Why Redefine Socialism?
Motivations for a Behavioral and Ethos-Oriented Turn
1. Traditional socialism lacks a theory of sociality
Classical socialism—especially in its Marxist and state-centered variants—tends to treat sociality as either:
- a derivative of economic conditions, or
- something that will naturally emerge once class antagonisms are resolved.
But our project insists that sociality is not a byproduct—it is the substrate. Without an account of how meaning, solidarity, and coordination are produced in real-time ensembles of interaction, socialism lacks the tools to build or maintain a genuinely collective life.
Hence the shift: socialism must be defined by its capacity to cultivate the conditions of shared social meaning, not just economic redistribution.
2. Political structures without behavioral infrastructure collapse or calcify
We've noted that socialism, when pursued primarily through political means (e.g., parties, states, revolutions), has repeatedly suffered:
- Bureaucratization (technocratic or authoritarian drift)
- Alienation (between people and the very institutions meant to represent them)
- Stagnation (due to insufficient feedback from lived communal practice)
In each case, mortal computation fails: the social systems can no longer adapt to the complexity of lived experience, because no real deliberative substrate exists.
Even when socialism secures political victories—whether in legislation, governance, or electoral representation—these gains often prove fragile. In a socio-political landscape still dominated by fragmented, commodified, and idiotized sociality, shifts in belief and conviction can rapidly erode hard-won progress. Without cultivating a transformed social substrate capable of sustaining and defending these changes, purely political gains are too easily undone.
Thus, we must shift the focus to behavioral coordination and interpretable social practices at the schmooze level—not as “soft infrastructure,” but as foundational.
3. The erosion of community is the deeper crisis
Modern capitalism has not merely privatized goods—it has enclosed and fracked the very environments of community, hollowing out the schmooze-level processes through which humans co-create shared sense, normativity, and care.
This enclosure has produced:
- Widespread loneliness, anxiety, and deaths of despair
- The rise of identity as consumption, not co-production
- A pervasive inability to coordinate, even around shared interests
Any meaningful socialism must address this directly—not just through programmatic policy, but by rebuilding the capacity for shared life.
4. Interpretive and epistemic enclosures have become central tools of power
Our framework has emphasized that:
- Power is exercised through control of interpretive frameworks
- Systems of diagnostic categories, algorithms, bureaucracies, and economic abstractions now shape what counts as real, legible and noticeable—not just who gets what
This means socialism must go beyond redistribution. It must:
- Contest epistemic hegemony
- Rebuild commons of interpretation
- Enable polycentric deliberation and contested meaning
Therefore, socialism must be understood as a way of life capable of resisting and replacing dominant frame systems—not merely as economic reorganization.
5. A socialism that cannot live before it wins will never win
Socialist theory has too often imagined transformation as something that will occur after seizing power. But waiting until “after the revolution” to begin building egalitarian, mutualist, meaningful ways of living:
- Prevents experimentation
- Narrows appeal
- Replicates the very alienation it seeks to overcome
We’ve been working from the idea that real socialism must be prefigurative in its approach—able to live and adapt now, in fragments and formations that demonstrate its value long before they command state power.
Hence, a socialism that begins in ethos, practice, and ensemble, not just party or program.
6. The unit of analysis must shift from the individual to the ensemble
Modern liberalism, and even much of left theory, retains the individual as the basic ontological and epistemic unit. But this leaves it vulnerable to:
- Capitalism’s exploitation of the isolated, commodified self
- Misrecognition of how deliberation, identity, and cognition are ensemble phenomena
- The reduction of “solidarity” to altruism, rather than co-constituted interest
Our framework proposes that:
- Human social ensembles are Kantian wholes
- Meaning, purpose, and coordination emerge relationally
- The “self” is adjustable and partially distributed
This shift mandates a socialism defined in terms of interpersonal infrastructure, not just class allegiance or programmatic affinity.
7. Political ideologies have become disembedded from lived reality
Today’s political life (including on the Left) often operates in abstract, symbolic registers:
- Discourse circulates online, detached from everyday life
- Organizations recruit identities but fail to sustain sociality
- Tactical victories are disconnected from habitable alternatives
The result is a spectacle of politics without embedded social practice.
A socialism worthy of the name must re-embed itself in habitable, quotidian, and meaning-generative social formations.
8. The Communitarium Project requires a foundational ethos, not a doctrinal platform
As we’ve developed the Communitarium Project, it has become clear that:
- The basis of resistance is ensemble-embedded cognition and care
- What is needed is not doctrinal agreement, but a shared infrastructure for living together meaningfully
This requires:
- A political economy of meaning, purpose, and interpretability
- A commitment to ecological evaluation of practices
- An emphasis on adaptive, federated mutualism
Socialism, in this sense, is not an ideology to be imposed but an ethos to be grown.
Coda: Expanding the scope of “socialist”
Under an ethos-oriented definition, “socialist” no longer applies only to economic arrangements, political programs, or party labels. It becomes a descriptor for any domain—value and trading relationships, modes of social interaction, understandings of kinship, forms of art, approaches to education, systems of care, technological development, and more—where the relational and interpretive infrastructure reflects the principles of shared life.
The point is not that such applications are already well established—they are not—but that our redefinition makes it possible to meaningfully apply the adjective “socialist” in domains where it has rarely been used. Whether in the design of cooperative economic arrangements, the cultivation of egalitarian learning environments, or the creation of collaborative tools and platforms, “socialist” should mark the presence of practices that prioritize shared meaning, mutual obligation, and ensemble-based creativity over commodification and extraction. In this way, the scope of the term expands to encompass the full range of human cooperative activity.
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