Introduction

We present here an idiosyncratic survey of four publishing projects, a survey which seeks to move beyond study of the static singular object of ‘the book’, to tease out the distinct forms and qualities of communist experiments with serial publishing.

Serial publications such as journals, bulletins, magazines and newspapers bear and create a field of conditions, associations, reciprocities and differentiations, and act as containers for a range of other publishing forms or genres: editorials, letters, interviews, essays, artists’ projects, songs, reports, photographs, video stills, poems, advertising, lists, glossaries, tables of contents, cover artwork and URLs. Commonly within even the most conservative of serial forms, “boundaries are fluid’ and ‘genres and authorial voices” mixed.^[1] Publishing conventions (layout formats, typography, columns, titles, headings etc.) provide a set of elements for experimentation within the rich seam of serial publishing which the communist movement dallied with across the long 20th century, aiming to infuse with the passion of a politics which might inculcate a future common life of abundance for all.

Seriality above all establishes a rhythm of production and a reciprocity between a community of readers and writers. Often punctuated by political events and self-organised forums for discussion, where exchanges between those two indistinct communities might mix and merge, serial forms offer opportunities for quick reflection and responses. They in turn may spark events, such that seriality offers the Benjaminian-modernist promise of a “strict alternation between action and writing”.^[2] As the 20th century drew to a close and modernist ideas, vanguardism and party forms receded, and new post-media forms such as the internet, video and radio came to the fore, radical currents tended to retain a relation to serial forms, but scaled down their ambitions and emphases away from mass populist formats such as the newspaper (or if used, it was reprised on a new community—Variant—or hybrid—Mute—basis) towards more minor instantiations of the serial form. These often don’t evacuate print altogether, but articulate a network or ‘post-digital’ hybridisation, simultaneity and divergence of print and digital forms, in step, but critically and experimentally, with the emergence of the new media communications infrastructure.

Échanges, bulletin of the network Échanges et Mouvement

Échanges (1975-2025) was established by Henri Simon and others who had been part of Informations et correspondances ouvrières (ICO), dissolved in 1973 and itself formed by a split from Socialisme ou Barbarie (S ou B) in 1958. ICO was effectively a journal and coordinating forum for council-communist groups in France, with some international connections, particularly to Belgium, the US (e.g. autoworkers in Detroit) and the UK. Échanges modelled itself on principles of direct correspondence and “means of exchanging information on struggles” between workers and as the bulletin of a network of individuals, groups and publishers and publications (Fig. 1). This approach was a contribution to problematising the situation of left communist activity after May ‘68 around the question of appropriate militants’ activity outside cycles of revolutionary struggle. The framework developed by the journal was strongly shaped by a text published by Simon at the point of dissolution of ICO, ‘The New Movement’ (1974). Describing emerging autonomous struggles since the early 1960s, the text identifies a ‘new movement’ “whose organization can only appear and develop out of struggle itself”.^[3] This new movement—or new movements—opposes itself to the old movement of trade unions, parties, revolutionaries stretching back to the early-20th century, whose plans and programmes mediated the struggles of the class and directed it. Instead and opposed to the old movement, the new movement’s characteristics are informality/spontaneity, immediation, direct action. Simon’s view, and that broadly expressed throughout Échanges, was that spontaneous organisation is fluid. Willed organisation tends towards rigidity and self-preservation. Militants’ ‘interventions’ into living struggles often do more harm than good. This finds reciprocity with the critique of so-called left ‘rackets’ developed by Jacques Camatte and Giani Collu in Invariance in the early 1970s. However Échanges’ novelty with regard to other heretical communist currents is that they continue to centre workplace struggles, ‘following the struggles’, while refraining from either intervention or substituting a new revolutionary subject for the absent or reluctant working class.^[4]

Though Échanges took a deliberately more humble and diminutive form than ICO (and S ou B before), it also opened itself to wider heterodox international connections and exchanges. Published from the first issue in English and French, with some later lapses over periods, its irregular correspondences stretched to India and USA. In a given decade the Échanges bulletin is replete with strike reports from all over the world, alongside announcements for meetings, announcements of publications (journals, books, pamphlets), as well as reviews, letters, and less commonly longer synthetic essays. A spirit of very loose and non-coercive attention and affiliation threads through its varying contributions. Though at times, especially towards the later years, the suspicion is that close to 100 percent of content was penned, or at the very least written-up, by Simon, there is always a clear indication in it of deference to and reliance on the correspondence and conversations which have shaped it.

