Before we begin, I want to thank the hundreds of readers who have recently subscribed to my blog. This Substack was largely inactive until just over a month ago when I posted about the protracted struggles experienced by staff, authors, and others who worked for Repeater Books and Zer0 Books during its third iteration. My piece prompted others involved with various Watkins Media imprints to speak out about a series of events that unfolded following internal support of the Publishers for Palestine solidarity statement. Some had been previously unaware of the issue, while others had long reamined silent due to the precarity of their employment with the company.
In the ensuing weeks, a contingent of authors—well, mostly just two of them—have sought to muddle things by conflating the call for a boycott of Watkins Media with the alleged censorship of particular authors, whose books in fact either went to print or remain currently on course to hit the market. The resentments they harbor are indeed connected to the boycott—but only insofar as they’ve sought to align their grievances with broader narratives aimed at undermining the moral credibility of those leading the resistance. These distortions are manifest in the social media activity of Daniel Tutt in particular, who has been the most prominent voice angled against former Repeater employees, affiliated authors, and formerly partnered entities. His most recent post to date, for example, seeks to demonstrate that the imprints’ alleged censorial tendencies were evident in the wake of his collaboration with Sublation Media in March of 2023. There was near-unanimous condemnation of Tutt’s crossover among those connected to the imprints—for several reasons, but one stood out as glaringly obvious: the founders and editors of Repeater and Zer0 considered Doug Lain, host of Sublation Media, a “scab” for opportunistically taking the helm of Zer0 Books, an operation they had built but were forced to abandon in an act of resistance against the imprint’s former parent company. The new iteration of Zer0 was making a concerted effort to distance itself from Lain’s legacy and his politics; thus, to have presenters or authors who were active on the newly refurbished YouTube channel getting cozy with Sublation flew in the face of those trying to overcome the host of compromises, bad faith decisions, and ideological reversals that had come to define the fallout. It wasn’t merely a question of affiliation. It was seen as a betrayal of that which made the relaunch of the Zer0 Books and its pairing with Repeater possible. As I noted in my previous piece, Tutt’s abstract conception of censorship collapses things like the principled rejection of antagonistic values and affiliations into the same category as authoritarian speech suppression or its more strategic elisions. But all this has been thoroughly addressed in what you are about to read. In any case, like a bad sequel—or a “then as farce” moment—the late Zer0/Repeater 3.0 team has found itself confronting a similar form of opportunism and duplicitous subversion that afflicted their predecessors.
My prefatory notes and introduction have gone on long enough. Today, I’d like to share the work of the brilliant Mattie Colquhoun, also known as Xenogothic, whom many readers may already know. Mattie has been an indispensable figure in building an online archive and offering incisive commentary on the work of their former teacher, Mark Fisher. Their blog also features a wealth of essays and critiques on the accelerationist tendency, emerging from the early work of Fisher and others. You’ll also find extensive documentation of events that have unfolded at Repeater and Zer0 over the years. In the following piece, Mattie gathers the threads in the wake of these ongoing struggles. Please read their piece here or continue reading below.
Glutton for embarrassment Daniel Tutt has taken to his Substack again to deflect from the current boycott against Watkins Media for suppressing Palestinian solidarity, in order to cynically claim that there is another — apparently just as important — scandal engulfing (whatever is left of) the imprint. It hardly dignifies a response, especially because all of this feels so painfully repetitive, but also because it is an attempt to deter the momentum of something far more important. But since Tutt is once again publicly making dubious and unfounded claims, let’s get into it.
It’s about censorship again — censorship that Tutt claims came from Acid Horizon and myself in some capacity. But in what capacity I don’t know. I talked about this in February — in fact, what follows is nothing new from what I said back then, albeit edging into more and more detail, as Tutt very slowly catches up and find announces gotchas and convenient omissions, when most of this has been on record going back four years. FOUR YEARS.
Anyway, back in February, Tutt emailed staff at Repeater to try and force me to delete tweets about him or face reprisals (who’s meant to be the “censor” again?). These reprisals, as it turned out, were simply to publicise Rhyd Wildermuth’s hurt feelings.
