Fascist Pizza — Locust Review

As the publication of Locust Review 12 was delayed, and do to the urgencies of the moment, we are posting the editorial for the issue early, as we wrap up production and printing of the print issue.

The call is coming from inside the house. You can ignore it, refuse to pick up, even pull the phone out of the wall. None of it will matter. The rings continue, a constant reminder of unspeakable danger.

It’s more than a terrifying reality on the other end of the line. Soon, it will be thick, stomping footsteps coming down the stairs. By then, it will be too late.

There is only one way out. But as your hand reaches for the doorknob, another sound freezes you in your spot. In between the incessant, foreboding rings of the phone… a knock at the door.

Everything in your mind is racing, leaping between fragments of dread outcomes and ingrained fears. And yet, you cannot move, trapped between fight and flight. The knocks, the rings, they jerk your thoughts and eyeballs between the ends of a room that has no safe exit.

You know now that there is no way out except through. At least you will finally be able to face whatever is on the other side of that door. Twisting the knob, the ringing phone and clomping footsteps filing your skull, you step back as the door slowly swings open.

This editorial will appear in the print issue of *Locust Review* 12 (2025).

He is wearing a brightly colored uniform, and carrying a large flat box. His dead eyes stare at you as he offers it to you. “Pizza?”

***

Hannah Arendt famously described the banality of evil after the Holocaust. How the functionaries of genocide were often not so much maniacal Simon Legres but dull enacters of designs beyond them; albeit no less culpable in their sheer normalcy.

American fascism is banal twice over. Nazism, before the “Night of the Long Knives,” had a bohemian wing. Aesthete dust, who once rubbed shoulders in Berlin garrets, were obsessed with the early end of Germany’s rise as an industrial power.

Unlike the black leather Nazi aesthetics that Susan Sontag discussed in her classic essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” American fascism has a plastic shopping mall nostalgia. It is the fascism, not of a young empire thwarted, but an empire in decline. It is, at one level, a photograph of an abandoned Pizza Hut with the caption “This is what they took from us.”

American fascism is (or was) -- like its German, Italian, Spanish and Chilean cousins -- present before its ascension to power.

It was, after all, the liberal Joe Biden administration that cheered on city and campus police as they mowed their way through college encampments protesting the genocide in Gaza. The same administration backed Israel to the hilt. For all the dire warnings about Donald Trump, capitalism’s “human face” was already contorted in a teutonic grimace.

The United States was founded by a genocide against the native population that inspired Nazi ideas of lebensraum. It was founded by slavery and Jim Crow, which inspired South African apartheid. One of the reasons “it can happen here” is that it already did.

Our initial title for this editorial was “The Call Is Coming From Inside the House.” After the election, that didn’t seem to fit. Not because the horror had abated, but because it was no longer skulking round the shadows of our homes. It was sitting in our living room recliner like a beached, racist uncle. The cruelest possibility has become reality.

During World War II, there was a months-long gap between the declaration of war between Germany and France and combat on Germany’s western front. The French bourgeoisie and government did almost nothing to prepare for the Nazi invasion. It did, however, put German dissident expatriates – like the artist Max Ernst – in concentration camps. Historians call it the “phony war.”

We started writing this editorial during our own “phony war.” Only, like many things American, it was underwhelming and lame.

The American liberal bourgeoisie, after months of claiming Trump was a fascist, simply handed over the keys of the empire without a fight. Cartoonist Ted Rall recently drew an image of President Joe Biden sitting in the Oval Office with Adolph Hitler in which Biden says to Hitler, “Unlike you fascists, we promise a smooth transition of power to you fascists.”

Like their French ancestors, most American liberals did nothing to prepare for Trump’s unconstitutional and undemocratic wreckage.

In our initial conception of this editorial, we had wanted to cut against liberal denial that held Trumpism was an aberration or a foreign import subsidized by Russia or China. We wanted to make the point that Trumpism was the outcome of the normally racist and undemocratic workings of neoliberal western democracy -- particularly its even less democratic American variant.

But the point was made for us. The “fascist pizza” was delivered. Like the more disgusting American pizzas -- Papa John’s for example -- it is covered with gastrological antagonisms, overwhelming our ability to metabolize the horror.

