Vol. 80/No. 24 June 20, 2016
Books about working-class politics do well at
Tehran fair
AND CATHARINA TIRSÉN
Books from Pathfinder Press, which publishes titles by communist and other working-class leaders around the world, have been displayed here since 1992. The big majority of the more than 200 people who left the booth with books in hand were first-time Pathfinder readers, leading to the highest sales in at least ten years.
Tehran-based publisher Talaye Porsoo, which translates and sells many Pathfinder titles in Farsi, also reported increased sales. Farsi is the language of a substantial majority in Iran, and is read or spoken by half the population in neighboring Afghanistan.
The annual cultural event, held this year at a large new trade-fair grounds south of Tehran, attracts hundreds of thousands looking for textbooks, novels, poetry, nonfiction and religious books in Farsi and other languages. In a special area, there were booths representing Algeria, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Oman, Turkey, and Russia, this year’s country of honor, as well as the Frankfurt Book Fair and the United Nations.
Participation by publishers from other countries remains limited by the refusal of major Western banks to process Iranian transactions, part of the decades-long imperialist economic and financial sanctions squeezing the people of this country.
Visitors came to the book fair from all corners of Iran. A student from Mashhad, near the border with Afghanistan, traveled some 600 miles by train. He was interviewed by Al Jazeera’s Newshour program after purchasing a copy of Problems of Women’s Liberation by Evelyn Reed at the Pathfinder stand. Asked by the correspondent why he picked that title, he replied, “All human beings are born equal.” He returned the next day and bought Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. That book was among Pathfinder’s best sellers here.
Books on the Cuban revolution
Books on Cuba’s socialist revolution were popular. A woman who stopped at the Pathfinder booth described what she had learned from The Cuban Five: Who They Are, Why They Were Framed, Why They Should Be Free, which she had bought at the fair last year. This time she got Absolved by Solidarity, which opens with the December 2014 victory of the international campaign to win freedom for five Cuban revolutionaries, who were framed up and held in U.S. federal prisons for up to 16 years.Two young men from Sanandaj, a Kurdish city in northwest Iran, bought the newest Pathfinder title, The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class, which was the top seller. “We want to find out how they came out of prison stronger,” one of them said, after reading the back cover.
Interest in what lies behind today’s deep-going capitalist economic and political crisis worldwide was registered in sales of the Marxist magazine New International, featuring articles such as “US Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War” and “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun,” both by Jack Barnes. Browsing through the latter, an economics student was drawn to two graphs showing the mounting debt bubbles that led up to the 2007-08 world financial crisis. Another popular title was Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? by Mary-Alice Waters.
A woman from Saudi Arabia studying in Iran bought the Arabic-language editions of Is Biology Woman’s Destiny by Evelyn Reed and Voices from Prison: The Cuban Five. Two men from Egypt bought 11 books, including titles by Malcolm X and by communist leaders Leon Trotsky and James P. Cannon. Other visitors to the Pathfinder stand included several individuals originally from Afghanistan, the largest immigrant group in Iran, as well as from Iraq, including Erbil, capital of the Kurdish Regional Government there.
Pathfinder’s titles in Spanish and French also attracted attention. A Spanish-language teacher snapped up eight books, saying her students would be more likely to learn by “reading something that interests them.”
At the Talaye Porsoo stand in the Farsi-language hall, top sellers included the fourth and final volume of Malcolm X, Black Liberation and the Road to Workers Power. Another was Two Worlds at Night: The Legacy of Imperialism and the Road to Social and Cultural Advance by Jack Barnes, which presents a course to close deep economic and social disparities between oppressed and oppressor nations as part of the fight for power by revolutionary workers parties the world over.
As has often been the case, the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels topped Talaye Porsoo’s sales at the book fair, along with other Marxist classics and titles on women’s emancipation and Cuba’s socialist revolution. In recent years, Talaye Porsoo titles have gotten favorable reviews in the Tehran daily newspapers Etemad and Shargh, as well as by the Iranian Students News Agency and Iran’s Book News Agency.
Golâzin, another Iranian publisher that translates and sells Pathfinder titles, had a number of these books at its booth, including Woman’s Evolution by Evelyn Reed and Che Guevara Speaks.
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