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from Seize the Means of Community


1. From Mamdani to Schmoozalism

In writing about Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, we introduced the term schmoozalism to describe the radical etiquette that animated his appeal. Here we want to step back and spell out more broadly what we mean by the word.

Crucially: schmoozalism is not socialism itself. It is the ethos in which socialism can grow naturally. Without this soil, socialism may sprout in programs or policies, but it withers under pressure — reversible, co-optable, thin. With this soil, socialism develops as the fruit of ensemble practice: resilient, lived, and deeply rooted.

Schmoozalism is best understood by its contrasts. It stands in opposition to Randian objectivism, which exalts the isolated heroic self. It opposes managerialism, the philosophy that reduces all human relation to systems of control, optimization, and management. And it rejects the neoliberal ethos that has dominated politics and economics for the last half-century: a fusion of heroic individualist rhetoric with managerial rule by markets, presented as inevitable and without alternative.

Against these currents, schmoozalism affirms a different foundation: the primacy of ensembles, the reciprocity of individuality and community, the exploratory character of play, and the convivial medium of the communitarium. What began as a description of Mamdani’s political style becomes here the sketch of a broader ethos, one we believe can serve as the living basis for socialism’s renewal.


2. Idiotism: Clarifying the Term

The world we inhabit today is structured by idiotism. By this we mean not the modern insult directed at someone’s intelligence, but the older sense of the word drawn from ancient Greece. In Athens, an idiōtēs was not a fool but a private person — one who withdrew from the affairs of the polis (the shared civic sphere) to focus only on personal concerns.

Idiotism, in this original sense, is the condition of self-enclosure: the withdrawal from communal life into privatized existence. It is the reduction of human beings to isolated, possessive units, cut off from the shared ensembles in which meaning, solidarity, and flourishing take shape.

This is the sense in which we use the term here. Idiotism is enclosure of the self. Under hegemonic capitalism, it becomes the privatization of meaning and the elevation of personal opinion and intent, treating individuals as units of consumption, production, and attention. Individuality is recoded as entrepreneurial selfhood — each person a mini-firm, optimizing for productivity and recognition.


3. History as Contingency, Not Necessity

Karl Marx and his contemporaries often conceived of history as an inevitable trajectory, a logic unfolding with necessity. From their perspective, socialism seemed destined to follow capitalism. Schmoozalism departs from this framework.

We hold history to be contingent. The comprehensive idiotism of our age was not an inevitability but one possible outcome. The siphoning of communal resources by higher-level hierarchies could have played out in other ways. In the nineteenth century, without knowledge of mass media, suburbanization, neoliberalism, and the Internet, it would have been difficult to foresee how fully idiotism would metastasize.

Thus, we should not accuse nineteenth-century socialists of “failing” to predict today’s conditions. Their horizon was bounded by the enclosures they directly confronted — land, labor, and capital. But this fairness does not excuse the absorption of idiotism that occurred within socialist thought.


4. Civilization as Siphoning (and the Role of Imaginaries)

To understand socialism’s blind spots, we need to place it within a much older civilizational pattern: the siphoning of resources from communal conviviality into hierarchical formations.

Human beings are endowed with pro-social tendencies: trust, reciprocity, curiosity, empathy. These evolved to sustain schmooze-level ensembles — the small-scale interactions through which meaning and solidarity emerge.

But civilizations have repeatedly fracked these resources, siphoning them upward into larger organizations: fiefdoms, early kingdoms, city-states, priesthoods, bureaucracies, corporations, empires, and modern nation-states. Smaller units often preserved some conviviality but were gradually subordinated. Over time, contests of scale led to the consolidation of ever-larger siphons.

At these larger scales, imaginaries became indispensable. In local ensembles, members see each other face to face. But at national or imperial scales, people must imagine one another as co-participants. Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” of the nation is the classic example: millions of strangers bound by shared symbols, narratives, and rituals. These imaginaries can extend solidarity, but they are also easily captured — siphoning pro-social impulses away from local conviviality and into bureaucracies, armies, or states.

