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.

#TheCommunitariumProject #TheMamdaniMovement #DSA

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The Mamdani Mo(ve)ment” – Post #2

The promise of Mamdani’s campaign is not a rescue. It is an invitation—to join in an ongoing, collaborative reconstruction of the political life of this city.

Previous post in the series:

The Mamdani Mo(ve)ment” – Post #1: Zohran Mamdani as DSA in the Flesh: Disindividuated Politics, Foundational Justice, and the Power of Sincerity

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign has done more than put a socialist on the brink of the mayor’s office. It has revealed the latent presence of something larger: a city-wide appetite for transformation, voiced by thousands who canvassed, organized, and voted—not just for a candidate, but for a different way of living together.

If Mamdani wins, his victory will not be the culmination of that movement, but the beginning of a new, more demanding phase.

Because Mamdani cannot save New York.

But he can help New York save itself—if we, the people who made his victory possible, understand that this is not a moment to stand back and hope. It is a moment to step forward and stay in motion—to enter into informal but sustained collaboration with a mayor who shares our values, and who depends on our ongoing presence to make them real.

We cannot treat politics as a matter of choosing the right person and waiting. We have to treat it as an enduring relationship—between elected officials and the public, yes, but also among ourselves, as neighbors and co-creators of the city we want to inhabit. Mamdani’s platform is a point of departure, not a destination. He will need help to realize it—help not just in the form of policy advice or advocacy, but in the form of a mobilized, federated, citizen-driven civic presence that can bring social and political pressure to bear in real time.

That means groups of ordinary people—not as lobbyists, not as NGOs, not as “stakeholders,” but as citizens—must become visible and consequential to the political process in new ways. We must show up in formats the system is not built to expect: not occasional protestors or passive constituents, but persistent ensembles of deliberating, collaborating, justice-seeking people.

We need a civic infrastructure that supports that kind of presence—an ecosystem of small, self-directed, self-governing communities that share political intention, moral vision, and concrete practices. These communities will not be arms of city hall, nor will they be traditional political organizations. They will be something looser, deeper, and more durable: places where the social and the political are no longer kept apart.

Places where people who exchange recipes also organize to end food deserts. Where transit riders discuss land use and urban form. Where book clubs become working groups. Where people talk, argue, analyze, and act. Not once, but week after week. Not as a campaign, but as a way of life.

To do this, we need tools: open-source platforms for discussion, collaboration, and publishing; deliberation forums that support iterative decision-making; shared archives of thought, analysis, and plans. But tools alone won’t do it. What’s needed is a shift in posture—from seeing ourselves as supporters of a campaign to seeing ourselves as co-stewards of a city in flux, building with and beyond the Mamdani administration the structures that will let justice take root.

This is not about perfection. It's about presence. About showing up, regularly, in places where our collective voice is legible—to ourselves, to each other, and to those in office.

Mamdani’s mayoralty, should it come, will not be a magic wand. But it can be a scaffolding. It can be the formal opening of a political partnership with the city’s people—so long as we stay in the room.

We cannot expect one man to transmute our hopes into a new city. But we can let the fire he lit change the way we treat each other—and the way we show up in public. If we act now—carefully, joyfully, together—we may find ourselves building the kind of New York that no administration could ever deliver alone.

#TheCommunitariumProject #TheMamdaniMovement

More posts in the series:

The Mamdani Mo(ve)ment – Post #1: Zohran Mamdani as DSA in the Flesh: Disindividuated Politics, Foundational Justice, and the Power of Sincerity

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The Mamdani Mo(ve)ment – Post #1

I want to explore—and ultimately defend—a line of thinking that may serve both as a response to skeptics who doubt Zohran Mamdani’s capacity to follow through on his political commitments and as an explanation to the uninitiated for how he has already achieved what he has.

In short: Mamdani has been telling us all along how he intended to do what he’s now doing—but his audience, in many cases, wasn’t the general public. It was the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the organization to which he has long belonged and which he credits not merely as his support base, but as the precondition of his political possibility.

There are recorded moments throughout his early political career where Mamdani clearly states: I am only possible because of DSA. He frames his own activity not as a heroic exception or as personal genius, but as a manifestation of DSA’s collective program and organizing structure. He argues, for instance, that attacks on him personally are less effective because he is not merely a charismatic individual or a vulnerable political actor. He is part of a collective body—and is seen to be part of it. His political persona is embedded within a shared infrastructure.

