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 multiverse trope in contemporary culture is overdetermined. It is ideological. It flows with the fragmented totality of an attenuating neoliberalism. It is also a result of the economy of digital media. On streaming services, the multiverse tropes of Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, and other intellectual property franchises reflect the expansion of an attention economy. Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm and Star Wars for more than four billion dollars requires the maximization of content production to realize future profits. A steady output of content must be produced to capture attention. In this way, the multiverse trope is also phenomenological. Digital media, along with the chaos of gig economics and neoliberal precarity, create a sense of “everything everywhere all at once.”
How do you dismantle a conspiracy theory? Through simple logic? A counter delirium? How do you disrupt — or gesture to disrupt — bland technophilia? Do you point out how the dystopian dreams of the tech billionaires will fail? Or, that they will work all too well? For the well-heeled, does the uncertain future overwhelm the comforts of the present? For the rest of us, does precarity overwhelm efforts to salvage the future?
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.
There are, culturally and in actuality, their “monsters” and our “monsters.” Our rulers describe whole sections of the working-class and subaltern in terms borrowed from various folk and other horrors. They demonize people by race and caste. They stoke fears of crime, exaggerated and irrational, even as they drive the entire world toward war and climate disaster. As they steal the wealth created by our labor. As they loot entire nations.
The following editorial was published in Locust Review #9 and written in late fall (2022): There is a prevailing sense of being under siege. It is felt in our bones. It turns our stomachs inside-out. It chokes our arteries with anxiety.
Please send submissions — artwork, poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, short essays, and so on — to locust.review@gmail.com by October 31st.
Dear comrades-descendants, the labourers of the 20th century are writing to you. Tell your children and grandchildren how we struggled for your right to immortality. We lived in heroic times when great discoveries were made, when the world was shaken by revolutions and wars burned the planet. […] You have probably already eliminated all harmful bacteria and viruses and live without ageing or sickness. But it was us who helped you in this, when we discovered the mysteries of cancer and overcame the barrier of tissue incompatibility.
Early in US history, graveyards were chaotic tumbles in the middle of cities. In the late 19th century, however, there was a suburbanization of death. Large new cemeteries were built in the farmlands and woods outside town. The ramshackle graves in the cities were sometimes a health hazard but also a site of ideological discomfort for the bourgeoisie. In Chicago, the silty earth near Lake Michigan would sometimes belch up a buried corpse. Wealthy cosmopolitans increasingly envisioned grassy fields with trees housing family mausoleums like estate mansions. Such stately accommodations were out of the reach for workers. For the poor there was a potter’s field.
We can still dream… for now. Throughout all of the darkness, we have managed to hope for something better. And behind that hope, there is always that word. Less a word than an idea, a longing, whose open description has come to be scoffed at in adult conversation. Utopia.
The discounted gift subscription rate will be available through January 15, 2022. In addition to the standard subscription packages, all gift subscriptions will include an additional copy of Locust #6 and Imago #1.
WHAT IF we become cyborgs right before the world ends, and because we are cyborgs we can no longer fear the apocalypse? Does the glowing sky on fire become, in our minds, an Instagram filter?
The Locust Arts & Letters Collective will be presenting a panel at Historical Materialism Online 2021, the replacement for HM’s conference that normally takes place in London in early November.
“Are you employed sir?”
“Employed?”
“You don’t go out looking for a job dressed like that? On a weekday?”
“Is this a… what day is this?”
-- exchange between Jeffrey Lebowski and the Dude
When more and more disasters are reached — in the form of personal catastrophe, a continent on fire, a city underwater, a state without water and electricity, a plague uncontrolled, a planet on the verge of ecological catastrophe — capitalist realism can only shrug (and hone new forms of disaster capitalism).
So send us what you have – your art, your poetry, your fiction, your odd ephemera – and remember that we only ask it be weird, strange, experimental, and that it cling to the dreams of liberation and the hopes of radical transformation.
How strange does sunlight seem to us now? Or seeing someone we haven’t seen in a year? Perhaps… even shaking hands with them? What is the odd-but-familiar sensation we call touch? And what does it mean on this dying rock? What does it mean for our hope and despair to be simultaneously so attenuated?
“I wanted to greet you, welcome you, embrace you, but ‘Normal’ kept getting in the way. I wish you, the Old King, the New King, and the Old King’s soldiers, good luck.”
Submissions are now open. As always, we want your words and images, your prose and poetry, your “this doesn’t quite fit in a normal world, in more than one way.” It needs a place. We have always sought to give it a place. We reckon, as the world spasms and unravels in so many unpredictable directions, it will continue to need a place.
Join us on Thursday, November 12 (18:30 GMT, 1:30pm EST, 12:30pm CST, 10:30am PST) for a Locust Review panel discussion at this year’s (virtual) Historical Materialism conference. Our panel, focusing on “Irrealism as Socialist Cultural Strategy” will feature Locust editorial collective members Alexander Billet on “The Case for Critical Irrealism,” Holly Lewis on “How Collective Dreams Can End the Sleep of Reason,” Adam Turl on “Their Weird and Ours: Socialist Irrealism vs. Fascist Occultism,” and Anupam Roy on “Representational Impossibility: A Propagandist’s Urgencies and Crisis.” More information follows below.
