First as Tragedy, Second as Farce, Thrice as Apocalypse

Laura Fair-Schulz October 11, 2023

Laura Fair-Schulz, First as Tragedy, Second as Farce, Thrice as Apocalypse, digital photo-collage (2025)

editorial

Is Capitalist Realism Over? - Call for Submissions

Locust Arts + Letters Collective

June 25, 2026

Is Capitalist Realism Over? - Call for Submissions

Locust Arts + Letters Collective

June 25, 2026

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?

Locust Arts + Letters Collective

June 25, 2026

online

Adam Turl

September 30, 2026

Healing the Broken Social Ensemble

Adam Turl

September 30, 2026

I fell in love with Anupam’s work because it isn’t “what it is,” it's something more. Anupam’s work is like slip healing fragments of broken clay.

Adam Turl

September 30, 2026

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate Ed Sheeran

Alexander Billet

September 25, 2026

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate Ed Sheeran

Alexander Billet

September 25, 2026

Because Ed Sheeran doesn’t exist. Not really. He may have at one point, but the avatar that cried onstage in Philadelphia and wants you to cry for him isn’t, in the end, a human with their own wants and needs, separate from the system he’s spent so much effort ingratiating himself to. Make enough decisions that fail to mark where you stand in relation to history, and you eventually vanish completely. Incapable of love, of fairness, of courage or even a modicum of individuality. Just another piece of flotsam aimlessly drifting through the tepid flow of capital.

Alexander Billet

September 25, 2026

The City at the End of Capitalist Realism

Adam Marks

September 23, 2026

The City at the End of Capitalist Realism

Adam Marks

September 23, 2026

We have held up both utopia and dystopia as symbols of alterity, to express this, often keeping them at not such a great distance from each other. The Communist Manifesto, for example, is utopian or dystopian depending on how you understand the dialectic of things such as abolition of private property. In a world ruled by the maxim ‘There is No Alternative,’ the first attraction of dystopia is it shows there quite obviously is….

Adam Marks

September 23, 2026

Featured

Alexander Billet

July 30, 2026

Cruelty

Alexander Billet

July 30, 2026

Don’t worry. / Don’t hesitate. / You are good. / You are righteous. / And righteous goodness / can never be cruel.

Alexander Billet

July 30, 2026

Letter to the Young Queers from Someone who Accidentally Got Old

Tish Turl

July 28, 2026

Letter to the Young Queers from Someone who Accidentally Got Old

Tish Turl

July 28, 2026

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.

Tish Turl

July 28, 2026

Customer Feedback Survey for the Apocalypse

Tish Turl

July 6, 2026

Customer Feedback Survey for the Apocalypse

Tish Turl

July 6, 2026

Thank you for participating in the end of the world. Your input helps us improve future catastrophes. Please complete the following fields to the best of your remaining ability.

Tish Turl

July 6, 2026

Featured

Irrealist Combat League

November 28, 2023

Theses on the Theatrical Party

Irrealist Combat League

November 28, 2023

The Theatrical Party embraces the organization of pessimism in contrast to the false optimism of the left. To be a revolutionary pessimist is to separate the political actor from their role. It is this separation which, in the epic theater of Brecht, invited a critical outlook on the performance from its participants and spectators — the first step in the transformation of spectators into collaborators, a task integral to both theater and the forging of a revolutionary party.

Irrealist Combat League

November 28, 2023

Anupam Roy, Tish Turl and Adam Turl

October 31, 2023

Constructing Counter-Imaginaries

Anupam Roy, Tish Turl and Adam Turl

October 31, 2023

We want a record of the real in the work — as in the cotton and ash — as well as reclamations of our history and imaginaries constructed against the limits of working-class imaginations by capitalist realism. So the individual pieces are sort of vignettes of class pathos and poetry, often in an irreal idiom, and all together representing, as much as we can, the limitless expansive nature of these stories in aggregate.

Anupam Roy, Tish Turl and Adam Turl

October 31, 2023

Irrealist Combat League

September 25, 2023

Toward the Theatrical Party

Irrealist Combat League

September 25, 2023

The Irrealist Combat League is for the construction of performances — for aberrant departures from the motions of everyday life, for the active imposition of proletarian will on space and time, for the enrichment of the political-imaginative capacity of the revolutionary class.

Irrealist Combat League

September 25, 2023

Adam Turl

December 1, 2022

Being with the Prophets

Adam Turl

December 1, 2022

Many of the best Marxist cultural interventions come from an intersection of Marxism and the Romantic/Gothic, either intentionally, or among Romantics moving into Marxism (even as they reject the Romantic),12 imparting a kind of working-class messianism. Because art cannot change the world — only the class can do that — this messianism often takes on a displaced character. Aaron to Moses. John the Baptist to Christ. Bodhisattva to Buddha.

Adam Turl

December 1, 2022

Featured

R. Faze

July 5, 2026

My Body Maps Political Forces

R. Faze

July 5, 2026

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.

R. Faze

July 5, 2026

Adam Marks

July 4, 2026

The Boredom Artist

Adam Marks

July 4, 2026

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.

Adam Marks

July 4, 2026

Adam Marks

July 3, 2026

Lucky Day in Hell

Adam Marks

July 3, 2026

“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…?”

Adam Marks

July 3, 2026

R. Faze

April 23, 2025

My Body's Claims, Verified

R. Faze

April 23, 2025

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.

R. Faze

April 23, 2025

Featured

December 1, 2025

Locust Radio Ep. 31 - Lucky 13

December 1, 2025

In Locust Radio 31, Tish and Adam read poems from the forthcoming issue, discuss Trumpism and art in Venice, and try to unpack the editorial for Locust Review 13. Tish and Adam also listen to the song “Dortn” by Sister Wife Sex Strike.

December 1, 2025

May 3, 2025

Locust Radio Ep. 30 - Evicted from Heaven and Earth

May 3, 2025

In this book, Adam traces the haunted landscapes left behind by capital—abandoned factories, broken promises, digital ghosts—and asks what it means to make art in a world where both Heaven and Earth seem to have shut their doors. It’s part art theory, part manifesto, part séance. And in true Locust Radio fashion, it’s not just a critique—it’s a search for openings.

May 3, 2025

November 14, 2024

Locust Radio Ep. 29 - Dead Bees on Hot Cement

November 14, 2024

In this episode of Locust Radio, Adam Turl interviews R. Faze, author of the My Body series published in Locust Review. This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with Locust members and collaborators on contemporary artistic strategies.

November 14, 2024

September 29, 2024

Locust Radio Ep. 28 - Anupam Roy + Irrealist Expressionism

September 29, 2024

In episode 28 of Locust Radio, Adam Turl is joined by Anupam Roy – an artist based in Delhi and member of the Locust Collective. This episode is part of a series of interviews of current and former Locust Collective members and contributors. It is being conducted as research for a future text by Adam Turl on the conceptual and aesthetic strategies of the collective in the context of a cybernetic Anthropocene.

September 29, 2024