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.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Introduction: We Produce One Another

There is a familiar way of imagining intelligence.

Intelligence belongs to an individual. It resides, somehow, inside a person’s head. Some people possess more of it than others. We test it, rank it, credential it, hire it, reward it, and sometimes attribute unusual historical accomplishments to those said to possess exceptional quantities of it. More recently, we have begun to speak as though intelligence might also reside inside machines.

This conception seems almost self-evident. Individual people think. Individual people remember, reason, anticipate, invent, decide, and solve problems. Intelligence therefore appears to be a capacity contained within individuals and manifested through their actions.

But consider what is required for even the most apparently individual act of intelligence.

A person reading these words did not invent the language in which they are written. They did not invent the alphabet, the conventions of punctuation, the distinctions carried by the vocabulary, or the innumerable prior conversations through which the argument becomes intelligible. They did not independently create the practices through which they learned to read, question, compare, infer, and respond.

A mathematician works with inherited notations and accumulated proofs. A mechanic encounters a machine whose design condenses generations of experiment and practical experience. A physician interprets symptoms through traditions of observation, classification, research, and apprenticeship. A musician improvises within forms that make the improvisation recognizable as an intelligible departure rather than random sound.

None of this means that individuals contribute nothing distinctive. Individuals notice what others miss. They combine inherited materials in unprecedented ways. They resist assumptions, introduce differences, and sometimes alter the conditions under which everyone else proceeds.

But the apparently solitary intelligence of the individual is already populated by others.

It may therefore be worth asking whether we have mistaken the point at which intelligence becomes visible for the place where intelligence is produced.

Perhaps intelligence does not reside wholly inside the individual. Perhaps much of what we call intelligence arises among differentiated beings, through their relations, within the shared worlds they become capable of inhabiting together.

That possibility is the subject of this series.

Shared worlds

We routinely recognize shared worlds without possessing a general name for them.

Someone begins explaining an idea and asks, “Do you catch my drift?” Another replies, “I see where you’re going.” A child joins a game already in progress. A musician enters a song after hearing only a few measures. A guest gradually realizes what kind of gathering they have entered and how people are expected to behave. Several people confront an unexpected problem and begin acting together without first writing a constitution.

In each case, something more is happening than the transmission of information between separate minds.

The participants are entering or generating a field in which particular words, gestures, objects, histories, expectations, and possible actions acquire mutually consequential meanings. They do not need to understand everything identically. They need enough practical alignment to recognize what is happening, what matters, what might happen next, and what responses would make sense.

To join a game is not merely to memorize a list of rules. One must learn what counts as a move, when it is one’s turn, what other players are attending to, which actions are permitted, which are clever, which are unfair, and how this particular instance differs from an abstract description of the game.

A person can know the formal rules of baseball and still fail to understand what is happening in a particular inning. Conversely, someone may acquire a workable sense of a game long before becoming able to state its rules explicitly.

Participation requires inhabiting a shared action-world.

Conversation works similarly. Words do not carry their full significance by themselves. Tone, timing, setting, prior exchanges, bodily expression, social position, implication, and anticipated response all contribute. “Fine” can indicate satisfaction, resignation, anger, dismissal, compliance, or a desire to stop talking. Participants do not resolve these possibilities by consulting a dictionary. They draw upon their situated involvement in a developing encounter.

Meaning is not merely transmitted. It is enacted, tested, adjusted, repaired, remembered, and sometimes contested.

Families, friendships, workplaces, rituals, games, classrooms, political organizations, artistic traditions, neighborhoods, professions, religious practices, and online communities all generate partially shared worlds of meaningful possibility.

These worlds overlap. They may support one another, conflict, or remain mutually opaque. A person competent in one may be lost in another. A gesture of respect in one setting may be interpreted as submission in another. A joke that strengthens intimacy among friends may become cruel in a workplace. The same object may become a tool, commodity, gift, sacred presence, piece of evidence, or inherited obligation depending upon the field in which it appears.

Human life does not unfold within one universally shared world. It proceeds through many overlapping, nested, contested, and temporarily activated worlds.

I have previously called these emic participation fields: fields whose meanings become actionable from within participation rather than being supplied solely by an outside observer. That terminology may or may not survive in the final form of this project. For the moment, “participation field,” “shared action-world,” and “shared world” will often do most of the necessary work.

The field is not only human

Our easiest examples involve human beings acknowledging and responding to one another. That can lead us to make mutual recognition between human interlocutors the defining condition of participation.

But the shared worlds humans inhabit have never been composed solely of humans.

Consider a community living for generations beside a river.

Changes in the river’s level, color, temperature, speed, surrounding vegetation, animal populations, and deposited material may indicate an approaching flood, a change in weather, the presence of fish, upstream disturbance, contamination, or a good time to plant or travel.

People respond through settlement, movement, harvesting, restraint, construction, ritual, teaching, and memory. Those activities alter the river system in turn. They may preserve its capacity to sustain life, damage it, redirect it, or make certain future responses impossible.

The river does not need to converse like a person or recognize human beings as moral agents for the relation to become reciprocal. Human activity changes the river; the river’s changed condition reorganizes what humans can perceive and do.

The reciprocity is asymmetrical. It may unfold across seasons or generations. It includes intention and accident, living beings and material persistence, signal and constraint.

The environment participates by affording, resisting, recording, soliciting, changing, and limiting. Human beings participate by detecting, interpreting, remembering, altering, caring for, exploiting, and responding.

An environmental participation field is not necessarily a conversation. It is an ecology of consequential uptake.

The significance of a wetland, forest, coastline, animal migration, or seasonal cycle may be generated through recurring relations among human bodies, plants, animals, soil, water, weather, tools, paths, stories, accumulated observations, remembered consequences, and practices of use and restraint.

No single constituent contains the whole field. The field is sustained through their continuing interaction.

This means that the shared worlds humans learned to inhabit were always simultaneously social, bodily, ecological, material, historical, and more-than-human.

The claim that “the earth is our relative,” encountered in many Indigenous accounts of land, can be misunderstood if it is treated merely as poetic language or a speculative belief about the earth’s inner nature. Within a participation field, relative is a practical and normative category. A relative does not simply possess value. A relative enrolls a person in expectations of care, restraint, memory, obligation, continuity, and return.

To say that one belongs to the land rather than owns it reorganizes the field of possible action.

Ownership places the land inside the owner’s project.

Belonging places the person inside a relationship that also makes claims upon them.

The distinction will matter later when we examine how shared worlds become abstracted into territory, property, resources, and assets. But it matters at the beginning because it prevents “shared world” from becoming merely another name for agreement among human minds.

Humans inhabit meanings together within material worlds they did not create by agreement.

The evolutionary problem

How did organisms with separate nervous systems, different bodies, and necessarily idiosyncratic histories ever become able to inhabit enough of the same world to act together?

No organism can directly enter another’s experience. We cannot inspect one another’s sensations, memories, intentions, or interpretations. Whatever occurs within one living body must cross some threshold if it is to become consequential for another.

Signals are therefore indispensable.

A movement, sound, expression, touch, scent, posture, rhythm, mark, artifact, environmental change, or patterned absence can make some aspect of a situation available for consequential response. But a signal does not possess fixed meaning merely because it has been emitted or detected. It must be distinguished, interpreted, and incorporated into continuing activity.

