Z Communications

= libertarian socialist media platform

Interview

Jerome Roos interviews founder Michael Albert:

"ROAR: Michael, you are one of the original founders of ZCommunications, arguably the main intellectual hub for libertarian socialist thought and reflection. What were your initial motivations for founding ZMagazine and ZNet, and how has your initiative evolved since then?

Michael Albert (MA): Actually it all began with the publishing house, South End Press. After about ten years spent helping start and stabilize that, Lydia Sargent and I moved on to start Z Magazine. Then, I also worked on online activity in various forms, culminating in ZNet. We, along with various others working on the projects, also started a summer school called Z Media Institute which has helped train many new people in media skills as well as political concepts.

When we started, we were trying to create an additional media operation that would, however, achieve some new ends. Unlike book publishing, the magazine was monthly, and would have regular readers. We hoped that it could lead to a kind of community of people able to sustain and generate other activities.

The editorial substance was like it had been with South End Press, what we called a holist or totalist political approach, emphasizing race, gender, class, and power and, as you say, rooted in libertarian and anarchist socialist thought and reflections. But with the magazine, we hoped for a greater degree of social ties with a hopefully growing audience.

When having the magazine did that somewhat, but not as much as we would have liked, we added online activities. We had something called zbbs, an old bulletin board system, and then we had left online,a fledgling web system, and finally, after a few incarnations, we had and still have ZNet. This diversification into online communications increased the extent of our connection with an audience, and also vastly enlarged our audience, but still, we hoped for more.

The next step is in process right now, and very nearly ready for live activity. It is called ZSocial and is basically a social networking system that will provide our constituencies with really excellent means to socialize and intercommunicate, without, however, being subject to the norms of or contributing to the development of commercial operations like Facebook. Those operations are okay — albeit certainly, as corporations, not optimal — for reaching out to long lost friends and for otherwise trying to reach new people, but they are not okay for engaging in political organizing, in developing new ties and relations, in exploring new ideas, and for developing politically insightful and committed communities.

ROAR: How do you explain the success of your initiatives, and did you expect things to evolve this way when you founded Z Magazine back in 1987?

MA: I think the main reason for our level of success, which is, I think, not really as great as many think, was simply that the editorial content we favored was and remains dear to many people, and that we developed the online side of the operation very early, which led to a substantial base of online users and supporters from the outset.

When we started we didn’t know precisely what the online component would become, of course, but we knew it would be very important, so basically, things have gone roughly as anticipated.

That said, the scale and the degree of community we have attained are still far less than we hoped. The idea, after all, is to contribute to winning change not simply establish a lasting institution. So we are moving on to ZSocial — which will be social networking without sale of users to corporations (advertising), without collection of data for surveillance and government interference, without state and corporate censorship, and less dramatically, but as important, we think, without a bias toward what I call nuggetized communication." (http://roarmag.org/2012/04/parecon-participatory-economics-interview-michael-albert/)