Both Rhyd and Tutt’s claims are baseless and basically amount to some authors thinking some other authors are reactionaries — which they are. But he keeps trying to spin our principles into more than that (and, for what feels like the tenth time, fails embarrassingly).
Desperately reaching for some sort of gotcha, Tutt asks: “why would Repeater Books bring on leftist authors that the staff of the press disagreed with so vehemently that they would censor and sabotage their books?” The first part of that question is good, but the claims about censorship and sabotage remain completely unfounded. As usual, Tutt makes lots of paranoid leaps here, when really this is all very simple.
Nevertheless, let’s go over everything again, for the sake of (further) transparency and to once again show what an idiot he’s being.
When Watkins Media bought John Hunt Publishing (the original owner of Zer0 Books) in 2021, many — myself included — were elated. (Here’s a report written for this blog at the time.)
It is with this moment that Tutt begins his latest post, writing how “the individuals who’d later push the boycott letter in March 2025 were at the forefront of a sustained attempt to defame the authors who had written for Zer0 in the 2014-21 period.” But he betrays his ignorance here immediately, as although he suggests that my animosity towards Zer0 2.0 wasn’t shared by its founders — never mind other authors and readers, before any of us wrote a single embittered word — it very much was.
All the founding staff of Zer0 had left the imprint in 2014. Two years later, they set up Repeater. The founders cited irreconcilable differences with JHP in the few public announcements made about their divorce. Repeater founder Alex Niven, for instance, wrote at the time:
In late 2014 all of the editorial staff involved with the original foundation of Zero Books … left to found Repeater books, a means of continuing the Zero project away from the control of a disliked and unsympathetic parent company. In our eyes the current manifestation of Zero has absolutely nothing to do with our original project … The current editors of Zero are of course legally entitled to use the name and back catalogue as they see fit, but we should make crystal clear that they do so without the blessing and against the wishes of the people who actually founded Zero in the first place.
As far as everyone at Repeater was concerned, then, Zer0 was being run by scabs. They didn’t need me to “defame” them; they’d already publicly registered their distain. No one at all seemed to think very highly of them, outside their little network of “anti-woke” shitstirrers.
Zer0 2.0 — as I came to call it in 2021, to distinguish it from its first and third iterations — came into its own shortly after the death of Mark Fisher, as they leaned into their circumstantial ownership of his first two books to claim some sort of authority over the interpretation of his work — a now-familiar line that centres the Vampire Castle and nothing else; something that felt all the more cynical in light of Niven’s statement above.
It was largely in response to this bastardisation of Fisher’s work by the Zer0 scabs that I began the work I’ve become known for over the last 8 years or so, building out Fisher’s arguments in his “Acid Communism” essay and highlighting how a reductive focus on the Vampire Castle essay maligns everything he went on to produce afterwards, particularly his far more open and enthusiastic engagement with feminist politics and philosophy (which I wrote about here).
For this reason, mine was probably the loudest voice to celebrate the buyback of Repeater, but it was nonetheless part of a chorus of celebration heard across left-wing Twitter and the publishing world in general. No one liked them. Shortly thereafter, the imprint set about course-correcting (apparently) by removing the stain of reactionary “anti-woke” leftists who’d spent a few years pissing on Fisher’s legacy.
Adam C Jones and I wrote a lot about this at this time: about how Zer0 2.0’s public allegiances lay with a reactionary current in British politics, emerging out of the Revolutionary Communist Party — a party whose name is a blatant misnomer, similar to the MAGA communists of today; its alumni include Tory baroness Claire Fox and Frank Furedi, one of the founders of Sp!ked Online and the head of a Viktor Orbán-funded thinktank.
The links between the two factions were strong; Ashley Frawley, a prominent associate of Zer0 2.0, was working for Furedi’s thinktank, for example. No one was under any illusion that these people were leftists, no matter how they chose to define themselves.
When Acid Horizon (of which Adam is a member) became more involved with Repeater and Zer0 Books following the buyback, this seemed to be a tacit endorsement of the position we had advanced on our own platforms already. That position was transformed into a mantra that came to dominate discussions had by those of us who’d written about moving on from the buyback in 2021: “No platform to anyone associated with Sp!ked” (or Compact or any other stupid website like it). It’s a sentiment that everyone seemed to be on board with, given what Doug Lain and co. had done to tarnish the work of the original Zer0 team.
