To get this party started, some recent thoughts about walking the talk...

Isn’t it just spouting ideology to verbally promote a Marxist “reality” when one cannot bring herself to go out of her way to help her comrades? It’s great to talk about where political systems break down and how they can be improved, but such talk is also an all-too-easy way to gloss over the disconnects between a person’s lifestyle and the ideals they articulate (or at least allude to in absentia).

In his Ph.D. thesis, social theorist Anthony McCann discusses a type of perception unique to the West -- one that drives the commodifying impulse -- that he terms “enclosure,” where intrapersonal and interpersonal relations proceed toward the end of eliminating uncertainty. Within such a worldview, not only are experiences other than one’s own objectified as peripheral and irrelevant, but each of one’s own experiences gets cordoned off from the others, unexamined holistically; as McCann puts it, “As long as the enclosing strategies of commodification dominate our experience, we are unlikely to personally, ethically challenge ourselves [bold added], nor personally, ethically challenge the negative effects of the dominant authoritative voices wherever we are.”

How can one relate humanely to others, then, if one is unwilling to integrate humanistic ideals into one’s mode-of-being, to where one is able to sacrifice comfort in some measure (embodied in “good” of the commodity) to the greater democratic good of community?

Something as obvious as political activism starts with simple gifts: doing things you don’t “have to” for people in need, things that involve looking someone in the face and shaking their hand. It starts with being there for and giving back to the loved ones we often take for granted. While virtual communities have begun to tap into their enormous democratic potential, they are no substitute for presence-based communities, and should unfold in tandem with them. We must never forget to interact with people as people, not merely as service providers, go-betweens, or “has-beens.”