30 October 2024 17:25
"We believe that knowledge is ultimately not revolutionary if it is not broadly accessible by the people who need it most. Thus, we provide unfettered free access to all print materials on the same day of publication."
Aras COŞKUNTUNCEL
We conducted a short interview with the Iskra Books, which took its name from Lenin's Iskra newspaper and was founded in 2017. Iskra has already filled a big gap in critical, socialist publishing in the USA and England, where liberals, anarchists and Trotskyists dominate. The publishing house has become increasingly popular since it published the first English translation of Italian philosopher and researcher Domenico Losurdo’s book on Stalin and the Stalin era in English. Iskra has recently published works in the USA and England from Aymeric Monville to Ibrahim Allawi, from Stalin’s Collective Works to the Historical Documents of the PLO. And a series of new and exciting books, from the Historical Documents of the PFLP to Lenin’s Collective Works, are about to be published soon. Below is our interview with Ben Stahnke, one of the founders of the publishing house.
You have a short section on your website about your history and approach, but could you provide a bit more detail about how Iskra is owned and operated?
Iskra Books is unique in the world of print publishing, and perhaps radical publishing more specifically, in that we operate as a registered non-profit. This legal designation helps us in several regards: 1. it decouples our editorial decision-making processes from the logic of profit—a logic that guides most publishers, radical publishers (unfortunately) included—and 2., it ensures that Iskra can in fact, legally, not operate for profit, and that all monies earned must be reinvested into the organization itself in pursuit of the organization’s mission.
As a non-profit, Iskra is thus owned—in a sense—by the public, and exists to serve the public good. We conceptualize this public good as an unfettered free access to educational materials, low-cost print materials, accessible and appealing visual design, and free educational events such as panel talks, book launches, and more. As firm believers in equity, inclusion, and the democratization of knowledge—following the adage “if it’s not accessible, it’s not revolutionary”—Iskra’s core mission is to bridge the problematic and exclusionary divide between the academy and the street; that is, to move the products and process of intellectual production outside of higher education and into the hands of organizers and activists involved in real-world liberation struggles.
With regard to our organizational logistics, Iskra operates as a worker-owned collective of early career researchers, scientists, editors, and educators each focused in unique areas of revolutionary inquiry. The multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary constitution of our editorial staff helps to ensure a robust internal conception of the state of the field, so to speak, where revolutionary theory intersects with, and rounds out, fields like ecology, anthropology, literature, data analytics, philosophy, history, neuroscience, and so on.
Iskra is led by a steering committee of four core editors, and then a larger advisory board comprising the general assembly of our editorial staff. Since its inception in 2017, Iskra has run solely on volunteer labor subsidized and donated by its brilliant staff of editors. We currently have a volunteer staff of 19.
Iskra was established in 2017; how did you decide that there was a need for a publishing house like Iskra? What were the reasons/needs you identified? There's, for example, Verso and others claiming that they also publish critical and socialist texts. What are the differences?
Iskra Books was organized and co-founded in 2017 by three researchers and educators (myself and two other colleagues/comrades) dissatisfied by the amount of support we received both inside and outside of academia as we engaged in research and teaching grounded in revolutionary theory. Our experience was that socialist research, or research that supported existing socialisms, was only really tolerated so long as its conclusions did not posit real revolutionary change; that is, as long as the conclusions of the research did not propose or enunciate real changes to property relations, profits, or entrenched structures of hierarchy and class. Further, as organizers and activists ourselves, we both saw and experienced a vast degree of separation between the kind of work that was happening in radical organizing spaces and the kind of intellectual production that occurred in the halls of academe.
For example, in pursuit of job security in an increasingly precarious and shrinking job market, assistant professors, adjunct professors, and graduate student workers devote incredible amounts of time, labor, and effort into the production of research articles and manuscripts that go on to be published in for-profit, ranked academic journals only to be read, perhaps, by a handful of scholars within the researcher’s own very niche sphere. Given that tenure portfolio reviews only tend to consider publications in the “big five” (SAGE, ScienceDirect, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley), many researchers must self-censor for publication in these so-called prestigious platforms.
