The following editorial is from Locust Review #5 and was written in the late Spring and very early Summer of 2021.
TWISTED GAS MASK. ACRYLIC FIBER (2020). AILENE PASCO
COINCIDENCE OFTEN illuminates a great deal about a historical moment. Several months into the pandemic, one of our editors submitted a poem to Locust Review with the title “Two Minutes Past Midnight.” Another editor replied that they had been working on something with almost the exact same title. Both had, apparently, been preoccupied with the way in which apocalyptic collapse had been made tangible again: the Cold War’s Doomsday Clock suddenly remade relevant. Days later, yet another member of our collective stepped in to say that they too had a poem in the works ruminating on the possibility of the world’s end.
It isn’t difficult to see why, as cases of Covid-19 continued to climb, without any meaningful social safety net to catch most of us, and with gun-toting fascists demanding that economies be reopened whatever the cost, these were our concerns.
If the quote often mistakenly attributed to Fredric Jameson — “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” — had become trite before Covid 19, we suddenly no longer had to imagine. Apocalypse had become tangible. You could witness it, even touch it.
Think, for example, of Texas. As winter storm Uri knocked out power, heat, and even water for hundreds of thousands of working people, the utilities for the state’s office buildings and commercial district were almost entirely unaffected.
The infamous photos of Ted Cruz jetting to Cancun easily inspired outrage, but they were also emblematic of the attitude of the state’s entire ruling class. For the bourgeoisie, disaster can always be avoided in various private Elysiums.
For the working-class there is little escape. Two of our editors who live along Texas’ coastal bend — Leslie Lea and Mike Linaweaver — described the Texas disaster as a “slow motion apocalypse.”
Hence the title of this issue of Locust Review.
LIKE THE myriad addictions it fosters, capitalist realism has no endgame other than disaster. When more and more disasters are reached — in the form of personal catastrophe, a continent on fire, a city underwater, a state without water and electricity, a plague uncontrolled, a planet on the verge of ecological catastrophe — capitalist realism can only shrug (and hone new forms of disaster capitalism).
While the representatives of the political center in the Biden administration has offered some ameliorative aid above and beyond recent neoliberal logics — the extension of unemployment benefits, etc. — these palliatives are notable mostly in comparison to the overall paucity of bourgeois imagination.
Much of this aid is set to expire. The eviction bans are being overturned. The petit-bourgeois shopkeepers complain that no one wants to work for poverty wages. Politicians are ready to push millions into precarious labor. Essential workers are no longer considered heroes in the popular presentations. They have become “lazy.”
Of course, millions of laid-off US workers got a slight taste of relative freedom. Here and there working-class poets got to be poets. Here and there working-class artists got to be artists. Here and there working-class parents got to see their children. Here and there, working-class people got a chance to rest. This is, to the middle-class wretch, the greatest effrontery, and we will see how these conflicted expectations unfold in the coming months.
At the end of the day, however, capitalist realism feeds the capitalist death cult. As we write this, our comrades in India are facing the brunt of the plague. The nationalist and racist US media wants to pretend the pandemic is drawing to a close. But there are dozens of countries that have not seen a single dose of vaccine. Hundreds of thousands get sick each day. Thousands die.
Apocalyptic images and narratives — at one time a mainstay of left critique — had already evolved into conditioning mythologies; preparations for what capitalism was going to bring us.
Comrades from Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), many of whom are now passed, would often remark on a soldier’s realization that they were an occupying army opposing a popular resistance movement. The VVAW comrades would say there were two ways that GIs would process this realization.
They could switch sides and support the National Liberation Front in whatever way they could. Comrades from VVAW toured North Vietnam and put themselves on the front lines of the US anti-war struggle. Rank-and-file anti-war GI publications spread throughout the military. Officers were fragged — killed — by their own men. Soldiers sent on “search and destroy” missions would avoid the enemy, signaling their solidarity with the Vietnamese cause by wearing peace signs or other symbols. By the end of the war, the US military was in shambles.
But there was another response. Soldiers could embrace their role as an exterminator for the empire, embrace the atrocities and embody them, relish the murder of children and peasants.
