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from Seize the Means of Community

Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty has become one of those books whose central distinction long ago escaped the book itself. When an organization or institution begins to fail us, we can leave it, or remain and try to change it. Loyalty complicates the relationship between those possibilities by holding exit at bay and giving voice more time and incentive to work.

Exit, voice, loyalty.

The scheme is powerful partly because so much of social life really can be described that way.

But the more I have thought about it, the more I have wondered whether something important happens when the institution itself becomes the object of political action.

Suppose the problem is not that an institution has stopped functioning as it should. Suppose it is functioning more or less as constituted, and the constitution of the institution is precisely what has become unacceptable.

Here I need to be careful about what Hirschman actually means by voice. His definition is very broad: essentially any attempt to change rather than escape an objectionable state of affairs, extending from petition and efforts to change management, to protest, and the mobilization of public opinion. Elsewhere he emphasizes that voice can range from faint complaint to violent protest.

So the problem is not that Hirschman simply rules transformative action out of the category of voice. Some of what I will propose that we call transformation could undoubtedly be described as voice in his terminology. The distinction appears elsewhere, in what the framework is principally trying to explain.

Hirschman repeatedly describes exit and voice as mechanisms of recuperation. The characteristic problem he envisions is deterioration that is remediable: an organization has fallen below its attainable performance and some combination of exit, voice, and loyalty may help get it “back on the track.”

But what happens when getting the institution back on the track is not the objective...because the track itself has become the problem? There seems to be a difference between trying to make an institution behave differently and trying to make a different institutional arrangement possible.

For want of a better word, I will call the latter transformation.

The Institution as an Object of Politics

The possibility is hardly foreign to American political language.

The Declaration of Independence famously says that people possess the right “to alter or to abolish” a form of government that has become destructive, and “to institute new Government.” It is tempting to treat that as the paradigmatic instance of transformation: petition fails, a revolutionary break occurs, and a new political order is founded. But I think that asks the Declaration to establish more than I need from it.

What matters here is the simpler proposition that the institutional order itself can become a legitimate object of political action. Government is not merely something within which politics happens. Its particular organization is contingent enough to be altered, abolished, or replaced. That is already a significant claim.

Modern American political culture commemorates an act of institutional transformation while often treating the institutional results of that transformation as considerably less transformable. We celebrate people who asserted a right to constitute a different order and then conduct much of ordinary politics within a vocabulary in which the inherited constitutional, economic, and organizational architecture has receded toward the status of background reality.

Not entirely, of course. Cooperatives exist. Community land trusts exist. Arguments about economic democracy, corporate power, workplace governance, constitutional reform, and alternative ownership have never disappeared. But they are easily pushed toward the margins of ordinary political debate, while disputes over the operation of familiar institutions occupy the center.

The corporation is largely given; politics concerns its regulation. The privately owned workplace is largely given; politics concerns wages and working conditions. The landlord-tenant relationship is largely given; politics concerns rents and protections.

Politics can therefore become extraordinarily contentious while leaving the organization of the institutions through which the contention occurs comparatively stable.

It is this distinction—not between moderation and militancy, nor quite between voice and something that is not voice, but between recuperating an institutional arrangement and making the arrangement itself politically contingent—that I find difficult to express within the framework as Hirschman develops it.

Hirschman as a Reluctant Ally

Initially, I found this particularly striking because of Hirschman’s own life. He fled Nazi Germany, fought in Spain, participated in the refugee rescue operation organized by Varian Fry in Marseille, and dedicated Exit, Voice, and Loyalty to his brother-in-law Eugenio Colorni, who was killed while participating in the Italian resistance.

My first reaction was almost accusatory. How could a man whose life had included resistance to intolerable political orders construct such an influential account of institutional response without giving transformation a category of its own?

I now think that may be the wrong question. Perhaps Hirschman’s biography does not make the absence anomalous. Perhaps it helps explain it.

Hirschman became one of the great twentieth-century intellectuals of modest possibility: suspicious of grand historical laws, suspicious of predetermined stages, suspicious of political projects confident that they already knew what an entire society ought to become. His temperament was experimental rather than totalizing. He was drawn to partial interventions, unexpected consequences, indirect paths, and possibilities disclosed in practice rather than imposed by blueprint.

There is something almost programmatic in the dedication of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty itself. Colorni, Hirschman writes, taught him about “small ideas” and how they may grow.

Seen that way, the politically salient idea of “transformation” available to him may have looked too much like precisely the thing he distrusted: rupture, comprehensive refounding, a project in which history is divided into before and after, and the new order is expected to emerge from a sufficiently decisive break with the old one.

Hirschman was certainly not unaware of revolutionary politics. He explicitly discusses the revolutionary claim that only sweeping change can release otherwise dormant or repressed social energies. What he does not do in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is make the transformation of the institutional framework itself a distinct object of the recuperative analysis he is constructing.

The interesting question therefore changes. It is no longer: why did Hirschman fail to see transformation? It becomes: did transformation recede from the framework because it had become too closely identified with rupture? That is a much more useful problem.

Hannah Arendt was a contemporary of Hirschman. Her political thought repeatedly returned to beginning, founding, and the human capacity to bring something unprecedented into existence and thus helps keep the larger category visible. But we need not choose between an Arendtian world of founding and a Hirschmanian world of recuperation and incremental adjustment. There may be forms of transformation that do not look much like founding moments at all.

Transformation Without the Grand Rupture

This is where Erik Olin Wright becomes especially useful.

Our political vocabulary is strangely thin between reform and revolution. Reform readily comes to mean making inherited institutions work somewhat differently. Revolution evokes a decisive break in which one order is displaced by another. Wright spent much of his later work trying to describe the enormous territory between them.

His language changed over time, but the central insight persisted: transformation need not depend upon a single revolutionary rupture. Alternative institutions and social relations can be built in the spaces of the existing order; political struggle can alter the conditions under which those alternatives survive and expand; functions can migrate from one kind of institution to another; arrangements that initially appear peripheral can become sufficiently interconnected that the larger ecology begins to change. His later phrase for this was “eroding capitalism.”

The word can sound misleadingly passive, as though capitalism were a shoreline and socialism merely a matter of waiting for the waves. Wright meant something more active. Institutions are built. Political protections are won. Capacities are accumulated. Relationships among institutions change. Activities that once required capitalist forms of organization become possible through other forms.

This is transformation, but it is not the transformation evoked by the Declaration’s revolutionary moment. The Declaration establishes transformability. Wright pluralizes the ways transformation might occur: interstitial revolution. And once the distinction is made, there is something unexpectedly Hirschmanian about Wright’s account.

It is experimental rather than blueprint-driven. It assumes incomplete knowledge. It allows different institutional forms to develop unevenly. It expects unintended consequences. It does not require history to wait for a single moment in which everything can finally be changed at once.

Perhaps the possibility I am trying to add is not the revolutionary opposite of Hirschman after all. Perhaps one route toward it passes through Hirschman’s own possibilism.

When Alternatives Become Consequential

There is an obvious difficulty, however, in talking about erosion this way: Existing power does not simply disappear because alternative institutions become more capable. If alternatives remain small enough, they may be tolerated.

A cooperative, a commons, a community land trust, a participant-governed institution, or an alternative communications network may occupy spaces that do not seriously threaten the prevailing organization of power. If such institutions become consequential enough, the situation changes.

The obvious possibility is confrontation. Property owners, employers, financial institutions, political authorities, or other incumbents may actively resist the transfer of capacities upon which their own power depends.

But confrontation is not the only danger. An alternative can also be absorbed. Its organizational form may survive while its practical function changes. A mutual institution can become increasingly indistinguishable from a conventional firm. A cooperative can survive by adapting itself so thoroughly to competitive pressures that little of its alternative logic remains. A once-participatory institution can professionalize, centralize, and gradually turn its members into clients. An innovation that began by displacing a prevailing institutional relationship can be purchased, incorporated, regulated, or normalized until it reinforces the surrounding order. Absorption may in some respects be the more difficult failure to recognize, because it does not announce itself as defeat.

Hirschman himself provides something suggestive here. Near the end of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, he warns that management can learn to blunt the mechanisms meant to correct it, converting voice from feedback into a mere safety valve through the institutionalization and domestication of dissent. His immediate subject is still organizational recuperation rather than transformation, but the problem has a familiar shape: institutions adapt to the pressures intended to alter them.

This is not an objection that Wright’s idea of erosion can simply dispose of. Nor do I have a general solution.

It does suggest that transformation cannot be measured merely by counting alternative institutions. The question is what relationships and capacities they actually reorganize, whether those changes persist, and what happens as the alternatives become sufficiently consequential to encounter the adaptive capacities of the surrounding order. The problem of transformation therefore remains political all the way down.

The Exit Trap

This brings me back to Hirschman from another direction.

There is a familiar response to criticism of a workplace, country, organization, platform, or economic arrangement:

If you don’t like it, leave.