Tutt hates this, but I’ve addressed what’s dumb about his position before (in 2023, for instance — I can’t believe he’s still banging on about it). He is the defender of a “post-left” — but nonetheless ostensibly liberal — marketplace of ideas, in which he believes that anyone with some politics and a backbone is a censorious authoritarian. Okay, Daniel…
Nevertheless, Tutt trips over a lot of this history, which he’s tried to summarise second-hand. He goes on to defend his suggestion that there wasn’t a consensus at Repeater at that time, for instance, by highlighting some of the original team’s publishing controversies, which weren’t so different from Zer0 2.0’s own. These are well-known. Mark Fisher had published Gilad Atzmon in 2011, for example — something he openly came to regret — a man infamous for an advocacy of Palestinian rights that nonetheless shades into blatant antisemitic tropes. They had also published James Heartfield, a Sp!ked contributor, via both Repeater and Zer0.
These are the same sorts of people that Tutt wants to defend. He can cry all he likes about censorship that’s never happened; the bottom line is he thinks that staff at Repeater — perhaps even someone like me, who never was a member of staff — are obliged to engage with bigots. For most people following this debacle, that speaks for itself.
Each of these aforementioned publications brought Zer0 controversy then, because they seemed like inapposite inclusions on its roster — a sentiment expressed primarily by its readership. They were bad judgement calls — a view I don’t think it’s wrong for anyone to hold. It can be tough when one of your favourite bands drops a duff album or whatever. For readers of the imprints, it was clear what these duffers were for them too.
For this reason, some of the imprint’s founders did come to regret these publications — I can’t speak for all of them — citing how relationships with some authors broke down, and so they were platformed by Repeater/Zer0 no longer. This only further bolstered a militancy among outspoken critics like myself and some of the new social-media team, who vowed to hold the line and do whatever we could to avoid anything like this happening again. We believed in the Repeater/Zer0 missions, and we agreed that these books were missteps.
In hindsight, our sense of unity and the long march onward to publishing glory was definitely naive, as none of us — least of all me — had any editorial oversight at either imprint. We made our position clear, and felt like it was backed by staff, but it was a hard line that was ours and ours alone. But it’s not like this was some sort of wallet inspection station that we kept manned 24/7. It was a public position and had no bearing on any of my work for Repeater.
During my time as proofreader, nothing arrived in my inbox that might warrant that kind of dissension. I have never proofread a book that I have taken any ideological issue with — lucky me. Regardless, neither I nor anyone else Tutt criticises has ever had any say over what should or should not be published — something he can’t seem to get into his thick head. But it is also here that Tutt nonetheless makes a good point, when he notes how “[t]he problem is that, after Zer0 had been taken over, the ownership didn’t actually seem to care much about upholding this agenda.”
That’s true, and it bothered some of us, considering we’d felt rallied behind. At a certain point, it began to feel like we’d done them a load of free PR work and they could now hide behind it. A few years later, this led to many of us feeling deeply embarrassed when Repeater began making some very familiar mistakes.
In 2023, Repeater publishes Rhyd Wildermuth’s Here Be Monsters — a book that opens with a bizarre anecdote about neopronouns and cancellation, and then proceeds to ramble about identity politics and how it is splitting the left. It’s all very familiar, and not very well written. The allusions to cancellation that Wildermuth makes are also notably to do with his previous work, for which he holds some notoriety, having faced accusations of ableism and transphobia. He’s a garden-variety reactionary, an anti-idpol gay man who loves to mention his queerness whenever it’s useful for throwing fellow queers (trans people) under the bus. Think Milo if he was less of a fascist twink and more of a crusty druid.
He was already “cancelled” for some, then, but not necessarily by us. But that’s because I’d never even heard of Wildermuth at the time, and it was only from some murmurings amongst Repeater’s readership — not its staff — that I took notice and made an attempt to read what had been published. (I didn’t get very far before tossing it aside.)
