Editorial
As AI slop is weaponized into fascist aesthetics, as the ghosts of Stalin and Kautsky are resurrected on the left, as absurdities mount, has the mainstream prohibition on radical alternatives morphed into something else? To what degree have elements of capitalist realism — market Stalinism, business ontology, depressive hedonia, reflexive impotence — attenuated, allowing the return of “grand narratives,” however weakened? To what extent do these dynamics continue, including within the left itself? And what does it all mean for the working-class, the Left, and art?
Math and bigotry seem to be the main coping mechanisms of the US capitalist class. Math provides the utopia — through technology and AI — as well as fixes election results, fixes labor, fixes society. At the same time, bigotry is being used as a cudgel, in part, to obscure the shifting algorithms of capital. Altogether this is a response to climate disaster and imperial decline, creating concentric racist circles of automated fortress.
As the US empire declines, avenues for middle-class advancement, historically tied to racism and imperialism, have declined. Running out of its traditional gambling venues, the American middle-class -- and parts of the ruling-class -- bet on Trumpism, racism, and 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.”
As part of a reorganization at Locust, we are seeking art, poetry and fiction, but also non-fiction, essays and reviews for the upcoming issue. Fiction submissions should be less than 3,500 words. Poetry submissions should be less than four pages. Non-fiction submissions should be less than 5,000 words for essays and less than 2,500 words for reviews. Images should be submitted in jpg format at 300 dpi, and at least eight inches in one dimension, and be accompanied by the title, date, and materials used in creating the work.
The multiverse trope in contemporary culture is overdetermined. It is ideological. It flows with the fragmented totality of an attenuating neoliberalism. It is also a result of the economy of digital media. On streaming services, the multiverse tropes of Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, and other intellectual property franchises reflect the expansion of an attention economy. Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm and Star Wars for more than four billion dollars requires the maximization of content production to realize future profits. A steady output of content must be produced to capture attention. In this way, the multiverse trope is also phenomenological. Digital media, along with the chaos of gig economics and neoliberal precarity, create a sense of “everything everywhere all at once.”
How do you dismantle a conspiracy theory? Through simple logic? A counter delirium? How do you disrupt — or gesture to disrupt — bland technophilia? Do you point out how the dystopian dreams of the tech billionaires will fail? Or, that they will work all too well? For the well-heeled, does the uncertain future overwhelm the comforts of the present? For the rest of us, does precarity overwhelm efforts to salvage the future?
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.
There are, culturally and in actuality, their “monsters” and our “monsters.” Our rulers describe whole sections of the working-class and subaltern in terms borrowed from various folk and other horrors. They demonize people by race and caste. They stoke fears of crime, exaggerated and irrational, even as they drive the entire world toward war and climate disaster. As they steal the wealth created by our labor. As they loot entire nations.
Non-fiction
Our forebears said evil is banal, but still we were unprepared for the crushing weight of the everyday as it unfolds parallel to the shifting tectonic plates of history pursuing the darkest timeline. Politicians gather (like generals… in their masses) and pull levers that threaten to shift ethical poles and move continental thought patterns, leaving collateral damage in all four corners. A future army is set on the march. It might be made up of drones. It will be comprised of killers... Back home your son wants a particular dish, cooked in some specific way. The drains are blocked, in some anomalous way. The algorithms of war pump more data. The real estate magnate botches another sales pitch. It doesn’t matter — he’s not selling anyhow. He’s stealing. Meanwhile, you’ve got a lesson to teach, a bill to pay, a podcast to record, a meme to post, a pizza to cook… all as global techno fascism comes rolling in.
Whither the Burgerkrieg auf Normal Island? The UK economy is at near perfect standstill. The state is busy hammering the repression button, the only thing it knows works… and it’s not so sure it works.
Mainstream right wing politicians have been experimenting with summoning their fascist golems. Suella Braverman who, in November 2023, was Home Secretary, after being frustrated at being unable to prohibit a peace march in London on the same weekend as Armistice Day, suggested that ceremonies at the Cenotaph on Whitehall were under threat from “hate marchers” displaying “thuggish intimidation and extremism.” The far right took this, fairly obvious, cue and descended on Whitehall, drunk and high. With no one to fight, they first fought the cops, then each other. Plus la change. Braverman largely blamed the police for this debacle. By December 2023, she was a back bench MP.
The socialist politics of art is, in part, centering both the rational and ineffable aspects of being on the actuality of a living revolutionary subject; the working-class both as it is, and as it could be. This includes the aspects of life that resist categorization, mapping, utility and rationality. Accepting this is not a concession to superstition. It is placing a working-class claim on all that it is to be human.
