I do not really consider myself a leftist, and I do not consider myself a Marxist either. I am a socialist, but my socialism does not come primarily through Marx. It comes much more from utopian socialism, religious socialism, older communal traditions, Indigenous and BIPOC forms of communal life, reciprocity, mutual obligation, shared stewardship, and the idea that human beings should organize life around the community rather than around property, profit, or the state. That starting point matters because it means I do not inherit many of the assumptions that later Marxist movements treated as necessary: centralization, historical stages, party leadership, seizure of the state, nationalization as the main meaning of socialism, or the idea that liberation can be administered downward by people who supposedly understand history better than everyone else.

My socialism starts from a much simpler moral question: how should people live together if nobody is supposed to dominate anybody else? Once I start there, socialism means common responsibility, democratic control of economic life, shared access to the necessities of life, ecological stewardship, and communities possessing real power over the conditions that shape them. It does not mean replacing private owners with state managers. It does not mean building a giant bureaucracy and calling that collective ownership. It does not mean telling workers that the factory belongs to them while a party official still tells them what they are allowed to do.

That is also why I do not feel particularly attached to the word leftist. The historical Left contains too many movements that have almost nothing to do with the society I am actually trying to build. A democratic communalist, a Marxist-Leninist, an authoritarian nationalist calling themselves socialist, a social democrat, an anarchist, and a liberal progressive can all get placed somewhere under the same giant label even though their understandings of power, freedom, the state, hierarchy, economics, and democracy can be completely opposed to one another. At that point the word becomes too broad to tell people very much about me.

I have far more in common with somebody who believes in direct democracy, ecological stewardship, local self-government, cooperative economics, confederation, and opposition to domination than I do with somebody simply because both of us can be placed historically on “the Left.”

That becomes especially obvious when people act as though every movement that used socialist language somehow belongs to the same political family. I do not consider Marxist-Leninist states part of my socialist tradition. State capitalism administered through a one-party bureaucracy is not the liberation of workers simply because private capitalists have been displaced. Workers still do not govern themselves. Communities still do not possess political power. The state becomes the employer, planner, owner, and disciplinarian. Domination remains.

The same problem appears in authoritarian movements that combined socialist language with nationalism and state power. Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athism has nothing to do with the socialism I am talking about. Gaddafi’s political system and his Third International Theory likewise do not become liberatory merely because they rejected Western capitalism or used language about popular rule. If meaningful authority is concentrated above ordinary people, if opposition is repressed, and if communities cannot independently organize and govern themselves, then I do not care what revolutionary vocabulary the state uses. That is domination.

Fascism and authoritarian state socialism are obviously not identical ideologies, but they share the structure I am fundamentally trying to escape: power moves upward, ordinary people become subjects, and somebody else claims the right to determine the direction of society for them. One says nation, another says party, another says leader, another says revolution. I am interested in the opposite movement: power moving downward until ordinary people themselves become the political center of society.

This is where I think about politics as a great historical conversation rather than a collection of isolated ideologies.

Classical liberalism entered that conversation by attacking old forms of domination. It challenged monarchy, hereditary aristocracy, established religious authority, and feudal privilege. The ideas of individual liberty, freedom of conscience, constitutional limits, and equality before the law were genuinely revolutionary against the societies that came before them.

But liberalism stopped at political and legal freedom while leaving economic domination largely intact.

So social democracy pushed the conversation further. It said that formal liberty means very little when somebody is starving, homeless, sick, overworked, or completely dependent upon an employer. It demanded unions, social protections, public services, welfare, and limits on capital.

But social democracy stopped while capitalism remained.

Democratic socialism pushes further by saying that economic power itself must become democratic. Workers and communities cannot remain politically equal while a small owning class controls workplaces, investment, housing, land, and enormous concentrations of wealth.

But democratic socialism can still stop too early if it merely transfers ownership into a centralized state.

Anarchism then asks an even deeper question: why preserve domination at all? Why should the state, hierarchy, bosses, landlords, patriarchies, and centralized authorities survive simply because somebody promises to use them responsibly?

That is one of anarchism’s great contributions to the conversation.

But then anarchism runs into the institutional question: how do free people actually govern a complex society together?

And that is where I arrive at communalism, libertarian municipalism, and democratic confederalism.

The community becomes the political foundation.

People govern themselves through assemblies.

Economic life becomes socially and democratically controlled.

Municipalities coordinate through mandated, recallable delegates.

Communities confederate rather than surrendering themselves to a centralized sovereign authority.

Ecology becomes part of the structure of society itself.

Politics stops being something performed by a specialized class and becomes something ordinary people actually practice.

So when I look at the great conversation, I see a movement from liberal freedom, to social protection, to economic democracy, to opposition to hierarchy, to democratic communal power.

Classical liberalism → social democracy → democratic socialism → anarchism → communalism → libertarian municipalism → democratic confederalism.

Not because history mechanically follows those stages, but because each one asks the question the previous one left unanswered.

Who is still dominating whom?

What power has not yet been democratized?

Where has liberation stopped?

That is why I do not feel the need to call myself a Marxist or even a leftist.

I know where I come from.

My tradition is broader and older than Marxism. It comes from people sharing land and responsibility, religious movements demanding justice for the poor, utopian socialists imagining cooperative societies before Marx developed his system, workers building mutual-aid institutions, Indigenous peoples maintaining forms of collective stewardship and confederation, Black communities developing traditions of mutual survival and communal responsibility, anarchists attacking hierarchy, social ecologists connecting domination of human beings with domination of nature, and democratic movements continually demanding that power belong to the people themselves.

I am interested in where that entire conversation leads when we refuse to stop halfway.

And to me it leads toward the liberatory society: communal, ecological, socialist, directly democratic, municipal, and confederal.

Not rule supposedly for the people.

Power of the people themselves.