I have just received John's comment on my WordPress website [1]. “ How does publishing through Amazon (of all of places) square with the general view here? The simple answer to this question is that publishing on Amazon does not square at all with my politics. From the age of 16, I considered myself a Marxist, and I will eventually die a Marxist.
If it has escaped John’s notice for a long time, it has been
impossible for a revolutionary Marxist to be published. The Writer George Orwell,
who was not a Marxist, found it very difficult to find a publisher for his book
Homage to Catalonia. Orwell was savvy enough to know that “Freedom of the Press”
had been “ Something of a fake because,
in the last resort, money controls opinion”.
This was true in Orwell's time and is even more true today. Unless you have access to a revolutionary Marxist party with its own printing press, you will not get published. No small or big publishing house will publish
an orthodox or classical Marxist. The use of Amazon as an avenue to get my work
published and reach a large audience does not endorse Amazon as a capitalist
enterprise.
It may have escaped John’s notice, but all publishing houses,
big or small, are run on capitalist lines. To accept or decline an offer from
one of these or to publish on platforms such as Amazon does not mean one denies
one's politics it is but a means to an end. If every author turned down the
opportunity to be published because the publishing company was a capitalist
nothing of worth would have been published. John’s argument is false, and I do
not accept it.
