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What magazine/paper/periodical most shaped your political thinking?

Most: Red Action and IWCA.
But also: SolFed, ACF, even the SWP and the Labour party.
Parties rather than periodicals I understand.
 
imposs1904 said:
What was Crowbar?

Btw, I see a few people have mentioned New Society. A few years back I got a hold of photocopies of most of Ian Walker's New Society articles, scanned them in and put them on the net. He was a journalist from the 70s and 80s, who started at independent radical magazine, The Leveller, moved onto New Society for a few years and then worked for The Observer in the second half of the 80s. He only published the one book, Zoo Station, which was about his time living in West Berlin in the early 80s.

His New Society articles covered everything from Skinheads, New Romantics, Anarchism in the UK, Toxteth Riots, infiltrating the National Front (by someone else) and much, much more. If nothing else, his articles are interesting snapshot of the times and the various sub-cultures.

Anyway, here's the link to his articles: New Society's Ian Walker.
Click to expand...
Crowbar was an anarchist paper centred on Brixton and was very funny and full on.
It encouraged direct action and gave advice and instructions on breaking into squats, fiddling the meters, making petrol bombs and how to use them, general tactics about fighting the police.
Many involved in it's production were very active and some were right up the front in 1985 and kicked off the Brixton riots of that year by attacking the police station with rocks and mollies.
 
TopCat said:
Crowbar was an anarchist paper centred on Brixton and was very funny and full on.
It encouraged direct action and gave advice and instructions on breaking into squats, fiddling the meters, making petrol bombs and how to use them, general tactics about fighting the police.
Many involved in it's production were very active and some were right up the front in 1985 and kicked off the Brixton riots of that year by attacking the police station with rocks and mollies.
Click to expand...

- - - - > Heads over to Libcom to see if it's in the vaults.
 
TopCat said:
I read Spare Rib from about 77 onwards. The sheer hate towards men and boys was palpable.
The hypocrisy and lack of selfawareness was hilarious.
Click to expand...

I don't remember it being hateful towards men and boys. It was just very different from anything that had been around before. Some men felt a bit threatened by it, I think.
 
TopCat said:
I will ask my comrade to let me scan and post the set. Should be achived by 2050.
Click to expand...

Normally, I would say they should just lend them to Libcom and they'd scan them in for them, but someone just turned on a Facebook group to complain that they'd lent them a load of rare early Solidarity pamphlets over a year ago and they've yet to get them back . . . so, maybe not.
 
imposs1904 said:
Normally, I would say they should just lend them to Libcom and they'd scan them in for them, but someone just turned on a Facebook group to complain that they'd lent them a load of rare early Solidarity pamphlets over a year ago and they've yet to get them back . . . so, maybe not.
Click to expand...
I dont like limp cock and wont give them the steam off my piss. :D
 
imposs1904 said:
Normally, I would say they should just lend them to Libcom and they'd scan them in for them, but someone just turned on a Facebook group to complain that they'd lent them a load of rare early Solidarity pamphlets over a year ago and they've yet to get them back . . . so, maybe not.
Click to expand...

Have they got beyond the cut it up and destroy it for easy scanning yet, libcom that is?
 
TopCat said:
I read Spare Rib from about 77 onwards. The sheer hate towards men and boys was palpable.
The hypocrisy and lack of selfawareness was hilarious.
Click to expand...

ElizabethofYork said:
I don't remember it being hateful towards men and boys. It was just very different from anything that had been around before. Some men felt a bit threatened by it, I think.
Click to expand...

For what it's worth, the full run of the mag is online here:

Journal Archives

I never read it, but I was once very surprised to see it onsale in a newsagent in Castlebar, at a time when that west of Ireland town was still mired in the grey mists of the Irish past (this must have been around the time of the divorce referendum of 1986, or a couple of years after it).
 
I read endless football fanzines as a youth: these were the most important:

The Absolute Game
Mission Impossible
Crooked Spireite
Leyton Orientear
Brian Moore's Head Looks Uncannily Like London Planetarium

Musically, I loved Record Mirror and Melody Maker : NME not so much (this was late 80s / early 90s). Later The Wire

Art : early Frieze and the long-running Variant which had a lot of quite radical political analysis

I must admit I came late to political reading and got most of my schooling on here in the early 2000s; moving from liberal-left to IWCA fellow traveller over half a dozen years. I read a little of Living Marxism as a youth but even then was put off by it's smug tone and ambulance-chasing "controversy". I always read Private Eye whose Rotten Boroughs column is still a must-read. More recently loved The Bristolian as an absolute template of how to get it right up red-trousered Blairites and leave them frothing at the mouth with rage, with no obvious comeback. Class War is funny, but I don't see it very often. I only ever read Red Action in archive form somewhere online.

It's slightly weird how fanzines have made a come back as a commodified hipster re-tread of the old days, with all the cutting edge blunted by silly fonts, boring design, narcissism and thirty years of far-right economic orthodoxy.
 
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