Seize the Means of Community

SeizeTheMeansOfCommunity

Toward a Communal Commentary on the Raw Material of Shared Life
A perspective on the Communitarium Project

“In the absence of God, we found the schmooze.”
— Fragment from the Book of No One

The Communitarium and the Hunger for Shared Meaning

What if the future of political life doesn't begin with a manifesto, a blueprint, or a charismatic leader—but with a comment thread?

What if the deepest antidote to social unraveling isn’t more certainty, or more ideology, but better conversations—and better tools to sustain them?

The Communitarium Project was born from a recognition: that under technofeudal conditions, meaning itself is being enclosed. Public reason collapses into algorithmic bait. Common speech is flattened into signal. Shared language is exhausted by overuse, drained of resonance.

But the problem isn’t just political. It’s ontological. What’s at stake is our ability to interpret the world together, to live inside something like a shared reality. And what the Communitarium sets out to build—provisionally, awkwardly, experimentally—is a space in which that shared interpretation can begin again.

Not a new gospel.
A new Talmud.

What Is a Talmud (and Why Might We Need One)?

The Talmud is not a creed. It does not offer a smooth surface of agreement. It is layered, recursive, polyphonic—a living archive of commentary, dispute, and careful memory. Its power lies not in answers, but in the rigor of the questions, the intensity of attention, the generosity of argument.

It is a space where disagreement lives without rupture.
Where interpretation multiplies instead of narrows.
Where community forms not around belief, but around the shared labor of making meaning.

This is what we need now—not because we share a God, but because we do not.
Because in the absence of fixed authority, shared attention is what we have left.

So What’s the Torah?

If the Communitarium is a space of collective commentary, what are we commenting on?

There is no one text. But here are some candidates:

  • The world itself—understood not as raw data, but as already interpreted, already relational, already meaningful to someone.
  • The language we’ve inherited—thick with history, conflict, poetry, and pain.
  • The structures of everyday life—the schmooze-level negotiations where power, care, justice, and recognition actually play out.
  • The wreckage of past revolutions and the whispers of future ones.
  • The multiplicity of selves—improvising, co-invoking, always half-made.

In truth, the Torah we comment on is whatever insists that it be interpreted together.
Whatever resists solitude.
Whatever demands co-presence.

A Theology Without God

To call this project sacred is not to smuggle in the divine. It is to recognize that some things are treated as sacred because we refuse to reduce them—because we gather around them, argue over them, pass them on.

The Communitarium has no final vocabulary. No infallible authority. No orthodoxy.

What it has—what it protects—is the possibility of shared interpretation.
The infrastructure of collective intelligibility.
The right to dwell inside problems without closure.

This is not a faith.
It is a practice.
A refusal to let meaning be privatized, extracted, or algorithmically compressed.
A conviction that some forms of speech—slow, dialogic, generous—are what hold the world together.

From Commentary to Community

A Talmud for atheists is not a contradiction. It is an aspiration.

It suggests that in the absence of divine commandments, we construct obligations through dialogue.
That without prophecy, we remember carefully.
That where politics fails to deliver liberation, we create the infrastructures of mutual intelligibility—not as a workaround, but as a ground zero for transformation.

To build the Communitarium is to practice sacred world-making without metaphysical guarantees.
It is to hold open the space where difference can become dialogue, where language can become shelter, and where community can become the site of co-created meaning.

Closing Invocation

Let us write together.
Let us disagree well, remember slowly, and speak with an ear for what might be heard.

Let us treat language not as spectacle or signal, but as shared labor.

Let us build tools for commentary, for co-interpretation, for schmooze—not for the gods, but for each other.

Let us seize the means of community.
And let that be holy enough.

#SeizeTheMeansOfCommunity #CommunitariumProject

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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

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The following, first posted in May of 2022 to a now abandoned blog, was originally intended to be a thread on Mastodon. But, since I didn't yet fully understand how posting to Mastodon worked, I managed to screw up the sequence by deleting and re-drafting one of the posts. This article is where I first started writing about what I now call the Communitarium Project. Here is the sequence as it was originally intended:

  • Since the late 19th century the world has seen several threats to the continued existence of global civilization. Two of these were world wars, which took terrible tolls but did not end global civilization. The crypto-theologically inclined, believing in inexorable historical progress, have tended to conclude that the world, overall and despite some glitches, is in most ways better than it was. This tends to be the belief of economists and the privileged. Others have doubts.

  • Another big threat to the continued existence of global civilization has been nuclear conflict. It has been (indefinitely) avertable and (so far) averted because a relatively small number of people have managed to exercise enough restraint. The crypto-theologically inclined have concluded (emotionally, if not propositionally) that nuclear catastrophe is no longer a significant prospect.

  • The current most urgent threat is the one that is most directly enmeshed with physical, chemical and biological processes. It will be resolved not just with changes in laws and attitudes but will require massive, rapid changes in the way all of us interact with the physical world we inhabit.

  • If we try to meet this threat simply as individuals we will fail. Global civilization will end in the lifetimes of our children, our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren.

  • If we do not urgently address this threat we will not have the time to reap the benefits of any other economic, social or moral improvements we manage to achieve.

  • We need a 21st-century form of revolution... not the 19th-century sort of violent confrontation with power in the streets so much as the organized, mutual, collective undertaking of rapidly examining and altering the values and assumptions that have been inculcated in us, progressively, over centuries, and have rendered us so individualistic that we have lost most of our ability to act communally with solidarity.

  • We need to collectively, deliberately develop forms of community

    • small enough that each member can know and care about each other,
    • purposive enough that its members are motivated to inform themselves and each other about what needs to be done and then organize to do it
    • inter-connected enough that perspectives are not merely local, fit within larger understandings and efforts

This approach doesn't guarantee success but it is our only hope.

#SeizeTheMeansOfCommunity

Here are the original posts as they each appear on Mastodon (but presented in their intended sequence)

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