That was the smaller of the two fights. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association has now qualified a statewide ballot measure for November that would effectively repeal Measure ULA in its entirety. A separate coalition of developers, union locals, and advocacy groups calling itself “Mend It, Don’t End It” is pushing the city to make exemptions and reforms. The political center is organizing to roll the program back. The political left is fighting to defend it in its current form, which it should. But defense is not the same as expansion, and a defensive posture is not the same as asking what ULA could become.

Since taking effect in April 2023, ULA has raised $1.1 billion from 1,633 real estate transactions, funded roughly 800 new affordable units, and helped stabilize thousands of renters facing eviction. The city projects about $500 million in the coming fiscal year, roughly half what proponents initially promised but still the largest pool of independent public housing capital Los Angeles has produced in a generation. Measures like it rarely survive contact with organized capital. Seattle’s 2018 head tax, a far smaller levy on large employers meant to fund homelessness services, was repealed less than a month after passage under an Amazon-led pressure campaign; the tax would have cost Amazon ten million dollars a year against a single quarter’s net income of $1.6 billion.2 ULA passed by ballot and has held for three years. That endurance is what November now puts to a vote. The Rent Stabilization Ordinance has been tightened in parallel: just-cause protections extended to nearly every rental unit, the annual rent-cap formula pulled lower, tenant anti-harassment enforcement finally given teeth. Each of these was a fight tenant organizers spent the better part of a decade winning.

Rent stabilization holds the line. ULA secures the funding. Neither, on its own, redraws the segregated geography we inherited.

Los Angeles still likes to think of itself as a progressive city. It elects democratic socialists to its council. It passed a mansion tax by ballot when the state legislature would not. It builds, at least rhetorically, in the direction of decommodification. And yet a child born this year in Crenshaw lives in a fundamentally different city than a child born this year in Westwood. The schools they will attend, the medical care they will access, the wealth their parents can build, the police force that will engage them: each of these tracks to within a few square miles of where their parents could afford rent. This is not a market accident. It is the visible footprint of decades of federal and state housing policy that was, in Richard Rothstein’s exact phrase, de jure segregation by design.3

Rothstein's central claim in The Color of Law is that the racial geography of American cities is the deliberate product of explicit state action: federal redlining, FHA underwriting standards that subsidized white-only suburbs, exclusionary zoning enforced as state policy, public-housing siting that confirmed rather than dissolved the color line. In his closing chapter, "Considering Fixes," he draws the corollary. Because segregation was built by state action, only equally explicit state remedies can undo it.4 Markets did not produce these walls. Markets cannot dissolve them.

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I’m pondering what an LA-specific remedy might look like. The federal path Rothstein contemplates, which includes direct subsidies for descendants of redlined families to buy into formerly exclusionary suburbs, is politically and judicially closed. The California path is narrower than it should be, in part because Proposition 209 forecloses race-conscious targeting. But the city has, for the first time in a generation, a permanent and independent revenue stream in Measure ULA. The municipal Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) is legally empowered to acquire property. The argument here is that those two facts, used together, make possible a municipal program of structural integration through class- and geography-targeted public acquisition, and that this is the most consequential housing fight in front of LA voters and our City Council right now.

Rothstein's most provocative proposal, set out in section VI of his concluding chapter, is a federal program that would purchase fifteen percent of the houses coming up for sale in Levittown, NJ each year at market rates and resell them to qualified African American families at the price their grandparents would have paid had they not been illegally excluded.5 He grants immediately that no presently constituted Congress would adopt this and no presently constituted court would uphold it. He offers it anyway, because the political imagination has to be able to conceive of remedies proportional to the harm before it can negotiate down to what is achievable.

Los Angeles has its own Levittowns. Lakewood, the postwar San Fernando Valley tract developments, the curated subdivisions strung along the foothills: these were the engines of mid-century white wealth formation, built with FHA-insured mortgages systematically denied to Black Angelenos. Mike Davis traced this geography in City of Quartz with the precision of someone who understood that the suburban grid was a political artifact, not a market outcome.6 What looked like a housing market was an engineered transfer of public wealth into private white hands, with Black families locked into renting or into the small ring of neighborhoods that redlining maps would tolerate.

The compounding effects of that transfer are not historical. Rothstein notes that about one-third of middle- and upper-income Black families currently live in neighborhoods bordering severely disadvantaged areas, while only six percent of similar-income white families do.7 In Los Angeles, this means a Black middle-class family in Inglewood or View Park lives a different distance from concentrated poverty, from over-policed corridors, from underfunded schools, than a white middle-class family in Mar Vista or Sherman Oaks at identical incomes. The walls did not come down with the Fair Housing Act. The mortgage interest deduction has, for sixty years, quietly subsidized the descendants of those who got in. The scale of that subsidy deserves a pause. Even after the 2017 tax law cut the deduction's cost roughly in half, the federal government still spends on it a sum equal to about half of everything it spends on low-income housing support, through a single program whose benefits flow only to households wealthy enough to itemize.8

How are these walls maintained today? Not by signs at the city limits. They are maintained by zoning. Single-family-only districts, minimum lot sizes, square-footage floors, parking minimums, design review processes calibrated to make multifamily development economically unworkable: these are the descendants of the restrictive covenants the Supreme Court struck down in Shelley v. Kraemer, preserved in the language of the building code.9 When Rothstein argues in section VIII for banning exclusionary zoning outright, he is naming the mechanism honestly.

The federal route he sketches in section IX, John Boger’s proposed Fair Share Act, would penalize homeowners in non-integrating jurisdictions by stripping their mortgage interest and property tax deductions.10 The proposal is elegant. It is also beyond municipal reach, since federal tax code cannot be amended by city ordinance. But California has its own version of leverage. The state's Regional Housing Needs Allocation already assigns each jurisdiction a numerical share of regional housing need by income band. The independent enclaves embedded in LA County, Beverly Hills, Calabasas, San Marino, are subject to those allocations and have repeatedly failed to meet them. The state's response has been mostly procedural. It does not have to be.

The model worth studying carefully is Montgomery County, Maryland. Its countywide inclusionary zoning ordinance requires developers in even the wealthiest communities to set aside between twelve and fifteen percent of units for moderate-income families. Then, crucially, the public housing authority purchases a third of those set-aside units for rental to the lowest-income families.11 The county is not merely a regulator. It is an active buyer in its own most exclusive markets. Rothstein notes the measurable result: significantly higher educational outcomes for low-income Black children attending school in the county’s wealthiest suburbs. The mechanism works because the public authority moves the housing from a commodity in a private market to a unit of public provision in the geography where private markets would otherwise exclude.

This is the move Los Angeles has not made.

The seventy percent of ULA revenue not statutorily locked for homelessness prevention is the most important pool of public housing capital LA has generated in fifty years. The question is how it gets spent. The default trajectory, the one institutional inertia will pull toward without organized pressure, is to fund affordable-housing developers building where they already build, which means South LA, the eastern Valley, the periphery of downtown. The pilot the council committee advanced last Friday, a reduced ULA rate on newly built affordable housing projects, runs in exactly this groove. It is a subsidy to the existing affordable-development pipeline. It will produce real units. It will not produce integration. It will deepen the existing geography rather than redraw it.

Anyone proposing to spend housing money in Los Angeles also has to answer for Proposition HHH. Voters approved $1.2 billion in 2016 to build ten thousand units of supportive housing over a decade. Three years in, by the accounting in Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern’s Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, the most rigorous recent empirical study of the American crisis, one percent of those units were ready for occupancy. Per-unit costs projected at $350,000 to $414,000 had reached a median of $531,000, with the bond covering roughly a quarter of each unit’s cost and the remainder assembled from the usual stack of tax credits and debt.12 The lesson of HHH is not that public housing money fails. The lesson is that pushing public money through the private construction pipeline is the slowest and most expensive way to turn dollars into homes. ULA’s first three years, roughly 800 units funded, echo HHH’s pace for the same reason: the pipeline is the same. Acquisition is the fast path, and the pandemic proved it at scale. When governments bought hotels and motels outright to house people during COVID, they added habitable units in months rather than years and at a fraction of new-construction cost, a model the state of California formalized as Project Homekey.13 An acquisition-first ULA strategy, aimed at high-resource neighborhoods, is how the city avoids running the HHH experiment a second time under a new name.

