Purpose

The principal goal of the Groundwork collective is to work toward a socialist revolution, but one that is different from any that have ever taken place. Much of our work has been to develop a theory and a practice, to lay the groundwork for the running of the good society. Our focus is not on the organizing of political parties, waiting for the capitalist crisis, or stockpiling guns, but rather to change people's consciousness and to sharpen the skills we need in order to function in the society that we envision.

We provide books which we feel will help people to better understand the social, economic, and political problems they deal with, as well as books on the processes which groups of people employ to change the prevailing social system. We hope this information will help people's efforts to change society. However, the central theme of Groundwork has been the development of a nonhierarchical, nonauthoritarian framework for doing work and relating to people. We believe that the skills that must be learned to accomplish this are those that will be used in our future good society.

Traditionally, the left has worked with large scale organizations: parties, armies, unions, and such. We don't think there is anything wrong with these. We simply feel that the development of the important skills can best be done within a small group of people. This is why Groundwork is a collective rather than a party, an army, or a union. Within our collective we strive to determine what is the best theoretical and practical basis to work with by working out some theory, putting it into practice, and then changing the theory based on the results.

So what are these skills that we think are important? Our model of the good society is based on several key concepts. These are socialist consciousness, consensus decision-making, criticism, self-criticism and praise, and responsibility and residual responsibility. The skills we find important are those needed to put these concepts into action. In the next few pages these and other concepts will be explained.

move along to Groundwork Concepts

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