What's Missing in the Boycott of Repeater Books

Why one form of censorship should not be used to conceal or hide another

There is a boycott petition currently underway. It is asking writers, publishers and readers of Repeater Books to cease from buying anything from the company due to its owner’s investments in Israeli AI companies and the removal of the name of Repeater from a pro-Palestine petition in November 2023 (“Publishers for Palestine”). But this is not the only scandal the press is facing.

There are also reports that the staff at Repeater attempted to get other staff members fired for signing authors that they disagree with ideologically and a detailed report from autonomist Marxist writer Rhyd Wildermuth that describes how his book at Repeater was censored and then sabotaged in its promotion. 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. This begs the question: 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? Clearly, more than just conflicts over Palestine were taking place behind the scenes at Repeater Books. In his account of the origins of the current boycott, Craig with Acid Horizon surprisingly ignored any mention of Wildermuth’s case. Craig instead blames me for breaking solidarity with Palestine because I spoke to the management of the press about the reports of censorship and to inquire into why the press stopped commissioning new books in 2024. Craig’s accusation is highly confusing because Tariq Goddard and his team which included Craig and others with Acid Horizon and Mattie Colquhoun never made a public call to other authors not to speak to the management of the press and nor did they make a call to boycott the press. It was only after they had all left the press and after these reports have come to light that the boycott came about.

It was the exiting of Goddard and then later his entire team that has allowed these stories of the toxic and censorious internal culture at Repeater to surface. It is an account of these specific behaviors that is missing from the recent call to boycott Repeater that has led me to refuse to sign the petition. And let me be clear that I believe it was anathema to the founding vision of Repeater to have the publisher’s name removed from the pro-Palestine list in November 2023. I am deeply supportive of the Palestinian liberation struggle (indeed, I interviewed a Hamas supporter from Gaza on my podcast, as well as hosted a panel on Palestine and the Actuality of Struggle with BICAR). But one form of censorship should not be used to conceal or hide another. My article “A New Direction” identified three different examples of left-liberal censorship at various groups that all share a common ideological rationale to shut down voices that one disagrees with in ways that are extremely damaging not only to the integrity of the left, but that risk cheapening the meaning of our commitment to the causes we champion from Palestine to trans rights.

These inconsistencies raise an important question: why did Acid Horizon and Colquhoun not call for a boycott of Repeater Books when the conflict between Ilfeld and Goddard over Palestine first started in November 2023? Or why was a boycott not called when this Substack article from September 2024 revealed that Etan Ilfeld has investments in Israeli AI companies? Surely those moments would have had more potential to leverage the left media and publishing industry to the importance of Palestine given that the war was so hot at that time. It is this inconsistency in the timing of the call to boycott the press, combined with the double standards on censorship displayed by the organizers of the boycott that makes me hesitant to support it.

A History of Repeater’s Toxic Internal Culture

It is important that we provide a historical context to the scandals that are currently wracking Repeater Books. Under the leadership of Tariq Goddard, Repeater reabsorbed Zer0 Books in 2021. This was followed by a toxic and hostile legal battle over rights to a massive YouTube channel that Douglas Lain had ran for several years at Zer0 Books (there is a good overview of how virulent this process was here). During the takeover, 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. Indeed: in repeated posts and online screeds, Matt Colquhoun went so far as to accuse the entirety of Zer0 2.0's roster of being a 'red-brown', fascist clique, with deep connections to the Spiked milieu (and in turn, the old RCP). These accusations were not credible, and they were easily discredited: while Zer0 2.0 did publish a few authors with connections to Spiked, these represented a minuscule proportion of its author base, with several of those actually tied to the magazine ironically being holdovers from the era when Goddard and Fisher ran the press. Moreover, it's hard to see in what universe individuals such as Ben Burgis or Matthew McManus could, on account of certain reservations about cancel culture, reasonably be labeled 'red-brown.'

The public relations campaign launched by those close to Repeater to justify the takeover floundered. But it still came to have a significant impact on events that followed. To justify behavior that would normally be impossible for anyone on the left to justify such as instantly cancelling contracts at Zer0 2.0 without the slightest regard for outgoing staff, for instance, Repeater had to rile up its base, convincing them they were coming to the defense of an identity politics fatally imperiled by Strasserite conspiracy. The problem is that, after Zer0 had been taken over, the ownership didn't actually seem to care much about upholding this agenda. On several occasions, in fact, the press deliberately signed Marxists critical of identity politics with the goal of regaining the share of the market they had lost when they blew up Zer0 2.0.

This created an acute crisis internally. People like Colquhoun and Acid Horizon, who were now ensconced within Zer0/Repeater, felt betrayed: the takeover, it seemed, had been more about getting rid of the wrong people than the wrong ideas. As such, they began to use their positions to sabotage authors they disagreed with who had contracts with the press. It’s important to stress why Marxists are critical of identity politics. Though deviations surely exist, it is not because they are racist, sexist, etc. Rather, it is because—by refusing to relate the plight of minorities to capitalism as a whole—identity politics fails to furnish us with the means to combat these injustices. Take liberal feminism: a movement like #MeToo is correct to point out that sexual violence in the workplace against women is a serious and egregious problem. But by stopping there, by failing to go further than a cycle of retributive accusation, it falls short of addressing the economic basis of sexism in society: the disproportionate performance of unwaged, socially reproductive labour by women. Movements such as these moreover risk—by treating ‘gender’ and ‘race’ as abstract categories, rather than modulations of class—undercutting the solidarity needed to achieve real equality. In this sense, Marxists critical of identity politics are more anti-racist and anti-sexist than those who uphold identity politics.