The alternative, then, is to direct HACLA’s acquisition program, which already exists and already buys property, toward the “high and highest resource areas” mapped by the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee: West LA, the coast, the wealthier parts of the Valley, the foothills. Pair that with a municipal acquisition quota on new multifamily development in those areas, modeled on Montgomery County’s, set somewhere between fifteen and twenty percent. Target eligibility by Area Median Income rather than race, which keeps the program inside the constraints of Proposition 209 while in practice reaching the working-class families most cut out of those neighborhoods.14 Bundle the housing placements with the social infrastructure that makes integration livable: transit subsidies, childcare networks, school stabilization funding for new arrivals, partnerships with the public-health system. Without that layer, integration is just expensive relocation. With it, it becomes the spatial expression of a universal right to the city.

One structural caveat has to be named here. Article XXXIV of the California Constitution, a relic of the 1950 real-estate-industry backlash to public housing, requires majority voter approval before any “state public body” may develop “low-rent housing.” HACLA acquisitions can be structured to fall under the provision’s effective threshold through mixed-income financing, and the city has, when it has chosen to, placed pre-authorization measures on the ballot to clear large-scale acquisitions in advance. Article XXXIV is a real constraint. It is not a fatal one. It is one of the few openly segregationist artifacts in the state’s foundational law still doing daily work, and a serious municipal acquisition program is, among other things, an argument for finally repealing it.15

This is what an active public buyer looks like. HACLA stops being the operator of last-resort housing. It becomes the city's instrument for breaking commodified geography.

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Three objections will come, and each is worth taking seriously.

The first is that integration policy disrespects the communities Black and brown Angelenos have built. South LA, Boyle Heights, Pico-Union: these are not zones of disinvestment. They are neighborhoods with deep institutional memory, civic networks, churches, mutual aid traditions forged precisely because the rest of the city excluded them. To treat integration as an automatic good is to repeat a paternalism this city already has too much practice in. The right response is to refuse the framing. The proposal is not to empty those neighborhoods. It is to fund them at full strength while also giving a working-class family a real choice. Stay in a Crenshaw or a Boyle Heights finally invested in commensurate to its residents’ contributions to the city, or move into a publicly owned unit in Westwood near jobs and well-funded schools without facing a rental paywall. The first is reparation through investment. The second is reparation through access. Either is a form of self-determination. Neither requires the other to be displacement.

The second objection is that municipal housing funds belong exclusively to permanent supportive housing for the chronically unhoused, and that anything else is misallocation. The objection deserves to be met at its strongest, because in Los Angeles it carries the force of what everyone can see. Three quarters of unhoused Angelenos sleep unsheltered, on sidewalks, in vehicles, in the parks; in New York, which operates under a legal right to shelter, the figure is under ten percent.16 LA’s crisis is the most visible in the country, and a visible crisis produces an intuitive policy: direct every public dollar at the people in front of you.

But the visible crisis and the causal structure point in different directions. Colburn and Aldern’s core finding is that rates of homelessness across American cities track two variables, rents and rental vacancy, and are not explained by poverty, addiction, mental illness, weather, or the generosity of local welfare. Detroit and Cleveland are far poorer than Los Angeles and have a fraction of its homelessness; Seattle’s per capita homelessness rate runs four times Cincinnati’s.17 Individual vulnerability determines who loses their housing. The housing market determines how many people must lose it. In their image, an injury may explain why a particular player loses at musical chairs, but only the number of chairs explains how many players end up standing. The encampment is the output of a machine whose intake valve is the rental market, and a city cannot shrink it by serving only the people already inside.

The ULA ordinance already directs roughly thirty percent of funds to homelessness prevention, which is the appropriate floor. The remaining seventy percent should be deployed where it breaks the inflow, which means stabilizing the rent-burdened workers one missed paycheck from the street. Bus drivers, school aides, hospital techs, line cooks: the “missing middle” of the LA workforce is what the next wave of homelessness will be made of if we wait. Social housing, understood as a universal workforce good rather than a residual program for the most destitute, is the upstream intervention that makes the downstream programs sustainable, and the empirical conclusion matches: no scale of shelter investment can end homelessness without permanent affordable housing on the far side of it.18 Vienna did not build the largest social housing system in Europe by treating it as charity. It built it by treating housing as infrastructure.19

The third objection is the most strategically serious. Aggressive public acquisition quotas, opponents will argue, will trigger a developer strike, with private capital fleeing to Orange County, Ventura, or the Inland Empire, shrinking total supply and pushing rents higher across the region. Rothstein anticipated the structural version of this in section IX when he warned that single-jurisdiction inclusionary zoning fails because developers simply build next door. The answer there, as here, is regional and state enforcement: California’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) mandates with real consequences for non-compliance, state-level penalties on independent enclaves that absorb fleeing capital, a coordinated regional approach rather than a city-only one. There is also a more honest socialist answer worth saying out loud. If private developers refuse to build housing unless they can extract margins incompatible with public provision, they have admitted that the private market cannot guarantee shelter as a human right. This is not a conclusion confined to socialists. Colburn and Aldern, who write with no ideological commitments beyond the evidence, grant that developers are right about their own incentives, that profit-seeking capital will not supply housing at the bottom of the market, and conclude that housing must therefore be decommodified, because shelter "demands a different treatment than iPhones."20 A strike by capital is not a reason for the city to retreat. It is a reason for the city to step in directly. ULA funds can capitalize public construction, fund land trusts, contract with union builders, and bypass the private development pipeline entirely. The threat of a developer strike is meant to be an argument against decommodification. It is in fact the argument for it.

Returning to the top, Friday’s committee vote was a defensive win. The Jarvis repeal effort is a defensive fight already in motion. The “Mend It, Don’t End It” coalition is organized to negotiate ULA’s edges. None of this, taken together, asks what ULA could become. The energy on the local political map is on preservation, not expansion.

The view from Sacramento is no better. Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee, is running a serious housing platform, but it is not a structural-integration argument. He promises to use the powers of the attorney general's office, which he has held, to sue non-compliant cities into meeting their RHNA obligations, and to fund a stabilizing program to keep at-risk families housed. The one genuinely structural idea raised in this year's gubernatorial forum, Tom Steyer's roughly $22 billion split-roll proposition to fund municipalities directly, left the race when Steyer did, in the June primary.21 Becerra is running, fundamentally, on the proposition that the California housing crisis is a supply problem to be solved by helping the market produce more and by making cities permit more. The structural question of public ownership in high-resource neighborhoods, of integration as an explicit aim of public investment, of Article XXXIV as the artifact it is and the obstacle it remains, is simply not on the table.

That gap is the reason the LA municipal case matters now. If structural integration is going to happen anywhere in California in the next decade, it is going to happen because a city does it. The state legislature will not lead. Becerra, the likely next governor, is not proposing to. The federal government has no plans. The path runs through HACLA as an active buyer in the city's wealthiest neighborhoods, capitalized by ULA, structured around Area Median Income (AMI) targeting to survive Proposition 209, bundled with the social infrastructure that makes integration livable, and disciplined by a regional enforcement regime that prevents capital flight. None of this is conceptually new. Montgomery County has been doing a version of it for forty years. What would be new is doing it in Los Angeles, at the scale ULA now makes possible, and naming it for what it is: a program of spatial reparations.

To call it that is to insist on the connection Rothstein insisted on, between the deliberate construction of segregation and the deliberate construction of its undoing. The walls of this city were built by design. So will the doorways.

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After the 1917 Russian Revolution, federal officials concluded that the way to defeat communism in the United States was to make as many white Americans as possible into homeowners, on the explicit theory that those who owned property would be invested in the capitalist system.

