"Your name is not on the list, you are not coming in"

Dear SPGB

As is the case every year, you are not eligible for a stall at the Anarchist bookfair. this is due to a fundamental incompatibility with your politics.

Regards

D. Chatterton*

It must be late July as the yearly ritual of the Party applying for a stall at the London Anarchist Bookfair, and getting the usual reply has cropped up again. I'm not sure why the Party puts itself through this scenario every year. Maybe there is a spare stamp lying around the office? No, maybe it's because when you look at the some of the stalls and workshops that will be at the event, perhaps there is a feeling of: "Well, if they can get a stall, maybe we should chance our arm?"

I mean, when there are groups and campaigns as diverse as Aufheben, the IWW, No Sweat, Hobgoblin Magazine, the Wages For Housework Campaign, Verso and Notes from the Borderland having stalls and/or workshops at the event, it's the easiest mistake in the world to think that perhaps there is now a broadminded approach to what consitutes anarchism in EC1. I remember a few years back at an Anarchist Bookfair hearing the most reformist drivel issuing forth from the mouth of Jello Biafra, whilst he was on stage addressing the teeming hordes of stall holders, political malcontents and weekend anarchists at the fag end of a Saturday afternoon. The funniest thing about the speech was when a member of the audience, seven sheets to the wind, decided to make his own impromptu stage with a spare table and decided to give a counter speech whilst Jello was in full flow. It wasn't a Jarvis Cocker versus Michael Jackson type political intervention, more a Special Brew inspired poetry intervention. If memory serves me right, no one in audience raised their voice in opposition to either Jello's reformism or to the poet's piss-poor performance.

For all my snottiness, like the Recruitathon in July, the Bookfair was always an event that was pencilled into my political diary, and I would have definitely attended if I was in London this year. I'm especially gutted at missing it this year, as it means that I won't be able to see that classic anarchist documentary, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which is about - and I'm quoting here from the Anarchist Bookfair website - Hugo Chavez, elected President of Venezuela in 1998, [who] is a colourful, unpredictable folk hero beloved by his nation's working class and a tough-as-nails, quixotic opponent to the power structure that would see him deposed." [Meeting Room 1/2: 11:30-12.45]

*Nice to see that the old "communistic, atheistic scorcher" D. Chatterton is still active in the anarchist movement.