Hirschman himself gives us a much richer understanding of exit than that slogan does. Indeed, one of the striking features of the book is his insistence that easy exit can sometimes weaken voice by removing precisely the members most likely to press effectively for change.

But the slogan reveals something about the political imagination in which exit can operate. It quietly equates remaining with consent.

You could leave. You have not left. Therefore you have accepted the institution.

The formal availability of exit retroactively launders the arrangement as voluntary.

But the inference works only if another possibility has already disappeared. I may remain precisely because I do not accept the institution as presently constituted. I may remain because leaving would surrender it to those who already control it. I may remain because the people with whom I share the consequences of the institution remain. I may remain because I want, with them, to participate in making it different.

Once transformation becomes thinkable, remaining no longer signifies acceptance. It may signify struggle.

This changes the meaning of voice as well. Voice need not merely seek better performance from an institution whose basic form remains intact. Hirschman’s own definition is broad enough to allow more than that. But once we distinguish recuperation from transformation, we can ask another question about voice: whether it is being used to restore an institutional arrangement or as part of the effort to constitute something different.

That seems particularly important from a socialist perspective. Socialism can easily be translated into a collection of demands concerning what capitalist institutions ought to deliver: higher wages, stronger benefits, public services, progressive taxation, regulation, better elected officials. Many such demands are valuable.

But socialism cannot finally mean that familiar institutions should produce nicer outcomes. At some point it raises institutional questions.

Who owns? Who governs? Who controls investment? Who decides how workplaces operate? Through what forms of association are common needs met? Which capacities are organized commercially, which publicly, which cooperatively, which as commons, and which through institutions we have not yet learned how to build?

Those are questions about the constitution of social life. And perhaps we have been poorly served by a political vocabulary that encourages us to imagine only two ways of reaching them: improve the existing order or overthrow it.

The Means of Transformation

Transformation can be gradual without being merely reformist. Institutions can be built, federated, democratized, displaced, appropriated, hollowed out, superseded, or deprived of functions that migrate elsewhere. Practices can begin inside an existing order and eventually change what that order can reproduce. Long periods of institutional accumulation may create capacities that matter when confrontation finally does occur. Moments of confrontation may in turn protect or extend capacities that were built much more slowly. There is no obvious reason transformation should have only one temporal shape.

But all of these possibilities depend upon something that political argument often treats as though it appeared spontaneously.

People must possess the capacity to make and sustain institutions together.

They need places in which relationships recur, ways of retaining common memory, procedures through which decisions become consequential, means of distributing responsibilities, opportunities to acquire competencies, and institutions through which things none of them can accomplish separately become collectively doable. In other words, transformation requires means through which collective capacity itself is produced.

That is where the phrase I have been using as the title of this blog—Seize the Means of Community—begins to seem less like a play on an old socialist slogan and more like a practical political question.

The means of production matter because they organize society’s capacity to produce. The means of community matter because they help organize society’s capacity to become a consequential we. And if transformation is something more than a choice between asking existing institutions to recover and waiting for the moment when they can all be swept aside, then perhaps those means are among the places we should begin looking for what comes after exit, voice, and loyalty.

—

A sequel to this essay, “What If DSA Is More Than It Thinks It Is?”, will take up the practical question left here: if transformation depends on capacities for making and sustaining institutions together, where might those capacities be cultivated? It considers DSA as one possible site where they are already being produced, however unevenly, and asks what might follow if that production were treated as part of the politics itself.

#RedefiningSocialism #TheCommunitariumProject

 
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from Seize the Means of Community

How a democratic socialist mayor may be using government not only to deliver benefits, but to help New Yorkers become participants in democratic power

The Bully Classroom

An aspect of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty may be becoming clearer now that the novelty of electing a democratic socialist mayor has begun to wear off.

Mamdani may be treating the mayoralty—perhaps especially his first term—as something like a bully classroom.

A politician with a bully pulpit has an unusually prominent platform from which to persuade. A politician occupying a bully classroom would be doing something more ambitious: using the experience of government itself to change the way people understand their relationship to government.

Mamdani has repeatedly described democratic socialism as extending democracy beyond elections, “from the ballot box to the rest of our lives.” Successful municipal government can certainly demonstrate that socialism is less frightening and more practical than its opponents suggest. Free childcare, improved public services and other tangible accomplishments can show that a socialist administration is capable of making ordinary life better.

But demonstrating democratic socialism is not the same thing as teaching people what it means to practice it.

Demonstration says: Here is what a democratic-socialist government can do for you.

Teaching goes further. It changes what people understand democratic government to be—and who they understand themselves to be in relation to it.

Americans have largely been trained to encounter government as beneficiaries, clients or customers. Government acts and we receive. We judge it by what it delivers and periodically vote for the people who will administer it. Even an ambitious progressive government can leave that relationship essentially intact while promising to deliver considerably more.

A democratic socialism that really extends democracy into the rest of our lives suggests something different. Its purpose cannot simply be to make government a more generous provider. It must also make people increasingly capable of participating in the processes through which their common lives are governed.

There is an old adage, often misattributed to ancient China: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Its moral is supposed to be that individual capacity is preferable to continued dependence upon someone else’s provision.

But it leaves out a third possibility: transform the community into a fishing village.

The point would then be neither simply to distribute fish nor merely to produce more self-sufficient fishermen. It would be to build the relationships, institutions, shared knowledge and material capacities through which people can provide for themselves together.

Democratic socialism, at its most ambitious, belongs to that third category.

The question changes from simply What will government do for us? to What can we become capable of doing together?

The $10,000 Problem

That distinction helps make sense of what might otherwise look like one of the strangest decisions of Mamdani’s young administration.

New York City’s roughly 26,000 school paraprofessionals are among its lowest-paid public employees. Many work directly with children with disabilities. Starting salaries are around $32,000. The City Council unanimously passed legislation providing them with $10,000 payments. Their union, the United Federation of Teachers, strongly supports the measure. Mamdani himself campaigned on raising paraprofessional compensation.

Yet his administration has gone to court to block the law.

If socialism means principally that government should redistribute more resources toward poorly paid workers, the position seems almost perverse. Workers need the money. Their union wants them to receive it. The Council has provided it. Why would a democratic socialist mayor stand in the way?

Mamdani’s administration says paraprofessionals should indeed be paid substantially more, but that compensation must be determined through collective bargaining. “We will not allow the political process to replace the collective bargaining table,” his spokesman said.

That argument becomes more intelligible if we remember what unions were originally for.

Workers organized unions because individually they possessed little power over the terms of their employment. By combining, they could formulate demands together, confront an employer collectively and, ultimately, withhold their labor. The achievement of unionism was therefore never merely that workers received better wages and benefits. They created an organized capacity to act upon the conditions of their own lives.

In the language of the fishing adage, the union was a way of building the fishing village.

But unions themselves do not necessarily retain that character. Collective bargaining can become something professional officers and staff periodically conduct on members’ behalf. Members pay dues, representatives negotiate, a contract appears and workers judge whether the resulting package is satisfactory. The union may still obtain substantial benefits, but the member can once again experience herself principally as their recipient.

The fishing village can become a fishing service.

That qualification is crucial to understanding Mamdani’s position. Collective bargaining is not inherently democratic merely because it is called collective bargaining. Its democratic-socialist value depends upon the extent to which workers themselves acquire an organized, continuing and consequential capacity to participate in determining the conditions under which they work.

And that makes the paraprofessional dispute more complicated than a simple opposition between legislation and bargaining.

The UFT itself sought the Council legislation. Organized labor is not standing passively by while benevolent politicians hand workers $10,000. The union has exercised its own political power to obtain that result. Mamdani is insisting that compensation should instead be pursued through another channel of worker power: collective bargaining.

The real question, then, is not whether workers should exercise collective power. It is how that power should be organized, through what channels, and with what consequences for workers’ capacity to act again tomorrow.

Because New York has roughly 150 municipal bargaining units, the answer may extend far beyond paraprofessionals. If compensation that proves difficult to obtain through bargaining can instead be obtained from the Council, unions, legislators and future administrations will adjust accordingly. Expectations will change. Bargaining strategies will change. The institutional environment of future negotiations will itself be altered.

That does not prove Mamdani right.

The UFT can reasonably argue that existing bargaining practices have themselves helped perpetuate intolerably low paraprofessional pay. If the bargaining system has failed these workers, using organized political power to force a correction may represent collective agency rather than an evasion of it. An institution does not become democratic merely because labor law has assigned it a particular function.

But that is what makes the controversy interesting.

The democratic-socialist question cannot be answered simply by asking which side will give workers more. Nor can it be answered by declaring one institutional procedure intrinsically correct. It requires asking which arrangements make workers more capable of acting together upon the circumstances of their lives.

From Benefits to Power

That is a much harder political lesson than “socialists want workers to have more money.”