Is it fascism? The question is relevant, unavoidable, though not so unavoidable it should distract us from seeing the stakes. Debates about whether Trump’s rise actually is the final ascent of American fascism have definitely preoccupied sections of the left, some so preoccupied that they miss the forest for the trees. Perhaps the question is less “Is it fascism?” and more “How much fascism?”

Richard Seymour, in his recently published book Disaster Nationalism, sees in the new far-right the raw materials of fascism beginning their convergence.

So here we are. Trump signed dozens of executive orders in the first week alone, at least half of which would have been considered illegal or unconstitutional just a few years ago.

The promise of a vast concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay. Unelected billionaires seizing government computers. Multiple communities under attack -- immigrants and queer and trans persons in particular. Neo McCarthyite witch-hunts in the works. The unilateral rollbacks of civil rights. The gutting of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The government is questioning the citizenship of Native Americans. The president is making bellicose threats against Mexico, Greenland, and Canada. Systematic new class immiseration is in the works. The administration is floating the possibility of deporting US citizens to foreign prisons. The idea is raised to classify protected free speech as terrorism. Trump proposed direct US ownership of the Gaza Strip. The blanket pardons and commutations for the January 6th putchists have given a green light to a developing American fascia.

It goes on and on.

The Elon Musk “takeover” of various government agencies and departments seems to be following a playbook from far-right tech billionaire Peter Theil -- inspired by the anti-democracy Dark Enlightenment “philosopher” Curtis Yarvin -- to dispose of the representative state.

As these executive orders and actions are challenged in court, two main possibilities seem likely.

1) The Supreme Court gives Trump’s hostile takeover a seal of approval. This would give a green light to further fascist developments, which will be increasingly dispensed at the molecular level against activists, citizens, workers, oppressed persons, socialists, anarchists, schools, universities, unions, noncompliant lower courts, state and local governments, and anyone else who gets in the way.

2) The Supreme Court rejects aspects of Trump’s actions and Trump defies the court -- which has no actual enforcement mechanism beyond ideology and historic norms. In this event, all the problems of the first scenario are coupled with the erasure of any pretense to the “rule of law” in a liberal democratic sense.

The shock and awe is part of the point. Future historians may describe the first two weeks of Trump’s second term as the beginning of a coup d'etat. We are, possibly, one or two Reichstag fires away from something much worse.

The vast reaction to Trump 2.0 is part of the reason for the delay in Locust Review 12. We kept asking ourselves -- what does it mean for the class, the oppressed, the left, and what does it mean for artists? How have artists historically responded to this kind of overdetermined reactionary logic? We went down rabbit roles researching anti-fascist cultural gestures -- Bertolt Brecht, John Heartfield, Aimé Césaire, Gillo Pontecorvo, Eugene Ionesco…

***

“Fascist Pizza” may seem silly and eye-roll worthy. And utterly inappropriate for the stakes of the era. Maybe. But there is a long history of left-wing and avant-garde arts movements using dark humor and sarcasm to cope with the depravities and tragedies of capitalism. The surrealists in particular.

No less a figure than André Breton compiled an Anthology of Black Humor. It was published in 1940, as Hitler and Benito Mussolini rampaged across Europe, with the world facing its darkest midnight. It is this anthology that is thought to have popularized the term “black humor,” as it pertained to jokes about the darkest and most dismal subject matter. Breton is believed to have coined the term in 1935.

Moreover, as Jean-Paul Sartre noted, there can be no “rational” response to the fascists themselves. One can (and must) make a rational appeal to other social layers, but the fascist and antisemite exist beyond the rational. They must be defeated, not reasoned with.

“Never believe that antisemites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The antisemites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

To gaze at the worst, most violent, most inhuman facets of human life, to laugh at them as they are actively unfolding; is this to trivialize them? It can be. But there is also a virtue in irreverence as an aid in disarming, of stripping emperors of their clothes.

The only thing that can literally disarm a fascist with a gun is an anti-fascist with another gun, but totalitarianism thrives on its aesthetics of invincibility. It has certainly been a facet of Trump and Trumpism’s strategy, particularly after surviving last summer’s assassination attempt.