Neoliberalism adds a distinctive turn: it managerializes the siphoning itself. Communities are not only drained but actively recoded as markets. Mutual aid becomes “volunteer service delivery.” Schools become “competitive education providers.” Even friendship is colonized by metrics and platforms. Neoliberalism is the siphon that insists extraction is freedom.


5. Socialism’s Absorption of Idiotism

Socialism, while opposing exploitation, often carried forward this civilizational siphoning.

  • Taylorism: Lenin’s embrace of “scientific management” treated workers as interchangeable cogs. Socialist ownership of the factory did not dissolve the idiotism of Taylorized labor.
  • Ownership as Panacea: Many socialists assumed that once workers owned production, communal relations would naturally emerge. This was less materialism than crypto-theology: a faith that solidarity would appear without cultivation.
  • Possessive Individual: Socialism inherited from liberal philosophy the conception of the individual as proprietor — a figure cut off from communal reciprocity, relating to others only through contract or coercion.
  • Intellectual Property: Nineteenth-century thinkers could not have foreseen the rise of the intellectual property regime, now central to capitalist enclosure. IP fences off creativity and knowledge themselves.

Socialism’s vulnerability came not only from external enemies but from its own shallow rooting in ethos. Without the grounding of schmoozalism, socialism too easily imported idiotism into its own soil.


6. Idiotism Beyond Socialism

Other traditions also sought liberation while carrying forward idiotism:

  • Existentialism: Presented the “authentic self” as a solitary hero, echoing Leibniz’s windowless monad. Schmoozalism instead insists on individuality as reciprocal and ensemble-defined.
  • Cognitive Psychology: Even embodied cognition emphasizes the body of the individual, leaving out the ensemble. Schmoozalism stresses that cognition is always ensemble-enabled.
  • Game Theory & Behavioral Economics: These fields complicate homo economicus with heuristics, but the “player” remains an isolated actor. In reality, a prisoner in the prisoner’s dilemma is also a parent, a neighbor, a community member. To erase these multiplicities is to reproduce idiotism. Schmoozalism restores multiplicity as the real ground of decision and meaning.

7. Schmoozalism as Counter-Idiotism

Schmoozalism begins with the recognition that individuality and community are co-evolved wholes: inseparable, mutually enabling, constituted in relation.

Schmoozalism as Soil

It is the soil of socialism, not its fruit. The fruit is what we call socialism: institutions, policies, and economies organized around solidarity and reciprocity. But the soil is schmoozalism: the radical etiquette, interpretive practice, and ensemble conviviality that make those fruits possible and sustainable.

Without schmoozalism, socialism can be decreed, even built for a time, but it remains brittle. With schmoozalism, socialism grows organically, renewed in each generation through the ensembles that sustain it.

Communitaria as Media and Counter-Siphons

Communitaria are not reservoirs to be drained but media: living substrates where ensembles can arise and flourish. They are also counter-siphons: structures that replenish conviviality at its base, reversing civilization’s age-old depletion.

Venture Schmoozalism

Venture schmoozalism names the exploratory character of ensemble life:

  • Study: probing, testing, learning.
  • Creativity: recombining meanings and practices.
  • Invention: ensemble construction of tools and institutions.
  • Play: the foundation of them all — enacting multiplicity, bending or reinventing rules, keeping ensembles fluid.

Civilizational siphons suppress play, enforcing rigid rules and commodifying leisure. Schmoozalism restores play as a political ontology of multiplicity.

Historical Glimpses

  • Sewer Socialism: In Milwaukee, early 20th-century socialists focused on sanitation, housing, and public works. This was venture schmoozalism in practice — pragmatic, ensemble-oriented, inventive. But managerialism gradually hollowed it out, reducing citizens to clients of bureaucracies.
  • Cooperatives: Exploratory economic ventures that often absorbed corporate managerialism under competitive pressure.
  • Mutual Aid Societies: Rich forms of ensemble solidarity, later subsumed by bureaucratic welfare systems.
  • Open Source: A digital commons of playful invention, partially captured by corporations and IP regimes.