American electoral politics encourages people to think of themselves as consumers choosing among competing packages of benefits. Politicians promise things; citizens reward or punish them according to what they deliver. A progressive government can greatly improve the package while leaving citizens substantially as spectators and recipients.

Mamdani’s language about democracy beyond the ballot box points toward another possibility.

Government, in this conception, becomes not merely the institution that acts on behalf of people but part of the infrastructure through which people become capable of acting together. A democratic-socialist administration would therefore be judged not only by what it delivers but by whether the people it governs acquire greater capacity to participate consequentially in their common life.

A government can improve workers’ wages without increasing workers’ collective power. It can build housing for tenants without strengthening tenants’ capacity to organize. It can provide excellent public services while leaving the public as passive consumers of those services. All of those accomplishments may be valuable. But they do not by themselves constitute an expansion of democracy.

The more ambitious project is to transform beneficiaries into participants.

And participation here means considerably more than being invited to meetings or asked for opinions. It means becoming part of organized relationships through which one can actually affect what happens.

This is also why the paraprofessional dispute is politically dangerous for Mamdani. A $10,000 payment is immediate and concrete. Institutional capacity is comparatively abstract. A poorly paid worker cannot reasonably be expected to accept a lecture about the integrity of collective bargaining in place of desperately needed income.

Mamdani therefore has to deliver the other half of his argument. If his administration defends the bargaining process but fails to obtain substantially better and durable compensation for paraprofessionals, the distinction collapses into proceduralism. Participation without consequential power is not much of a democracy.

But if the administration can improve compensation while strengthening workers’ capacity to determine their conditions collectively, the episode teaches something more interesting than the proposition that a socialist mayor supports unions.

It teaches people to look beyond what government gives them and ask what forms of power they possess together.

A Civic Apprenticeship

Calling Mamdani’s mayoralty a bully classroom should not imply that the mayor possesses the answers while eight million New Yorkers sit at their desks taking notes. If the project is genuinely democratic, the teaching must itself be reciprocal and contested. The UFT may turn out to understand this dispute better than City Hall. Unions, Council members, neighborhood organizations, public employees and ordinary residents will sometimes teach the administration rather than the reverse.

The point is that governing can itself become a kind of civic apprenticeship.

Conflicts expose institutions that normally remain invisible. Different forms of power become perceptible. People discover what they can and cannot accomplish through them. One struggle changes the conditions under which the next takes place. Over time, expectations about government—and about citizenship itself—can change.

Mamdani’s bully classroom, understood this way, is not primarily teaching New Yorkers a definition of democratic socialism. It is potentially teaching them a different political grammar.

Government need not be something standing above society, periodically dispensing benefits to individuals below. Workers need not appear merely as people deserving better treatment. Citizens need not understand democracy principally as the right to choose who will govern them.

They can begin instead to understand themselves as participants in the continuing work of governing their common life.

If that is indeed part of what Mamdani is attempting, then his first term has an objective that will not appear on any checklist of campaign promises.

He is not simply trying to show New Yorkers what democratic socialism can do for them.

He may be trying to help them build the political equivalent of a fishing village.

 
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from Seize the Means of Community

Part 2.1: Campus, Communitarium, Commons

Part One proposed that NYC-DSA explore the creation of a participant-built online socialist campus. The word campus is being used somewhat unconventionally, but not arbitrarily. A campus is a constructed environment that brings together resources, activities, and relationships so that people can pursue common purposes and conduct some portion of their lives in keeping with them. In this case, the environment would be digital, and much of what happens within it would be initiated and developed by the people who use it.

A collection of online tools, however well chosen, would not by itself create the kind of community being proposed.

The deeper starting point would be a perception among prospective members that they already share something important: broadly similar purposes, a generally compatible ethos, and an interest in living out at least some of those commitments together. They would not need to agree about everything. They might disagree sharply about strategy, political analysis, priorities, culture, or conduct. But they would need enough common ground to believe that sustained cooperation was both possible and worthwhile.

That common ground would necessarily begin in a broad and incomplete form. Members might share commitments to socialism, democracy, mutual care, equality, collective provision, opposition to domination, or the belief that people should not have to face every difficulty as isolated individuals. Such commitments are meaningful, but their implications become clearer and more demanding when people try to act on them together.

One purpose of a communitarium would be to give members a setting in which their shared ethos could become more detailed, practical, and specific.

The language of the commons may help describe what is at stake. A commons is not merely a collection of things made available for general use. It brings shared resources together with a community that uses, develops, maintains, and governs them. Those resources may be material, technical, informational, cultural, organizational, or social. They may include software, accumulated knowledge, working procedures, relationships of trust, or arrangements through which people cooperate and care for one another.

The digital campus would provide an initial environment in which such commons could take shape. The communitarium would be the shared life that developed there. The continuing activity through which members created resources, cared for them, established expectations around them, and revised those expectations could be understood as commoning.

These terms identify different aspects of the same proposal. The campus is the enabling architecture. The communitarium is the community and shared life that form through its use. The commons consists of the resources, relationships, practices, and capacities that members come to hold and govern together.

The distinction matters because the project is not chiefly about delivering finished services to users. It is about giving members resources with which they can create and shape activities themselves.

The campus could support the formation of explicitly socialist institutions, including worker cooperatives, tenant associations, community land or garden projects, and other collectively governed arrangements. It would not establish or operate such organizations on members’ behalf. It could make it easier for interested people to find one another, work through proposals, prepare documents, coordinate activity, preserve knowledge, and develop suitable forms of governance.

Different organizations could also learn from one another. A worker cooperative might share experience with a tenant association dealing with delegated authority and democratic control. A community garden might exchange practical knowledge with a food-distribution group. Neighborhood documentation or mapping efforts might support several undertakings by recording conditions, identifying patterns of need, or preserving institutional memory.

The campus could become a shared informational and organizational environment for activities that remain distinct but have reasons to cooperate.

The members of such a community would still encounter difficult questions. What does mutual care require when someone repeatedly needs more help than they can return? What does democratic participation mean when only a few people have the time or expertise to make a decision? How should a community respond when a member expresses an opinion many others find objectionable? What kinds of privacy should members expect? When does informal assistance become a commitment on which others are entitled to rely? Which differences can the community contain, and which make continued membership impossible?

No founding statement or code of conduct can settle such questions in advance. Members would work out many of the answers through experience: by creating things together, depending on one another, disagreeing, making mistakes, revising arrangements, and explaining their decisions.

The communitarium would therefore not simply serve people who already shared a settled ethos. Through commoning, it would allow them to sharpen, test, extend, and sometimes alter their understanding of that ethos.

Providing a place to begin

The initial task would be to establish a varied and adaptable set of online services, together with enough starter material to make the environment usable.

A completely empty campus would ask too much of its first participants. People should not have to invent both the institution and every possible use of it before they can begin. A forum might open with several potentially useful discussions already underway. A collaborative-document application might contain sample guides, proposals, research notes, or working documents. Other services could offer similarly modest points of entry.

These would be invitations, not a program.

The intention would not be to decide in advance what members ought to do. It would be to give them resources through which they could form groups, begin discussions, work on shared documents, maintain bodies of information, coordinate activities, publish material, make proposals, or develop arrangements that the original designers had not anticipated.

The initial sponsors would nevertheless have considerable influence. Their choices about which applications to install, how those applications are connected, what examples they contain, and which defaults they use would affect what participants notice and what they find easy or difficult to do. The environment could not be neutral.

Those choices should therefore be treated as provisional and open to explanation. The first version of the campus should make activity possible without pretending to determine the final shape of the institution.

The resources provided at the outset would become genuine commons only as members developed purposes, practices, responsibilities, and forms of stewardship around them. A document system does not become a knowledge commons merely because many people can open it. A forum does not become a deliberative commons merely because anyone can post. What matters is whether members can shape how the resource is used, share the knowledge and labor required to sustain it, and revise its rules when experience shows that they should change.

The campus would give commoning somewhere to begin. What members sought there, however, could take many forms. The next installment considers the different reasons people might choose to belong.

 
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from Seize the Means of Community

Part One: Why NYC-DSA, Why Now, and How to Begin

The Democratic Socialists of America has acquired something political organizations usually struggle to obtain: sustained public attention.

In New York City, that attention follows political consequence. After helping elect Zohran Mamdani mayor, NYC-DSA is now running a large slate of candidates for the state legislature. The chapter has accumulated electoral experience, organizational momentum, and a public prominence that would have seemed improbable not many years ago.

Success produces scrutiny.

Journalists, political opponents, Democratic Party officials, donors, voters, and people newly curious about socialism are asking what DSA is, what it believes, and what kind of organization it might become. Some of those questions are hostile. Others are genuinely inquisitive. Many are being answered by institutions and commentators with little interest in allowing DSA to define itself.

