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An Open Letter to Tascha Van Auken and the Office of Mass Engagement

Dear Commissioner Van Auken,

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Executive Order No. 7, establishing the Office of Mass Engagement, names a real democratic failure in New York City. The order recognizes that New Yorkers exercise agency when they build community with their neighbors, communicate their concerns and solutions, and engage with local government. It also recognizes that existing civic structures often privilege those with the most time and resources: meetings are long, applications are confusing, feedback is fragmented, and participation often seems disconnected from visible outcomes. The result is frustration, disenchantment, and disengagement.

That diagnosis is important. But the success of the Office of Mass Engagement will depend on how deeply the city interprets the phrase mass engagement. If it means only more surveys, more testimony drives, more public meetings, better feedback portals, and more coordinated outreach, the city may improve the existing system without transforming it. Those things matter, but they are not enough. Mass engagement should not mean mass intake: a more efficient process for collecting public input and routing it through City Hall. It should mean helping New Yorkers build the durable civic capacity to notice problems, share knowledge, deliberate, coordinate help, preserve memory, and act together over time.

Mass engagement should be the opening condition for a living civic ecology. By civic ecology, I mean the web of spaces, organizations, relationships, habits, records, tools, and conflicts through which people become able to participate meaningfully in the life of the city. That ecology includes government, but cannot be owned by government. It includes digital tools, but cannot be reduced to a platform. It includes formal meetings, but cannot depend mainly on people having the time, confidence, and procedural fluency to attend them. The question for the Office of Mass Engagement is therefore not only how to help more New Yorkers reach City Hall. It is how to help New Yorkers reach one another.

The Missing Layer: Civic Commons

The city needs engagement campaigns, accessible feedback venues, outreach to historically excluded communities, and feedback loops between residents and policy. Executive Order No. 7 assigns these duties to the Office of Mass Engagement, along with responsibilities involving community boards, district service cabinets, district managers, agency coordination, and training or technical assistance. But there is a missing layer between isolated residents and city government: the neighborhood or district civic commons.

A civic commons would not be merely a website, a city portal, a social-media group, a newsletter, or a meeting. It would be a locally rooted, digitally supported, cooperatively governed space where residents and local institutions can become more visible to one another and more capable of acting together. Its everyday value would come from ordinary civic life: water main breaks, train shutdowns, spare moving boxes, elder check-ins, accompaniment to appointments, community gardens, block parties, filming notices, local sports, tenant meetings, community-board agendas, recurring service failures, and the many small problems that now remain scattered across group chats, flyers, agency websites, social media, local newsletters, and word of mouth.

These examples may sound mundane, but they are not secondary to democracy. They are the practical life out of which democratic politics grows. People do not become civic actors only by attending hearings or submitting comments. They become civic actors through repeated experiences of mutual recognition, shared trouble, practical help, disagreement, memory, repair, and coordination. A tenant comparing landlord behavior with neighbors is already in civic life. A parent trying to understand a school policy is already in civic life. Residents documenting recurring elevator outages, transit disruptions, sanitation failures, or agency delays are already producing public knowledge.

The problem is that these civic activities are usually fragmented and fragile. The city should not try to absorb them into one official system. But it can help make them more visible, durable, accessible, privacy-respecting, and capable of informing public decisions.

Enable, Do Not Own

A civic commons controlled by City Hall would not be a commons. It would be an engagement apparatus. The distinction matters.

The city can convene, support, translate, train, fund, connect, and listen. It can help residents understand how to interact with agencies. It can help community-board processes become more legible. It can support pilots, technical assistance, accessibility, and public standards. But it should not own the civic spaces through which New Yorkers deliberate, remember, coordinate, and hold power accountable.

A real civic commons must be able to support City Hall when City Hall is right, inform it when it is incomplete, pressure it when it is slow, and oppose it when necessary. That is not a defect. It is what makes such a commons democratic. If the Office of Mass Engagement becomes only a more effective way to gather input for the administration, it will fall short of its promise. If it helps New Yorkers build civic capacity that does not belong to the administration, it could become one of the more important democratic experiments in city government.

Infrastructure Should Match the Politics

The form of this work matters. A city trying to build democratic civic capacity should not rely uncritically on the proprietary, centralized, extractive platforms that have helped weaken democratic life. Civic infrastructure should be open where possible, privacy-respecting, accessible, multilingual, interoperable, and governable by the people and institutions that depend on it.

