After reading the discussion in response to Oleander Sārameyas the Younger’s essay on the failure of nonprofit book publishing, I found myself torn between Nicolas D Villarreal’s sober and unsentimental evaluation of the direction the Left should take toward publishing and Ali C’s heartfelt appeal to grassroots and collective efforts toward creating a more ethical publishing system here and now.

Those who have read my writing, or have worked alongside me in organizing, know that I am generally much closer to the position Villarreal articulates, with a deep commitment to a defense of efficiency and economizing as important elements of proletarian struggle against the owning class, as well as a rejection of petty bourgeois ideology on the left. But I think that Villarreal too quickly dismisses Ali C’s example of a hand-stitched binding as untenable and anything more than a petty bourgeois luxury.

Villarreal is correct to argue that leftist authors, who seek to reach as wide an audience as possible to agitate and educate the working class and other progressive elements, ought to take advantage of the best avenues for this. Small bespoke publishers cannot, and will not, replace institutional publishing, and it does not make sense to cut ourselves off from social infrastructure, even if it is run according to principles opposed to our own.

However, Villarreal elides the fact that relying on these channels of distribution themselves pose dangers. It is not fear mongering to worry about potential censorship, especially given social media environments have already turned extremely hostile to the distribution of socialist and anti-imperialist messages. This has a variety of causes, and has taken many different forms, but the point remains that Amazon could turn off the taps at any point to content that they, or an increasingly illiberal government, deems politically incorrect. And as we become more and more dependent on these distribution channels, our shared capacity for producing outside of them atrophies. It remains important to recruit and maintain some level of capacity for pivoting to a potential future where our access to mainstream distribution channels becomes more limited. I can’t think of any feasible means to do so except as a second-order effect of maintaining some kind of niche independent press ecosystem.

For better or worse, we need effective independent publishing. This can and will take many forms, from winning over sympathetic editors at medium-sized presses who are willing to publish socialist content, artisan bespoke publishers whose craft serves a political statement of the sort Ali C so admires, and even small groups at the kitchen table assembling Xerox-printed and saddle-stitched pamphlets ripped from marxists.org to distribute in person and online. Each of these, just like using corporate print-on-demand distribution, serves a different niche.

An important concept in the business world that is worth bearing in mind is “market segmentation.” Commodities, like books, are inherently differentiated by quality. Sometimes these qualities do not merit significant consideration beyond the consumer’s evaluation at the store, like the level of ripeness of a fruit for instance. But other times, different qualities of a commodity correspond to distinct use-values or fulfill different niches. A truck with a full sized pickup bed serves a different function and niche than a truck with a lift and an extended cab. Market segmentation often relies on marketers successfully educating (or manipulating depending on your perspective) the consumer on the importance of the differences and how one product or another will better satisfy their demand.

When it is successful, market segmentation generally allows for a greater realization of socially necessary labor time embedded in higher quality or bespoke products. A hyper-precision machined rotor takes much more skilled labor, which embodies a greater quantum of SNLT, than a mass market rotor which looks identical to the untrained eye. The former can fetch a far higher premium from aerospace buyers than the latter. The same is true for bespoke, high quality, books.

Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher, famously said ‘the medium is the message.’ That is, the form communication occurs in, whether audio-visual, print, verbal, and more narrowly within these channels, has an impact on the way the message is both structured and processed. Moreover, the medium itself is inherently a communication. To make this more concrete and specific to the discussion of publishing, book covers, typesetting, and other elements of publishing have an impact on readers that includes both the effective communication of vibes as well as just plain ease and accessibility of reading. I cannot tell you how many print-on-demand books from Amazon I have acquired that were terribly formatted and borderline unreadable. This matters. A beautiful and pleasurable reading experience, even if the underlying formal elements producing it are not understood, elevates a text and facilitates political content all the better.

Now this does not mean that the answer is for those of us connected to publishing on the left to become Luddites, smash our digital Thinking Machines, and spend our time lovingly hand making books so that the handful of workers we can reach will be sufficiently edified. In fact, many tools like the book layout software Atticus automate a good deal of work that used to take a lot of skill and produce quality results. Likewise, tools such as InDesign have already long removed so much painstaking work. But it still takes talented and skilled people, motivated because of their love of the work, to successfully produce books that make reading better.

Will these more expensive books that work better as books replace mass market publishing? No. But there is also a gradient in which skilled publishing professionals remain necessary to produce books that are better than a lot of what we get now, even as they use institutional publishing channels to do so. But also, why shouldn’t we promote lovingly produced editions of communist texts? I couldn’t think of a warmer and more well received gesture than being gifted a beautiful copy of Capital by a comrade (hint hint: fellow Cosmonaut staff) I think ultimately, Villarreal is mistaken to try to pose an opposition within the wide spectrum of kinds of publishing worth promoting and advocating for within the socialist movement.

Both of the comrades who have weighed in thus far have valuable points that are worth considering. But neither cancels the other out.

In solidarity,

-A. Davenport