In light of the recent buyout of Zer0 Books by the publishing firm Repeater, discussion about the legacy of the imprint era has been circulating the web. In light of this discourse, the Zero-Degree Collective takes a stab at an honest assessment.
On October 23rd, the world of leftist publishing experienced a small but palpable upheaval. Zer0 Books, it was announced on the freelance publishing manager’s Patreon, had been acquired as part of the purchase of its parent imprint John Hunt Publishing. The company behind popular—and often controversial—titles ranging from Capitalist Realism to Kill All Normies to Against the Web would no longer continue with its current staff. Instead, they would all be unceremoniously “let go.”
Rumors initially swirled online regarding who was behind the takeover—was it OR Books? Verso? Within twenty-four hours a tweet was issued by Repeater Books which clarified the situation. “Repeater Books, the team that started and ran Zer0 for its first seven years, have bought Zer0 Books. “
The news drew mixed reactions online. On one hand, Zer0’s acquisition seemed like an archetypal feel-good story. Zer0 Books was founded by Tariq Goddard and the late Mark Fisher in 2009; in 2014, they left the company due to disputes with its parent, John Hunt. Thus like Steve Jobs or Simba in The Lion King, Goddard had come full circle with his purchase of Zer0, wrenching back what had been wrongfully taken from him (and notably consolidating Fisher’s catalog under one roof). On the other, though, the fact remains that many of Zer0’s most successful authors—Ben Burgis, Michael Brooks, Angela Nagle—had published with the company after the departure of Goddard and Fisher. Would their legacies, as well as those of other authors who published with what’s been termed “Zer0 2.0,” be treated respectfully in this new dispensation? And was it really the case that all of the current staff—including the publishing manager, Doug Lain—had been “let go”?
The early signals emanating from those in and around Repeater were not promising. The same day Repeater tweeted about the buyout, Polish journalist and former Zer0 author Agata Pyzik gushed that Zer0 had been bought back from “right-wing edgelords.” This sentiment was echoed in a post by Matt Colquhoun on blog Xenogothic. Not since the death of Thatcher, for Colquhoun, has such a “ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead carnival atmosphere” prevailed among “left-wing Twitter in the UK” (a claim that likely tells us far more about the self-affirming character of Twitter’s algorithm than the actual views of the UK left). It’s appropriate that the witch in said metaphor is the Wicked Witch of the West, since Colquhoun also reproaches Zer0 2.0 for dragging its erstwhile authors “through the mud of an American culture war” on behalf of a “reactionary American pseudo-left.” Indeed, for Colquhoun “Doug Lain and co.” are nothing but “scabs”—scabs who “embraced a newly grotesque and reactionary style that seemed like legacy media and outdated politics trying to wear the loose-fitting skin of Buzzfeed-esque clickbait in physical form.”
Full disclosure before continuing: we authored a number of books between us during the “Zer0 2.0” period. This brought us into contact with Doug Lain, as well as a number of other authors we now consider friends (and who Colquhoun likely considers “co.”—Matthew McManus, Ben Burgis, Eliot Rosenstock, Conrad Hamilton, Mike Watson). So perhaps we’re too close to Zer0 2.0 to speak objectively. Still, we’d have to think even a disinterested observer knowledgeable of the situation would have a hard time taking these allegations seriously.
