A note from the editors: Locust #3 is going to the printers. We are releasing the editorial early for this issue as it deals, in part, with matters more sensitive to the unfolding of time. The editorial was mostly written in the early summer. Subscribers should begin receiving their full copies of Locust #3 within the next few weeks — featuring artwork, poetry, literature, essays, interviews and other gestures from Locust writers, artists, and contributors. Subscribe here.
“History invariably transforms an era that is ending into a travesty of itself.” - René Ménil (October 1941) [1]
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.
Photograph by Alexis Delilah. Projection by VIDEOmeTRY
Adam Ray Adkins (@art.o.dirt), The Means of Inflection
It lunged. But without its guns, its shields, its armies of cops, it was helpless. Although it still controlled the housing and food supply. We grabbed it by its soiled Armani collar, nailed its hands to the wall, and spat in its face. We demanded it tell us everything it knew. How we got here. How we get out.
The corpse groaned with petulant starvation. Then, relenting, it told us everything.
“Those who lead the country into the abyss / Call ruling too difficult / For ordinary men.” - Bertolt Brecht [2]
IN MARCH came the plague, Covid-19. By the time you read this, the pandemic and the economic crisis it triggered and exacerbated (but did not cause), will have raged for months. We find ourselves in a new terrain, a new world -- but one fundamentally the product of the world that existed before.
Millions of us were trapped in our houses, trailers, and apartments. Hundreds of thousands of unhoused in the US alone were left exposed to the new plaguelands. Millions of us trudged to factories, warehouses, hospitals, and grocery stores to be exposed to the plague. Millions of us lost our jobs in an economic crisis that may rival the Great Depression.
With capital determined to maintain, if not accelerate, rates of surplus value extraction -- in contradiction to needed public health policies -- the conflict between use and exchange value was demystified for countless workers.
Suddenly exposed, small but significant layers of the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie turned fascist, imbuing their death cult with meaning, redirecting anger outward, forcing us back to increasingly precarious, deadly, and dangerous labors.
The working-class subject navigated these capitalist-imposed disasters in a constant state of anxiety -- more or less suppressed depending on the triggers and demands of each moment. It is, after all, difficult to live in a constant state of war with the world.
Trapped in essential jobs we swallowed fear and anger. We temporarily pushed aside anxieties as we fruitlessly struggled to get unemployment benefits. We tried to forget the horror outside in quixotic efforts to remain “sane.”
Evolution did not prepare us for such a prolonged attenuation of our fight or flight response.
Each of us became two people -- the persons we were before and after the plague. We became ulterior version of ourselves. Anxiety rushed in when we blurred each of our two selves, seeking equilibrium, wondering if there was a third us to come -- in death or further crisis: a dead us or a new us.
We were compelled to imagine our impossible selves.
As Jase Short, earlier in the pandemic, wrote in Red Wedge:
‘We are beset on all sides by disturbances of what the ancient poet-philosopher Lucretius called “an alien sky.” The Covid-19 pandemic is felt by all of us as a presence, a presence of that which should not, which cannot be—inasmuch as our ordinary perceptions define what can and cannot be. It sticks out like a sore, a wound, sudden and without warning causing even the bravest and strongest to groan. Our lives were moving right along, certainly already beset by intrusions into a billion little homeostases, when suddenly it all came crashing down. Before horror, we have felt a fascination with the very strangeness of it all, this thing which should not be that has arrived on our doorstep.’
The strangeness came with further threat -- and not just the threat of the virus itself. Microscopic terrors animated fascist dust across nations. Racist “patriots” made their middle-class lives and deaths available as tools for capital.
The far-right protesters of the United States screamed “fuck us daddy” to the grotesque buffoon in the White House. Working-class consent was not required. When the American fascist talks about “liberty” this is what they mean. Dead and sick workers. Dead and sick Black people. Dead and sick immigrants. This is their kink. Don’t shame them, libtard.
