What Happened to Repeater?

And how what happened to my book was exactly what the book warned about

As you probably already know, a book I wrote — Here Be Monsters: How to Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other — was published in September of 2023 by Repeater Books. That book uses the archetype of monsters to discuss recent failures of leftism and to propose a path beyond those failures.

Monsters were a very useful way of thinking about these recent failures. Deriving from the Latin word that means “to show,” they were originally seen as divine warnings or supernatural signals that something had gone out of balance. And rather than something to fight or destroy, a monster was a call for healing, a restoration of right relationship between humans and each other and especially humans with the rest of the world.

I’ve always thought this fact to be the underlying truth informing Nietzsche’s admonishment, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” But there’s also another saying I’d hear often as a kid in rural Appalachia that describes the problem just as well:

“Don’t wrestle with a pig. You’ll both get dirty, and the pig will like it.”

Search the internet, and you’ll find the quote attributed to George Bernard Shaw. That presents a bit of a problem, though, as none of the rural “hicks” I learned it from seemed likely to have ever read Shaw’s works. Sure, maybe the phrase had spread through media over the years and then became adopted as a folk saying. But it’s just as likely that Shaw himself heard it elsewhere, and then was mistakenly assumed — by readers who’d not lived on farms — to have come up with it on his own.

Transmission of knowledge — especially of truisms — is quite a difficult mechanism to trace. The genealogy of ideas is not something most of us have the time to think about, let alone the skills or interest to pursue. We inherit our sense of the world and what is correct from everything around us, and rarely give thought to whether those conclusions are correct — or even our own.

That is one of the reasons I wrote Here Be Monsters. Over more than two decades of engagement in leftist organizing and politics, I’d encountered countless ideas, beliefs, and conclusions which many — including myself — falsely believed to be foundational to leftism. But the more I chased down the history of these ideas, the more I found this not to be the case.

In fact, what was increasingly claimed to be “leftist” looked much more like the very things that leftists — by which I mean anti-capitalists — had previously set themselves out to fight. This was especially true in regard to many Anglo-American “leftist” obsessions about identity, a category that has come to completely displace earlier beliefs about economic exploitation and class struggle.

This isn’t to say that I believe there’s any such thing as a “pure” leftism. The left/right dichotomy — an inheritance passed down to us from a seating arrangement in French parliamentary meetings — is not something I’ve any interest in defending, let alone policing. Instead, what interests me most is how a thriving, self-aware, and coherent movement against capitalism and the world it creates might not only arise but also succeed.

To get to such a point, however, we’ll need to sort out these beliefs and test them against material reality. Especially, we must ask if those beliefs really have the potential to liberate people, or if — as we’ve often seen — they instead feed back into the very same problems capitalism has caused.

Now, of course, I’ve nothing against actual pigs. I’ve used the icon of the boar — a sacred animal associated with the goddesses Arduinna and Freyja — for this Substack since its inception. And I’ve always disliked hearing cops referred to as “pigs,” since none of the actual pigs I’ve known give much attention to enforcing laws.

But certainly, I’ve wrestled with metaphorical pigs in my life, and found that folk saying to be quite true. Engaging with the sorts of people for whom slinging mud is a default mode of social relating results in exactly what you might think it does. You both get dirty, they really like it, and it’s absolutely not worth your time.

Having learned my lesson years ago, I made the decision not to wrestle any of these metaphorical pigs during the writing and publication of Here Be Monsters. While I certainly knew my book wouldn’t be well-received by some, I committed myself to not arguing with them.

This might not have served me as well as I had hoped, as it took me quite some time to then understand a cascading series of publicity problems the book encountered even before it was published. And I still don’t fully understand everything that happened, nor do I think I ever will. But it’s worth telling you as much as I discovered since it has as much to do with the larger failures of “leftism” as it does with my book.

Problems began before the publication of the book. A friend had alerted me to people expressing outrage that Repeater would publish me.¹ As I didn’t know any of these people personally and hadn’t heard of any them before, this didn’t seem at first much worth my attention.

