Seize the Means of Community

The word is having a moment. Trump said “communism” eighty-one times in a two-week period. J. D. Vance spent a genial half hour on Joe Rogan's show worrying aloud about why young Americans keep drifting toward socialism. The Secretary of State convened sixty countries to discuss the menace of the left. And on the other side of it, socialists keep winning primaries — in New York, in Colorado, in Wisconsin — which is presumably the reason for all the noise.

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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