Radical underground papers operated unpaid, in debt, and near collapse

Evidence

At twenty-six, editor Jeff Spero was the oldest person on the Rat staff. Many of his colleagues were still in their teens. Some were high school dropouts. The Motherfuckers had been supplanted by radical kids. Militant politics and raw language, Newfield reported, kept Rat off newsstands; the rag was boycotted by affluent liberals, harassed by school principals, and, having lost some 4,000 of its 25,000 readers to the sex tabloids, broke, in debt, and harassed by creditors. “Any issue could be its last,” Newfield warned. He did not mention that none of Rat’s writers were paid. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1480

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core thesis about material conditions enabling radical culture — unpaid labor and debt are the hidden subsidy that let the scene exist.