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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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.

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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