effort ingratiating himself to. Make enough decisions that fail to mark where you stand in relation to history, and you eventually vanish completely. Incapable of love, of fairness, of courage or even a modicum of individuality. Just another piece of flotsam aimlessly drifting through the tepid flow of capital. 

We have held up both utopia and dystopia as symbols of alterity, to express this, often keeping them at not such a great distance from each other. The Communist Manifesto, for example, is utopian or dystopian depending on how you understand the dialectic of things such as abolition of private property. In a world ruled by the maxim ‘There is No Alternative,’ the first attraction of dystopia is it shows there quite obviously is….

The twin determinist-fatalisms of Social Democracy and Stalinism, and consequently the crisis and collapse of these two trends and the mass parties they led, have relegated discourse over the shape of the future to the halls of economic abstraction — to a grand numbers game a dedicated cadre of critics and political economists conduct in perpetuity. The wider movement, meanwhile, either cheerleads all perceived sites of resistance to the main imperialist power, or limits the political horizon to immediate economic and democratic demands, with socialism relegated to a gesture of intent. 

Our forebears said evil is banal, but still we were unprepared for the crushing weight of the everyday as it unfolds parallel to the shifting tectonic plates of history pursuing the darkest timeline. Politicians gather (like generals… in their masses) and pull levers that threaten to shift ethical poles and move continental thought patterns, leaving collateral damage in all four corners. A future army is set on the march. It might be made up of drones. It will be comprised of killers... Back home your son wants a particular dish, cooked in some specific way. The drains are blocked, in some anomalous way. The algorithms of war pump more data. The real estate magnate botches another sales pitch. It doesn’t matter — he’s not selling anyhow. He’s stealing. Meanwhile, you’ve got a lesson to teach, a bill to pay, a podcast to record, a meme to post, a pizza to cook… all as global techno fascism comes rolling in.

Digital technology appears as naturally artificial when it is actually shaped by political economy and intensive ideological encoding. It appears as a phantasmagorical being — a neutral cloud of invention floating above everyday life.1 In actuality it is a product of social life, including its privations, exploitations, and oppressions — and it reinforces or undermines those aspects of life, usually for financial and political reasons.

The socialist politics of art is, in part, centering both the rational and ineffable aspects of being on the actuality of a living revolutionary subject; the working-class both as it is, and as it could be. This includes the aspects of life that resist categorization, mapping, utility and rationality. Accepting this is not a concession to superstition. It is placing a working-class claim on all that it is to be human. 

Few serious people would consider Greg Abbott, the current governor of Texas, to be excessively subtle or nuanced. But even by the crude standards of right-wing politics in the Lone Star State, Abbott turned some heads when he announced on October 19th, in a post on Elon Musk's "X," that college and university professors can and should be fired for mere "ideological differences" with him and his de facto fascist outlook.  Right-wing politicians usually talk about such things in a slightly more guarded way, deploying euphemisms and dog whistles. 

I contend that Manos, while complaining about the lack of politics in Turl’s work, has written a very apolitical review, predicated upon an intellectual campism rooted in what China Miéville calls “folk Marxism,” received beliefs, rather than dialectical reason. Manos’s view of the politics of art seems entirely functionalist.