But then, that friend also pointed out that they were Repeater authors with books slated for publication around the same time as mine,² and so I followed up. Turned out, though, I’d been pre-emptively blocked from viewing the social media accounts of two of them, so there was no way I could initiate a discussion about their concerns.

I brought this up to Tariq Goddard, then the acting director of Repeater Books. He assured me that this wasn’t much for me to worry about, but warned me not to write anything else “triumphant” about my book’s impending publication so as not to irritate them. ³

Unfortunately, these social media attacks were being written by authors who also worked for Repeater Books in peripheral roles. In fact, one of them had been the copy editor for my book, which explained the extremely argumentative and condescending tone of the notes I’d received on the text.⁴

However, Tariq Goddard assured me that there was nothing I should really worry about. So, I didn’t, and eagerly prepared for the book’s release event in London.

I’m a bit naive sometimes. I have a tendency to assume the best in people, as it’s quite tiring to instead assume the worst. Even when malevolence is a more likely explanation for certain actions, I regardless default first to ineptitude or ignorance. Thus, other problems that might have alarmed others a lot sooner remained just mere curiosities to me until I had to seriously consider the darker possibility.

A short list of those circumstances will suffice to show how I probably missed something larger:

• Other Repeater authors received their twenty author copies months before their title’s release date. I didn’t. In fact, I received mine after the book’s release, too late to use for local release events, and only after I repeatedly begged Repeater staff to send them.

• I kept offering to help arrange release events for Here Be Monsters, and also offered to co-ordinate social media advertising through my own networks (including spending my own money to help with early promotion). These offers were repeatedly dismissed or ignored, and potential events were not followed up on.

• Other books were heavily promoted on Repeater’s social media channels, while mine received scant mention.

• I provided the publicists with a list of writers and podcast hosts to be sent promotional copies. None of these people I followed up with received promotional copies.

These were early signs I maybe shouldn’t have ignored, but you can also see how limited time, crossed-communication, or incompetence could just as easily sufficed as explanations. And some of these might actually have been due to financial issues at Repeater, an underlying matter that became more apparent a few months later.

I did, however, get offered a spot to speak at the London Radical Bookfair in December of 2023. This was really damn exciting, and I’d of course said yes. As it would cost me money to travel there, I requested a travel offset but was initially offered an amount that wouldn’t even pay for the cheapest possible Ryanair flight there and back.⁵ Tariq Goddard eventually agreed to increase this a bit more, though he complained that he was paying for a lot of travel by other authors at the same time.

Unfortunately, I learned at the London Radical Bookfair that travel expenses weren’t the only place Repeater’s finances seemed a bit strange.

The London Radical Bookfair is a massive event, with a large central hall crowded with booksellers and publishers. Upon arriving, I had to circle the hall twice before I finally found the Repeater/Zer0 table. That’s not just because the book area was so big, though. Instead, it was because there was nothing announcing the table except a hastily scrawled sheet of A4 paper.

To get a sense of what this was like, consider this photo, and imagine that I’m standing in front of a table with hardly any books and nothing telling those people which publisher created those books.

There were very few copies of my book, and I didn’t ask if that was because they’d already sold by the time I arrived or if the publicist had just brought fewer of them than he had of other recent releases. But what I can tell you is that it seemed quite tragic that none of the forty people who came for my speaking event could purchase a copy of my book afterward — because they were already gone.

Maybe Repeater really couldn’t afford to provide more copies for sale or to have something resembling a sign for the table. Or maybe the publicist was hungover, or just inept. Much later, though, I was told (by Tariq Goddard) that the publicist didn’t agree with my book. So, maybe he just didn’t want to sell many of them.

That might also explain this next part. After my speaking event, I was approached by the workers and owners of several bookstores wanting to arrange further events. I referred them to the publicist, who never followed up with them.⁶

Since then, I learned that one of the aforementioned Repeater authors who was highly antagonistic about my book was also responsible for the social media of Repeater. This might explain why I needed to repeatedly beg for the photos I’d taken from the event to be added to the social media feeds, a request that was only honored when I CC’d in other Repeater staff to my requests.

