The Democratic Socialists of America, especially in major urban chapters like NYC-DSA, has become a formidable presence. It has helped elect socialist-aligned candidates, mobilized around labor and tenant struggles, and consistently shown up at pivotal demonstrations. Its members are often among the most principled, capable, and hardworking organizers in left-wing spaces today. And yet, despite all this activity, DSA remains more formative than transformative.

To put it provocatively: DSA functions less like a revolutionary political organization and more like an adult, socialist scouting movement. It fosters solidarity, builds competencies, and cultivates a kind of ethical-political citizenship. But its structure and strategic habits suggest that it prepares its members for a world that never arrives. It produces scouts without a campaign, comrades without a horizon.

This isn't a dismissal. The scouting analogy is not meant as a slight. Scouting organizations are, in many ways, admirable: they emphasize practical skills, moral development, mutual support, and local leadership. But they do so within a largely unchallenged framework. They teach people to navigate a world, not to remake it. And DSA, at its best, has excelled at helping people navigate a hostile, alienating, and unjust society—building moral stamina and organizing competence. But the question remains: toward what end?

The organization’s activities—electoral campaigns, tenant organizing, strike support, protest mobilization—are laudable in themselves. DSA also pursues concrete policy goals that, at first glance, seem to edge closer to the kind of envisioning we claim is lacking—for example, the BPRA proposal for public renewable energy. But these efforts, too, are often carried out in parallel rather than in integration. Mutual aid efforts do not necessarily feed into electoral education. Campaign infrastructure is rarely redeployed for building durable communal life. Even DSA’s most successful chapters seem to lack a unifying strategic theory beyond the moral imperative to act. The result is a vast, talented body of organizers whose efforts rarely cohere into cumulative, systemic counter-power.

This fragmentation is not simply a matter of strategy. It is also a matter of political psychology. DSA, like many left movements, has grown rapidly by gathering together people disillusioned with capitalism but not necessarily aligned around a shared vision of what comes next. In this way, DSA is structurally incentivized to keep its future blurry. Too much specificity could prompt rupture. A detailed vision might cause as many members to leave as it inspires to stay. So the organization remains safely capacious, organized around shared grievances and ethical sensibilities more than strategic clarity.

But vagueness comes at a cost. Without a shared horizon, it's nearly impossible to accumulate power across time and scale. The competencies DSA cultivates do not feed into a post-capitalist infrastructure—they circulate within the organization, forming a kind of ethical holding pattern. The result is a paradox: a movement that builds capacity but not trajectory. It gathers strength but doesn't translate that strength into a transformative counter-system.

This is the scouting trap. DSA builds up the best of us, but does not yet build beyond us. It creates refuge, not rupture. Formation, not transition. Without a different kind of vision—a riskier, more integrative one—it may keep developing socialist scouts long after the campfire of capitalism has burned through the forest.

#SeizeTheMeansOfCommunity #CommunitariumProject #DSA

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When I first joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), I was searching for something beyond the meetings, the organizing drives, and even the occasional victories. Most of the members I encountered, however, seemed committed either to participating in those ways or to sequestering themselves in various “study groups” or “reading groups,” collectively pursuing individual education or enlightenment without actually doing much with respect to the larger world or the broader, more active organization they had joined. But the question that lingered for me was this: where do we live our socialism?

For most of us, socialism is a belief, a set of values, a lens through which we critique the world as it is and dream about what it could be. But how often do we get to practice it? How often do we get to step into a space where socialist principles shape the ways we work, play, learn, care, and make decisions together? In the grind of daily life—under capitalism, with its isolations and exploitations—it’s easy to feel that our socialism is just an overlay on the same old structures, rather than a lived alternative.

This is where the Communitarium Project comes in. It’s an experiment—a tentative, provisional attempt to carve out spaces (starting online) where we can build the kinds of relationships, practices, and habits that sustain a socialist life. Not just moments of activism, not just communities of interest, but environments where we can engage in the full scope of daily relations and conviviality.

What would such a space look like? For one thing, it would foster mutual support and respect. This isn’t about imposing a rigid code of conduct or performing solidarity as a ritual. It’s about building relationships that are robust enough to hold the weight of honest conflict, disagreement, and growth. It’s about ensuring that everyone in the community has what they need to participate fully, whether that means material resources, emotional support, or simply the sense of being genuinely welcomed.

It would also be a place for communal deliberation and education. Too often, socialist groups replicate the structures of the wider world, with a small cadre of the knowledgeable or charismatic setting the agenda while the rest of us follow along. To live socialism is to treat education as a mutual process, where everyone has something to teach and something to learn. And it means making decisions collectively, not just through formal votes but through the ongoing work of understanding each other’s perspectives and finding common ground.

