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A Socialist Life Needs Socialist Spaces

When I first joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), I was searching for something beyond the meetings, the organizing drives, and even the occasional victories. Most of the members I encountered, however, seemed committed either to participating in those ways or to sequestering themselves in various “study groups” or “reading groups,” collectively pursuing individual education or enlightenment without actually doing much with respect to the larger world or the broader, more active organization they had joined. But the question that lingered for me was this: where do we live our socialism?

For most of us, socialism is a belief, a set of values, a lens through which we critique the world as it is and dream about what it could be. But how often do we get to practice it? How often do we get to step into a space where socialist principles shape the ways we work, play, learn, care, and make decisions together? In the grind of daily life—under capitalism, with its isolations and exploitations—it’s easy to feel that our socialism is just an overlay on the same old structures, rather than a lived alternative.

This is where the Communitarium Project comes in. It’s an experiment—a tentative, provisional attempt to carve out spaces (starting online) where we can build the kinds of relationships, practices, and habits that sustain a socialist life. Not just moments of activism, not just communities of interest, but environments where we can engage in the full scope of daily relations and conviviality.

What would such a space look like? For one thing, it would foster mutual support and respect. This isn’t about imposing a rigid code of conduct or performing solidarity as a ritual. It’s about building relationships that are robust enough to hold the weight of honest conflict, disagreement, and growth. It’s about ensuring that everyone in the community has what they need to participate fully, whether that means material resources, emotional support, or simply the sense of being genuinely welcomed.

It would also be a place for communal deliberation and education. Too often, socialist groups replicate the structures of the wider world, with a small cadre of the knowledgeable or charismatic setting the agenda while the rest of us follow along. To live socialism is to treat education as a mutual process, where everyone has something to teach and something to learn. And it means making decisions collectively, not just through formal votes but through the ongoing work of understanding each other’s perspectives and finding common ground.

Perhaps most importantly, it would be a space for collective action that doesn’t just happen in bursts—a protest here, a campaign there—but as a continuous way of relating to the world. This doesn’t mean doing everything together, all the time. It means gradually coming to constitute an “us” about which it is reasonable to ask, “What can we do?” instead of the daunting default most of us face when confronted with problems in the world: “What can I do?” It means knowing that you’re part of a collective effort to improve the world, and that your individual actions are woven into a larger fabric of solidarity.

And while the project might begin in the digital realm, it can’t remain there. Connectedness to other communities and to the physical world is essential. A truly socialist life doesn’t see the online and offline as separate domains but as interconnected spaces where relationships and actions flow seamlessly.

This is the vision I’m working toward with the Communitarium Project. It’s speculative, contingent, and full of unanswered questions. How do we design spaces that encourage rather than constrain? How do we make them open to new people while ensuring they feel genuinely supported? How do we make sure they’re fun, nourishing, and life-giving—not just another obligation on the to-do list?

At the moment, the Communitarium Project is just me talking about these ideas and a “ghost town” of a self-hosted, online website cobbled together from available open source applications. Bearing in mind that, in many ways, I don't really know what I'm doing, I believe that users who would like to discuss the Communitarium Project with me may join the Matrix room I've set up for that purpose at https://matrix.to/#/#Introduction:communitarium.org. It won’t actually exist until a community coalesces around the mission of bringing it into existence. But I believe that if we’re serious about socialism as a way of life, not just a political program, we have to start trying. The Communitarium Project is one small step in that direction. If you’re reading this, maybe it’s a step you’d like to take, too.

In previous posts I have tried to explain why I think new forms of online communities are necessary, some of the history that has brought us to this point, some of the principles and theories which I think can inform our decisions, and some of the goals which I think we should adopt.

I have begun trying to build one instance of such an online community but I am old and somewhat creaky, underskilled for the task, and insufficiently disciplined to persist without substantive feedback.

I understand that it's a long shot but I'm hoping to find people interested in rolling up their sleeves and building, bottom-up, robust and enduring online collaborative communities of broad, egalitarian purpose. This will, I think, require the development of a new kind of organizing, digital community organizing, which borrows from the traditions of voter organizing, civil rights organizing, community organizing and labor organizing that precede it.

If we are going to build for an uncertain future we cannot specify in detail what our community will eventually look like; we're just going to have to work that out as we go along. Which means that, in order to conduct all-inclusive discussions, the community will have to be of a humanly-manageable size, small enough that everyone stands a chance of getting to know and to trust each other.

We'll all have to be engaged participants (no lurkers!). We'll need to cover a wide range of interests and abilities: concerned citizens, activists, academics, techies, designers, content creators, coders, enthusiasts, writers, organizers, etc.