Same with Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Javier Milei in Argentina, and any number of right-wing authoritarian presidents and prime ministers. That they keep winning elections has as much to do with the disintegration of centrist liberalism as whatever strengths they may actually possess. This further bolsters the strongman image.

Against all evidence to the contrary, we are made to pretend these “strongmen” must possess some sort of virtue.

The first to collapse into this hagiography are the more craven liberals. This flows from the logic of capital itself. If Trump is president, he must be worthy of the fictional honor that position ascribes.

As Karl Marx wrote in 1844:

“Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy.

“Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all things – the world upside-down – the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities.

“He who can buy bravery is brave, though he be a coward. As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every quality for every other, even contradictory, quality and object: it is the fraternisation of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace.”

Showing these regimes as mockable, fallible, to point and laugh, is essential to gaining the will to resist with more than just a hashtag. There is skepticism in laughter, cynicism, a sneering, necessary refusal to take power at its word. We would do well to keep it in mind.

Already, many in the liberal establishment who spent the election branding Trump a fascist are lining up to bend their knee to him. It is reprehensible, and frankly reflects liberalism’s complete aimlessness. Unable to counter the threat of the far-right, it now throws up its hands and says if you can’t beat them, join them.

Various stages of this pattern can already be seen playing out in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and beyond.

An academic debate -- in part born of normalcy bias -- persists among some on the left: Is it fascism yet? This continues even as more opportunistic American academics have begun to turtle, sensing that something like McCarthyism (or worse) may be coming.

Fascism is not simply an historic category, or a quantity of barbarisms, or a “stage of capitalism” (as some Stalinists argued). It is also a process.

As Locust comrade Adam Turl warned in 2020 prior to the January 6th putsch:

“The difference between fascism and ‘normal’ liberal and conservative politics isn’t simply quantitative—Trump deported less people than Obama, Trump hasn’t built that much wall, etc.—it is qualitative. It is that fascism reconciles (or tries to reconcile), temporarily, in the interests of capital, contradictions that can’t be resolved by the normal functioning of bourgeois democracy. It achieves this, in part, by reactionary overhauls to the capitalist state in tandem with a mutually-reinforcing, reactionary mass movement (largely made up of the disaffected middle-class).

“For fascism to become a contender for ‘alternative’ rule in capitalism, broadly speaking it has to be conditioned/formed by: A prolonged crisis not fixable by the normal means of bourgeois democracy; The organization and formation of frenzied bands, armed street fascists, etc. -- the ‘human dust’ -- largely but not exclusively drawn from the middle-class; sections of the state -- mostly its armed and repressive sections -- provide coordination and cohesion to these masses, provide the supportive fascia; Support from sections of capital itself.”

All this has only become more developed in the past four years.

Another mistake is to see Leon Trotsky’s conception of fascism as a response to working-class revolution as categorical: It can only be fascism if there is a failed workers revolution or the threat of one. That was the case, perhaps, in the first half of the 20th century, as fascism arose in relation to industrial capital, but it doesn’t necessarily apply to fascism arising in a neoliberal context.

As Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and Giorgia Meloni’s “Brothers of Italy” have shown, there can be stages of “in-between” total authoritarianism and open democratic norms. In the case of India, the deployment of repression and reaction is uneven and varies state by state.

Seymour argues contemporary disaster nationalism tends to lack the utopianism of earlier fascisms. There is little substantive promise of racialized welfare -- as in German Nazism. In historic fascism, this was always for a selected group at the expense of the murdered, enslaved, and displaced. It also failed to materialize, in the end, for many in the chosen group. The fascist “true believers” in racialized welfare were often purged by fascism in power. Nevertheless, utopia was promised.

Instead, disaster nationalism fuses the dynamics of classical fascism with oligarchic libertarianism. It provides a psychological wage -- in the DuBoisian sense -- sans rhetorical anti-capitalism. In this way it bears the mark of its neoliberal parentage. This psychological payout represents a protest by certain layers of the petit-bourgeois and bourgeois who chafe at a relative decline in economic and social status. And, to the extent there is a contradiction in Trumpism, for example, we saw it in the deferred schism between Steve Bannon and Elon Musk; between MAGA and “Dark MAGA.”