RICHARD ROTHSTEIN

I have been reading Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, and a passage I came to this week sharpened something I already knew in a way that has not left me alone since.1 I knew, generally, that single-family homeownership in the United States is a state-engineered arrangement rather than a market outcome. I knew the FHA redlined Black neighborhoods, that the GI Bill funneled federal mortgage subsidies to white veterans and excluded Black ones, that the postwar suburb was a public-private project organized around the production of a white propertied class. That much is commonly in the literature.

What Rothstein gives in this passage is the prehistory of the policy, the ideological ground that the FHA and the GI Bill would later operationalize at scale, and it is more direct than I had understood. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, federal officials concluded that the way to defeat communism in the United States was to make as many white Americans as possible into homeowners, on the explicit theory that those who owned property would be invested in the capitalist system. The Department of Labor launched an Own-Your-Own-Home campaign that same year. It handed out buttons that read “We Own Our Own Home” to schoolchildren. It printed two million posters for factories and other workplaces. It distributed pamphlets describing it as a “patriotic duty” to cease renting and to build a single-family home. The contradiction is worth pausing on. Capitalism sells itself as the system of individual freedom, but its foundation in the United States was laid through state-mandated social duty, evangelized at scale to a population whose patriotism was conditional on its compliance. The advertisements throughout the country featured white couples and white families exclusively.

Reading this, I had to stop and sit with what it actually means. The American Dream, the entire ideological infrastructure of property as freedom and renting as failure, was called into being within three years of the Bolshevik seizure of power, as a counter-revolutionary measure, directly evangelized to children. Children actually wore buttons. The political project of producing a propertied subject who would experience their interests as aligned with capital was not the cumulative effect of a thousand small decisions. It was a deliberate state campaign with posters and pamphlets, executed by named officials in named years.

I have been writing about how capitalist culture conditions bodies in Southern California, about how the freeway is in every nervous system and the fortress home is a posture the body assumes. The Rothstein passage names one of the documented mechanisms by which that conditioning was installed. It did not appear from nowhere. It was put there, on purpose, by a state apparatus that understood exactly what it was doing. The schoolchildren who wore those buttons became the parents who bought the suburban homes that became the neighborhoods whose property values their grandchildren now defend at zoning meetings without knowing why.

The recognition does not by itself change anything. It is also not nothing. The thing about a historical project that has been successful enough to become invisible is that naming it returns it to the category of contingent choice. The buttons came from somewhere. The buttons can stop being made.

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The vote adopted a reform package on pretextual stops. It would prohibit pretextual stops and detentions of motorists and cyclists except where a violation poses a significant and imminent safety risk. It would ban consent-based searches during such stops. It would require officers to articulate the reason for any stop on body-worn video before questioning, in line with state law passed in 2022. It would direct the Office of Inspector General to monitor traffic stop data and report to the Council twice a year.

Then it would do nothing. Because this is not a law. The Los Angeles City Council has no authority over the Los Angeles Police Department. The Council can legislate directly for every other department in the city: Sanitation, Public Works, Transportation. The Police Department alone is carved out. Final policy authority over LAPD sits with the Board of Police Commissioners, a five-member civilian body appointed by the Mayor. What the Council can do is ask the Board to amend the policy. That is what the vote did.

The Board will receive the request. They may agendize it; they may not. They may vote on it; they may not. They may adopt the language as written; they may dilute it; they may reject it. None is appealable to the public. The most democratic body in the city government can ask. It cannot tell.

Pretextual stops are the everyday material of American policing. An officer pulls a car over for an inoperative taillight, an unsignaled lane change, a tinted window. The infraction is the door in. The encounter that follows is the point: the questioning, the look at the driver’s hands, the request to step out of the vehicle, the consent search. It is what the body of the driver experiences as routine surveillance and the threat of escalation. It is one of the dominant ways police presence becomes police harm.

Resmaa Menakem, in My Grandmother’s Hands, names this with care. Menakem defines the body as more than anatomy: the place where history is carried, where racialized trauma is transmitted across generations, where threat is felt before it is thought. Writing to patrol officers, he tells them that issuing citations for jaywalking, littering, or failing to signal a lane change is not service to the community. He notes, in passing, that this is not what officers do in affluent neighborhoods, and he asks why the practice is otherwise where they work. The encounter is geographically and racially distributed. The body of the officer and the body of the driver enter a relationship shaped by what Menakem calls the neo-Crow era: the structural pattern of policing as the targeting and corralling of dark-hued bodies.1

Menakem’s argument is that this dynamic will not be undone from above. It changes through the patrol officer who reorients to the neighborhood, through the chief who, where possible, “bucks the system.”2 This is a powerful diagnosis and a partial prescription. It is at the somatic and historical scale. It locates change in the body.

What it cannot do is render the change institutional. An individual officer who refuses to make pretextual stops is one officer. The patterns Menakem describes are produced by departmental policy, training, deployment, and incentive. Six years of public process at the Council have arrived at language that would do at the policy level what Menakem urges at the body level. That language was approved unanimously this morning. It will now sit on the desk of an appointed board.

There is another report on Los Angeles policing in front of the public this season. The RAND Corporation released its Organizational Assessment of the Los Angeles Police Department. It runs to 112 pages and offers more than fifty recommendations.3 It was commissioned by the Los Angeles Police Foundation, the private fundraising entity tied to LAPD leadership. Its audience is the Chief of Police.

The recommendations are organizational. RAND wants larger academy classes, civilianized administrative positions, faster background investigations, better internal communication between command staff and rank-and-file. It treats the Department’s complaint system as a workflow problem. The complaints, in RAND’s framing, are stressful for officers and “discourage proactive police activity.” The high-priority recommendation on discipline is to improve the ability of supervisors to handle nondisciplinary cases through guidance and training. That is to say: keep more of the disciplinary process inside the chain of command, faster.

RAND’s frame is not ignorant. The hiring pipeline really does take 349 days. Class sizes really are below replacement. The complaint system really is administratively burdened. These are real problems if your unit of analysis is the Department as an organization in need of internal optimization. They are not the problems you would identify if your unit of analysis were the body of the driver profiled.

The point is not that RAND has the wrong answers. The question RAND was paid to ask is how to optimize the Police Department as currently constituted. The question RAND was not paid to ask, and that the Police Foundation will never pay anyone to ask, is who should control the Department in the first place. The ceiling of the report is the ceiling of its commissioning structure.

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There are at least three scales at which police reform can be argued in Los Angeles right now. Each has its own logic. None alone is sufficient.

The organizational scale is RAND’s: tidy the workflow, the staffing, the chart. The public is not the audience. Discipline tightens its grip on its own operations.

The somatic and historical scale is Menakem’s: reorient the body, refuse the routine encounter that produces harm, build daily presence in the community. The audience is the individual officer and the individual leader. The hope is that bodies harmonize. The limit is that institutions are not bodies; they are patterns that survive the bodies that compose them. Menakem himself concedes the limit when he tells leaders they will need to defy the institution they work inside. The system is the institution. The institution does not reform itself.

The structural and democratic scale is the one this vote inhabits and could not complete. It says: the question of what the Department is permitted to do should be answered by the body whose authority comes from the public. In Los Angeles right now, that body is the Council, and the Council does not have the authority. The City Charter, in Section 574, lodges general management and control of the Department with the Board of Police Commissioners.4 The Council can ask. The Mayor’s appointees decide. This was settled, in the form it now takes, by Charter Amendment F in 1992, which strengthened civilian oversight in the wake of the Christopher Commission’s report on the Rodney King beating.5 That reform was real. It is also why today’s Council can only request what it would have voted to require. Reforms harden into structures that constrain later reform.

Charter reform has the chance to undo this calcification. Council ordinance authority over Police Department policy would mean that this 14-0 vote was the law, not a petition.