And this is where malevolence, rather than ineptitude or financial problems, might be an equally adequate explanation for some of these problems. The YouTube channel for Repeater/Zer0, with 90,000 subscribers, was being run by some of the same authors who weren’t happy about my book being published. That’s why none of the video interviews I did with fellow Repeater authors Dan Evans, Anthony Galluzzo, and Daniel Tutt were republished there. In fact, I was told directly by Tariq that those running the channel would never consent to anything related to me or the book appearing there. I was also told that they — rather than Repeater — would have the final decision on whether or not to promote any review, interview, or planned event related to Here Be Monsters on Repeater’s social media channels.⁷

I did — silly me — seek to initiate a conversation with these antagonists. Since they’d all blocked me from their social media platforms (despite me never having any interaction with them before or even ever mentioning them), I asked Tariq — who was currently vacationing with one of them — to ask for this on my behalf.

No requested conversation ever happened, and Tariq’s explanation for this changed several times. First, he told me it was a bad idea, and then told me that some might be open to it privately, and then, months later, told me, no — they absolutely would not under any circumstances have any kind of conversation with me. The words he used for that last bit during a video conference, that they’d consider it “speaking with the enemy,” still stick with me.

Now, since this all happened, Repeater itself has gone through an upheaval. Tariq Goddard left without public explanation, which has of course caused relentless matters of conjecture. Some insinuated it was because the owner of Repeater, Watkins Media, fired Goddard for his pro-Palestinian beliefs, or that Tariq left because of pressure to do so based on those beliefs.

In fact, a strange article, published anonymously on Substack, purports the very thing:

The question is, what happened? Why would Goddard leave his second successful imprint? Was there some dispute with the ownership? At the end of the day, wee (sic) can only speculate, but we believe we have an idea.

One word: Palestine.

That article then goes on to assert a conspiracy theory asserting that the Jewish owner’s connection to an Israeli business is what led to Goddard’s departure.

There are a few things to note about this article. First of all, a statement called “Publishers for Palestine,” spearheaded by Verso, was initially signed by Repeater and then was unsigned. Some have used this as proof that Tariq was pushed out because of his pro-Palestine stance, but this seems very unlikely. I’ve heard from several sources that the signature was initially Tariq’s decision, but a later staff vote rescinded this. Regardless of how or why this change happened, the statement itself was more an empty gesture than anything that actually would have changed the conditions for Palestinians. And, despite my pro-Palestinian stance and many published criticisms of Zionism⁸, I refused to sign it on behalf of myself or the leftist publisher I directed.⁹

Secondly, the article is quite suspicious. The anonymous author shows no activity prior to publishing the conspiracy theory, and only published one other piece — at 450 words¹⁰ — the next day with no further activity. And there’s a third strange matter. The names of those who signed up to follow the author (there are less than twenty of them) include some people peripherally involved with Tariq or Repeater.

Now, while it’s impossible to say for certain, there doesn’t seem to be any legitimate proof that Tariq was pushed out for political reasons. And if you know anything about publishing, or if you’ve got any business sense at all, you’d suspect this story about political differences over Palestine is just a cover-up for something else.

That something else? Probably financial problems:

“Repeater Books has recently suspended commissions as it assess the future viability of the imprint. According to my conversation with the current owner of the press, Repeater has accrued losses of approximately £200,000 annually in recent years. While Repeater Books will likely and hopefully survive this financial crisis, behind the scenes of the press there have been reports of highly censorial practices, certain authors—whom I will not name—have reported experiences of blatant sabotage of their book after it was published, refusal to promote their work and refusal by the press to connect them to reviewers at other presses.”

Daniel Tutt, “A New Direction: For a Left Beyond Censorship and Control”

A publisher — whether a for-profit, a non-profit, or a workers’ collective — needs to promote the books it publishes, otherwise it will lose money and eventually shut down. And, as Daniel Tutt mentions, Repeater recently accrued losses of around £200,000 annually under Tariq Goddard’s management.