The liberals followed the far-right in shambolic triangulation. The economies reopened like flowers to a dying sun. The marinas opened for yachts to sail in acidic bays. The factories never closed. The night clubs swelled with petit-bourgeois fools -- somehow stupider than Edgar Allan Poe’s Prince Prospero, many didn’t even use their wealth to hide from the plague. They taunted it.
As of writing ICU beds are once again filling to capacity. The virus runs free across the purple mountains, across a stolen continent, over the ruins of plantations and rust belt factories.
“What has the youth been offered during these last fifty years? Positions. Trades. Words. Nothing. Not one idea.” - Aimé Césaire (April 1941) [3]
IN MAY came the uprising. It started in Minneapolis, and quickly spread to virtually every urban area in the United States and even small towns where weeping young workers protested and renounced their racist parents.
If the plague clarified the gap between what we need and what we get -- our absolute expendability to the system -- the uprising after the racist police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor showed that millions will not take it anymore.
The rebellion has been, rightly so, Black-led. It is the Black communities, along with other communities of color, who know better than anyone how deadly America is, how easily it lords death and maiming over a person.
That mass participation in the rebellion has been overwhelmingly multiracial shows how sharply Covid 19 brought this reality home for other populations. On a long enough timeline, longer or shorter depending on race, gender, and other factors, any working person is disposed of, replaced, left to wither away or just straight up die.
This helps account for the reverent place the dead occupy in this movement. Their names have been scrawled across walls and shouted by hundreds of thousands who may have never known them.
In a matter of weeks cities transformed. Condominium walls and shopping centers were remade with slogans and graffiti. Racist monuments that stood for decades were torn down. Affluent areas walled off from the realities of poverty and racism were forced to face reality.
In some cities -- most well-known in Seattle but also in Philadelphia -- police-free autonomous zones were established. Bus drivers refused to cart off arrested protesters. Schools severed contracts with police departments. And, of course, there were calls to defund and even abolish the police.
It is beautiful.
There are those -- from the cesspools of the far-right, Fox News, and “Blue Lives Matter” protests -- who insist that a militant anti-racist movement has the potential to bring down the United States. They are absolutely correct, and we relish and support this possibility.
The United States would’ve been impossible without racism, often in its most repressive and genocidal varieties. The colonial-settler project of the country relied on the wholesale theft of Native lands and the slaughter of indigenous people. The profits reaped in the colonies came in large part through the labor of Africans kidnapped from their homes, crammed in the disease-ridden hulls, and forced to work for free. These actions demanded a racist justification, a systematic demotion of subjugated people to sub-human status.
American capitalism developed. Slavery was abolished, thanks in large part to a massive work stoppage by slaves themselves (W.E.B. DuBois described it as the first general strike in American history), and many radical white workers were won over to the anti-slavery cause. But as we know, this was not the end of racism. The 155 years since the first Juneteenth have seen inhuman abuse, hyper-exploitation and violence against non-whites, be they the descendants of slaves, Mexican or Latinx, immigrants from China, Japan, or the Philippines, or indigenous Americans.
This is not to say that this racism went unopposed. Time and again, non-white workers in the US rose up, formed radical unions and political associations, and refused to accept the violence of everyday life. They gained support among some working-class whites -- those who realized that their own lots in life were made better by opposing bigotry. But too often, white workers have given into the lure of what DuBois termed the “psychological wage” of whiteness. White workers are told: Yes, you are broken at work, you are struggling to build a life for yourself, your boss sees you as little different from a workhorse. But at least you are white… at least you aren’t… THEM.
Adam Turl, Anachs: Back Home Ellie was a Cellist (mixed media on cardboard, 2019)
Adam Turl, Anachs: I Met an Anach from Cleveland Whose Head Keeps Playing “Mississippi Goddamn” Over and Over (mixed media on cardboard, 2019)
US history is filled with instances of militant class rebellion -- including multiracial class rebellion: the St. Louis Commune of 1877 and the New Orleans Dockworkers Strike in 1893, the 1919 strike wave, the 1930s industrial rebellions, and the 1970s wildcat strike wave, and so on. But racism and the promise of white supremacy -- “the American Dream” -- has, more often than not, been the achilles heel of US labor struggles. Even against their own immediate material interests white workers often chose racism (and their bosses) against their Black or brown siblings.