Some will argue this is too much. That the Board of Police Commissioners is civilian oversight, that civilianization is what the post-Rodney King reforms intended, that giving the Council direct authority politicizes policing. The objection should be taken seriously, then refused. The Board is appointed civilian oversight, not elected civilian oversight. The Council, however imperfect, is the body whose members face the voters of fifteen districts every four years. That is the political accountability the Charter currently routes around. To call its restoration “politicization” is to defend the existing politics, in which a board appointed by a single official adjudicates the most consequential institution in the city.

Some will argue that the deferral is itself prudent. That police policy requires expertise, that boards exist for that reason, that rushing into ordinance authority would produce unstable governance. After six years of public process on a single policy item, ending in a unanimous vote that creates no obligation, the deferral argument is no longer prudence. It is evasion.

The body of the driver does not harmonize with the body of the officer across an institutional structure designed to keep them at war. The org chart does not self-correct against the interest that funds its assessment. The Council vote does not become law without the authority to make law. The vote was a precise demonstration: democratic will is here. Democratic power is not. Charter reform is the work of closing that gap.

Council File 20-0875 will sit, now, with the Board of Police Commissioners. Whether they act will be one more datum in a long record. The record itself is the case.

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"The genius of capitalism is that it makes the dominated dream in the language of the dominant."

CHAD SHIELDS

The invisible walls

“There are men,” Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, “who go to their graves without having ever questioned anything.”1 He was writing about the colonized subject, about the peasant who accepts the colonial order as the permanent shape of the world. But Fanon’s diagnosis travels further than its original context. It names something broader: the human capacity to mistake a historical arrangement for a natural fact, to live entirely within a horizon that someone else drew.

This capacity is capitalism’s most durable asset. The exploitation the system produces is real and measurable: wages suppressed below the value workers create, housing priced beyond what ordinary incomes can sustain, healthcare rationed by ability to pay. Exploitation alone, however, does not explain capitalism’s persistence. Systems of naked domination have fallen before, when the gap between what exists and what is possible became impossible to ignore. What distinguishes capitalism is that it has largely closed that gap, not by delivering on its promises, but by making alternatives unthinkable. We live within capitalism as a total horizon of possibility, dreaming in its categories even when we strain against its constraints.

I would argue that capitalism maintains power primarily through an act of imagination: by colonizing the aspirational life of the people it exploits, converting structural domination into common sense. True emancipation, therefore, requires something prior to policy or political organizing: a rupture in our perception of what is natural, what is possible, what constitutes a life well lived. Understanding that rupture requires tools that capitalism’s own intellectual tradition cannot supply. We need Fanon’s psychology of colonial subjectivity, Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, György Lukács’s concept of reification, and Lauren Berlant’s analysis of cruel optimism. Together, these let us diagnose not just what capitalism does to our bodies, but what it does to our minds.

The zone of insufficiency: Fanon and the modern worker

The analysis begins where modern capitalism’s critics often hesitate to begin: with the psyche. Fanon, writing from the specific catastrophe of French colonialism in Algeria, was concerned with what domination does to the dominated at the level of self-understanding. The colonial subject, he argued, is not simply exploited materially. They are made to experience themselves as incomplete, as lacking, as existing in what he called the “zone of non-being,” a psychic territory where one’s humanity is perpetually in question.2

The mechanism is worth examining carefully. Colonial power does not merely extract labor and resources; it also produces a particular kind of subject, one who measures their own worth by proximity to the dominant culture. The colonized person learns to see through the colonizer’s eyes, to internalize the terms of their own degradation. The most insidious form of this internalization is aspiration: the desire not to abolish the hierarchy but to ascend it, to become, in Fanon’s analysis, as close to the master as possible. Freedom, in this frame, means becoming more like the people who defined you as inferior.

Some will object immediately: the analogy between the colonized subject and the modern worker is inappropriate. Fanon was analyzing the specific violence of racial colonialism, a system organized not just around labor extraction but around the production of racial categories designed to justify it. This objection is correct and important. Race and class are not interchangeable. The experience of anti-Black racism or colonial subjugation carries specific forms of violence, dehumanization, and historical dispossession that cannot be reduced to economic exploitation. Flattening Fanon risks both intellectual dishonesty and political harm.

And yet: Fanon himself understood his analysis to carry implications beyond its immediate context. The mechanism he identified, the way domination shapes subjectivity such that the oppressed come to measure themselves by the standards of those who dominate them, extends beyond racial colonialism. It describes, more broadly, the psychology of any system comprehensive enough to function as someone’s entire world. The modern worker confronting a labor market they did not design, measured by standards of productivity and wealth they did not choose, told that their value is precisely what the market will pay for their time, inhabits an analogous psychic structure. They are not in Fanon’s zone of non-being in any precise sense, but they occupy something we might call the zone of insufficiency: a condition in which existence is perpetually framed as inadequate, perpetually in need of more output, more consumption, more proof of worth through market performance.

Sixty miles east of the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where the global supply chain enters Southern California, the warehouses begin around Ontario and run uninterrupted toward the desert. The Inland Empire, San Bernardino and Riverside counties together, holds roughly a billion square feet of warehouse space, the equivalent of more than seventeen thousand football fields. Nearly one in fifteen working people in the region is employed inside one of those buildings.3 On a summer floor in Fontana or Moreno Valley, the temperature climbs past a hundred degrees. Work is timed in seconds. Wages run about a quarter below the regional average. Turnover is engineered into the staffing model. Mount San Jacinto rises to the west, Joshua Tree spreads to the east, both protected as public land, both available to the dominated for the cost of the gas: a horizon of common ownership the colonized imagination has not yet been taught to read politically.

The aspiration that results is the system’s greatest achievement. The person working a warehouse double shift in one of those buildings does not, typically, want to abolish the warehouse. They want to become the warehouse owner. This is the predictable outcome of living inside a total horizon, not a failure of intelligence or political consciousness. When the only stories widely available about a better life are stories of individual ascent within the existing system, that is the only story available to dream.

The architecture of common sense: Gramsci and Lukács

What the warehouse worker confronts is not just constrained material conditions but a foreclosed imagination. Antonio Gramsci developed his concept of cultural hegemony to explain how that foreclosure becomes possible: why subordinate classes so often consent to arrangements that serve dominant interests. Hegemony operates at a deeper level than propaganda, beyond simple lies told loudly enough to be believed. It is the more thorough work of making a particular class's worldview into the common sense of society as a whole, into the background assumptions that organize perception before anyone sits down to think.4

Capitalism operates hegemonically in this sense. Its core assumptions, that work generates worth, that poverty reflects personal failure, that freedom consists in choosing between consumer options, are not typically presented as ideological positions. They are not labeled and defended; they simply appear as the way things are. A child raised in a capitalist society does not learn “capitalism is the best economic system.” They learn to be embarrassed about poverty, to admire the wealthy, to experience time not spent in productive labor as waste. These lessons arrive through family, school, media, and the daily texture of social life. By the time we are old enough to question them, they feel less like ideas than like organs: components of ourselves that preexist our consciousness of them.

This is what György Lukács called reification, and it deserves careful attention because it names something we all experience but rarely articulate.5 Reification is the process by which social relations, things that human beings create and that could be arranged otherwise, come to appear as fixed, objective, and natural: forces of geology rather than products of human choice. The market is the paradigm case. We speak of “market forces” and “market signals” as if the market were a geological formation rather than a set of human institutions governed by humanly-made rules. The “invisible hand” is, of course, a hand. It has fingerprints, and they belong to identifiable people who have made identifiable choices about property laws, labor regulations, and financial architecture. Yet we experience it as something above and outside us, something to which we must respond rather than something we have made and could unmake.

Mark Fisher captured this dynamic with characteristic precision in his account of capitalist realism: the widespread sense that capitalism functions as the very medium of reality itself, not merely one possible economic system among others, such that imagining its end requires greater effort than imagining the literal end of the world.6 Proposals that challenge the terms of the existing system rather than merely negotiating within them begin to feel like errors rather than political options.

