The Left’s key terms—solidarity, mutual aid, liberation—often fail to mobilize because they have been enclosed, ritualized, and detached from lived practice. While leftist organizations sustain these terms internally, they must help build outward-facing communities that integrate language into real, systemic change. This series will explore how to reclaim a vocabulary of communal power.
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The Left speaks, but does it still move? Across activist spaces, online discussions, and political organizing efforts, certain words appear again and again:
solidarity, mutual aid, liberation, community, organizing, care, accountability, resistance, radical. These words are meant to inspire and orient, to mobilize and sustain. But too often, they function as
ritual incantations rather than as catalysts of real communal action. They circulate as tokens of ideological belonging, yet they frequently fail to generate the kind of deep, ongoing commitment necessary for transformative politics. Instead of mobilizing, they can alienate. Instead of building communal power, they can reinforce individualist performance.
This is not merely a problem of rhetoric. It is a symptom of deeper fractures in the Left’s capacity to create and sustain communal life. Our language has been subject to
enclosures—sometimes imposed by hegemonic forces, sometimes self-inflicted through hyper-politicized subcultural discourse. The result is a set of terms that often
mean less to those who use them than to those excluded from their use. This article is the beginning of a broader inquiry: How has the language of the Left been enclosed, hollowed out, or ritualized in ways that undermine its purpose? And what might it mean to reclaim a political vocabulary that
moves us—one that generates real communal structures rather than merely
naming them?
The Problem: When Words Cease to Build Worlds
Political language does not simply describe reality; it
constructs it. Language is infrastructure—it enables coordination, orientation, and the reproduction of meaning across time and space. For a movement to be effective, its vocabulary must be
alive—capable of evolving, spreading, and embedding itself in the daily experiences of those it seeks to mobilize.
Yet, many of the Left’s key terms have undergone a transformation that renders them
less actionable, less felt, and less real:
- They have become detached from practice – Terms like solidarity and mutual aid are now more often used as performative declarations than as embedded social relations. Solidarity becomes a gesture rather than a structure of obligation; mutual aid becomes a hashtag rather than a durable system of care.
- They have become hyper-moralized and exclusionary – Instead of inviting participation, certain words now function as boundary markers, distinguishing the ideologically pure from the insufficiently committed. This leads to paralysis rather than expansion—instead of asking, “How can we bring more people into shared struggle?” the emphasis shifts to, “Who is using the right words in the right way?”
- They have been absorbed into bureaucratic and academic discourse – Many of the Left’s most vital concepts have been NGO-ified and academicized, stripped of their disruptive energy. Words like organizing and resistance become grant-friendly, professionalized terms, more suited for white papers than for lived, communal struggle.
- They are overused but underdefined – Some of the most frequently invoked words have lost any clear meaning. What does it mean to “center care”? What does it mean to be “radical” when that word is applied equally to lifestyle choices and revolutionary movements? When everything is called “liberation,” what distinguishes real, substantive transformations from aesthetic rebellion?
The result:
a language that no longer moves us because it no longer connects to felt experience. A language that feels more like a
moral scaffolding for individual positioning than a set of tools for collective world-building.
The Hegemonic Trap: Outrage, Containment, and Semantic Drift
Hegemonic forces do not simply repress leftist language; they
capture, redirect, and exhaust it. This happens in multiple ways:
- The commodification of radical language – Terms like resistance and liberation are now frequently deployed by corporate brands, drained of any structural critique. The language of social change is absorbed into the market, where it can be used to sell sneakers and streaming services.
- The exploitation of moral outrage cycles – The Left is often caught in a reactive posture, responding to right-wing attacks or crises rather than setting its own agenda. This leads to the circulation of language within high-intensity but low-sustainability outrage cycles.
- The dilution of meaning through institutionalization – Once-radical ideas become incorporated into the logic of liberal reformism, where they can exist as terms without consequences. Concepts like diversity and inclusion can be operationalized in ways that leave power structures untouched.
- Algorithmic reinforcement of in-group jargon – Social media accelerates the transformation of political language into coded subcultural currency. Instead of words spreading outward to create shared meaning, they are often reinforced within ideological enclaves, making broad coalition-building harder.
The Limits of Walled Communities and the Fragmentation of Struggle
It is important to recognize that certain leftist organizations, such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), have managed to create communities in which these terms
do function with greater coherence. Within their walls, words like
solidarity and
mutual aid are more susceptible to genuine contestation and more effective at mobilization. However, these organizations often operate as
walled communities, which, although open to anyone,
exact the fee of ideological commitment—becoming sites of refuge rather than engines of broad democratic world-building.
Leftist organizations like DSA must be in the business of
enabling the people they want to help to build their own speech communities and communities of practice. They must be in a position to
teach people how to achieve what they, to some degree, have achieved. They must do work that
plants the seeds of thousands of new outward-facing cosmopolitan communities, dedicated to certain broadly common principles but each pursuing them in their unique ways and forging distinct communal identities.
Outside of these spaces, leftist efforts tend to be
piecemeal rather than integrative,
localized rather than systemic. They promise
particular improvements rather than articulating
a broadly re-conceived way of living. This leaves leftist politics fragmented, unable to present a holistic alternative to the systems it critiques. If political language is to regain its vitality, it must escape these enclosures and serve as the connective tissue of a
living, communal structure rather than a subcultural dialect.
Conclusion: Toward a Vocabulary of Communal Power
This series will examine key leftist terms through the lens of
speech communities and communities of practice, exploring how they can be reclaimed to build a
real, living infrastructure of communal meaning-making. Because if the Left is to move again, it must first find words that move
us.