Even worse, these large-scale, for-profit publishers, in an effort to garner additional profits on top of an already-opulent revenue portfolio, will play upon researchers’ sympathies to make their work accessible to a broad public audience, charging researchers exorbitant open access fees, as with the predatory yet prestigious journal, Nature, charging authors upwards of £8890.00/$12290.00 per article for a so-called “Gold Open Access.” Consider recent research by Butler, et al. (2023) who estimated that “globally authors paid $1.06 billion in publication fees to these publishers from 2015–2018.”[1] Consider also the labor offset encouraged by such an arrangement, where academic laborers provide all the work, inclusive of outsourced editorial labor, only for already-wealthy publishers to then charge authors for the privilege of others reading their work on largely for-profit platforms. Such an exploitation could only exist under a capitalism entirely uninterested in—and in fact working against—the public dissemination of scholarly knowledge.
Aside from padding the researcher’s own chances at job security, healthcare, and a living wage, what good does such a restricted and inaccessible knowledge do for the general public more broadly? Knowledge, in this regard, betrays itself; it loses its transformative and educive edge, and becomes a component of the predatory capitalist system, despite its best intentions.
As educators and researchers ourselves, our experience with publishing was such that while many in academia seemed interested in revolutionary social change in the abstract, the moving of abstract theory into revolutionary, on-the-ground practice was not only frowned upon, but actively sabotaged and dissuaded. For example, to publish papers and manuscripts on revolutionary topics in our respective fields, we often had to soften certain aspects of the language, or remove sections entirely. Many journals or “big five” publishing houses will in fact not even consider works in direct support of national liberation struggles in the Indigenous Americas, in Palestine, in Africa, and beyond.
Even worse, our early experiences with publishing was made more troubling by the fact that even many of the radical publishing houses often maintained this counterrevolutionary—and, ultimately, reactionary—position. In circling back to the main point of this question—that is, how Iskra is different from what already exists—we must begin to make links between politics and the publishing house. For example, extant radical publishing is dominated by both Trotskyist and anarchist political sentiments. The radical bookshop also tends to fall under similar auspices. Thus, in the development of a truly revolutionary platform—a publisher which, by practice, works to subvert not only the problematic for profit frameworks of capitalism more generally, but also the reactionary trends of other publishers who carefully avoid questions and practices of national liberation—we saw no real dissimilarity between extant radical publishing houses and the houses of the academy itself. We saw the former as supportive the latter; an appendage of radical recuperation and co-option, where radical academics would, for example, go to publish their work under the prestige of the Verso imprimatur, only to end up removing truly revolutionary sections of their writing, or to receive rejections of their work altogether.
Iskra was developed to not only subvert the capitalistic tendencies of publishing more generally, but the capitalistic and exclusionary tendencies of radical publishing more specifically. As communists, we sought to develop a professional Marxist-Leninist press, not a Trotskyist press nor an anarchist press, as much as our comrades in those spheres might produce important or fruitful works. We see ourselves as distinct in that we do not shy away from publishing truly revolutionary materials intended to be put into direct practice by organizers involved in direct action on the front lines of global struggles; not simply abstract works for fruitless theorizing (although we appreciate that dimension of the work, no doubt). And, further, we publish materials in active support of existing revolutionary movements and states, from Palestine to the People’s Republic of China, Vietnam to Cuba, and beyond.
In a very short amount of time, Iskra gained considerable popularity, especially after publishing Losurdo's now-classic analysis of Stalin and the Stalin era in English. There are many exciting recent and upcoming releases; could you talk about these releases and short term plans?
I appreciate your notice of our growing popularity in publishing! We are a bit shocked ourselves, to be completely honest. We are not in this for the prestige or the glory (of which there is little); and we ultimately envisioned, and undertook the work of, publishing as a practice of public service—as in, we serve the people by making available and accessible novel and classic works of important theory intended to guide and support on-the-ground revolutionary practice. All of our labor is donated; we all work full time, have families, and so on, and are engaged in organizing work outside of Iskra. None of us presently receive any money, and we are all volunteers.
Thus, we undertook the work at Iskra only from this position—to serve the people. We realized we had a specific and fruitful set of skills, put them to practice, and have been very pleasantly surprised that people have responded so positively to the work.
