Redefining Socialism
1. The Problem We Face
We live in a world of escalating crises — environmental collapse, economic inequality, technological overreach, political instability — yet the dominant systems for thinking about and acting on these crises feel exhausted.
Our inherited political vocabularies still try to address 21st-century problems with 19th- and 20th-century categories. Terms like democracy, freedom, solidarity, and community persist, but their meanings have been thinned, simplified, or distorted by overuse, commodification, and systemic enclosure.
When people speak of the social, they often mean something passive or optional — a realm of connection distinct from “real” politics or economics. Yet what we call the social is the ground of everything: it is where meaning is created, where purpose is forged, and where action becomes possible.
If we want to make socialism adequate to the present, we have to rethink not only its policies or structures, but also its ethos — what it assumes about the self, about community, and about how people live, work, and act together.
2. Why Redefine Socialism
We all grew up with a political vocabulary in which socialism was framed primarily as a matter of economics and state policy: public ownership, redistribution, class struggle. Those remain important — but they are not enough.
I'm suggesting that socialism is not a set of policies. It’s a way of organizing life so that the systems we build, maintain, and inhabit serve the flourishing of people in their full, embedded, interdependent existence. That means not just changing ownership structures, but changing the terms of belonging and the terms of engagement.
To do this, we have to look critically at factors that earlier formulations of socialism took as unproblematically foundational:
- A concept of self as discrete, bounded, and internally coherent.
- A view of the individual as the primary unit of analysis, with “society” as an aggregation of such units.
- An assumption that the meaning of “social” is self-evident and unchanging.
My work in the Symbiotic Intelligence Framework (SIF) and the General Theory of Interpretive Systems (GTIS) has led me to reject those assumptions. I see the self as porous and adjustable, individuality as relational, and “the social” as a dynamic web of mutual prehension, purpose, and coordinated action.
3. Idiotism and the Fracturing of the Social
I call it, with Neal Curtis, idiotism: not just an individual attitude, but a systematically facilitated epistemic enclosure. The term comes from the Greek idiōtēs — a private person disengaged from public life — and here names a condition in which the shared interpretive and deliberative capacities of communities are weakened.
Idiotism encourages people to treat their private interpretations as self-sufficient, to disengage from the slow work of joint meaning-making, and to resist the obligations and adjustments that come with living among others.
It is reinforced by platforms, institutions, and economies that suppress deliberation and extract immediate engagement. This is the engagement of clicks, swipes, and outrage — unidimensional and easily harvested — not the engagement of mutual responsibility, shared projects, and long-term cooperation.
This is where the redefinition of “social” becomes urgent. Without a richer conception of how people co-create meaning–purpose–action in real time, socialism risks inheriting the same fractured epistemic field that capitalism thrives on.
4. The Role of Indexical Stability
You begin to notice that real cooperation requires more than incentive or ideology — it demands what most current systems actively undermine:
- Indexical stability — the dependable ability to know and maintain what we are each referring to in shared contexts, so that “this,” “here,” “now,” and “us” mean the same thing for everyone involved.
- Mutuality — not just care, but the full range of reciprocal engagement, shared obligation, and collaborative action that sustains a functioning community.
- Infrastructures for joint world-maintenance — the material, procedural, and cultural supports that make shared life possible.
When indexical stability erodes — as it has in politics, media, and even daily communication — coordination falters. We no longer share enough reference points to deliberate, decide, and act together effectively. The social becomes noise.
5. Value, Purpose, and Action
In humane, embedded communities, value is not an abstract number or market price; it is what people recognize as worth sustaining, protecting, or cultivating. This value emerges directly from shared meaning, common purpose, and joint action.
Under hegemonic systems, value is extracted, tokenized, and severed from the conditions that give it life. It becomes a tool for control rather than a reflection of mutual commitments.
Part of redefining socialism is reclaiming value as something generated and held in common — inseparable from the purposes we pursue and the actions we take together. Here, value is not just a metric but a living property of sustained cooperation.
6. Engagement as the Measure of the Social
We use the word engagement easily, but rarely ask what kind. In functioning communities, engagement is multidimensional: conversational, deliberative, material, cultural, and affective. It is measured in the density and resilience of relationships, not in raw counts of interactions.
In current online systems, engagement is flattened into a single extractable dimension — attention. The richness of mutual engagement is replaced by metrics that can be sold to advertisers.
Redefining socialism means restoring engagement to its full register, where it is not just contact but co-presence; not just reaction but contribution; not just participation but shared maintenance of a world.
7. Toward a Socialism of the Social
This leads to a political conclusion: socialism, as redefined here, is the design and maintenance of federated interpretive ensembles capable of distributing power, meaning, purpose, and resources through mortal computation across scales.
It is a socialism that begins with the social — with the practices of mutual engagement, the infrastructures of joint world-maintenance, and the conditions for indexical stability — because without these, neither economic redistribution nor political reform will hold.
This is not socialism as an end-state or a fixed doctrine. It is socialism as an ongoing ethos: an active commitment to the shared work of building, sustaining, and repairing the worlds we inhabit together.
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