ZCom Mission

Z Communications is a compendium of projects and institutions with an overaching shared agenda. The idea, insofar as it can be expressed succinctly, is to assist in the creation and in the actions of social movements seeking to better people's lives by reducing injustices in the present context -- and by ultimately changing the context so in the future injustice is undone.

A central but not sole focus is communication of ideas, information, inspiration essential to activist motivation and success. ZCom seeks to provide content that addresses redressing today's reality and envisioning tomorrow's. This motivates our print, video, online, audio, and direct interactions, such as those of ZMI.

A notable aspect of our mission, happily significantly less unique now than when Z Magazine was born, much less the earlier South End Press, is an approach that does not privilege any one side of life over the rest. ZCom is about race, gender, power, class, ecology, and peace - it is about justice in all conceivable forms -- seeing each as intimately entwined with and certainly in no sense prior to or alone causal of the rest.

A second notable aspect, regretably almost as unigue now as when Z Magazine was born, is a comittment to fundamental transformation and two implications that stem from that comittment. First, ZCom highlights that successful (and given cynicsm, perhaps any) action in the present depends very much not only on understanding current conditions but also on broad clarity about future goals and knowledgeably building links between the two. A priority of ZCom is therefore vision and strategy regarding all sides of life. Second, however, ZCom is convinced that a movement able to transform society requires massive, highly informed, participatory, unwavering allegience which will not grow and persist unless the seeds of a better future are embodied in the actions of current activists.

When South End Press was born thirty years ago, when Z Magazine spun off, and in all the innovations since then leading to the onilne presense, to ZNet, ZVideo, and ZMI, and now to ZCom and its new ZSpace, there has been continuity. Our mission is to help improve life via social struggle that also builds growing comittment and organization informed by understanding existing conditions and shared vision of future improvement, fueled by personal and structural solidarity, by personal and colllective desire, and by personal and rational hope.