The Rebellious Media conference was one of the best organised I have ever been to plus lots of very good meetings…………..but………my overall impression is that most people there were after funding for their own media projects and hoping to get full time jobs out of their ‘activism’. These days funding is a fucking nuisance – no body does anything without fucking funding any more.Projects aren’t ‘sustainable’ without funding! So every video/film/radio/internet/paper project was more interested in hearing about funding rather than content. It was disheartening to see two of the better established papers – Salford Star and Manchester Mule – reveal they no longr produce print versions but exist only on line while they await funding. I went down to the bridgef for a look – think most people there would have been delighted to have an ‘internship’ with UK Uncut or somesuch with their ‘activist’ CV as a reference. Bloody hell – i’m owed some backpay!
Ian Bone 
What was wrong with the tried and tested way of activists self financing through bank raids and stuff?
Well we’re not funded. Although I’d love to be sponsored Burberry or Baracuta. Not sure if Dick would be up for it.
What do the Radio Shows need funding for? I can’t think of any thing? Unless you wanted to give up your job and do the Radio everyday?
I know some other Radio ‘Stars’ post on here, do any of you get funding?
There is always the alternative – which Class War managed for years.
This means basically operating like a small business – you make a profit, or break even. If you don’t do that, the members have to dip into their own pockets to cover the shortfall.
Christ! Doesn’t anybody do anything for free anymore, sacrifice time and energy? Have we all been so utterly colonised by commodity relations that we can’t do ‘something for nothing’?
I gave up my 21st birthday to (literally) copy and paste a national anarcho paper years ago…
Fucking charity-isation of grass roots politics, fucking Greenpeace cunts.
Money talks and merit walks yeah!?
The Thurrock Heckler (when it makes one of its rare appearances) and the Thurrock Alternative Media blog are funded out of our not very deep pockets. Obviously this restricts what we’d like to do with the paper but outside funding…WTF is that about? To us it opens the way to a surrender of editorial control or having to tone things down a bit when you actually need to be outspoken. We’d rather struggle and carry on blagging what we can rather than accept any constraints that might be posed by outside funding…
No funding for Radical Wales, don’t need any either, link would be good though.
@ Incubus –
I’m sure there’s still plenty of people willing to do something for nothing, but how do you pay the print bills? If you’re trying to do a mass circulation paper it’s becoming a bit pricey (paper increases every six months at the moment).
If you haven’t got the time for Class War’s old approach, why not get some funding if you can? Someone’s gotta get it.
How can you pay the print bills? Out of your own pockets. Or print less expensively if you can. Ask readers to send you a few pounds if they can afford it. After all, it’s the content that’s important, surely? And you don’t want people to rate you better because you’re glossy or whatever, do you? Surely you don’t have illusions of tricking people’s attention by looking very adverty, and then, only then, exploiting the position by encouraging them to think for themselves? That kind of thinking can justify almost anything – such as standing for Parliament, joining the Labour Party, or for that matter the Tory Party, becoming Malcolm Maclaren, etc. If you rely on people’s passivity, you encourage that passivity. Eyes to the front. Listen to sir. Ooh sir’s right radical today. Talk about extraparliamentary recuperation and the complete rerouting of what passes for ‘radical’ away from the working class, at the hands of bronzed Greenpeace heroes and professional activists. I’m sure you could get hold of a Gestetner for practically nothing somewhere. Cut down on your alcohol spending maybe?
“Why not get some funding if you can? Someone’s gotta get it.”
If it was free, you might have a point. But it’s not! Recipients pay for it in what they give up (assuming they ever had anything to give up). The guys with big money don’t give it away to undermine themselves. Whether they’re called George Soros or Triodos Bank or whoever. Once upon a time, all of the above was ‘obvious’ to a lot of people.
About ten years ago some academic at Bristol University worked out that if you divvied-up all the money spent on the homeless industry and just gave it to the homeless you wouldn’t have any homelessness.
This went in one ear and out the other of most liberals and lefties of most persuasions who believe the answer to stopping poverty is anything but giving the poor money.
The money’s much better spent on art, media, dj workshops, forums, neighbourhood partnerships, communications, community cohesion. Anything, in fact, that creates jobs for graduates from pursuing hobbies.
The anarchist movement has long been in danger of deserting its militant,working class roots.Funding?,you want to alienate the working class,just THINK of being a revolutionary and getting paid for it.
You don’t receive a grant for it, you take it.
Paul Stott is right-class war was self funded for what,20 odd years?
To all you anarchists with a taste for tradition,do you think that Marius Jacob or Clements Duval bothered pleading to the pathetic wimms of middle class people for contributions to fund their fight back?
And Ian,whilst I’d like to compare you to Dan Chatterton,addressing an assembly of toffs at Eton,and talking of a grand march on Eton with its leaders’ head impailed on a pike at the front of the said march,which cascades into an orgy of class destruction upon which one of the most embedded bastions of the ‘Establishment’,is rendered,ASH;not likely….at the moment…
Anarchists made a lot mates when they refused to condemn the England riots.That’s where our strength lies.Organising from a position of strength-and launching outwards after we have firmly established ourselves.Never showing our weaknesses-you fucking know that.Basic strategy.
As others have said;a coharent,relevant, blue print or map forward,wouldn’t go astray.And should be THE topic of discussion at the annual bookfair rather than a load of bollox.
Everything is totally confusing.Simplify it.
And to anyone deluded enuf to think that the ‘inevitable collapse of caplitalism is nigh’-well, we’ve been falsely guaranteed that hundred to one winner, too many times in the past, as the beginning of some romantic underclass organisational focal point.It ain’t gonna work that way.Be good if it did though.
The words,comrades,are RELEVANT and REVOLUTIONARY.If those two are not symbiotic,we’re for the tomb.
I agree most people were there to network and look for funded amongst like-minded, middle class circles…
We should look at the very radical media of the past (rather than merely alternative) and recognise they faced the same issue of funding with nothing like the technological abilities of us and did not always advocate centralisation…