Seize the Means of Community

Part One: Why NYC-DSA, Why Now, and How to Begin

The Democratic Socialists of America has acquired something political organizations usually struggle to obtain: sustained public attention.

In New York City, that attention follows political consequence. After helping elect Zohran Mamdani mayor, NYC-DSA is now running a large slate of candidates for the state legislature. The chapter has accumulated electoral experience, organizational momentum, and a public prominence that would have seemed improbable not many years ago.

Success produces scrutiny.

Journalists, political opponents, Democratic Party officials, donors, voters, and people newly curious about socialism are asking what DSA is, what it believes, and what kind of organization it might become. Some of those questions are hostile. Others are genuinely inquisitive. Many are being answered by institutions and commentators with little interest in allowing DSA to define itself.

An organization subjected to increased scrutiny can become trapped inside definitions supplied by other people. DSA appears when an endorsed candidate wins, when an opponent extracts a controversial phrase from a platform, when journalists report an internal dispute, or when an elected official is asked whether the organization exercises too much influence.

The result is a narrow public picture.

DSA appears as an electoral faction, an ideological label, a collection of policy positions, or a group of activists who canvass, attend meetings, organize demonstrations, and argue about endorsements.

Those activities are real and important. They do not exhaust what a large socialist organization could be.

The present moment offers NYC-DSA an opportunity to enlarge the public understanding of democratic socialism by enlarging the range of things democratic socialists can be seen doing together.

The iron is hot.

More Than Better Messaging

By saying that the iron is hot, I do not mean merely that NYC-DSA should improve its communications.

The chapter certainly needs to explain its positions, defend its elected officials, respond to attacks, and make its work intelligible to people who do not already share its language or assumptions.

But better messaging alone would leave the basic relationship unchanged.

Other institutions would continue to decide what questions DSA must answer, when those answers must be supplied, and the form in which they can appear. DSA would continue responding to subjects selected by journalists, opponents, campaigns, and the political calendar.

The larger opportunity is to construct a durable institution through which democratic socialists and other participants can investigate subjects before they become controversies, develop explanations before a crisis demands them, and preserve what has been learned after public attention moves elsewhere.

Such an institution might eventually offer courses, workshops, videos, podcasts, essays, books, reference materials, discussions, performances, collaborative research, and places in which people interested in those activities could find one another.

It would be educational, but not merely a school.

It would produce media, but not merely function as a media outlet.

It would publish, but not merely operate as a magazine or press.

It would support discussion and social interaction without reproducing the commercial social-media ecology in which people and subjects are divided among competing platforms, restricted forms of expression, and algorithmically manipulated feeds.

The provisional description I have been using is a participant-built online open-source socialist campus.

“Online” matters because the campus would extend beyond a particular building, neighborhood, schedule, or course session.

“Campus” matters because the institution would include more than formal instruction. A campus has classrooms, but it also has libraries, studios, publications, workshops, archives, associations, performances, projects, arguments, and informal encounters.

And “participant-built” matters most of all.

The Beginnings Already Exist

NYC-DSA would not be starting from nothing.

The chapter has already established an Academy for Socialist Education. The Academy has completed its second year of courses addressing subjects including imperialism, strikes, democracy, capitalism, and climate change, and it is continuing with workshops and courses during the summer and fall of 2026.

This is not an incidental precedent.

The Academy demonstrates that NYC-DSA already contains people willing to organize sustained political education, teachers willing to provide it, and participants interested in something more substantial than a brief orientation or campaign training.

The proposal developed here should not therefore be understood as an attempt to replace the Academy with a speculative technological project.

The Academy could be one of the seeds from which a broader online campus grows.

An online environment could allow educational materials to remain available after a course has ended. Courses could develop successive editions rather than disappearing with their final sessions. Participants could continue discussions, contribute examples, identify unclear explanations, suggest readings, or join the work of revising and extending the material.

People unable—or simply disinclined—to attend a multi-session course at a particular place and time could encounter some portion of the work through other forms. A lecture might become a video or podcast. A reading list might become the beginning of a reference article. A classroom disagreement might disclose the need for a public essay, research project, or additional course.

Online extension would not have to replace in-person education. It could make the consequences of in-person education more durable and more widely available.

