The IULP is a network that confronts the challenges of the market-driven desiccation of ideas with left books that amplify the voices of ordinary people.
Formed in 2020, the International Union of Left Publishers emerged as a platform of left publishers to promote left books through Red Books Day (21 February), to defend left authors, publishers, and bookshops, and to develop a copyleft method of sharing books across our countries and languages.
Red Books Day
Red Books Day celebrates left books, their authors, and the people’s movements they ushered forward on 21 February 1848, the day Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto.
The day, however, is not just a celebration of the publication of the Manifesto, but a time to stand in solidarity with the comrades across the world who have been facing attacks from the right-wing.
- Red Books Day celebrates left books, their authors, and the people’s movements they ushered forward.
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto on 21 February 1848. The day, however, is not just a celebration of the publication of the Manifesto, but a time to stand in solidarity with the comrades across the world who have been facing attacks from the right-wing.
- On 21 February 2020, more than thirty thousand people from South Korea to Venezuela joined the public reading of the Manifesto in their own languages. ︎ This booklet ︎ captures the day in words and images.
- Join us this year for Red Books Day on February 21, 2024, marking the 176th anniversary of the publishing of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It is an international celebration and commemoration of the Communist Manifesto and the liberatory impact it has had on people’s movements, past, present and future.
- ORGANIZE AN EVENT
- CELEBRATE RED BOOKS DAY IN YOUR CITY!
- We are calling on organizations, unions, collectives, publishers, artists and individuals to host activities for the #RedBooksDay2023 celebrations. We’ve created a toolkit to help you get started.
- 1.
- First, think of an action, big or small, to show your solidarity with leftist literature everywhere! Some ideas…
- ︎ Host a reading of the Manifesto, virtual or in-person
- ︎ Post your favorite “Red Book” on social media
- ︎ Hold workshops or study groups about the any red book
- ︎ Create political art in commemoration of Red Books Day
- ︎ Distribute copies of the Manifesto in your organizations
- ︎ Document everything you do with the hashtag #RedBooksDay2024
- ︎ …or anything else you think of!
- 2.
- Once you’ve decided an activity, here are some next steps to join the #RedBooksDay2024 celebrations:
- ︎ Create a social media square graphic for your activity and share it with the hashtag #RedBooksDay2024
- ︎ Submit your activity in this form so we can include it on RedBooksDay.iulp.org
- ︎ Gather with your communities and stand in solidarity for leftist books!
- Social Media Toolkit
- Formed in 2020, the International Union of Left Publishers emerged as a platform of left publishers to promote left books through Red Books Day (21 February), to defend left authors, publishers, and bookshops, and to develop a copyleft method of sharing books across our countries and languages.
- History
- Over the past decades, we have noticed two related dynamics that have challenged left publishing:
- 1. The rise of the far right
- Neo-fascists and their allied forces have made physical threats against left authors, publishers, bookstores, and magazines. Attacks on these institutions have been punctual and terrifying. Assassinations of authors have come alongside the fire-bombing of our cultural institutions. The roots of this neo-fascist strength go back to the Cold War, during which Washington, DC provided the capitals of the Third World with the authorisation to murder communists, mainly, but also leftists of all stripes, such as in Brazil (1964) and Indonesia (1965). Remembering that terrible history remains vital.
- The far right has driven an anti-Marxist agenda that promotes unreason, obscurantism, and hatreds of various kinds, including misogyny, racism, and an intolerance towards social diversity. The anti-Marxist ethos deepened by the far right is shared by a cross-section of liberalism, which rarely comes out in defence of the left when it is attacked by the far right.
- 2. The suffocation of the publishing industry
- Under pressure from declining revenues, capitalist publishing houses have attempted to squeeze as much profit as possible from every imaginable avenue, including the sale of foreign rights. This has made the question of rights confounding for independent presses, and especially for left presses.
- The emergence of platform booksellers – notably Amazon – has provided a short-term opportunity for small and independent publishers, increasing their potential reach, eliminating intermediaries, and shortening payment cycles. In the long run, however, these platforms harm the larger ecosystem with their near monopoly behaviour, driving out individual publishers who find their profit markets squeezed. It is dangerous to allow corporate monopolies to be the main conduit for sales, as they can cut the spigot at any time.
