Seize the Means of Community

Too often, socialism is framed as a theory to be argued or a system to be installed. But perhaps we should begin elsewhere—not with ideology, but with orientation. Not with a program, but with a posture.

What if socialism, at its heart, is simply a way of doing things together?

A way of living more communally—not because we’ve signed a manifesto, but because we’ve come to see our lives as interwoven. A way of acting more collectively—not because the state requires it, but because we realize that most of what matters can’t be done alone. A way of caring more reciprocally—not as noblesse oblige or moral duty, but as a natural expression of a life shared on level ground.

To embrace socialism in this sense is to cultivate the art of widening our us. It means learning to extend our sense of self so that it includes others—sometimes many others—with whom we share no prior allegiance but with whom we now share a world. It's a daily practice of enlarging who counts as “we.”

This isn’t to say that beliefs and theories don’t matter. But they’re not the starting point. They come after we notice that something is off—too isolated, too competitive, too lonely, too enclosed. And what we’re reaching for isn’t an abstract system—it’s a more humane way of organizing life on Earth.

In this light, socialism is less a destination than a disposition. It’s not about who has the right slogans or citations. It’s about how we live, work, share, decide, and care—together. It asks: do we orient ourselves toward interdependence or isolation? Toward collaboration or control? Toward sufficiency or scarcity?

This kind of socialism doesn’t wait for permission. It begins wherever people are already trying to meet each other’s needs with dignity, already experimenting with fairer, kinder, more communal ways of doing things. It takes root in a thousand small acts of mutuality—and it grows when more people can afford to be generous, more people can afford to trust, and more people can find themselves in an us that is worth belonging to.

So yes, there are systems to change. But the transformation begins not with diagrams or doctrines.
It begins with our doing things differently together.