DOPE magazine is a libertarian socialist quarterly street newspaper distributed for free to homeless and financially precarious people. Our vendors can sell the magazine for the cover price of £3 and keep all the proceeds. We don’t take a cut, and we keep the bar to entry as low as possible – anyone who wants to sell it can do so.
DOPE is sold on the streets of London, Bristol, Edinburgh, Stroud and Norwich. We print around 35,000 copies per issue, generating over £100,000 for our vendors every three months. Vendors have told us that the magazine has saved lives.
In addition to providing marginalised people with a way to earn money, DOPE exposes a diverse audience to anarchist, socialist, and communalist ideas – philosophies that can fundamentally reshape power structures in our society and create a world where no one is homeless. Our distribution model allows us to reach individuals who might not typically engage with these ideas; many will purchase the newspaper to support a vendor without necessarily identifying as left-wing.
While social media is a powerful tool – and I would argue that we should engage more with platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, where the right is currently ascendant – it has its limitations. A supporter of the Reform Party is unlikely to encounter a radical left perspective in their algorithm driven online feed, trapped as they are in an echo chamber. However, they might buy our newspaper. Physical products can cut through in a way online tools can’t.
Nonetheless, we recognise the limitations of relying solely on either online or physical media approaches. As Diane di Prima says, ‘No one way works; it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.’ Our articles are freely available on our website, and we utilise social media to share these articles and other online content we create.
The coming decades will be marked by one crisis after another as climate issues worsen. However, crises also present opportunities to fundamentally reorder society. When crisis comes, the actions taken will be based on the ideas lying around – will it be our ideas, or those of fascists and religious fundamentalists? A vibrant left media landscape is crucial to winning this battle of ideas and creating counterpower and a revolutionary counterculture.
Currently, we are small. Our funding comes from approximately 700 subscribers who contribute a monthly amount to cover our outgoings, primarily the cost of printing the paper. Unfortunately, there is also a growing number of homeless people, as people are becoming increasingly insecure and pushed into poverty. We speculate that we could do a print run of millions, and there would still be demand from vendors to sell them – we just lack the resources to do this.
We have a model that works at its current scale and could certainly be expanded to meet the growing demand with more resources and replicated in other publications. To paraphrase Kropotkin, it is not love for my neighbour, not even sympathy, which induces me to stand by his side in time of need. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or sympathy – it is a feeling of solidarity.