This was the general feeling at that time. No one really paid any attention to Wildermuth or his book. It was disappointing, yes, for its poor quality and poor arguments, but that didn’t really mean anything. It meant it wasn’t a book I was going to publicise in a personal capacity, as I’d often been happy to do with much of Repeater’s generally excellent output, without being asked or paid to. But who cares? I was under no obligation to publicise anyone. I shared the books I liked and have often become friends with other authors on that basis of a mutual appreciation and respect.
Is not having that with Wildermuth also censorship? The book sucked, but there was nothing anyone could do about it, even if they wanted to — and nobody cared enough to want to. Repeater had inexplicably published reactionaries before, and it was strange to see someone of this ilk be let back in, but it was whatever. Rhyd was one person. It was best to let him drift back off into irrelevancy.
When Rhyd nonetheless makes claims about censorship, it seems to be solely on the basis of having not been given the sort of attention he thinks he deserves. He makes some claims about spurious comments from a copyeditor in his own Substack post, for example — a person unknown; again, it wasn’t me — with which he disagreed, as is his right. But there’s the rub: although he feels like people may have stepped out of line, half of his comments come down to being dissatisfied with people just doing their jobs. Copyeditors question and make suggestions about your copy! That’s not censorship! But maybe Rhyd just isn’t used to having someone actually read his work and critique it.
Carl Neville was his editor, he says, and he was also mine for my second book. But Carl’s comments, in my experience, were basically nonexistent. He didn’t particularly like the book, and seemed incapable of offering up any kind of constructive criticism on it that wasn’t pointlessly vague, and so the book languished in a futile back-and-forth. Tariq later took over and sent one email that made me realise what the book needed, cutting it to bits and taking a lot out. It was great. I’d been looking for someone to actually take it to pieces, rather than just wave around it. That’s what a good editor does. If you let your ego get in the way of that process, your book is suffer as a result.
By contrast, Rhyd himself comes across as a man with a fragile ego, championing the disengaged yes men of editorial, who feels that the very fact he has been published affords him a certain amount of deference and attention, and won’t accept any criticism prior to or after publication.
But we’re drifting here, because no one in a position to give those sorts of comments in a professional capacity is in the firing line here. Those running the Repeater / Zer0 YouTube channel weren’t obliged to give him attention. Nor is anyone unaffiliated with the imprints. He might think it would have been polite of them to swallow their principles and platform him like anyone else, but that is a question of etiquette rather than censorship. And if he feels like it wasn’t marketed sufficiently, he should take that up with the marketers. I don’t know who those people are. And for what it’s worth, Repeater / Zer0 has never been that pro-active on that front, ostensibly leaving marketing up to the authors themselves.
All of the publicity garnered for my books, for example, has either come from press independently, or was organised without recourse to Repeater’s team at all. (Things were different with Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire lectures, but since the author of that text is dead, he can’t be expected to do his own marketing.) My first book, of more obvious interest given its subject matter, faired pretty well in that regard; my second hasn’t been reviewed by a single English-language publication, although my international readership seems more engaged. It is what it is. You don’t see me having a tantrum about it. So maybe Wildermuth should reflect on some of his own failings as well.
None of this constitutes censorship. It is a reflection on the personal discretion of individuals. This is something that Sereptie has emphasised recently: the Repeater/Zer0 YouTube channel, although existing under the names of the imprints, was always a largely independent entity that focused on Repeater/Zer0 authors above anyone else at his discretion. The decision not to engage with some others was made on a personal basis. It’s not sabotage if other press outlets appear to be in agreement with that. No one — reviewers, readers, YouTubers — is obliged to pay attention to him if they don’t want to — and many people simply didn’t want to.
This makes Tutt’s claim that myself and Acid Horizon “began to use their positions to sabotage authors they disagreed with who had contracts with the press” totally laughable. No sabotaging took place. There was simply a consensus that their work and politics sucked. And this is the sort of thing that really makes Tutt’s position so muddled. He talks about the integrity of the left, fighting against those who want to split it, but what he’s fighting against is a consensus (in the UK at least) that these people aren’t worth our own time. We reject their entryism and will criticise it in a personal capacity, as many of us did before publishing with the imprints. The majority of us share a politics. We are unified. Tutt is just upset that that unity doesn’t include him.