Colquhoun and Acid Horizon have peddled a hyperbolic and exclusive narrative that ostracizes fellow leftists as enemies and reactionaries when the actual views of the leftists that they deem the enemy are most often very far from deserving of this label. The fact that Colquhoun and Acid Horizon claim that what happened to Rhyd Wildermuth’s book at Repeater is acceptable, or that it is not censorious, is most telling. Wildermuth’s book is entitled, quite appropriately given this situation, Here Be Monsters: How to Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other. I encourage everyone to read his testimony as it explains how Goddard’s staff treated authors they disagreed with. We should be clear here, and I can attest to this in my experience as an author at Repeater, it was Colquhoun and Acid Horizon members who seemed to mostly pressure Goddard to stick to their artificial narrative that Repeater is taken over by red-brown fascist authors so as to justify their cruel treatment of other authors. This is evident in Wildermuth’s testimony. Right after he signed a contract, Goddard told Wildermuth not to write anything about his book on social media so as not inflame the contingent (Colquhoun and Acid Horizon) that were ideologically opposed to it. This treatment was not limited to social media; it also entailed direct harassment and censorship during the editing process. Goddard’s editors at Repeater forced Wildermuth to remove things he didn’t feel comfortable removing as a gay man. But he complied with their requests and expected the press to support him. That faith was misplaced: the Acid Horizon clique at Repeater refused to promote his book. When Wildermuth asked for an explanation, Goddard told him that if he cooperated with Wildermuth his team would consider it “working with the enemy.”

This same behavior of blanketing cancelation and denunciation of other leftists extended beyond the immediate Repeater world of authors. For example, in the summer of 2023 Theory Underground published its first book, and this drew harsh responses from Acid Horizon: they declared anyone associated with the book as ‘working with the enemy.’ This was a deeply unfortunate way of treating the Theory Underground collective, which is a collection of working-class autodidacts. The authors that contributed essays to the collection include Norman Finkelstein, Todd McGowan and Slavoj Žižek along with working-class authors such as Bryce Nance and Mikey Downs who wrote essays about ostracization from the university, identity politics and generational politics. The inclusion of Nina Power in the series likely led Acid Horizon to take such a Manichean approach to the book and to denounce it so harshly.

But the consequences of this were far-reaching. Everyone was guilty by association with one TERF author when in reality people’s views differ from Nina Power profoundly, as evidenced by the fact that the authors of Underground Theory mostly had nothing to do with trans issues. Our ideological world is not so black and white and people should be trusted to address transphobic views directly, and they should not be shamed for attempting to combat transphobic views. This type of treatment of other leftists has negative effects on the morale of the left, it shuts down the possibility of solidarity, and most importantly it clouds our vision of what is truly reactionary. It also prevents us from developing the means to draw people away from actual reactionary thought. As an author in the Underground Theory collection I was deemed an enemy, as betraying the trans cause, as purely guilty by association—but association to what is not exactly clear. Transphobia is not tolerable to me and that is why I butted heads with Nina Power. What Acid Horizon and Colquhoun refuse to see is that I dare to debate transphobes all the time. In fact, little do they know that I am considered too pro-trans among rightwing communists associated with the ACP and Infrared. At the start of the new year in early 2025, a notorious TERF podcast “Morbid Symptoms” created a video about me that drew the ire of hundreds of MAGA Communists on X.

My support for these authors—from Wildermuth, to Angie Speaks, to the dozen or so authors that make up the Underground Theory collection, or to the dozens of leftists that AH and Colquhoun deemed ‘red-brown’ and reactionary in the 2021 transfer period to Repeater—is not about me and nor should it be. We do not need to necessarily agree with the positions of other leftist authors to recognize that what was done to them is wrong. 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. Like the corporate apparatchiks of Biden’s America, the cancel-happy staff at Repeater were excessively concerned with any deviation from the identitarian line, even by those who express fundamental support for these struggles—even by those who, in a certain sense, support them better than they do. What did not concern them is solidarity with Marxists, a significant proportion of whom they were willing to—for lack of subscription to the identitarian credo—toss under the bus. In effect, they became exactly what Mark Fisher had decried: vampiric censors more concerned with leveling moralistic sanctions than engaging in collective political struggle.

The Meaning of Solidarity

This gets us back to our initial question: why the boycott now? Why was it launched after Acid Horizon and Colquhoun left the press? The organizers of the Repeater boycott are accusing me of ‘opportunism,’ and of breaking solidarity, because I spoke to the current staff and ownership in order to get to the bottom of these censorious actions. I was treated in a censorious way by Repeater Books staff and the organizers of the current boycott, but I complied with their demand at the time.¹ Despite my compliance with their demand and the toxic and tense environment they created, I am pleased to learn that my book has sold well at the press. I wrote my article on left-liberal censorship (“A New Direction”) not for me but for the integrity of the left. How exactly can I be an opportunist who is opportunistic by virtue of being too concerned with the lot of others.

At face value, the petition isn't wrong—clearly it was a breach of Repeater’s mission to not keep their name on the Publishers for Palestine petition. But at the same time, 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. I do not think they will do this. More likely, they will simply continue to attack me personally, using Palestine as a cover for their actions at the risk of discrediting supporters of Palestine. But one thing is clear: the internal culture at Repeater was disrupted by more than just this.

1. In March 2023 the editors of Repeater Books along with another leftwing publisher sought to have my book on Nietzsche, How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche canceled. The director of Repeater Books Tariq Goddard worked as a middleman in this dispute and I agreed to cease from interacting with Sublation Media, despite the fact that I only engage Sublation Media to debate their tendencies, as evidenced by my critical exchanges with Doug Lain on anti-imperialism and my critical exchange with Chris Cutrone. The March 2023 action by editors and a mysterious other publisher disproves the claims in Mattie Colquhoun’s recent article that claims this sort of censorial behavior did not happen at the press; clearly it did.