Perhaps most importantly, it would be a space for collective action that doesn’t just happen in bursts—a protest here, a campaign there—but as a continuous way of relating to the world. This doesn’t mean doing everything together, all the time. It means gradually coming to constitute an “us” about which it is reasonable to ask, “What can we do?” instead of the daunting default most of us face when confronted with problems in the world: “What can I do?” It means knowing that you’re part of a collective effort to improve the world, and that your individual actions are woven into a larger fabric of solidarity.

And while the project might begin in the digital realm, it can’t remain there. Connectedness to other communities and to the physical world is essential. A truly socialist life doesn’t see the online and offline as separate domains but as interconnected spaces where relationships and actions flow seamlessly.

This is the vision I’m working toward with the Communitarium Project. It’s speculative, contingent, and full of unanswered questions. How do we design spaces that encourage rather than constrain? How do we make them open to new people while ensuring they feel genuinely supported? How do we make sure they’re fun, nourishing, and life-giving—not just another obligation on the to-do list?

At the moment, the Communitarium Project is just me talking about these ideas and a “ghost town” of a self-hosted, online website cobbled together from available open source applications. Bearing in mind that, in many ways, I don't really know what I'm doing, I believe that users who would like to discuss the Communitarium Project with me may join the Matrix room I've set up for that purpose at https://matrix.to/#/#Introduction:communitarium.org. It won’t actually exist until a community coalesces around the mission of bringing it into existence. But I believe that if we’re serious about socialism as a way of life, not just a political program, we have to start trying. The Communitarium Project is one small step in that direction. If you’re reading this, maybe it’s a step you’d like to take, too.

#TheCommunitariumProject #DSA

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I am a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). I follow its activities, read its publications, and support its efforts for a more equitable and just society. However, I remain a “paper member,” abstaining from direct involvement in the campaigns and organizing work that define so much of DSA’s current activity. My wife, in contrast, is deeply involved with NYDSA, contributing to the ecosocialists working group, advocating for the NY Build Public Renewables Act, and serving on organizing committees. Her commitment, and that of her comrades, is extraordinary, and I deeply respect their efforts. Yet I choose not to join them, and this essay aims to explain why.

The issue is not a lack of belief in DSA's values or its goals. I fully support the fight for economic justice, public ownership, ecological sustainability, and the radical transformation of our social and political systems. Rather, my reluctance to engage stems from a broader critique of contemporary activism and the limitations of focusing on isolated policy victories and candidates. I worry that these efforts, however commendable, operate within a sociopolitical context that makes them inherently fragile, reversible, and limited in their potential to inspire deep, systemic change.

The Limits of “Meeting People Where They Live”

In my blog post Breaking Free: Why 21st Century Activism Can't Just Meet People Where They Live I argued that contemporary activism often falls into the trap of meeting people on the terms set by the current system, thereby reinforcing the very frameworks it seeks to challenge. This is the crux of my concern with many of DSA’s campaigns: they operate within a political, cultural, and economic environment dominated by possessive individualism, market logic, and neoliberal ideology. By pursuing victories within this context, we end up playing by the rules of a game designed to confine us to small, incremental changes that the system can easily absorb, co-opt, or roll back.

DSA’s approach, while strategically savvy, often seeks to appeal to voters, legislators, and other power structures “where they are” rather than seeking to radically transform the broader interpretive frameworks that shape our understanding of society and economics. For instance, the campaign to pass the NY Build Public Renewables Act is laudable in its pursuit of expanding public ownership in the energy sector. However, the success of such campaigns is contingent on framing them in terms that are palatable within the current market-centric, growth-oriented paradigm. This framing risks reinforcing the idea that public ownership is merely a pragmatic, market-compatible option rather than an expression of a fundamentally different way of organizing our social and economic life.

In this way, activism that focuses primarily on policy wins operates in a fragmented fashion, addressing symptoms without transforming the underlying “soil” from which these symptoms arise. The result is a continuous game of Whac-a-Mole, where victories are celebrated, but their effects are limited by the cultural and ideological terrain that remains largely unchallenged. The broader social consciousness continues to be shaped by a market-oriented, individualistic framework that constrains the potential for these policy gains to grow into a truly transformative movement.

