Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it.

Portside is a community of people on the left and an alternative medium of communication. While the commercial media are becoming steadily more monopolized by the same giant economic interests that control finance and industry, we are dedicated to realizing the democratic potential of the Internet and other new communications technologies. We are part of the movement to create an alternative information infrastructure. We are beholden to no corporate interests.

The moderators believe that a new and more just social order must be imagined before it can be built. We intend Portside as a space that fosters such imagining. We aim to be a catalyst to imagination by sharing dreams and experiences, political programs and struggles, which are the raw material of imagination. We believe that we are all emboldened and reinforced by knowing about the real efforts, all around the globe, to achieve a better world.

The moderators all think we can do better than capitalism -- and had better do better, if we and our children are going to have a future -- without proposing a neat blueprint for the future or a well-drawn roadmap to it. We believe that the search for alternatives must be based on working class solidarity and on principled opposition to all forms of exploitation, racism, sexism, homophobia and ethnocentrism. We seek a society based on democracy, social and economic justice, and racial and gender equality. We believe in globalization from below, in development of international ties in the interest of peace and social progress. We know that our future depends on developing and implementing new models of sustainable social reproduction and guardianship of nature.

With the aid of readers and contributors, we search the Internet every day for relevant, insightful, critical, informative, perhaps funny, material and deliver it to your digital doorstep. In deciding what to distribute, we seek information from diverse sources. We encourage debate.

We respect our readers as people who think for themselves. We strive for variety in subject matter and opinion. We look for things that are topical. We also look for things that are analytical, probing and challenging. We rely on readers to help provide those things.