I never intended to become a communist. Although the language and imagery of tired, fallen regimes was of interest to me throughout my time at university, where I studied art, I maintained an ironic, healthy distance from engagement with any form of political action. Today, things are different. Through entering the world of the market, a political consciousness has been pushed to the forefront of my brain; it has developed not through ideological wishful thinking but through necessity and praxis. And when reading articles such as Thierry Schaffauser's, I'm beginning to feel part of a wider movement.

The change started when a group of fellow students and I were assessing our options post-graduation. We all wanted to carry on making art, but didn't yet feel ready to start another educational course. To continue, we wanted what we had been provided with on our course – a studio space to make our work, and a shared space in which to show it. Our options were limited – we were all in precarious work with short-term contracts, mainly in construction and maintenance or catering and service industries. Studio spaces were expensive, with long waiting lists in London. The gallery system of showing work consisted of spending a lot of time courting the market and dealers, and gave little space for experimentation.

And so we tried something else, together. We pooled our resources to rent a cheap warehouse, and started meeting to decide on its use. We make decisions as a group. The labour is shared between all members, and it has stopped being just a gallery – we've held meetings and talks, film nights and workshops and used it as a base for a community garden. Art in itself is a vanity, but the learning process for me has become a political awakening as to what it really means to be "of the left" in Britain today.

Leftwing party politics appears to be a corpse – a few professional activists are trying to reanimate it, but its effect on people's everyday lives is minimal. Yet as I learned with our own co-operative, I started noticing grassroots projects organising along truly leftist principles all around me. Community groups with horizontal power structures, grassroots unions, co-operative printing presses and bookshops, anti-poverty campaigns and myriad projects run by their workers or participants were brought to life. Collective labour resulted in collective gain.

This stood in stark contrast to what I'd perceived before. I was used to the visible face of the left being totally irrelevant to my life. I saw a movement led by academics who were more concerned with issues of media representation or their own romantic legacy of anti-imperialism than the everyday inequalities and injustices that people face because they're poor. I wasn't interested in dubious alliances with patriarchal Islamist groups, identity chauvinism or "prolier-than-thou" slanging matches. I was interested in changing the conditions of my everyday life. Raoul Vaneigem wrote: "People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life … such people have a corpse in their mouth". He was remarkably prescient.

The collectives I saw around me weren't gorging on the dead, they were asking: "Who has control over my everyday life, and how do I get it back?" They were simply organising to take control of their lives themselves, directly and without forming new versions of the hierarchies they were attacking. For them, it was "not a question of objectives, but tactics".

The left needs to relearn from co-operatives that to regain their potential for innovative thought and to build a social movement, our politics need to be learned from action, and not from the imposition of academic thinking on to groups perfectly capable of representing themselves. We refuse to accept that politics begins and ends at the ballot box. It is not a specialised professional sphere, but a series of decisions about where power lies followed by actions to take it back. Three-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Gerrard Winstanley wrote: "Action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing". These small groups seem to embody his spirit.

Communes (as shown by the Tarnac 9) come into being when people find each other, get on with each other, and decide on a common path. Why shouldn't communes proliferate everywhere? Communism no longer means red flags and symbolic marches. It certainly doesn't mean a party or a centralised state enslaving its people. Today, it is what it was first intended as – working people organising democratically outside the specialised area allotted for politics by the state. It means organising in our workplace, our community, even in our homes, in order to gain control over the decisions that influence our everyday lives. It means those decisions being taken by all those whom they will affect, not just those with market power or the time and financial backing to climb the political hierarchy. I have found myself an accidental communist.

• Huw Lemmey posts on Cif under the username of zounds. This commission was suggested on a You tell us thread