Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
PDF for printing (bilingual, 8.5 x 11)
This response to the statement by the Bookfair Collective was posted by @cedar on Kolektiva.social.
Well, this is quite the dishonest and self-serving post. I’m pretty surprised and disappointed, and there’s a lot that deserves a response, but I’m just going to focus on a few things.
1) You use incredibly vague and yet loaded language to talk about the conflict in the bookfair collective, and this is deliberately deceptive. You want to have us believe that some serious harm occurred, and not something that makes you look silly, like, for instance, members of your collective being unable to handle disagreement about your decision to ban tarot cards at the 2023 bookfair.
To hide this basic fact – that some people melted down when others didn’t simply accept their assertion that tarot is cultural appropriation – you are talking about “behaviours rooted in the logic of white supremacy.” Yes, issues of identity can be hard and disagreement around ideas can be stressful, but dressing up your attempts at shutting down criticism as anti-racism is truly a depressing comment on the anarchist space.
(Also, there was a great text about tarot distributed at the 2023 bookfair and I consider the issue settled: https://mtlcounterinfo.org/rethinking-identity-safety-and-appropriation-or-why-is-tarot-banned-at-the-bookfair/)
2) You don’t own the bookfair. It has been organized by lots of different people over time and takes tons of different kinds of contributions to thrive. You decided to use the money needed for the bookfair on mediation to seek “accountability” for people disagreeing with you about tarot cards rather than organize a bookfair, and other people stepped up and made it happen. And they did a great job. That they planned to do Constellation again is only natural, especially considering it took you 18 months to be honest about why you actually tried to cancel the bookfair in 2024. And what do you do? Do you support their initiative? Do you see that your collective is not needed right now and focus on other things? No – you decide to hold your own event and announce that you will be competing with Constellation for their time slot next year. Fucking bizarre.
3) All your discourse about community and care rings pretty hollow in a post that is basically just an attempt at settling scores – and these words are hopelessly vague at the best of times. You offer nothing on the level of ideas about how an event organized by your collective would be distinct and instead just list the race, religion, or ethnicity of the members of your collective. This is the worst form of identity politics, where identity has completely replaced politics. If vague platitudes and weak identity politics are what your collective stands for – after a year and a half to decide what makes you distinct – then it is hard to see the value in the event you’re proposing. This is doubly true when you are basically saying you are going to fight another collective for their project. It is hard to see your attempts at taking over the bookfair again as anything but ego.
You should delete your post and then do some thinking about how you got to the point of publishing something like this.