New York would not be starting from zero. The open-source civic-technology world has already developed tools that address parts of this problem: participatory budgeting, structured deliberation, collaborative decision-making, shared files, calendars, transparent records, project coordination, and community governance. Decidim, Loomio, CONSUL Democracy, Nextcloud, openDesk, and related projects are not by themselves a civic ecology. They do not solve trust, moderation, language access, disability access, unequal time, digital exclusion, institutional power, or the labor needed to maintain a commons. But they show that public engagement need not depend entirely on proprietary platforms, scattered surveys, social-media fragments, commercial cloud systems, or consultant-designed portals.

The deeper lesson is that civic participation requires infrastructure, governance, continuity, and ecology. A citywide engagement office should not ask only how to collect more feedback. It should ask how to help residents and local organizations sustain the civic ecologies in which meaningful participation becomes possible.

A Federated City Needs Federated Civic Life

New York is not one community. It is a city of neighborhoods, languages, histories, buildings, schools, tenant associations, libraries, public housing developments, faith communities, immigrant networks, parks, workplaces, and informal local worlds. A single centralized engagement platform cannot adequately represent that reality.

A better model would be federated. By federated, I do not mean fragmented. I mean that different neighborhood, issue-based, institutional, tenant, school, library, mutual-aid, and cultural spaces should be able to remain distinct while becoming more discoverable, mutually aware, and capable of coordination. The goal should not be one massive official forum. The goal should be a civic ecology in which many local commons can connect without being absorbed into a single hierarchy.

This approach would also strengthen existing civic institutions rather than bypassing them. Community boards, for example, are important, but their meetings can be hard to follow, hard to attend, procedurally narrow, and disconnected from the everyday ways people encounter public problems. Local civic commons could help residents understand agendas, prepare testimony, document follow-up, compare experiences, track recurring issues, and turn isolated complaints into visible public patterns. They would not replace community boards. They would give them a stronger civic substrate.

Maintenance Is Civic Work

A living civic ecology requires labor: documentation, translation, moderation, calendar maintenance, meeting summaries, accessibility work, onboarding, technical repair, conflict handling, and preservation of public memory. This should not be treated only as a procurement problem. It should also be treated as civic education and public work.

The administration could encourage interdisciplinary projects among CUNY campuses, community colleges, public high schools, libraries, community boards, and local organizations. Students and faculty in technology, public administration, urban studies, journalism, design, social work, translation, history, library science, accessibility, and related fields could help design, research, build, document, evaluate, and maintain neighborhood civic commons. They could map local resources, summarize community-board meetings, translate and simplify agency materials, maintain public calendars, document recurring service failures, conduct oral-history projects, and support open-source tools.

Done properly, this would not be free labor for City Hall. It would need stipends, course credit, supervision, community accountability, and real educational value. But it could become civic education through civic maintenance. Students would not merely study government. They would help maintain the civic conditions under which democratic government becomes more possible.

Libraries, Hosting, and Connectivity

Public libraries may be among the natural institutional homes for this work. They already provide access to knowledge, technology, local history, meeting space, digital literacy, public trust, and non-commercial information infrastructure. A citywide civic-commons strategy could build on that role by supporting orientations, digital-literacy help, local archives, public documentation, meeting space, and access for people who cannot or do not want to participate only from personal devices.

Over time, this points toward something larger: public-interest civic hosting. New York might eventually help provide privacy-respecting, open-source digital capacity that local groups could use for websites, calendars, shared files, collaborative documents, archives, meeting spaces, and public records. This should not mean one City Hall-owned platform for civic life. It should mean a supported ecology of locally governed, interoperable tools that gives residents and community groups an alternative to dependence on corporate platforms.

This question does not stop at software. Civic participation also depends on access, connectivity, resilience, and local control. New York already has community-led efforts, such as NYC Mesh, that treat connectivity itself as a commons. OME would not need to run such networks, but a city serious about mass engagement should understand that participation depends not only on invitations, forms, and meetings, but on the material conditions that let people communicate at all.

Trust Requires Design

A civic commons is not automatically benign. A space where neighbors ask why an elder has not been seen recently can become a space of care, but it can also become intrusive. A space where people document landlord abuse, immigration fears, policing, benefits problems, or health needs can become empowering, but it can also expose people to risk. Privacy, consent, moderation, and safety cannot be afterthoughts. A civic commons should not become a surveillance commons.

