Schmoozalism: A Clarificatory Introduction
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.
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