Black and brown workers are usually the first to be crushed under the capitalist boot. And when the capitalists decided that they needed to accelerate the exploitation of all labor following the neoliberal turn of the late 1970s and early 1980s, they turned to racism, as they had done many times before, to divide and conquer.
The closest white and Black workers ever came to income parity was in the 1970s. [4] This was the interlude after the civil rights and Black Power explosions of the 1960s, but before the systematic dismantling of organized labor. That dismantling of organized labor came in tandem with the criminalization of Black youth and the racist demonization of people on social welfare (even though, of course, most of the people on welfare were white). This was in tandem with the rise of the racist “war on drugs,” the militarization of police, the systematic disinvestment from communities of color, and the disappearance of good-paying manufacturing jobs from these same communities which, ultimately, vanished from working-class communities as a whole.
There are those who merely tinker around the edges of this history. They insist that the police can be reformed. They ignore that the US police have their origins in the patrols assembled to catch runaway slaves. There is no more chance reforming them than reforming a particle accelerator into a terrier.
The same goes for the United States itself.
Look at the McCloskeys, the wealthy lawyers who walked out of their opulent St. Louis home to threaten Black Lives Matter protesters with an assault rifle and pistol. The protesters weren’t even targeting them. Merely marching by. But their gated-community mentality (their street is literally considered private property) causes them to view the non-white and not-well-off as unwashed masses wielding pitchforks. The McCloskey’s house, appropriately enough, looks like a mansion in the French countryside. Speaking to the media afterward, they even compared their home to the Bastille. And the only people who truly fear the storming of Bastilles are the rich, their prison guards, and police.
No country that generates such unapologetic self-entitlement, such obscene privilege, deserves to survive history.
This poses a choice to “white” workers. Hold onto whiteness, embrace the exposed racist core, join the increasingly fascist howl that surrounds the President, MAGA, the human dust, etc., often against one’s actual material interests. Or, renounce that whiteness, join in the destruction of the exposed racist core, join the uprisings, and be in alignment with one’s actual collective material interests.
The white children crying in disgust at their parents’ racism? The vile full-throated embrace of racism among their parents? They have fallen on different sides of an existential divide.
BALM agit-prop
But this is not the full story.
The collapse of the empire poses not just a choice but a threat to those not hitherto granted whiteness. The threat of something far worse than the already unacceptable status quo. Fascism. The threat of extermination.
The recent uprisings were fed, of course, by the immediate anger and genius of the Black community in concert with multiracial crowds of mostly young working-class people. At the same time the tendrils of US racism and capitalism are joined at their roots. The uprisings are therefore, at their root, about all of it. The rebellions came not a moment too soon. Even something as small as a puncture in the order of death’s hegemony was welcome. To outright tear it open was a waterfall in a parched outback.
As we started writing, there was something resembling an equilibrium taking shape. Protests continue, and though there are sporadic flare-ups between demonstrators and cops, they are not as widespread or constant as they were mere weeks ago. This may change. In fact there is every reason to believe it will. The situation is volatile, whiplash-inducing, gaining new dimensions and contradictions daily, with any one of them capable of dramatically shifting events.
Portions of the ruling class obviously feel nervous, looking for opportunities to co-opt or gain back lost ground in-between concessions. The US Supreme Court struck down the ability of employers to fire queer or trans workers while affirming Trump’s “right” to deny asylum to migrants. City officials in Seattle talked a big game in reclaiming the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), but bid their time, clearly afraid of provoking a new wave of resistance city-wide or, possibly, beyond. These dynamics contributed to Trump’s deployment of Homeland Security agents in the Pacific Northwest -- in what amounts to an early formation of his own would-be Sturmabteilung (SA).