This is especially important for immigrants, tenants, workers, unhoused people, people with disabilities, people navigating public benefits, people with precarious legal status, and anyone vulnerable to retaliation. Trust will not come from branding. It will come from design, governance, practice, and accountability.

The same is true of accessibility and language justice. Reaching people who have not historically participated in government decision-making cannot mean only inviting more people into existing formats. It means changing the formats: plain-language summaries, multilingual materials, interpretation, accessible design, offline access points, asynchronous participation, disability access, and help for people who do not already know how city processes work. The goal should not be to make more people behave like professional meeting-goers. The goal should be to make civic life more available to ordinary people.

A Modest Proposal

The Office of Mass Engagement does not need to build a citywide civic commons from scratch. It should not try. A better first step would be to convene a public conversation about how New York might support a federated ecology of neighborhood civic commons.

That conversation should include civic institutions, local organizations, residents not already embedded in formal politics, public-interest technologists, privacy advocates, accessibility advocates, educators, librarians, community-board participants, youth organizations, and people already maintaining local networks of care and information. OME could then explore a small number of pilots, publish public-interest principles for civic digital infrastructure, support open-source experiments, fund maintenance and translation, create directories of existing civic resources, and help local commons connect to community-board and agency processes.

I have begun a small and preliminary experiment in this general direction at Inwood Nexus: https://inwoodnexus.nyc. It is not a finished model, and I am not suggesting that the city adopt it. I mention it only to make clear that this proposal is not merely abstract. I have been thinking practically about what a local, online-first civic commons might look like and how such efforts might begin.

The creation of the Office of Mass Engagement is an opening. It can become a better way for City Hall to hear from New Yorkers. That would be useful. But it can become something more important: a way to help New Yorkers build durable civic capacity with one another.

That is the deeper promise. Mass engagement should be the beginning of a civic ecology broad enough, practical enough, and democratic enough to make participation part of ordinary city life.

There are moments in political life when the whole thing begins to take on the texture of a Broadway revival — not the noble kind, mind you, but the self-aware sort where the actors and the audience share a wink each time the orchestra swells. New York City, never shy of drama, now finds itself in just such a production.

The curtain has risen on the Mamdani Era, and everyone, including the ushers, wants a piece of the script. And the whole thing bears more than a passing resemblance to Gypsy, that great musical about ambition, rehearsal, overreach, and the perilous art of letting go

I. The DSA Parent-Teacher Association Convenes

Inside the venerable halls of the Democratic Socialists of America, a great debate rages. It is conducted in a tone ranging from “quiet disappointment” to “full Mama Rose.”

After all, it was DSA that plucked young Mamdani from the chorus, taught him his lines, drilled him in socialist theory, and sent him, starched and scrubbed, into the spotlight.

There is a certain pride in having raised a political child who not only survives the primary but grows up to run the city. But there is also the unmistakable anxiety of parents whose kid has just moved to Manhattan and refuses to answer texts during dinner.

Hence the question: Now that the boy is mayor, must he still call home nightly?

One internal faction insists, with the moral confidence of a playwright (eyeing a Pulitzer) who won’t change a word, that of course he must. They point out — not incorrectly — that they packed his ideological lunchbox, stitched his policy worldview from scratch, and sent him into the world with a perfectly fine pair of socialist training wheels.

The argument goes something like this:

We raised him, and therefore he should be fully accountable to us. Not just consultative accountability — full-on clean-your-room, take-out-the-trash, and don’t-roll-your-eyes-at-us accountability.

It’s touching, in a way, but it’s also deeply impractical. More on that later.

II. The View from the Mayor’s Mansion

From inside City Hall, things look rather different.

• One cannot run a $100 billion municipal apparatus using only the Stanislavski Method learned in Acting School.
• The Department of Education isn’t organized to perform a script submitted by a conflicted Drama Department still arguing over the second act.
• And the NYPD cannot be expected to fall into a crisp chorus line just because a working group has tapped out the rhythm.

A mayor is many things — negotiator, bureaucratic whisperer, hostage to Albany, occasional therapist to agencies in crisis — but one thing he is not is a fully supervised movement intern.

When DSA members say, “Why isn’t he doing exactly what we want?” City Hall might reply, “Because he is busy attempting to govern New York City — a task occasionally compared to teaching a herd of caffeinated rhinoceroses to ride the subway.”

Governance introduces new interpretive frameworks — legal, institutional, fiscal, electoral — that do not politely step aside for socialist purity. The music changes tempo, the lighting shifts, and the choreography becomes more complicated.