A similar choice faces millions of people as capitalist realism falters — as the slow motion apocalypse gains strength: A choice between solidarity in the face of unimaginable catastrophe or joining in the parade of peril — signing up to be an agent of the apocalyptic.
Our side wants to pull the emergency brake, do whatever we can to stop the unfolding “slow-motion apocalypse.” The other side is constructing a twilight death cult. Despite (or partly because of) an oft-professed religiosity, they thrill at the prospect of becoming the beast’s servants.
Of course these choices are conditioned — but not predetermined — by social class, race, gender, nationality, and identity. But they are also conditioned by capitalist realism’s assault on our imaginations.
To rebuild the emancipatory imagination, we submit counter-proposals against the capitalist death cult; digging into the primordial social-existential nature of species-being.
SOCIAL RESURRECTION TASK-PRINTS. DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE AUGMENTED WITH COTTON, ASH + PAINT, HANGING ON CLOTHESLINES (2021). ADAM TURL + TISH TURL. BORNAGAINLABOR.COM
AGAINST THE capitalist death cult we propose a communist resurrection cult.
We also propose other things. And we don’t actually propose a restrictive and abusive cult form of organizing. In fact, we generally support the opposite — an open and fully democratic revolutionary organizing. But we also propose a communist resurrection cult — retaining the word “cult” for a kind of combative symmetry and transgressive attitude toward capitalist rationality.
This exposition begins at the crossroads of Russian Cosmism and the October Revolution; a radical imaginary cut short by the Stalinist Thermidor.
The esoteric worldview of Russian Cosmism was first articulated by the 19th century Moscow librarian Nikolai Fedorov. He believed that humanity should unite around the goal of abolishing death and resurrecting all lost generations; envisioning that this would be achieved by a fusion of art and science, wherein art, as the recorded fragments of past human performance, would aid science in identifying and preserving those who had been lost.
Fedorov called this the philosophy of the Common Task.
To implement the Common Task Fedorov believed that space travel was necessary. The particles of the longtime dead, he reasoned, had spread like cosmic dust across the universe. That material would have to be found in order to resurrect the ancestors. Moreover, once death was abolished, the flowering of an immortal humanity would be too great for a single world.
Fedorov rarely wrote down his ideas, preferring to hold court with intellectuals and artists in his Moscow library, including Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. After his death in 1903, his followers published his work. It found reception among a certain layer of scientists, writers, artists, Bolsheviks, and anarchists.
Nikolai Fedorov believed the human race had been “bewitched,” as George Young writes, and it needed “to be awakened by a higher magic.” The October Revolution of 1917 seemed to unleash a kind of social magic, an elixir of freed imagination.
Just as Red Guards sacked the Winter Palace when provisional ministers fled, the academicians of Russian art ran away and were replaced by avant-gardes sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause.
Among them was the painter, Kazimir Malevich, who applied cosmist ideals to abstract color shapes, meant to invoke the vast cosmos, both as a real and spiritual space, a cosmos that revolution had seemingly put into an imagined reach.
Vladimir Tatlin’s plans and scale models for an enormous Monument to the Third International are widely known. Less known is that this building, meant to house the Soviet government, would have moved cyclically to track the movements of the spheres.
Cosmist exhibitions were held across Russia, drawing tens of thousands of people, mixing the philosophy of the Common Task with hard science. There were public discussions on interstellar travel in popular magazines that prefigured subjects like the Fermi Paradox. Cosmists lectured factory workers and old-age pensioners, emphasizing to the latter the benefits of reduced gravity.
An anarchist cosmist movement — called Biocosmism — was organized after October, supporting the Soviet government while calling for its revolutionary energies to be directed toward immortality, resurrection, and space travel.
The long-time Bolshevik, Alexander Bogdanov, a medical doctor and science fiction (SF) writer, was influenced by cosmism. As a doctor he was a pioneer in blood transfusions; doing his part to practically contribute to the Common Task. In 1928, after sharing blood with a patient sick with malaria and tuberculosis he fell ill and died himself. The patient was saved.