The problem for Échanges as a serial publication, a bulletin, is how to maintain coherence and connection without becoming a willed organisation. Its regularity and longevity suggests the self-preserving constancy of the willed organisation, rather than the fleeting emergence of the spontaneous organisation. However, the stability of the form is simply intended to be the minimum necessary for the reports from living struggles to be made legible and circulate. This also provides some reasons for why the role of theory is vexed and suppressed in Échanges. It did not see itself as an organ for the production of theory, a priority that had empowered a kind of bourgeois cult of personality in S ou B around Cornelius Castoriadis, and enchained rival revolutionary groups in self-important, competitive forms of intellectual production delinked from struggle (a hubris which impacted S ou B when it was completely wrong-footed by the events of May ’68).^[5] Instead, the focus of Échanges was pragmatic, maintaining links and lines of communication and directly focused on interpreting new developments in the international relationships between capital and labour directly out of struggles and conflicts themselves. This meant that while there was emphasis on the power of the working-class in production, Échanges’interest in social and community struggles extended far beyond the workplace.

Satirised as ‘the choice of non-existence’ by the Situationist International, Échanges’ willingness to circulate information, but refusal to theorise or intervene, drew the ire and mystification of more aggressive commentators on the French ultra-left.^[6] Simon has equally been accused of ‘attentisme’ (a passive ‘wait-and-see’ attitude) for advocating non-intervention by militants in revolts and strikes. For Simon, however, the emphasis remained on connecting experiences through ‘partial knowledge’ as opposed to the ‘generalising’ which might block them.^[7]

Latterly, this information-oriented approach to simply circulating news and analysis of struggles has been further linked to the emergence of networked communications and pilloried by Gilles Dauvé as a form of ‘information fascination’. He argues that in a media sphere dominated by “constant data flow, information overload and obsolescence, sensationalism’, radicalism too often becomes a mimic of these features, radicalism ‘reduced to a description and exaltation of manifold struggles.”^[8] This warrants further exploration, but the point we wish to make here is that Échanges’ prefigured and mirrored the emergence of the networked form proper in its humble stapled bulletin.^[9] It enabled international correspondence, ‘following the struggles’, to reach into the ‘hidden abode of production’ and open those spaces up to worker-correspondents’ reflection and understanding. “Échanges takes account of the fact that everything is continually changing and modifying”, as Roland Simon puts it, the network is fundamentally a community: the bulletin is a communifying form which seeks to connect with other self-determined struggles, reports and rhythms (movement and change).^[10]

Beginning as an A4 mimeographed stapled newssheet, the bulletin coalesces into its iconic smart format around 1993, where a more or less brightly coloured card cover indicates the title, date and issue number of the journal and its complete table of contents below this information (Fig. 2.). The back cover bears the senders’ address and a small blank printed box for the address of the receiver. The journal therefore acts as its own envelope communicating its contents and its emphatic network relation through its external form. The format also emphasises its portability and mobility, which meets and merges with the international composition and global field of interests communicated quickly by the content titles. Its layout and organisation aspires to transparency of the relations that produce the bulletin, and transparency with regard to other initiatives which are constitutive of its community of readers and writers—subscribers and correspondents.  

This emphasis links Échanges to a minor subterranean tradition of workers correspondence, developed in the post-war moment by a group of intellectuals and militants around CLR James and Martin Glaberman in Detroit, forming the Correspondence Publishing Committee in the 1950s. They published the Correspondence newspaper, “A paper that is written, edited and circulated by its readers”, “in the interests of workers, negroes, women and youth”, “a living factor in social struggles”.^[11] This Brechtian workerist aspiration to turn each reader into a writer (in a period of rising literacy in the US, especially for black workers) governed the Committee’s efforts to simultaneously publish a lively newspaper and black working-class fiction.

