Twenty Theses For Liberation

Welcome! This is a place for all who strive for the wellbeing of people & planet to come together around a unifying & dynamic organizing strategy towards mutual aims & collective action.

We invite you to consider the 20 Theses for Liberation as a living document to engage with in a continued, collective process.

Twenty Theses for Liberation

Co-Hosts & Co-Authors:

  • ZNetwork
  • DiEM25
  • Academy of Democratic Modernity
  • MetaCPC
  • RealUtopia
  • Cooperation Jackson
  • Kali Akuno
  • Michael Albert
  • Renata Ávila
  • Ramzy Baroud
  • Medea Benjamin
  • Peter Bohmer
  • Fintan Bradshaw
  • Jeremy Brecher
  • Urška Breznik
  • Noam Chomsky
  • Savvina Chowdhury
  • Devriş Çimen
  • Mark Evans
  • Andrej Grubačić
  • Jason Hickel
  • Kathy Kelly
  • Arash Kolahi
  • Bridget Meehan
  • Sotiris Mitralexis
  • Jason Myles
  • Cynthia Peters
  • John Pilger
  • Matic Primc
  • Don Rojas
  • Stephen Shalom
  • Alexandria Shaner
  • Norman Solomon
  • Cooper Sperling
  • Yanis Varoufakis
  • Brett Wilkins
  • Greg Wilpert

Introduction: A Proposal

The idea of a movement of movements is not new. The concept remains popular, logical, and inspiring yet remains just that—a concept. Near universal woes such as poverty, climate change, and fascist stirrings could pressure diverse movements into a holistic progressive bloc, and in some cases, there has already been progress towards such convergence. There is a rising desire and will for coming together, but in practice, cohesion and even solidarity remain largely elusive.

What is missing is often identified as strategic organizing, while at the same time our anti-authoritarian and pluralist values rightly cause us to shy away from rigid blueprints and vertical chains of command. However, this dilemma presents a false choice. We must get organized, but we don’t need to abandon diversity and self-determination in order to come together around vision and strategy if we build our values into shared vision. Perhaps further effort towards conceiving, sharing, and utilizing a broad but unifying vision and strategy could provide much needed structure for a movement of movements to grow and thrive. And why now? Because there currently seems to be more hunger than in a long time for unity even as there is also considerable doubt about attaining it.

Below, we propose some basic insights, claims, and commitments that all seekers of new societal relations might choose to further develop and refine. The 20 theses are not ours per se, but come from many movements over years, decades, and even centuries.

Of course, none of the organizational or individual signers, or the many added signers since the document became public, agree with every word of what follows. Rather, we all feel that in sum the 20 theses provide an excellent basis for debate and elaboration that can, over time, inform not just agreed opposition to existing injustices, but collective pursuit of a better world. So, here are the twenty proposed theses we together submit as a living document to be regularly refined by signers.

Our hope for the 20 Theses For Liberation is that it will be periodically altered in light of new experiences and insights even as it is shared among steadily more individuals, movements, and organizations to provide a degree of unity and mutual aid wherein each component and project that signs on comes to see itself as part of the larger network of all who sign on, with each providing support for and aid to the rest.

Thesis One: Foundations

To be comprehensive and liberatory, long-term aims must centrally address polity, economy, kinship, racism, culture, ecology, and global relations because each of these aspects of life not only profoundly influences peoples’ options and well being, but also because due to extensive entanglement, each contributes to and even reinforces and reproduces the defining features of the rest, so that all have priority strategic importance.

 

Thesis Two: Polity

To eliminate political elitism and domination, to be liberatory, political institutions will need to establish transparent mechanisms to carry out and evaluate political decisions and to convey to all citizens self managing political say proportionate to effects on them. To accomplish that will in turn require that liberatory political institutions include grassroots assemblies, councils, or communes (and federations of those) by which people can manifest their views. It will likewise require that liberatory political institutions provide advanced public education so people’s views are well formed and clearly expressed. And to ensure that deliberations and decisions are made consistent with people’s interests, it will require frequent direct policy participation or, when needed, re-callable representation and delegation that utilizes appropriate voting algorithms.

Additionally, to ensure freedom to each person consistent with freedom to all people, and to benefit all people while also protecting and even advancing diversity, liberatory political institutions will need to guarantee maximum civil liberties. This will of course include freedom to speak, write, worship, assemble, and organize political parties.

To ensure diversity and continuous development, liberating political institutions will need to welcome, facilitate, and protect dissent, and to guarantee to individuals and groups means to pursue their own goals consistent with not interfering with the same rights for others.

Regarding violations, to attain justice while promoting rehabilitation, liberatory political institutions will need to foster solidarity and to provide inclusive means to fairly, peacefully, and constructively adjudicate disputes and violations of agreed norms.