As Seymour writes, “Disaster nationalism appears when [traditional national] unity is no longer plausible, and when the compensations of nationalism are threatened. The apocalyptic threat, from this point of view, is not plague, wildfire, or ecological catastrophe. It is the liquidation of social distinction.”

Anyone who has read Locust at all in the past will know the debt we have to the late Mark Fisher’s framework of capitalist realism, in particular his notion that the ideological cul-de-sacs of neoliberalism have canceled our sense of the future. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

The intransigence of the center, unable to move decisively in any direction but equally entrenched in power, cannot be taken for granted like it once was. The future is here, and it’s garbage. The questions that were raised by the negative space around capitalist realism, appear to have been answered by the far right.

But without the utopian gesture of 20th century fascism, the far-right answer to capitalist realism seems to remain imprisoned by a new kind of capitalist realism.

This is related to the aesthetics of fascism-in-formation in the neoliberal context. It can sometimes appear to have a democratic or carnivalesque aspect. This is true online in various “chans” and right-wing spaces. X/Twitter may seem anarchic but it is decidedly determined by an increasingly fascist algorithm.

This fascist pastiche, echoing the chaos of contemporary production and being, is also to be found “in real life” (IRL).

This dynamic was noted, for example, around the LD50 “Alt-Right” Art Gallery controversy in London in 2017. Using an aesthetic of postmodern pastiches, fascist and far-right artworks were smuggled into an initially oblivious London art scene.

Or, consider the aesthetics of a “Trump caravan.” It can look like a mob that might tar and feather the local English governor. But it is, in actuality, a different kind of mob from American history. The polysemic nature of the Trump caravan is its point. It signals the Sons of Liberty to one group, a lynch mob to another group, and both to its ideological core.

Make no mistake: we are in for some dark fucking times. Laughing is not enough. And certainly, we should not laugh at the stupidity of Trump’s barbarism while ignoring the humanity and subjectivity of its victims; as some liberals are wont to do.

The limp, smug and self-satisfied model we’ve seen in the media that positions itself against the right – “enjoy this, then vote” – is ineffective. It underestimates art’s potential for imagining alternatives. It overestimates its power over passive consumers.

Politics is not the same as picking toothpaste at the grocery store. Nor should be the experience of making and creating art.

It is always tempting to look at history in parallels. For a long time, and for fairly obvious reasons, the fortunes of the left were thought of in comparison to the upsurges of the Long 1960s.

There are good reasons for this, first and foremost the litany of movements and moments that seemed to signify the birth of a radically new world. Civil Rights. Students and GIs protesting the war in Vietnam. National liberation struggles across Asia and Africa. Black Power, women’s rights, gay liberation. An increase in workers’ militancy and near-miss revolutions from Chile to Portugal.

Anyone with a heart would rather be part of that series of events than the reaction that unfolded after: the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the rollbacks on rights, smashing of unions and social movements, and the slashing of living standards.

After decades of neoliberalism and a global financial crisis followed by more austerity, the pendulum undoubtedly needed to swing the opposite direction. One would be tempted to think: That period of reaction and conservatism -- of the sacred (but debased) individual lionized over the greater good -- inevitably must give way to fairness and equality.

It would be easy if history swung like a pendulum, but it doesn’t. What happens depends on the balance of class forces and the organization of the opposing classes.

There were, of course, multiple opportunities to begin to rebuild a larger working-class left: the anti-corporate globalization movement of the late 1990s, the antiwar movements of the 2000s, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the heyday of Greece’s Syriza, the pink tide in Latin America, the explosions of Black Lives Matter (BLM) in 2015 and 2020, the growth of a new Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the U.S. after 2017.

But we were in a race against time.

What’s more, conceiving of events as an oscillating left-right pendulum risks overlooking just how vicious the reaction of recent decades has been. It abstracts the extent of the immiseration and privation that has faced the majority of workers.

John Heartfield, *No Pasaran!,* photomontage (1936)

This kind of abstract politics may condemn reactionary policies. It may condemn cuts to social programs. It may say many of the right things. But it doesn’t know, in its bones, what it means to risk death because one can’t afford both medication and rent. It doesn’t know about being forced to choose between elderly loved ones and children. It laments loss from a position of relative safety. It has, as they say, no skin in the game.