And yet, the movement expects him to dance the same steps.

III. Enter Mama Rose, Stage Left

This is where Gypsy becomes uncomfortably relevant.

Mama Rose, that indomitable engine of ambition, spent years shaping her daughters into stars: the costumes, the routines, the forced smiles, the relentless rehearsals. But when the daughters finally become stars, they insist on inhabiting their own lives.

The pathos, the comedy, and the tragedy all reside in that conflict. So too with DSA and Mamdani. DSA is caught in the Mama Rose dilemma: having created a star, it must figure out how to stop being the choreographer.

This is not as easy as it sounds. Movements are emotional organisms; they do not simply “transition” because the situation demands it. They feel things — pride, fear, protectiveness, suspicion, hope, and occasionally the sharp sting of abandonment when their rising star stops showing up to chapter socials.

And yet, if the movement cannot release its electeds into autonomy, the entire strategy collapses into a kind of ideological helicopter parenting.

IV. A Mayor Is Not a Puppet (Even If the Strings Are Organic, Recycled, Collectively Owned)

The idea that a socialist mayor should function as a wholly owned subsidiary of his political origin story is charming, in the same way that the idea of a toddler balancing the city budget is charming — but disastrous.

Movements produce leaders precisely so those leaders can expand the sphere of action — not so they can remain trapped in an eternal adolescence.

What Mamdani needs from DSA is not custody but agonistic companionship. He needs a movement that argues, pressures, critiques, mobilizes, and refuses to be placated — but also understands the difference between guiding and governing.

If DSA tries to rule his mayoralty like a parent monitoring screen time, it will stunt both the movement and the administration — and eventually alienate the very public Mamdani needs to radicalize.

A movement that cannot let its children grow up ends up talking only to itself.

V. The Final Number: “Let Me Entertain You, But Not Obey You”

There is a version of this story in which everyone gets what they want:

• The mayor retains his socialist backbone.
• DSA maintains its moral vigilance.
• The administration makes real gains for working people.
• The movement grows stronger rather than subordinate.
• And the audience — the public — remains dazzled.

But this demands something DSA has never fully had to face: the need to redefine its relationship to the very political figures it helped bring into being — a shift many of its members now insist is overdue. Not obedience, not distance, but a new kind of relationship; loving the leaders it has nurtured without assuming they remain forever in its house, eating from its fridge and texting for permission before making plans.

DSA must cultivate the wisdom to recognize that the point of nurturing political talent is not to create obedient children — but to create adults who can take the movement’s values into places the movement itself could never reach.

Rose learns this lesson late, kneeling in a spotlight, realizing she was never meant to live through her daughter’s success.

One can only hope DSA learns it earlier.

(On Freedom, Discipline, and the Forgotten Middle of Social Life)

“Sometimes I feel like [I'm] the only anarchist who believes discipline is a good attribute... and before anyone comes up with some trolley-problem-level abstract edge-case, I am talking about the much more mundane: keeping to agreements, tidying up after yourself, finishing tasks when they're no longer fun, etc.” — anonymous Mastodon user

This simple lament captures a deep distortion in modern political imagination. It exposes a confusion that should never have seemed inevitable: the belief that freedom and discipline must be in opposition.

That opposition, I would suggest, only makes sense in a civilization that has long lived under what we might call the law of the excluded schmooze.

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1. From the excluded middle to the excluded schmooze

In logic, the law of the excluded middle states that something must be either true or false. Between yes and no there is no room to dwell. Western social thought has applied a similar principle to human life. Actions are imagined as either the expression of autonomous individuals or the result of coercive institutions. Either I act freely, or I am constrained by some external authority. There is no acknowledged middle term.

But that “middle” is where almost everything human actually happens.

It is the dense, ambiguous, negotiated realm of mutual adjustment and coordination—the domain of tone, gesture, compromise, habit, humor, apology, timing, and attention. It is the space where meaning, trust, and cooperation are continually re-made, even when no rule compels them and no solitary will dictates them.

This is what I call the schmooze.

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2. What is “the schmooze”?

The schmooze is not small talk or flattery, though both may play their part. It is the field of ongoing interpretive attunement through which people manage to live and act together at all. It is a social medium—visceral, reciprocal, constantly self-revising—within which individuals and collectives co-constitute one another.