Few serious people would consider Greg Abbott, the current governor of Texas, to be excessively subtle or nuanced. But even by the crude standards of right-wing politics in the Lone Star State, Abbott turned some heads when he announced on October 19th, in a post on Elon Musk's "X," that college and university professors can and should be fired for mere "ideological differences" with him and his de facto fascist outlook. Right-wing politicians usually talk about such things in a slightly more guarded way, deploying euphemisms and dog whistles.
I contend that Manos, while complaining about the lack of politics in Turl’s work, has written a very apolitical review, predicated upon an intellectual campism rooted in what China Miéville calls “folk Marxism,” received beliefs, rather than dialectical reason. Manos’s view of the politics of art seems entirely functionalist.
The Housing Act 1980 was the big bang, the origin story for Normal Island. After World War Two Britain was desperately short of housing stock. State action, by both Tory as well as Labour governments, got homes built. Even in the 1970s work was ongoing, bomb sites were still being cleared. The 1980 Act, however, promised council tenants the right to buy their homes. In time a gigantic amount of equity was released. By 1986, financial markets were deregulated and this equity could be traded with greater ease and velocity.
There is one form of the Romantic culture that does not advocate the return to the past, but a detour by the past, towards an emancipated future. This we call revolutionary Romanticism, which begins with Rousseau, followed by Blake, Shelley, William Morris and many others.
The default cultural logic of neoliberalism and the political center is capitalist realism. In response the cultural logic of working-class emancipation (socialism) is critical irrealism. The ir – or no – of critical irealism is opposed to a particular kind of realism. Therefore, we should examine it more closely.
Fiction
THE BOREDOM Artist was set to retire. He would give one more performance. London’s Festival Hall was sold out as a result. Last chance to see. One-thousand seven-hundred and ten people, people who liked and appreciated what he did, would go with Dave to a place he had never gone before, though midnight, past the hour-mark. A clock behind them counted down.
It was four years since the attempted self-immolation by my body. Three years since my body was named The Idiot. Two years since The Idiot had any contact with sister, mother or father. A year and a half since The Idiot’s prayers had been answered. In the wrong way.
“Who are… Do I know you…?” Jake was puzzled. The voice came from a woman, tall, olive skin with dark, greying curly hair. She was standing just inside the street light, on the corner of the alleyway, leading from the High Street to Dyvenor Road. After a moment of figuring this out Jake realised she was holding him, gently but firmly by the shoulder. “What do you want…?”
The mansion had to be more than twenty thousand square feet, with five wings; it took up two acres. In the backyard, a giant infinity pool overlooking downtown L.A., a jacuzzi big enough for a football team, an industrial-size outdoor kitchen that could feed two hundred people, thirty-two-seat table made of rough-cut red wood with an eight-inch-thick top, three brick fireplaces, eight open firepits, two pizza ovens, and more trees and flowerbeds than in a Vegas resort.
“It snatched a dog two days ago, in Drapers Fields,” Detective Constable Habib explained back at the station to her superior, “right in front of its owner. They found its entrails wrapped around a lamppost on the High Road. It’s head was…”
Even in this cacophony, it’s the silence that unsettles most. If only because it won’t be long until it’s pierced again. Screaming, shouting, tires screeching, panicked footfalls, sporadic gunfire. If there were ever a silence that could threaten, a kind of quietude that, for a few seconds or several minutes, promises to split the skull of whomever steps in its way, this is it.
It was a dark, cloudy night: perfect! A group was gathered in a corner of Old St Pancras Churchyard. They were not a regular congregation. They were men and women of various ages, pepper-pot faces, ordinarily dressed, mostly; a true cross-section of London. They were stood in a circle. Each was holding a bucket and glancing, quietly, reverently at the bare, muddy ground in front of them…except for one.
The Idiot knew why. It had started talking union with other drivers and field technicians who drilled the wells and collected the samples.
Poetry
The people who became us lived under oaks. / In the canopy two rat snakes were in love, / spending their days in a warm caduceus.
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Don’t bury your images in the yard. / You’re supposed to starve the faeries, / mow down grave mushrooms, / take off your Scotch bonnet and / burn your scalp with moonlight.
If you held to your guns you’d still have guns. / Mean like Lenin without the mean, wrap / yourself in Jacobin bylines like a letter jacket, / forget the golden rules.
Don’t worry. / Don’t hesitate. / You are good. / You are righteous. / And righteous goodness / can never be cruel.
One day I woke up / and somebody called me “elder,” / and I almost checked my pulse. / Then I remembered— / queer years run on dog-time.
You’ve been hiding in the closet / of the abandoned K-Mart. / You’ve become a pastor to pigeons
nestled in trusses and rafters. / They coo to your sermons of / plentiful seed and a multiverse of millet.
1. The first thing you smell when you hit Main Street is: A. Burnt oil and fryer smoke. B. The ghost of the factory, coughing in the dust. C. Your own nerves. D. All of the above.