The Need for a New Sociopolitical Soil

The series of posts introducing the Communitarium Project (Part 1, Part II, Part III, Part IV) outlines the necessity of cultivating new interpretive frameworks—ones that foreground cooperation, mutual aid, and communal responsibility while rejecting the reductive individualism and commodification that define our current era. The problem with much of today’s activism, including the work of groups like DSA, is that it too often focuses on advocating for changes within the existing system without sufficiently challenging the interpretive frameworks that sustain it. It’s not that these policy victories are unimportant; it’s that they are unlikely to foster the kind of radical transformation we need unless they are part of a broader cultural shift.

The Communitarium Project proposes that what we lack is not just new policies but new ways of understanding and engaging with the world—what I have referred to as the creation of a new “sociopolitical soil.” This soil involves reshaping how people conceive of themselves, their communities, and their relationship to the broader world. It entails moving beyond meeting people “where they live” in their existing frameworks and instead inviting them to participate in the development of alternative ways of living, thinking, and interacting.

Without this deeper cultural groundwork, efforts like those of DSA, while important, risk being diluted or absorbed by the prevailing systems of power. They remain isolated patches of resistance in a landscape that continues to prioritize market logic, individual competition, and private ownership. The focus on securing individual policy victories, while necessary in the short term, lacks the capacity to nourish the emergence of a new collective consciousness capable of sustaining more profound, lasting change.

Why I Remain a Paper Member

I remain a paper member of DSA not out of apathy, but because I believe that my contributions might be better directed toward cultivating the interpretive frameworks that can make deeper, systemic change possible. The real challenge lies not just in winning policy battles, but in fostering a cultural transformation that shifts the focus from individual advancement to collective well-being, from market transactions to communal deliberation, and from isolated policy interventions to systemic reorganization.

The Communitarium Project represents one attempt to engage with this deeper work. It seeks to explore new forms of community, new modes of knowledge-sharing, and new ways of thinking about value that transcend the reductive frameworks of possessive individualism and commodification. It aims to create spaces where schmooze-level interactions—those everyday processes of negotiation, meaning-making, and community-building—can flourish outside the confines of market logic.

My wife and her comrades within the DSA are doing crucial work, and I have immense respect for their dedication and accomplishments. Yet, I fear that without a broader cultural movement that challenges the interpretive frameworks of our society, these efforts will remain precarious and easily reversed. This is why I choose to remain on the sidelines of direct activism, focusing instead on what I see as the foundational task: building the sociopolitical soil in which true transformative change can take root.

The Path Forward

This is not to say that policy advocacy is pointless. It is to argue that, in the absence of a broader cultural shift, policy victories will struggle to endure and multiply. We need both: immediate, tangible wins that improve lives and a long-term project of reshaping the interpretive frameworks that govern our collective existence. I support DSA in its efforts, but I believe the time has come to expand our focus, to build spaces where new ideas can take hold, and to encourage the development of a collective consciousness that values cooperation, mutual aid, and ecological stewardship over market-driven competition. We need to invent new forms of organizing to meet the unique challenges we face in the rapidly transforming landscape of the 21st century.

My paper membership, then, is not a rejection of activism but a call for a deeper engagement—a call to break free from the game of Whac-a-Mole and to cultivate the cultural and ideological conditions that can support a more profound transformation of our society. This is the work I believe must be done if we are to move beyond the isolated, temporary victories of the present and build a future where communal values can truly flourish

#DSA #SeizeTheMeansOfCommunity

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Breaking Free: Why 21st Century Activism Can’t Just Meet People Where They Live

The framed comic on my wall, titled Trippy from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, sums up a frustrating paradox that I’ve seen in progressive activism over the last few decades. It shows a character telling comrades: “Imagine you can share information instantaneously with fellow travelers around the world but you can only organize activism by sending your information to a large multinational corporation in a way that makes them rich.” One comrade replies, “Whoaaa, trippy!”

It's a humorous yet bitter observation of how modern activism has become entangled with the very systems we aim to overthrow. In the real world, when my wife raised this very concern to a comrade in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), they gave a standard reply: “You have to meet the people where they live.” This answer missed a vital point—the goal of any socialist movement is not just to meet people where they live but to help create a better, freer, and more equitable place for them to live.

Complicity with Surveillance Capitalism: A Self-Negating Trap

It’s hard to ignore the fact that progressive movements, despite their critical rhetoric, rely on the same capitalist and surveillance-driven platforms that actively subvert their goals. Platforms like Google, Facebook, The Communication Silo Formerly Named Twitter, and Instagram—behemoths of surveillance capitalism—become the very spaces where activism happens. These corporations profit from our clicks, likes, and shares, capturing our data and feeding it into systems of control that profit from inequality, exploitation, and surveillance.