In current times, in many places, all this will of course require that we challenge growing authoritarian and fascistic trends in political parties, populations, and governments including combating the growing tendencies to scapegoat immigrants, people of color, religions, women, and the poor.

Finally, in light of the entanglement of all key facets of society, liberatory political institutions will have to be compatible with new features in other dimensions of life and vice versa.

 

Thesis Three: Kinship, Gender, and Sexuality

To achieve an end to denials based on sex, gender, identity, or age, new kinship institutions will need to ensure that no individuals or groups—by gender, identity, sexual orientation, or age—are privileged above or dominate others in income, influence, access to education, job quality, or any other dimension of life that bears on quality of life. This of course includes full LGBT rights and liberation. To attain that end, liberatory gender and kin institutions will need to respect marriage and other lasting relations among adults as religious, cultural, or social practices, but will need to reject such ties as ways for sectors of the population to gain financial benefits or social status that others lack.

Both for equity and also for the enrichment of personality and affirmation that care-giving conveys, liberatory gender and kin institutions will need to respect care-giving as a central function of society including, perhaps even making, care-giving a part of every citizen’s social responsibilities, and in any event otherwise ensuring equitable burdens and benefits among people of all genders for all household and child raising practices.

Liberatory gender and kin institutions will need to not privilege certain types of family formation or role over others, but instead to actively support all types of families consistent with society’s other norms and practices. This includes the right to have children or not to have children and for the children and mothers to thrive after birth. And to promote children’s well-being and affirm society’s responsibility for all children, liberatory gender and kin institutions will need to affirm the right of diverse types of families to have children and to provide them with love and a sense of rootedness and belonging, and will need to minimize or eliminate age- and or gender-based permissions and or restrictions, instead utilizing non-arbitrary means for determining when an individual is too old (or too young) or otherwise able or not able to receive benefits or shoulder responsibilities.

To ensure that each person honors the autonomy, humanity, and rights of others, liberatory gender and kin institutions will also need to centrally affirm diverse expressions of sexual pleasure, personal identity, sexual identity, gender identity, and mutual intimacy while they provide diverse, empowering sex education as well as legal prohibition against non-consensual sex.

And finally, in light of the entanglement of all key facets of society, liberatory kinship institutions will have to be compatible with new features in other dimensions of life and vice versa.

 

Thesis Four: Race, Ethnicity, Culture and Community

Liberating cultural/community relations, including race, ethnic, national and religious relations, requires that we rectify the negative historical and contemporary impacts of racist, colonial, and otherwise bigoted structures and neo-liberal policies and practices on countries and communities, especially in the global South.

Liberating culture and community will require implementing new participatory cultural/community institutions that ensure that no individuals or groups—by race, ethnicity, nationality, language, religion, or any other cultural community identification—are privileged above or dominate others. To that end, liberatory cultural and community institutions will need to ensure that people can have multiple cultural and social identities, and will need to provide space and resources for people to positively express their cultural/community identities however they choose while recognizing that which identity is most important to any particular person at any particular time depends on that person’s situation and assessments. While it may be accomplished differently in different places and times, elimination of domination of course implies an end to material racial inequalities in education, health, housing, criminal justice system, employment and racial division of labor, income and wealth and environmental racism.

Liberatory cultural and community relations will also need to explicitly recognize that many rights and values exist regardless of cultural identity, so that all people deserve self management, equity, solidarity, and liberty, even while society also protects all people’s right to affiliate freely to enjoy diversity.

To end the reality and even the fear of colonization and race, caste, religious, or national suppression, liberatory cultural and community relations must also provide all cultural communities guaranteed access to means to preserve their cultural integrity and practices.

Liberatory cultural and community relations will also need to eliminate barriers to free exit from all cultural communities, including nations, and must impose no arbitrary non cultural barriers to free entry, including affirming that communities that guarantee free entry and exit can be under the complete self determination of their members so long as their policies and actions don’t conflict with society’s overall agreed norms.

And finally, in light of the entanglement of all key facets of society, liberatory cultural/community institutions will have to be compatible with new features in other dimensions of life and vice versa.

 

Thesis Five: Economy

Liberating economics will require implementing new economic institutions that ensure that no individuals or classes are privileged above or dominate others and that all economic actors are able to participate fully in determining their own economic lives. To attain such classlessness, liberatory economic institutions will need to preclude owning productive assets such as natural resources and factories so that ownership plays no role in determining people’s’ decision-making influence or share of income.

To attain classlessness, new economic institutions will also need to ensure that all workers have a say in decisions, to the extent possible, proportionate to effects on them, sometimes best attained by majority rule, sometimes by consensus or other arrangements. This will, in turn, entail that new economic institutions have venues for deliberation including worker and consumer councils or assemblies, including that new economic institutions eliminate corporate divisions of labor that typically give about one-fifth of workers empowering tasks while they consign to four-fifths mainly rote, repetitive, and obedient tasks.

