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.
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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.
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