Each example shows both the vitality of schmoozalism and the danger of managerial capture.


8. Horizons and Pragmatism

Schmoozalism is not statist and not anti-statist. States are contingent resource-ensembles, legitimate only insofar as they serve smaller ensembles.

This stands directly against neoliberal inevitabilism, which insists that all institutions must be marketized. Schmoozalism affirms contingency instead: there is no natural inevitability, only the choices and experiments of ensembles.

Its stance is pragmatic: “when in Rome.” Schmoozalism engages state and economy tactically, but it does not enthrall itself to them. Its foundation is always the schmooze-level.


9. Conclusion

Schmoozalism is not socialism itself. It is the foundational ethos in which socialism becomes durable. It is the counter-idiotism that restores conviviality, replenishes multiplicity, and reopens the imaginative ground of collective life.

Where Randian objectivism exalts the isolated self, schmoozalism situates individuality within ensembles. Where managerialism reduces life to systems of control, schmoozalism fosters fluidity and exploration. Where neoliberalism insists on inevitability, schmoozalism insists on contingency.

Communitaria are the living media where this ethos is cultivated: counter-siphons, replenishing conviviality, sustaining multiplicity. They are where socialism’s foundation is laid anew, not in abstraction but in playful, exploratory, ensemble life.


➡️ Read the introductory essay: Schmoozalism: The Radical Etiquette Behind Mamdani’s Appeal
➡️ Read the companion essay: Why Mamdani’s Success Depends on Civic Communitaria


Takeaway: Schmoozalism is the ethos of ensembles: the soil from which socialism can grow, the practice of restoring conviviality at its source, and the invention of futures through play.

#TheCommunitariumProject #TheMamdaniMovement #RedefiningSocialism #Schmoozalism

 
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from Seize the Means of Community

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign has mobilized New Yorkers on a breathtaking scale. But a Mamdani mayoralty will quickly run up against the trap of neoliberal managerialism and the danger of cultish overreach. Its strength will come not from charisma or technocracy, but from civic communitaria: living assemblies where New Yorkers sustain collective competence.


The Promise of a Mamdani Mayoralty

No one can miss what has just happened in New York City. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign brought tens of thousands of people into motion, united by clear demands: affordable housing, childcare, and a city that works for the people who keep it running.

That movement already distinguishes him from the “CEO mayors” of the last generation. Yet as Ross Barkan and others have warned, the role of mayor is not only agitator-in-chief. It is also manager of one of the most complex municipalities in the world. A Mamdani mayoralty cannot evade this reality.


The Managerial Trap

Managerialism insists that “competence” means efficiency, budget discipline, and keeping business confidence high. Its success is measured in bond ratings and growth indices.

If Mamdani allows himself to be judged by these standards, he will find himself fighting on the enemy’s terrain. He will be forced to reassure markets rather than mobilize people. The result: promises whittled down, demands deferred, energy dissipated.


The Charisma Trap

There is another danger, equally real: that Mamdani’s ability to mobilize people in motion gets misread as charisma.

Charisma can inspire, but it cannot institutionalize. If competence is located in the aura of the leader, then a Mamdani administration risks devolving into a personality cult. That is as sterile as managerialism, for both collapse the civic into a single figure — either the technocrat or the hero — rather than the living intelligence of the people themselves.

We call Mamdani’s alternative approach schmoozalism — a radical etiquette of encounter that defined his campaign.

But schmoozalism, on its own, is an ethos. It is the soil of politics, not its full harvest. To bear fruit, it requires structures that make the ethos durable. That is what we mean by civic communitaria.


A Schmoozalist Alternative: Civic Communitaria

What the campaign has proven is that competence can be distributed. Fifty thousand volunteers, disciplined coalitions, neighborhood roots: this is not charisma, it is infrastructure.

Civic communitaria would extend that achievement into governing.