The practical consequence is a particular kind of political inertia. When the terms of the existing system feel like the terms of reality, reform proposals that stay within those terms seem responsible and serious, while proposals that challenge the terms themselves seem utopian and naive. The advocate for a higher minimum wage is a pragmatist; the advocate for democratic control over production is a fantasist. This hierarchy of seriousness is itself a product of hegemony. It does not reflect which proposals are more technically feasible. It reflects which proposals remain legible within a worldview that treats capitalist social relations as permanent.

The mirage of mobility: cruel optimism and the aspiration trap

In 2011, Lauren Berlant gave this dynamic its most precise contemporary formulation. “Cruel optimism,” she argued, describes a relation in which the object of desire is itself an obstacle to flourishing: a situation in which we remain attached to possibilities that are actually working against us, not because we are foolish, but because those possibilities feel like the only available way to make sense of our striving.7

The American Dream is the paradigmatic case, and the gap between the expectation and the underlying data is worth stating plainly. Surveys consistently find that most Americans believe they or their children will end up substantially better off than their parents did. The actual data on intergenerational mobility tells a different story: the share of Americans earning more than their parents has fallen from roughly ninety percent for those born in 1940 to about fifty percent for those born in the 1980s, and the United States ranks among the lowest of wealthy nations on cross-national mobility measures.8 The dream of meritocratic ascent is, for most people who hold it, statistically unfounded.

Yet the cruelty Berlant identifies is not simply that the dream is false. It is that the dream is necessary. The person working two jobs while raising children on an inadequate income cannot afford, psychologically, to conclude that the system is rigged and that their efforts are structurally constrained. That conclusion offers no immediate comfort and no immediate alternative. The dream of “making it” supplies what the reality of the situation withholds: a sense of agency, a narrative that connects today’s sacrifice to tomorrow’s reward, a reason to keep going. Berlant is not mocking the dreamer; she is analyzing the function the dream performs and the cost it exacts.

The cost is political. “Hustle culture,” the ideology of individual effort and relentless self-improvement as the solution to structural problems, is not a distraction from capitalism’s contradictions. It is one of capitalism’s primary mechanisms for managing them. When a warehouse worker’s response to inadequate wages is to pick up a side hustle rather than organize with coworkers, the system has succeeded not through coercion but through aspiration. The desire for a better life has been redirected away from structural demands and toward individual performance. The hierarchy remains intact.

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The aspiration trap functions because it is not entirely false. Some people do ascend. Some individual efforts do pay off. This is precisely what makes the dynamic cruel rather than simply deceptive: the exceptions are real, and they are continuously amplified, while the structural conditions that make most people exceptions to the exception remain invisible. Every story of individual success confirms the logic of individual striving; every story of collective demand remains marginal, threatening, or simply absent from the culture’s dominant narratives. Each lottery winner is national news. The actuarial table that makes the lottery a tax on desperation is not.

Yet the cruel optimism dynamic is not total, and the gaps are worth naming. There are domains in which Americans, including the same Americans who buy lottery tickets, refuse the lottery logic and accept the actuarial table. The fire department is one. The public library is another. The beach in California, made permanently public by the California Coastal Act of 1976, is a third. Californians who would not tolerate a public option for healthcare will fight a billionaire to the state supreme court over a stretch of sand. The dissonance is the data. It tells us that the colonized horizon is not seamless, that the imagination has already been ceded ground in specific domains, and that the political work ahead is partly the work of extending the vocabulary of the commons into the domains where it has been forbidden.

The semantic prison: what happens when we lack the words

There is a further difficulty, one that compounds every other. If capitalism is the primary language available to us for describing our social world, how do we articulate a world beyond it? Language is not simply a vehicle for expressing pre-formed thoughts; it is the medium in which thinking happens. The concepts available to us constrain what we can think as well as what we can say.

The semantic prison operates through translation. Dissatisfaction with capitalist conditions tends to be converted back into capitalist terms. The person who feels that something is fundamentally wrong with how their time is organized, how their days are spent, what their labor produces and for whom, reaches for the available vocabulary and finds “I need a better job.” The underlying intuition, that the entire structure of wage labor might be the problem, cannot be easily articulated because the words for saying it are not in common circulation. “I need a better job” is immediately legible. “I need a world organized around human flourishing rather than capital accumulation” sounds like a slogan, or an error, or both.

The semantic prison, however, has gaps. Californians know what it means for a thing to belong to everyone and to no one, because they have words and practices for the beach, for the public library, for the urban park, for the museum that charges no admission. The vocabulary of the commons exists in our language, just unevenly distributed. We accept it without strain in some domains and find it unintelligible in others. The question worth asking is why the same person who would defend coastal access against billionaire fence-builders cannot conceive of healthcare on the same model. The words are not missing. They have been allowed to apply only in domains the system has already decided it can afford to cede. The political project is the extension of the vocabulary we already possess into the domains where it has been forbidden.

Fanon noticed something analogous in a different context. Bourgeois society, he wrote, hardens. The categories through which dominant culture organizes experience become fixed, and social life becomes organized around their maintenance. We stop experiencing history as a process still unfolding and start experiencing it as a settled arrangement, as a series of facts rather than a series of choices that could have been made differently and might still be.9

Consider the person who grew up in a house with no outside windows. They would experience the walls not as walls, but as the edge of the universe. Their sense of what is possible, what constitutes space, would be organized entirely by that architecture. Now ask them to describe the outside. They would translate: bigger rooms, perhaps, or different walls. They would reach for the only items available to them. The imagination does not transcend its conditions by wishing; it requires exposure to what those conditions have excluded. This is why the survival of alternative traditions, labor history, socialist thought, utopian fiction, feminist economics, indigenous political philosophy, matters beyond the merely academic. These traditions are windows. They offer the experience of a different set of categories, a different grammar of social life, that makes alternative arrangements legible and therefore thinkable.

Reform, rupture, and the question of decommodification

None of this means that reform is worthless, and precision matters here. Higher wages are better than lower wages. Stronger labor protections are better than weaker ones. Union contracts that reduce the arbitrary power of employers over workers’ lives are genuine victories that matter enormously for the people who win them. The argument is not against reform but about the horizon within which reform operates and whether that horizon itself should be a subject of political contestation.

The limit of purely reformist unionism, what labor historians call business unionism, is that it negotiates better terms within a structure it leaves unchallenged. The wage bargain is improved; the fundamental premise of the wage bargain, that workers must sell their time and capacity to whoever controls capital, is accepted. A better cage is still a cage. This does not mean the workers inside should refuse improved conditions. It means we should not mistake improved conditions for the end of the analysis, or allow the achievement of modest reforms to exhaust our political imagination. Unions should be the beginning of the conversation, not its conclusion.

What lies beyond that conversation is the project of decommodification: the systematic removal of the necessities of human life from the logic of the market. Healthcare, housing, education, time itself: when these are provided as social goods outside the wage relation, the power of the employer over the worker changes fundamentally. A worker who does not fear illness, homelessness, or the inability to educate their children has a categorically different relationship to the labor market than one whose survival depends entirely on maintaining employment. Decommodification is not abstract; the historical and contemporary examples are concrete. Vienna’s municipal housing program provides quality housing to more than sixty percent of the city’s residents through a non-market model. The Nordic welfare states demonstrate that substantial portions of social life can be organized outside market logic.10

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The American examples are closer to hand than they appear. The public university, the public library, the national park, the fire department, the public beach, Medicaid/Medicare: each is a domain in which the United States has already decommodified a significant portion of social life and treats the decommodification as natural. The argument that decommodification is foreign to American political culture collapses on contact with the actual American built environment. The question is not whether Americans can accept decommodified goods, since we already have, in many domains. The question is why the political imagination treats the existing examples as exhaustive rather than as precedent.

The answer returns us to where we began: the colonized imagination. When the market has become the medium of reality, proposals to organize life outside it seem to violate something fundamental, to threaten not just economic interests but ontological stability. This is why the political work of decommodification requires the prior work of perceptual rupture: the demonstrated, visceral experience that the walls are not the edge of the universe, that what lies beyond them is not void but possibility.