- Capitalist consolidation has taken place in the world of publishing, but in the world of left publishing, we are atomised and isolated. This has meant that we do not have a clearing house to know about books that one another is publishing and books that we could publish in common. It has been hard to know how to contact authors in different countries to get rights. This level of isolation from each other has had a negative impact on our work. It is even more confounding for publishers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, who are often sidelined by left presses in the North Atlantic.
- To counter the first set of problems, the informal Indian Union of Left Publishers, made up of publishing houses affiliated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist), put out a call for Red Books Day on 21 February 2020. The call was endorsed by the International Peoples’ Assembly and by a range of political and social forces, as well as left publishers. The response from publishers and bookstores around the world was heartening. The day itself was a success. It proved that the concrete possibility exists to create an International Union of Left Publishers (IULP).
- Current Programmes
- Roughly forty publishers have joined the IULP. We have had two meetings with all the member publishers and created three committees: an executive committee, a publications committee, and a rights committee. The work we have done together includes:
- 1. Red Books Day
- Every year on 21 February, we ask writers, editors, publishers, booksellers, and readers to go out into public places – including bookshops – and to read, and bring alive, any red book. This event, Red Books Day, takes place on the date The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848.
- In 2020, more than thirty thousand people from South Korea to Venezuela joined in a public reading of The Communist Manifesto in their own languages. The epicentre of Red Books Day was in the four Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana, where the bulk of the public readings took place. Without question, Bharati Puthakalayam and the Tamil Nadu State Secretariat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) created the greatest number of events, from a morning reading of the manifesto under the labour statue on Chennai’s marina to evening readings at union halls. Peasant organisations affiliated with the Communist Party of Nepal held readings in rural areas, while the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil held readings in their occupied settlements. In Havana, study circles met to read the manifesto, while in South Africa the Sesotho translation was launched and read for the first time. Left publishing houses from Expressão Popular in Brazil to Batalla de Ideas in Argentina and Inkani Books in South Africa also joined the effort. Many participants reported that this was the first time that they had opened a book by Marx and that the captivating prose has drawn them to start study circles of Marxist literature.
- Due to the pandemic, Red Books Day 2021 was held largely online, but enthusiasm nonetheless remained high. The publishing house Založba in Slovenia released a short film entitled Dan rdečih knjig (Red Books Day), in which Založba’s writers read from the manifesto. Meanwhile, the publishing house Yordam Kitap in Turkey asked its authors to read from the manifesto in Turkish and organised a talk with Ertuğrul Kürkçü, a leader of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP). Small, appropriately distanced gatherings took place in Kerala, where the manifesto was read in Malayalam and English, as well as in Brazil, where militants of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) organised readings of the manifesto in Portuguese in their encampments. Not one corner of India was without Red Books Day events, as readings took place from Assam to Karnataka to Tamil Nadu.
- The highlight of Red Books Day 2022 was that half a million people in Kerala (India) read the books of EMS Namboodiripad in 35,000 meetings across the state. Various colleges in Perinthalmanna (Malappuram) held a three-day-long book festival, The Battle of Literature in the Era of the Ban, while the Purogamana Kala Sahitya Sangham (Association of Progressive Art and Literature) held programmes across Kerala. At the Vijayawada Book Festival in Andhra Pradesh, Prajasakti Bookhouse erected a popular Communist Manifesto book stall, while in villages in Maharashtra, night classes were held that reminded participants of the early days of the peasant movement. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) leaders gave talks at many of these events. Readings were held in Indonesia and Turkey, Brazil and Venezuela. Films were screened and music was sung while social media buzzed with the hashtags of Red Books Day in multiple languages. The South African shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo held a talent show on Red Books Day at the eKhenana occupation site. ‘The price for land and autonomy is always paid in blood. But struggle is not only shared suffering. It is also shared joy’, the organisation declared.