Liberalism heard the people screaming and told them the economy was doing great. The lesser evilist left knew better, but still told people to hold their noses and vote for genocide and the status quo. At least half the class didn’t vote. There was nothing to vote for. The working-class had no representation in the 2024 election.

As Chris Hedges describes it, the choice in the 2024 election, in economic terms, was between corporate rule and the direct rule of the oligarchs.

Neoliberalism, the manifestation of capitalist political economy that entrenched itself starting in the 1970s, has never been a mere set of policies. Neoliberalism has shown itself to be a full-spectrum system of ideology and governmentality, permeating market economy logic into all spheres of daily life, including the way in which we conceive of ourselves as human beings.

“The argument is that economic values have not simply supersaturated the political or become predominant over the political,” writes Wendy Brown. “Rather, a neoliberal iteration of homo economicus is extinguishing the agent, the idiom, and the domains through which democracy — any democracy — materializes.” It is why this system has proven itself so durable, so flexible and adaptable, even the most basic provisions like universal healthcare elusive.

What if, in a sense, the previous decade was our 1960s? The Arab Spring, Occupy, the brief flourish of left parties in Europe, the brief uptick in workers’ struggles and activism around BLM and women’s autonomy; what if all of this, rather than providing the opening salvo to a new high point in radical struggle and ideas, was the high point?

What if, as the neoliberal model proves itself finally untenable, the pivot away from it is characterized not by any kind of solidarity but a reheated framework of “us vs. them.” This framework not only sabotages social spending, welfare, and social rights -- as with classical austerity -- but unravels them completely.

What if, as we asked before, fascism is the governing logic of a suicidal Anthropocene?

A far right revanchism -- with growing fascist elements -- has already been the prevailing model in Israel, Poland, and Hungary. We’ve already seen Trump (version one) and Jair Bolsonaro tinker with this model.

Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland and France’s Rassemblement National promise more of the same. What if we are no longer faced with only a neoliberal enemy, but something altogether more terrifying, born of discontent with its inequities even as it weaponizes them?

This is not to say that all alternative avenues are now closed. Struggle happens not because we want it to but because it is inevitable. It is even more urgent now. Around the US, comrades are trying to sew together community defense, creating homes for queer refugees, organizing emergency responses to defend immigrants, and long-term class organizing at the point of production.

Struggle will happen in the coming years. It may even escalate substantially depending on the speed and focus of Trump’s attacks. But it will face long odds.

Look at the intransigence of the faltering liberal and conservative establishment. The violence of police against protesters, the calls from liberal and conservative politicians alike to bring the full force of the law down on students, the venal refusal from Joe Biden or Kamala Harris to countenance real consequences for Benjamin Netanyahu (even if it meant torpedoing the latter’s electoral viability in states like Michigan), the cynical painting of those calling for a ceasefire as antisemitic.

Meanwhile, the reality in Gaza – as well as the West Bank – is subject to the will of the genocider. No mountain of dead, no amount of starvation or human suffering, was too high for the status quo.

Those who disagree, who refuse to die quietly, are deemed undeserving of even basic democratic protections. Which calls into question just how democratic the status quo was to begin with.

What does this mean for art? The short answer is that we do not yet know. The long answer can be found, in part, in two things:

1) What did our historical artist-comrades -- like John Heartfield, Bertolt Brecht, Aimé Césaire, André Breton, and others -- do in response to fascism? How does this relate to our practice(s) today?

2) We must urgently connect our work -- in both its physical locality and its form/content -- to the class and anti-fascist struggle at the molecular IRL level. For example, writing copy, making images, and other gestures for local community defense and labor struggle.

In 1933, the former Dadaist and Communist artist John Heartfield, after lying low in the months following the Nazi seizure of power, returned to his Berlin apartment to gather, among other things, a Honoré Daumier print he had left there. Minutes later the SS (Schutzstaffel, or so-called “Protection Squad”) arrived. Heartifled climbed through a window and hid behind a barber shop billboard before making a further escape. He fled to Prague. The German government then pressured Czechoslovakia for his extradition. He had to flee, once again, to London.

Heartfield continued to make anti-Nazi and anti-fascist photocollages in the coming years.