A cry may indicate danger, pain, excitement, anger, deception, or play. Its significance depends upon histories of interaction, the identity of the caller, the surrounding situation, the listener’s condition, and what follows after others respond.

Signals acquire significance within relations.

Humans did not invent sociality, communication, coordinated behavior, distributed perception, or environmental responsiveness. Other living beings cooperate, compete, warn, deceive, care, hunt, migrate, build, imitate, teach, and alter their surroundings through elaborate systems of interaction.

The distinctively human development may therefore not have been the invention of shared participation as such. It may have been the extraordinary elaboration of participation fields: their density, flexibility, reflexivity, portability, nesting, cumulative preservation, and capacity for deliberate reconstruction.

Humans developed unusual capacities for joint attention, imitation, turn-taking, teaching, role-taking, narrative memory, rhythmic synchronization, symbolic abstraction, reputational sensitivity, and reflection upon failures of mutual understanding. We became able not merely to coordinate, but to discuss coordination; not merely to follow norms, but to argue about them; not merely to inhabit shared worlds, but to represent, preserve, compare, and intentionally modify them.

A perception no longer had to remain confined to the person who perceived it. A discovery could become a practice. A practice could become a tradition. A warning could become a story. A route could become a path. A tool could preserve the accomplishment of someone absent or dead. A distinction introduced in one encounter could become available in another place and another generation.

Human formations acquired capacities for perception, memory, judgment, and action that no individual member possessed alone.

We became participants in transpersonal intelligences.

The intelligence between us

Imagine several people moving through an unfamiliar landscape.

One notices changes in the weather. Another remembers a water source. Another recognizes animal tracks. Another detects rising tension within the group. Another can repair a damaged tool. Another recalls a story about what happened in a similar place many years before.

No one contains the whole situation. Yet if these perceptions and capacities can circulate, be tested, corrected, remembered, and made available for coordinated action, the formation can respond more intelligently than any participant could alone.

The participants do not have to share a single consciousness. They may disagree, misunderstand one another, conceal information, or pursue partially conflicting purposes. But their activities can become sufficiently coupled that what one detects alters what others can do.

The intelligence lies not only in the people considered separately. It lies in the circulation among them.

It lies in who notices, who speaks, who listens, what can be said, what is believed, how uncertainty is expressed, how disagreement is handled, which memories are retained, which warnings are ignored, and how errors are repaired.

A group of individually capable people may act disastrously if its relations suppress warning, reward conformity, hide uncertainty, or concentrate authority in the wrong places. A formation composed of people with limited individual knowledge may become remarkably capable if it can distribute attention, preserve differences, coordinate effectively, and correct mistakes.

The arrangement matters.

The field matters.

The pathways through which signals travel matter.

The conditions of participation matter.

What we call intelligence may therefore be partly an ecological property: a capacity generated by relations among differentiated beings, inherited forms, artifacts, infrastructures, and environments.

Schmooze

For years I have used the ordinary word schmooze to point toward these processes.

In everyday usage, schmoozing usually means informal conversation, sometimes with an implication of amiable talk, networking, or social maneuvering. I use it more broadly to name the recurring relational activity through which participants signal, interpret, respond, adjust, coordinate, remember, contest, and generate actionable meaning.

Schmooze need not be harmonious. Argument is schmoozal. So are negotiation, instruction, ritual, mutual aid, rivalry, gossip, collective improvisation, courtship, punishment, and political struggle.

What matters is that the participants’ activities become recursively consequential for one another.

One response alters the meaning of the next. A misunderstanding prompts repair. A gesture opens or closes a possibility. A proposal changes the field of available action. A distinction introduced in one encounter becomes available for later use.

The word helps name the activity binding together nodes, signals, frameworks, histories, infrastructures, constraints, affordances, and criteria of uptake.

But schmooze should not be imagined as something already completed individuals subsequently decide to do.

Individuals and schmoozes produce one another.

Every schmooze depends upon the differentiated bodies, perceptions, histories, vulnerabilities, and actions of its participants. Yet participation also helps constitute those beings as the particular individuals they become, shaping their identities, competencies, expectations, dispositions, obligations, and possibilities for action.

This resembles what Kant described as an organized whole: the parts generate and sustain the whole, while the whole produces and sustains the parts as the kinds of parts they are.

The whole may be evanescent. A conversation, game, argument, sexual encounter, emergency response, or coordinated movement may last only moments. But while it persists, the participants are partly constituted by the field they are jointly producing.

The schmooze does not hover above them as a superorganism. It exists only through their activity. But the individuals do not enter it unchanged as completely self-contained units. They become these participants, occupying these roles, possessing these possibilities, partly through the field itself.

The relation is one of mutual individuation.

The individual does not arrive first

It is tempting to preserve a final refuge for atomic individuality by saying that the biological organism exists first and is then socially shaped into a person.

Even that sequence is too simple.

By the time elaborate human communality had developed, schmoozal formations were already helping determine which organisms would be conceived. Courtship, attraction, kinship systems, incest prohibitions, alliance, status, residence patterns, religious rules, economic conditions, family negotiations, affection, violence, and culturally organized expectations all affected who encountered whom, who reproduced, and under what conditions.

Human beings commonly talked, signaled, danced, negotiated, displayed, courted, promised, prohibited, or coerced before they reproduced.

Culture entered the causal chain of biological existence.

After conception, gestation, birth, nourishment, protection, touch, care, language, environmental conditions, and social recognition all helped sustain and differentiate the developing organism.

Organismic integrity remains real. Living beings possess boundaries, mortality, histories, and partially autonomous activity. But organismic differentiation does not establish social priority.

The individual does not emerge from nowhere and subsequently join society. Schmoozal and ecological relations precede, produce, sustain, and continually reorganize the individual.

Nor does this mean that the individual is merely a passive product of the whole. Particular participants are not interchangeable carriers of a preexisting culture. Their differences help generate this field rather than another. Who notices what, who resists, who is trusted, who remains silent, who introduces an unexpected signal, and whose embodied history becomes consequential all alter what the whole can become.

A capable shared world must preserve enough commonality for participation and enough difference for discovery, correction, and transformation.

Individuality is not the enemy of collective intelligence. It is one of its conditions.

But individuality is itself collectively and ecologically produced.

Consciousness at the threshold

This mutual constitution may also alter how we think about consciousness.

Consciousness is commonly imagined as a private interior contained within the individual. But human consciousness may be understood, at least partly, as liminal activity through which the distinction and relation between node and field are continually negotiated.

Much of what occurs within a living body cannot be directly shared. Sensations, affects, memories, and neural processes must be selected, shaped, and rendered into forms capable of crossing into a participation field. Conversely, signals arriving through the field must be interpreted in ways that can reorganize the organism’s continuing activity.

Consciousness participates in both directions.

It helps make some portion of the node available to the shared world and some portion of the shared world available within the node.

But the threshold does not merely connect two fully completed domains. It participates in differentiating them.

Through liminal activity, an organism learns what is internal or external, what may be attributed to itself or another, which impulses become recognizable as intentions, when it is being addressed, what can be expressed, what must remain unspoken, and how its conduct alters the field.

The self is not simply waiting behind the threshold. It is partly generated through the threshold’s operation.

