Seize the Means of Community

The Myth of Independence

We begin with a simple correction.

Human beings are not simply independent creatures who occasionally decide to cooperate, nor are we merely absorbed into one another. We are interdependent creatures who require workable forms of independence in order to participate in shared life. The trouble begins when that necessary, partial independence is hardened into a mythology of self-sufficiency.

This matters because the fantasy of independence has become one of the central myths of our political life. We are told, in a thousand different ways, that freedom means standing on our own, needing as little as possible, owing as little as possible, asking for as little as possible, and treating dependence on others as a kind of personal failure.

We are told that a free person is a self-sufficient person.

But no such person exists.

Every one of us depends, every day, on other people, inherited knowledge, roads, cables, pipes, teachers, caregivers, food systems, language, neighbors, strangers, workers we will never meet, forms of trust we did not create, and institutions we usually notice only when they break.

The question is not whether we depend on others.

The question is what kind of dependence we live under.

The Dependence We Already Live Inside

At present, much of our dependence is hidden, privatized, humiliating, and difficult to govern.

We depend on employers who can discard us, landlords who can price us out, insurers who can deny us, platforms that can manipulate us, bureaucracies that can ignore us, markets that can abandon us, and political institutions that often remember us only when they want money, votes, clicks, labor, or compliance.

Then, after arranging our lives in this way, the dominant order tells us we are independent.

This is not independence.

It is isolation inside systems of dependence we do not control.

Freedom as Democratic Interdependence

We declare, therefore, that real freedom requires a different starting point.

Freedom is not the absence of dependence. Freedom is the ability to live within relations of dependence that are visible, reciprocal, accountable, contestable, and shared.

Freedom requires the social power to say: here is what we need from one another; here is what we owe one another; here is how we will decide together; here is how we will repair what breaks; here is how we will resist being separated, exploited, and ruled through our separation.

We call this interdependence.

Not dependence as submission.

Not community as sentimental decoration.

Not togetherness as a slogan.

Interdependence means that our lives are materially, socially, emotionally, politically, and ecologically entangled, and that the only honest politics is one that begins from that fact.

Embodied Socialism

This is why socialism, if it is to mean enough, cannot remain only a theory of ownership, redistribution, public policy, or state power.

Those things matter. They matter greatly. But socialism also has to come down to the scale of ordinary life: how people meet, talk, deliberate, help, disagree, remember, organize, trust, repair, and build things together.

A socialism that does not reach that level remains too abstract.

We need embodied socialism.

By embodied socialism, we mean socialism as a lived practice of interdependence. Not merely a program to be enacted somewhere else by someone else, but a way of remaking the ordinary conditions under which people become available to one another as neighbors, comrades, collaborators, learners, caregivers, organizers, critics, and friends.

Some of us have jokingly, but not only jokingly, called this schmoozalism.

The word is homely on purpose. It points to the level at which politics often actually begins: in conversation, recognition, gossip, checking in, lending a hand, asking what happened, asking what can be done, noticing who has disappeared, remembering who knows how to fix something, arguing without severing the relationship, and creating enough shared life that collective action stops feeling like an emergency stunt and starts becoming a normal human possibility.

That is not a substitute for institutions.

It is the soil from which democratic institutions can grow.

The Missing Soil of Democratic Life

Modern politics often lacks that soil.

Campaigns mobilize people and then dissolve them back into private life. Platforms connect people while keeping them fragmented, surveilled, distracted, and monetized. Institutions ask for participation but rarely offer belonging. Organizations recruit volunteers for narrow tasks but often fail to build lasting shared capacity.

The result is a public made up of people who are constantly addressed, measured, activated, targeted, and managed, but rarely given the conditions in which they can become a durable “we.”

We need places where that “we” can be built.

Communitaria as Online Civic Campuses

This is the purpose of communitaria.

A communitarium is not just another online group, message board, social network, or campaign tool. It is better understood as an online civic campus: a small enough place for people to become meaningfully known to one another, but diverse enough to hold many kinds of activity at once.

A campus has rooms, paths, gathering places, working groups, libraries, notice boards, arguments, habits, memories, projects, and informal life. People do not all do the same thing there. They do not all know one another equally. They do not agree about everything. But they share enough space, enough history, and enough practical orientation that their activities can begin to add up.

That is the scale we need.

Not a total community that absorbs the whole person.

Not a faceless mass platform.

Not a town, not a party, not a school, not a church, not a commune, not a brand.

An online campus for democratic interdependence.

In such a campus, people might deliberate, learn, publish, archive, plan, organize, request help, offer help, form working groups, hold discussions, run polls, create shared documents, support local campaigns, host reading groups, build mutual-aid practices, document local knowledge, welcome newcomers, debate strategy, and develop the ordinary habits of collective life.

That sounds modest. In one sense, it is.

But modest practices become politically serious when they are durable, visible, repeatable, and federated.