Thus, instead of producing a class division based on differential empowerment, liberatory economic institutions will need to ensure that each worker enjoys a share of empowering tasks via suitable new designs of work that convey to all workers sufficient confidence, skills, information, and access to participate effectively in self-managed decision making.

Additionally, to attain equity, liberatory economic institutions will need to ensure that workers who work longer or harder or at more onerous conditions, doing socially valued labor (including socially valued training), earn a proportionately greater share of the social product but do not earn payment according to property, bargaining power, or the value of personal output—while all who are unable to work nonetheless receive full income.

Likewise, liberatory economic relations will need to avoid both market competition and top-down planning, since each produces class rule, alienation, and ecological degradation among other violations. In their place, liberatory economic relations will need to find ways to conduct decentralized cooperative negotiation of inputs and outputs via workers and consumers councils and federations of councils, with additional participatory facilitating structures as needed.

And finally, in light of the entanglement of all key facets of society, liberatory economic institutions will have to be compatible with new features in other dimensions of life and vice versa.


Thesis Six: Internationalism

Internationalism means valuing people in other countries and being in solidarity with their just struggles for decent lives. Liberating international relations will require implementing new participatory international institutions that ensure that no nations or geographic regions are privileged above others, and that, until that is achieved, move toward that result. As a means to that end, liberatory international relations will need to end the subordination of nations, particularly subordination of the Global South by the Global North, and end that subordination in all its forms including colonialism, neo-colonialism, and neoliberalism, but also residual differences in collective wealth.

Liberatory international policy and structures will need to foster equitable internationalist globalization in place of exploitative corporate globalization, including diminishing economic disparities in countries’ relative wealth, protecting cultural and social patterns internal to each country, and facilitating international entwinement as people desire, including implementing reparations and international exchange and aid as well as border redefinitions with these ends in mind.

 

Thesis Seven: Ecology

Not only for liberation, but literally for human survival, to liberate ecological relations will require implementing new participatory ecological practices that first and foremost cease and reverse unsustainable resource depletion, environmental degradation, climate change, and other ecosystem disrupting trends.

To such ends, liberatory ecological relations will need to facilitate not only an end to fossil fuels, but an ecologically sound reconstruction of society that accounts for the full ecological as well as social/personal costs and benefits of both short- and long-term economic and social choices, so that future populations can sensibly decide levels of production and consumption, preferred duration of work, degrees of self and collective reliance, energy use and harvesting, stewardship of nature, pollution norms, climate policies, conservation practices, consumption choices, and other future policy choices.

Liberatory ecological norms and practices will also need to foster a consciousness of ecological connection, responsibility, and reciprocity so that future citizens understand and respect the ecological precautionary principle and are well prepared to decide policies regarding such matters as animal rights or vegetarianism that transcend sustainability.

Where theses 1 – 7 above address attaining a degree of visionary unity regarding what we seek, theses 8-20 below seek to attain a degree of strategic unity regarding how to win what we seek.

 

Thesis Eight: Organize

Liberatory organizations are needed for groups to work effectively together with shared intentions while discovering new insights, retaining and sharing lessons, and collectively applying lessons from their own experiences. Such liberatory organizations will need to facilitate learning by all their members, preserve lessons to provide continuity, combine and apply energies and insights to win changes, and sustain support for members.

 

Thesis Nine: Be Strategic

To win liberation requires organizing that counters cynicism with hope, that incorporates seeds of the future in the present, that grows membership and commitment among the class, nationality, cultural, age, ability, and sexual/gender constituencies to be liberated, and that wins reforms without becoming reformist. Liberatory organizing requires relevant, flexible strategy, guided by shared vision, to consistently progress along a trajectory towards lasting, fundamental change.

 

Thesis Ten: Center Vision

Liberatory organizing will need to realize that doubt about the possibility of a better society is a primary impediment to people seeking change. To combat cynicism rooted in doubt and to engender informed hope will therefore need to be a permanent organizing priority. To that end, liberatory organizing will need to always offer and clarify the possibility and merit of vision and the efficacy of activism, even beyond indicating, detailing, and explaining the pains people currently endure and the tenacious obstacles to change people currently confront. Vision as an evolving set of goals will need to embody insights gleaned from experiments and experience.

 

Thesis Eleven: Promote Participatory Decision Making

To arrive at well-considered decisions, collectively implement decisions, and monitor that such decisions have been carried out correctly, a liberatory organization will need to provide extensive opportunities for members to participate in organizational decision making, including engaging in deliberations with others. To those ends, a liberatory organization will need to establish internal structures that facilitate everyone’s participation including, when possible, offering childcare at meetings and events, finding ways to reach out to those who might be immersed in kinship duties, striving to meet diverse accessibility needs, and aiding those with busy work schedules. 