Attention humans. We at Locust Review are pleased to announce SWARMCAST, a monthly podcast on the weird, the political, and where they intersect in fiction, art, poetry and creativity. Hosted by LR editors Tish Markley, Adam Turl and Alexander Billet, SWARMCAST will feature discussions of the radical weird, history and current events, interviews with artists, writers, and musicians, readings of poetry and fiction from contributors to LR, and even the occasional comedy performance.
We found the corpse of Capitalist Realism. Rona-riddled, the initials “ACAB” carved in its forehead. It was discovered in the burnt shell of a Minneapolis police station. On discovery it opened its eyes and stood up and told us to go back to work. We refused. It reached for us, moaning a voracious hunger of unholy sadism, unquenchable violence, an unknowable cosmic horror, stinking of gout and fresh teargas.
“BE REALISTIC” we are told. The weather is rejecting us, fascism has resurrected itself, pogroms rage, new pandemics knock on our doors, and yet, “be realistic.”
“Be realistic.” The favorite refrain of those who, in their blindness to history, allow history to be changed in ways they cannot understand. “Be realistic.” The slogan of those who love their power and privilege while denying they have any of it. “Be realistic.” The bootlicker’s mantra, chanted when the independent thoughts they have repressed begin to surface.
Now here we are. A global pandemic. We are stuck at home, that voice asking “what about the rent?” or “what happens if you lose your job?” or can’t get unemployment getting louder and louder. Or we are saddled with that ignominious label of “essential worker,” unprotected, likely underpaid, always exhausted, always at risk.
Locust Review #2 is finally in the mail. We’re sorry that we were so delayed mailing out the issue. Of course this four-week delay was largely due to the pandemic and its related social crises and catastrophes, struggles and horrors.
You cannot stop us. We are legion. We are Locust. Our second issue will be coming back from the printers soon, and it contains a new passel of the bizarre and bombastic, the cosmically communist. You know you want to read. You know you want to subscribe. A copy of Locust Review issue two will give you art from Adam Ray Adkins, Leslie Lea, Anupam Roy, James Walsh, Sambaran Das, John McVay, plus a continuation of Tish Markley and Adam Turl’s Born Again Labor Museum. There will be poetry and fiction from Alexander Billet, Tish Markley, Adam Marks, Frank Fucile, Lane Powell, Mike Linaweaver, Adam Turl, Evan Edwards and many others.
You’re an artist, poet, author, playwright, an unearthly creator of the fantastic and terrifying. You’ve decided to destroy capitalism. Only social movements and struggle, from below, of the exploited and oppressed, can overthrow capitalism. Nevertheless, art is a human necessity, and an arena for the contestation of the imaginary. To that end, Locust Review, a quarterly socialist publication of critical irrealist art and literature, needs you.
TEN YEARS ago, as the Great Recession ripped through people’s lives, the left-wing cultural critic Mark Fisher penned his book Capitalist Realism. The book diagnosed a cultural logic of late-late-capitalism in which the Thatcherite idea of “There Is No Alternative” had been diffused through every politico-economic institution, every cultural manifestation, how we regard work and education, consumption and self-expression.
Two editors from Locust Review, Alexander Billet and Adam Turl, will be speaking on art related topics in London at the annual Historical Materialism (HM) conference (November 7 - 10, 2019), sponsored by the Historical Materialism journal and book series. Turl has organized a panel with fellow artists Anupam Roy and David Mabb (more information below). Other LR editors will also be speaking on matters not directly related to art and aesthetics (but still awesome) and attending the conference as well. Holly Lewis will be speaking on two panels, presenting on “Queer Liberation and Marx’s Ecology” and acting as a discussant for the book launch of Ashley Bohrer’s Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism (2019). In addition, Adam Turl’s fellow editor at Red Wedge Magazine, Jordy Cummings, will be presenting on “Bruno Bauer, Class Reductionist: A Strategic reading of On the Jewish Question in 2019.” The theme of this year’s HM is “Claps of Thunder: Disaster Communism, Extinction Capitalism, and How to Survive Tomorrow.” See below for more information on the art and aesthetics presentations (basically we copied and pasted the “abstracts.”) The exact schedule for the conference is forthcoming.
We offer six different levels of subscription via our Patreon. With multiple subscription rates, as affordable as $1 or $3 a month, you can get every irrealism packed issue of Locust Review delivered straight to your door through the anachronistic marvel of universal postal service. Our subscription model aims to be very affordable as well as emphasize the importance of the material object/journal in light of the corporate enclosures of the Internet. Therefore, all contributors get two dozen copies of each issue to distribute; and we encourage our readers to order multiple copies as well.