In Échanges, listings of journals, magazines, bookstores and new publications provide lateral associations to other projects. Letters, texts shared from other journals and translations make the bulletin a porous waystation or clearing floor for other projects, reports from elsewhere. Subtending this is a network of interpersonal correspondence behind Échanges, as apostal box, a node in an international network which introduces and promotes connection between initiatives and isolated individuals. Your copy is addressed to you, you are implicated directly as a correspondent of this correspondence, the gesture is intended to be humble, flattening and empowering. The air of facticity formalises the objective processes the medium of communication is made of. The aim is not exactly transparency—since full disclosure of the choices which have made this collection of reports from the class struggle come together is never completely possible—but matter of factness. And blunt pragmatism by design matches prose which aims to lay out in the most stringent terms the accounts of struggle at work and economic crises restructuring the restlessly international relations between workers and capital. Vertical association draws from Échanges long lineage linking it to ICOand further back to S ou B. Each of these endeavours are anchored by a remarkably consistent central published journal, newsletter or bulletin. As Henri Simon emphasises in his scattered interviews and reflections, militant life is above all a rhythm carried out within and against constraint, but it is not the consistency but the breaches which mark determinate shifts—‘real movement’—in thinking, which govern the subsequent direction and coalescing around a new form.^[12]

Debartis: Circulator of Autonomous Forms

Functioning as an email circular, webpage and single sheet printed bulletin (slightly smaller than A3) published inside an A5 brown envelope with unique artwork, often accompanied by an epigram, Debartis carves out a self-consciously secretive and marginal space as a ‘circulator of autonomous forms’ (Figs 3 and 4). Primarily an epistolary network, the distribution of the ‘letters’ circulated by Debartis coincide with peripatetic meetings, discussions, screenings and launches taking place at small autonomous spaces (bookshops, infoshops, social centres and left archives), recently in Warsaw, London, Vilnius and Copenhagen. These meeting points have often become a collection point for new contributions. Though it is early days for Debartis and possibly too early to generalise in the way we do here, the format is very much founded on a form of serialism, but is definitely not a magazine. It could be thought of as a form of mail-art anarcho-communist theorising, or simply a network branching out in wider circuits of correspondence and experiments in connecting an ever wider range of media formats.The instantiations of Debartis feature different media objects, events, but rather than these being central, they are sites of iterative contribution and chains of association. For example, the reading of texts by Sadiya Hartman and others on ‘Looting’—a discursive event which happened in Berlin—draws from a publication by another publisher Diversity of Aesthetics.^[13] A watercolour painting by Sashko Protyah leads us to the video 100 percent off reflecting playfully—through both animated watercolour paintings and vérité footage—on looting in shops in Mariupol during the siege and capture of the city by Russian troops in March 2022.^[14] In its goth-cute watercolour animated introductory sequence, jets and missiles zoom through the dark grey skies, knocking geese out of the sky just before impacting a similarly grey and runny tower block at mid-height. To the apparent indifference of the grey prole seated indifferently on a bench under the tower, next to graffiti reading ‘bomb shelter’ and ‘Putin fuck off!’, goods begin raining from the skies. High heels, a crown, tomatoes, sausages, bottles of whisky, milk, cake, chairs, spectacles, pineapple, fish and bottles of champagne tumble to the floor surrounding this man, with his blank looks and his bench transforming his outdoor destitution into a well-stocked pseudo-interior cornucopia of comforts. Footage from around the city provides varied views of operational and defunct supermarkets. According to one witness, “looting started one perfect morning” when the “military opened up the store so we could take what we want”. Several interviewees testify to the feeling of plenty, they’d never seen, or fleetingly possessed before. The sense is of a moment of inverted hope in the midst of the trauma of war. The sky which has dropped bombs shows itself equally capable of showering luxuries, the gift is simply the commodity turned inside out, with its packaging of shutters, glass and metal unwrapped and discarded.^[15]

Sometimes it is not easy to follow all the links and associations developed by the Debartis website, and that no doubt is a part of its mystery. There, a performative video by the Underground Diasporic Committee for the Dispersion of Abomination is connected to the theme of ‘hereness’, developed in the responses to the translation of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Languages and Peoples’, but also linked to ongoing research into the Jewish bund in Lithuania and the wider region.^[16] The bund a historical high point of working class, anti-Zionist jewish solidarity, this is explored further through ‘Poppies And Daffodils: Anti-Zionist Jewish Solidarity and its Absence’—an audio recording from a discussion in Vilnius featuring presentations and discussion by Kamal Ahamada, Mila Burchart and Noah Brehmer.