In the Symbiotic Intelligence Framework (SIF), the schmooze is the level at which information ensembles—networks of perception, intention, and response—maintain their coherence. It is where interpretive frameworks are not just applied but enacted: where interpretation and action are fused into what I have come to call interpretaction.

The schmooze is the site of mortal computation—a real-time, situated, resource-dependent process of sensing, adjusting, and negotiating that cannot be fully formalized without killing the living coordination it supports.

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3. How the West excluded the schmooze

The Western intellectual tradition has been astonishingly suspicious of this realm. From Plato’s disdain for rhetoric and performance, through Augustine’s distrust of worldly conversation, to the Enlightenment’s ideal of the solitary Reasoner, the preferred model of knowledge and virtue has been the individual standing apart, detached from the noise of human interplay.

Even when modern social science sought to study society, it often did so from above or outside—through statistics, abstractions, or structural laws that drained the immediacy out of human encounter. Political philosophy inherited this habit: society became an aggregation of rational agents or a structure of institutional constraint, never the fluid process of schmooze that actually binds human beings together.

The result is that freedom and discipline have come to appear as mutually exclusive poles. Freedom belongs to the isolated agent, discipline to the imposed system. The possibility that discipline might emerge organically, horizontally—from the shared upkeep of a common world—has been rendered almost unthinkable.

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4. The politics that vanished with the schmooze

The exclusion of the schmooze has had profound consequences. It has hollowed out our conception of community, turning it into either a romantic ideal or a bureaucratic abstraction. It has made democratic deliberation seem impossible without procedural machinery, and cooperation seem impossible without command.

When anarchism appears allergic to discipline, or when socialism degenerates into managerialism, both are suffering from the same blindness: they lack a language for the middle dynamics through which coordination naturally occurs when people inhabit a shared world attentively and responsibly.

If we restore the schmooze to view, we begin to see that the maintenance of agreements, the tidying-up, the finishing of tasks when they cease to be fun are not acts of submission but acts of care. They are what living systems do to remain alive. They are not beneath politics; they are its foundation.

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5. Toward a politics of the schmooze

To recognize the schmooze is to recognize that the fundamental work of freedom is not rebellion but maintenance: the upkeep of the relational fields that make both rebellion and rest possible.

A politics that honors the schmooze would not fixate on law, nor on individual will, but on the cultivation of the interpretive ecologies that sustain trust, responsiveness, and shared orientation. It would value the slow work of conversational repair, the etiquette of co-presence, the attentiveness that allows differences to coexist without collapse.

This is what we are after in the Communitarium Project: the deliberate reconstruction of the social middle—the living field of mutual interpretive action—through which communities can think, deliberate, and act as wholes without surrendering to hierarchy or fragmentation.

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6. Closing reflection

The Western tradition’s law of the excluded schmooze has left us with politics that lurch between individualism and authoritarianism, between expressive chaos and imposed order.

But the schmooze has never ceased to exist. It persists in friendships, in kitchens, in protests, in open-source collaborations, in neighborhood assemblies. It is the real infrastructure of freedom.

To restore the schmooze to philosophical visibility is not to propose a new doctrine but to notice the living medium we already inhabit—and to begin designing our institutions so that they cultivate, rather than suppress, the disciplined freedom it affords.

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Perhaps discipline, properly understood, is nothing more than care extended through time—and schmooze, the medium through which that care becomes collective.

#Schmoozalism #TheCommunitariumProject #RedefiningSocialism

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1. From Mamdani to Schmoozalism

In writing about Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, we introduced the term schmoozalism to describe the radical etiquette that animated his appeal. Here we want to step back and spell out more broadly what we mean by the word.

Crucially: schmoozalism is not socialism itself. It is the ethos in which socialism can grow naturally. Without this soil, socialism may sprout in programs or policies, but it withers under pressure — reversible, co-optable, thin. With this soil, socialism develops as the fruit of ensemble practice: resilient, lived, and deeply rooted.

Schmoozalism is best understood by its contrasts. It stands in opposition to Randian objectivism, which exalts the isolated heroic self. It opposes managerialism, the philosophy that reduces all human relation to systems of control, optimization, and management. And it rejects the neoliberal ethos that has dominated politics and economics for the last half-century: a fusion of heroic individualist rhetoric with managerial rule by markets, presented as inevitable and without alternative.

Against these currents, schmoozalism affirms a different foundation: the primacy of ensembles, the reciprocity of individuality and community, the exploratory character of play, and the convivial medium of the communitarium. What began as a description of Mamdani’s political style becomes here the sketch of a broader ethos, one we believe can serve as the living basis for socialism’s renewal.