An organization subjected to increased scrutiny can become trapped inside definitions supplied by other people. DSA appears when an endorsed candidate wins, when an opponent extracts a controversial phrase from a platform, when journalists report an internal dispute, or when an elected official is asked whether the organization exercises too much influence.

The result is a narrow public picture.

DSA appears as an electoral faction, an ideological label, a collection of policy positions, or a group of activists who canvass, attend meetings, organize demonstrations, and argue about endorsements.

Those activities are real and important. They do not exhaust what a large socialist organization could be.

The present moment offers NYC-DSA an opportunity to enlarge the public understanding of democratic socialism by enlarging the range of things democratic socialists can be seen doing together.

The iron is hot.

More Than Better Messaging

By saying that the iron is hot, I do not mean merely that NYC-DSA should improve its communications.

The chapter certainly needs to explain its positions, defend its elected officials, respond to attacks, and make its work intelligible to people who do not already share its language or assumptions.

But better messaging alone would leave the basic relationship unchanged.

Other institutions would continue to decide what questions DSA must answer, when those answers must be supplied, and the form in which they can appear. DSA would continue responding to subjects selected by journalists, opponents, campaigns, and the political calendar.

The larger opportunity is to construct a durable institution through which democratic socialists and other participants can investigate subjects before they become controversies, develop explanations before a crisis demands them, and preserve what has been learned after public attention moves elsewhere.

Such an institution might eventually offer courses, workshops, videos, podcasts, essays, books, reference materials, discussions, performances, collaborative research, and places in which people interested in those activities could find one another.

It would be educational, but not merely a school.

It would produce media, but not merely function as a media outlet.

It would publish, but not merely operate as a magazine or press.

It would support discussion and social interaction without reproducing the commercial social-media ecology in which people and subjects are divided among competing platforms, restricted forms of expression, and algorithmically manipulated feeds.

The provisional description I have been using is a participant-built online open-source socialist campus.

“Online” matters because the campus would extend beyond a particular building, neighborhood, schedule, or course session.

“Campus” matters because the institution would include more than formal instruction. A campus has classrooms, but it also has libraries, studios, publications, workshops, archives, associations, performances, projects, arguments, and informal encounters.

And “participant-built” matters most of all.

The Beginnings Already Exist

NYC-DSA would not be starting from nothing.

The chapter has already established an Academy for Socialist Education. The Academy has completed its second year of courses addressing subjects including imperialism, strikes, democracy, capitalism, and climate change, and it is continuing with workshops and courses during the summer and fall of 2026.

This is not an incidental precedent.

The Academy demonstrates that NYC-DSA already contains people willing to organize sustained political education, teachers willing to provide it, and participants interested in something more substantial than a brief orientation or campaign training.

The proposal developed here should not therefore be understood as an attempt to replace the Academy with a speculative technological project.

The Academy could be one of the seeds from which a broader online campus grows.

An online environment could allow educational materials to remain available after a course has ended. Courses could develop successive editions rather than disappearing with their final sessions. Participants could continue discussions, contribute examples, identify unclear explanations, suggest readings, or join the work of revising and extending the material.

People unable—or simply disinclined—to attend a multi-session course at a particular place and time could encounter some portion of the work through other forms. A lecture might become a video or podcast. A reading list might become the beginning of a reference article. A classroom disagreement might disclose the need for a public essay, research project, or additional course.

Online extension would not have to replace in-person education. It could make the consequences of in-person education more durable and more widely available.

The Academy is not the only relevant beginning.

NYC-DSA’s Red Rogue Theater has been developing a series of Theater for Social Change workshops in collaboration with the Bechdel Project. Workshops have included improvisation, group readings, political discussion, and theatrical exploration of subjects such as Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

Red Rogue Theater matters because it demonstrates that socialist education and cultural production need not be confined to courses, lectures, and written analysis.

People also learn through performance, satire, rehearsal, dramatic interpretation, improvisation, and storytelling. Theater can make political conflicts, assumptions, and social roles perceptible in ways that an essay or lecture cannot.

It also demonstrates that NYC-DSA already contains some of the writers, performers, facilitators, and relationships from which a wider cultural institution might develop.

An online campus could provide means by which such work accumulates and travels. Scripts could be published. Performances could be recorded. Workshops could generate instructional material. Discussions could continue after the room has emptied. Writers could find performers, performers could find researchers, and participants elsewhere could adapt a production or create one of their own.

The point would not be to move everything online.

It would be to connect activities occurring at particular times and places to a persistent environment through which their effects can continue.

The Academy and Red Rogue Theater suggest that the proposed campus need not be imposed upon an organizational vacuum. Elements of it are already appearing through activities NYC-DSA members have chosen to create.

The first task is to recognize those beginnings, identify others, and ask what shared infrastructure might allow them to become more mutually consequential.

An Answer to PragerU—but Not Its Mirror Image

One way to introduce the proposal is to describe it as DSA’s answer to PragerU.

The comparison is deliberately provocative and requires immediate qualification.

PragerU has understood something important: political ideas do not circulate merely because somebody has stated them correctly.

They require vehicles.

They need video, audio, stories, animation, performance, repetition, recognizable formats, archives, indexes, and distribution systems. They must be presented differently to children, adults, casual viewers, committed supporters, and people encountering the material for the first time. They need an institutional home capable of accumulating resources rather than starting over whenever a political question reappears.

PragerU possesses ample means to do this. Its 2025 federal filing reported $76.6 million in revenue and more than $105 million in net assets.

A socialist organization can learn from PragerU’s recognition of the need for durable educational and media infrastructure without imitating the institution it has built.

A DSA answer to PragerU should not be a left-wing PragerU.

The relevant difference is not simply that one institution would communicate conservative conclusions while the other communicated socialist ones.

PragerU’s structure is top-down. Those who finance and direct the institution determine what it will communicate. Producers, presenters, and performers turn those decisions into media, which are then delivered to viewers. The audience may watch, approve, donate, share, or use the material, but it does not ordinarily participate in determining the institution’s purposes or producing the worldview it distributes.

A participant-built socialist campus should have a fundamentally different social form.

The people encountering it should not be confined to the role of audience. They should be able to move into discussion, research, teaching, performance, production, revision, moderation, administration, and governance.

The campus would not merely deliver socialist content.

It would cultivate additional capacities among the people participating in it.

Expertise Should Enable Participation

A participant-built institution should not reproduce the mystique that competent intellectual, journalistic, educational, or cultural work can be produced only by people who already possess extensive credentials or professional standing.

Experts would remain important. But their role should often be to make competent participation by other people possible.

When my son was in his early teens, he participated in a youth journalism organization then called Children’s Express. Young people were trained in the basic practices of journalism, equipped with recording equipment, and sent to report on serious subjects, often under the guidance of older and more experienced teenagers.

My son questioned members of the George W. Bush administration about the effectiveness of abstinence education. He traveled to Gujarat, India, to interview survivors—particularly children—of a devastating earthquake.

He and the other participants were not treated as decorative children acting out an imitation of journalism. They were expected to produce journalism. The organization made that possible by providing training, equipment, access, editorial support, progressively greater responsibility, and a community in which more experienced participants helped prepare newer ones.

That experience suggests a useful model.

Experienced journalists can teach interviewing, sourcing, verification, and narrative construction. Editors can develop review procedures and work with inexperienced writers. Filmmakers can train participants to record usable sound and images. Teachers can help people turn knowledge into instruction. Researchers can demonstrate how to identify reliable sources and distinguish evidence from assertion.

None of this requires that established experts personally originate, control, or execute most of the work.

People can acquire substantial competencies when they are given clear instruction, appropriate tools, meaningful assignments, constructive supervision, and opportunities to learn through consequential activity.

A participant might begin by transcribing an interview, checking a citation, operating basic recording equipment, preparing background research, or asking questions developed with a production team. That person could then undertake progressively more complex work as competence and judgment developed.

The relevant division should not be between experts who produce and amateurs who consume.

It should be among people possessing different kinds and degrees of experience, working within structures designed to make learning and reliable production occur together.

Expertise should circulate and reproduce itself rather than becoming a barrier protecting established producers from wider participation.

Participation Should Not Have One Preferred Form

An online campus could also enlarge the ways in which people participate in NYC-DSA.

Not everyone wants to canvass for hours, attend frequent meetings, travel to demonstrations, or take part in the interpersonal intensity of electoral organizing.

Some people cannot do those things because they are housebound, disabled, overworked, responsible for dependents, or constrained by irregular schedules.

Others simply do not find those forms of activity congenial, rewarding, or well suited to what they have to contribute.

They should not therefore be made to feel marginal to DSA, insufficiently committed, or incapable of meaningful political participation.

A large political organization should not define participation so narrowly that one temperament, bodily capacity, social style, or repertoire of activist practices becomes the implicit measure of seriousness.