  • Unlike New York’s community boards, they are not bound by municipal charters or limited to advisory roles.
  • Unlike conventional civic organizations, they do not simply represent members to City Hall.
  • They are porous ensembles, open to anyone, oriented to the life of the city, cultivating mutual practice alongside deliberation.

What are they in practice? Civic communitaria are set up, run, and maintained by their own members. They are organized online through open-source, federated platforms that ensure no single company or city agency controls them. The online layer is only a tool — a facilitative space where neighbors deliberate, coordinate, and share resources — always oriented toward real-world action: meetings, mutual aid, monitoring, and mobilization.

Think of them as people’s fora in that they provide ongoing space for deliberation and collective decision-making. Think of them as community centers in that they anchor real-world projects, practices, and forms of care. But unlike either alone, communitaria weave these elements together. They are independent but aligned: starting from support for Mamdani’s broad policies while remaining free to evaluate, pressure, and articulate needs in their own voice.


Why Mamdani Needs Civic Communitaria

  • They preserve campaign energy, preventing post-election demobilization.
  • They measure success in lived outcomes — secure housing, accessible childcare, reliable transit — rather than abstract efficiency metrics.
  • They inoculate against cultism by dispersing agency and competence among plural assemblies.
  • They erode managerialism’s monopoly by showing that competence can be collective, deliberative, and reproducible.

A Mamdani administration that welcomes such formations at its side will be stronger, not weaker. It will be accountable to real people, not merely to markets or the myth of charisma.

Because communitaria are not just instruments. They are the fields in which the soil of schmoozalism bears fruit: the spaces where everyday radical etiquette ripens into collective governance, where socialism becomes livable.


The Larger Horizon

Civic communitaria are one expression of a broader communitarian project: building living formations of shared life that complement but are not captured by state institutions.

If Mamdani’s mayoralty helps plant and nurture these new civic forms, his legacy will not be limited to policy wins. It will be remembered as the moment New Yorkers began to rebuild the civic in full — together, in deliberation, in care, in common action.


Takeaway: Zohran Mamdani won’t save New York — but with civic communitaria, New Yorkers can save it together.

➡️ Read the introductory essay: Schmoozalism: The Radical Etiquette Behind Mamdani’s Appeal

➡️ Read the clarificatory essay: Schmoozalism: A Clarificatory Introduction

#TheCommunitariumProject #TheMamdaniMovement #RedefiningSocialism #Schmoozalism

 
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from Seize the Means of Community

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign captivated New Yorkers not only through its demands and discipline, but through its atmosphere. What drew so many to his side was not just policy, but practice: a way of being with others that we call schmoozalism — a radical etiquette that resists managerialism and reopens politics to human encounter.


Why Mamdani Felt Different

When supporters talk about Mamdani, they don’t begin with bullet points from a policy platform. They talk about his presence. His availability. The sense that when you encountered him, he was there to listen and engage, not to manage you as a constituent or a volunteer.

The campaign reflected this ethos. Tens of thousands of volunteers joined not because they were given marching orders, but because they felt part of a living conversation. Tasks were clear, yes — but always framed in relation to one another, never in the top-down language of a corporate team.

This was not accidental. It was the felt difference between Mamdani’s campaign and the managerialism of establishment politics. It was the everyday practice of what we are calling schmoozalism.


What Is Schmoozalism?

At its core, schmoozalism is a radical etiquette.

It is not about grand gestures or personal charisma. It is about the ordinary practices of encounter: greeting, listening, adjusting, deliberating, joking, telling stories, giving recognition.

Schmoozalism thrives at the schmooze-level of politics — the ongoing human traffic of conversation, care, and collective sense-making. Where managerialism prioritizes procedure, and charisma prioritizes aura, schmoozalism prioritizes relation.

It is radical because it insists that these everyday encounters are not superficial, but the very heart of democratic life.