This gives us a provisional relationship among several concepts:

Schmooze is the recurring relational activity.

Liminal consciousness is among the processes through which nodes and fields become mutually available and mutually differentiated.

Schmoozal intelligence is the enlarged capacity for perception, interpretation, memory, evaluation, and action generated through the resulting ecology.

Individual intelligence may then be understood not as the opposite of schmoozal intelligence, but as a locally concentrated and partially internalized manifestation of it.

Even solitary thought is often populated by traces of prior schmooze. A person anticipates objections, rehearses explanations, invokes inherited standards, imagines another’s response, stages an internal disagreement, or reformulates an idea until it becomes sayable.

The apparently solitary thinker carries a portable, incomplete, and continually revisable model of shared worlds.

Communities preserve participation fields

Immediate encounters dissolve. Communities create conditions through which participation fields can be preserved, reactivated, interwoven, and made available when needed.

A community is not one enormous shared framework in which everyone understands everything identically. It is better understood as an ecology of overlapping and partly latent participation fields:

households, friendships, workplaces, rituals, games, care relations, stories, institutions, customary expectations, shared places, political practices, and material infrastructures.

Communities preserve histories. They stabilize roles. They maintain reputations. They train newcomers. They provide recurring opportunities for repair. They retain artifacts and places through which prior meanings can become active again.

A short exchange between familiar people may mobilize an enormous sedimented history. A path can preserve previous movement. A tool embodies experiments conducted by people now dead. A story carries a warning across generations. A ritual can reactivate expectations without requiring their complete explanation.

This accumulated relational capacity constitutes what we have elsewhere called sociopolitical soil: the inherited and continually cultivated conditions through which collective perception, judgment, and action become possible.

When those conditions deteriorate, the loss is not merely sentimental.

A society deprived of recurring relationships, shared spaces, community memory, and opportunities for consequential participation may become less able to perceive, interpret, deliberate, coordinate, and act.

A fragmented society may be not only less communal, but less intelligent.

Why call it socialist?

The title of this series deliberately introduces a complication.

I am not using socialist intelligence to mean intelligence possessed by socialists. Nor am I claiming that every form of collective cognition is socialist, benevolent, egalitarian, or emancipatory.

Armies, corporations, empires, intelligence agencies, bureaucracies, fascist movements, and organized criminal networks can all generate formidable transpersonal capacities. Schmooze can support mutual aid or coordinated predation, collective discovery or enforced conformity, democratic deliberation or command.

The general phenomenon is schmoozal intelligence.

“Socialist intelligence” names a particular propensity and affordance within it.

Participation fields make it possible for capacities manifested by one participant to enlarge the capacities of others. A discovery can become a common practice. A warning can become collective memory. A skill can be taught. A distinction developed across generations can become available to a child who did not help originate it. One person’s limitations can be compensated for by another’s differentiated competence.

The underlying form is:

commonly generated capacity becoming commonly or mutually enlargingly available.

That is not yet socialism as a modern political doctrine. But neither is the use of socialist merely metaphorical or politically empty.

It identifies a form of production in which participants produce not only a common result but one another’s developing capacities. The whole becomes more capable through differentiated contribution, and the participants become more capable through access to the whole.

Socialist intelligence is intelligence organized as a commons.

It does not dissolve individuals into an undifferentiated collective. It describes a process of mutual individuation: people become more distinctive and capable through participation, while their distinctions enlarge what the shared world can perceive and do.

This tendency can be defeated, enclosed, captured, or redirected. Knowledge can be monopolized. Roles can harden into castes. Coordination can become command. Shared symbols can legitimate domination. Institutions can appropriate intelligence generated throughout a field and attribute it to a chief, sovereign, executive, owner, state, or machine.

“Socialist” therefore names a possibility within schmoozal intelligence, not its guaranteed outcome.

From anthropological propensity to political socialism

The political relevance follows, but not as a simple deduction.

The argument is not:

Human intelligence is socially constituted; therefore every proposed socialist institution is justified.

Nor is it:

Early human communities were socialist societies in the modern sense, and political history should return us to their natural condition.

The argument is more limited, but still consequential.

Libertarian and capitalist political thought commonly begin with an atomic individual. The individual exists first, possesses faculties and labor power that are originally their own, and enters social relations by agreement. Society may then make claims upon the individual, but those claims require special justification because they appear as intrusions upon an antecedent ownership.

The sequence usually runs:

the individual exists;

the individual possesses capacities;

the individual produces;

society subsequently taxes, regulates, redistributes, or restricts what was originally individual property.

Our account contests the presumed starting point.

The economically productive person has been generated through histories of care, language, teaching, inherited knowledge, ecological participation, public infrastructure, collective labor, community reproduction, and accumulated technique. Even the identity of the person as an independent owner and contracting subject is socially instituted.

This does not erase individual claims, effort, creativity, bodily integrity, privacy, or deserved recognition. It places them inside the ecology that made them possible.

The political question therefore changes.

It is no longer only:

Why may society take from an independently productive individual?

It becomes:

How should capacities and products generated through mutually constitutive relations be attributed, governed, distributed, and returned to the fields that made them possible?

Political socialism can then be approached not as the artificial subordination of naturally self-sufficient people to a collective, but as an attempt to construct institutions adequate to the common production of human capacity.

That does not settle what those institutions should be. It clears away a false ontology that has made them appear inherently illegitimate.

Civilization and the abstraction of shared worlds

The capacities generated through immediate participation can be partially preserved and transported.

Words, stories, diagrams, rituals, maps, laws, numbers, tools, records, money, classifications, and procedures can condense products of previous schmooze into forms available beyond their original setting.

This portability made cumulative culture, large-scale coordination, science, historical memory, complex technology, and institutions possible.

But abstraction also introduces danger.

A portable condensation necessarily leaves much of its originating field behind. A rule can travel without the history that made it sensible. A metric can become more authoritative than the activity it was designed to represent. A classification can replace situated judgment. A map can make land legible to distant administrators while rendering local relations invisible.

The same process that allows knowledge to circulate allows authority to travel without accountability.

The projects we call civilization developed institutions capable of aggregating, standardizing, preserving, and commanding abstracted products of many local participation fields.

Writing, taxation, territorial mapping, standardized measures, bureaucratic categories, property systems, archives, military organization, law, and centralized administration enabled commanding nodes to see and act across larger populations and distances.

The distributed intelligence of local worlds could be appropriated by a center that then appeared to be the source of order.

The ruler received credit for the capacities of the polity. The bureaucracy’s categories became more authoritative than the lived worlds they compressed. Local knowledge became raw material for a metanode whose purposes participants could not readily alter.

This is one form of the principle of the excluded schmooze: capacities generated through a field are attributed to its most salient or commanding node while the relations that produced them disappear.

Hierarchical aggregation was not the only possible use of abstraction. Human societies have repeatedly developed federative, commoning, municipal, and heterarchical arrangements. But abstraction created possibilities for scale and concentration that transformed the relation between locally generated meaning and distant authority.

Capitalism and the capture of socialist intelligence

Capitalism intensified these processes.

It generalized abstraction and fungibility through money, wage labor, commodity exchange, standardized time, accounting, alienable property, transferable ownership, corporate organization, quantitative productivity, and competitive markets.