Evidently then, the single issue ‘letters’ have begun to gather further contributions and responses as they have circulated. The small yet powerful aspect of this model, is that on a minor scale it is both centrifugal and centripetal, that is it involves concentration around a debate, bringing differing perspectives into focus on an object, a text, a theme, and it opens outwards to different, further flung, contexts, bringing local specificities, debates and conditions into dialogue, thereby widening its ‘circulars’. These two dynamics are also reconfigured by a specific politics of translation and language (the 4^th letter features a multi-language translation,RU, PL, LT, EN, of Agamben’s essay ‘Languages and Peoples’) As such, Debartis contributes to a recently emerging political practice of translation in militant serial publications, which could be seen to be emblematised in its most ambitious form in a recent issue of the Funambulist on the ‘thread of translation’, in which a text in three European languages was used ‘to facilitate the translation of the text into thirty non-hegemonic languages’.^[17]

Earlier, Frére Dupont’s journal project Letters took a similarly, and then increasingly, idiosyncratic form to Debartis, including republished or translated documents from left history, commentary, ephemera, letters, interviews tending to emphasise small discussions, personal and intimate exchange as the basis for writing and publishing, though through this a more singular, albeit eclectic and polyphonic, authorial voice. Frére Dupont tended to predominate, or at least outstrip the pace of any other contributors.^[18] The present website self-parodies this tendency, archiving no fewer than six ‘self-interviews’ with Frére Dupont. It’s a form we first encountered, used to great effect, in Autotoxicity, published by Ian Trowell in Sheffield in the mid- to late-1990s, more or less in parallel with his other serial publication, Communist Headache.^[19] Beginning with an openness to surveying then-current movements, speculating on possible connections and potentials for recomposition, both projects grappled also with retreat and self-introspection. Textually, these centripetal and centrifugal tendencies often manifested together, especially in Trowell’s reflexive auto-theory. While in terms of publishing form, they diverged. In Communist Headache, A4 photocopied and staple bound, the layout is dense and centripetal, while Autotoxicity’s experiments with format are an example, almost uniquely so, of the possibilities of what might be called an ultra-left artists’ book—playing with print formats, techno-print affordances, inserts, stickers, paper types and colours and hand-made cover art. These serial projects, then, are anearly example of two tendencies which act in tension to constitute the dynamic field of communist small publishing: outward engagement, promiscuity, network relations, openness, and an opposing, yet co-constituting, movement which pulls things into a centre, concentrating and making intensive, in a comparatively isolated formation.

Endnotes

In the journal Endnotes (2008–), is a form of seriality that bears and projects rifts and ruptures in linear time, a communist seriality apt for the collapsing temporality of progress that is characteristic of the social and ecological crises of the present. These rifts in seriality are not conscious decisions as regards publishing practice, as far as one can tell, but a consequence of the journal’s understanding of communism. It’s an expression in serial form of the collapse of the linear and expanding subject of the modern workers’ movement, due to stagnation and deindustrialisation, where communism now takes shape through confrontations and rifts with the limits, complicities and exclusions in workers’ and other identities.

Yet rupture in seriality isn’t the first impression one gets from the visual and physical form of Endnotes in print. An open series of five issues to date, in the format of perfect-bound books of between 167 and 424 pages, it has a high degree of uniformity—a pared-down and rigorously ordered page layout devoid of images, modernist sans-serif typeface throughout, and austere image-less covers. There is some variation, though less than in many serial publications: the cover colour changes with each issue (partially reminiscent of the internationale situationniste journal), as does the issue title on the front cover, a back-cover epigraph, and a boxed-in drawing of a partially-concealed fantastical monster, lurking behind a modernist or finance-industries building, which accompanies the postal address on the back flap—something like a reimagined ‘union bug’ or Renaissance printshop colophon. Issue no. 4 also bore a wraparound image as a dustjacket, which we’ll return to, and no. 5 includes a 56-page ‘dossier’ section in light-yellow pages (Fig 5).