The feedback, in fact, really motivates us to continue to expand our catalog, and because of this we find ourselves currently engaged in a pretty steady growth phase, where our primary focus has shifted towards the building of a more robust and representative catalog. I think there exist major imbalances in general catalog compositions not only in academic and scholarly spaces, but more problematically within radical publishing spaces as well. For example, if you look at demographic factors like gender identity and ethnicity compositions of authors in extant radical catalogs—without specifically calling out certain publishers—you will find, in almost every case, a catalog dominated by white, cis-hetero men.
Our plans for the future include a robust addressing of this pervasive issue, with an aim to compose our catalog in such a way as to combat persistent demographic imbalances in publishing. In considering this, we have a bunch of really incredible and diverse publications on the horizon—from political memoirs by storied Black radical women, anthologies on the intersection of trans liberation and radical action, publications by legendary activists, organizers, and thinkers like Torkil Lauesen, previously unreleased works from James Connolly, connections with revolutionary movements in Africa, India, Vietnam, Cuba, and beyond, and much, much more.
What is Iskra's publishing philosophy? How would you describe your approach to publishing?
Our approach to publishing is guided by five core values that form the foundational framework through which Iskra operates. Those are: 1. excellence in print media publishing, 2. robust accessibility, 3. collective decision-making and democratic centralism, 4. responsiveness to global liberation struggles, and 5. communist organizing principles appleid to the practice of publishing in the modern era.
Firstly, we understand that socialism more broadly conceived represents the avant-garde of human thinking, and this, by necessity, includes cultural and aesthetic thinking. We have all seen the shoddy socialist publications that, while important, do not reach a broad readership either due to poor design, poor materials use, or poor overall construction. As artists, artisans, and aesthetes ourselves, we understand that the aesthetic struggle is a core component of the revolutionary struggle, and we take a robust artistic approach to the publication of every book, considering each book as a work of art in its own right, thus ensuring that not only is the interior of the book accessible, but its exterior as well.
Secondly, we believe, as above, that knowledge is ultimately not revolutionary if it is not broadly accessible by the people who need it most. Thus, we provide unfettered free access to all print materials on the same day of publication, providing free PDFs of all of our works at no cost to our readers, and selling our books for as close to cost as possible. Further, we are a reader-focused press; that is, we are not seller-focused. Thus we set our seller discounts as low as possible to ensure lowest end-user cost for individual readers, meaning that our books are typically available well below market value held in place even by other radical publishers.
Thirdly, we operate as a collective organization, enacting democratic centralism as organizational decision-making practice, to ensure a robust and unified approach to our operations. All of us at Iskra believe in Iskra, and love the project dearly. Iskra is a lateral organization, in which all editors are part of a general assembly of editors engaged in organizational decision-making, strategizing, and publications acceptance.
Fourthly, we aim to be as responsive as possible to the rapidly changing dynamics of global liberation struggles. In pursuit of this, our publications calendar remains flexible given the vicissitudes of national liberation struggles the world over, changing and adapting as we shift focus to Palestinian, African, and Indigenous struggle abroad and at home.
Finally, and this point ties into our third value, we aim to operate the organization not as other publishing organizations operate, instead opting to bring our experiences from socialist organizing into the realm of publishing. Iskra Books was initially an experiment in the reimagining of the labor of publishing. Motivated by professional trainings, editorial assistantships, and our academic proximity to publishing, and driven primarily by the need for the communist movement in the anglosphere to have its own publisher outside of the extant hegemony of publishers engaging in rampant intellectual gatekeeping, author exploitations, and ideological cooptions, the experiment of approaching professional, scholarly publishing as organizers has been, thus far, incredibly successful. We have grown every year, and have, through employing organizing principles as thoroughly as possible, remaining impeccably ethical in practice, watched with pride as Iskra has grown from a small online platform to a thriving international publisher liaising with well known authors, editors, and thinkers from liberations struggles the world over.
Additionally, and perhaps more prosaically, we aim to move as much money as possible back into the hands of the authors and editors engaged in labor of intellectual production. For example, I believe we currently pay the highest royalty rates of any radical publisher while still being able to make accessible free PDFs of all works. We are able to do this precisely because we are a non-profit, and because we all deeply believe in the core values that guide our mission.
What are your long-term goals as a publisher in the U.S. and the UK?