Situated activities and relations could increasingly be rendered commensurable, exchangeable, and governable from outside their originating participation fields.

Land became real estate or productive acreage. Work became labor time. Knowledge became intellectual property. Attention became an advertising resource. Human capacities became human capital. Community relations became markets, networks, audiences, or demographic data.

Capitalism did not abolish schmooze. It organized immense schmoozal formations.

Workers coordinate production. Scientists build upon generations of research. Programmers use shared languages and libraries. Communities reproduce care, competence, trust, and social stability. Users contribute attention, content, feedback, and data. Public institutions educate people and finance infrastructure.

Capitalism depends upon transpersonal intelligence at every level.

Its distinctive operation is to interrupt the common return of those capacities.

A contribution generated through a field is bounded, attributed to a legally recognized node, converted into an alienable asset, and accumulated by an owner.

The entrepreneur appears to create what the workforce, public infrastructure, inherited science, and social ecology made possible. The corporation appears intelligent while the distributed knowledge of its workers becomes an input. The market appears to coordinate what innumerable institutions, conventions, states, and relationships sustain.

Capitalism privately appropriates the products of socialist intelligence while concealing the socialist organization of their production.

Intellectual property

This account places intellectual property on a different footing.

The problem is not merely that copyrights and patents last too long, impede innovation, or distribute rewards unfairly. The prior question is how an idea, expression, invention, or technique becomes imaginable as the exclusive property of a discrete person or firm.

A song, program, formula, design, or text can be understood as a portable condensation of schmooze. It gathers inherited language, conventions, tools, education, prior works, collaboration, institutional support, and individual difference into a form capable of traveling beyond the encounter in which it was produced.

The individual contribution is real. But capitalism transforms attribution into something further: alienable exclusionary power.

The work becomes a bounded object. A rights-holder can restrict access, license use, transfer control, incorporate it into corporate valuation, or prevent competing development.

The creator supplies the moral story. Capital acquires the asset.

This does not mean that everything socially generated should become freely available for unrestricted extraction. A commons is not an ownerless resource available to whoever has the greatest capacity to appropriate it. Attribution, livelihood, privacy, contextual integrity, community authority, stewardship, and legitimate restrictions must be distinguished from transferable proprietary control.

But once intelligence is understood as schmoozally produced, intellectual property can no longer appear as the natural recognition of isolated creation.

It becomes part of the capitalist machinery through which collectively generated capacities are bounded, enclosed, and accumulated.

Artificial intelligence

Contemporary artificial intelligence brings these processes into unusually clear view.

The systems grouped under the term “AI” are heterogeneous. Generative models, predictive classifiers, recommendation systems, robotics, surveillance technologies, and scientific tools do not constitute one coherent object simply because marketers and journalists place them beneath a common label.

That disaggregation will matter.

But the dominant generative systems already illustrate a basic operation. Vast archives of human language, imagery, code, research, culture, classification, and feedback are detached from their originating relationships and converted into training material. The resulting computational capacities are then attributed to models controlled by a small number of firms.

Society’s accumulated activity becomes raw material.

The condensed capacity becomes proprietary capital.

Society purchases access to processed traces of its own intelligence.

This is not simply a dispute about whether an individual work was copied or whether a creator deserves compensation. It is an industrial-scale reattribution of intelligence.

The machine appears to possess what the social field produced. The firm appears to have created what it assembled, enclosed, and operationalized. The underlying schmooze disappears twice: first when human intelligence is represented as the possession of discrete individuals, and again when the traces of those individuals’ shared activity are represented as the intelligence of a proprietary machine.

AI may then be deployed to weaken the very participation fields from which its capacities arose.

An answer can replace the conversation through which judgment develops. Generated prose can replace the struggle through which thought becomes articulated. Automated instruction can reduce contact with teachers and peers. Centralized recommendations can displace local knowledge. Synthetic cultural products can crowd out communities of practice. Administrative models can replace situated deliberation with standardized output.

The system harvests accumulated intelligence and may then compete with the practices that replenish it.

A society can therefore become more capable of generating outputs while becoming less capable of generating intelligence among its participants.

The question ahead

The argument of this series will not be that individuals are unreal, that collectives are inherently wise, or that every traditional community should be preserved.

Nor will it be that all technology is alienating, that artificial intelligence has no useful capacities, or that political socialism follows automatically from human sociality.

The argument begins more fundamentally.

Individuals and shared worlds are mutually constitutive.

Human intelligence emerges through schmoozal and ecological relations that generate both transpersonal capacities and the differentiated participants capable of contributing to them.

Communities preserve and reactivate these capacities. Abstraction allows them to travel. Hierarchical institutions can aggregate and capture them. Capitalism converts their products into alienable assets and attributes their ownership to discrete nodes. Intellectual property formalizes parts of this enclosure. Contemporary AI concentrates it in technical systems capable of being deployed as external powers over the people and fields whose activity made them possible.

The political question is not merely how intelligence should be redistributed after it has been produced.

It is how forms of life produce intelligence in the first place.

Which relations make participants more capable?

Which institutions preserve common knowledge and permit it to grow?

Which arrangements allow individual differences to become sources of collective discovery rather than grounds for subordination?

Which abstractions allow meaning to travel while preserving answerability?

Which formations concentrate socially generated intelligence in commanding nodes?

Which technologies enlarge the intelligence of their surrounding fields, and which make people increasingly dependent upon capacities controlled elsewhere?

And what would it mean to build institutions that recognized intelligence as an achievement of shared worlds rather than the private possession of isolated beings?

Humans did not first become independently intelligent and then discover cooperation.

Through inhabiting shared worlds, we became the kinds of individuals capable of producing them.

We have become accustomed to looking for intelligence in the most salient node: the gifted person, the leader, the expert, the institution, the state, the corporation, the machine.

This series will look instead at the activity among the nodes—and at the worlds, human and more-than-human, that make the nodes possible.

It will ask whether intelligence is often what schmooze becomes capable of doing.

And it will explore the possibility that socialism, at its most fundamental, is not simply a program for redistributing what separate individuals produce.

It is an effort to construct institutions adequate to the fact that we produce one another.

#RedefiningSocialism

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Openings like this do not come often. For most of my life the word was simply unavailable: a conversation-ender, a thing you were accused of rather than a thing you could be. Now it is being argued about in public, by people who are not socialists, in front of audiences who have never given it five minutes' thought. That is worth something. But an opening is only as good as what gets carried through it, and what is being carried through this one is, I think, too small.

Consider how the case for socialism is currently being made by its friends. Liza Featherstone, in Jacobin, argues that the right is panicking because socialism is popular — and her evidence is that the policy agenda polls well. Affordable housing, higher wages, Medicare for All. She then has to deal with an inconvenience she raises herself: Trump also ran on the cost of living. Her answer is sincerity. He never meant it; the socialists do.

That is true, and it is not nothing. But look at what the argument has conceded. Socialism is being defended as a list of programs, plus the intention to actually enact them. Which means socialism is competent, sincere liberalism — and if that is what it is, then it is one honest Democrat away from being redundant.