A liberatory organization will need to also provide transparency regarding all actions by elected or delegated leaders, including placing a high burden of proof on keeping secret any agenda, whether to avoid repression or for any other reason, and to provide a mechanism to recall leaders or representatives who members believe are not adequately representing them, as well as to provide means to fairly, peacefully, and constructively resolve internal disputes.


Thesis Twelve: Build Empowerment, Not Hierarchy

To be liberatory, an organization’s structure and policies will need to approximate, as well as circumstances and priorities allow, the self-management norm that “each member has decision making influence proportional to the degree they are affected.” 

To that end, a liberatory organization will need to be internally classless including being structured so that a minority who are initially disproportionately equipped with needed skills, information, and confidence do not form a formal or informal decision-making hierarchy that leaves initially less-prepared members to perpetually follow orders or perform only rote tasks. 

Likewise, over time, a liberatory organization needs to apportion empowering and disempowering tasks to ensure that no individuals or sectors of members have a relative monopoly on information or position, and no subset of members has disproportionate say whether due to race, gender, class, or other attributes.

 

Thesis Thirteen: Celebrate & Protect Diversity

A liberatory organization must monitor and work to correct instances of sexism, racism, classism, ableism, transphobia, and homophobia, including having diverse roles suitable to people with different backgrounds, personal priorities, and personal situations. 

To those ends, a liberatory organization will need to celebrate internal debate and dissent and to allow dissenting views to exist and be tested alongside preferred views. It will need to guarantee members’ rights to organize “currents” or “caucuses” with full rights of democratic debate.

 Likewise, a liberatory organization will need to ensure that national, regional, city, and local chapters, as well as different sectors of the organization, can respond to their own circumstances and implement their own programs as they choose, so long as their choices do not block other groups equally addressing their own situations, or deny the shared goals and principles of the whole organization.

 

Thesis Fourteen: Start Now! Prefigure, Practice, Experiment, & Refine

Liberatory organizing will need to plant the seeds of the future in the present to enhance hope, to test and refine ideas, and to learn experiential lessons able to inform strategy and vision. To plant seeds of the future under present class, race, gender, sexual, age, ability, and power relations, liberatory organizing will need to not only constructively address the ways it’s members interrelate but to also establish internal norms that support building exemplary workplace, campus, and community institutions that represent and refine the values of the movement, which the organization then in turn offers as liberating alternatives to the status quo it combats.

 

Thesis Fifteen: Engage in Outreach & Build Structures of Outreach

To constantly grow membership among the class, community, nationality, and gender constituencies it aims to liberate, liberatory organizing will need to learn from and seek unity with audiences far wider than its own membership. It will need to attract and affirmatively empower young people and to organize people currently critical and even hostile to its aims, not least by participating in, supporting, building, and aiding diverse social movements and struggles beyond its own immediate agendas, and also by explicitly directly and respectfully addressing critical and even hostile constituencies in communities, on campuses, and at work. 

Liberatory organizing will also need to seek, develop, debate, disseminate, and advocate truthful news, analysis, vision, and strategy via popular education among its members and especially in the wider society, including developing and sustaining needed media institutions and means of face-to-face communication as well as using diverse methods of agitation and struggle—from educational efforts to rallies, marches, demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, occupations, and diverse direct action campaigns—to win gains and build movements.

 

Thesis Sixteen: Build Power Blocs

To sustain principled unity, liberatory organizing will need to go beyond seeking coalitions of diverse organizations and movements who agree on a minimum focus, to develop new forms of cross-constituency and cross-issue mutuality. New blocs of activist movements, campaigns, and organizations will often need to take as their shared program not a least common component of what they all individually favor, but the totality of their individual priorities, even including their differences, so that each movement, campaign, and organization in the bloc aids the rest and all thereby become dramatically more powerful. This is what shared visionary and strategic theses aim to facilitate.

 

Thesis Seventeen: Build Trajectories of Commitment & Momentum

Liberatory organizing will need to seek changes in society for citizens to enjoy immediately, while it also establishes by the words and methods of its struggles, the means it uses in its organizing, and the ideas it broaches and broadcasts, a likelihood that all those involved will pursue and win more change in the future. Liberatory organizing will need to seek short-term changes of its own conception by its own actions, but also need to seek short term changes that others conceive by supporting other movements and projects, both internationally, by country, and also locally, including addressing such matters as climate change, arms control, war and peace, the level and composition of economic output, income, agricultural relations, education, health care, housing, income distribution, duration of work, gender roles, racial relations, immigration, policing, media, law, and legislation. 

Liberatory organizing will need to seek and win gains by means that reduce oppression in the present and that prepare means, methods, and allegiances able to win more gains in the future, always leading toward liberation.

 

Thesis Eighteen: Choose Tactics to Serve Strategy

Liberatory organizing must embrace a diversity of tactics suited to diverse contexts that best serve flexible, resilient strategies guided by shared vision. 