The Academy is not the only relevant beginning.

NYC-DSA’s Red Rogue Theater has been developing a series of Theater for Social Change workshops in collaboration with the Bechdel Project. Workshops have included improvisation, group readings, political discussion, and theatrical exploration of subjects such as Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

Red Rogue Theater matters because it demonstrates that socialist education and cultural production need not be confined to courses, lectures, and written analysis.

People also learn through performance, satire, rehearsal, dramatic interpretation, improvisation, and storytelling. Theater can make political conflicts, assumptions, and social roles perceptible in ways that an essay or lecture cannot.

It also demonstrates that NYC-DSA already contains some of the writers, performers, facilitators, and relationships from which a wider cultural institution might develop.

An online campus could provide means by which such work accumulates and travels. Scripts could be published. Performances could be recorded. Workshops could generate instructional material. Discussions could continue after the room has emptied. Writers could find performers, performers could find researchers, and participants elsewhere could adapt a production or create one of their own.

The point would not be to move everything online.

It would be to connect activities occurring at particular times and places to a persistent environment through which their effects can continue.

The Academy and Red Rogue Theater suggest that the proposed campus need not be imposed upon an organizational vacuum. Elements of it are already appearing through activities NYC-DSA members have chosen to create.

The first task is to recognize those beginnings, identify others, and ask what shared infrastructure might allow them to become more mutually consequential.

An Answer to PragerU—but Not Its Mirror Image

One way to introduce the proposal is to describe it as DSA’s answer to PragerU.

The comparison is deliberately provocative and requires immediate qualification.

PragerU has understood something important: political ideas do not circulate merely because somebody has stated them correctly.

They require vehicles.

They need video, audio, stories, animation, performance, repetition, recognizable formats, archives, indexes, and distribution systems. They must be presented differently to children, adults, casual viewers, committed supporters, and people encountering the material for the first time. They need an institutional home capable of accumulating resources rather than starting over whenever a political question reappears.

PragerU possesses ample means to do this. Its 2025 federal filing reported $76.6 million in revenue and more than $105 million in net assets.

A socialist organization can learn from PragerU’s recognition of the need for durable educational and media infrastructure without imitating the institution it has built.

A DSA answer to PragerU should not be a left-wing PragerU.

The relevant difference is not simply that one institution would communicate conservative conclusions while the other communicated socialist ones.

PragerU’s structure is top-down. Those who finance and direct the institution determine what it will communicate. Producers, presenters, and performers turn those decisions into media, which are then delivered to viewers. The audience may watch, approve, donate, share, or use the material, but it does not ordinarily participate in determining the institution’s purposes or producing the worldview it distributes.

A participant-built socialist campus should have a fundamentally different social form.

The people encountering it should not be confined to the role of audience. They should be able to move into discussion, research, teaching, performance, production, revision, moderation, administration, and governance.

The campus would not merely deliver socialist content.

It would cultivate additional capacities among the people participating in it.

Expertise Should Enable Participation

A participant-built institution should not reproduce the mystique that competent intellectual, journalistic, educational, or cultural work can be produced only by people who already possess extensive credentials or professional standing.

Experts would remain important. But their role should often be to make competent participation by other people possible.

When my son was in his early teens, he participated in a youth journalism organization then called Children’s Express. Young people were trained in the basic practices of journalism, equipped with recording equipment, and sent to report on serious subjects, often under the guidance of older and more experienced teenagers.

My son questioned members of the George W. Bush administration about the effectiveness of abstinence education. He traveled to Gujarat, India, to interview survivors—particularly children—of a devastating earthquake.

He and the other participants were not treated as decorative children acting out an imitation of journalism. They were expected to produce journalism. The organization made that possible by providing training, equipment, access, editorial support, progressively greater responsibility, and a community in which more experienced participants helped prepare newer ones.

That experience suggests a useful model.

Experienced journalists can teach interviewing, sourcing, verification, and narrative construction. Editors can develop review procedures and work with inexperienced writers. Filmmakers can train participants to record usable sound and images. Teachers can help people turn knowledge into instruction. Researchers can demonstrate how to identify reliable sources and distinguish evidence from assertion.