Some people are more inclined toward research, teaching, writing, editing, programming, acting, design, illustration, translation, archiving, technical maintenance, media production, documentation, or sustained discussion.

Those preferences are not lesser versions of politics.

They are among the activities through which a political institution acquires knowledge, memory, competence, culture, and continuity.

This does not mean that every activity is interchangeable. Knocking on doors and editing a podcast accomplish different things. Organizing tenants and maintaining a server are not substitutes for one another.

The point is ecological.

A capable political organization requires many kinds of work. Their importance depends partly upon how they support and extend one another.

An online campus could create additional routes through which people enter the organization’s life, develop useful roles, and form relationships with people engaged in other activities.

People need not all enter through the same door.

Nor should they all be expected to end up doing the same thing.

NYC-DSA Does Not Have to Build It Yet

The scale of this proposal creates an obvious objection.

NYC-DSA already has more campaigns, committees, working groups, administrative responsibilities, and worthwhile proposals than it can easily sustain. An initiative involving education, media production, publishing, technical infrastructure, discussion, and social organization could become an occasion for institutional overextension.

That objection should be taken seriously.

NYC-DSA need not decide now to build the campus.

It need not install a suite of applications, establish a new department, commit a large budget, or assume responsibility for an ambitious production schedule.

The first step could be much smaller.

The chapter—or a group acting in conversation with people involved in the Academy, Red Rogue Theater, political education, technical work, publications, membership, and other relevant formations—could convene a limited exploratory project.

Its task would not be to launch the campus.

Its task would be to determine what such a campus might concretely involve and whether enough people are prepared to constitute it.

The group could inventory relevant activities and resources already present within NYC-DSA. It could identify where useful work is being duplicated, lost, or confined to unnecessarily narrow audiences. It could investigate technical requirements, editorial problems, governance questions, accessibility needs, likely costs, and labor demands.

It should also be prepared to discover that the originating proposal is mistaken.

Perhaps the concept is too broad.

Perhaps the Academy should remain concentrated on in-person instruction while another formation undertakes online work.

Perhaps some activities should remain independent rather than being gathered beneath a common portal.

Perhaps NYC-DSA lacks enough people prepared to maintain the infrastructure.

Perhaps the first useful experiment is much smaller than a campus.

An exploratory group should be free to reach any of those conclusions.

Its principal product could be a detailed but provisional public prospectus.

A Public Invitation

The prospectus would not announce that NYC-DSA had designed a new institution and now needed volunteers to occupy predetermined roles.

It would say something closer to this:

Here is an institution NYC-DSA is considering attempting to build. Here are the needs it might address, the activities it might connect, the obstacles we can already foresee, and the limited experiment with which it might begin. Who would be interested in participating in DSA in this way? What knowledge, labor, equipment, experience, money, or other support might you contribute? What would make sustained participation possible for you?

That invitation should reach beyond people already understood as political organizers.

It could address teachers, librarians, historians, researchers, writers, editors, actors, playwrights, designers, illustrators, animators, translators, programmers, system administrators, filmmakers, camera operators, sound engineers, archivists, moderators, project managers, and people who would like to acquire any of those capacities.

Some might possess existing material that could be adapted.

Some might have equipment, workspace, technical resources, or useful connections.

Some might contribute money.

Some might be interested in sustained work.

Others might undertake a single bounded project.

The inquiry should not merely ask whether people like the idea. An attractive proposal can produce hundreds of expressions of general approval while revealing little about whether an institution can be sustained.

The useful questions would be more specific.

What could people contribute?

What would they like to learn?

What kinds of work would they be prepared to attempt?

How much time could they realistically offer?

What training or support would they require?

Which portions of the proposal attract them?

Which appear unnecessary, unworkable, or politically misguided?

The answers would begin to reveal whether the campus represents an actual adjacent possibility or only an appealing abstraction.

The process would itself test the proposal’s central premise.

Can NYC-DSA make visible capacities presently dispersed among its members and supporters?

Can it provide intelligible routes through which those capacities become contributions?

Can experienced participants help others acquire useful competencies?

Can the process produce not only a plan but a body of people capable of undertaking a limited pilot?

If the answer is no, NYC-DSA will have learned something important before constructing an expensive and largely empty platform.

If the answer is yes, the campus will already have begun.

Not as software.

As relationships among people discovering what they might be able to make together.

A Prototype Others Could Use

The proposal’s significance need not end with NYC-DSA.

The campus could be constructed entirely from free and open-source software. Its technical architecture, governance experiments, production methods, costs, successes, and failures could be documented in detail.

It could therefore produce something beyond the original institution.

It could become a prototype—or eventually a starter kit—for other groups wishing to build participant-created online campuses organized around different concerns.

A union, tenant organization, environmental coalition, professional association, cultural project, intellectual movement, local community, or political formation might not share NYC-DSA’s political identity or priorities.

It might nevertheless benefit from the underlying model: an online environment connecting education, publishing, media production, collaborative research, durable discussion, social interaction, and institutional memory.

Such groups should not have to repeat the entire experiment from the beginning.

They could adapt software configurations, installation guides, governance procedures, course templates, editorial practices, training methods, and production workflows developed in New York. They could replace the campus’s substantive focus with their own and contribute improvements that later projects might use.

Documentation would therefore not be an administrative afterthought.

It would be one of the campus’s principal products.

The objective would not be to construct a single central campus to which every other group must subordinate itself.

Success might instead produce many campuses: separately governed, differently focused, but capable of exchanging materials, methods, software, and experience.

NYC-DSA would not own the form.

It would have helped make the form available.

Why Now?

There is no perfect moment for an undertaking of this kind.

NYC-DSA will always confront immediate campaigns and emergencies. Skilled contributors will always have competing demands upon their time. Money and organizational attention will remain limited. Any new initiative will risk becoming a distraction, an administrative burden, or an empty collection of technological affordances.

But political moments create openings that do not remain available indefinitely.

NYC-DSA is now visible because it has demonstrated political consequence. Thousands of people have recently participated in socialist electoral activity. Others are newly curious, alarmed, hopeful, or uncertain about what democratic socialism in New York might mean.

The chapter could respond to that attention only by preparing for the next election and defending itself against the next attack.

It should do those things.

But it might also use the moment to demonstrate that a socialist organization can be more than an electoral operation, a protest network, or a producer of policy positions.

It can be a place where people educate one another.

A place where they investigate the world together.

A place where they produce knowledge and culture.

A place where different abilities, dispositions, and interests find consequential forms of participation.

A place where expertise enables the development of further competence instead of monopolizing production.

A place where activities generate additional activities and relationships endure between campaigns.

A place where people encounter socialism not only as a program to support, but as a way of organizing the production of understanding and collective capacity.

NYC-DSA does not need to promise that it can build such a place.

It needs only to decide that the possibility is important enough to investigate seriously, provisionally, and publicly.

The iron is hot because people are looking.

The first step is not to unveil a finished online campus.

It is to ask who might be willing to help constitute one.

 
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from Peptide Tracker & Calculator

A dose log stays useful over months when it records four things rather than one.

Reconstitution. A vial's labeled strength is not a dose. Add the diluent, divide the total mass by the volume of water, and you have mg per mL. From there a dose in mL, and in insulin units, follows. Writing that ratio down at the moment you mix prevents most errors.

Titration as a history. Most protocols step up on a schedule. The useful record is the step history – what dose, for how long, and what happened – not just today's number.

Site rotation. Rotating injection sites is easy to lose track of after several weeks.

Expiry after puncture. Worth recording next to the reconstitution ratio, since both start on the same day.

Nothing here is medical advice; dosing decisions belong with your prescriber.

 
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from Seize the Means of Community

How Humans Learned to Inhabit Shared Worlds

Introduction: We Produce One Another

There is a familiar way of imagining intelligence.

Intelligence belongs to an individual. It resides, somehow, inside a person’s head. Some people possess more of it than others. We test it, rank it, credential it, hire it, reward it, and sometimes attribute unusual historical accomplishments to those said to possess exceptional quantities of it. More recently, we have begun to speak as though intelligence might also reside inside machines.

This conception seems almost self-evident. Individual people think. Individual people remember, reason, anticipate, invent, decide, and solve problems. Intelligence therefore appears to be a capacity contained within individuals and manifested through their actions.

But consider what is required for even the most apparently individual act of intelligence.

A person reading these words did not invent the language in which they are written. They did not invent the alphabet, the conventions of punctuation, the distinctions carried by the vocabulary, or the innumerable prior conversations through which the argument becomes intelligible. They did not independently create the practices through which they learned to read, question, compare, infer, and respond.

A mathematician works with inherited notations and accumulated proofs. A mechanic encounters a machine whose design condenses generations of experiment and practical experience. A physician interprets symptoms through traditions of observation, classification, research, and apprenticeship. A musician improvises within forms that make the improvisation recognizable as an intelligible departure rather than random sound.

