Books, Communists and Talks in Liverpool

by New Worker correspondent

Marxists and communists gathered last Saturday at the 2022 Merseyside Marxist Book Fair to exchange literature and ideas and hold talks and discussions. Around sixty people met at The Casa, in the city’s Georgian Quarter, is a bar and venue that was set up by dockers who were sacked when they refused to cross a picket line in the 1990s. The dockers’ struggle began in September 1995 and ended in a one-sided settlement in February 1998. But some of the dockers, who had been paid £130,000 for writing a drama about the dispute for Channel Four, used the money to buy a building to set up a communal hub, not-for-profit bar and an advice centre.
    The event was the third organised the Red Book Fairs Collective, including members of Red Fightback (RFB) a “revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party”, and it included stalls from the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), Ebb Magazine, an independent online communist publication, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) independent street union, the New Communist Party of Britain, socialist and labour history book specialists Northern Herald Books, Peace, Land, & Bread, the journal of the Center for Communist Studies, rs21 (Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century) and Socialist Classics - Reprints of classical Marxist literature.
    Theo Russell from the New Communist Party gave a talk on the history and current situation in Ukraine which focused on the experiences of the Russian-speaking community in Ukraine since 2014, which was well received and followed by a fraternal discussion. Other talks were given by Alfie Hancox from Red Fightback on ‘The Long Crisis of British Marxism in the Shadow of Thatcher’ and Harry Holmes from rs21 on ‘Transforming the British Workers Movement’.
    Among the publications available was the English version of Alexander Bogdanov’s Art and the Working Class from US-based Iskra books – the publishing house of the Center for Communist Studies, and new editions of works by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin from Foreign Languages Press, the publishing house of Redapark, the Indian Maoist website.
    The New Communist Party stall included books by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, party pamphlets and Soviet badges, all of which sold well, as well as up to date leaflets on the conflict in Ukraine.
    Many fruitful discussions and contacts were made, and cooperation on future book fairs was also discussed, in which comrades from the UK and India based Second Wave Publications have already expressed interest. The next Merseyside Marxist Book Fair is scheduled to take place on Saturday 18th November 2023.