Locust Review will be unapologetically socialist and irrealist. We reject the framework of “capitalist realism” that has infected every aspect of our culture, producing cynical aesthetics and narratives, projecting the “morality” of exploitation into daily life as well as forward and backward through time. This “realism,” its constant viral imagery, its “prestige” television shows, its banality, tokenism and zombie formalism, is little more than an apologetics for social terror and the daily traumas inflicted on working and oppressed people.

We propose what we and other radical thinkers have called critical irrealism. Irrealism is a broad tradition encompassing horror, surrealism, fantasy, conceptualism, speculative fiction, situationism and many other “non-realist” styles and movements.

Critical irrealism emphasizes the alterity, the otherworldliness, of these styles to discover a radical truth living in the cracks of late capitalism. The surrealists might have called this the “dream image.” Indian communist artist Anupam Roy (featured in our first issue) calls it “the real image.” Whatever it might be called, we see it as corresponding more closely with how people experience and interact with a world at once hyper-connected and alienated while threatened with really-existing catastrophe.

Socialist Realism, in the contemporary context, tends to assume a non-existent “normal” working-class. The working-class is weird. There is no normal to appeal to. Critical irrealism assumes a working-class that contains within itself varied and queer multitudes. It assumes the gravediggers of capitalism to be a chaotic jumble. And that each individual gravedigger contains within them an entire universe.

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We invite you to join us in this endeavor. Our Patreon is currently live for subscribers to join and donate, as are our Facebook and Instagram. If you are interested in submitting work, or supporting us in any way, we hope you’ll reach out to us at locust.review@gmail.com.

Above all, we hope that you’ll find some meaning in dissecting the absurdities before us as we explore the gravediggers’ multiverse.

Sincerely,

The Locust Arts + Letters Collective



