Seize the Means of Community

Part 2.1: Campus, Communitarium, Commons

Part One proposed that NYC-DSA explore the creation of a participant-built online socialist campus. The word campus is being used somewhat unconventionally, but not arbitrarily. A campus is a constructed environment that brings together resources, activities, and relationships so that people can pursue common purposes and conduct some portion of their lives in keeping with them. In this case, the environment would be digital, and much of what happens within it would be initiated and developed by the people who use it.

A collection of online tools, however well chosen, would not by itself create the kind of community being proposed.

The deeper starting point would be a perception among prospective members that they already share something important: broadly similar purposes, a generally compatible ethos, and an interest in living out at least some of those commitments together. They would not need to agree about everything. They might disagree sharply about strategy, political analysis, priorities, culture, or conduct. But they would need enough common ground to believe that sustained cooperation was both possible and worthwhile.

That common ground would necessarily begin in a broad and incomplete form. Members might share commitments to socialism, democracy, mutual care, equality, collective provision, opposition to domination, or the belief that people should not have to face every difficulty as isolated individuals. Such commitments are meaningful, but their implications become clearer and more demanding when people try to act on them together.

One purpose of a communitarium would be to give members a setting in which their shared ethos could become more detailed, practical, and specific.

The language of the commons may help describe what is at stake. A commons is not merely a collection of things made available for general use. It brings shared resources together with a community that uses, develops, maintains, and governs them. Those resources may be material, technical, informational, cultural, organizational, or social. They may include software, accumulated knowledge, working procedures, relationships of trust, or arrangements through which people cooperate and care for one another.

The digital campus would provide an initial environment in which such commons could take shape. The communitarium would be the shared life that developed there. The continuing activity through which members created resources, cared for them, established expectations around them, and revised those expectations could be understood as commoning.

These terms identify different aspects of the same proposal. The campus is the enabling architecture. The communitarium is the community and shared life that form through its use. The commons consists of the resources, relationships, practices, and capacities that members come to hold and govern together.

The distinction matters because the project is not chiefly about delivering finished services to users. It is about giving members resources with which they can create and shape activities themselves.

The campus could support the formation of explicitly socialist institutions, including worker cooperatives, tenant associations, community land or garden projects, and other collectively governed arrangements. It would not establish or operate such organizations on members’ behalf. It could make it easier for interested people to find one another, work through proposals, prepare documents, coordinate activity, preserve knowledge, and develop suitable forms of governance.

Different organizations could also learn from one another. A worker cooperative might share experience with a tenant association dealing with delegated authority and democratic control. A community garden might exchange practical knowledge with a food-distribution group. Neighborhood documentation or mapping efforts might support several undertakings by recording conditions, identifying patterns of need, or preserving institutional memory.

The campus could become a shared informational and organizational environment for activities that remain distinct but have reasons to cooperate.

The members of such a community would still encounter difficult questions. What does mutual care require when someone repeatedly needs more help than they can return? What does democratic participation mean when only a few people have the time or expertise to make a decision? How should a community respond when a member expresses an opinion many others find objectionable? What kinds of privacy should members expect? When does informal assistance become a commitment on which others are entitled to rely? Which differences can the community contain, and which make continued membership impossible?

No founding statement or code of conduct can settle such questions in advance. Members would work out many of the answers through experience: by creating things together, depending on one another, disagreeing, making mistakes, revising arrangements, and explaining their decisions.

The communitarium would therefore not simply serve people who already shared a settled ethos. Through commoning, it would allow them to sharpen, test, extend, and sometimes alter their understanding of that ethos.

Providing a place to begin

The initial task would be to establish a varied and adaptable set of online services, together with enough starter material to make the environment usable.

A completely empty campus would ask too much of its first participants. People should not have to invent both the institution and every possible use of it before they can begin. A forum might open with several potentially useful discussions already underway. A collaborative-document application might contain sample guides, proposals, research notes, or working documents. Other services could offer similarly modest points of entry.

These would be invitations, not a program.

The intention would not be to decide in advance what members ought to do. It would be to give them resources through which they could form groups, begin discussions, work on shared documents, maintain bodies of information, coordinate activities, publish material, make proposals, or develop arrangements that the original designers had not anticipated.

The initial sponsors would nevertheless have considerable influence. Their choices about which applications to install, how those applications are connected, what examples they contain, and which defaults they use would affect what participants notice and what they find easy or difficult to do. The environment could not be neutral.

Those choices should therefore be treated as provisional and open to explanation. The first version of the campus should make activity possible without pretending to determine the final shape of the institution.

The resources provided at the outset would become genuine commons only as members developed purposes, practices, responsibilities, and forms of stewardship around them. A document system does not become a knowledge commons merely because many people can open it. A forum does not become a deliberative commons merely because anyone can post. What matters is whether members can shape how the resource is used, share the knowledge and labor required to sustain it, and revise its rules when experience shows that they should change.

The campus would give commoning somewhere to begin. What members sought there, however, could take many forms. The next installment considers the different reasons people might choose to belong.

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