When we founded the publication in 2019, the core elaboration of Locust Review — as a Marxist journal of art and culture — was to put into opposition two key concepts: Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism and Michael Löwy’s idea of critical irrealism.
We had come to believe that the default cultural logic of neoliberalism and the political center had been capitalist realism, and that in response the cultural logic of working-class emancipation (socialism) ought to incorporate some kind of irrealism — speculative fiction, Surrealism, magical realism, absurdism, and other rejections of false rationality and capitalist “common sense.”
Capitalist realism, as outlined by Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative (Zero Press, 2009), argued that there was a widespread participatory prohibition of theory, rhetoric, cultural gestures, narratives, art, and politics that imagined beyond the logic of capital accumulation. This prohibition took hold with the defeats of the mass liberation movements of the long 1960s, and the “end of history” represented by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Capitalist realism was facilitated at the top of cultural and political institutions and media, but it was also reproduced in everyday life, with a material base in neoliberalism and the precarity of lean production.
Locust Review counterposed critical irrealism — which Michael Löwy sketched in his 2011 essay “A Moonlit Enchanted Night” — to that false realism. In a 2018 Red Wedge interview with Löwy, he “defined critical irrealism as an embrace of the non-realist as a way of criticizing reality.” Borrowing from Darko Suvin and China Miéville, we’ve related “criticism through alterity” to Bertolt Brecht’s concept of estrangement or alienation, of creating critical distance by the alternating employment and exposure of theatrical (or other cultural) tropes.
But what if capitalist realism — tied to the political center — is over? As the center continues to break — the floundering of the Democrats in the United States, Congress in India, Labour in the UK — it has been challenged by both the far-right and left — albeit by the former more successfully. 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? Thus the theme of Locust Review 14: Is Capitalist Realism Over?
We are looking, in particular, for essay-contributions on this exact question, of 1,000 to 3,500 words, as well as poetry contributions (up to three pages per poem), fiction (up to 3,000 words), and visual art submissions (300 dpi, at least eight inches on longest side, jpg format). Submissions should be sent to editors@locustreview.com by August 31st, 2026. Art submissions should include an image list with artists’ name, title of piece, media, and year of completion. Submitted reviews should be 1,000 to 2,000 words in length. Due to the volume of submissions we may not be able to respond individually to every correspondence.