The following editorial was published in Locust Review #9 and written in late fall (2022).
Locust Review 9 cover by Adam Ray Adkins. Social media splash image by Anupam Roy.
EAT YOUR heart out, Elvis Costello. Somewhere along the line, peace, love, and understanding actually became “funny.” Once, the idea of a world without war was worth fighting for, or at least dreaming of. Now it’s seen as fanciful, dangerously naive even. “The world has gotten more dangerous” the rationale goes, “so we must inevitably do things to protect ourselves that make it even more volatile and hostile.”
It isn’t just belief that brought us here, though. It is a series of events and political decisions – made, as always, by those in power (the people who have addresses). While we write this, Russia’s war on Ukraine has threatened the world’s wheat supply, aggravating food and supply shortages that have already been brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. Western leaders wag their fingers and spit bellicose rhetoric in Putin’s direction. Does it do anything? Do any of the massive corporations who wrapped themselves in blue and yellow have anything to offer this dire emergency other than empty hopes and prayers? Nevermind that the US invasions and interventions of the past twenty years set the stage for this accelerated conflict.
What got us here will not get us out. On the contrary, the solidarity needed to get Russia out of Ukraine, that will allow Ukrainians to rebuild, stands in diametric opposite to the solipsistic obsession with optics that the accumulation of profit now requires. We are left with the hypocritical posturing from the same war criminals who reduced Iraq to ashes— killing upwards of a million people, the people who ignored the firebombing and bulldozing of Palestinian villages for decades. In “mainstream” politics it is the far-right that questions the war.
Artists, historically offering a rich aesthetic and psychological language against war, are perhaps the most derelict in their duties. Observe the truly pathetic display at the Guggenheim during the war’s initial days, where artists threw paper airplanes through the lobby demanding a no-fly zone from the west that would surely have exacerbated the conflict — if not led to nuclear war. If not even the artists can imagine peace, then you know we’re in trouble. A shocking lack of human ethos and solidarity has infected the “art world.” Alexander Billet channels the hauntology of a lost artistic solidarity in his poem, “Artists for Mutually Reassured Destruction” (in this issue):
I know these words / are useless. / They won’t rebuild kindergartens / or shoe factories, / or UNESCO sites. / They won’t give us back a shared history, / or a child their lost joy. / They won’t feed Mariupol, / or Aleppo, or the Lower Ninth Ward./ Kandahar, / Pyongyang, /Caracas.
Not long before Putin got his boot stuck in the Ukrainian mud, Joe Biden made the decision to finally end the United States’ longest running war. In different circumstances the final withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan might have been cause for celebration. But everyone saw the Taliban waiting in the wings. Yes, it is good that the United States is no longer occupying one of the world’s poorest nations. The longer the troops stayed, the more likely it was that forces like the Taliban – fundamentalist, anti-democratic, misogynist — would gain support out of sheer desperation and despair. After all, the Taliban were in their very origins the product of the last imperialist conflict in Afghanistan.
Let’s call it imperialist realism — a close cousin to capitalist realism. No longer is it merely that war gives us meaning. Now it is that war creates global deprivation, new mechanisms through which we can thin the herd even more quickly, a state of affairs that may be moderated in this or that way, but never questioned, and certainly not eliminated. The devastation is the point. No longer does Moscow need to remake Kyiv in its own image. Nor does Washington need to remake Baghdad in its image. It is enough to destroy. There was —for capital— too much civilization anyway. Too much life. Too many workers.
In some ways the 2022 US elections could be described as a competition between a liberal pursuit of World War Three abroad versus a far-right pursuit of fascism at home.
IT SHOULD be second nature for leftists to connect the wars abroad to “the wars at home.”
It is becoming increasingly clear to us, as artists and workers, that everyday life is becoming intolerable. As we’ve noted elsewhere, 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, even as the political center congratulates itself on the indeterminate outcome of the midterm elections.
Reproductive rights and queer liberation are threatened or rolled back. 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 ten-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. It is felt in our bones. It turns our stomachs inside-out. It chokes our arteries with anxiety. As Michael Linaweaver writes in the poem, “Someday Massacre” (also in this issue)
I’m almost positive that I’m dying. / Don’t laugh. / It’s not a joke. / I haven’t told my wife yet / and I expect, / at your age, / you should be able to keep a secret. / I’m away from home, / working graveyards, / checking soft hotels / and burned out, / punched out / apartment complexes. / The someday massacre is still somewhere up ahead. / I don’t know how far.
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. The intolerability of everyday conflict leads us to imagine a different kind of conflict, a class conflict — to imagine against the one-sided war of capital against us. As capitalism threatens us with existential oblivion we become ghosts ourselves.
In “Planet Cleveland Unionizes,” (this issue) Tish and Adam Turl write:
By 6 AM, the lobby floor and tables were wiped over with a slime that dried into a protective, antibacterial, anti-loiter film. Dave spent the next hour putting bags of ‘festive protein filler’ into the sous vide machines. He then went to the break room for his first fifteen.
He saw Vera, Thad, and Obrex tying up the manager Greg. Greg’s head lulled to the side, swinging gently as they tightened his bonds. They’d gagged him with Vera’s unwashed work hat.
Dave paused and watched. It took his coworkers a moment to notice him but once they did, they also froze. After a beat of silence, Vera extended a roll of duct tape to Dave.
“We’re going to ransom Greg so they’ll let us communicate with #2 and #5 today. They said #1 fell to a worker mutiny. So they locked down the phones and TVs.”
“The Taco Queen CEO just bought the last forest on Cleveland. We plan on using him to…” Obrex elaborated.
Dave waved off his alien comrades. “I don’t care. Fuck ‘em. You had me at ‘worker mutiny’, dude.”
Capitalism was always organized on a principle of competition that becomes conflict — whether open wars of the exploited and oppressed against the oppressor, or displaced wars of imperialism and hatred. But everyday competition is more and more conflict in itself. Daily life is a war of survival; a fantasy of social darwinism. Or, the banality of apocalyptic television shows folded into “regular” existence.
Corporate AI (artificial intelligence) “image generators” — meant to, among other things, permanently displace artists — are advertised on social media platforms in apocalyptic terms. As if to underline the redundancy of human subjectivity altogether, the come-on is to imagine the last selfie, the last instance of human self-representation.
The center congratulates itself on a seeming stay of execution in the midterm elections. But Pakistan floods. The Mississippi River watershed runs dry. The working-class is still in an apocalyptic jail. We make plans for a prison break. Because they’ve left us no other options. We have nothing left to lose. We are already ghosts.
“You know I caught a C-O / fallin’ asleep on death row. I grabbed his gun — then he did what I said so…”
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