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Back Issues |
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Established 1979 |
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These are the back issues of Red Rag. They'll be posted here every (usually) two weeks on or around the anniversary of their original publication. We're currently reissuing 1987; the latest issue is dated March 24th (scan / txt); the next one is due out on April 7th. Red Rag, or Reading's only newspaper, had a noble tradition of misspelling, mixed metaphors, wrong facts, confused political judgements and a readership in its heyday of 4000. It printed practically everything it got sent ("except poetry and party political broadcasts, provided it isn't racist, sexist, militarist or otherwise supportive of oppression"). It aimed to provide a decent alternative coverage of local news and issues from a radical non-aligned position; to promote subversive and creative initiatives; to provide a forum for unorthodox views; to allow some sort of co-existence between a huge variety of interests. An indispensible source of local information? a forum for the self-indulgent and self-important? a continuous experiment in collective, de-centralised organisation? Who knew? In its first seven years it never sold a single copy; but now after much soul-searching a price had been put on the Rag's head... In this issue (scan / txt): it's next to impossible to say how much of Reading will be trashed by "developers" over the coming years, but it seems like nothing short of a market collapse will stop the rot. In its first year The Conspiracy put on over 30 concerts and raised thousands of pounds for local organisations; working people must organise together, understand the full implications of attacks on their living standards, and fight for democratic control over their own affairs; International AIDS Day is on April 3rd; and why you might say that the formative mechanism of culture amounts to a reification of human activities which fixates the living and models the transmission of experience from one generation to another on the transmission of commodities: a reification which strives to ensure the past's domination over the future. One might ask who exactly it is who gains - like one might ask how come there aren't any winos in the architects drawings of the latest Kings Rd office. | |||