Now, I’m of course not privy to the inner financial workings of Repeater, but it should be obvious that Tariq Goddard was — at best — a poor manager of the Repeater imprint. My own experiences were not unusual: other authors have told me of public events where no books for sale were provided to the audience, multiple incidents of publicity events not being followed up on, shoddy copy editing and book production, and other signs of mismanagement or disorganization.¹¹ And also, quite a few of the authors at Repeater — primarily Marxists — have repeatedly been at the receiving end of social media smears from the same group paid to run Repeater’s social media platforms.

If you don’t promote and sell the books you publish, you’ll lose money. Judging from my own experience and those of a few other authors I’ve talked to, Repeater wasn’t promoting its books. Some of that could have been due to ineptitude, of course. But the censorious atmosphere Goddard encouraged probably contributed much more to this. Hiring out Repeater’s social media promotion to a small clique of narcissists who then used those platforms for self-promotion —while refusing to promote books from authors they saw as rivals¹² — certainly wasn’t the best business strategy.

All of this has been quite unfortunate. It was unfortunate for my book, of course, but it was much more unfortunate for Repeater and its many great authors.

Now that Tariq Goddard is no longer the head of Repeater, and now that many of the wreckers no longer get to block the promotion and publicity of Repeater titles, I greatly suspect Repeater will not just survive all this, but it will probably become much stronger.

That’s especially because there’s still a great editor there, Carl Neville. He’s a brilliant, kind, balanced, and wily sort, who, despite the restraints of his position, always assured me that I’d done everything right with the book. In fact, Carl often pushed back against some of the insanity, likely at great personal risk to himself. For instance, when Tariq gave me a list of places I wasn’t “allowed” to give interviews to,¹³ it was Carl who defended me.¹⁴

And despite all the many problems my book faced, I’ve absolutely no regrets about publishing Here Be Monsters with Repeater, and I’m deeply grateful they had asked me to do so.

After all, what happened to the book was exactly what the book warned about. In several chapters — especially the one on Vampires and in the interlude — I warned about the way leftist organizations are sabotaged and destroyed from within. That sabotage comes from several sources, but the two most destructive ones are ressentiment and a fear of confronting uncomfortable truths about leftist mistakes.

People overcome with ressentiment act like vampires in any group, draining the life and power of resistance movements while justifying their actions through social justice language. They’re the activists who attack other activists and launch public crusades to silence rivals, all to cover for their own sense of inadequacy, feelings of failure, and refusal to heal.¹⁵

While its antagonists wasted endless amounts of time decrying the danger of my book, they only gave more evidence that ressentiment and social justice identitarianism can only destroy, never create. Exactly like the vampires I discuss, they suck the blood out of any project of resistance — be that an entire movement or just a publisher — and can never be sated, only healed. They’re wreckers, and Repeater’s financial problems can certainly be at least partially blamed on Tariq Goddard’s cowardly placation of their adolescent tantrums.

Just as destructive, though, is the refusal to admit such things even happen. As Daniel Tutt writes, the larger issue of “left” publishing — and the left itself —still remains to be addressed. For more than a decade now, a loud but very small crowd of disaffected self-appointed elites has managed to shape what is allowed to be thought, spoken, and published under the ever-more-irrelevant category of “leftism.” But rather than functioning as a vanguard of the working class, they’ve only managed to push workers as far away as possible from any kind of anti-capitalist politics and instead into the waiting arms of authoritarian strongmen like Trump.

But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that engaging them on their terms, like wrestling with pigs, only gives them pleasure.¹⁶ Eventually, there may come a time when what remains of leftist organizing learns to recognize them as vampires and wreckers and finds ways to speak over them, rather than being cowed by them.

And to get to that point, we’ll need to insist, as Daniel Tutt does, that:

…market-driven left-liberal censorship must end. It is a form of practice that takes the worker to be an infant who cannot think for themselves.

We cannot fight capitalism by suppressing radical thought. Nor can we fight capitalism by fighting each other.