Why? Well, Tutt, being the useful idiot that he is, tells on himself here again and again. Addressing his tacit support for the likes of Wildermuth in his post, he writes:
I don’t agree with Wildermuth’s criticisms of the ‘declarationist’ model of trans identification, for instance, according to which one gains access to women’s spaces merely by declaring themselves a woman (a position that, to be fair, he has adopted out of concern that it risks undermining popular support for bona fide trans inclusion). But using mild reservations like this as a pretext to relentlessly attack Marxists while ignoring altogether the array of Repeater authors who promote milquetoast liberalism without the slightest concern for worker’s struggle is more than a little dubious from a Marxist standpoint.
Okay, so Wildermuth is a TERF who has “concerns”, and you think that’s not so great, but you also see this as a “minor reservation” in light of a larger class struggle. But as a trans person, I think that’s bullshit, and am inclined to suggest here again, as I have elsewhere, that you go fuck yourself.
These aren’t minor reservations for many of us, but nor does this mean we take class struggle any less seriously. We care about myriad political struggles — those that affect us directly, and those that don’t (which can’t be said for Tutt, clearly.)
It is in light of this position that things did change a bit later when Angie Speaks — then claiming to be an editor at Sp!ked Online — announced on Twitter that she’d signed a contract with Repeater, something like two years ago (my memory is hazy). It is this that ruffled some feathers — far more than Rhyd ever did — as it brought the number of recently contracted reactionaries up to two. Some people feared this was the start of a trend, and in that regard, it wasn’t simply some Repeater-staff feathers that were ruffled, but those of its readership again also, which tweets from those paying attention at the time attest to.
I can only emphasise my personal position here again. As someone close to Repeater, I’ve been privy to lots of discussions, no doubt in ways similar to Tutt. But I’ve never claimed to be a mouthpiece for the imprints. I’m simply an interlocutor, registering my agreement and disagreement in a personal capacity. I’ve never cared much about whether that makes life difficult for anyone managing the imprints — and some have told me that it has — because I’ve never been employed by them. Tutt’s paranoia shines through again, then, when he attempts to construct conspiracy theories about collusion, which are in fact only examples of a unified politics that he sits outside of. The boycott is surely a further example of this. I don’t personally know most of the authors who’ve agreed or asked to have their names added. They simply agree with an overall political position. Isn’t that a demonstration of the unity he finds so lacking?
It’s that same consensus that led no one to (prospectively) want anything to do with Angie Speaks either — a moot point now, since none of these people are involved with the imprints anymore in any capacity, and so will have no involvement in her still-forthcoming book. But even if Acid Horizon were still custodians of the Repeater/Zer0 YouTube channel — again again again — they would not be obliged to engage it. They have always had final say over what appeared on their own platforms, just as the editors at Repeater at large did over theirs. I don’t see any problem with that. Another mantra again (so many agains) bears repeating: political publishing is political. At a certain point, Tutt just seems to be upset that people have politics different to his, and in that way we’re not so different.
But whereas we’re capable of a solidarity without similarity on a number of issues, the bigotry of the individuals Tutt is desperate to defend is a line we won’t cross. It’s as simple as that. Like the Zer0 2.0 crowd we were all glad to be rid off, we don’t want anything to do with individuals who we knew (and they’ve only proven us right since) would be useless in a situation like a boycott. They’re all scabs, in one way or another. They’re not comrades.
This is nonetheless an important point, as it is this solidarity among the majority of authors and express of disgruntlement behind the scenes that Tutt again claims constitutes censorship. Here he starts parroting more claims from untrustworthy idiots. He writes:
There are … reports that the staff at Repeater attempted to get other staff members fired for signing authors that they disagree with ideologically …
We’re talking about Carl Neville here again, and it seems clear that some people questioned the quality of writer he was bringing on board, having been given some sort of free reign to scrape the bottom of a Zer0 2.0-adjacent barrel. But this claim is news to me — news that comes from Angie Speaks’ Twitter account, where she writes:
I just learned that someone tried to get the editor at Repeater books that I’m working with fired for giving me a contract a while back. It didn’t work of-course. The Book is scheduled for December so nice try seething losers.
