Winning Is Not the Purpose of Organizing
a reflection toward the ethos of communitaria
Winning should not be the purpose of organizing. It should be a by-product.
But this is not a call for quietism, nor a dismissal of what many now face as existential threats. In the present moment—when hard-won rights are being rolled back, when institutions are captured by oligarchy, when the ruling order criminalizes dissent and encroaches on every form of collective life—winning is often a necessity. Sometimes survival depends on it.
There are times when winning means stopping a pipeline, freeing someone from prison, securing a ceasefire, defending a clinic, preventing a ban, resisting a coup. In such moments, organizing must win—or people suffer irreparably.
But that is precisely why we must be careful.
When organizing is consumed by winning, its soul begins to shrink. It adopts the tempo of campaigns rather than lifeways. It treats people as assets or voters rather than as participants in the shaping of shared meaning. It focuses on resisting power, not building power. And worst of all, it may forget to ask what kind of world we want to live in beyond the struggle.
So yes, we fight to win. But we must also refuse to let “winning” become the only thing we know how to do.
Capitalism encourages us to think in terms of winning—as market share, as domination, as victory over others. Even the most well-meaning left movements often internalize this competitive frame, speaking of “winning power” as though the goal were to inherit the throne rather than dismantle the castle. We fall into cycles of mobilization driven by urgency, moral crisis, and the desire to defeat an enemy—but without building durable alternatives in how we live, work, care, and relate. We become crisis-chasers. The campaign never ends. The election never ends. The fundraising never ends.
The Communitarium Project begins elsewhere. It starts from the intuition that we cannot outcompete capitalism on its own terrain. We must change the terrain. Not with slogans, not with purity tests, not with aesthetic defiance—but by building environments of shared life that allow for collective agency, mutual care, and meaningful deliberation to flourish. These are the conditions under which real freedom grows—not as individual autonomy floating in space, but as the lived experience of shaping the world together.
This means organizing not toward a win, but toward a way of life. A socialist lifestyle, if we must use that word, is not primarily about consumption choices or moral consistency—it’s about how we make meaning together. It’s about restoring the infrastructures of reciprocity and repair that capitalism has eroded. It’s about cultivating an “us” robust enough to withstand fragmentation, capture, and despair. And that “us” cannot be built by tactical maneuvers alone.
In this sense, the fixation on “winning” is not just a strategic error. It is a symptom of idiotism—in the classical sense, where the idiot is one who retreats into the private sphere and disengages from collective life. Modern idiotism doesn’t always look like retreat; it often takes the form of constant activity, performative outrage, or solitary moral heroism. But it remains private in effect. It does not bind us together in common purpose. It does not help us stay with each other when things get hard.
The Communitarium Project resists this idiotism by reclaiming the local, the dialogic, the schmooze-level reality of human life. It proposes that we need not just movements, but places—communitaria—where people live, argue, experiment, and grow together. Where political action is not separated from the daily processes of storytelling, caregiving, and collective sense-making. Where success is measured not by how decisively we win the next battle, but by how deeply we embed shared agency into the structure of our days.
This is also a challenge to the language of the left. So much of it is borrowed from war, from management, from academic critique. We talk about “mobilizing” people, “deploying” strategies, “leveraging” movements, “seizing” opportunities. These metaphors betray us. They frame the world in terms of resources and threats, not relationships and possibility. They obscure the slow, patient, dialogic work of reweaving a frayed social fabric.
The Communitarium vision calls for different metaphors—of gardening, tending, fermenting, assembling, repairing. These are not metaphors of passivity. They are metaphors of durability. They suggest a politics not of conquest, but of cultivation.
And if we do this well—if we build spaces where people come alive to each other again—then yes, victories may come. But they will come as by-products of coherence, not as prizes wrested from our enemies. They will come because we have remembered how to live together, and because no system—however powerful—can stand against a people who have done that.