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2. Idiotism: Clarifying the Term

The world we inhabit today is structured by idiotism. By this we mean not the modern insult directed at someone’s intelligence, but the older sense of the word drawn from ancient Greece. In Athens, an idiōtēs was not a fool but a private person — one who withdrew from the affairs of the polis (the shared civic sphere) to focus only on personal concerns.

Idiotism, in this original sense, is the condition of self-enclosure: the withdrawal from communal life into privatized existence. It is the reduction of human beings to isolated, possessive units, cut off from the shared ensembles in which meaning, solidarity, and flourishing take shape.

This is the sense in which we use the term here. Idiotism is enclosure of the self. Under hegemonic capitalism, it becomes the privatization of meaning and the elevation of personal opinion and intent, treating individuals as units of consumption, production, and attention. Individuality is recoded as entrepreneurial selfhood — each person a mini-firm, optimizing for productivity and recognition.

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3. History as Contingency, Not Necessity

Karl Marx and his contemporaries often conceived of history as an inevitable trajectory, a logic unfolding with necessity. From their perspective, socialism seemed destined to follow capitalism. Schmoozalism departs from this framework.

We hold history to be contingent. The comprehensive idiotism of our age was not an inevitability but one possible outcome. The siphoning of communal resources by higher-level hierarchies could have played out in other ways. In the nineteenth century, without knowledge of mass media, suburbanization, neoliberalism, and the Internet, it would have been difficult to foresee how fully idiotism would metastasize.

Thus, we should not accuse nineteenth-century socialists of “failing” to predict today’s conditions. Their horizon was bounded by the enclosures they directly confronted — land, labor, and capital. But this fairness does not excuse the absorption of idiotism that occurred within socialist thought.

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4. Civilization as Siphoning (and the Role of Imaginaries)

To understand socialism’s blind spots, we need to place it within a much older civilizational pattern: the siphoning of resources from communal conviviality into hierarchical formations.

Human beings are endowed with pro-social tendencies: trust, reciprocity, curiosity, empathy. These evolved to sustain schmooze-level ensembles — the small-scale interactions through which meaning and solidarity emerge.

But civilizations have repeatedly fracked these resources, siphoning them upward into larger organizations: fiefdoms, early kingdoms, city-states, priesthoods, bureaucracies, corporations, empires, and modern nation-states. Smaller units often preserved some conviviality but were gradually subordinated. Over time, contests of scale led to the consolidation of ever-larger siphons.

At these larger scales, imaginaries became indispensable. In local ensembles, members see each other face to face. But at national or imperial scales, people must imagine one another as co-participants. Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” of the nation is the classic example: millions of strangers bound by shared symbols, narratives, and rituals. These imaginaries can extend solidarity, but they are also easily captured — siphoning pro-social impulses away from local conviviality and into bureaucracies, armies, or states.

Neoliberalism adds a distinctive turn: it managerializes the siphoning itself. Communities are not only drained but actively recoded as markets. Mutual aid becomes “volunteer service delivery.” Schools become “competitive education providers.” Even friendship is colonized by metrics and platforms. Neoliberalism is the siphon that insists extraction is freedom.

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5. Socialism’s Absorption of Idiotism

Socialism, while opposing exploitation, often carried forward this civilizational siphoning.

• Taylorism: Lenin’s embrace of “scientific management” treated workers as interchangeable cogs. Socialist ownership of the factory did not dissolve the idiotism of Taylorized labor.
  
• Ownership as Panacea: Many socialists assumed that once workers owned production, communal relations would naturally emerge. This was less materialism than crypto-theology: a faith that solidarity would appear without cultivation.
  
• Possessive Individual: Socialism inherited from liberal philosophy the conception of the individual as proprietor — a figure cut off from communal reciprocity, relating to others only through contract or coercion.
  
• Intellectual Property: Nineteenth-century thinkers could not have foreseen the rise of the intellectual property regime, now central to capitalist enclosure. IP fences off creativity and knowledge themselves.
  

Socialism’s vulnerability came not only from external enemies but from its own shallow rooting in ethos. Without the grounding of schmoozalism, socialism too easily imported idiotism into its own soil.

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6. Idiotism Beyond Socialism

Other traditions also sought liberation while carrying forward idiotism:

• Existentialism: Presented the “authentic self” as a solitary hero, echoing Leibniz’s windowless monad. Schmoozalism instead insists on individuality as reciprocal and ensemble-defined.
  