German expressionism and Romanticism had faltered after Germany’s defeat during the First World War. As the Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck noted with disgust, the bohemians of Berlin had marched off to war “with a volume of Goethe in their knapsacks to skewer Frenchmen and Russians on their bayonets.” Artists like John Heartfield redirected the impulses of pre-war German art and put them in service of the class struggle. Understandably sick of German nationalism, Heartfield Anglicized his own name in protest.

Many Weimer-era artists moved toward a kind of political modernism, eschewing the Romanticism of art before the war. But when the Nazis came to power, even largely apolitical German expressionists like Max Beckmann had to flee. Even fascist expressionists like Emil Nolde were repressed if they didn’t conform to Hitler’s prosaic artistic inclinations.

Nevertheless, the aesthetics of German Nazism-in-power are not “the model” of fascist aesthetics; any more than Nazism was a natural outgrowth of Romanticism. Fascist aesthetics depends on the specific social layers who create fascism, and in what national and historical context.

John Heartfield’s photomontages could not stop Nazism. But they are holy relics of the partisan struggles against fascism in Germany and Spain. They were once pinned on the walls of Republican barracks in the International Brigades.

Johnatan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) -- based on the book by Martin Amis -- stymied supporters of Israel’s genocide for its recognition of exterminism’s pattern, which plays out regardless of the ethnicity of the perpetrator or victim. It also gives a particularly stark and stunning example of what art can be capable of in the coming years.

The dehumanization, the rendering of mass extermination as blase and quotidian; these were done by the Nazis against the Jewish people, and are now being done by Israel against Arabs and Palestinians. Israeli cabinet members have declared the country’s push into Lebanon and Syria in the name of lebensraum. That should tell us everything we need to know.

Jonathan Glazer’s *The Zone of Interest* (2024)

What The Zone of Interest does is strip the process down its barest bones (sometimes literally). It is profoundly upsetting. It is also, in a way, if not funny, then sometimes, albeit circuitously, humorous. The absurd may make us laugh, but sometimes that laugh is a way of expurgating anxiety in a moment of profound distress and disorientation.

Please do not misunderstand. The Zone of Interest is the furthest thing from a comedy. It portrays a cozy domestic life playing out next to industrialized mass murder. One of our editors only had the emotional capacity to watch the film divided into 15-minute sections. Another started having a panic attack 20 minutes in and almost had to leave the theatre.

The Zone of Interest shows the revelry of garden parties taking place while gunshots and screams are heard in the distance on the other side of a wall. The absurd extremity beggars belief, even as we know it all actually happened.

In other words, the outrage isn’t in combining the words “fascism” and “pizza,” it is that normalcy and horror have become intimates.

As the social, cultural and political terrain has shifted -- along with the material and mental capacities of our collective -- we are making some changes here at Locust Review.

When we started Locust Review in 2019 we were still riding a wave (at least in the United States) of the 2010s radicalization and growth of a new socialist left. We experienced the ongoing development of anti-capitalist and radical milieus for more than a decade.

As noted, many of these developments have hit walls. Fascism is on the rise. The overall growth of DSA seems to have faltered; although that may shift in the struggles to come.

The working class has been hit by immiserating inflation and moral exhaustion following the COVID pandemic.

Over one million people, disproportionately working-class, poor, persons of color, and disabled people died of COVID in the US alone. This was almost never acknowledged in public discourse under neoliberal normalcy. It is likely to be less acknowledged now.

The culture, already in denial, fails to process, the US-Israel genocide in Gaza.

The far right has grown, and in the US we were initially told to pick, in the past election, between a semi-fascist authoritarian clown and an incompetent-and-senile genocide enabler.

The soft-coup replacing Biden with Harris changed the symbolism of the election but not its substance.

The constituencies for Locust Review, and the publication with which many of us were involved before LR, Red Wedge, sits in a venn diagram at the mutual intersection of the working-class, the left, and various “art worlds” (“official” and counter-cultural).

The working-class, at least in the US, Britain and parts of Europe, is getting poorer. In the US, this has amounted to something like a 10-20 percent pay cut since 2019, and sometimes more for workers in less “skilled” industries.