Such is history. Which, evidently, is back. In all its strange, chimerical chaos. As it looks now, the new history is going to include sustained mass protest as part of its landscape. This is an unqualified good. Especially as all the pulls in the opposite direction are toward mass death.
“Capitalist realism was only ever a fantasy -- a fantasy that the human resources capital needs for its growth were as infinite as its own drive. Yet capital is now coming up against limits of all kinds, and existential limits are not the least of these.” - Mark Fisher (2016) [5]
THE CURRENT economic and health disasters are both ruptures and continuations. They flow, in no small part, from the failures of imagination born of capitalist realism. We could not imagine a collective escape from the norms and restrictions of capital -- and this is the result.
Capitalist realism only imagined the scale of the present catastrophes in its apocalyptic television and film apologetics -- the subconscious preparations it made for the inevitable outcomes of capitalist policy. The outcomes it couldn’t admit it was preparing us for.
Likewise, the rebellions are a response to decades of racist oppression and immiseration as well as a break with the paucity of imagination fostered by capitalist realism; an ideological “normal” that tried to make peace with constant documentary footage of police murders.
Everyone in the world now knows that US police stations are flammable.
The privations and everyday barbarisms of capitalism -- kept at bay through debt and ideology -- were most of all accepted by millions of workers because enough of us, enough of the time, could imagine individual negotiation or escape -- through luck, hard work, talent, drugs, religion, love, family, etc.
The plague and economic crisis choked off most individual avenues of escape. The working-class subject, existentially and phenomenologically, moved from a generalized state of constraint in “normal” times to a state of being utterly trapped. The further normalization of racist police murder was simply too much under such conditions.
But if history has awoken it is still shaking off its chains.
The exodus of stranded migrant workers in India
Potential artificial famines
The seizures of medical supplies by governments hoarding them from hospitals
Nurses who cannot quit their jobs out of their sense of duty and barren checking accounts
Students saddled with debts from betting on jobs that no longer exist
Factory workers reporting to viral petri dishes to pack meat and make cars
Hard fought labor laws repealed with emergency measures by politicians of every stripe
Even with partial victories due to the uprisings in the US, everyday life becomes increasingly proscribed. Rent-strikes and wildcats against the impossibility of the current situation are among the only immediate responses workers have. But they are young. Our organizations are still hobbled by capitalist realism’s decades-long assault on our imaginations.
The greatest number of victims are among the most oppressed -- by imperialism, racism, sexism, normativity. The impact of the virus is socially othered -- projected onto other nations and races, in part reflecting how the intentional government direction of the virus is othered, racist, and nationalist. But this also conceals a simultaneous saming.
The looming devastation of the entire working-class demands militant solidarity from all quarters -- or utter defeat. Until then, barring miracles, we continue to be Shroedinger’s proletariat, trapped in between a class in and for ourselves -- under the threat of fascism, submission, and death.
This is not hyperbole. The economic crisis -- in country after country -- is both rapidly immiserating the working-class and proletarianizing layers of the middle-class. As middle-class persons, accustomed to some degree of autonomy in relationship to capital, are increasingly compelled into dangerous, exploitative, and alienated labor under threat of starvation, they will seek to restore their relative and perceived subjective freedom.
Ajith Nedgumangad, Land… Body… (drawings on cigarette packages and paper)
For these newly proletarianized persons, this can only come in one of two ways -- through working-class consciousness (socialism) or a return to “what was lost” (fascism).
The former presupposes the subjective liberation of the individual can only truly come from equality and direct democracy. The latter presupposes that lost middle-class grace is due to the interference of the “others” -- “Jews, Muslims, globalists, Black persons, queers, women, immigrants…” Of course there will be intermediate forms and grotesqueries. But these are “the polls of attraction.”
In this context, there will be a further acceleration of competition between the left and the right and the attenuation of the political center. This will hold true even if the political center returns to formal power.