• Cognitive Psychology: Even embodied cognition emphasizes the body of the individual, leaving out the ensemble. Schmoozalism stresses that cognition is always ensemble-enabled.
  
• Game Theory & Behavioral Economics: These fields complicate homo economicus with heuristics, but the “player” remains an isolated actor. In reality, a prisoner in the prisoner’s dilemma is also a parent, a neighbor, a community member. To erase these multiplicities is to reproduce idiotism. Schmoozalism restores multiplicity as the real ground of decision and meaning.
  

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7. Schmoozalism as Counter-Idiotism

Schmoozalism begins with the recognition that individuality and community are co-evolved wholes: inseparable, mutually enabling, constituted in relation.

Schmoozalism as Soil

It is the soil of socialism, not its fruit. The fruit is what we call socialism: institutions, policies, and economies organized around solidarity and reciprocity. But the soil is schmoozalism: the radical etiquette, interpretive practice, and ensemble conviviality that make those fruits possible and sustainable.

Without schmoozalism, socialism can be decreed, even built for a time, but it remains brittle. With schmoozalism, socialism grows organically, renewed in each generation through the ensembles that sustain it.

Communitaria as Media and Counter-Siphons

Communitaria are not reservoirs to be drained but media: living substrates where ensembles can arise and flourish. They are also counter-siphons: structures that replenish conviviality at its base, reversing civilization’s age-old depletion.

Venture Schmoozalism

Venture schmoozalism names the exploratory character of ensemble life:

• Study: probing, testing, learning.
  
• Creativity: recombining meanings and practices.
  
• Invention: ensemble construction of tools and institutions.
  
• Play: the foundation of them all — enacting multiplicity, bending or reinventing rules, keeping ensembles fluid.
  

Civilizational siphons suppress play, enforcing rigid rules and commodifying leisure. Schmoozalism restores play as a political ontology of multiplicity.

Historical Glimpses

• Sewer Socialism: In Milwaukee, early 20th-century socialists focused on sanitation, housing, and public works. This was venture schmoozalism in practice — pragmatic, ensemble-oriented, inventive. But managerialism gradually hollowed it out, reducing citizens to clients of bureaucracies.
  
• Cooperatives: Exploratory economic ventures that often absorbed corporate managerialism under competitive pressure.
  
• Mutual Aid Societies: Rich forms of ensemble solidarity, later subsumed by bureaucratic welfare systems.
  
• Open Source: A digital commons of playful invention, partially captured by corporations and IP regimes.
  

Each example shows both the vitality of schmoozalism and the danger of managerial capture.

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8. Horizons and Pragmatism

Schmoozalism is not statist and not anti-statist. States are contingent resource-ensembles, legitimate only insofar as they serve smaller ensembles.

This stands directly against neoliberal inevitabilism, which insists that all institutions must be marketized. Schmoozalism affirms contingency instead: there is no natural inevitability, only the choices and experiments of ensembles.

Its stance is pragmatic: “when in Rome.” Schmoozalism engages state and economy tactically, but it does not enthrall itself to them. Its foundation is always the schmooze-level.

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9. Conclusion

Schmoozalism is not socialism itself. It is the foundational ethos in which socialism becomes durable. It is the counter-idiotism that restores conviviality, replenishes multiplicity, and reopens the imaginative ground of collective life.

Where Randian objectivism exalts the isolated self, schmoozalism situates individuality within ensembles. Where managerialism reduces life to systems of control, schmoozalism fosters fluidity and exploration. Where neoliberalism insists on inevitability, schmoozalism insists on contingency.

Communitaria are the living media where this ethos is cultivated: counter-siphons, replenishing conviviality, sustaining multiplicity. They are where socialism’s foundation is laid anew, not in abstraction but in playful, exploratory, ensemble life.

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➡️ Read the introductory essay: Schmoozalism: The Radical Etiquette Behind Mamdani’s Appeal
➡️ Read the companion essay: Why Mamdani’s Success Depends on Civic Communitaria

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Takeaway: Schmoozalism is the ethos of ensembles: the soil from which socialism can grow, the practice of restoring conviviality at its source, and the invention of futures through play.