Starting a new history

Fanon ended The Wretched of the Earth with a call to start a new history. Europe had proposed a model of humanity organized around accumulation, extraction, and the hierarchy of civilizations, and that model had produced catastrophe. The task, he argued, was not to imitate the dominant model but to invent something genuinely new: to produce human beings who no longer dreamed in the currency of their own exploitation.

The task is not less urgent because the horizon we inhabit is capitalism rather than formal colonialism. The mechanism is the same: a total structure of experience that makes itself feel like nature, that converts historical choices into permanent facts, that mobilizes aspiration as a mechanism of control. The first act of emancipation is perceptual. To see the walls as walls.

This recognition does not by itself change anything. Seeing the walls does not open doors; that requires organization, political will, and sustained collective action. But it is the necessary prior condition for wanting them opened, for understanding that what lies beyond is not chaos but another possible arrangement of human social life. Freedom, understood adequately, is not proximity to wealth. It is the collective power to determine the conditions of our own existence: to decide, together, what we will produce, how we will care for one another, and what constitutes a life worth living.

We already dream. The question is whose language we dream in, and whether we are willing to learn another.

I have been working on another essay that I am calling, for now, “The Colonized Horizon.” It started as a separate project, something I had been carrying for months before the body essay arrived, but the more I write into it the more I see that the two pieces are not separate. The body essay was about how capitalist culture conditions bodies. The horizon essay is about how capitalist culture conditions imaginations. The mechanism is the same, and I am only beginning to see how much of one essay was already inside the other.

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The horizon piece is taking longer than the body piece did. Part of that is its scale, since it pulls on Fanon, Gramsci, Lukács, Berlant, and Fisher, and each of those thinkers wants more room than I am giving them. Part of it is harder. The body essay diagnosed a city. The horizon essay is trying to diagnose how we are taught what to want, which is a more slippery target. I keep writing paragraphs and then realizing they are restating the body argument at a higher altitude rather than doing new work. The unmanufacturing of capitalism’s hold on the imagination is not the same task as the building of socialist culture in Los Angeles, but they are close enough that I lose track of where one ends and the other begins.

Something has surfaced in the drafting that I did not expect, and I am working out where it goes. The body essay was written under the assumption that the conditioning urban theorist Mike Davis describes is total, that the freeway is in every nervous system, that the work is to build an alternative against the grain of a complete cultural achievement. I am no longer sure this is right. There are domains in California where Californians, including ones who would otherwise vote against every form of public provision, accept and even insist on common ownership without flinching. The beach, made permanently public by the 1972 Coastal Act. The major museums, free or nearly free, available to anyone who shows up. Griffith Park and the Observatory, gifted to the city in 1896 by a complicated patron and defended ever since by Angelenos who understand the land to be theirs. It is a consensus so powerful that it shapes even our battlegrounds; look at the contested LA River revitalization, where even the developers feel obligated to use the language of the commons.

The conditioning is real but not complete. There are spaces where the political imagination of the Californian has already ceded ground to collective life, and the body of the Californian has already learned what shared space feels like. I do not yet know whether this material belongs in a separate Marginalia, in the body essay as a correction I owe my readers, or in the horizon essay as the place where the analysis grows teeth. My current instinct is that it belongs in the horizon piece, because it gives the abstract argument about colonized imagination a concrete local foothold and because it sets up something the essay needs to do, which is to show where the dynamic breaks down. If you can name where capitalism’s grip fails, the argument that the grip is otherwise total becomes more credible, not less.

I am writing this note from the middle of the work, which is not where the previous Marginalia came from. I believed most would be written either before an essay began or after it landed. This one is being written while I am still inside the second essay, with the first one a week behind me. I am not certain what I will keep of what I have drafted. I am certain that the body and the horizon are the same problem at different scales, and that the political work suggested by both turns out to be more continuous than I had thought.

More when I know more.

The argument I’m making is simple and difficult. Democratic socialism in Los Angeles will not arrive through policy alone, however carefully drafted. It will not arrive through the right slate of candidates, however disciplined. It will arrive, if it arrives, because we have built a counter-culture dense enough that ordinary bodies can find belonging inside it: a network of places, rituals, and relationships that make socialist life feel like home rather than homework. Strategy that does not produce belonging produces exhausted activists and barren streets.

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Southern California was built, deliberately, against the kind of urbanism that produces solidarity. Mike Davis traced this history in City of Quartz: the dismantled streetcars, the freeways routed through Black and brown neighborhoods, the privatization of public space, the architecture of the fortress home.2 Each of these was a choice. Together they produced a region in which the dominant cultural technology, the car, isolates us inside a private chamber for hours each day, and in which the dominant residential form, the single-family house, isolates us inside a private chamber for the rest. The body learns. It learns that strangers are threats, that errands are individual, that weather is something you experience between buildings.

This is not incidental to capitalism. It is one of capitalism’s central achievements in this region. An atomized population is a population that consumes more, organizes less, and turns to the market for what neighbors used to provide. The objection that geography is not destiny, that plenty of socialists have come from suburbs, is correct on its own terms but proves the smaller point. Geography is a teacher, and Southern California has been teaching the same lesson for a century: you are alone, and your aloneness is freedom.

The left’s response has too often been to argue with the lesson rather than to teach a different one. We produce excellent analyses of why the lesson is false. We write white papers on social housing, on transit equity, on the commons. The papers are correct, but they lose to the freeway every time, because the freeway is in the body and the white paper is in the mind. Menakem’s insight applies with uncomfortable precision: when our cognitive arguments compete with the embodied culture of the neoliberal city, the culture wins.

Menakem lists what culture involves: elders, rituals, symbols, uniforms, displays, rules, stories, mentoring, roles, titles, awards, codes of behavior, a shared history.3 This is a useful inventory because it forces a question the left rarely asks itself honestly. Does democratic socialism in the city of Los Angeles have these things? In some places, yes. UNITE HERE Local 11 has them in abundance: the picket line as ritual, the union jacket as uniform, the veteran organizers as elders, the strike songs as shared history. The hotel workers who shut down the city in 2023 were not persuaded into solidarity by an argument. They were inducted into a culture that already held them.4

Tenant unions are building this culture in fragments. The Los Angeles Tenants Union, the building-by-building work in Boyle Heights and Koreatown, the Eastside organizing networks: each is producing rituals of meeting, codes of mutual defense, stories of victories and losses that get retold. The mutual aid networks that emerged during the pandemic, during the January 2025 fires, and during the summer of 2025 ICE surge demonstrated something the strategic literature underrates. Thousands of Angelenos were waiting for an excuse to belong to something, and when the excuse arrived they showed up with food and water and labor and stayed. The culture exists. It is thin, scattered, and constantly under pressure. It is also real.

The question for democratic socialists is whether we can thicken it. Here the temptation is to reach immediately for programs: a socialist community center in every council district, a federation of mutual aid groups, a citywide tenants’ assembly. These are good ideas. But programs without rituals are bureaucracies, and rituals without elders are performances. What we lack most acutely is the patient cultivation of socialist life as a thing one lives rather than a thing one attends. The typical community meeting that ends at five and sends everyone home alone in their cars has not built culture. The branch meeting that ends with thirty people walking to the same bar, where the bartender knows them, where last month’s strike is on the television, where the new member gets introduced to someone who will become their mentor: that has begun to.

I have to argue with myself here. I have spent the last year drafting amendments to the city charter and I believe in them. The Public Advocate proposal, the LAPD oversight restructuring, the budget protections: these are serious instruments of structural change at the city level, and I will keep working on them.5 But the left’s pathological attachment to the perfect plan is itself a symptom of the culture we are trying to escape. The plan is what an atomized intellectual produces when they has no community to act with. It is the substitute for belonging. We make the plan more elaborate because we cannot make the movement larger, and we cannot make the movement larger because we have not built the cultural conditions in which strangers become comrades.