I want to go further. Mamdani has acted as if he were a lens onto DSA. But since most of the public, in our increasingly parasocial world, pays more attention to the lens than to what it is focused on, he has effectively become “DSA in the flesh.” To borrow from early Christian rhetoric, he has become a kind of incarnation—a visible, tangible, and rhetorically savvy mediator between:

• the world that does not understand or recognize DSA, and
  
• the world DSA is trying to build.

He is not merely articulating ideas. He is enacting a strategy of disindividuation, in which political speech and action are never framed as personal expressions, but as the result of collective deliberation and organizing. He continually redirects questions from reporters—questions often framed in the idiom of individual ambition or liberal self-making—and turns them toward collective stakes, shared conditions, and systemic causes. In doing so, he challenges what might be called idiotism: the isolationist logic of possessive individualism built into the default grammar of political discourse.

But there is another dimension to Mamdani’s political appeal—one that helps explain why this strategy has worked where others have floundered. It is not just that Mamdani is aligned with a powerful organization, or that he deploys strategic messaging more skillfully than his peers. It is that he is widely and deeply perceived as sincere.

An old, multiply-attributed adage holds: “The main thing is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” But Mamdani has found a more direct path to political effectiveness. He doesn’t perform sincerity; he embodies it. Everyone who knows him—or watches him closely—believes him to be sincere. His consistency, humility, clarity of purpose, and refusal to posture all reinforce a basic sense that what you see is what he believes. And in a political world saturated with cynicism and performativity, this perceived sincerity is itself a radical form of credibility.

And so while Mamdani’s political strategy is operational, it is not coldly tactical. His effectiveness derives from the trust he inspires among those who have long felt excluded from power—not just because he promises to represent them, but because he seems to already be of them.

When he proposes legislation, he is not simply putting forward a bill; he is deploying a political test. A Mamdani bill is never just a policy idea. It is also an invitation to collective visibility—a chance for a constituency long treated as marginal to assert its centrality.

Take, for example, a bill that would tax the top 1% of income earners—something that would require implementation at the state level. If Governor Hochul is weighing whether to veto such a bill, she is not just doing policy math. She is being asked to consider whether doing so will trigger a groundswell of opposition from people who are increasingly seen as the true stewards of the city—the ones who build it, clean it, transport it, teach it, cook for it, care for it, and hold it together.

The supporters Mamdani has coalesced are not just numerous—they are morally and materially foundational. They are seen to represent New York’s everyday life and long-term interest in a way that property developers and managerial elites do not. And so Mamdani’s strength comes not simply from organized force, but from a growing recognition that his politics are anchored in justice, equity, and authentic representation.

This is what differentiates his politics. While traditional electeds operate in the performative register of individual persuasion or technocratic competence, Mamdani operates in a register of emergent legitimacy. His proposals are not just backed by infrastructure—they are backed by a rising sense that the people he speaks for are the city’s true body politic, and that those who oppose him are not just obstructing progress but sustaining an illegitimate status quo.

This is the “how he will do it” that critics and observers often miss. Mamdani is not betting on institutional goodwill. He is not just wielding numbers. He is advancing a reconstitution of the political imagination—one that says the right to shape the city belongs not to those who own the most of it, but to those without whom it cannot function.

In this way, his politics exemplify one of the core principles animating the Communitarium Project:

A proposal backed by organized popular power cannot be evaluated solely on its perceived ideological merits or messaging. It must be evaluated in terms of its capacity to mobilize collective action and its representational legitimacy among those who materially sustain the world in question.

Mamdani doesn’t need to hold executive power to influence executive decisions. What he wields is a politics of foundational justice—and he does so as a node in a living, distributed, and increasingly visible political body.

This is what makes him legible—both as a singular figure and as a prototype of what a post-individualist politics might look like. Not a man with a platform. A membrane between worlds. A vector of activation. A politician who understands himself not as the source of politics, but as its relay—and whose legitimacy comes not just from movement support, but from embodying the right of the many to reclaim the city they keep alive.

#TheCommunitariumProject #TheMamdaniMovement #DSA

More posts in this series:

The Mamdani Mo(ve)ment – Post #2: Zohran Mamdani Won’t Save New York—But He Can Help New York Save Itself

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