None of this means that individuals contribute nothing distinctive. Individuals notice what others miss. They combine inherited materials in unprecedented ways. They resist assumptions, introduce differences, and sometimes alter the conditions under which everyone else proceeds.

But the apparently solitary intelligence of the individual is already populated by others.

It may therefore be worth asking whether we have mistaken the point at which intelligence becomes visible for the place where intelligence is produced.

Perhaps intelligence does not reside wholly inside the individual. Perhaps much of what we call intelligence arises among differentiated beings, through their relations, within the shared worlds they become capable of inhabiting together.

That possibility is the subject of this series.

Shared worlds

We routinely recognize shared worlds without possessing a general name for them.

Someone begins explaining an idea and asks, “Do you catch my drift?” Another replies, “I see where you’re going.” A child joins a game already in progress. A musician enters a song after hearing only a few measures. A guest gradually realizes what kind of gathering they have entered and how people are expected to behave. Several people confront an unexpected problem and begin acting together without first writing a constitution.

In each case, something more is happening than the transmission of information between separate minds.

The participants are entering or generating a field in which particular words, gestures, objects, histories, expectations, and possible actions acquire mutually consequential meanings. They do not need to understand everything identically. They need enough practical alignment to recognize what is happening, what matters, what might happen next, and what responses would make sense.

To join a game is not merely to memorize a list of rules. One must learn what counts as a move, when it is one’s turn, what other players are attending to, which actions are permitted, which are clever, which are unfair, and how this particular instance differs from an abstract description of the game.

A person can know the formal rules of baseball and still fail to understand what is happening in a particular inning. Conversely, someone may acquire a workable sense of a game long before becoming able to state its rules explicitly.

Participation requires inhabiting a shared action-world.

Conversation works similarly. Words do not carry their full significance by themselves. Tone, timing, setting, prior exchanges, bodily expression, social position, implication, and anticipated response all contribute. “Fine” can indicate satisfaction, resignation, anger, dismissal, compliance, or a desire to stop talking. Participants do not resolve these possibilities by consulting a dictionary. They draw upon their situated involvement in a developing encounter.

Meaning is not merely transmitted. It is enacted, tested, adjusted, repaired, remembered, and sometimes contested.

Families, friendships, workplaces, rituals, games, classrooms, political organizations, artistic traditions, neighborhoods, professions, religious practices, and online communities all generate partially shared worlds of meaningful possibility.

These worlds overlap. They may support one another, conflict, or remain mutually opaque. A person competent in one may be lost in another. A gesture of respect in one setting may be interpreted as submission in another. A joke that strengthens intimacy among friends may become cruel in a workplace. The same object may become a tool, commodity, gift, sacred presence, piece of evidence, or inherited obligation depending upon the field in which it appears.

Human life does not unfold within one universally shared world. It proceeds through many overlapping, nested, contested, and temporarily activated worlds.

I have previously called these emic participation fields: fields whose meanings become actionable from within participation rather than being supplied solely by an outside observer. That terminology may or may not survive in the final form of this project. For the moment, “participation field,” “shared action-world,” and “shared world” will often do most of the necessary work.

The field is not only human

Our easiest examples involve human beings acknowledging and responding to one another. That can lead us to make mutual recognition between human interlocutors the defining condition of participation.

But the shared worlds humans inhabit have never been composed solely of humans.

Consider a community living for generations beside a river.

Changes in the river’s level, color, temperature, speed, surrounding vegetation, animal populations, and deposited material may indicate an approaching flood, a change in weather, the presence of fish, upstream disturbance, contamination, or a good time to plant or travel.

People respond through settlement, movement, harvesting, restraint, construction, ritual, teaching, and memory. Those activities alter the river system in turn. They may preserve its capacity to sustain life, damage it, redirect it, or make certain future responses impossible.

The river does not need to converse like a person or recognize human beings as moral agents for the relation to become reciprocal. Human activity changes the river; the river’s changed condition reorganizes what humans can perceive and do.

The reciprocity is asymmetrical. It may unfold across seasons or generations. It includes intention and accident, living beings and material persistence, signal and constraint.

The environment participates by affording, resisting, recording, soliciting, changing, and limiting. Human beings participate by detecting, interpreting, remembering, altering, caring for, exploiting, and responding.

An environmental participation field is not necessarily a conversation. It is an ecology of consequential uptake.

The significance of a wetland, forest, coastline, animal migration, or seasonal cycle may be generated through recurring relations among human bodies, plants, animals, soil, water, weather, tools, paths, stories, accumulated observations, remembered consequences, and practices of use and restraint.

No single constituent contains the whole field. The field is sustained through their continuing interaction.

This means that the shared worlds humans learned to inhabit were always simultaneously social, bodily, ecological, material, historical, and more-than-human.

The claim that “the earth is our relative,” encountered in many Indigenous accounts of land, can be misunderstood if it is treated merely as poetic language or a speculative belief about the earth’s inner nature. Within a participation field, relative is a practical and normative category. A relative does not simply possess value. A relative enrolls a person in expectations of care, restraint, memory, obligation, continuity, and return.

To say that one belongs to the land rather than owns it reorganizes the field of possible action.

Ownership places the land inside the owner’s project.

Belonging places the person inside a relationship that also makes claims upon them.

The distinction will matter later when we examine how shared worlds become abstracted into territory, property, resources, and assets. But it matters at the beginning because it prevents “shared world” from becoming merely another name for agreement among human minds.

Humans inhabit meanings together within material worlds they did not create by agreement.

The evolutionary problem

How did organisms with separate nervous systems, different bodies, and necessarily idiosyncratic histories ever become able to inhabit enough of the same world to act together?

No organism can directly enter another’s experience. We cannot inspect one another’s sensations, memories, intentions, or interpretations. Whatever occurs within one living body must cross some threshold if it is to become consequential for another.

Signals are therefore indispensable.

A movement, sound, expression, touch, scent, posture, rhythm, mark, artifact, environmental change, or patterned absence can make some aspect of a situation available for consequential response. But a signal does not possess fixed meaning merely because it has been emitted or detected. It must be distinguished, interpreted, and incorporated into continuing activity.

A cry may indicate danger, pain, excitement, anger, deception, or play. Its significance depends upon histories of interaction, the identity of the caller, the surrounding situation, the listener’s condition, and what follows after others respond.

Signals acquire significance within relations.

Humans did not invent sociality, communication, coordinated behavior, distributed perception, or environmental responsiveness. Other living beings cooperate, compete, warn, deceive, care, hunt, migrate, build, imitate, teach, and alter their surroundings through elaborate systems of interaction.

The distinctively human development may therefore not have been the invention of shared participation as such. It may have been the extraordinary elaboration of participation fields: their density, flexibility, reflexivity, portability, nesting, cumulative preservation, and capacity for deliberate reconstruction.

Humans developed unusual capacities for joint attention, imitation, turn-taking, teaching, role-taking, narrative memory, rhythmic synchronization, symbolic abstraction, reputational sensitivity, and reflection upon failures of mutual understanding. We became able not merely to coordinate, but to discuss coordination; not merely to follow norms, but to argue about them; not merely to inhabit shared worlds, but to represent, preserve, compare, and intentionally modify them.

A perception no longer had to remain confined to the person who perceived it. A discovery could become a practice. A practice could become a tradition. A warning could become a story. A route could become a path. A tool could preserve the accomplishment of someone absent or dead. A distinction introduced in one encounter could become available in another place and another generation.

Human formations acquired capacities for perception, memory, judgment, and action that no individual member possessed alone.

We became participants in transpersonal intelligences.

The intelligence between us

Imagine several people moving through an unfamiliar landscape.

One notices changes in the weather. Another remembers a water source. Another recognizes animal tracks. Another detects rising tension within the group. Another can repair a damaged tool. Another recalls a story about what happened in a similar place many years before.

No one contains the whole situation. Yet if these perceptions and capacities can circulate, be tested, corrected, remembered, and made available for coordinated action, the formation can respond more intelligently than any participant could alone.

The participants do not have to share a single consciousness. They may disagree, misunderstand one another, conceal information, or pursue partially conflicting purposes. But their activities can become sufficiently coupled that what one detects alters what others can do.

The intelligence lies not only in the people considered separately. It lies in the circulation among them.

It lies in who notices, who speaks, who listens, what can be said, what is believed, how uncertainty is expressed, how disagreement is handled, which memories are retained, which warnings are ignored, and how errors are repaired.

A group of individually capable people may act disastrously if its relations suppress warning, reward conformity, hide uncertainty, or concentrate authority in the wrong places. A formation composed of people with limited individual knowledge may become remarkably capable if it can distribute attention, preserve differences, coordinate effectively, and correct mistakes.

The arrangement matters.

The field matters.

The pathways through which signals travel matter.

The conditions of participation matter.

What we call intelligence may therefore be partly an ecological property: a capacity generated by relations among differentiated beings, inherited forms, artifacts, infrastructures, and environments.

