How Haymarket Books Took Organizing Online

[Haymarket books]

By Samantha Grasso

Reading and discussion of left literature has always been a central tool of socialist organizing, which is why the online events staged by Haymarket Books became a go-to hub for progressives during the Covid lockdown.

The Chicago-based socialist book publisher acted early in the pandemic to provide a regular platform that could transcend pandemic-imposed isolation and prompt thoughtful analysis of the crisis and its implications.

After the police killing of George Floyd, people new to abolitionist thinking brought their questions to Haymarket’s panels and teach-ins, where activists and academics discussed racial justice and the meaning of calls for defunding the police and prison abolition.

Curious to know more about how this played out, I reached out to John McDonald, who has organized Haymarket’s events for over a decade, and helped launch the publisher’s pivot into virtual events over the past year. Here are the main takeaways.

Power in collective spaces

One reason their events resonated with progressives, McDonald told me, was that “the sense of overriding powerlessness that existed at the very beginning of the pandemic needed some kind of a counter.” The Trump administration and mass media was spreading information that was, in many cases, not helpful, and people wanted to figure out “how you continue a pursuit of social justice and [combat] the various oppressions and inequalities that we knew were going to be exacerbated by the pandemic.”

They wanted to find a way for people to “feel that community, that solidarity, and to just discuss, what do we do? How do we continue organizing?” McDonald said. “Our power always came from collective spaces.”

As the political climate changed over the summer, so did Haymarket’s programming. “The feeling of powerlessness and isolation was punctured by these rebellions in the streets,” McDonald said, and the moment demanded a conversational shift as well.

Fighting injustice with knowledge

Haymarket’s audience became more international when it went fully online, with McDonald able to stage conversations with panelists and audiences that couldn’t easily be assembled for in-person events in Chicago or New York.

With thousands of people tuning in from across the world, the publisher began to see an uptick in engagement with its books, McDonald said, perhaps a result of “the glaring, morbid symptoms of capitalism on display” during the pandemic.

“Ideas are an essential weapon in the toolkit of activists trying to combat … imperialist violence, capitalist exploitation, racial oppression, any of these things,” McDonald said. “You can't just fight without the tools needed to confront your enemies, and ideas are part of that. Books are part of that. But we have no illusions that what we're doing with our events series is nitty-gritty organizing that's going to immediately lead to specific actions, most of the time. It's more about providing a forum.”

Interconnected struggles

Haymarket’s online events have covered topics such as police abolition, dismantling racist public education, abortion access and Palestinian liberation. Panels have featured some leading voices on the left, including Mariame Kaba, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Naomi Klein.

The important thing for McDonald is how these authors and subjects can mutually reinforce one another. “We want to cross pollinate [ideas] as much as possible, because we think that these struggles are very much interconnected,” he said, and teaching and organizing around them are intertwined.

For example, online events featuring Kaba can help get her book on abolitionist organizing, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, into the hands of more readers — particularly people who are incarcerated, via Haymarket’s book donation program.

“Online spaces aren’t a substitute”

While McDonald said online spaces are important because of their reach, he also recognizes they’re not a substitute for in-person discussion and events, and that “the kind of informal exchange that can happen [in person] among people who are mutually interested” isn’t the same with virtual programming.

As the country reopens, allowing for in-person events to resume, Haymarket has decided that “any events that we organize in our own spaces in person are going to [be] accessible online, either immediately or immediately afterwards, just because there is clearly a set of people internationally who wouldn't be able to attend,” McDonald said. The international forum for real-time socialist conversation Haymarket created during the pandemic is a legacy the publisher is determined to sustain.

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