It is not just the masses that will be increasingly polarized left and right. The collapse of the old order demands radical shifts.
As noted by Salvage, Peter Frase, and others, there is an exterminist solution for capital as it approaches the endgame of climate catastrophe. There is a not insubstantial section of the ruling-class that is fine with workers perishing en masse. And in the face of this, the liberal portions of the capitalist class will most likely be paralyzed. They are, in the end, willing to go along with the fascists if it preserves their class prerogatives and rule.
This too is both a break with the past as well as a continuation and acceleration of the capital’s “normal” exterminationism.
By way of contrast…
If, as the Martiniquais surrealist René Ménil argued, our real task lies “in the attempt to bring the marvelous into real life, so that life can become more encompassing...” [6]
Everyone in the world now knows that US police stations are flammable.
“I’ve distributed some pamphlets to the plants, but not all were willing to accept them.” - André Breton
LOCUST HAS, over our first two issues, argued for an irrealist framework, a revelatory and fantastical Marxism which, even as it grounds itself in the materiality of history, also enthuses in its mutability.
This is not so much a supplement of Marxism as it is a reckoning with its method, which has always emphasized a process of “enweirding” in order to expose the workings of capitalism, and, therefore, how it might be overthrown.
Look, for example, at Capital. There is weirdness in Marx’s method of abstraction. Starting with a simple, static commodity, he dissects the processes and movements that not only went into making it but also still animate the commodity. The entrapment of labor and even time itself into an apparently unmoving thing seems alchemical at first blush. Not for nothing did Marx employ gothic and supernatural imagery to emphasize his points.
Through one path or another, this has led many artists standing in the communist tradition to similarly embrace this method of enweirding. Brecht estranged so that his audience might deconstruct collective mythologies, reassembling them in light of how workers experience the actuality of capital.
Similarly, we point to the role that irrealist ideas have played in the liberation movements against racism and colonialism. Some scholars even argue that radical Black artists employed a surrealist methodology before the term “surrealism” was coined. This is, as Rochelle Spencer notes in Afrosurrealism, related to an anti-teleological worldview, a rejection of the western myth of linear progress. This is connected to what some of us at Locust have argued: that the oppressed have a gothic-furturist relationship to time.
Anupam Roy, Exodus (2020)
Anupam Roy, Exodus (2020)
Anupam Roy, Exodus (2020)
While this contradictory relationship to time is a universal quality of the exploited and oppressed it is also specific. Walter Benjamin observed that every document of culture was simultaneously a document of barbarism. Benjamin’s aphorism is universal. How it is experienced, however, is quite specific.
Presented with a racist mythology of white “progress,” and a racist mythology of the Black “primitive,” each related to a disproven teleology of progress, some Black irrealists have countered with a kind of warping of time (see, for example, Rasheedah Phillips’s concept of “Black Quantum Theory.”) [7]
The early European surrealists not only placed capitalism and the racist colonial order in their sights; they were very soon in contact with Black and brown co-thinkers in France, Haiti, Madagascar, Guyana, Morocco, Brazil, and across the African diaspora. In part this was due to the expulsion of the surrealists from Europe by fascism, including Francophone artists of the African diaspora. But it was also due to the priority that André Breton and other early surrealists placed on solidarity with the anti-colonial struggle.
Over time this led the better European surrealists to break with the orientalism of European modernism (although in a contradictory and haphazard way). Surrealism’s international and anti-imperialist lineage continued for decades, in many places far outliving the heyday of European surrealism.
The Martiniquais communist and poet Aimé Césaire declared surrealism to be a kind of decolonization of the mind. In a sense it supplemented his strength to shun a linear European view of history and embrace a vision of Afrocentrism and liberty. “Surrealism,” he wrote, “provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation… it’s true that superficially we are French, we bear the marks of French customs; we have been branded by Cartesian philosophy, by French rhetoric; but if we break with all that, if we plumb the depths, then what we will find is fundamentally black.”
