Statement of Principles

Note: this document is now maintained as part of the SocialTools web site. See WebsiteMaintenance.

In recent decades, capitalism has spread worldwide. However, it continues to concentrate wealth and power in the West, where it originated. Using an array of economic, legal, social and military pressures, the capitalist world order continually attempts to shrink the spaces where opposition or alternatives could develop. This is precisely why it is urgent for people who live and work in the West to work on undermining this order, and on building alternatives.

One of this order's main strategies for extending its power is to offer neoliberal values as the means for achieving equality, individual well-being and a just society. Private, for-profit ownership of all resources and infrastructure (food, water, energy, education, roads, etc.) is the essential goal of the neoliberal project. At its very core is the drive for the same kind of ownership of media, knowledge, information, and electronic means of communication, whose development it attempts to control so that they become instruments of domination.

SocialTools is an attempt to undermine capitalism and its resulting relations of domination and exploitation, by working on the construction of a society whose practices and goals will be cooperation, equality and solidarity. To this end, the members of SocialTools make the following commitments:

1. We will work towards collective and not-for-profit ownership of all scarce resources, especially of those where our skills lie: knowledge, information and means of communication.
2. We will demonstrate and promote organizational processes characterized by open participation, self-management, accountability, transparency, best practices, public ownership of knowledge, respect for skill, and diversity. We will do this by helping organizations use software tools that promote these characteristics.
3. We will use only Free Software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation.
4. We will work on a theoretical political framework that will give the SocialTools project a firm and clear base to build on.
5. Whenever possible, we will support each other, as well as other projects that, in our view, are working toward the same goals.

Through our work with software tools, we nurture organizational processes that embody our principles; this in turn helps build organizations that can be part of the new society we envisage.