Scattered Capacities, Shared Power

The dominant order fragments us at every scale.

It fragments persons into consumers, workers, voters, patients, renters, users, followers, clients, applicants, profiles, and data points.

It fragments communities into markets, demographics, jurisdictions, audiences, and constituencies.

It fragments political action into campaigns, emergencies, donations, petitions, posts, and moments of outrage.

It fragments knowledge into specialties, credentials, paywalls, feeds, and proprietary systems.

It fragments responsibility so thoroughly that everyone can see something is wrong while almost no one can find a stable place from which to act with others.

Communitaria are an attempt to reverse that fragmentation.

They begin from the premise that people need organized places in which their partial capacities can meet. One person has time. Another has technical skill. Another has local memory. Another has legal knowledge. Another knows how to host a meeting. Another knows who is sick, who is isolated, who needs a ride, who has a spare room, who is being evicted, who can translate, who can cook, who can repair, who can write, who can listen, who can mediate, who can teach.

Alone, these capacities remain scattered.

Brought into relation, they become power.

This is the practical meaning of interdependence.

Resistant Independence

Interdependence is also the basis of a different kind of independence.

We do not reject independence. We reject the false independence of isolated individuals abandoned to systems they cannot control.

We seek instead a resistant independence: the capacity of interdependent people to reduce their dependence on the institutions that dominate, exploit, and fragment them.

A person standing alone is easy to discipline.

A community with memory, tools, trust, habits, and shared resources is harder to dominate.

A federation of such communities is harder still.

This is why interdependence is not the opposite of independence. Properly organized, interdependence is how people become independent from domination.

That independence will never be absolute. It should not be. Absolute independence is another name for fantasy. But relative independence matters. Shared capacity matters. Redundancy matters. Memory matters. Common infrastructure matters.

The ability to deliberate outside corporate platforms matters.

The ability to care for one another outside market relations matters.

The ability to organize before the emergency matters.

The ability to keep going after the election, the protest, the strike, the crisis, or the news cycle matters.

We are not declaring independence from one another.

We are declaring independence from the regime that makes us lonely, dependent, frightened, and governable, while calling that condition freedom.

Federation and Ecological Life

One isolated communitarium would be fragile.

Many communitaria, linked together while retaining their own character, could become something more powerful: a federation of interdependent campuses.

Each campus would have its own life, but none would need to stand alone. Knowledge could travel. Tools could be shared. Mistakes could be studied. Conflicts could be learned from. Local experiments could become common resources. People could belong somewhere without being trapped there.

This also means that interdependence must be ecological.

Every communitarium is an ecology of participation. It has conditions that make some forms of life easier and others harder. It has paths of entry, habits of speech, ways of noticing, methods of repair, forms of memory, distributions of attention, and patterns of power.

These things should not be left to accident, charisma, market design, or platform architecture. They should be shaped deliberately and democratically.

The same is true among communitaria. A federation should not be an empire, a command structure, or a brand family. It should be an ecology of mutual support among distinct campuses.

The goal is not sameness.

The goal is shared viability.

We need places where difference does not immediately become fragmentation.

We need places where conflict does not immediately become expulsion, humiliation, or collapse.

We need places where people can remain answerable to one another without being swallowed by the group.

We need places where individuality is not denied but rescued from isolation.

We need places where collective life can be practiced before it is demanded.

The Ordinary Work of Building Another Freedom

That is the work.

It will not be glamorous at first. Much of it will look like setting up tools, writing norms, welcoming people, hosting discussions, keeping calendars, documenting decisions, fixing technical problems, moderating disputes, explaining things twice, noticing silence, inviting participation, and learning from failure.

But this is what building a world looks like before it looks like a world.

The dominant order has spent generations building the infrastructure of separation. It has campuses of its own: malls, offices, platforms, bureaucracies, media systems, financial networks, and gated institutions where power learns how to reproduce itself.

We should not be surprised that resistance needs infrastructure too.

If we want people to act together, they need places to become people who can act together.

If we want democracy to be more than voting, people need places to practice democracy.

If we want socialism to be more than policy, people need places to live some part of its meaning.

If we want independence from domination, people need interdependence strong enough to sustain resistance.

We Declare

So we declare our interdependence.

We declare that no one is free alone.

We declare that dependence hidden by markets, platforms, bureaucracies, and myths is not freedom.

We declare that democratic interdependence is the material basis of real independence.

We declare that embodied socialism must be built at the scale of everyday life.

We declare that communitaria, as online civic campuses, are one way to begin.

Not the only way.

Not the final way.

A beginning.

A place to gather what has been scattered.

A place to make visible what has been hidden.

A place to practice what has too often been postponed.

A place to ask, not only “What can I do?” but “What can we do, now that we have found one another?”

And having found one another, we intend to become harder to isolate, harder to exploit, harder to frighten, harder to govern against our will, and more capable of building the forms of life on which freedom actually depends.

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