In 1908 Bogdanov published the first Bolshevik SF novel, Red Star, projecting onto the surface of Mars a communist utopia. In his 1912 short story, “Immortality Day,” Bogdanov describes a future interplanetary communist society that has achieved immortality.
“One thousand years have passed since the day the genius chemist Fride invented a formula for physiological immunity. Injecting the formula into the bloodstream renewed the body’s tissues and sustained its eternal blossoming youth.
Bogdanov’s immortal Fride has grown restless. He has visited countless worlds, mastered various artistic practices, explored new scientific avenues, visited his many descendants, and went through several marriages that lasted decades. Fride wants to know the one thing immortality will not let him know — death. Eventually he kills himself, taking care to do so in a manner that he cannot be resurrected again.
In this way the death of Fride — the creator of immortality — prefigures Bogdanov’s own death. Moses doesn’t get to stay in the promised land.
Bogdanov’s pivots with and against the Common Task express the liberatory and irrealist potential of cosmism. Bogdanov didn’t just want immortality and communism, he wanted everyone to experience equality and immortality as completely free subjects.
When Fride has exhausted his subjectivity he is, in Bogdanov’s mind, free to go as he wishes. For Federov there was no question. Everyone must become immortal. For Bogdanov everyone has the right, but not the obligation, to immortality.
THIS EXPOSITION about the intersection of cosmism and Marxism is offered as a wedge of imaginary potential.
Today, too many would-be Bolsheviks and social democrats alike paint communism in drab colors. But in the early days of the workers revolution, even amidst civil war, hunger, and disease, revolutionary imaginations opened like flowers to the sun.
The idea of salvaging past generations is not alien to Marxism. Walter Benjamin incorporated the theological concept of apokatastasis — the redemption of lost souls — into Marxism when he proposed that the revolutionary generation redeemed all previous generations of the exploited and oppressed.
More bluntly, is it not a peculiar madness to disbelieve even the possibility of communist resurrection while tacitly accepting capitalism’s slow motion apocalypse?
A Communist Resurrection Cult holds that the martyrs — Communards, Black Panthers, Spartakusbund — all live on, not just as abstract symbols, but in potentiality and actuality. Beyond the known martyrs, every lost worker, exploited peasant, slave, every victim of colonialism and imperialism, every murdered woman and queer person, every single person, lives on.
They wait for the revolutionary generation.
WEST BENGAL WALL WRITING. FROM LATE MARCH THROUGH APRIL A NUMBER OF COMRADES IN WEST BENGAL PRODUCED SEVERAL MURALS/WALL-WRITINGS AS PART OF THE CAMPAIGN FOR THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA MARXIST-LENINIST LIBERATION DURING STATE ELECTIONS. (2021).
THE LOCUST Arts & Letters Collective (LALC) has gone through a great amount of growth over the past year, both in membership and the number of projects in our wheelhouse.
We are, of course, thrilled for our horizons to be expanding so quickly. We’ve branched from the publication of art, poetry and fiction into the worlds of audio and video. We have launched an annual theoretical publication called Imago, which subscribers should be receiving around the same time as this issue of Locust, intended to better unpack questions around critical irrealism and the radical weird. We hope that “real life” exhibitions and performances are on the horizon.
One of the reasons we are so pleased that the Locust project has grown so quickly is because, if there is any hope to stop this slow motion apocalypse, it will come from an upsurge that incorporates the massive range of lives and experiences of this planet’s working, poor, and oppressed.
Today’s proletariat is larger and more diverse than it has ever been, which means that our visions of liberation have to be bigger, grander, more multifaceted and intricate than ever.
The previous exposition of Bolshevik-Cosmism is just one of many thousands of imaginaries that inform our irrealist project. There are as many potential critical irrealist imaginaries as there are workers to create them.
Grasping this differentiated totality is one of the aims behind the mission and aesthetic approach of our collective. And so, while this issue does include work from other contributors, we have decided to dedicate a large part of this edition to showcasing LALC comrades.
It is, as with everything under the Locust ambit, something of an experiment, an attempt to simulate the installation and poetry reading on the page even as we try to make you, the reader, incredibly aware that there is no simulation actually happening here.
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