The argument that Zer0 embraced a “right-wing” publishing agenda after 2014 rests on two essential premises. The first is that Doug Lain presided over a transformation whereby Zer0 threw open its doors to a slew of authors adjacent to the populist right, including contributors to the magazine Spiked. This allegation is not without a kernel of truth: Frank Furedi has written for Spiked, as have Philip Cunliffe and Angela Nagle (though the latter only contributed one article, in 2015). All three of these authors moreover hold certain positions which would typically be classified as “right-wing”—take Nagle’s opposition to immigration on the grounds that it diminishes the value of labor, or Cunliffe’s more recent denunciation of the lockdown for causing the inflation of state power. Yet even if we accept the view that these authors are not really left-wing, the allegation of a right-wing coup at Zer0 lacks credibility both in (a) its overestimation of the overall import of these authors to the company from 2014-21, and (b) its failure to address the fact that the publication of ideologically ambivalent authors at Zer0 presages Doug Lain’s tenure. Zer0 has published literally hundreds of books since 2014, the vast majority of which are unambiguously socialist if not Marxist. Is it the view of Zer0’s critics that a Marxist value-theorist like Anselm Jappe is “right-wing”? A “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist” like Joshua Moufawad-Paul? A card-carrying DSA member like Ben Burgis? Of course, critics of Zer0 2.0, when pressed on this, will likely point to the fact that the best-selling book put out by the company during Doug’s time as publishing manager—Kill All Normies, about the ascendant online alt-right—evinces sympathy for denizens of the septic subforums of 4chan. What they will likely not point out is that Doug Lain critiqued Nagle openly via Zer0’s YouTube channel once her flirtation with the right became more explicit, and that she cut ties with the publisher because of this in 2018—just around the time of the placement of her anti-immigration piece in the American Affairs Journal.
Equally troubling is the intellectual dishonesty evinced by Zer0 2.0’s critics in not acknowledging that Zer0’s association with—how shall we say—“problematic” authors did not begin under Lain’s stewardship of the imprint. By most accounts the name “Zer0 Books” is inspired by the work of Nick Land (“descent to the unknown = degree zero”)—a thinker who Fisher collaborated with in the nineties, and who became persona non grata on the left after his 2013 text “The Dark Enlightenment” advocated the control of the Earth by thousands of joint-stock corporations and defended eugenics. Fisher criticized Land’s rightward turn; nevertheless, the experimental atmosphere at Zer0, the attempt to get beyond the dominant left-liberal consensus, led to occasional dalliances with views shared by an alt-right that had proven itself far more adept in exploiting a multitude of cultural energies than the professional-managerial, “Brahmin left” (to apply the parlance of Thomas Piketty). Fisher’s own writings, of course, were often highly controversial—most notably, his attack on the censorious impulse of the left in 2013’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” caused him to be dubbed an old white guy out of touch with various identitarian struggles by proponents of these. But while Fisher’s critiques of the left were always anchored in a strongly left-wing worldview, this is decidedly less clear of several of the authors Goddard and Fisher elected to publish during their editorial tenure. The noted antisemite and former SWP affiliate Gilad Atzmon somehow managed to put out a book—The Wandering Who?—which flirts with Holocaust denial with Zer0 in 2011 (after seeing Atzmon lecture in Portland, Lain promptly decided that Zer0 would not publish his work under his editorship). James Heartfield, a British historian who has contributed to Spiked and who in 2019 ran for the Brexit Party, had three books approved by Zer0 before Doug’s tenure (as well as one after). And while it may not have been obvious at the time, it’s hard not to conclude in hindsight that Nina Power’s biologistic feminism served as ideal ideological scaffolding for her more recent embrace of an odious strain of transphobia. Of course, while Fisher and Goddard approved all of these authors, they did in some instances revise their positions. With Power, this happened only once her trans animus became apparent—fair enough, since One-Dimensional Woman is an excellent book. With Atzmon the response was more immediate: according to Zer0 1.0 author Dominic Fox Fisher came to acknowledge shortly after his signing with Zero that his contract had been a “terrible mistake.” This did not stop him from feeling personally betrayed when an open letter was circulated by Fox and others denouncing Atzmon’s book—to the point of possibly distancing himself from Fox (Fox is unsure of the exact cause of the weakening of their friendship).
The image of Lain’s editorial stint at Zer0 as Themidorean, then, is without merit—these tendencies were already part of Zer0’s brand. Should we thus conclude that Zer0 was always reactionary, that Lain inherited a publisher that was already showing signs of ideological decay, and did little to improve it? This brings us to the second allegation that’s recently been leveled against Zer0 2.0. Namely that it propounded a species of free speech absolutism that conflated, in the words of Colquhoun, “censorship of content and critique of quality,” thereby joining arms with the right. Indeed, Colquhoun is close to obsessed with this issue. A few days after his initial post celebrating Zer0’s buyout, he published a follow-up piece. In it, he argues that Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” should not be read as a condemnation “of ‘identity politics’ and ‘cancel culture’” avant la lettre (a reading characteristic of the Zer0 2.0 set). Rather its message is a more pedestrian one: that the left’s “Twitter miserabilism” is symptomatic of its impotency, which favors internal disparagement over the construction of any kind of “common project.”