Where, then, is the communist seriality the rift in homogeneous and subject-consolidating time? It comes as a two-fold movement of severance and displacement. First, severance. The back-cover epigraph to Endnotes no.1 is taken from Marx’s epistolary exchange with Arnold Ruge, where they hammered out the aims of their ill-fated journal, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (‘German-French Annals’, its single issue published in February 1844). Here Marx famously struck against political dogma, “the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge”, to situate communist thought in ever-new conjunctures, thought bound not to a linear unfurling of time but leaning into the contingent and mutating horizons and antagonisms of capitalist society. This is the “ruthless criticism of all that exists” ruthless ‘externally’, in readiness for “conflict with the powers that be”, but also ‘internally’, in opening the self, class, struggle, and the journal to disruption, to “not being afraid of the results it arrives at”.^[20]

With this epigraph, paradoxical though it seems, a text some 180 years old and written to guide a nineteenth-century journal, is enlisted to designate and confirm a journal seeking to “cleave off the present from the past”, to sever itself from communism understood as an emergent workers’ subject.^[21] But that is what the epigram is doing, confronting “Marxism itself … [as] a tradition of dead generations”, while demonstrating that in orienting against linear time, communism can still borrow effectively from the past.^[22] Hence the first issue of Endnotes, most unusually for a new journal, is an editorialised collection of previously published texts by other writers and projects, Troploin and Théorie Communiste, where the purpose is to form a balance sheet of the high-point of the post-ultra-left, so “drawing a line that foregrounds the struggles of our own time”.^[23]

If we turn again to the journal’s visual and physical design, it can now be viewed as an expression of this severance, so stripped down to the thin horizon of class abolition—without subject, tradition, teleology, dogma, or guarantee—that it looks like printed alienation, necessarily so, given the impossibility of any positive proletarian form today. However, this design aesthetic is not a surrender to capital, but bears the proletariat as a pressing non-identity. The preference for austere visual style is a rigorous non-preference for any identifiable communist, anarchist, feminist, anti-racist or counter-cultural design (notwithstanding occasional ultra-left design affectations). It is a stripping out of design identity which would otherwise bind it to the past rather than open it to the rifts of the present. It is minimalism as a maximal condition of unforeseen rupture..

If severance is Endnotes’ meta project, it manifests as a series of displacements in the practice of journal publishing itself, the second movement of its communist seriality. For the Endnotes group, the priority of publishing is displaced in favour of group dialogue. As they put it, anti-dogmatic, “ruthlessly honest, open-ended internal debate”, the group “a place for the careful working out of ideas”, “in which no topics would be off-limits”, an “impolite conversation” at the limits of the group’s identity and the horizons of social antagonism.^[24] To this dialogue, the print journal is only adjacent, not the primary project; the journal is “conceived specifically as a by-product”.^[25]

The publishing of issues is thus displaced from linear periodicity, to be conjoined instead with the contingent, layered, and ruptural temporalities of group discussion, discussion which is indexed to antagonism and struggle. This impacts on both content and rhythm. For example, the editorial to Endnotes no. 3 explains that the more abstract theoretical content of the previous two issues, was in part a result of a low ebb in global class struggles, but also “because we didn’t know what we wanted to say about the struggles that were on-going, and we thought it best not to pretend otherwise”.^[26] Such experiences incline the journal to avoid “rush[ing] to conclusions for the sake of being topical”, and what it glosses as “concerns about publishing”, which we take to mean subjection to the linear temporality of having to produce regular issues. Whereas, when struggles against global social murder accelerated, issue numbers 3 and 4 leant into the leading edges of antagonism, including the crucial article ‘Brown v. Ferguson’, on the dynamics and fault lines of the Black Lives Matter movement, which sprung forth after the police murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012.

Nonetheless, seriality appears to have carried a nagging compulsion to periodicity, seriality’s compromised pole, for Endnotes editorials often begin by remarking on the causes of delay in publication. This compulsion must have been relieved in recent years, as the print journal was joined by a mix of online forms, each with their different and looser temporalities of production: themed ‘dossiers’; stand-alone essays, interviews, and translations, aggregated in a large and growing section named ‘palabre’ (a term developed by Théorie Communiste to describe reflexive discussion and decision pursued from multiple angles); translations of Endnotes articles; and PDFs of the print journal.

