Background image: Antifascist partisans in Italy in 1945.
When we started Locust Review two of our editors lived in Las Vegas. They gambled maybe thirty dollars in the three years they lived there; mostly at the airport waiting for flights back east. But they saw throngs of tourists lose millions at the resorts, and working-class addicts would drop a thousand dollars in a night on a gas station slot machine.
Of course, sometimes folks hit the jackpot. Just enough to keep the ethos of possibility alive. But probability, in aggregate, trumps possibility.
On the one hand Las Vegas burns away the secondary ideologies of capitalism. Notions of family, sentimentality, piety, culture, and philosophy are stripped down to cold cash relations. On the other hand Las Vegas performs a central ideological conceit of capitalism. The feeling that all that stands between you and the ruling-class is numbers and luck.
A failing casino, however, will rewrite the rules even more. The perception of fair play no longer matters. The casino is going bust anyway.
In India, Modi’s national identification scheme will, in addition to persecuting Muslims and minorities, change the math on upcoming elections. Similarly, in the US, MAGA seeks to make voting harder, gerrymander congressional districts into absurd abstractions -- a one hundred seat Republican house majority (!) -- and put ICE thugs and soldiers on the streets to intimidate voters. As Ruha Benjamin notes of racism and computer code, fascism finds a friend in a perverse kind of mathematics.
The “prosperity gospel” -- with roots in pentecostalism -- holds that faith alone can make you rich. This gospel festered among speculative prospectors in Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Many of them died looking for often toxic rare minerals. But a not insignificant minority became wealthy. Like many European immigrants on the forefront of US colonial settler expansion, the “gamble” paid off. Former peasants, workers and third-born aristocratic children joined the ranks of the American bourgeois.
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. As an aside, this has been a huge blow to the Las Vegas tourism industry, as international gamblers have decided a week of debauchery isn’t worth the risk of being locked in one of Trump’s gulags.
Similar dynamics are underway in other countries.
The working-class and the left, however, have mostly lost our nerve to bet -- not in the capitalist casino; it is still full of our siblings. But lost our faith in possibility. It seems we’ve misplaced the radical potential of the working-class and social rupture. We’ lost the revolutionary Marxist inversion of the capitalist wager -- as Walter Benjamin might have put it.
The left and working-class, including its artists, must relearn to gamble on class consciousness, class struggle, and revolution. There’s no playing it safe anymore. Realism is no longer realistic.
Locust Review is seeking submissions for our thirteenth issue, “Lucky 13,” including visual art, non-fiction, theory, reviews, fiction, poetry, and more. The deadline for submissions is October 31st. Submissions should be forwarded to editors@locustreview.com.
A note on submission guidelines: All images should be jpegs -- at least 300 dpi and at least eight inches at their widest dimension. Images should be submitted with the full name of the artist, the title of the work, media, and date. Text files need to be submitted as either word documents or google docs. Submitted fiction should be no more than 3,500 words (per story). Submitted poetry should be no more than three pages (for each poem). Non-fiction and theory should be less than 3,500 words, and reviews should be no more than 2,500 words. Due to the volume of submissions we cannot respond to all those who submit work.
Locust will not accept AI generated images and text.
Subscribe to Locust Review for as little as $1 a month.
Submit work to Locust Review by e-mailing us at locust.review@gmail.com.