Digital collage provided by the Born Again Labor Museum
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.
Stay-at-home orders, quarantines, distancing, and elemental human solidarity meant that we had to do the postage ourselves (instead of doing it at the post-office) for the first time. This meant we had to order a scale, download applications to print postage, etc.
Most US contributors and subscribers should get their copies over the next few days. International subscribers and contributors will have to wait a little bit longer in the present circumstances – but not too much longer (we hope).
For those in the US who get more than 10 copies per issue: We will be sending additional mailings in separate smaller packages over the next few weeks to avoid taking large boxes to the UPS store. But your first issues should be arriving this week.
We have already started work on Locust #3. In the coming weeks we will post a second “Irrealist Workers’ Survey” as well as a call for new submissions.
After all subscribers and contributors have received their print and/or electronic copies we will begin posting some selected material from issue 2 on the website. We will also continue to post material from the ongoing “Locust Dispatches” project.
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Some of us are quarantined at home. Some of us have lost our jobs. Some of us are being forced to work; exposed to the virus because our jobs have been deemed essential. Some of us work in hospitals. Some of us are stranded hundreds of miles from home. Some of us are sick. Some of us will become sick. Some of us will die. Almost all of us are terrified.
Just looking at the United States: Class struggle has become violently and far more immediately concrete. Our siblings are on strike – at Whole Foods, Amazon, Domino’s, Instacart, Purdue Chicken, construction trades in Boston, and more. They are striking for elemental human protections from the pandemic. They are, like many of our forbears, striking for survival itself.
Nightmares and bizarre dreams are spreading in our sleep as we try to process this catastrophe. As we get home from terrifying jobs in emergency rooms, subways, and grocery stores, as we fret about the sudden evaporation of income, as we sit isolated in rotting working-class bungalows, tenements, and trailer parks… We are prisoners of fantastic dreams and horrific nightmares.
Agit-prop for the “All India Central Council of Trade Unions” from Locust editor Anupam Roy.
We hope to shape those dreams for a new world.
We aim to turn the nightmares around – and point them back at the people who put us in this position: the capitalists, the fascists, the craven careerist liberals, the far-right lunatics, the racists, the transphobic scum, the nationalists…
From our dreams we wager on building a mythology that will outlive us as individuals; a mythology that will help animate the exploited and oppressed.
Myths are merely stories about how to live and die in this world. We will bet on the international working-class collectively and democratically constructing such stories. And, to paraphrase the Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, creating new myths that can thunder and smash this world to bits.
Such stories and images cannot be a monolith. Instead they ought to be expressions of our vastness; the legion of our class, the unique value of each and every one of us; that value denied to us by the capitalists who sacrifice our lives to Wall Street.
The mythology of Proletarocene revolution can only be queer and infinite.
Ash the cat helping prepare the Locust mailing in the back room of the Born Again Labor Museum’s temporary hq.
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