Nearly six years since print issue no. 5, which was itself at a four-year interval from no. 4, this web constellation has come to lead this journal’s serial form, a seriality now mixed and layered. A 2024 interview with two of the group suggests that no. 6 may never appear, such is the print-journal’s displacement from centrality, although now due to the more commonplace complications of social life: “There’s a lot of pressure not to do Endnotes stuff”, “the work of writing and publishing still seems just out of our immediate grasp, but there’s also talk of this book series, which might be an alternative to issue 6”.^[27] For all its insight, the pacing of this interview (conducted by the Chinese communist journal Chuang, itself an important serial publication), is structured by issue numbers, with a ‘What’s Next?’ at the end. That’s too linear for our purposes here, so we’ll turn back to an example of Endnotes’ communist rupture in seriality, regarding its visual design.

Endnotes no. 4, whose bound covers follow the stripped-back regimen of the other issues, also has a wraparound dustjacket. The dustjacket exactly repeats the text layout of the covers, but the standard blank colour is replaced by a visual image, the only image, aside from the mutant union bug, in a journal that up to this issue had published some 900 pages of text. It is included for no apparent reason—it feels like a gift—but not one of relief and resolution. The image is a greyscale aerial photograph of the massive Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St Louis, Missouri, whose rigid geometric plan is so strikingly evident that the image at first looks like an abstraction. It expresses the spatial containment, racialised segmentation, and domination of mid-twentieth-century capitalist urbanism—the latter’s ‘own peculiar décor’, in Debord’s phrase, which titles the relevant article. But in the minds of some readers, the image is haunted by the well-known photograph of the scheme’s dynamiting, in 1972, with which Charles Jencks, the reactionary architecture critic, identified ‘the death of modernism’. As such, this scene of order and control also bears, explosively, the concatenating crisis that is today’s collapse of that socio-urban form, its linear subject fragmented, scattered, and yet the condition for rupture unconstrained by workerist subjectivity. Once this has been visualised on the covers of this one issue, the image of explosive constraint is a flickering presence that runs backwards and forwards across them all.

Counter-Signals

Edited by Jack Henrie Fisher (Chicago) and Alan Smart (Berlin), the bi-annual journal Counter-Signals (2016–) describes itself as “addressing, in variable iterations, different aspects of the intersection of design, media, and politics”. It is acutely sensitive to materiality and form, as much as to the abstractions of capital and thought. And it places questions of communism and publishing at its heart, which serve as the journal’s fabric and problem space, sometimes up front, other times latent, as it unfolds in series.

This is most evident in issues 1 and 2 of the five to date, titled ‘Militant Print / A Form Oriented Towards its Own Circulation’ (Counter-Signals #1) and ‘Hieroglyphs of the Anti-Commodity’ (Counter-Signals #2).^[28] They can be read instructively in relation to Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub’s Marxist archival and publishing work, which has a central place in Counter-Signals’ self-formation—their monumental project on class struggle in communication that was the International General / International Mass Media Research Center (IG/IMMRC) and the huge two-volume selection from its materials, Communication and Class struggle (1979, 1983). Siegelaub, in his preface to volume 1, has a keen eye for the fugitive, ephemeral, uneven, unstable, poorly distributed and inadequately archived qualities of revolutionary publishing, produced and consumed, as it is, under the fraught conditions of international class struggle. It makes for a strong rationale for their archival project, which Counter-Signals seeks to affirm and renew. But in so doing, Counter-Signals introduces an important twist, which places it within the understanding of communism and class that is broadly carried by the other publishing projects in our survey.

Where Siegelaub, seemingly still attached to the form of coherent class subjectivity, seeks to correct for and overcome the fugitive and volatile conditions of communist publishing, Counter-Signals approaches these as the very expression of the fraught non-identity of the working class, whose horizon has bodied forth so much more forcefully than at the time of Siegelaub’s text. As Henrie Fisher puts it in the editorial to issue 2, “instead of attempting to heroically overcome (or pedantically correct) those conditions of disorganization and indeterminacy which Siegelaub so vividly noted […] Counter-Signals affirms these conditions as salient qualities—mutable, autonomous, unstable—of the ongoing project of a self-reflexive communist media form.”^[29] As such, the conditions both index the crisis and collapse of the coherent class subject and present the singular qualities and terrain of a communist publishing against and beyond it.