Jon Stewart put the same reduction (sympathetically) to Zohran Mamdani a few days ago. He noted, admiringly, that the mayor hadn't seized anything or nationalized anything; he had found revenue, negotiated with the governor, extended child care, frozen rents, filled potholes. “It doesn't seem radical,” Stewart said. “It seems workmanlike.” He asked, more than once, whether democratic socialism was a genuinely different politics or just different nomenclature for the same one — and, in his most serious version of the question, whether it wasn't in fact a reform movement for capitalism, in the way the New Deal drained the revolutionary pressure of the 1930s.

The attackers and the sympathizers, it turns out, are working from the same dictionary. Both parties assume that socialism is a claim about economic arrangements: who owns what, who is taxed, what the state provides. They disagree only about whether the claim is good. So the defense is conducted entirely on the ground of outputs — is the program popular, is it affordable, is it more or less radical than the New Deal — and the movement's actual distinctiveness never comes up, because that vocabulary has nowhere to put it.

Which brings me to what I think is worth carrying through this opening.

Some twenty years ago the philosopher G. A. Cohen wrote a short book called Why Not Socialism? It begins with a camping trip. On a camping trip, people simply do not behave the way the market says people behave. Nobody charges his friends for the use of his pot. Nobody who finds the good fishing spot demands a toll. Tasks get divided by ability and need and inclination, facilities are shared, and if someone insisted on his property rights in the corkscrew we would think there was something wrong with him. Everyone recognizes this arrangement. Everyone has lived some version of it. Cohen's question is why we accept, for a whole society, principles we would find monstrous over the course of a week in the woods.

The part of his answer that matters here is that he identifies two principles at work, not one. The first is a kind of equality, and it is the one everybody expects. The second he calls community, and it is a separate requirement — not implied by equality, and capable of being violated even where equality is satisfied. Community, in his sense, means that people care for one another and care that they care; that I serve you because you need serving, and not because of what I can extract in return. Market relations run on the opposite motives. Cohen names them plainly: greed and fear. The other person appears as a source of gain or a threat of loss, which is a strange thing to be to your neighbor, however efficient it turns out to be.

I raise Cohen because he was making, from inside the analytic tradition, a point the founders of socialism did not have to make. The great nineteenth-century theorists could take an enormous amount of community for granted. Extended families, guilds, congregations, mutual aid societies, sick funds, burial clubs, neighbors who knew each other for forty years — the fabric of ordinary reciprocity was still thick enough that no one thought to write it into the program. It did not need defending because it had not yet been taken.

It has since been taken. That is the difference between their circumstances and ours, and it is why a socialism specified purely as an economic arrangement now leaves out the thing people most acutely lack. Vance, on Rogan, made the diagnosis better than most Democrats do: young people own nothing, the game is rigged, and this is why they turn to socialism. But his remedy was that we must give them a stake, give them ownership. Even the cure arrives as a smaller private share, handed down. Within that frame there is nothing else security could be made of. The possibility that the missing thing might be held in common rather than distributed individually — that the answer to having nothing might be having something together — is not a position he rejects. It is one he cannot form.

So the argument is not really about whether things are bad. Everybody now agrees things are bad. The argument is entirely about what kind of remedy is even thinkable, and that is where a wider understanding of socialism would do its work.

None of this is new to me; I have been circling it for a while, though not always in a form I would call broadly accessible. I have argued that socialism is a way of doing things together rather than a policy list, that independence is a myth and interdependence is the real question, and — under a coinage I am still not sure anyone will forgive me for — that what we need is an ethos before it is a program.

But the moment is not mine, and it is not going to last. While the word is briefly in everyone's mouth, it would be a shame if the only thing we managed to say about it was that our programs poll well and we mean them.

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These are people who agree on almost nothing. Yet each has reached for the same kind of description. And the sameness is more revealing than any of the descriptions, because it points to something the three of them share underneath their disagreements — a picture of what politics is.

In that picture, politics is a contest among groups that already exist. Blocs, factions, ideologies, constituencies: each is assumed to arrive with its interests already formed, and the game is the negotiation among them for control of offices. Voters come pre-sorted. Leaders speak for the sorted. Elections settle, for a while, who speaks for whom. It is a serviceable picture, and most of our political vocabulary is built from it.

The trouble is that DSA is doing something the picture has no slot for. So each observer, needing to file it somewhere, files it under the nearest category the picture already keeps. For the president, the slot marked foreign enemy ideology is closest, so: Communist. For the party establishment, the slot marked faction miscalculating its coalition is closest, so: spoiler. For the press, the slot marked one bloc displacing another is closest, so: demographic tsunami. Three different labels, one operation — take the unfamiliar thing and assimilate it to a familiar one, so you never quite have to notice that what is unfamiliar about it is not its content but its form.

Here is the form they are missing. DSA's candidates do not generally appear as talented individuals with good positions, marketed to a waiting electorate. They come out of an organization — with members, chapters, dues, internal arguments, political education, and a program the members vote on. Thousands of people knock on doors not because they were hired to but because they have entered something. And the people they talk to are not only being asked for a vote; some of them are being drawn, door by door, into the same activity. What is new is not a bloc with a sharper message. It is the attempt to organize people into a political force that did not exist before the organizing — to make a constituency through participation rather than to locate one that was already there.

That is the distinction worth carrying, because once you have it you can answer most of what is being thrown at the movement without answering on the frame's terms. A bloc is a standing thing you can count. A movement is an activity people are doing. The observers keep mistaking the second for the first — and every specific charge is a version of that one mistake.

Take the question, asked earnestly by reporters, of whether a well-paid tech worker can really be working class. Inside the bloc picture the question is about sorting: which income category does this person belong to, and does DSA's answer stretch the category past honesty? But the movement is not sorting people by income. It is asking whether someone who depends on an institution he does not control — who can be laid off, outsourced, automated out of a career he thought was secure — shares a situation with the home-care worker who is far poorer and far more exposed. The salary is real and the difference in exposure is real, and neither settles the question, because the question was never about the bracket. It was about whether people in different positions can be organized to act together. The honest answer declines the sorting and describes the activity.

Or take the sharpest version, the one that deserves the most care: that some of these victories came in neighborhoods reshaped by displacement, where the movement may be winning fair elections among the people who remain precisely because poorer, longer-tenured residents could no longer afford to stay. That worry should not be waved off. The Black and Latino political institutions now being challenged were not handed down by a generous system; they were won, through lawsuits and organizing and decades of work, by communities the system was built to exclude. Those institutions carry the accumulated legitimacy of real struggle.

But an institution cannot stay representative merely because it once emerged from representation. Its authority has to be renewed by the living activity that first produced it — by continuing to organize, involve, and answer to the people it claims. Representation, you might say, is what participation leaves behind, and it stays democratic only as long as fresh participation keeps renewing it. So the test of a socialist victory in a changing neighborhood is not the winner's race, and not the election result, and not the demographic chart the coverage leads with. It is whether the movement is organizing the public-housing tenant, the immigrant, the family facing eviction — whether longtime residents help set its program or are merely counted among its intended beneficiaries. Winning the district does not answer that. Only what gets built afterward does. And that is a question about activity, which the bloc picture cannot even pose, because it is busy reading the demographic chart.