We’re not particularly interested in dissecting Colquhoun’s reading of Fisher, which seems to us somewhat implausible (as well as somewhat unflattering, in so far as it partially defangs Fisher’s critique of dominant left-liberal positions). Rather we’re more interested in why Colquhoun feels compelled to elevate Fisher’s writing to holy writ, declaring that the authors of Zer0 2.0 lacked the prodigious insight required to understand him. In one sense, of course, his rationale is obvious. Fisher’s work, and “Vampire Castle” in particular, are referenced favorably in several Zer0 2.0 works—Nagle’s Kill All Normies, but also Michael Brooks’ Against the Web and Ben Burgis’ Canceling Comedians While the World Burns (and this list is surely non-exhaustive). This ongoing fidelity to Fisher threatens to undermine the image of Repeater as the rightful heirs of his work—and by extension, the rightful proprietors of Zer0. It must therefore be shown that they did not read it properly—that they are, as Colquhoun tells us time and time again, vulgarizers who sullied a storied tradition.
In pursuing this thesis, Colquhoun predictably sets aside the possibility that the positions staked out by Zer0 2.0 might be consistent with Fisher’s work. In a recent online lecture for the University of London, Benjamin Noys—a longtime acquaintance of Fisher’s, and former Zer0 author—took a different stance. Fisher’s work, according to Noys, was beholden to an explicitly Nietzschean paradigm. This paradigm had elitist implications, and in Noys’ view diminished his ability to adequately navigate political conflicts. “Vampire Castle,” which casts the working-class as a sort of Ubermensch above petty moral concern, is a product of this ideological drift. Noys understood why Fisher thought the way he did: something unsurprising since, as—he points out—he comes from a similar class background as Fisher. Ultimately though Fisher’s inversion of Nietzsche—in which liberal-capitalist moralism (the “Vampire Castle”) appears as “something,” in Fisher’s words, “worse than Christianity”—isn’t up to the task of providing a nuanced and dialectical analysis of late capitalist society.
The point here—as is perhaps obvious—is not that Zer0 2.0 are the rightful heirs of Fisher’s legacy and that Repeater are not. Rather it’s that the two presses pursued differing political agendas in the wake of 2014, and that these manifested in different readings of Fisher. Colquhoun describes the period of 2008-14 as a “golden era” for Zer0. We’re inclined to agree: under the expert editorial guidance of Goddard and Fisher, Zer0 moved from strength to strength in this period, helping popularize both object-oriented ontology as well as lay the groundwork for what would subsequently be referred to as “Accelerationism” or “Prometheanism”. Just as importantly, it helped solidify a new style muscular social-democratic politics in the UK—take Russell Brand’s lauding of Mark Fisher, or the way Nick Srnicek and co. connected the dots between Capitalist Realism and Corbynism. Yet once this political agenda came to fruition, with the elevation of both Corbyn and Sanders, nascent left populism had to resolve the conundrum of how to yoke together the left’s professional-managerial base with the views of a working-class they sought to reconnect with. From a cultural standpoint, this required punchy and thoughtful polemics that would help expand the left beyond its existing demographic. Thoroughly ensconced in the UK intellectual circuit, Repeater published many standout books in this time: philosophical texts like Steven Shaviro’s Discognition, or cultural retrospectives like Post-Punk: Then and Now (as well as, funnily enough, a book by Spiked contributor James Heartfield). What they did not do was repeat the success of Capitalist Realism for an enlarged left readership. With Fisher’s passing in 2017, Repeater’s drift into a hazier and more abstruse—not to mention more left-liberal—cultural space seemed all but assured (something quite apparent now as they bring to market books about the spiritual nature of sex work, or whatever).