As multiple communities of this sort form we will need to find ways to forge robust and mutually supportive relations among them.

Even though I cannot (and don't want to) dictate the final form of these communities I can describe some initial hopes, wishes, and thoughts about what might emerge from this effort:

I hope it will be possible to build a community which will serve as a model for a network of online, general-purpose, communities-for-community's-sake that are:

• small (members numbering no more than the population of, say, a NY neighborhood);
• intentional (which is to say, elective and with some degree of mutually agreed common purpose);
• cooperative;
• commons-oriented;
• self-formed, self-supporting and self-maintaining;
  • members (who are able) should collectively pay for its hosting; and
  • develop the technical capacity to keep it running (either within their ranks or by recruiting those who can); and
  • regularly participate in the “chores” that must be done to administer the site;
• committed to mutual aid;
  • actively greeting and educating new members;
  • actively monitoring the ability of members to negotiate the environment and keeping an eye out for those who may need help;
  • actively working to maintain the site as a safe and hospitable environment for as broad a range of people as possible;
  • seeking to find other ways members can assist and collaborate with each other, both online and in the real world;
• built exclusively out of software that is freely shareable and whose code is openly readable;
  • with clear, democratically-developed and communally-enforced rules of conduct, standards of participation and guidelines for constructive criticism/engagement which are regularly collectively reviewed and periodically revised;

• engaged in active, robust efforts at inter-community relations (not just individual cross-community relationships);

• which is to say, a community whose members understand their membership to entail constantly collectively negotiating the character and identity of that community;

  • transparent (in terms of finance, governance, technical design and maintenance, inter-community relations, etc.);
  • dedicated to the repair and improvement of the world.

This is an enormously ambitious project, hard to imagine on first reading. But, for now, I hope I've given you enough to start thinking about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• We need to collectively, deliberately develop forms of community

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

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

#SeizeTheMeansOfCommunity

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

I am a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). I follow its activities, read its publications, and support its efforts for a more equitable and just society. However, I remain a “paper member,” abstaining from direct involvement in the campaigns and organizing work that define so much of DSA’s current activity. My wife, in contrast, is deeply involved with NYDSA, contributing to the ecosocialists working group, advocating for the NY Build Public Renewables Act, and serving on organizing committees. Her commitment, and that of her comrades, is extraordinary, and I deeply respect their efforts. Yet I choose not to join them, and this essay aims to explain why.

The issue is not a lack of belief in DSA's values or its goals. I fully support the fight for economic justice, public ownership, ecological sustainability, and the radical transformation of our social and political systems. Rather, my reluctance to engage stems from a broader critique of contemporary activism and the limitations of focusing on isolated policy victories and candidates. I worry that these efforts, however commendable, operate within a sociopolitical context that makes them inherently fragile, reversible, and limited in their potential to inspire deep, systemic change.

The Limits of “Meeting People Where They Live”

In my blog post Breaking Free: Why 21st Century Activism Can't Just Meet People Where They Live I argued that contemporary activism often falls into the trap of meeting people on the terms set by the current system, thereby reinforcing the very frameworks it seeks to challenge. This is the crux of my concern with many of DSA’s campaigns: they operate within a political, cultural, and economic environment dominated by possessive individualism, market logic, and neoliberal ideology. By pursuing victories within this context, we end up playing by the rules of a game designed to confine us to small, incremental changes that the system can easily absorb, co-opt, or roll back.

DSA’s approach, while strategically savvy, often seeks to appeal to voters, legislators, and other power structures “where they are” rather than seeking to radically transform the broader interpretive frameworks that shape our understanding of society and economics. For instance, the campaign to pass the NY Build Public Renewables Act is laudable in its pursuit of expanding public ownership in the energy sector. However, the success of such campaigns is contingent on framing them in terms that are palatable within the current market-centric, growth-oriented paradigm. This framing risks reinforcing the idea that public ownership is merely a pragmatic, market-compatible option rather than an expression of a fundamentally different way of organizing our social and economic life.

In this way, activism that focuses primarily on policy wins operates in a fragmented fashion, addressing symptoms without transforming the underlying “soil” from which these symptoms arise. The result is a continuous game of Whac-a-Mole, where victories are celebrated, but their effects are limited by the cultural and ideological terrain that remains largely unchallenged. The broader social consciousness continues to be shaped by a market-oriented, individualistic framework that constrains the potential for these policy gains to grow into a truly transformative movement.

