This is a call for submissions for Locust Review #9: “Wars Beneath: Atomization, Alienation + Excavating Futures in an Age of Conflict.” Locust Review is a quarterly socialist and irrealist journal of art, literature, and culture. It is becoming increasingly clear to us, as artists and workers, that everyday life is becoming intolerable.
On the one hand we have actual war (again). Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and accelerating imperialist competition between the US, Russia and China.
But there is also a “positive” feedback loop of conflict in daily life. There are 4.2 million people on the “Public Freakouts” Reddit, sharing hundreds of videos of people losing their shit in public. Mental health problems and suicides are on the rise. Incidents of road rage are increasing. There is a slight increase in crime; a fact that is being exaggerated by the right-wing for reactionary ends.
Politics is polarized between a seemingly ineffectual liberalism and an increasingly fascist Republican Party. Reproductive rights and queer liberation are threatened or rolled back across the United States and United Kingdom. The celebrated online deplatforming of the right has concealed the algorithmic marginalization of the left. The fascist threat is growing.
Stochastic terrorism has become constant. Official politics seems to shrug off the deaths of moviegoers and children, just as society shrugs off the hundreds of people who still die everyday from COVID 19.
Inflation gave most US workers a nine percent pay cut over the past year. But the amount of work we are required to do mounts in constant “speed-ups” fueling organizing drives in retail, Amazon, and Starbucks, as well as the aborted railroad strike.
There is a prevailing sense of being under siege.
Mark Fisher used Jacques Derrida’s concept of “hauntology” to describe the potential reclamation and persistence of “lost futures” of socialism and communism. For Derrida it was a word game of sorts. In his concept of “deconstruction,” every concept created its opposite. A triumphant capitalism, when it declared that Marx was “dead,” accidentally created an “undead” Marxism. For Fisher it was about imagining against capitalist realism. It is becoming clearer that being under siege compels us to resurrect the ghosts of the 20th century, good and bad. The hauntological has a material basis..
It is this dialectic that we are focusing on with Locust Review #9: How the conflicts of daily life lead us to “excavate new futures” against a capitalism that seems to be fine with erasing the future altogether.
Please send submissions — artwork, poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, short essays, and so on — to locust.review@gmail.com by October 31st.
Sincerely,
LALC
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