Good for her, I guess. But it will be a lonely book, I’m sure, given so many other authors have chosen to pull their titles in lieu of the boycott, and probably a book strewn with errors since they’ll only have Etan’s AI to look over it.
The point remains: I don’t think anyone tried to get Carl fired. He was criticised maybe, and rightly, but no one came for his job. All I remember hearing about was a trans writer asking him not to contract any more transphobes.
Angie, like Tutt, doesn’t really understand the situation here, nor the consequences of what she’s claiming even if it was true. After all, would an attempt to get an editor fired — if any such attempt had been made, and I don’t know anyone who sought to make that happen — mean that the book wouldn’t be published? I don’t think so.
When authors registered their disappointment with the editorial team — not staff, to my knowledge, although staff may have passed this feedback on; and some authors were also staff, of course — the response I remember being shared between a community of authors upset about this at the time was: “Okay, point taken, but its all signed away now.” I imagine an advance was sent. As soon as Angie announced her book, Repeater were locked in — and we knew that.
What I remember most from that time is that, in light of this deadlock, people were already thinking about pulling their own books from the printers. Certainly, no one sought to get anyone fired. We thought Carl was an idiot maybe, and assumed that it really was ignorance rather than malice, but people were more inclined to walk away from Repeater themselves, having had their faith in an imprint that saw itself as some bastion of left-wing thought thoroughly shaken by the fact it was now repeating the mistakes that had brought it controversy in years past. Some frank discussions were had, by the sounds of it, but nothing more came of it internally. Again, no one tried to get anyone fired — the only “Marxist” who likes to run and tattle to your boss is Daniel Tutt, after all.
Speaking of whom, his post continues with mention of another “report from autonomist Marxist writer Rhyd Wildermuth” — what are these credentials doing near this man, seriously, it’s trying too hard — “that describes how his book at Repeater was censored and then sabotaged in its promotion.” Censored by whom? You mean the book was copyedited. Promotional sabotage how? When you write a book, some people write nice things, some people don’t, some people write nothing at all. If Rhyd thinks the balance is tipped away from niceness, he should write a better book.
Tutt continues: “Thus far, the organizers of the current boycott have either denied these claims of censorship or in the case of Mattie Colquhoun, they have seemed to somehow justify them.” But I don’t think I’ve ever justified censorship… I simply disagree with what constitutes censorship in this context. You’d expect that censorship is a practice exercised by those with the power to censor, which no one Tutt criticises has ever held. It’s thus a bloviating term to throw around, as again, the only people who have actually had their speech suppressed by someone who holds any real power over it are the staff who were interrogated over support for the Palestinian cause by their boss, as Sereptie detailed a few weeks ago.
Is “no-platforming” censorship? We’ve had this debate before. I’m not interested in going back over it. Suffice it to say, I don’t think so — not when no one is obligated (legally or otherwise) to talk to you about your work.
But if Tutt really wants to highlight this other “scandal” at Repeater Books, let him do so. It’s probably something that warrants an airing, even if many of us have chosen to ignore it simply because it detracts from what is now a far more important issue. I’m sure there’s plenty more dirty laundry to be aired in publishing — and people don’t usually like to shit things that happen at the place they work (with) — again, a question of etiquette rather than censorship — and anyway, I think investments in countries committing genocide is a bit stronger than all that.
That’s the story so far. All already public, going back about four years. If things were tricky for those of us who’d been brought closer to Repeater, seemingly because of our staunch defense of it when it was ridding Zer0 of the scabs, it was a poisoned chalice when suddenly many of us felt we couldn’t express our political beliefs in the same way as we once had done, for fear of pissing inside the tent or irritating our bosses or those more compromised higher-ups we nonetheless saw as our friends. That is a real suppression of speech; a suppression with far more weight than not wanting to talk to published authors — yes, their work has still been published — on a secondary media channel, if that’s all these claims amount to (but even then, it’s not clear).