The work is the slow construction of a parallel infrastructure of belonging: the union hall, the tenant meeting, the political education series that meets at the same coffee shop every Thursday for three years until the coffee shop becomes part of the movement. The work is the production of socialist elders, which means staying in the same neighborhood long enough to become one. The work is the development of rituals that mark socialist time: May Day as a real holiday rather than a hashtag, the strike anniversary as a remembered date, the founding of the tenant union as a story the children of the building will tell. None of this is on a Gantt chart. All of it is what culture means.

Here we encounter the obvious objection. Culture-building takes generations, the climate does not have generations, the rent is due Tuesday. The objection is serious and I take it seriously. The response is not to abandon electoral work or charter reform or the urgent material fights. The response is to stop pretending these can substitute for the deeper work, and to recognize the deeper work as work. The hours spent at the bar after the meeting are not leisure. They are infrastructure. The block party that the tenant union throws is not a distraction from organizing. It is organizing. Belonging makes our bodies feel safe, and humans want to belong more than almost anything.6 A movement that cannot offer belonging is competing for converts against a culture that offers it abundantly, on terms we find monstrous.

What does this mean concretely for the city of Los Angeles? It means treating every existing node of socialist culture as infrastructure to be defended and thickened. The DSA-LA branches, the tenant unions, the labor councils, the immigrant rights organizations, the abolitionist study groups, the food not bombs servings in MacArthur Park, the Boyle Heights political traditions that go back to the garment strikes of the 1930s.7 These are not separate projects. They are fragments of a single counter-culture that has not yet learned to recognize itself as one.

The strategic task is to weave them together without smothering them: shared spaces, shared rituals, shared elders, shared stories. The Public Advocate’s office I have proposed could house a civic assembly that does this work institutionally, giving the counter-culture a foothold inside the city government. A worker-led research body, if we build it, could be a place where the movement’s intellectual life happens in common rather than in isolated graduate programs. A true, integrated federation of labor would produce, if it works, a shared culture between, for instance, the entertainment unions and the service unions that the city’s owners have spent decades preventing.

None of this is a substitute for taking power. All of it is what makes taking power possible, and what makes power, once taken, mean something other than a new set of administrators. A democratic socialist Los Angeles will not feel like the current Los Angeles with better policies. It will feel different in the body. The streets will be louder, slower, more populated. The meetings will run later. People will know their neighbors. The afternoon walk downtown will teach a different lesson.

We are not there. We are not close. The work is not mysterious. It is the work of building, in the cracks of the present city, the cultural conditions of the future one. It is the work of giving bodies somewhere to belong that is not the market and not the freeway. The plan, in the end, is to become the kind of movement that does not need the plan, because the culture has done what the strategy could not.

I spent most of the year carrying that reading around without quite knowing what to do with it. I work on charter reform. I draft amendment language. I sit in council hearings. The Davis I had absorbed felt true and important and somehow not actionable, the way a diagnosis is true and important and not, in itself, a treatment. I would notice the freeway differently on the drive home. I would notice the gates and the signage and the way the bus stops are placed for the convenience of the cars rather than the riders. I would notice and notice and notice, and then I would go back to drafting language about police accountability, which is necessary work but which began to feel, in some way I could not yet articulate, insufficient.

I was also, all year, teaching. I facilitate a monthly DSA 102 Mass Organizations class, and one of the historical examples we work through every cycle is the original Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: the workers’ libraries, the choral societies, the gymnastics clubs, the hiking associations, the funeral cooperatives, the newspapers, the theater groups. The SPD did not build a party. It built a parallel society in which a worker could live almost an entire life, from cradle to grave, inside the movement. Membership was not a position one held. It was a world one inhabited. I had been teaching this every month while pushing charter reforms, and the two registers had not yet collided.2

Simultaneously, my therapist suggested I read Resmaa Menakem. The recommendation was clinical before it was political. My Grandmother’s Hands is a book about racialized trauma, written for Black readers among others, and I came to it as a Black man living in Los Angeles trying to understand why I put so much pressure on myself to be smart, to be perfect, to not make mistakes that could be held against me. That is its own essay and I am not ready to write it. What I will say here is that the parts of Menakem that have been moving through left circles for a few years are the parts about how trauma lives in bodies and gets transmitted through them. I came to the book for that, and for the personal reasons underneath that. I stayed for a sentence I was not expecting.

Menakem writes that culture is how our bodies retain and reenact history, and that when strategy competes with culture, culture wins every time.3

I have read the sentence ten times since. It has been working on me the way certain sentences do, the way Davis had been working on me all year without my knowing where it was headed. What Menakem gave me was the link I had been missing, and the moment the link landed I realized I had been teaching its historical proof every month. Davis tells you what was built and why. Menakem tells you where it lives now, in whose body, doing what work. The SPD tells you what a movement looks like when it takes the cultural problem seriously, when it stops competing with capitalism for converts and starts building a world a worker can live inside. The freeway is not just out there in the built environment. It is in the nervous system of every Angeleno who has ever merged onto it. The fortress home is not just an architectural pattern. It is a posture the body assumes when it walks past the gate. The privatization of public space is not just a policy outcome. It is a conditioning. We have been conditioned, for a century, to expect aloneness and to call it freedom.

This is the seed of the essay I have been working on, which I am calling “The Body Politic.” The argument I am circling is that the left in Los Angeles has been trying to win an argument while losing at culture, and that the policy work I do, the policy work many of us do, cannot substitute for the slower work of building (organizing) the embodied conditions in which socialist life feels like belonging rather than obligation. The SPD did this for fifty years before they did anything else. We have been trying to do everything except this for at least as long.

I have to face a sharper version of an objection I keep encountering in this work. Culture-building takes generations. The climate crisis does not have generations. The rent is due Monday. I do not yet have a clean answer to this. The provisional answer in the essay is that culture-work and policy-work are not substitutes for each other, that the hours at the bar after the meeting are infrastructure rather than leisure, that the mutual aid response to the fires and the summer ICE surge demonstrated a latent capacity for solidarity that the formal political system had failed to organize. I think this is right. I am not sure it is enough. The question of whether socialist counter-culture can be built fast enough to matter on the timelines that actually bind us is the question I am most stuck on, and I am writing into it rather than around it.

There is also a question I am asking myself privately as I draft, which I will name briefly here because it bears on the work. The essay contains a critique of what I call the cult of the plan, the left’s pathological attachment to the perfect document as a substitute for the larger movement we have not yet built. I am critiquing a tendency I share. The perfectionism Menakem helped me see in myself is the same perfectionism I am critiquing in the political work, and the recognition has been clarifying and uncomfortable in equal measure. The plan is what I produce when I do not yet trust the community to act with me. Writing about this honestly is part of why I am writing the essay rather than only the policy memos.

What I know now that I did not know in January is that Davis, Menakem, and the SPD belong to a single argument. The city was built to condition certain bodies. The conditioning worked. Undoing it is not a policy problem. It is a question of what we build, in the cracks of the city we have, that lets bodies belong somewhere other than the market and the freeway. The historical answer is that movements have done this before. The contemporary question is whether we will. The essay is the working-out. This note is the working-out before the working-out.

More soon.

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Each generation must, out of relative opacity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.

FRANTZ FANON

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On a Thursday afternoon in March, at four o'clock, in a hearing room of the Board of Public Works at Los Angeles City Hall, seven commissioners sat at a long table preparing to vote on the future of the largest line item in the city's budget. Seven, barely a quorum. The other six commissioners, the ones absent, were presumably doing what most Angelenos were doing at four on a Thursday: working, sitting in traffic, picking up children, surviving the day. The hearing had been buried at the back of the agenda. It had taken six months of intense advocacy, working alongside LA Forward, DSA-LA and others, just to get the question of police accountability heard at all. Forty people sat in the audience, give or take. Three of them, of whom I was one, had spent those six months making the meeting possible. We were citizens, not staff and not lobbyists, whose interests had converged on this question and who happened to have the time and flexibility to put in the face time and the research. We had met one on one with the commissioners for months, drafted the reforms, built the coalition that pushed them forward.