As a project which seeks to register and develop these volatile, ephemeral and uneven qualities, they tip Counter-Signals not into stripped-back design, characteristic of Échanges and Endnotes, but into the full material complexity of publishing—the multiplicity of formats, production materials and technologies, designs, modes of authorship, distribution circuits, publishing paradigms, economies, temporalities, readership patterns, etc., through which the history and present of revolutionary publishing takes its ill-shapen form. This isn’t an ‘autonomous’ publishing culture, it needs to be stressed. Even as communism turns publishing toward its own aims and practices, its singular qualities arise from doing so within and against the capitalist conditions and forms of publishing, of which it cannot but be a part. Henrie Fisher quotes Siegelaub to this effect: “while these [communication] forms reproduce the social conditions from which they issued, they might also serve, along with other forces, to exacerbate the contradictions latent within these conditions and help to destroy them”.^[30]

“Along with other forces”—for publishing is only a facet of revolutionary politics (even if it sometimes mistakes itself for the whole), which must co-mediate with praxis in the social and planetary totality. Hence, along with publishing, the pages of Counter-Signals engage a host of topics and problems, whose variety can be indicated by issue titles, which themselves allow for content that skitters about untethered: ‘(All the Way) Down with Platforms!’ (#3), ‘Identity Is the Crisis’ (#4), ‘Systems and their Discontents’ (#5), and ‘Cryptic Commodity Design in the Graphic Design Superstructure’ (as is the title of the contributors’ call for #6)

It’s on the terrain of visual design that communist seriality presents itself most enticingly here, in the form of repetition and difference, which manifests within each issue and through the series. The pages are packed full of images, but images that are self-consciously reproductions of other publications, reproductions that become originals (as is the magic of print), in their appropriation, renewal, and divergence, in pages that aspire to belong to the (open) set itself. Mechanically, this is effected through offset lithography (issues #1, #2, and #3) and Risograph (#4 and #5), inscribing the project in today’s favoured technology of experimental publishing; graphically, through dissolving the figure/ground division by reproducing images at 100%, where possible (Fig. 6 and 7). And critically, these mechanical and graphic means of the “recursive iterability” of images enact “a self-reflexive strategy with which to begin to talk and write and reproduce” the field of communist publishing.^[31] These means impress that field into the page, in order for the journal to take “as its multiform subject those things which the other publications share: labor, textiles, antenna towers, porta-paks, telegraphy, grocery store commodities, incarceration, anarchy, typefaces, books, book covers, and communism (among many other things).”’^[32]

This difference through repetition, as technology, graphic style, and critical aim, is achieved tangentially to the journal too. Counter-Signals issued from Henrie Fisher and Smart’s design and publishing outfit, Other Forms, but not in a relation of project to base, figure to ground. The two repeat through each other. From one perspective, Other Forms is the base for the serial journal to unfurl; from another, the journal provides the serial rhythm—and a laboratory—from which Other Forms’ projects can peel off, transversally, experimentally, anomalously. One such example is a ‘bootleg’ pamphlet of Siegelaub’s two prefaces to Communication and Class Struggle.^[33] Appropriated, reiterated, and rethought, with a postscript by Henrie Fisher, Siegelaub’s extraordinary texts are in this way sent off in new directions, in relation with new problems and under new conditions, and returned to the samizdat terrain from whence so much of thearchive of communist publishing, serial or otherwise, in its ever tense present

1. Beetham, Margaret, ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, in Investigating Victorian Journalism, eds Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 19–32, 29. ↑

2. Walter Benjamin, One Way Street trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Michael W. Jennings (London: Belknapp Press, 2016), 21.       ↑

3. Henri Simon, ‘The New Movement’, Solidarity Pamphlets (1974), https://archive.leftove.rs/documents/XEE ↑

4. Jacques Camatte and Gianni Collu, ‘On Organisation’, trans. Edizioni International (1972), https://libcom.org/article/organisation-jacques-camatte-gianni-collu ↑

5. A. The refusal of theory was not without its own problems. As Simon put it, “     the success of the ICO was simultaneously its death”     , when it was overrun by students after ’68 and lost its focus on class struggle. Henri Simon with Dominik Müller, ‘In Conversation: An Active Life’ (2023), Brooklyn Rail, https://brooklynrail.org/2023/03/field-notes/Henri-Simon-with-Dominik-Mller/ ↑