Schmooze

For years I have used the ordinary word schmooze to point toward these processes.

In everyday usage, schmoozing usually means informal conversation, sometimes with an implication of amiable talk, networking, or social maneuvering. I use it more broadly to name the recurring relational activity through which participants signal, interpret, respond, adjust, coordinate, remember, contest, and generate actionable meaning.

Schmooze need not be harmonious. Argument is schmoozal. So are negotiation, instruction, ritual, mutual aid, rivalry, gossip, collective improvisation, courtship, punishment, and political struggle.

What matters is that the participants’ activities become recursively consequential for one another.

One response alters the meaning of the next. A misunderstanding prompts repair. A gesture opens or closes a possibility. A proposal changes the field of available action. A distinction introduced in one encounter becomes available for later use.

The word helps name the activity binding together nodes, signals, frameworks, histories, infrastructures, constraints, affordances, and criteria of uptake.

But schmooze should not be imagined as something already completed individuals subsequently decide to do.

Individuals and schmoozes produce one another.

Every schmooze depends upon the differentiated bodies, perceptions, histories, vulnerabilities, and actions of its participants. Yet participation also helps constitute those beings as the particular individuals they become, shaping their identities, competencies, expectations, dispositions, obligations, and possibilities for action.

This resembles what Kant described as an organized whole: the parts generate and sustain the whole, while the whole produces and sustains the parts as the kinds of parts they are.

The whole may be evanescent. A conversation, game, argument, sexual encounter, emergency response, or coordinated movement may last only moments. But while it persists, the participants are partly constituted by the field they are jointly producing.

The schmooze does not hover above them as a superorganism. It exists only through their activity. But the individuals do not enter it unchanged as completely self-contained units. They become these participants, occupying these roles, possessing these possibilities, partly through the field itself.

The relation is one of mutual individuation.

The individual does not arrive first

It is tempting to preserve a final refuge for atomic individuality by saying that the biological organism exists first and is then socially shaped into a person.

Even that sequence is too simple.

By the time elaborate human communality had developed, schmoozal formations were already helping determine which organisms would be conceived. Courtship, attraction, kinship systems, incest prohibitions, alliance, status, residence patterns, religious rules, economic conditions, family negotiations, affection, violence, and culturally organized expectations all affected who encountered whom, who reproduced, and under what conditions.

Human beings commonly talked, signaled, danced, negotiated, displayed, courted, promised, prohibited, or coerced before they reproduced.

Culture entered the causal chain of biological existence.

After conception, gestation, birth, nourishment, protection, touch, care, language, environmental conditions, and social recognition all helped sustain and differentiate the developing organism.

Organismic integrity remains real. Living beings possess boundaries, mortality, histories, and partially autonomous activity. But organismic differentiation does not establish social priority.

The individual does not emerge from nowhere and subsequently join society. Schmoozal and ecological relations precede, produce, sustain, and continually reorganize the individual.

Nor does this mean that the individual is merely a passive product of the whole. Particular participants are not interchangeable carriers of a preexisting culture. Their differences help generate this field rather than another. Who notices what, who resists, who is trusted, who remains silent, who introduces an unexpected signal, and whose embodied history becomes consequential all alter what the whole can become.

A capable shared world must preserve enough commonality for participation and enough difference for discovery, correction, and transformation.

Individuality is not the enemy of collective intelligence. It is one of its conditions.

But individuality is itself collectively and ecologically produced.

Consciousness at the threshold

This mutual constitution may also alter how we think about consciousness.

Consciousness is commonly imagined as a private interior contained within the individual. But human consciousness may be understood, at least partly, as liminal activity through which the distinction and relation between node and field are continually negotiated.

Much of what occurs within a living body cannot be directly shared. Sensations, affects, memories, and neural processes must be selected, shaped, and rendered into forms capable of crossing into a participation field. Conversely, signals arriving through the field must be interpreted in ways that can reorganize the organism’s continuing activity.

Consciousness participates in both directions.

It helps make some portion of the node available to the shared world and some portion of the shared world available within the node.

But the threshold does not merely connect two fully completed domains. It participates in differentiating them.

Through liminal activity, an organism learns what is internal or external, what may be attributed to itself or another, which impulses become recognizable as intentions, when it is being addressed, what can be expressed, what must remain unspoken, and how its conduct alters the field.

The self is not simply waiting behind the threshold. It is partly generated through the threshold’s operation.

This gives us a provisional relationship among several concepts:

Schmooze is the recurring relational activity.

Liminal consciousness is among the processes through which nodes and fields become mutually available and mutually differentiated.

Schmoozal intelligence is the enlarged capacity for perception, interpretation, memory, evaluation, and action generated through the resulting ecology.

Individual intelligence may then be understood not as the opposite of schmoozal intelligence, but as a locally concentrated and partially internalized manifestation of it.

Even solitary thought is often populated by traces of prior schmooze. A person anticipates objections, rehearses explanations, invokes inherited standards, imagines another’s response, stages an internal disagreement, or reformulates an idea until it becomes sayable.

The apparently solitary thinker carries a portable, incomplete, and continually revisable model of shared worlds.

Communities preserve participation fields

Immediate encounters dissolve. Communities create conditions through which participation fields can be preserved, reactivated, interwoven, and made available when needed.

A community is not one enormous shared framework in which everyone understands everything identically. It is better understood as an ecology of overlapping and partly latent participation fields:

households, friendships, workplaces, rituals, games, care relations, stories, institutions, customary expectations, shared places, political practices, and material infrastructures.

Communities preserve histories. They stabilize roles. They maintain reputations. They train newcomers. They provide recurring opportunities for repair. They retain artifacts and places through which prior meanings can become active again.

A short exchange between familiar people may mobilize an enormous sedimented history. A path can preserve previous movement. A tool embodies experiments conducted by people now dead. A story carries a warning across generations. A ritual can reactivate expectations without requiring their complete explanation.

This accumulated relational capacity constitutes what we have elsewhere called sociopolitical soil: the inherited and continually cultivated conditions through which collective perception, judgment, and action become possible.

When those conditions deteriorate, the loss is not merely sentimental.

A society deprived of recurring relationships, shared spaces, community memory, and opportunities for consequential participation may become less able to perceive, interpret, deliberate, coordinate, and act.

A fragmented society may be not only less communal, but less intelligent.

Why call it socialist?

The title of this series deliberately introduces a complication.

I am not using socialist intelligence to mean intelligence possessed by socialists. Nor am I claiming that every form of collective cognition is socialist, benevolent, egalitarian, or emancipatory.

Armies, corporations, empires, intelligence agencies, bureaucracies, fascist movements, and organized criminal networks can all generate formidable transpersonal capacities. Schmooze can support mutual aid or coordinated predation, collective discovery or enforced conformity, democratic deliberation or command.

The general phenomenon is schmoozal intelligence.

“Socialist intelligence” names a particular propensity and affordance within it.

Participation fields make it possible for capacities manifested by one participant to enlarge the capacities of others. A discovery can become a common practice. A warning can become collective memory. A skill can be taught. A distinction developed across generations can become available to a child who did not help originate it. One person’s limitations can be compensated for by another’s differentiated competence.

The underlying form is:

commonly generated capacity becoming commonly or mutually enlargingly available.

That is not yet socialism as a modern political doctrine. But neither is the use of socialist merely metaphorical or politically empty.

It identifies a form of production in which participants produce not only a common result but one another’s developing capacities. The whole becomes more capable through differentiated contribution, and the participants become more capable through access to the whole.

Socialist intelligence is intelligence organized as a commons.

It does not dissolve individuals into an undifferentiated collective. It describes a process of mutual individuation: people become more distinctive and capable through participation, while their distinctions enlarge what the shared world can perceive and do.

This tendency can be defeated, enclosed, captured, or redirected. Knowledge can be monopolized. Roles can harden into castes. Coordination can become command. Shared symbols can legitimate domination. Institutions can appropriate intelligence generated throughout a field and attribute it to a chief, sovereign, executive, owner, state, or machine.

“Socialist” therefore names a possibility within schmoozal intelligence, not its guaranteed outcome.

From anthropological propensity to political socialism

The political relevance follows, but not as a simple deduction.

The argument is not:

Human intelligence is socially constituted; therefore every proposed socialist institution is justified.

Nor is it:

Early human communities were socialist societies in the modern sense, and political history should return us to their natural condition.

The argument is more limited, but still consequential.

Libertarian and capitalist political thought commonly begin with an atomic individual. The individual exists first, possesses faculties and labor power that are originally their own, and enters social relations by agreement. Society may then make claims upon the individual, but those claims require special justification because they appear as intrusions upon an antecedent ownership.

The sequence usually runs:

the individual exists;

the individual possesses capacities;

the individual produces;

society subsequently taxes, regulates, redistributes, or restricts what was originally individual property.