As mentioned, we are currently (sustainably) growth-minded, and are engaged in a period of catalog-building and reader support. Operating on both sides of the Atlantic presents us with unique logistical challenges, but also with unique opportunities to reach a broad body of readers. We are presently working to implement a more robust educational approach with each book release through an author support that encourages and liaises book launches, panel talks, and classes/reading circles focused on our publications. We are also currently engaged in the development of in-house imprints, which, along with acquisitions and catalog-building, has been occupying a large amount of our time.
Are you planning to operate in other markets as well or to establish collaborations in different countries?
Yes! As noted above, we are currently developing several in-house imprints under the Iskra imprimatur: only one of which we have officially announced—our Irish-language imprint, Bradán Feasa. With our editors in Ireland, we assist Gaeilgeoir liberation struggles by making available brand new works into the Irish language, along with translations from our catalog, in an effort to celebrate and promote the linguistic revival currently underway in the country. Further, and while we have not officially announced it, we will very soon be moving into Vietnamese language publishing for the Vietnamese diaspora, along with a few more exciting genre-specific imprints.
We have plans to have a robust array of Iskra imprints, all geared towards publication in colonized languages currently undergoing liberatory struggles and revivals in their home territories and abroad. This is one core way Iskra aims to reach beyond anglophone publishing, bringing our model outside the imperial core and into the periphery in robust and transformative ways.
Could you also walk us through the process of deciding which text to publish and translate, and which new authors/texts to select for publication?
Yes, absolutely. As professional academics, we are—perhaps obviously, perhaps not—wedded to the peer-review model of acquisitions. We do not generally solicit texts, although we have begun to do so lately to correct imbalances in the demographic composition of our catalog. We thus rely primarily on unsolicited submissions from authors. These submissions follow standard academic guidelines, where authors will submit proposals, either formal or informal, chapter selections, outlines, etc.
It might be worth noting here that our first print publication was in fact our journal, Peace, Land, and Bread, and, perhaps naively, we have maintained the standard journal editorial format in acceptance decision-making for books submissions. Following this, all submitted manuscripts are assigned a primary and secondary reviewer, sourced from our content specialists (drawing in external content specialists, if needed), and then our editorial general assembly will typically have a roundtable discussion on submissions, often bringing about a lively and educational discourse amongst our board.
For Iskra-specific collections, such as several of our collected works series, these ideas tend to emerge organically either at Iskra meetings, or during the course of the work day, as our editors propose projects and ideas generally in line with their work, regional liberation struggles, and more. We are quite enthusiastic about the work our editors do, and the ideas generated internally can be incredibly exciting.
Overall, however, we rely on external submissions, of which we receive a surprisingly large amount! Folks seem to be really excited about the work we do, and I think the sheer number of projects we have in the works evidences that.
Does Iskra have any organic relationships or ties to a political organization?
Iskra is independent of any political party or external organization, although we have very positive relationships with many political parties and organizations both domestically and abroad. We are anti-sectarian in our orientation, and work to support anti-imperialist liberation struggles worldwide, which necessitates that we remain deeply and unwaveringly independent, and broadly interested in coalition-building. We are not hostile with any legitimate revolutionary parties or organizations, yet we also do not tolerate national imperialist chauvinisms, reactionary thinking, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, or racism—and we refuse to work with organizations holding these positions, such as recent manifestations of chauvinist so-called “socialisms” (which are, in fact, fascist reconstitutions) in the imperial core.
Remaining independent and internationalist gives us a lot of room to support coalitions, parties, programs, and united fronts worldwide, and we aim to position ourselves as broadly supportive of emancipatory and liberation struggles around the globe.
Is there anything else you would like to add/share or that you think would be helpful for us to know?
I would like to close with a deep amount of gratitude for your excellent questions, and for the opportunity for this interview! I would encourage folks to follow new publications announcements on our website, www.iskrabooks.org, where you can also subscribe to emails on forthcoming publications (we promise not to spam folks, and will only email once every month or so); and then on our social media, where you can find us on Twitter/X as @iskrabooks and @plbmagazine, and then on Facebook and Instagram as @plbmagazine.
Thank you again for this chance to talk about our work.
[1] Leigh-Ann Butler, Lisa Matthias, Marc-André Simard, Philippe Mongeon, Stefanie Haustein. The oligopoly’s shift to open access: How the big five academic publishers profit from article processing charges. Quantitative Science Studies 2023; 4 (4): 778–799. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00272
Yusuf Karadaş