Schmoozalism vs. Managerialism

  • Managerialism: defines competence as control, efficiency, and reassurance to markets. It is technocratic and aloof.
  • Schmoozalism: defines competence as the ability to cultivate relationships of mutual recognition, to host deliberation, and to sustain collective effort. It is intimate and attentive.

Managerialism seeks to suppress disruption in the name of order. Schmoozalism sees disruption as deliberation: a chance for voices to be heard, for disagreements to be worked through, for community to be renewed.


Not Charisma, Not Cult

It is important to be clear: schmoozalism is not a new name for charisma.

Charisma is the aura of a singular figure. Schmoozalism is distributed practice, reproducible across thousands of encounters. Where charisma risks cultism, schmoozalism resists it — because it depends on multiplicity, not centrality.

Mamdani’s success does not come from his personal magnetism alone, but from his capacity to host and model this radical etiquette in ways others can take up and carry forward.


Why It Matters Now

Politics in the United States has been suffocated by two models: managerialism and spectacle. One reduces politics to spreadsheets and bond ratings; the other reduces it to personality cults.

Mamdani’s campaign pointed to something else. What people experienced was politics as a shared conversation with purpose — one that could scale to tens of thousands without losing its human texture.

That is schmoozalism. And that is why it resonated so widely.

But schmoozalism is not itself socialism. It is the soil from which socialism grows. Without this ethos, socialism too easily withers under pressure. With it, socialist possibilities take root in the everyday life of a community.


The Road Ahead

The lesson of Mamdani’s campaign is not only that schmoozalism works electorally. It is that schmoozalism is the social fabric from which a new politics must be woven.

The next question, then, is how to sustain it beyond a campaign — how to prevent it from dissolving under the pressures of managerial office, or being misread as the aura of a single figure.

Our answer: civic communitaria. They are the living formations that can carry this ethos forward, making it durable enough to support a socialism rooted in shared life.


Takeaway: Mamdani’s appeal comes from more than policies. It comes from a radical etiquette of encounter — schmoozalism — that reminds New Yorkers what politics feels like when it is ours.

➡️ Read the companion essay: Why Mamdani’s Success Depends on Civic Communitaria

➡️ Read the clarificatory essay: Schmoozalism: A Clarificatory Introduction

#TheCommunitariumProject #TheMamdaniMovement #RedefiningSocialism #Schmoozalism

 
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from Seize the Means of Community

This conversation hosted by Laura Flanders in April, 2025, between Masha Gessen and Jason Stanley is a reminder of how precarious the state of democracy has become in the United States. Both speakers, drawing on histories of survival under authoritarian regimes, agree that what we are witnessing is not simply a continuation of “bad policies” but a catastrophic acceleration that may soon pass the point of no return.

As Masha Gessen puts it:

“Democracy is never a state of being. Democracy is a vector of development.”

And Jason Stanley echoes:

“Democracy is a practice, an ideal. You’re in a democracy when you take yourself to be engaged in the project of realizing that ideal.”

Democracy is not a possession, not an end state we inherit or can complacently rest upon. It is a trajectory of practice—enacted or abandoned every day. And right now, the signs of abandonment are unmistakable.

From Political to Sociopolitical Crisis

What Gessen and Stanley diagnose is not only a political crisis in the narrow sense of institutions, parties, and elections. It is a sociopolitical crisis: the erosion of the cultural, practical, and communal underpinnings that make “politics” possible at all.

  • When education is attacked as “woke” indoctrination, the capacity for public reasoning is undermined.
  • When nostalgia for “great men” and “conquered frontiers” replaces democratic ideals, the cultural substrate of democracy collapses.
  • When mass surveillance and corporate data capture become the default architecture, the possibility of free deliberation shrinks to a ghost of itself.

Gessen warns that we are already in the stage of autocratic breakthrough, where electoral means may no longer suffice to reverse authoritarian advance. Stanley underscores that the very identity of the country is being shifted—from imperfect democratic ideals toward chauvinist myth.