It was that same year—in 2017—when Zer0 showed signs that it might yet recover from Goddard and Fisher’s departure. This was somewhat surprising. As a science fiction author past his (early 2000s) prime with a soporific podcast (“Diet Soap”), expectations were not high for Doug Lain when he took over as publishing manager (Lain claims that in his final conversation of many with Fisher, Fisher—while polite—seemed almost stunned when Lain cited going door-to-door for environmental charities as an example of his political background). But as Zer0 2.0 developed, Lain’s relatively limited credentials and his distance from the upper echelons of professional society, ended up working largely in his favor. This is not to say that he was faultless as a publishing manager: Lain could be disorganized as well as capricious, and too often made conformance with his left-communist views a litmus test for who was and wasn’t allowed in his inner circle (in spite of publishing many authors who diverged from this line). However, the fact he was not a professional academic or full-time writer had a couple of positive side-effects. First, it meant Lain—as a guy who prior to running Zer0 had spent years without extensive media access—was acutely sensitive to the capacity of online discourse to stimulate interest and sales. Indeed, by releasing regular videos and building a following on YouTube, he succeeded in constructing a publicity machine arguably stronger than that of Repeater (whose new releases are regularly reviewed and discussed by the UK press but whose most popular video on YouTube had two thousand views as opposed to Zer0’s half a million). Second, it meant that, when faced with a choice over whether to defend the sacred left-liberal tenants of political correctness and identity politics, or whether to support a “dirtbag” left seeking to expand its working-class support, he unambiguously went for the latter.
The result of this was, of course, Kill All Normies—Zer0’s second best-selling book after Capitalist Realism. It’s become almost a cliché to criticize it, and with good reason. While the subject matter of the book was novel in 2017, as a writer Nagle is often derogatory and dismissive, reflexively condemning online phenomena that warrants more careful consideration (those Tumblr feminists sure are crazy, ha ha ha right?). But what’s clear is that its publication bequeathed Zer0 with an identity that it lacked in the immediate aftermath of Goddard and Fisher’s exit. Most of Zer0’s biggest (“normcore left”) successes thereafter—Against the Web, Canceling Comedians—followed the same format, if more thoughtfully: essentially criticizing the left and calling for it to adopt a more populist line (which invariably means assigning heightened importance to addressing economic inequality). It also attracted the support of—among others— Slavoj Žižek, whose first question when asked to write the foreword for Myth & Mayhem was whether Nagle’s career would survive in light of the backlash she’d received (that Fisher favorably cited Žižek on a number of occasions makes the attempts to divorce Zer0 2.0 from his writings seem even less believable).
It’s only with this context established that we can meaningfully discuss the aversion to “cancel culture” Colquhoun and others find to be such an objectionable feature of Zer0 2.0. One can say many things about “cancel culture,” of course. For our part, we would say that it’s mostly a cultural turf war between liberals and the far right, which has little to do with socialism (or else why would it be the case, as Žižek has asked, that Louis C.K. showing a few women his penis is grounds for cancellation but being cited in the Panama Papers is not?). It should be obvious to anyone familiar with the Internet however that it lacks support among the working-class—as surely as studies have confirmed that the largest supporters of political correctness are rich, well-educated, and white. If authors at Zer0 often simplistically expounded the privilege of “free speech” against “cancellation,” then, this served a political purpose—to expand the class base of the left. This didn’t require any hard break with the legacy of Zer0. For the simplicity was already partly a defect of Fisher’s work, put to political use by Lain and co. And it was Fisher, and really only Fisher, that became the model for Zer0 2.0 after 2014 (Lain for instance has little to no interest in object-oriented ontology, nor for Repeater’s Landian occult tinges).