Again, I’m glad I wrote Here Be Monsters, and it will be re-released later this year in a new edition and under a new title. That edition will have quite a lot more material and a much better chance to work its magic in the world. But having witnessed the deep transformation of an important leftist publisher and the misfortunes of those who wasted endless effort trying to suppress it, I can only conclude the magic woven into its creation has already manifested its true purpose.

1. Being possibly unaware that Repeater had actually solicited me for the book.

2. This is an important detail. Much of the cancellation drive on the left seems to derive from the kind of attention scarcity created artificially by universities, and the proximity of my release to theirs likely galled them. However, every publisher knows that the sales of each title are synergistic and increase the sales of other titles released during the same period.

3. This was the first of many moments where I was given directives about how not to promote my book so to avoid offending, irritating, or enraging a group of people I’d never met and had no connection to.

4. Before final approval of the manuscript, I also received a demand to change certain things to conform to GLAAD’s standards for writing about gay, lesbian, trans, and other identities. According to GLAAD, I (as a gay man) am not “allowed” to describe myself as a homosexual, so I rejected this demand. Fortunately, the book’s chief editor, Carl Neville, fully supported my decision.

5. Tariq did increase this to an amount which allowed me to pay for the airfare, but not enough to get back directly home or to get even cheap accommodations for the night in London. I managed instead to find a way to fly back to a different city where hotels would be cheaper, and then I took a train back the next morning from there.

6. Thanks to my friend and one of the early endorsers of my book, Dougald Hine, I later learned that Unherd had also attempted to contact Repeater with the intention of inviting me to speak at one of their events. And guess what? I was never contacted by Repeater’s publicists about this, and so no invite was forwarded to me.

And really, regardless of what one thinks of Unherd, this was obviously a very large publicity event for the book that Repeater ignored — or even potentially suppressed.

7. There’s a long backstory on the power struggle over Repeater/Zer0’s YouTube channel. Short version is that the previous owner of Zer0 had initially refused to turn it over to Repeater after the sale. Thus, it’s quite ironic that those who took over its management then acted in the very same ways as the person they fought to replace.

Though I should also add: it’s actually possible that Goddard either encouraged this blacklisting or even directed it.

8. For example. And another example.

9. Verso’s involvement led to my decision, and the article smearing me on their blog late last year certainly hasn’t made me change my mind about the matter. Also, the statement was quite hypocritical, as quite a few of the initial signatures were from groups who actively censor and suppress Marxist critiques of social justice identitarianism.

10. And that second article, ironically, contains several “tells” which suggest it may have been written by AI…

11. Speaking of disorganization, I even received a panicked email from Tariq asking me a year after I’d sent my signed contract if I’d ever sent it. Just so you know how crazy this is, I’ve literally got a binder on my desk of every signed contract from every author I’ve published — and I am not a very organized person.

12. Incidentally, now that they’ve lost the stranglehold they had over what Repeater publishes and who Repeater promotes, they’ve shown themselves quite willing to maul the hand that fed them. At least one of them has loudly vowed never to publish with Repeater again, while others have increased their personal attacks on successful Repeater authors like Daniel Tutt.

13. Yes: this happened. Repeatedly. The way the conversations would go was endlessly frustrating. Tariq would tell me first that he had “no interest in censoring” me and also that “I won’t tell you where you cannot write.” Then, he told me that there were lines that, if I crossed, there would be unspecified “consequences.” The list of places included both Compact and Unherd, but Carl defended my right to write for Unherd.

14. Also, late last year, I met the deputy publisher for Watkins and therefore Repeater, Vicky Hartley, to get some clarity about what had happened with my book. Though she understandably didn’t divulge anything about Tariq Goddard’s departure, she did help me understand that the problems Here Be Monsters faced had nothing to do with anything I had done or with the book itself.

15. Repeater is hardly alone in its experience with them, but there’s certainly a tragic irony that the most celebrated critique of this behaviour was written by Mark Fisher — whose legacy Tariq Goddard claimed to continue.

16. Pro-tip for deeply frustrating a narcissist: write a very long public essay obliquely referencing them throughout without even once mentioning their name. :)