Why Socialism Must Be Redefined

If democracy is a practice, then it cannot be sustained by electoral ritual alone. It must be enacted in everyday life, through communities that share power, resources, and meaning. Here, the Communitarium Project proposes that we need a redefinition of socialism that resonates with Gessen and Stanley’s account of democracy:

Socialism is the lived practice of federated communities that design, maintain, and recalibrate ensembles for distributing power, meaning, care, resources, and purpose equitably among people across scales.

In this sense, socialism and democracy are not rivals but different facets of the same practice. Democracy orients us toward egalitarian ideals; socialism builds the material and interpretive infrastructures that make those ideals livable.

From Analysis to Action

Where Gessen and Stanley leave us with warnings and historical parallels, we suggest more actionable steps:

  1. Rapidly constructed online spaces must serve as headquarters for real-world efforts—commons for coordination, deliberation, and knowledge-sharing.

  2. These spaces must seed on-the-ground, person-to-person nodes of counter-power: care networks, mutual aid, study circles, neighborhood assemblies.

  3. We call this counter-community: formations where people practice the distribution of power, care, and meaning in miniature, making socialism not a distant program but a daily lived fact.

  4. Through federation, these nodes can become resilient counter-power infrastructures—not just resisting authoritarian advance but offering more compelling, life-affirming futures than the nostalgic fantasies of empire.

By making it simple for people to build and maintain decentralized, community-owned spaces, we’re not just preparing for some future transformation—we’re already living it differently, here and now. Every communitarium node is a small but tangible step away from reinforcing the hegemonic structures that rely on our inertia. The more we shift our energy and daily practices into these spaces, the less legitimacy and power those extractive systems retain.

The Fierce Urgency of Now

Laura Flanders opened the conversation with Dr. King’s warning about the “fierce urgency of now” and the risk of arriving at history’s judgment too late. Gessen sharpened it further:

“Now is not the time to act underground.”

The Communitarium Project agrees. What we need are not only warnings but frameworks for immediate, collective enactment. The practice of democracy will not survive unless it is suffused with the practice of socialism—embodied in counter-communities that anchor solidarity, cultivate deliberation, and defend freedom.

If democracy is to remain a vector, socialism must be its infrastructure. And both must be lived, together, now.

#TheCommunitariumProject #RedefiningSocialism

 
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from Seize the Means of Community

Motivations for a Behavioral and Ethos-Oriented Turn


1. Traditional socialism lacks a theory of sociality

Classical socialism—especially in its Marxist and state-centered variants—tends to treat sociality as either:

  • a derivative of economic conditions, or
  • something that will naturally emerge once class antagonisms are resolved.

But our project insists that sociality is not a byproduct—it is the substrate. Without an account of how meaning, solidarity, and coordination are produced in real-time ensembles of interaction, socialism lacks the tools to build or maintain a genuinely collective life.

Hence the shift: socialism must be defined by its capacity to cultivate the conditions of shared social meaning, not just economic redistribution.


2. Political structures without behavioral infrastructure collapse or calcify

We've noted that socialism, when pursued primarily through political means (e.g., parties, states, revolutions), has repeatedly suffered:

  • Bureaucratization (technocratic or authoritarian drift)
  • Alienation (between people and the very institutions meant to represent them)
  • Stagnation (due to insufficient feedback from lived communal practice)

In each case, mortal computation fails: the social systems can no longer adapt to the complexity of lived experience, because no real deliberative substrate exists.

Even when socialism secures political victories—whether in legislation, governance, or electoral representation—these gains often prove fragile. In a socio-political landscape still dominated by fragmented, commodified, and idiotized sociality, shifts in belief and conviction can rapidly erode hard-won progress. Without cultivating a transformed social substrate capable of sustaining and defending these changes, purely political gains are too easily undone.

Thus, we must shift the focus to behavioral coordination and interpretable social practices at the schmooze level—not as “soft infrastructure,” but as foundational.


3. The erosion of community is the deeper crisis

Modern capitalism has not merely privatized goods—it has enclosed and fracked the very environments of community, hollowing out the schmooze-level processes through which humans co-create shared sense, normativity, and care.