The Need for a New Sociopolitical Soil

The series of posts introducing the Communitarium Project (Part 1, Part II, Part III, Part IV) outlines the necessity of cultivating new interpretive frameworks—ones that foreground cooperation, mutual aid, and communal responsibility while rejecting the reductive individualism and commodification that define our current era. The problem with much of today’s activism, including the work of groups like DSA, is that it too often focuses on advocating for changes within the existing system without sufficiently challenging the interpretive frameworks that sustain it. It’s not that these policy victories are unimportant; it’s that they are unlikely to foster the kind of radical transformation we need unless they are part of a broader cultural shift.

The Communitarium Project proposes that what we lack is not just new policies but new ways of understanding and engaging with the world—what I have referred to as the creation of a new “sociopolitical soil.” This soil involves reshaping how people conceive of themselves, their communities, and their relationship to the broader world. It entails moving beyond meeting people “where they live” in their existing frameworks and instead inviting them to participate in the development of alternative ways of living, thinking, and interacting.

Without this deeper cultural groundwork, efforts like those of DSA, while important, risk being diluted or absorbed by the prevailing systems of power. They remain isolated patches of resistance in a landscape that continues to prioritize market logic, individual competition, and private ownership. The focus on securing individual policy victories, while necessary in the short term, lacks the capacity to nourish the emergence of a new collective consciousness capable of sustaining more profound, lasting change.

Why I Remain a Paper Member

I remain a paper member of DSA not out of apathy, but because I believe that my contributions might be better directed toward cultivating the interpretive frameworks that can make deeper, systemic change possible. The real challenge lies not just in winning policy battles, but in fostering a cultural transformation that shifts the focus from individual advancement to collective well-being, from market transactions to communal deliberation, and from isolated policy interventions to systemic reorganization.

The Communitarium Project represents one attempt to engage with this deeper work. It seeks to explore new forms of community, new modes of knowledge-sharing, and new ways of thinking about value that transcend the reductive frameworks of possessive individualism and commodification. It aims to create spaces where schmooze-level interactions—those everyday processes of negotiation, meaning-making, and community-building—can flourish outside the confines of market logic.

My wife and her comrades within the DSA are doing crucial work, and I have immense respect for their dedication and accomplishments. Yet, I fear that without a broader cultural movement that challenges the interpretive frameworks of our society, these efforts will remain precarious and easily reversed. This is why I choose to remain on the sidelines of direct activism, focusing instead on what I see as the foundational task: building the sociopolitical soil in which true transformative change can take root.

The Path Forward

This is not to say that policy advocacy is pointless. It is to argue that, in the absence of a broader cultural shift, policy victories will struggle to endure and multiply. We need both: immediate, tangible wins that improve lives and a long-term project of reshaping the interpretive frameworks that govern our collective existence. I support DSA in its efforts, but I believe the time has come to expand our focus, to build spaces where new ideas can take hold, and to encourage the development of a collective consciousness that values cooperation, mutual aid, and ecological stewardship over market-driven competition. We need to invent new forms of organizing to meet the unique challenges we face in the rapidly transforming landscape of the 21st century.

My paper membership, then, is not a rejection of activism but a call for a deeper engagement—a call to break free from the game of Whac-a-Mole and to cultivate the cultural and ideological conditions that can support a more profound transformation of our society. This is the work I believe must be done if we are to move beyond the isolated, temporary victories of the present and build a future where communal values can truly flourish

In this series, we’ve explored Richard Rorty’s key concepts—contingency, solidarity, and final vocabularies—and how the Communitarium Project builds upon them. In this final post, we will synthesize these ideas into a Rortyan statement of the Communitarium Project.

Contingency as the Basis for Solidarity

Like Rorty, the Communitarium Project embraces contingency but turns it into a creative force. Instead of treating it as a philosophical challenge, the Communitarium harnesses contingency to foster adaptive, evolving communities capable of nurturing solidarity over time.

Contingency in the Communitarium | The Communitarium Wiki

Institutionalizing Solidarity

Rorty’s solidarity is contingent and fragile, based on empathy and shared vocabularies. The Communitarium, however, seeks to institutionalize solidarity, creating a medium in which it can be nurtured, maintained, and cultivated through structured interaction.

Rortyan Communitarium | The Communitarium Wiki

Conversation Stoppers and Deflectors

By recognizing both conversation stoppers and conversation deflectors, the Communitarium creates an environment where final vocabularies can be challenged and renegotiated in productive ways, ensuring that solidarity remains dynamic and responsive to the community’s evolving needs.

Conversation Stoppers and Conversation Deflectors | The Communitarium Wiki

The Communitarium Project represents an evolution of Rorty’s philosophy, taking his ideas on contingency and solidarity and using them as the foundation for a new kind of community—one that is flexible, inclusive, and capable of adapting to the changing world.