None of this means the observers are lying, and it is important not to treat them as if they were. The frame is a genuine blindness, not a pose. The president's label is a weapon, but it does the same work a sincere reporter's does: it reaches for the nearest known category because the frame supplies no other. People standing inside the bloc picture are not being stupid when they cannot see the form. They are standing where the form cannot be seen from. The useful response is not to score against them but to describe what they are missing plainly enough that a reader can step outside the frame and look.

And stepping outside it cuts both ways, which is the part a movement's own supporters should keep. If what is new about DSA is an activity rather than a category, then the activity has to actually continue, or the new thing collapses back into an old one. A campaign can become a machine for winning and nothing more. An organization can harden into another faction that treats defeated rivals as territory to be seized. New leaders can drift as far from the organized public as the ones they replaced. The distinction that lets you answer the movement's critics is the same distinction the movement is answerable to. It is not a trophy. It is a standard, and it has not yet been met — it has only been made visible.

So when you next hear that DSA is Communist, or a spoiler, or a demographic wave washing over someone else's neighborhood, you now have something to notice before you answer. Each of those descriptions has already made the same move: it has mistaken a living activity for a standing thing. You do not have to argue on its terms. You can decline the translation, and describe what is actually happening — people trying, and not yet finished, to become an organized force that governs the conditions of its own life. Whether they succeed is an open question. But you cannot even ask it from inside the picture that keeps calling a verb a noun.

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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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Dear Commissioner Van Auken,

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Executive Order No. 7, establishing the Office of Mass Engagement, names a real democratic failure in New York City. The order recognizes that New Yorkers exercise agency when they build community with their neighbors, communicate their concerns and solutions, and engage with local government. It also recognizes that existing civic structures often privilege those with the most time and resources: meetings are long, applications are confusing, feedback is fragmented, and participation often seems disconnected from visible outcomes. The result is frustration, disenchantment, and disengagement.

That diagnosis is important. But the success of the Office of Mass Engagement will depend on how deeply the city interprets the phrase mass engagement. If it means only more surveys, more testimony drives, more public meetings, better feedback portals, and more coordinated outreach, the city may improve the existing system without transforming it. Those things matter, but they are not enough. Mass engagement should not mean mass intake: a more efficient process for collecting public input and routing it through City Hall. It should mean helping New Yorkers build the durable civic capacity to notice problems, share knowledge, deliberate, coordinate help, preserve memory, and act together over time.

Mass engagement should be the opening condition for a living civic ecology. By civic ecology, I mean the web of spaces, organizations, relationships, habits, records, tools, and conflicts through which people become able to participate meaningfully in the life of the city. That ecology includes government, but cannot be owned by government. It includes digital tools, but cannot be reduced to a platform. It includes formal meetings, but cannot depend mainly on people having the time, confidence, and procedural fluency to attend them. The question for the Office of Mass Engagement is therefore not only how to help more New Yorkers reach City Hall. It is how to help New Yorkers reach one another.

The Missing Layer: Civic Commons

The city needs engagement campaigns, accessible feedback venues, outreach to historically excluded communities, and feedback loops between residents and policy. Executive Order No. 7 assigns these duties to the Office of Mass Engagement, along with responsibilities involving community boards, district service cabinets, district managers, agency coordination, and training or technical assistance. But there is a missing layer between isolated residents and city government: the neighborhood or district civic commons.

A civic commons would not be merely a website, a city portal, a social-media group, a newsletter, or a meeting. It would be a locally rooted, digitally supported, cooperatively governed space where residents and local institutions can become more visible to one another and more capable of acting together. Its everyday value would come from ordinary civic life: water main breaks, train shutdowns, spare moving boxes, elder check-ins, accompaniment to appointments, community gardens, block parties, filming notices, local sports, tenant meetings, community-board agendas, recurring service failures, and the many small problems that now remain scattered across group chats, flyers, agency websites, social media, local newsletters, and word of mouth.

These examples may sound mundane, but they are not secondary to democracy. They are the practical life out of which democratic politics grows. People do not become civic actors only by attending hearings or submitting comments. They become civic actors through repeated experiences of mutual recognition, shared trouble, practical help, disagreement, memory, repair, and coordination. A tenant comparing landlord behavior with neighbors is already in civic life. A parent trying to understand a school policy is already in civic life. Residents documenting recurring elevator outages, transit disruptions, sanitation failures, or agency delays are already producing public knowledge.

The problem is that these civic activities are usually fragmented and fragile. The city should not try to absorb them into one official system. But it can help make them more visible, durable, accessible, privacy-respecting, and capable of informing public decisions.

Enable, Do Not Own

A civic commons controlled by City Hall would not be a commons. It would be an engagement apparatus. The distinction matters.

The city can convene, support, translate, train, fund, connect, and listen. It can help residents understand how to interact with agencies. It can help community-board processes become more legible. It can support pilots, technical assistance, accessibility, and public standards. But it should not own the civic spaces through which New Yorkers deliberate, remember, coordinate, and hold power accountable.

A real civic commons must be able to support City Hall when City Hall is right, inform it when it is incomplete, pressure it when it is slow, and oppose it when necessary. That is not a defect. It is what makes such a commons democratic. If the Office of Mass Engagement becomes only a more effective way to gather input for the administration, it will fall short of its promise. If it helps New Yorkers build civic capacity that does not belong to the administration, it could become one of the more important democratic experiments in city government.

Infrastructure Should Match the Politics

The form of this work matters. A city trying to build democratic civic capacity should not rely uncritically on the proprietary, centralized, extractive platforms that have helped weaken democratic life. Civic infrastructure should be open where possible, privacy-respecting, accessible, multilingual, interoperable, and governable by the people and institutions that depend on it.

New York would not be starting from zero. The open-source civic-technology world has already developed tools that address parts of this problem: participatory budgeting, structured deliberation, collaborative decision-making, shared files, calendars, transparent records, project coordination, and community governance. Decidim, Loomio, CONSUL Democracy, Nextcloud, openDesk, and related projects are not by themselves a civic ecology. They do not solve trust, moderation, language access, disability access, unequal time, digital exclusion, institutional power, or the labor needed to maintain a commons. But they show that public engagement need not depend entirely on proprietary platforms, scattered surveys, social-media fragments, commercial cloud systems, or consultant-designed portals.

The deeper lesson is that civic participation requires infrastructure, governance, continuity, and ecology. A citywide engagement office should not ask only how to collect more feedback. It should ask how to help residents and local organizations sustain the civic ecologies in which meaningful participation becomes possible.

A Federated City Needs Federated Civic Life

New York is not one community. It is a city of neighborhoods, languages, histories, buildings, schools, tenant associations, libraries, public housing developments, faith communities, immigrant networks, parks, workplaces, and informal local worlds. A single centralized engagement platform cannot adequately represent that reality.

A better model would be federated. By federated, I do not mean fragmented. I mean that different neighborhood, issue-based, institutional, tenant, school, library, mutual-aid, and cultural spaces should be able to remain distinct while becoming more discoverable, mutually aware, and capable of coordination. The goal should not be one massive official forum. The goal should be a civic ecology in which many local commons can connect without being absorbed into a single hierarchy.

This approach would also strengthen existing civic institutions rather than bypassing them. Community boards, for example, are important, but their meetings can be hard to follow, hard to attend, procedurally narrow, and disconnected from the everyday ways people encounter public problems. Local civic commons could help residents understand agendas, prepare testimony, document follow-up, compare experiences, track recurring issues, and turn isolated complaints into visible public patterns. They would not replace community boards. They would give them a stronger civic substrate.