6. Gilles Dauvé, ‘The Bitter Victory of Councillism’, in Gilles Dauvé,

   Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 131. For a recent reflection on the originality and paradox of the unspoken and unnameable theory that inheres in Échanges’ refusal to theorise its non-intervention, see Roland Simon, ‘The best thing that can happen to a theory is to be of its time’ (2025), https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/roland-simon-the-best-thing-that-can-happen-to-a-theory-is-to-be-of-its-time ↑

7. Henri Simon, ‘Some Thoughts on Organisation’ (1979), https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/henri-simon-some-thoughts-on-organisation ↑

8. Dauvé, ‘The Bitter Victory of Councillism’, op. cit. 131. ↑

9. If we table a less flat account of capital’s sweeping ‘recuperation’ of social forms, including forms of resistance, there may be some more points to make about the development of a field of parallel information by ICO, Échanges and other ventures (Red Notes in the UK launched several similar, work-focused information-gathering, information-circulating initiatives in the late-1970s and early 1980s). That is, in studying the new capitalist technologies and technologised organisation of workplaces, militants adopted forms of organisation which borrowed effective techniques of administration, whilst eschewing the forms of hierarchy, exploitation and privation which they generally served. ↑

10. Roland Simon, ‘The best thing that can happen to a theory is to be of its (2025), https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/roland-simon-the-best-thing-that-can-happen-to-a-theory-is-to-be-of-its-time ↑

11. The Correspondence Booklet (1954), https://libcom.org/article/correspondence-booklet-1954 ↑

12. Henri Simon, ‘Reflections on Reflections Around Exchanges’ (1979)https://endnotes.org.uk/posts/henri-simon-reflections-on-reflections-around-exchanges-excerpt ↑

13. https://www.commonnotions.org/diversity-of-aesthetics-vol-iii?srsltid=AfmBOoqJpZffnSw6of00HlbLfPhKlx1uLo5uPGxm9X23iorWQ7P2ob1l ↑

14. https://youtu.be/hkUjr6zB2oc ↑

15. Later, the economy of taking becomes one of giving, as looted alcohol ‘becomes currency’, it is traded for 70kg of small fish which in turn is cooked to feed a small army of abandoned pets and dishevelled, shocked people who have gathered. ↑

16. https://vimeo.com/976299705 ↑

17. https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/thread-of-translations/thread-of-translations-introduction ↑

18. http://www.lettersjournal.org/ ↑

19. https://archive.leftove.rs/documents/grid/title/author==Ian_Trowell ↑

20. Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge, letter, Kreuznach, September 1843, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm ruge letter ↑

21. Endnotes, ‘A History of Separation: The Rise and Fall of the Workers’ Movement, 1883-1982’, Endnotes 4 (2015): 70-192, 74. ↑

22. Endnotes, ‘Bring Out Your Dead’, Endnotes 1 (2008): 3-18, 3. ↑

23. Ibid.,.4 ↑

24. Endnotes, ‘About Endnotes’, (n.d.), Endnotes ‘Editorial’, Endnotes 3 (2013): 1-10, 1. ↑

25. Endnotes, ‘About Endnotes’, op. cit.n.d., ↑

26. Endnotes, ‘Editorial’, Endnotes 3 (2013): 1-10, 1. ↑

27. J, in Chuang, ‘Neither Prophets nor Orphans: An Interview with Endnotes’ (2025), https://chuangcn.org/2025/02/neither-prophets-nor-orphans-interview/ ↑

28. The latter phrase is taken from Jacques Rancière’s Proletarian Nights, where it evokes and affirms the anomalous, indecipherable, and wrenching qualities of aesthetic works––paintings, poetry, prose––created by nineteenth-century proletarians, in their impossible efforts ‘to exorcise their inexorable future as useful workers’. See Nick Thoburn’s development of this in his theory of the ‘communist object’, in Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). ↑

29. Jack Henrie Fisher, ‘Editorial’, Counter-Signals 2 (2017-2018): 2-3, 2. ↑

30. Op. cit., 3. ↑

31. Op. cit. ↑

32. Op. cit. ↑

33. Seth Siegelaub, Prefaces to Communication and Class Struggle volumes 1 and 2 (Chicago: Other Forms, 2022). ↑