Liberatory organizing will need to connect efforts, resources, and lessons across continents and from country to country, region to region, community to community, workplace to workplace, and campus to campus, even as it also recognizes that strategies and tactics suitable to different places and different times will differ. 

Liberatory organizing will need to take a long and encompassing view, so as to focus not solely on immediate tactical success or failure—such as stopping a meeting, completing a march, or winning a vote—but also and even mainly on broader matters such as how many new people are reached, what commitments are enlarged or enriched, and what infrastructure is created. It will need to combine respect for the urgency of immediate injustices that need to be righted with the patience that major long-term change requires. 

Liberatory organizing will, to that end, need to understand that vision orients aims, strategy informs program, and tactics implement plans. For each, it will need to pay close attention to implications of choices for advancing immediate campaigns, organization, and consciousness, but also for advancing longer run prospects, all for those immediately involved and for those viewing from a distance. For example, it will need to judge calls for participation in electoral politics case by case, including cultivating a cautious electoral attitude because of the captivating and corrupting dynamics of electoral campaigns, even while also recognizing their outreach potential and reform relevance.

 

Thesis Nineteen: Practice Regenerative Organizing

Liberatory organizing will need to develop mechanisms that provide financial, legal, employment, and emotional support to its members so that its members can be in better positions to participate in campaigns as fully as they wish and to navigate the various challenges and sometimes negative effects of taking part in radical actions. 

Liberatory organizing will need to substantially improve the life situations of its members, including aiding their feelings of self-worth, their knowledge, skills, and confidence, their mental, physical, sexual, and spiritual health, and even their social ties and engagements and leisure enjoyments. It will need to take a positive approach in all interpersonal and organizational matters, always seeking ways forward. It will need to address disagreements not to win against others, or to elevate self, but to find ways all can progress collectively successfully. Thus minority positions will need to be protected and preserved, as possible, in case in time they prove essential.

When conflicts, disputes, and violations arise, regenerative activism implies holding people accountable with the goal of transforming people and society. The priority will not be to punish or expel unless absolutely necessary. The aim will be to address violations with the goal not of expelling people but of becoming better human beings and organizers.

 

Thesis Twenty: Foster Leadership From Below

Liberatory organizing will need to understand that we are all different and that successful insights and paths forward are found, communicated, and advocated by some people earlier than by others in acts of “leadership”. Liberatory organizing will need to celebrate such acts but also to prioritize methods that ensure acts of leadership do not yield lasting differential empowerment. The key personal contribution of any leading person or group is elevating other persons or groups into leading, while organizational relations must propel and abet that priority. A key role of good leadership is to share and build skills and knowledge of members, to build leadership of members.

 

Conclusion: Three Goals

Our primary goal of The 20 Thesis for Liberation as a living evolving document is to make the case that organizers and diverse movements would benefit immensely from a widely shared positive perspective. We would benefit from a framework for coalescing around shared vision and strategy that can help individuals, movements and organizations identify shared aims, and for leveraging collective power to win immediate reforms on a trajectory of societal transformation. 

Would it matter if activists were to arrive at such a shared outlook that could span a country, many countries, or even the world? Would it matter if people who mainly address and seek anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, anti-ecocide, or anti-war gains were to all share a unifying positive vision? Would it matter if behind calls to enrich and align struggles in different places for different gains, there arose a shared perspective? 

If not, there’s no need to think further on sharing these or any other theses on liberation. But if such a shared stance could assist each progressive, radical, revolutionary endeavor and could especially align them into much more effective mutual support, then seriously considering the idea of arriving at a shared positive perspective and a strategy for achieving it is essential. 

Our second goal is to move forward from identifying the need for a widely shared visionary and strategic framework, to proposing this particular draft framework for engagement. Are these ‘20 Theses for Liberation’ sensible, flexible, and general, but also rich enough to sustain a productive discussion and even generate shared, effective advocacy? They come from movements, experiences, organizations and diverse individuals, but we do not propose them as the only possible formulation. 

Across the broad spectrum of progressive and radical movements, there are sure to be reactions that these 20 theses are too long, too specific, lack something favorable, include something unfavorable, go beyond our means, utilize imprecise or un-preferred terminology, or are just something that no matter how worthy, will likely be ignored. Our hope is that these concerns are not a stopping point, but a starting point for undertaking further examination, discussion, debate, improvements, and refinements towards a shared basis, however different it might look from this draft, for future activism and organization building. 

How might such a final shared viewpoint emerge? By people talking, writing, reading, debating in person, in periodicals, in organizations. The result, of course, wouldn’t be a fixed, unchangeable stance. It would instead continually alter in accord with new experiences, contexts, and insights. The best result would be a continued, collective process of refining, adapting, and utilizing a unifying framework. We would be building and sustaining a culture of coalescing around shared vision and strategy—which is the work of building a movement of movements. We would be bringing separate agendas into powerful solidarity with one another. 