Maintenance Is Civic Work

A living civic ecology requires labor: documentation, translation, moderation, calendar maintenance, meeting summaries, accessibility work, onboarding, technical repair, conflict handling, and preservation of public memory. This should not be treated only as a procurement problem. It should also be treated as civic education and public work.

The administration could encourage interdisciplinary projects among CUNY campuses, community colleges, public high schools, libraries, community boards, and local organizations. Students and faculty in technology, public administration, urban studies, journalism, design, social work, translation, history, library science, accessibility, and related fields could help design, research, build, document, evaluate, and maintain neighborhood civic commons. They could map local resources, summarize community-board meetings, translate and simplify agency materials, maintain public calendars, document recurring service failures, conduct oral-history projects, and support open-source tools.

Done properly, this would not be free labor for City Hall. It would need stipends, course credit, supervision, community accountability, and real educational value. But it could become civic education through civic maintenance. Students would not merely study government. They would help maintain the civic conditions under which democratic government becomes more possible.

Libraries, Hosting, and Connectivity

Public libraries may be among the natural institutional homes for this work. They already provide access to knowledge, technology, local history, meeting space, digital literacy, public trust, and non-commercial information infrastructure. A citywide civic-commons strategy could build on that role by supporting orientations, digital-literacy help, local archives, public documentation, meeting space, and access for people who cannot or do not want to participate only from personal devices.

Over time, this points toward something larger: public-interest civic hosting. New York might eventually help provide privacy-respecting, open-source digital capacity that local groups could use for websites, calendars, shared files, collaborative documents, archives, meeting spaces, and public records. This should not mean one City Hall-owned platform for civic life. It should mean a supported ecology of locally governed, interoperable tools that gives residents and community groups an alternative to dependence on corporate platforms.

This question does not stop at software. Civic participation also depends on access, connectivity, resilience, and local control. New York already has community-led efforts, such as NYC Mesh, that treat connectivity itself as a commons. OME would not need to run such networks, but a city serious about mass engagement should understand that participation depends not only on invitations, forms, and meetings, but on the material conditions that let people communicate at all.

Trust Requires Design

A civic commons is not automatically benign. A space where neighbors ask why an elder has not been seen recently can become a space of care, but it can also become intrusive. A space where people document landlord abuse, immigration fears, policing, benefits problems, or health needs can become empowering, but it can also expose people to risk. Privacy, consent, moderation, and safety cannot be afterthoughts. A civic commons should not become a surveillance commons.

This is especially important for immigrants, tenants, workers, unhoused people, people with disabilities, people navigating public benefits, people with precarious legal status, and anyone vulnerable to retaliation. Trust will not come from branding. It will come from design, governance, practice, and accountability.

The same is true of accessibility and language justice. Reaching people who have not historically participated in government decision-making cannot mean only inviting more people into existing formats. It means changing the formats: plain-language summaries, multilingual materials, interpretation, accessible design, offline access points, asynchronous participation, disability access, and help for people who do not already know how city processes work. The goal should not be to make more people behave like professional meeting-goers. The goal should be to make civic life more available to ordinary people.

A Modest Proposal

The Office of Mass Engagement does not need to build a citywide civic commons from scratch. It should not try. A better first step would be to convene a public conversation about how New York might support a federated ecology of neighborhood civic commons.

That conversation should include civic institutions, local organizations, residents not already embedded in formal politics, public-interest technologists, privacy advocates, accessibility advocates, educators, librarians, community-board participants, youth organizations, and people already maintaining local networks of care and information. OME could then explore a small number of pilots, publish public-interest principles for civic digital infrastructure, support open-source experiments, fund maintenance and translation, create directories of existing civic resources, and help local commons connect to community-board and agency processes.

I have begun a small and preliminary experiment in this general direction at Inwood Nexus: https://inwoodnexus.nyc. It is not a finished model, and I am not suggesting that the city adopt it. I mention it only to make clear that this proposal is not merely abstract. I have been thinking practically about what a local, online-first civic commons might look like and how such efforts might begin.

The creation of the Office of Mass Engagement is an opening. It can become a better way for City Hall to hear from New Yorkers. That would be useful. But it can become something more important: a way to help New Yorkers build durable civic capacity with one another.

That is the deeper promise. Mass engagement should be the beginning of a civic ecology broad enough, practical enough, and democratic enough to make participation part of ordinary city life.

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The curtain has risen on the Mamdani Era, and everyone, including the ushers, wants a piece of the script. And the whole thing bears more than a passing resemblance to Gypsy, that great musical about ambition, rehearsal, overreach, and the perilous art of letting go

I. The DSA Parent-Teacher Association Convenes

Inside the venerable halls of the Democratic Socialists of America, a great debate rages. It is conducted in a tone ranging from “quiet disappointment” to “full Mama Rose.”

After all, it was DSA that plucked young Mamdani from the chorus, taught him his lines, drilled him in socialist theory, and sent him, starched and scrubbed, into the spotlight.

There is a certain pride in having raised a political child who not only survives the primary but grows up to run the city. But there is also the unmistakable anxiety of parents whose kid has just moved to Manhattan and refuses to answer texts during dinner.

Hence the question: Now that the boy is mayor, must he still call home nightly?

One internal faction insists, with the moral confidence of a playwright (eyeing a Pulitzer) who won’t change a word, that of course he must. They point out — not incorrectly — that they packed his ideological lunchbox, stitched his policy worldview from scratch, and sent him into the world with a perfectly fine pair of socialist training wheels.

The argument goes something like this:

We raised him, and therefore he should be fully accountable to us. Not just consultative accountability — full-on clean-your-room, take-out-the-trash, and don’t-roll-your-eyes-at-us accountability.

It’s touching, in a way, but it’s also deeply impractical. More on that later.

II. The View from the Mayor’s Mansion

From inside City Hall, things look rather different.

• One cannot run a $100 billion municipal apparatus using only the Stanislavski Method learned in Acting School.
• The Department of Education isn’t organized to perform a script submitted by a conflicted Drama Department still arguing over the second act.
• And the NYPD cannot be expected to fall into a crisp chorus line just because a working group has tapped out the rhythm.

A mayor is many things — negotiator, bureaucratic whisperer, hostage to Albany, occasional therapist to agencies in crisis — but one thing he is not is a fully supervised movement intern.

When DSA members say, “Why isn’t he doing exactly what we want?” City Hall might reply, “Because he is busy attempting to govern New York City — a task occasionally compared to teaching a herd of caffeinated rhinoceroses to ride the subway.”

Governance introduces new interpretive frameworks — legal, institutional, fiscal, electoral — that do not politely step aside for socialist purity. The music changes tempo, the lighting shifts, and the choreography becomes more complicated.

And yet, the movement expects him to dance the same steps.

III. Enter Mama Rose, Stage Left

This is where Gypsy becomes uncomfortably relevant.

Mama Rose, that indomitable engine of ambition, spent years shaping her daughters into stars: the costumes, the routines, the forced smiles, the relentless rehearsals. But when the daughters finally become stars, they insist on inhabiting their own lives.

