Lowering the Threshold: Socialism Begins with Shared Life, Not Just Shared Demands
Too often, socialism is framed as a political identity one must adopt in order to access deeper forms of solidarity. But many people who might be drawn to socialist values are never offered a meaningful, low-barrier path into lived participation. Building a broader movement means making socialism something people can practice before they’re asked to profess.
This is not a call to replace or abandon any part of how DSA currently functions. On the contrary: we are advocating for an expansion of DSA’s self-understanding and activity, one that makes its most powerful internal affordances—collective deliberation, mutuality, democratic coordination—more available to people outside its formal boundaries. The goal is not revision or retreat, but refinement, packaging, and outward diffusion.
When Zohran Mamdani brought “socialism” into mainstream New York politics, he didn’t just propose a new set of policies. He shifted the register in which socialism could be understood—not as an ideology to adopt or to fear, but as a way of showing up, of caring for neighbors, of being accountable, joyful, and resolute. As I argued in Zohran Mamdani Won’t Save New York, but He Can Help New York Save Itself, he opened a cultural crack that lets people imagine socialism differently—not as a political philosophy, but as a presence.
But that crack won’t widen unless we seize the opportunity it presents.
And to do that, we need to radically reframe the threshold of entry.
Socialism as Practice, Not Password
DSA, to its credit, has cultivated an internal world that reflects socialist values: collective deliberation, shared labor, mutuality, and democratic coordination. But to access that internal world, one must typically start with political alignment—an identification that many people are not yet prepared (or positioned) to adopt.
This means that what’s most precious—the lived experience of socialist life—is functionally gated by political commitment.
But what if we flipped that model?
In Socialism Is a Way of Doing Things Together I made the case that socialism should not be offered primarily as a policy platform or a critique of capitalism. It should be a way of relating and acting together, visible and available before it is named. A thing you do, not just a thing you believe.
Organizing Isn’t About Winning
That’s why it matters to recognize something many organizers already know in their bones: Winning Is Not the Purpose of Organizing
Yes, we fight to win concrete things—housing protections, labor rights, and public infrastructures that can serve as the basis for shared life, or be reclaimed as part of the commons, resisting its ongoing erosion by hegemonic forces.
We organize to build new modes of life. We organize to create solidarities where none existed, to cultivate agency where there was resignation, and to construct durable ensembles capable of meaning-making, care, and resistance. Whether the campaign fails or succeeds, the ensemble remains—if we've done the real work.
This is why starting with lived socialist practice—regardless of political identity—matters so much. Because the relational fabric is the movement. Because people become socialists by doing socialism, not just by arguing for it.
Communitaria: Platforms for Living Socialism Before Naming It
The question, then, is how to invite people into that practice.
That’s where what we are calling communitaria come in—socialist community media platforms designed not to proclaim socialism but to enable it to be built and discovered. These are not branding vehicles or propaganda outlets, but low-barrier, participatory habitats: digital spaces that embody a socialist ethos—even if they are not called “socialist”—that function more like third places, streetcorners, or kitchen tables than campaigns or conferences, and that are constantly oriented toward enabling consequences beyond the digital world.
These platforms are being designed to reflect the values they aim to cultivate: built on free and open-source software, community-hosted and maintained, and federated rather than centralized. This ensures that the infrastructure itself resists enclosure and reinforces shared ownership, autonomy, and resilience.
While communitaria place no ideological or political requirements on participation, they are designed to afford political capacity. They provide tools and environments that support fact-gathering, reporting, joint document production, deliberation, responsibility allocation, resource management, publishing, and event planning. In other words, they make ad hoc political responsiveness easy and natural, rooted in shared practice rather than doctrinal allegiance.
The binding commitment is not to a party line, but to an ethos of collective life—an evolving culture of mutual aid, co-creation, and shared responsibility. Taken as a whole, this ethos constitutes a socialist way of living together—even for those who have not (yet) named it as such.
Communitaria let people enter into shared rhythms, without having to clear ideological gates. They prioritize coordination over conversion. They offer people the chance to build, discuss, disagree, contribute—and in doing so, begin to live another kind of life.
Culture Before Commitment
When people begin to experience socialism as a culture—as a viable, compelling, generative way of life—they become more likely to defend it, organize for it, and name it.
In a limited, ad hoc, and unsystematic way, DSA has already developed the early affordances of this kind of cultural infrastructure—spaces where people can practice mutuality, shared decision-making, and political imagination. The task now is to recognize that this is a distinct and transferable capacity: one that needs to be clarified, refined, and extended beyond the organization’s internal life.
What we’re proposing is the deliberate creation of an online test kitchen—a limited but generative environment in which people can workshop the attitudes, practices, and vocabularies of collective life. The goal is not containment, but diffusion: to develop forms of solidarity and shared meaning that can be taken up, adapted, and lived far beyond the bounds of DSA itself.
The problem isn’t that socialism is too radical. It’s that most people have no way to try it before they’re asked to buy in. The threshold is too high. And the benefits are obscured behind abstractions.
Let’s make the first experience one of mutual support—not a test of ideological readiness, but a shared search for where one might meaningfully land.
Because socialism doesn’t start when we win. It starts when we build something together that’s worth keeping, whether the campaign succeeds or not.
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