- 2. Joint books
- As part of our experience in building the IULP, we produce books together, from selecting the content to carrying out production process with the respective committees. We began modestly – with three publishers – and have grown to approximately thirty publishers participating in producing the same red book to be published on the same day in our various languages:
- Lenin 150 (April 2020)
- Mariátegui (June 2020)
- Che (October 2020)
- Paris Commune 150 (May 2021)
- Kollontai 150 (April 2022)
- 3. Solidarity Rights
- The IULP is developing a new formula for sharing rights to our books and building a procedure in which some of them can be shared with our entire IULP membership in a solidarity fashion. More details about these rights will be shared soon.
- Thus far, we have produced several books, such as Washington Bullets, which was translated from English into Spanish by Batalla de Ideas (Argentina) and then offered, gratis, to other Spanish-language publishers outside of Argentina to print and sell.
- Contact Us
- If you want to get in touch with us, please send us a message to the address contact@iulp.org.
- We will try to get back to you as soon as possible.
- Thanks!
- IULP_Booklet_2023.pdf
L’ INTERNATIONALE | CHEMM PARVATHY (youtube.com)
Leftword books
Red Books Day 2024
The Dance of the Working Class – Part 2
Campaign towards #RedBooksDay2024 has been started with releasing a dance video on L’Internationale.
youtu.be/nZLQiTQ4xeQ?si…
dance #artist #art #redbooks #workingclass #leftwordbooks
HISTORY OF RED BOOKS DAY
Red Books Day 2023: Fight the Rise of the Right, Read a Red Book | NewsClick
The Fourth Red Books Day, 2023
Nitheesh Narayanan, Sudhanva Deshpande, and Vijay Prashad
ONE hundred and seventy-five years ago, Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels celebrated the publication of the Communist Manifesto on February 21, 1848 and then watched as Europe’s peoples rose up against one monarchical system after another. The text seemed to anticipate the Springtime of Nations, which included the attempt by the French people to redeem the promise of their 1789 Revolution, whose promise had been squashed by the restoration of the monarchy. ‘A spectre haunts Europe’, the Manifesto opens, and indeed the ghosts had appeared on the streets to dress themselves in republican ideas – and to some extent even socialist ideas (although the rest of the sentence in the Manifesto, ‘the spectre of communism’, was truer in theory at that time than in practice). The Manifesto was not read widely when it was first published, mainly because it was censored in country after country and because the Communist League – which had commissioned the text – fell apart during the uprising and then disbanded in 1852.
The Manifesto had a second life in the 1870s as a consequence of Marx’s own increasing prominence in the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) and due to his writings on the Paris Commune (1871). The growth of the German Social Democratic Party and the trade union movement in the decade of the 1870s provided the social basis for the circulation of a new German edition of the Manifesto, published in 1872. By the next year, nine editions of the Manifesto appeared in print in six languages. It is now one of the most widely circulated texts, one of the most regularly read books by Marx (given the difficulties associated with reading Capital, Marx’s most important book). The Manifesto has been translated into almost all Indian languages, with the first translation being into Bengal by Soumyendranath Tagore (in Ganavani, the weekly paper of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party, edited by Muzaffar Ahmad, and serialised between 1926 and 1927).
A few years ago, the Indian Society for Left Publishers decided to hold events on February 21, the date of the publication of the Manifesto in 1848. The plan was to hold public readings of the Manifesto in the various Indian languages, since that date – February 21 – is also International Mother Language Day. The idea was to hold a Red Books Day on that date and make this a broadly cultural activity to ‘rescue the collective life’ on a secular and socialist basis. Not long after the idea had been proposed, publishers from around the world expressed an interest in being involved in Red Books Day, so that when it was first held – in 2020 – already writers, publishers, booksellers, and others joined in from South Korea to Cuba. The epicentre for Red Books Day in 2020, as in 2023, was in India, where during that year thousands of people read the Manifesto across the country. This year, in 2023, it is estimated that over a million people joined in to participate in Red Books Day from China to Mexico. An idea of the Left publishing houses in India is now being rooted into the international calendar of the Left.