Our third and final goal is to invite engagement and responses to these 20 Theses, for which we must stop writing and start listening.

Table of Contents

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Join the continued, collective process of refining, adapting, and utilizing a unifying framework. Add your voice in building & sustaining a culture of coalescing around shared vision & strategy – bringing separate agendas into powerful solidarity with one another.

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Next Steps: Engage, Adapt, Share

How does the 20 Theses for Liberation framework relate to your context, or not?
How can unifying vision & strategic organizing be applied in your life?
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Articles & Events Engaging with 20 Theses for Liberation

The 20 Theses for Liberation is a living document to engage with in a collective process. Here are some early responses:

Education #4Liberation
by Michael Albert

Me, You, and 20 Theses
by Michael Albert

What I Owe the 20 Theses
by Lonnie Ray Atkinson

Community #4 Liberation

by Alexandria Shaner

Watch Real Utopia’s online discussion session on 20 Theses for Liberation

Listen to Episode 244 of the Revolution Z podcast entitled “Cooperation Jackson with Kali Akuno”

Join ZNetwork’s Community Forum

Endorsing organizations:

Signatories:

ZNetwork, International
DiEM25, Europe
MetaCPC, Greece
RealUtopia, International
Academy of Democratic Modernity, Europe
Michael Albert, United States
Renata Avila, Guatemala
Ramzy Baroud, United States
Medea Benjamin, United States
Peter Bohmer, United States
Fintan Bradshaw, Ireland
Jeremy Brecher, United States
Urška Breznik, Slovenia
Noam Chomsky, United States
Savvina Chowdhury, United States
Devriş Çimen, Turkey
Mark Evans, United Kingdom (the)
Andrej Grubačić, Balkans (the)
Jason Hickel, Eswatini
Kathy Kelly, United States
Arash Kolahi, United States
Bridget Meehan, Ireland
Sotiris Mitralexis, Greece
Jason Myles, United States
Cynthia Peters, United States
John Pilger, Australia
Matic Primc, Slovenia
Don Rojas, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Stephen Shalom, United States
Alexandria Shaner, Sint Maarten
Norman Solomon, United States
Cooper Sperling, United States
Yanis Varoufakis, Greece
Brett Wilkins, United States
Greg Wilpert, United States
Susan Kolahi, United States
Srsly Wrong Podcast, Canada
Shawn Vulliez, Canada
Aaron Moritz, Canada
Mattia Valanzano, Italy
Alina Shaner, United States
Niclas Widmark, Sweden
Michael Kwet, South Africa
David Shaner, United States
Scott Cooper, United States
Steven Allen, Hungary
Terezija Breznik, Slovenia
Veronica Sarra, Panama
Steve Sorento, United States
Raj A, Sint Maarten
James Wilson, Australia
David Somekh, Ireland
Andrew Sage, Trinidad and Tobago
Terri Tippett, United States
Peter Gringinger, Austria
Alex Buchanan, United States
Bob Nobes, United Kingdom (the)
Tom Llewellyn, United States
Sandy Carter, United States of America (the)
guido, Chile
Donna Jackel, United States
Timothy Lennon, United States
Zechariah Shrum, United States
Steven Allen, Hungary
Anita James, United States
kathleen leonard, Mexico
Greg Dean, Canada
barbara Penn, United States
Ken Bank, United States
Timothy Braatz, United States
BB Guevara, United States
Leo Joseph Melenoski Jr, United States
Wes Hinckes, United Kingdom (the)
Pierfrancesco Zinilli, Italy
Miljenko Cimesa, Croatia
Francisco Martins, Portugal
Alan L. Stewart, United States
Bruce Lofquist, Canada
Marcus Hill, United States
Semih Bilgen, Turkey
Graça Nazaré, Portugal
Jože Kos Grabar, Slovenia
exadverso, United Kingdom (the)
Rafael Sousa, Portugal
Kellermann, Thomas, Germany
Ashley Glass, United States
manuel aparicio, United States
Stephen Soldz, United States
Steven Hugh Knoblauch, United States
Anna Weicker, PsyD, United States
Dilip Babu, United States
Lama Zuhair Khouri, United States
Sean Michael Wilson, Japan
Brad OIson, United States
brigitte Ladisch Bidault, United States
META KORDIŠ, Slovenia
Michael Albert, United Kingdom (the)
Andrew Samuels, United Kingdom (the)
Borut Osonkar, Slovenia
Abigail A. Fuller, United States
Rahat Ulain, Australia
Compa, Germany
Deborah hellerstein, United States
James Traub, United States
Greg Wilson, United States
Rick Galli, United States
Dr. Jose j morales, Canada
Alex, Australia
Lorraine Osborn, Australia
Natalie Pickaver, United Kingdom (the)
John, United States
Puneet Dhall, New Zealand
Mofwoofoo, Ecuador
Plamen, Australia
Joel Isaacs, United States
William Pettus, United States
Michael Rissler, United States
Mansoor Shah, United States
Scott Oates, United States
Gordon, United Kingdom (the)
Gordon Asher, United Kingdom (the)
brigitte Ladisch Bidault, United States
M.Brinton Lykes, United States
Doug Hamilton, United States
brid connolly, Ireland
Francine Suzanne R. Mestrum, Belgium
Elin Hywel, United Kingdom (the)