#TheCommunitariumProject #TheMamdaniMovement #RedefiningSocialism #Schmoozalism

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign has mobilized New Yorkers on a breathtaking scale. But a Mamdani mayoralty will quickly run up against the trap of neoliberal managerialism and the danger of cultish overreach. Its strength will come not from charisma or technocracy, but from civic communitaria: living assemblies where New Yorkers sustain collective competence.

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The Promise of a Mamdani Mayoralty

No one can miss what has just happened in New York City. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign brought tens of thousands of people into motion, united by clear demands: affordable housing, childcare, and a city that works for the people who keep it running.

That movement already distinguishes him from the “CEO mayors” of the last generation. Yet as Ross Barkan and others have warned, the role of mayor is not only agitator-in-chief. It is also manager of one of the most complex municipalities in the world. A Mamdani mayoralty cannot evade this reality.

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The Managerial Trap

Managerialism insists that “competence” means efficiency, budget discipline, and keeping business confidence high. Its success is measured in bond ratings and growth indices.

If Mamdani allows himself to be judged by these standards, he will find himself fighting on the enemy’s terrain. He will be forced to reassure markets rather than mobilize people. The result: promises whittled down, demands deferred, energy dissipated.

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The Charisma Trap

There is another danger, equally real: that Mamdani’s ability to mobilize people in motion gets misread as charisma.

Charisma can inspire, but it cannot institutionalize. If competence is located in the aura of the leader, then a Mamdani administration risks devolving into a personality cult. That is as sterile as managerialism, for both collapse the civic into a single figure — either the technocrat or the hero — rather than the living intelligence of the people themselves.

We call Mamdani’s alternative approach schmoozalism — a radical etiquette of encounter that defined his campaign.

But schmoozalism, on its own, is an ethos. It is the soil of politics, not its full harvest. To bear fruit, it requires structures that make the ethos durable. That is what we mean by civic communitaria.

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A Schmoozalist Alternative: Civic Communitaria

What the campaign has proven is that competence can be distributed. Fifty thousand volunteers, disciplined coalitions, neighborhood roots: this is not charisma, it is infrastructure.

Civic communitaria would extend that achievement into governing.

• Unlike New York’s community boards, they are not bound by municipal charters or limited to advisory roles.
  
• Unlike conventional civic organizations, they do not simply represent members to City Hall.
  
• They are porous ensembles, open to anyone, oriented to the life of the city, cultivating mutual practice alongside deliberation.
  

What are they in practice? Civic communitaria are set up, run, and maintained by their own members. They are organized online through open-source, federated platforms that ensure no single company or city agency controls them. The online layer is only a tool — a facilitative space where neighbors deliberate, coordinate, and share resources — always oriented toward real-world action: meetings, mutual aid, monitoring, and mobilization.

Think of them as people’s fora in that they provide ongoing space for deliberation and collective decision-making. Think of them as community centers in that they anchor real-world projects, practices, and forms of care. But unlike either alone, communitaria weave these elements together. They are independent but aligned: starting from support for Mamdani’s broad policies while remaining free to evaluate, pressure, and articulate needs in their own voice.

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Why Mamdani Needs Civic Communitaria

• They preserve campaign energy, preventing post-election demobilization.
  
• They measure success in lived outcomes — secure housing, accessible childcare, reliable transit — rather than abstract efficiency metrics.
  
• They inoculate against cultism by dispersing agency and competence among plural assemblies.
  
• They erode managerialism’s monopoly by showing that competence can be collective, deliberative, and reproducible.
  

A Mamdani administration that welcomes such formations at its side will be stronger, not weaker. It will be accountable to real people, not merely to markets or the myth of charisma.

Because communitaria are not just instruments. They are the fields in which the soil of schmoozalism bears fruit: the spaces where everyday radical etiquette ripens into collective governance, where socialism becomes livable.

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The Larger Horizon

Civic communitaria are one expression of a broader communitarian project: building living formations of shared life that complement but are not captured by state institutions.

If Mamdani’s mayoralty helps plant and nurture these new civic forms, his legacy will not be limited to policy wins. It will be remembered as the moment New Yorkers began to rebuild the civic in full — together, in deliberation, in care, in common action.

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Takeaway: Zohran Mamdani won’t save New York — but with civic communitaria, New Yorkers can save it together.

➡️ Read the introductory essay: Schmoozalism: The Radical Etiquette Behind Mamdani’s Appeal

➡️ Read the clarificatory essay: Schmoozalism: A Clarificatory Introduction

#TheCommunitariumProject #TheMamdaniMovement #RedefiningSocialism #Schmoozalism