Part of why I started my original friend group, The Communal Cult Discord, was that I was tired of having to deal with conservatives, reactionaries, and bigots. I wanted to have friends and a space where that wasn’t always the thing I had to work around. And having the group has helped me get clearer about who I actually want in my life. Interpersonally, I don’t have some complicated checklist. I want people I care about and trust. Politically, I want friends who are democratic and progressive, and who want democracy to reach every part of our lives so people and communities have real power over the things that affect them.

The more I think about it, the more I realize how post-left I am. I share a lot with people on the left, but I’m also really critical of the inherited left and a lot of the newer left spaces I see around me. When I call myself post-left, I mean I’m trying to think beyond those inherited categories. The labels don’t tell me enough about what someone thinks democracy should look like, who should hold power, or how we actually get to a liberatory society. People can use the same political words and mean very different things, and I keep coming back to that.

A lot of the distance I feel comes down to political seriousness. I keep pushing back against lifestylism, performativism, purity culture, and sensationalism. Anti-cruelty matters to me, and so do means and ends. I can’t separate the society I want from the choices we make while trying to reach it. I think about that a lot when people argue about emerging technology and what social revolution is supposed to look like. I want us to be serious about building a liberatory society, not just proving how much we oppose the present one.

My socialism comes from a different place, too. I feel much closer to ethical socialism, utopian socialism, and spiritual or religious forms of socialism than I do to the Marxist tradition. I don’t share a political project with authoritarian socialists. I do have more in common with libertarian socialists, but a lot of those spaces still get pulled into some of the same tendencies I’m trying to separate myself from. So even where there’s real overlap, I don’t always feel at home.

Communalism is where I found a clearer way to talk about what I mean. Bookchin helped me see it as a political project in its own right, one that comes out of anarchist thought but can’t be reduced to just another kind of anarchism. Öcalan’s move away from Marxism-Leninism toward democratic confederalism, with Bookchin’s influence, helped me think about another path toward people governing themselves. I was already anti-authoritarian before I read either of them, but their work helped me understand where my own ideas were going.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that my politics have their own shape. They have a lot in common with libertarian socialism, but I don’t feel like authoritarian socialism or anarchism fully describes where I’m coming from. Sometimes I feel like not many people are thinking about how all these things connect, or tracing where their own politics come from in the same way. Maybe that’s why I’ve been finding it so hard to explain myself and to find people I can really build with. I have a lot in common with people on the left, but I still feel pretty far outside the groups and labels I’m expected to fit into.