This ongoing reliance on corporate-owned platforms represents a deep contradiction in our movements. By using these tools, we are feeding the beast—the tech giants profiting from our data, monetizing our activism, and undermining the very causes we fight for. In a real sense, we've become complicit in our own subjugation, ceding our autonomy, values, and privacy to the very corporations that reinforce the inequalities we seek to dismantle.

The comic is funny because it’s true. But the joke is on us—especially if we shrug off this reality as something we just have to accept.

“Meeting People Where They Live” vs. Offering a New Place to Live

The phrase “you have to meet people where they live” has been an all-too-convenient defense for this complicity. But this outlook only reinforces the status quo. Shouldn’t a genuinely radical movement—especially a socialist one—work toward building new spaces where people can live, organize, and act outside of these exploitative systems?

Socialist movements throughout history didn’t merely meet people in existing power structures—they created new models of organization, new forms of cooperation, and new spaces for living and working together. From cooperatives to unions, the goal has always been to build alternatives to the capitalist way of life. Why, then, should we treat digital space any differently?

The digital world has become a critical battleground, and by continuing to rely on capitalist platforms for our organizing, we risk undermining our goals before we even begin. The excuse that people are already on these platforms only feeds into the idea that we are powerless to change the conditions of where we live and organize. But this isn’t true—we can build new spaces.

Technofeudalism and the Trap of Corporate Platforms

Yannis Varoufakis, in his book TechnoFeudalism, describes how modern capitalism is giving way to a form of technofeudalism—a system where corporate digital platforms exercise feudal control over digital territories. We are the serfs, compelled to labor on these platforms, producing content (and data) that enriches our tech overlords. Activists, by organizing through Google, Facebook or Twitter, are trapped in this feudal relationship, where every action feeds into the extraction machine.

Corey Doctorow calls this process the “enshittification” of the internet, where platforms begin by serving users and then gradually pivot toward exploiting them as they consolidate power. Ben Tarnoff argues that the internet has been captured by private interests, and calls for public ownership of digital infrastructure—an internet for the people, rather than the corporations.

These critiques point to a central problem: relying on corporate platforms is not neutral. It perpetuates the very systems of inequality and control that we are fighting against. Every document, every post, every message, and every organizing effort that goes through these systems feeds the machine, cementing the power of the techno-feudal lords.

A New Vision: Building the Communitarium

What if, instead of capitulating to the logic of these platforms, we started to build new digital spaces rooted in the values of socialism, mutual aid, and collective ownership? What if our movements didn’t just aim to “meet people where they live” but actively created new, cooperative digital environments where we can live, work, and organize together?

This is where the concept of the Communitarium comes into play. We’ve been discussing the idea of building community-owned, federated online platforms that align with anti-capitalist values. These would be spaces where people can communicate, deliberate, celebrate, commemorate and act without feeding the data-extractive engines of tech giants. Instead of funneling our organizing efforts through Google, Facebook or Instagram, we could build open source, decentralized, user-owned platforms where privacy, transparency, and collective decision-making are built into the infrastructure.

Communitaria would allow for distributed, collective governance, transparency among communities, and peer-to-peer cooperation. These platforms would allow movements to organize outside the constraints of corporate control, and would focus on mutual aid, collective ownership and privacy—fundamental tenets of a socialist lifestyle. In effect, they could function as online prototypes of modes of organization which could then be extended (with effort) into the real world.

A 21st-Century Activism for a Post-Capitalist Future

To build an effective socialist movement for the 21st century, we need to stop relying on the tools of our oppressors. The vision of the Communitarium movement isn’t just about creating a new app or platform—it’s about building a new way of organizing, communicating, and living in the digital age. It’s about giving people a new place and new ways to live, in both a literal and digital sense.

We cannot keep organizing through the tools of surveillance capitalism if we want to build a post-capitalist future. We must take control of the infrastructure itself—through open-source, community-run platforms. This is not just about technical solutions, but about aligning our methods of organizing with our values and principles.

It’s time to stop meeting people where they live—and start building new places to live.

Conclusion: From Trippy Comics to Real Change

The cartoon on my wall is a reminder that the paradoxes of our current activism are more absurd than they should be. We are at a point where it’s possible to build new digital spaces, free from the corporate stranglehold of tech giants. The Communitarium movement is one such path forward—a way to resist the forces of technofeudalism and surveillance capitalism, while providing people with autonomous, self-governed spaces that reflect the values of solidarity, mutual aid, and collective ownership.

It’s time to confront the uncomfortable truth: as long as we rely on corporate platforms, our activism is compromised and limited. The future of our movements depends on creating new spaces for organizing, free from the exploitation of surveillance capitalism. It’s time to build the digital commons that our movements deserve.

#DSA #TheCommunitariumProject

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