During the planning for Red Books Day 2020, the first such activity, the Indian Society of Left Publishers convened meetings of publishers from around the world. These convenings led to the creation of the International Union of Left Publishers (IULP), which now includes over forty publishers. The IULP was formed not only to promote Red Books Day, but to provide a platform for Left publishers to defend ourselves from attacks by the right-wing, to promote rational and socialist ideas, and to share our books between each other. Over the course of the past four years, the IULP has been able to produce several joint books (including of the writings of Che Guevara and to commemorate the Paris Commune). These joint books are published in our various languages (from Romanian to Indonesian) on the same day. We have released statements to defend our authors and to defend our publishers when they have come under attack. The core of the work of the IULP – in which all members of the Indian Society of Left Publishers belong – is to promote the work of Red Books Day.
Despite the disruptions caused by the pandemic – when Red Books Day went online in 2021 – the enthusiasm for a day such as this has grown astronomically. For now, the epicentre remains in India, with readings conducted across the country of the Manifesto (since it was its 175th anniversary) but also of other Red Books. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) gave a call in January to build Red Books Day, a call taken up with enthusiasm across the Party and the mass organisations. Public readings took place before large audiences, but equally importantly small groups gathered to read and discuss Red Books of various kinds. The library movement in Kerala adopted Red Books Day, having held discussions during the Indian Library Congress about the project and then executing it through the network of public libraries in the state. Cultural workers sang and acted, while lakhs of people lifted their spirits with rationality and the promise of socialism.
A week-long Red Book literary festival was held in Kannur. Teesta Setalvad, the author and activist, inaugurated the event. The festival featured a Red Books Day talk, various discussions on red books, a young writers meeting, seminars, and other events. Pondicherry saw a wide range of gatherings, from auto drivers, street vendors to working class women, reading the Manifesto. Bharathi Puthakalayam initiated a discussion across Tamilnadu and Pondicherry around Marx’s writings on religion. The books chosen for the collective reading in Maharashtra varied by district. In the run-up to Red Books Day, The Young Socialist Artists collective in India began collecting various types of art and disseminating it. These art works were shared widely on social media, emphasising that Red Books Day is about more than just books, but also about art, music, and other forms of collective culture. In Assam and Karnataka, Navyug Prakashan and Kriya Publications were instrumental in organising events. Telangana held readings on Bhagat Singh’s life and ideology. In Andhra Pradesh, the book Maha Prasthanam was chosen for Red Books Day discussions. Campuses across India, from Jamia, Presidency, Delhi University, Hyderabad Central University to Jawaharlal Nehru University enthusiastically celebrated Red Books Day with talks, art performances, film screenings, and book exhibitions, among other activities. The final event in India was held at May Day Bookstore (Delhi) and featured a variety of programmes, starting from reading of Manifesto in various languages and concluding with a street play of Janam, that lasted until late at night. In many places, the programmes were also linked to International Mother Language Day.
While there were events in countries that had participated in Red Books Day from 2020 – such as in Nepal and Cuba – there were new participants in countries such as Malaysia and Mexico. The president of Cuba – Miguel Díaz-Canel – tweeted about Red Books Day, while the leaders of several socialist parties on the African continent read the Manifesto in public. Socialist forces are now seized with the idea that Red Books Day must be part of their routine, with February 21 being an important date in the calendar of the Left. It was remarkable to see Red Books Day exceed the circuits of those affiliated to the IULP or to the Left currents already in our networks, and to see those far outside our ranks adopt this day as their own. This is precisely the objective of a day such as this – to become an integral part of public culture and to struggle to establish rational and socialist ideas as the ideas of society. By the end of the decade, we estimate over ten million people will participate in Red Books Day.
Contact Editorial desk pd.cpim
The People’s Forum | Red Books Day Celebrations 2023! – The People’s Forum (peoplesforum.org)
Red Books Day 2023: Marx, Engels and Byron | Morning Star (morningstaronline.co.uk)
Red Books Day – Socialist Voice
Mother Language Day and Red Books Day celebrated in Khammam-Telangana Today
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