Art worlds (in the west, but particularly in the US) are facing what the art critic Ben Davis calls a crisis of substitutability due to the digital mediation of culture. Conscious human curation of music, art, literature, etc. is being replaced by capitalist controlled algorithms, undermining what is left of so-called “third spaces;” cultural-social spaces that are neither liberated anti- or post-capitalist spaces, but are also not overdetermined by capital.

Examples of these kinds of spaces included independent cultural journals, zines, cafes, record shops, pubs/taverns, community centers, union halls, non-profit art spaces and small independent galleries, Mexican state halls (among immigrants in the US), etc.

These were spaces that nurtured counter-cultural and political art and cultural activity in the past (from the writing of persons like Walter Benjamin and John Reed, the formation of Blues, Jazz, folk, punk, Hip Hop, etc, the mass immigrant rights marches of the 2000s, and so on).

Additionally, while LR put an emphasis on our physical publication, we did use social media to promote LR, and the algorithms of social media have changed dramatically – de-emphasizing organic reach, promoting legacy media, nerfing the reach of alternative media.

This, in effect, ended the 2010s phenomena in the US (and to some extent the west overall) called “LeftBook,” in which mass left communication was briefly facilitated by the social industry. In effect, as we put it in LR, the left outsourced its “scaffolding” (to borrow from Lenin) to capitalist social media, and that scaffolding was removed, isolating parts of the left.

Regardless, all these developments have impacted the audience, patronage, and constituencies for LR, our collaborators, and our editorial collective members. We have had a declining pool of resources. Even some of our editors, at the end of pay periods, find themselves going hungry and unable to afford groceries.

Locust’s monthly income has declined while prices (for printing, shipping, website maintenance, etc.) have gone up. Moreover, life has often become more of a hustle for comrades, even those of us who reject the notion of hustling. We have to spend more time focusing on day jobs and mental health because of the impossibilities of everyday life.

This is not a negative assessment of LR, or of the work comrades have done, or the artwork published in LR. We believe that this has been a success. We have already published more issues than certain historically important Surrealist journals. Our audience has, at times, far surpassed the audience for the Moscow Conceptualists (from which artists like Ilya Kabakov came), and we have made a mark.

We have created a platform for irrealist working-class art, however imperfect, and are proud of our work so far.

We have, our editors and contributors together, made gestures that cut against capitalist realism in often brilliant ways, and developed relationships with great comrade-artists around the world, like R. Faze’s My Body series.

But we have to reckon with the shifting political and material situation. When we started LR, we initially contrasted and compared it to Red Wedge, stating that we wanted to shift toward practice. RW had, over time, become focused on cultural theory from a Marxist perspective, albeit in an open and non-sectarian way (taking inspiration and contributions from multiple anti-capitalist and communist traditions).

Our editorial collective has made the following decisions:

We are folding our non-fiction/theory annual Imago into our regular issues of Locust Review. Each issue will now contain a mix of theory, non-fiction, poetry, fiction, and visual art.
This will mean increasing the size of each issue of Locust Review. We are also going to reduce the number of issues we try to print each year. We will be producing the same amount (or more) writing and artwork for our patrons and readers, but this will save us money in terms of printing and shipping costs, as well as bring into balance our focus on theory/non-fiction and poetry/art/fiction.
We have also rationalized our patron and subscriber benefits. This is because inflation has increased our shipping and printing costs substantially. The new benefits and subscription rates can be seen on our Patreon and website.
We have relaunched Locust Radio with a new focus that flows from the actual practice of our editors and collaborators. Recent and upcoming episodes include a discussion of the late Iranian Marxist and poet Ahmad Shamlou; interviews with Locust comrades; a reflection on “Normal Island” (i.e., the UK) by LALC comrade Adam Marks; interviews with Anupam Roy, R. Faze, and Omnia Sol.

For the next year, we will continue to send materials to patrons who have recently stopped their subscriptions to make sure everyone is treated fairly.

We hope these changes allow LR to rise to the current moment and move forward in a sustainable manner.

We will continue as long as the First Amendment remains in effect. And we will continue, in some form, even if it isn’t. There is only one way out: through. We may yet still need to laugh as we reach for a way forward.

¡Hasta la victoria, siempre!

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