The pathos, the comedy, and the tragedy all reside in that conflict. So too with DSA and Mamdani. DSA is caught in the Mama Rose dilemma: having created a star, it must figure out how to stop being the choreographer.

This is not as easy as it sounds. Movements are emotional organisms; they do not simply “transition” because the situation demands it. They feel things — pride, fear, protectiveness, suspicion, hope, and occasionally the sharp sting of abandonment when their rising star stops showing up to chapter socials.

And yet, if the movement cannot release its electeds into autonomy, the entire strategy collapses into a kind of ideological helicopter parenting.

IV. A Mayor Is Not a Puppet (Even If the Strings Are Organic, Recycled, Collectively Owned)

The idea that a socialist mayor should function as a wholly owned subsidiary of his political origin story is charming, in the same way that the idea of a toddler balancing the city budget is charming — but disastrous.

Movements produce leaders precisely so those leaders can expand the sphere of action — not so they can remain trapped in an eternal adolescence.

What Mamdani needs from DSA is not custody but agonistic companionship. He needs a movement that argues, pressures, critiques, mobilizes, and refuses to be placated — but also understands the difference between guiding and governing.

If DSA tries to rule his mayoralty like a parent monitoring screen time, it will stunt both the movement and the administration — and eventually alienate the very public Mamdani needs to radicalize.

A movement that cannot let its children grow up ends up talking only to itself.

V. The Final Number: “Let Me Entertain You, But Not Obey You”

There is a version of this story in which everyone gets what they want:

• The mayor retains his socialist backbone.
• DSA maintains its moral vigilance.
• The administration makes real gains for working people.
• The movement grows stronger rather than subordinate.
• And the audience — the public — remains dazzled.

But this demands something DSA has never fully had to face: the need to redefine its relationship to the very political figures it helped bring into being — a shift many of its members now insist is overdue. Not obedience, not distance, but a new kind of relationship; loving the leaders it has nurtured without assuming they remain forever in its house, eating from its fridge and texting for permission before making plans.

DSA must cultivate the wisdom to recognize that the point of nurturing political talent is not to create obedient children — but to create adults who can take the movement’s values into places the movement itself could never reach.

Rose learns this lesson late, kneeling in a spotlight, realizing she was never meant to live through her daughter’s success.

One can only hope DSA learns it earlier.

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(On Freedom, Discipline, and the Forgotten Middle of Social Life)

“Sometimes I feel like [I'm] the only anarchist who believes discipline is a good attribute... and before anyone comes up with some trolley-problem-level abstract edge-case, I am talking about the much more mundane: keeping to agreements, tidying up after yourself, finishing tasks when they're no longer fun, etc.” — anonymous Mastodon user

This simple lament captures a deep distortion in modern political imagination. It exposes a confusion that should never have seemed inevitable: the belief that freedom and discipline must be in opposition.

That opposition, I would suggest, only makes sense in a civilization that has long lived under what we might call the law of the excluded schmooze.

1. From the excluded middle to the excluded schmooze

In logic, the law of the excluded middle states that something must be either true or false. Between yes and no there is no room to dwell. Western social thought has applied a similar principle to human life. Actions are imagined as either the expression of autonomous individuals or the result of coercive institutions. Either I act freely, or I am constrained by some external authority. There is no acknowledged middle term.

But that “middle” is where almost everything human actually happens.

It is the dense, ambiguous, negotiated realm of mutual adjustment and coordination—the domain of tone, gesture, compromise, habit, humor, apology, timing, and attention. It is the space where meaning, trust, and cooperation are continually re-made, even when no rule compels them and no solitary will dictates them.

This is what I call the schmooze.

2. What is “the schmooze”?

The schmooze is not small talk or flattery, though both may play their part. It is the field of ongoing interpretive attunement through which people manage to live and act together at all. It is a social medium—visceral, reciprocal, constantly self-revising—within which individuals and collectives co-constitute one another.

In the Symbiotic Intelligence Framework (SIF), the schmooze is the level at which information ensembles—networks of perception, intention, and response—maintain their coherence. It is where interpretive frameworks are not just applied but enacted: where interpretation and action are fused into what I have come to call interpretaction.

The schmooze is the site of mortal computation—a real-time, situated, resource-dependent process of sensing, adjusting, and negotiating that cannot be fully formalized without killing the living coordination it supports.

3. How the West excluded the schmooze

The Western intellectual tradition has been astonishingly suspicious of this realm. From Plato’s disdain for rhetoric and performance, through Augustine’s distrust of worldly conversation, to the Enlightenment’s ideal of the solitary Reasoner, the preferred model of knowledge and virtue has been the individual standing apart, detached from the noise of human interplay.

Even when modern social science sought to study society, it often did so from above or outside—through statistics, abstractions, or structural laws that drained the immediacy out of human encounter. Political philosophy inherited this habit: society became an aggregation of rational agents or a structure of institutional constraint, never the fluid process of schmooze that actually binds human beings together.

The result is that freedom and discipline have come to appear as mutually exclusive poles. Freedom belongs to the isolated agent, discipline to the imposed system. The possibility that discipline might emerge organically, horizontally—from the shared upkeep of a common world—has been rendered almost unthinkable.

4. The politics that vanished with the schmooze

The exclusion of the schmooze has had profound consequences. It has hollowed out our conception of community, turning it into either a romantic ideal or a bureaucratic abstraction. It has made democratic deliberation seem impossible without procedural machinery, and cooperation seem impossible without command.

When anarchism appears allergic to discipline, or when socialism degenerates into managerialism, both are suffering from the same blindness: they lack a language for the middle dynamics through which coordination naturally occurs when people inhabit a shared world attentively and responsibly.

If we restore the schmooze to view, we begin to see that the maintenance of agreements, the tidying-up, the finishing of tasks when they cease to be fun are not acts of submission but acts of care. They are what living systems do to remain alive. They are not beneath politics; they are its foundation.

5. Toward a politics of the schmooze

To recognize the schmooze is to recognize that the fundamental work of freedom is not rebellion but maintenance: the upkeep of the relational fields that make both rebellion and rest possible.

A politics that honors the schmooze would not fixate on law, nor on individual will, but on the cultivation of the interpretive ecologies that sustain trust, responsiveness, and shared orientation. It would value the slow work of conversational repair, the etiquette of co-presence, the attentiveness that allows differences to coexist without collapse.

This is what we are after in the Communitarium Project: the deliberate reconstruction of the social middle—the living field of mutual interpretive action—through which communities can think, deliberate, and act as wholes without surrendering to hierarchy or fragmentation.

6. Closing reflection

The Western tradition’s law of the excluded schmooze has left us with politics that lurch between individualism and authoritarianism, between expressive chaos and imposed order.

But the schmooze has never ceased to exist. It persists in friendships, in kitchens, in protests, in open-source collaborations, in neighborhood assemblies. It is the real infrastructure of freedom.

To restore the schmooze to philosophical visibility is not to propose a new doctrine but to notice the living medium we already inhabit—and to begin designing our institutions so that they cultivate, rather than suppress, the disciplined freedom it affords.

Perhaps discipline, properly understood, is nothing more than care extended through time—and schmooze, the medium through which that care becomes collective.

#Schmoozalism #TheCommunitariumProject #RedefiningSocialism

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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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