None of this requires that established experts personally originate, control, or execute most of the work.

People can acquire substantial competencies when they are given clear instruction, appropriate tools, meaningful assignments, constructive supervision, and opportunities to learn through consequential activity.

A participant might begin by transcribing an interview, checking a citation, operating basic recording equipment, preparing background research, or asking questions developed with a production team. That person could then undertake progressively more complex work as competence and judgment developed.

The relevant division should not be between experts who produce and amateurs who consume.

It should be among people possessing different kinds and degrees of experience, working within structures designed to make learning and reliable production occur together.

Expertise should circulate and reproduce itself rather than becoming a barrier protecting established producers from wider participation.

Participation Should Not Have One Preferred Form

An online campus could also enlarge the ways in which people participate in NYC-DSA.

Not everyone wants to canvass for hours, attend frequent meetings, travel to demonstrations, or take part in the interpersonal intensity of electoral organizing.

Some people cannot do those things because they are housebound, disabled, overworked, responsible for dependents, or constrained by irregular schedules.

Others simply do not find those forms of activity congenial, rewarding, or well suited to what they have to contribute.

They should not therefore be made to feel marginal to DSA, insufficiently committed, or incapable of meaningful political participation.

A large political organization should not define participation so narrowly that one temperament, bodily capacity, social style, or repertoire of activist practices becomes the implicit measure of seriousness.

Some people are more inclined toward research, teaching, writing, editing, programming, acting, design, illustration, translation, archiving, technical maintenance, media production, documentation, or sustained discussion.

Those preferences are not lesser versions of politics.

They are among the activities through which a political institution acquires knowledge, memory, competence, culture, and continuity.

This does not mean that every activity is interchangeable. Knocking on doors and editing a podcast accomplish different things. Organizing tenants and maintaining a server are not substitutes for one another.

The point is ecological.

A capable political organization requires many kinds of work. Their importance depends partly upon how they support and extend one another.

An online campus could create additional routes through which people enter the organization’s life, develop useful roles, and form relationships with people engaged in other activities.

People need not all enter through the same door.

Nor should they all be expected to end up doing the same thing.

NYC-DSA Does Not Have to Build It Yet

The scale of this proposal creates an obvious objection.

NYC-DSA already has more campaigns, committees, working groups, administrative responsibilities, and worthwhile proposals than it can easily sustain. An initiative involving education, media production, publishing, technical infrastructure, discussion, and social organization could become an occasion for institutional overextension.

That objection should be taken seriously.

NYC-DSA need not decide now to build the campus.

It need not install a suite of applications, establish a new department, commit a large budget, or assume responsibility for an ambitious production schedule.

The first step could be much smaller.

The chapter—or a group acting in conversation with people involved in the Academy, Red Rogue Theater, political education, technical work, publications, membership, and other relevant formations—could convene a limited exploratory project.

Its task would not be to launch the campus.

Its task would be to determine what such a campus might concretely involve and whether enough people are prepared to constitute it.

The group could inventory relevant activities and resources already present within NYC-DSA. It could identify where useful work is being duplicated, lost, or confined to unnecessarily narrow audiences. It could investigate technical requirements, editorial problems, governance questions, accessibility needs, likely costs, and labor demands.

It should also be prepared to discover that the originating proposal is mistaken.

Perhaps the concept is too broad.

Perhaps the Academy should remain concentrated on in-person instruction while another formation undertakes online work.

Perhaps some activities should remain independent rather than being gathered beneath a common portal.

Perhaps NYC-DSA lacks enough people prepared to maintain the infrastructure.

Perhaps the first useful experiment is much smaller than a campus.

An exploratory group should be free to reach any of those conclusions.

Its principal product could be a detailed but provisional public prospectus.

A Public Invitation

The prospectus would not announce that NYC-DSA had designed a new institution and now needed volunteers to occupy predetermined roles.

It would say something closer to this:

Here is an institution NYC-DSA is considering attempting to build. Here are the needs it might address, the activities it might connect, the obstacles we can already foresee, and the limited experiment with which it might begin. Who would be interested in participating in DSA in this way? What knowledge, labor, equipment, experience, money, or other support might you contribute? What would make sustained participation possible for you?

That invitation should reach beyond people already understood as political organizers.