What happened in the next hour was, by the standards of how American cities are usually governed, a small thing. The Charter Reform Commission voted nine to nothing to recommend that the Chief of Police be granted the authority to terminate officers, and that the City Council be permitted to send ordinances and advisory action on policing to the Board of Police Commissioners. Two more commissioners had arrived during the debate, late, by which I mean they had driven through Los Angeles at four in the afternoon to make a hearing on the future of LAPD oversight. By the standards of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the vote was an earthquake. By the standards of how a city of nearly four million people decides who polices it and on what terms, it was the work of a room you could fit inside a small restaurant.

The vote was the conclusion of a maneuver none of us had seen coming. Two commissioners had been communicating in private. One was the panel's most conservative voice, a former developer and longtime fixture of City Hall commissions. The other was a Black professor and preacher whose family carries the memory of a lynching. Weeks earlier, in a subcommittee meeting, the former developer had moved to strip the police reforms entirely and pass forward a recommendation for another Christopher Commission, after the body convened in 1991 to investigate the LAPD in the wake of the Rodney King beating, whose recommendations on use of force and officer discipline were partially implemented and then largely subsumed by the department's pre-existing institutional culture. The Rampart scandal, the federal consent decree, and the discipline system in which officers are almost never fired for serious misconduct: this is the record commissions have been asked to study for thirty years and have, mostly, declined to disturb. The proposed reforms before the Commission were ordinary in cities far less progressive than Los Angeles imagines itself to be. The political price of doing nothing about a department consuming half the General Fund would land harder than the political price of doing something. Somewhere in that pressure, two unlikely commissioners had started writing a motion together.

They called a recess after public comment. They printed copies of a motion none of us had seen and walked it around the room. We had ten minutes. The three of us read it standing up, conferred quickly, decided what was salvageable and what was not, and walked back to the commissioners. They looked over at us before they voted, because they had been working with us for months and knew our judgment on the reforms was as close to a coalition position as the room was going to get. We gave a thumbs up. The motion passed.

You could feel the air go out of the room. It was a glorious moment, and it was also nothing. The recommendations now go to the Rules Committee, then to the full Council, where the same arguments must be made again to a different set of people, most of them elected, most of them weighing the same calculation about the LAPPL that the commissioners had been weighing. We are already meeting with their offices. The room reopens.

I write this because most Angelenos will never see the inside of this room.

Fanon's line is the one I keep returning to. Each generation must, out of relative opacity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.1 The opacity is not a metaphor. The hearing room on a Thursday at four is opaque. The Council file system is opaque. The question of who actually wrote the motion that determines whether a police officer can be fired for dishonesty is opaque. The opacity is not a failure of civic attention; it is the structural condition under which decisions about a city of nearly four million people are made by a few dozen, witnessed by a few dozen more, and felt by all the rest. To work inside that opacity, to be one of the few in the room, is to feel acutely the gap between what a democracy is supposed to be and what one actually is.

This is also the gap I want to write about. California is imagined, by people who do not live here and many who do, as the country's progressive bastion. The films the state exports, the senators it elects, the lawn signs that announce what is believed inside the house, all conspire to maintain that impression. That impression is not entirely false. It is also not the whole picture. This is the state that produced Reagan and the tax revolt and the carceral expansion of the 1980s. This is the state whose constitution, through Article XXXIV, still requires a public vote before low-rent housing can be built in any community, a clause written in 1950 to keep neighborhoods white and never repealed. And Los Angeles is where the gap between the imagined California and the actual one is widest. More billionaires live here than in almost any city on earth, and tens of thousands of people sleep on its sidewalks, and the political class treats this as weather rather than policy. California is liberal. California is not socialist. The distance between those two words is the distance this publication is interested in, and Los Angeles is where I am writing from because Los Angeles is where the distance is most visible.

Liberal California polices its image carefully. Socialism remains, in the official imagination of the state's political class, a slur or a curiosity even as the conditions that produce socialist analysis (housing as commodity, healthcare as commodity, water as commodity, labor as commodity, life as commodity) compound around us. The work of removing the mask is not the work of denouncing California's liberalism. It is the work of taking seriously what the liberal frame cannot see: that a state which lets its largest city fail to house its workers, fail to police its police, fail to decommodify the basic conditions of life, is failing on terms its own self-image refuses to acknowledge. To name that failure structurally rather than as scandal, and to imagine the alternatives that the liberal frame renders unthinkable, is what I mean by socialism here. Not a program handed down from elsewhere. A practice of pulling the aperture wider until what was unthinkable becomes visible, and then, with luck and work, possible.

This is also why the publication is called what it is. Most American socialism has been theorized from the dense industrial cities of the Northeast, against the backdrop of factories and unions and tenement blocks. Los Angeles fits that frame poorly. It is a sprawl city built on water theft and racial covenants and the entertainment industry, a city of single-family lots and freeway commutes and a working class scattered across two hundred miles. Mike Davis spent a career arguing that the apparent strangeness of Los Angeles is in fact exemplary, that the contradictions worked out here arrive everywhere else later.2 If that is true, then the work of building a socialist politics adequate to Los Angeles is not a regional project but a general one. SoCalism, said with a wink and meant in earnest, is the name for that work.

A word about what this publication will and will not be.

It will not be a venue for takes. It will not be a feed of breaking news from the charter reform fight or any other fight, though both will appear here when there is something worth saying about them that cannot be said in a thread. It will not pretend to expertise it does not have, and it will not perform the kind of confident authority that political writing on the left often mistakes for seriousness. The truth is that I do not have most of the answers. I am reading, sitting through hearings, talking with organizers and electeds and neighbors, watching the city, and writing in order to think. The writing is the discovery, not the report on a discovery already made.

What I can offer is attention. I have spent hundreds of hours in rooms most Angelenos will never see, and the texture of those rooms matters. I have read the documents and sat through the public comment and watched the procedural choreography of a city deciding what kind of city it wants to be. I do this because I believe Los Angeles can be a different city than it is, and because I believe the work of imagining that difference cannot be left to the people already in the rooms. If the opacity is structural, then the writing has to be a small act against the opacity. Not a claim of transparency, which would be dishonest. A claim of attention.

The publication has two sections. The longer essays will appear when they are ready, and not before, because the form requires it. They are the pieces in which I try to work out something structurally: the political economy of housing in California, the genealogy of the LAPD as an institution, the question of what democratic socialism could mean in a city like this one. They are written for educated readers who care about these questions and who can tolerate footnotes. The shorter notes, gathered under Marginalia, are the workshop. They are what I read this week, what hearing I sat through, what someone said at a meeting that snagged on something I had been thinking about, what the next essay is starting to look like before it is an essay. They run on the metabolism of attention rather than of argument. They will sometimes be wrong. They will sometimes change my mind in public. That is the point.

Both sections will be free. There will be a paid tier for readers who want to underwrite the work, and the pitch is exactly what it sounds like: this is reader-supported civic writing, and if you can help keep it going, please do. Nothing will sit behind a paywall, because the politics of paywalling civic analysis cuts against everything I would want this publication to mean.

The hearing on March 5 was step one. The room reopens at the Rules Committee, then at the Council, and the same arguments must be made again, and the political calculation about the police union must be confronted again, and the people in the next room will be elected rather than appointed, which changes the texture of the argument without changing the structure of it. I will be there. I will write about it here. I will also write about a great deal else, because the charter reform fight is a single front in a much larger contest over what kind of city Los Angeles becomes in the years just ahead of us.

Fanon wrote his line in 1961, in a context utterly different from this one, and yet the line travels. Each generation, in conditions it does not choose and through opacity it cannot fully clear, has to decide whether to discover its mission or betray it. The mission of this generation in this city, as I see it, is to refuse the comfortable lie that California's liberalism is enough. It is not enough. It has not been enough for a long time. The work of imagining what would be enough, and then of building toward it, is the work this publication exists to take part in.

Come think with me.