What the surrealists understood / understand is that liberty and equality (political, economic, social) require each other. They took this kernel of knowledge born of the French and Hatian Revolutions to its extremes. This knowledge still elides mainstream liberals and crude (class-reductionist) Marxists alike.
The revolutionary, Marxist, radically anti-colonial, and anti-European aspects of surrealism were long obscured in official “art world” retellings of the movement’s history. An international, multi-racial, and revolutionary art movement that elevated the freedom of the individual, in tandem with the full emancipation of humanity, and the elevation of all human subjectivities, has in the mainstream narrative been reduced to dead white Europeans doing weird things between the two world wars. [8]
Césaire, reflecting on the position of Black poet in a racist capitalism in the 1940s, prefigures Jase Short’s notes on the “alien sky:”
‘[T]he primary feeling of the black poet is a feeling of uneasiness, better yet, of intolerance. Intolerance of the real because it is sordid, of the world because it holds him caged up, of life because he is robbed of it on the highway of the sun.’
In other words, Césaire’s ability to imagine a world without unease allowed him to more clearly see the world for what it was. The alien sky may eventually turn against us all. But it turns against some of us sooner than others. The irrealist method, the bridging of analytical and aesthetic strategies, has been proven time and again. This includes our current moment. Wrapping our heads around what is requires a sense of what could be.
“We are tired of not being intense” - Jean Toomer (1931) [9]
IF THE events of the past several months have proven anything, it is that there is no negotiating with a corpse. Even one that shambles along and manages to still shout orders at us. There can be no common sense “realism” in a political strategy that seeks to change a world already made strange and unpredictable.
Reality is changeable, and this is borne out.
At the start of the pandemic, there were reminders everywhere of common good, decency and solidarity in our working class communities, if always stalked by the fact that it was not going to be enough. People got to know their neighbors and communities in ways they hadn’t before. They formed mutual aid groups and solidarity networks. They began to form the basic raw materials of a better world.
What was still lacking was the ability to transpose these groups and their ethic onto the world at large. This is not the fault of those who built these networks, which have included some Locust editors. Rather it is a matter of limited resources that can only be stretched so far. After all, if we had greater resources, we would not be working-class.
The resources exist, but they need to be redistributed. Ergo the need for wholesale transformation. The wave of wildcat and rent strikes pointed to this lacuna, this gap between what people can actively and collectively grasp, and what more needs to be within their control.
The uprisings and protests have managed to partially close the gap between actuality and utopian impulse. Or, to put it another way, they have strengthened the case that something else is possible and that there are seeds of it in what have already been doing. At virtually every protest there has been a clear and pronounced spirit of mutual aid -- volunteers and organizers handing out water and food, as well as facemasks. On many occasions they have also handed out baking soda or antacid to neutralize the effects of teargas, or thick signs that can be used as shields against police clubs.
Can we expand that ethos, from marches of tens of thousands and temporary autonomous zones, into renewed visions for larger systems and our daily lives? If our cities and streets can be transformed from theaters of apocalypse into avenues of militant creativity, if monuments of slaveholders can be turned into sites of radical expression, then we might ask ourselves: what else can transform?
In short, we must demand the impossible. An impossible that seems more possible than before but an impossible that desperately needs to grow.
Our survival increasingly depends on us being unreasonable: unreasonable in our demands, in the audacity of our direct actions for relief and medicine, and in the urgency of our actions to counter the fascists.
This does not mean adventurism. It means organizing for survival and solidarity. It means strangling the “capitalist realist” still in our heads and exorcising its ghosts in our organizations and ideas.
“It is impossible for human beings to experience reality directly” - René Ménil (July 1941) [10]
IN TERMS of aesthetic strategy, we are even more convinced of Locust’s orientation to the radical weird and it’s assertion of all aspects of working-class subjectivity -- individual, sectional, collective. An aesthetics in which all these, at each point, are related to the pathos of “proletarian morality” -- the full and complete emancipation of the entire working-class.