Our account contests the presumed starting point.

The economically productive person has been generated through histories of care, language, teaching, inherited knowledge, ecological participation, public infrastructure, collective labor, community reproduction, and accumulated technique. Even the identity of the person as an independent owner and contracting subject is socially instituted.

This does not erase individual claims, effort, creativity, bodily integrity, privacy, or deserved recognition. It places them inside the ecology that made them possible.

The political question therefore changes.

It is no longer only:

Why may society take from an independently productive individual?

It becomes:

How should capacities and products generated through mutually constitutive relations be attributed, governed, distributed, and returned to the fields that made them possible?

Political socialism can then be approached not as the artificial subordination of naturally self-sufficient people to a collective, but as an attempt to construct institutions adequate to the common production of human capacity.

That does not settle what those institutions should be. It clears away a false ontology that has made them appear inherently illegitimate.

Civilization and the abstraction of shared worlds

The capacities generated through immediate participation can be partially preserved and transported.

Words, stories, diagrams, rituals, maps, laws, numbers, tools, records, money, classifications, and procedures can condense products of previous schmooze into forms available beyond their original setting.

This portability made cumulative culture, large-scale coordination, science, historical memory, complex technology, and institutions possible.

But abstraction also introduces danger.

A portable condensation necessarily leaves much of its originating field behind. A rule can travel without the history that made it sensible. A metric can become more authoritative than the activity it was designed to represent. A classification can replace situated judgment. A map can make land legible to distant administrators while rendering local relations invisible.

The same process that allows knowledge to circulate allows authority to travel without accountability.

The projects we call civilization developed institutions capable of aggregating, standardizing, preserving, and commanding abstracted products of many local participation fields.

Writing, taxation, territorial mapping, standardized measures, bureaucratic categories, property systems, archives, military organization, law, and centralized administration enabled commanding nodes to see and act across larger populations and distances.

The distributed intelligence of local worlds could be appropriated by a center that then appeared to be the source of order.

The ruler received credit for the capacities of the polity. The bureaucracy’s categories became more authoritative than the lived worlds they compressed. Local knowledge became raw material for a metanode whose purposes participants could not readily alter.

This is one form of the principle of the excluded schmooze: capacities generated through a field are attributed to its most salient or commanding node while the relations that produced them disappear.

Hierarchical aggregation was not the only possible use of abstraction. Human societies have repeatedly developed federative, commoning, municipal, and heterarchical arrangements. But abstraction created possibilities for scale and concentration that transformed the relation between locally generated meaning and distant authority.

Capitalism and the capture of socialist intelligence

Capitalism intensified these processes.

It generalized abstraction and fungibility through money, wage labor, commodity exchange, standardized time, accounting, alienable property, transferable ownership, corporate organization, quantitative productivity, and competitive markets.

Situated activities and relations could increasingly be rendered commensurable, exchangeable, and governable from outside their originating participation fields.

Land became real estate or productive acreage. Work became labor time. Knowledge became intellectual property. Attention became an advertising resource. Human capacities became human capital. Community relations became markets, networks, audiences, or demographic data.

Capitalism did not abolish schmooze. It organized immense schmoozal formations.

Workers coordinate production. Scientists build upon generations of research. Programmers use shared languages and libraries. Communities reproduce care, competence, trust, and social stability. Users contribute attention, content, feedback, and data. Public institutions educate people and finance infrastructure.

Capitalism depends upon transpersonal intelligence at every level.

Its distinctive operation is to interrupt the common return of those capacities.

A contribution generated through a field is bounded, attributed to a legally recognized node, converted into an alienable asset, and accumulated by an owner.

The entrepreneur appears to create what the workforce, public infrastructure, inherited science, and social ecology made possible. The corporation appears intelligent while the distributed knowledge of its workers becomes an input. The market appears to coordinate what innumerable institutions, conventions, states, and relationships sustain.

Capitalism privately appropriates the products of socialist intelligence while concealing the socialist organization of their production.

Intellectual property

This account places intellectual property on a different footing.

The problem is not merely that copyrights and patents last too long, impede innovation, or distribute rewards unfairly. The prior question is how an idea, expression, invention, or technique becomes imaginable as the exclusive property of a discrete person or firm.

A song, program, formula, design, or text can be understood as a portable condensation of schmooze. It gathers inherited language, conventions, tools, education, prior works, collaboration, institutional support, and individual difference into a form capable of traveling beyond the encounter in which it was produced.

The individual contribution is real. But capitalism transforms attribution into something further: alienable exclusionary power.

The work becomes a bounded object. A rights-holder can restrict access, license use, transfer control, incorporate it into corporate valuation, or prevent competing development.

The creator supplies the moral story. Capital acquires the asset.

This does not mean that everything socially generated should become freely available for unrestricted extraction. A commons is not an ownerless resource available to whoever has the greatest capacity to appropriate it. Attribution, livelihood, privacy, contextual integrity, community authority, stewardship, and legitimate restrictions must be distinguished from transferable proprietary control.

But once intelligence is understood as schmoozally produced, intellectual property can no longer appear as the natural recognition of isolated creation.

It becomes part of the capitalist machinery through which collectively generated capacities are bounded, enclosed, and accumulated.

Artificial intelligence

Contemporary artificial intelligence brings these processes into unusually clear view.

The systems grouped under the term “AI” are heterogeneous. Generative models, predictive classifiers, recommendation systems, robotics, surveillance technologies, and scientific tools do not constitute one coherent object simply because marketers and journalists place them beneath a common label.

That disaggregation will matter.

But the dominant generative systems already illustrate a basic operation. Vast archives of human language, imagery, code, research, culture, classification, and feedback are detached from their originating relationships and converted into training material. The resulting computational capacities are then attributed to models controlled by a small number of firms.

Society’s accumulated activity becomes raw material.

The condensed capacity becomes proprietary capital.

Society purchases access to processed traces of its own intelligence.

This is not simply a dispute about whether an individual work was copied or whether a creator deserves compensation. It is an industrial-scale reattribution of intelligence.

The machine appears to possess what the social field produced. The firm appears to have created what it assembled, enclosed, and operationalized. The underlying schmooze disappears twice: first when human intelligence is represented as the possession of discrete individuals, and again when the traces of those individuals’ shared activity are represented as the intelligence of a proprietary machine.

AI may then be deployed to weaken the very participation fields from which its capacities arose.

An answer can replace the conversation through which judgment develops. Generated prose can replace the struggle through which thought becomes articulated. Automated instruction can reduce contact with teachers and peers. Centralized recommendations can displace local knowledge. Synthetic cultural products can crowd out communities of practice. Administrative models can replace situated deliberation with standardized output.

The system harvests accumulated intelligence and may then compete with the practices that replenish it.

A society can therefore become more capable of generating outputs while becoming less capable of generating intelligence among its participants.

The question ahead

The argument of this series will not be that individuals are unreal, that collectives are inherently wise, or that every traditional community should be preserved.

Nor will it be that all technology is alienating, that artificial intelligence has no useful capacities, or that political socialism follows automatically from human sociality.

The argument begins more fundamentally.

Individuals and shared worlds are mutually constitutive.

Human intelligence emerges through schmoozal and ecological relations that generate both transpersonal capacities and the differentiated participants capable of contributing to them.

Communities preserve and reactivate these capacities. Abstraction allows them to travel. Hierarchical institutions can aggregate and capture them. Capitalism converts their products into alienable assets and attributes their ownership to discrete nodes. Intellectual property formalizes parts of this enclosure. Contemporary AI concentrates it in technical systems capable of being deployed as external powers over the people and fields whose activity made them possible.

The political question is not merely how intelligence should be redistributed after it has been produced.

It is how forms of life produce intelligence in the first place.

Which relations make participants more capable?

Which institutions preserve common knowledge and permit it to grow?

Which arrangements allow individual differences to become sources of collective discovery rather than grounds for subordination?

Which abstractions allow meaning to travel while preserving answerability?

Which formations concentrate socially generated intelligence in commanding nodes?

Which technologies enlarge the intelligence of their surrounding fields, and which make people increasingly dependent upon capacities controlled elsewhere?

And what would it mean to build institutions that recognized intelligence as an achievement of shared worlds rather than the private possession of isolated beings?

Humans did not first become independently intelligent and then discover cooperation.

Through inhabiting shared worlds, we became the kinds of individuals capable of producing them.

We have become accustomed to looking for intelligence in the most salient node: the gifted person, the leader, the expert, the institution, the state, the corporation, the machine.

This series will look instead at the activity among the nodes—and at the worlds, human and more-than-human, that make the nodes possible.

It will ask whether intelligence is often what schmooze becomes capable of doing.

And it will explore the possibility that socialism, at its most fundamental, is not simply a program for redistributing what separate individuals produce.

It is an effort to construct institutions adequate to the fact that we produce one another.

#RedefiningSocialism

 
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