DavidCronsilver, Canada
Pieter W.D. Kroon, Netherlands (the)
David B Baldwin, United States
Mofwoofoo, Ecuador
Ed, Netherlands (the)
Eugene Nulman, Italy
Tim J Penton, Canada
Jill abson, Canada
Bill Jacobson, United States
Lynne Layton, United States
Alex Welte, South Africa
Natalia Pritt, Indonesia
Ryan Ericksen, United States
Paulo Rodriguez, Belgium
Steven Grumbine, United States
Jeffrey A Reisberg, United States
Mikko Karjalainen, Netherlands (the)
KEN BANK, United States
Emily Jones, United States
Abbas Ali Siddiqui, Pakistan
Sruti Bala, India
Mary McManus, United Kingdom (the)
Elizabeth Marxsen, United States
Thomas Marxsen, United States
Peter Gringinger, Austria
Lonnie Ray Atkinson, United States
Travis Froberg, United States
Andrew Sisk, United States
Matthew Allen, Japan
Carolyn Faille, United States
Samuel Alexander, Australia
GUILLERMO KUHL, United States
Matt Mol
mike caggiano, United States
Octavio, United States
CHARLES L VANSICKLE, United States
Thomas Rapine, United States
Andrew LaFrance, Canada
António Tavares da Costa, Portugal
KEN BANK, United States
Matthew Fisher, United States
Dan McCrory, United States
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Paul Schantz, United States
Marc Estrin, United States
Bradley Aukerman, United States
Anton Dalemma, Canada
Bryan Mintenko, Canada
Julie Webb-Pullman, New Zealand
Abbas Ali, United States
Jen Ligh6, United States
Michael McKinley, New Zealand
Steve Early, United States
Athanasios Petridis, United States
Brad, Canada
Maria, United States
Mark Allcock, United Kingdom (the)
James Pochury, India
John Koons, United States
Sina Tafazoli, United States
Robert Toland, United States
Kristi doyne-Bailey, United States
Jeremy Hurford, United States
Farrell Brody, United States
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alice slater, United States
David Jones, United States
Angelo Gelmini, Italy
Gloria Gannaway, Spain
Margaret Carlson, United States
Peter Wright, United Kingdom (the)
Sumanta Banerjee, India
Nasir Khan, Norway
Lia Nogueira, United Kingdom (the)
Laurence Schechtman, United States
Michael Needleman, United Kingdom (the)
Bojan Radej, Slovenia
Rebert Lima, Brazil
Vijay, South Africa
Andy Philpott, United Kingdom (the)
Kenny Murray, United Kingdom (the)
Blair Fix, Canada
Rodney G. Peffer, United States
Andrés Unger, Spain
JOHN KEMP, United Kingdom (the)
Richard Goff, United States
Mahmood Iqbal, Pakistan
Alan Shank, United States
Jim Loveland, United States
Ron Jacobs, United States
B. R. Gowani, United States
Tom Hall, United States
Mike Murphy, Spain
Chinnaya Parimi, United States
Robert Beshara, United States
Sulyen, United States
Nicole Garneau, United States
Naser, Norway
Leren Leren International, United States
SAOUD EL MAWLA, Lebanon
Charitha Kommalapati, India
Kelly Renner, Germany
Filip Bojanić, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Kubilay Aşar, Turkey
Rk Tamang, Nepal
Hep Ingham, United States
kothapalli Ravibabu, India
Svante Malmström, Finland
Brian Bowzer, United States
Joel Rogers, United States
François Brunetta, Canada
Mark Allcock, United Kingdom (the)
Jack Strasburg, United States
Meijfroidt Bernard, Belgium
Peter Dawes, United Kingdom (the)
Drew Jennings-Grisham, Colombia
Wayne Smith, United States
Paul, United States
Ricardo coelho, Belgium
Anna, United Kingdom (the)
tugo zaletel, Slovenia
tugo zaletel, Slovenia
blue, United States
kathleen leonard, Mexico
Richard Klin, United States
Kali Akuno, United States
Grace F Marlier, United States
Rex Green, United States
Reza Muharam, Indonesia
Martin Karlsson, Sweden
Paul L. Johnson, Pakistan
Stevie, Ireland
Pascal, Ireland
Virginia Gawler, Australia
Reg Tydell, Australia
Terence Hegarty, United States
Tony Weis, Canada
Jim Driscoll, United States
Tsering Lhamo, India
James Underwood, United States
Joel Isaacs, United States
Tony Weis, Canada
Richard Linsenberg, United States
Eric B., United States
Bob Nobes, United Kingdom (the)
Horacio Almanza, Mexico
Guillermo Kuhl, United States
Susan Neiman, United States
Joel Isaacs, United States
Travis Froberg, United States
Tiago Ferreira, Portugal
Ian, Netherlands (the)
Colin MacWhirter, Canada
Prof. dr. milan popovic, Montenegro
Malin Widehammar, Sweden
Peter Gringinger, Austria
Demokratisk Omställning (Democratic Transition), Sweden
Gordon Asher, United Kingdom (the)
Victor, Australia
Jean Maria Arrigo, United States
Peter wilkin, France
Philip makin, United Kingdom (the)
Julia Wong, Canada
Caroline Hamilton, United Kingdom (the)
DimaVlll, Aland Islands
Ferdia O’Brien, Ireland
Paul Burke, United States
Mitchell Clogg, United States
JOHN KEMP, United Kingdom (the)
Giovanni Giordano, Australia
James Fleming, United States
George Maliotis, United States
Steven Klees, United States
SHANTI MANSINGH, United States
StevenDog, Eswatini
Mustafa Durmus, Turkey
Mustafa Durmus, Turkey