Irrealism estranges. It allows for the deconstruction of collective mythologies and their possible reassembly “from below.” In this way, socialist and communist artists, propagandists, and writers can assert the human echo of politically “demanding the impossible.”
As the present crises expose the conflict of use and exchange value (the human and inhuman, labor and capital) in the framework of a racist capitalism, there are two rough categories of “irreal” responses.
In one sense, our side reasserts the subjective by fully attacking the alien sky, and in so doing demonstrates that the alien sky is not truly alien. It is a product of social relations in interplay with the existential condition. The disparate threat has a source - normative racist capitalism. The enemy has a name. Capital is demystified. But in the process of this exposure the marvelousness of our lives is restored. Human beings return to the center of myth.
The fascist occultic chooses the opposite response. This is how the capitalist death cult works at the individual level. Subjective meaning, for the fascist, is regained by becoming one with the alien sky -- becoming one with normative racist capitalism. In fascism, capital becomes the center of myth. (Most) human beings become NPCs, mere trash to be cleared from the dungeon.
Critical irrealism negates the contradiction of the alien sky by valorizing the process of becoming fully human. Fascist occultism rejects the human.
This is not an appeal to a humanism divorced from social class. It is an appeal to the human realized through social class; through the emancipation of the exploited and oppressed.
We are in a moment of plague. The lines on the charts of the Dow Jones and the charts tracking the number of Covid cases are both, as of writing, spiking. We should expect, at every turn, for this moment of plague to be used against us. Historically, plagues have been used to put working and toiling people in their place.
But there is another kind of plague in history. The biblical plague of the locust, swarming from the ground by the millions, able to destroy but also create. We don’t welcome the destruction of farms in South and East Africa. We do, however, welcome the tendency of the rich and powerful to see us in the same way. It is, of course, one of the reasons behind the title of this publication. We see the uncontrollability of the locust, its instinctive penchant for socializing and building indefatigable bonds with others like it, as something to learn from. The McCloskeys are scared of the locusts. So are the cops. So are Trump and his ilk. Let them all tremble.
What happens when we become the plague? We will find out. By any means necessary.
The Locust editors want to take this opportunity to pre-announce that we will soon be launching a new project: SWARMCAST -- a Locust Review podcast. SWARMCAST will feature discussions of irrealist art, poetry, and stories, as well as performances and readings from Locust Review artists and contributors. The SWARMCAST will be released early for Locust and Evicted Art patrons at and above the $5 monthly pledge level. In addition there will be exclusive content available only for patrons. Coming soon!
coming soon!
Endnotes
René Ménil, “Introduction to the Marvelous,” in Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelly, eds, Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealism Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (Austin, Texas: University of Texas press, 2009), 82
Bertolt Brecht, Selected Poems, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1947), 131
Aimé Césaire, “Panorama,” in Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelly, eds, Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealism Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (Austin, Texas: University of Texas press, 2009), 74
It must be noted that even at this time, while income parity came fairly close, wealth disparity remained immense even between poor white workers and Black workers. This was due to many factors but one of the most important was the entrenched policies that denied Black people from achieving equity, particularly in housing, land, and farms.
Mark Fisher, “Cybergothic vs. Steampunk”, in K-Punk (London: Repeater Books, 2018), 614
René Ménil, “Introduction to the Marvelous,” in Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelly, eds, Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealism Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (Austin, Texas: University of Texas press, 2009), 82
Rochelle Spencer, Afrosurrealism: The African Diaspora’s Surrealist Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 28-31
See Franklin Rsosemont and Robin D.G. Kelly, eds, Black, Brown and Beige: Surrealism Writings from Africa and the Diaspora (Austin, Texas: University of Texas press, 2009) for an excellent corrective.
Rosemont and Kelly, 213
René Ménil, “The Orientation of Poetry,” in Franklin Rosemont and Robin D.G. Kelly, , 82
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