One can analogize this sort of dispute with the debates on the left over Brexit. Brexit isn’t likely to help the working-class, any more than the abolition of “cancel culture” is (which is to say that it’s somewhat diagonal to the question of building socialism). But the working-class in the UK strongly support Brexit. In this context the course of action the socialist left should take is unclear. Should it accept its representative status vis-à-vis the proletariat, and commit itself to carrying out their will? Should it reject it, at the risk of severing its links with this class, as occurred in 2019? Or should it try to compromise between the two options? To reject the characterization of Zer0 2.0 as right-wing for leaning in to anti-cancel culture sentiment is not to say that its position was perfect. It is only to say that, faced with a conundrum for which there does not exist a prefabricated socialist response, Zer0 2.0 took a strong position and avoided waffling. Partly because Lain and co. did not attempt to play the role of the intellectual who sees things from all sides on this issue, Colquhoun is correct that the period from 2014-21 was a philosophical regression (which is not to say the likes of Burgis or Brooks are dummies). What he does not seem to realize is that this philosophical regression is the flipside of what could easily be construed as a political advance—one that saw Zer0 2.0 attract a dedicated following, enlarge its American readership, and intervene more directly in significant political conversations than ever before. Nor that, while it may be true that Zer0 2.0 fell short of Fisher’s legacy by being too reverent towards it, Colquhoun’s image of Fisher as an apologist for cancel culture really has no other basis than his social position. This is suggested by the complete overlap of his views with the dominant liberal ones: essentially, that cancel culture is a myth created by the right to escape responsibility for the expression of abhorrent views (though to be fair, Colquhoun does insightfully recommend that we seek the causes of nonstop social media sniping in the technology itself).
It is a shame that, to draw a balance sheet of Zer0 2.0’s accomplishments, things like Zer0 1.0’s signing of Atzmon have to be dredged up (though it has long been a public issue). Certainly we have respect for Fisher, Goddard, and Colquhoun—even if the latter has taken a highly partisan position we cannot approve of. But this article was written at a tense moment. In a presumed effort to allay concerns about the buyout, a letter was sent to Zer0’s authors on October 27:
As you may have heard, John Hunt Publishing has recently been bought by Watkins Media. A new interim team is currently being assembled to manage Zer0 Books, which will include members of the original team that founded the imprint in 2007. No one has been ‘fired’, but Douglas Lain has announced inaccurately that he was let go. We have currently suspended submissions and commissions for Zer0 Books whilst we look at how the list will fit in with Repeater Books. All contracts will be honored, all titles currently in production will be published, and any forthcoming titles will be marketed by an active and dedicated team.
In fact, all of Zer0 2.0’s employees simply invoiced the company. Even if they all ceased to be paid, this would not technically mean they would’ve been “fired” or “let go”—and their new bosses know it. It is also far from clear how a “new interim team” can be assembled to run the imprint without redundancies being created that would lead to de facto dismissals.
Granted, it is not clear what’s going to happen yet. The possibility of combining Repeater’s philosophical and cultural cachet with Zer0’s sharp political focus is a tantalizing one. Perhaps the top brass at Repeater know this and are currently at work implementing that vision. Whatever the long-term intention of Repeater though, the attacks launched by those close to the press have created a climate of unease amongst Zer0’s authors. If these are indeed reflective of the attitudes of Zer0’s new management—if they ultimately decide to cease paying Zer0 2.0’s staff, and to distance themselves from the books published by it—it will almost surely trigger the departure en masse of its current authors. Who knows? Maybe Repeater’s top brass will simply harvest Zer0’s pre-2014 catalog and close the press, so that Zer0 Books will literally publish zero books. If they take these sorts of actions though they’ll be effectively squandering their shot at creating a second golden era. One that they won’t be able to bring about if Zer0 is reduced to a husk of its former self. How’s that for vampiric?
UPDATE: On November 2, a letter was sent to Zer0 authors announcing the replacement of seemingly all Zer0 2.0 staff. This was followed by the publication on Twitter of a statement on November 3 by new manuscript editor Tristam Adams. In addition to alluding obliquely to the normalization of “right-wing populism,” Adams claims in the statement that “it is time Zero Books played its role in solidarity, lucid intellect, sympathy and learning again”—an implicit condemnation of Zer0 2.0. Perhaps as recompense for this, Zer0 later that day re-tweeted a message from Ben Burgis directing potential buyers to purchase his new book on Christopher Hitchens on the website of Red Emma’s.