Z needs your help!

Join Noam Chomsky in supporting Z, as we bring 45 years of independent media to the next generation of activists and movements.

A special message from Noam Chomsky

Dear Z Network reader:

I have written for, related to, and been close friends with the outstanding Z project for much of my political life. I came on board when South End Press was born, stayed when Z Magazine first launched, and became still more connected with ZNet itself via my yet earlier New Left era connections to Michael Albert and Lydia Sargent. I know Z from writing books for South End Press, articles for Z Magazine, and all manner of things for the web system now called znetwork.org. I have also written countless letters, over the years, to aid Z’s efforts to raise funds. This is another of those letters, but it is also a chance to make a more general case that needs making.

The new Z, I guess about a year old now, arose from Michael getting on in years and deciding it was time to make way for younger leadership. There are seven on the new staff. I know some and have now seen the work of others. They rebuilt the site and now seek to broaden and grow its impact. They have done this as volunteers with no income at all. Compare znetwork.org to other operations with budgets not only for salaries, but for solicitation, and more. Despite that they have had none of that you wouldn’t know it by looking. So, it is reasonable to wonder, aside from helping them exist, what might they bring us all if we provide funds for them to work longer hours, and to implement more innovations?

These people are not content with survival, and rightly so. Their goal is to aid activists win real change. They cover everything that needs attention but far more so than many other projects, they focus on strategy and vision. I am a ZFriend—a group they have assembled to consult, publish, and get advice from. They don’t want a nominal board that does nothing. They want a community of involved Friends to relate to and I know they want to address their entire audience in much the same fashion. I believe that with funding support, each of the seven staff will not only free themselves to devote more time, more energy, and more creative focus for the long haul, but they will also have means to pay writers, generate topical explorations, sponsor debates and roundtables, generate video and a videocast to go with podcasts and more, plus generate something they call ZedTalks…imagine that!

For over fifty years I have watched groups try to fundraise. It is an alienating, thankless, pursuit. After all, it is a kind of begging. But what choice do such groups have? Well, I would like to propose to you that you let this long-running, highly accomplished, left project, and all those you really like, have your support without further begging by the likes of me—or themselves.

So please visit ZNetwork.org  and support the new ZNetwork staff in their efforts. They don’t claim they will shut the doors if you don’t. They are far too committed for that and far too honest, as well. They seek your support not for personal survival but for increased organizational achievement. What they do claim, and what I believe is true, is that they will do steadily greater things if you provide support. Help them help us all. Help them, and here I quote them, “grow, diversify, and contribute to a movement of movements that wins steadily escalating gains on the path to a new world.”

I support Z. I hope you will do so too.

Noam Chomsky

Welcome to ZNetwork
… the spirit of resistance lives!

Z in 2024: a new website, new features, ambitious new plans, and even some new blood…

Join us in this new chapter, and in celebrating 45 years of community dedicated to advancing vision & strategy, resisting injustice, fostering liberty, and winning a better world for all!

Renovating this massive site took considerable time, a ton of effort, and even a little luck. But all is well and we are still innovating new components.

We encourage your participation in helping continue to improve – please share your feedback and suggestions via email: [email protected], or in our new community forum.

Without further ado – check it out!

In solidarity,

  • The Z Staff: Alexandria, Arash, Bridget, Cooper, Fintan, Greg, & Matic

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