It could address teachers, librarians, historians, researchers, writers, editors, actors, playwrights, designers, illustrators, animators, translators, programmers, system administrators, filmmakers, camera operators, sound engineers, archivists, moderators, project managers, and people who would like to acquire any of those capacities.

Some might possess existing material that could be adapted.

Some might have equipment, workspace, technical resources, or useful connections.

Some might contribute money.

Some might be interested in sustained work.

Others might undertake a single bounded project.

The inquiry should not merely ask whether people like the idea. An attractive proposal can produce hundreds of expressions of general approval while revealing little about whether an institution can be sustained.

The useful questions would be more specific.

What could people contribute?

What would they like to learn?

What kinds of work would they be prepared to attempt?

How much time could they realistically offer?

What training or support would they require?

Which portions of the proposal attract them?

Which appear unnecessary, unworkable, or politically misguided?

The answers would begin to reveal whether the campus represents an actual adjacent possibility or only an appealing abstraction.

The process would itself test the proposal’s central premise.

Can NYC-DSA make visible capacities presently dispersed among its members and supporters?

Can it provide intelligible routes through which those capacities become contributions?

Can experienced participants help others acquire useful competencies?

Can the process produce not only a plan but a body of people capable of undertaking a limited pilot?

If the answer is no, NYC-DSA will have learned something important before constructing an expensive and largely empty platform.

If the answer is yes, the campus will already have begun.

Not as software.

As relationships among people discovering what they might be able to make together.

A Prototype Others Could Use

The proposal’s significance need not end with NYC-DSA.

The campus could be constructed entirely from free and open-source software. Its technical architecture, governance experiments, production methods, costs, successes, and failures could be documented in detail.

It could therefore produce something beyond the original institution.

It could become a prototype—or eventually a starter kit—for other groups wishing to build participant-created online campuses organized around different concerns.

A union, tenant organization, environmental coalition, professional association, cultural project, intellectual movement, local community, or political formation might not share NYC-DSA’s political identity or priorities.

It might nevertheless benefit from the underlying model: an online environment connecting education, publishing, media production, collaborative research, durable discussion, social interaction, and institutional memory.

Such groups should not have to repeat the entire experiment from the beginning.

They could adapt software configurations, installation guides, governance procedures, course templates, editorial practices, training methods, and production workflows developed in New York. They could replace the campus’s substantive focus with their own and contribute improvements that later projects might use.

Documentation would therefore not be an administrative afterthought.

It would be one of the campus’s principal products.

The objective would not be to construct a single central campus to which every other group must subordinate itself.

Success might instead produce many campuses: separately governed, differently focused, but capable of exchanging materials, methods, software, and experience.

NYC-DSA would not own the form.

It would have helped make the form available.

Why Now?

There is no perfect moment for an undertaking of this kind.

NYC-DSA will always confront immediate campaigns and emergencies. Skilled contributors will always have competing demands upon their time. Money and organizational attention will remain limited. Any new initiative will risk becoming a distraction, an administrative burden, or an empty collection of technological affordances.

But political moments create openings that do not remain available indefinitely.

NYC-DSA is now visible because it has demonstrated political consequence. Thousands of people have recently participated in socialist electoral activity. Others are newly curious, alarmed, hopeful, or uncertain about what democratic socialism in New York might mean.

The chapter could respond to that attention only by preparing for the next election and defending itself against the next attack.

It should do those things.

But it might also use the moment to demonstrate that a socialist organization can be more than an electoral operation, a protest network, or a producer of policy positions.

It can be a place where people educate one another.

A place where they investigate the world together.

A place where they produce knowledge and culture.

A place where different abilities, dispositions, and interests find consequential forms of participation.

A place where expertise enables the development of further competence instead of monopolizing production.

A place where activities generate additional activities and relationships endure between campaigns.

A place where people encounter socialism not only as a program to support, but as a way of organizing the production of understanding and collective capacity.

NYC-DSA does not need to promise that it can build such a place.

It needs only to decide that the possibility is important enough to investigate seriously, provisionally, and publicly.

The iron is hot because people are looking.

The first step is not to unveil a finished online campus.

It is to ask who might be willing to help constitute one.

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