It still sucks that they were published, and if that is the direction Repeater wants to go in, it was a direction that many of us did not want to follow. I have no books on the horizon regardless, but already at that time, when Wildermuth and Angie Speaks seemed to suggest an emergent trend, I was planning to take my work elsewhere in future anyway. I had no interest in rubbing shoulders with the very people I’d spent many months denouncing over the years previously, not only for their manipulation of Mark Fisher’s legacy but for their shady politics more generally. I chose to use my voice, on this blog, and I chose to exit. I also wasn’t alone in that. But things blew over, as reassurances were made by editorial staff that calmed things down a bit. That is, until the revelations about Etan Ilfeld’s removal of the publishers from the “Publishers for Palestine” letter once again ramped up disbelief among authors who had become — quite literally — the public face of the imprints.
It’s worth joining up where we started with where things end. No one has sought to pour any scorn on the founders, as none of this is about them. But it is infuriating that Repeater has been so adept at repeating past mistakes. Almost ten years ago, Alex Niven wrote about continuing a political publishing project “away from the control of a disliked and unsympathetic parent company”, and what do we have now if not a gathering of authors who seek to do the same thing, no thanks to the founders’ past decisions themselves.
It is a familiar situation — one that reminds me of my time at Goldsmiths, University of London; an institution whose management loves to play up the radical politics of its students and alumni, whilst advancing down a disastrous path of neoliberalisation. It has begun to feel like Repeater Books has been counting on its most public-facing authors to launder its editorial dalliances and the ownership’s investments also. When Tutt highlights a disparity between authors and ownership/management, that is a sign that something was going wrong. For a lot of the reasons Tutt highlights, I’ve no interest in helping them launder their reputations any longer. The conclusions he nonetheless draws from this are bizarre and hysterical.
The point bears repeating — although at some point you’ve got to accept Tutt is too thick to get it: no one who has publicly expressed disgruntlement with the imprints has had any editorial power. The contentions, discussed quietly, have been between the principles of those who managed or otherwise unofficially represented Repeater’s front-of-house (its YouTube channel and the majority of its authors), and those who actually run the imprints behind the scenes. This has led to some private tensions, yes. If Tutt thinks this desperately needs acknowledging, he can have his acknowledgement. But it’s the inexplicable leap he takes from this that further shows what a paranoid moron he is:
why the boycott now? Why was it launched after Acid Horizon and Colquhoun left the press?
Hmmm, do you think maybe it’s because, whilst all of this was being discussed in private, many of those aggrieved were workers? That a boycott of your own publisher isn’t really something you can do with inside of it? That leaving is its own form of boycott? That this was a question of tearing down their own livelihoods and those of others? Of washing our hands of years’ worth of work and imploring others to do the same? No one took any of that lightly. Adam Jones “left” the press at the very moment he chose to highlight Ilfeld’s investments and suppression of speech publicly. He sent those tweets and assumed the obvious: he wasn’t gonna have to awkwardly wait out a notice period for a few weeks afterward.
As for me, I had no position to leave. I hadn’t been called upon to proofread anything for Repeater in almost a year, nor was I waiting for anyone to come knocking, as I was only a freelancer and was already aware of suggestions that the imprints were being wound down because of the disagreements that arose over Palestine. What I left (behind) is my own work. Don’t buy my books. If you want a PDF copy, email me. It’s yours.
That’s the end of it, but not for Tutt. He ends by throwing down a gauntlet — at least that how I assume he must feel:
the onus is on Acid Horizon and Colquhoun to explain and justify their specific actions against left-wing writers critical of identity politics, why they waited so long to call the boycott, and why they specifically sought to sabotage book projects at the press of authors that they disagreed with.
Daniel, what the fuck are you talking about? People waited so long because it meant leaving their jobs, and jobs aren’t the easiest things to come by in this economy. We were also told not to by the founders because they feared legal reprisals. Fed up with a year of cowardice and legal maneuvering, Adam let off the bomb.
That’s self-sabotage. What other sabotage is there? What press? My “sabotage” is simply thinking you’re a paranoid idiot, and my having a distain for TERF writers as a trans person. Is that not explanation enough? I have no obligation to you, nor to Repeater, to uphold some illusion of politeness, when I thought you were an idiot long before you published a book with them. You seem to have an acute inability to understand what my relationship to all of this is. I hold no power here. The only thing I take responsibility for — the only thing I can take responsibility for — is my own speech, on a blog that is totally independent and mine. If not being censorious necessitates giving you some good press rather than bad, you’d be best served being less of a wasteman.