This enclosure has produced:

  • Widespread loneliness, anxiety, and deaths of despair
  • The rise of identity as consumption, not co-production
  • A pervasive inability to coordinate, even around shared interests

Any meaningful socialism must address this directly—not just through programmatic policy, but by rebuilding the capacity for shared life.


4. Interpretive and epistemic enclosures have become central tools of power

Our framework has emphasized that:

  • Power is exercised through control of interpretive frameworks
  • Systems of diagnostic categories, algorithms, bureaucracies, and economic abstractions now shape what counts as real, legible and noticeable—not just who gets what

This means socialism must go beyond redistribution. It must:

  • Contest epistemic hegemony
  • Rebuild commons of interpretation
  • Enable polycentric deliberation and contested meaning

Therefore, socialism must be understood as a way of life capable of resisting and replacing dominant frame systems—not merely as economic reorganization.


5. A socialism that cannot live before it wins will never win

Socialist theory has too often imagined transformation as something that will occur after seizing power. But waiting until “after the revolution” to begin building egalitarian, mutualist, meaningful ways of living:

  • Prevents experimentation
  • Narrows appeal
  • Replicates the very alienation it seeks to overcome

We’ve been working from the idea that real socialism must be prefigurative in its approach—able to live and adapt now, in fragments and formations that demonstrate its value long before they command state power.

Hence, a socialism that begins in ethos, practice, and ensemble, not just party or program.


6. The unit of analysis must shift from the individual to the ensemble

Modern liberalism, and even much of left theory, retains the individual as the basic ontological and epistemic unit. But this leaves it vulnerable to:

  • Capitalism’s exploitation of the isolated, commodified self
  • Misrecognition of how deliberation, identity, and cognition are ensemble phenomena
  • The reduction of “solidarity” to altruism, rather than co-constituted interest

Our framework proposes that:

  • Human social ensembles are Kantian wholes
  • Meaning, purpose, and coordination emerge relationally
  • The “self” is adjustable and partially distributed

This shift mandates a socialism defined in terms of interpersonal infrastructure, not just class allegiance or programmatic affinity.


7. Political ideologies have become disembedded from lived reality

Today’s political life (including on the Left) often operates in abstract, symbolic registers:

  • Discourse circulates online, detached from everyday life
  • Organizations recruit identities but fail to sustain sociality
  • Tactical victories are disconnected from habitable alternatives

The result is a spectacle of politics without embedded social practice.

A socialism worthy of the name must re-embed itself in habitable, quotidian, and meaning-generative social formations.


8. The Communitarium Project requires a foundational ethos, not a doctrinal platform

As we’ve developed the Communitarium Project, it has become clear that:

  • The basis of resistance is ensemble-embedded cognition and care
  • What is needed is not doctrinal agreement, but a shared infrastructure for living together meaningfully

This requires:

  • A political economy of meaning, purpose, and interpretability
  • A commitment to ecological evaluation of practices
  • An emphasis on adaptive, federated mutualism

Socialism, in this sense, is not an ideology to be imposed but an ethos to be grown.


Coda: Expanding the scope of “socialist”

Under an ethos-oriented definition, “socialist” no longer applies only to economic arrangements, political programs, or party labels. It becomes a descriptor for any domain—value and trading relationships, modes of social interaction, understandings of kinship, forms of art, approaches to education, systems of care, technological development, and more—where the relational and interpretive infrastructure reflects the principles of shared life.

The point is not that such applications are already well established—they are not—but that our redefinition makes it possible to meaningfully apply the adjective “socialist” in domains where it has rarely been used. Whether in the design of cooperative economic arrangements, the cultivation of egalitarian learning environments, or the creation of collaborative tools and platforms, “socialist” should mark the presence of practices that prioritize shared meaning, mutual obligation, and ensemble-based creativity over commodification and extraction. In this way, the scope of the term expands to encompass the full range of human cooperative activity.

#TheCommunitariumProject #RedefiningSocialism

 
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