I care about a free Palestine. I care about that more than your books. I care about that more than mine. I hope our readers choose to boycott Watkins Media, and I hope everyone formally employed by them goes onto bigger and much better things, in which they do not have to compromise, self-censor, or embroil their work inadvertently with the interests of a shallow venture-capitalist. I hope for better forms of left-wing publishing, which are actually as “independent” as they claim and don’t kowtow to pathetically chasing culture-war income.
I extend these sentiments to Tutt as well, but I continue to reserve the right to point out the stupidity of whatever he chooses the publish next. That’s not censorship. That’s using my free speech to comment on his own. If he continues to insinuated that having an opinion is censorship, he’s even more a hypocrite than I thought.
Update: 08/04/2025
Rhyd was joined in on Substack, having seemingly missed all of this:
A few weeks after writing my long essay, “What Happened to Repeater,” one of the members of the collective that tried to suppress its publication — who also happened to be employed by its previous publisher to run its social media channels — threw an adolescent tantrum on his last day on the job. The result was a few hours of social media sabotage during which he claimed that the real reason he and others were pushed out was due to their pro-Palestinian beliefs.
He says this is all bullshit. But how? His claims of “suppression” amount only to his work not being sufficiently promoted by those who were not obligated to promote it. And the claim that staff were pushed out for this “censorship” rather than staff choosing to leave over Watkins’ position on Palestine is completely nonsensical. Adam’s actions on social media very much surprised the ownership. The insinuation that Adam already knew it was his “last day” is backwards. It was Adam who made sure the day he sent messages on social media was his last. Rhyd is simply struggling to imagine a struggle bigger than the one he’s had with this book.
Most galling, really, is the misuse of the Palestinian struggle as a cover. These social justice identitarians have set themselves up as somehow just as oppressed as the Palestinians they claim to defend. Sure, Gaza might be getting razed to the ground, but also a group of upper middle class would-be philosophers who shat where they ate don’t get to control what their former employer’s editors choose to publish any longer.
Again, only Rhyd and Tutt are trying to force these two issues together. The actions taken in calling for a boycott against Watkins were made without paying either of them a second thought, because as much as we don’t like them — and clearly we don’t — everything would have probably continued along as usual were it not for Israel’s genocide and Etan’s attempts to stifle opposition to it. Or, as explained above, if we had seen a continuing trend of reactionaries once again finding a place at the imprints, we’d have taken our work elsewhere in future.
That is the only exercise of agency anyone has had, because we’re not editors or owners. We’re workers, often precarious workers on zero-hours / freelance contracts. There’s nothing “upper middle class” about that. My income from Repeater has been infrequent — one proofreading job every few months, on average — a job I took on when I had nothing else, as I lost my regular job at the start of the pandemic. Five years later, I spend most of my time working in a bar. I’m a PhD student, sure, but Americans don’t seem to understand that that constitutes a very different set of material conditions in the UK than in the US, where it is surely a mark of some privileged. PhD funding in this country — if you can get it — amounts to little more than minimum wage. I am on a lower “salary” as a post-graduate researcher than I ever was when working as an arts technician or labourer, which is why I work a second job in a bar to boost my earning so I can simply afford my rent and food and whatever else. And that’s after three years where I had to occasionally solicit donations from generous readers, because I couldn’t afford those things for a while. I might not fall at the lower end of Rhyd’s vibes-based class system, but painting precarious workers who take a stand as somehow putting their “luxury beliefs” ahead of all else is just one more instance of his “Marxist” politics having far more in common with a Tory politician than anyone who really cares about these things.
As for the repeated claim that his “censors” have had their power taken away from them — power never held — the editorial team has always and continues to hold all responsibility for what is brought into print under the names Repeater and Zer0 (for better or worse). That some of us felt the quality of what was being printed had slipped in some areas only redoubled our efforts to emphasise what was good in our own capacity. And that wasn’t so hard because there was a lot to like. Rhyd and Tutt truly are a minority here, and it’s completely self-serving that they’d try make any of this about them. They’re really not that significant — that’s what upsets them the most.