Groundbreakings usually follow a familiar script: officials in hard hats they will wear for eleven minutes, ceremonial shovels, remarks about partnerships. A celebration of development, they are meant to mark the moment something moves from an idea to reality. What broke ground outside Gallup that Thursday was the opposite operation: the removal of roughly a million cubic yards of radioactive waste rock from the Northeast Church Rock mine, formerly operated by United Nuclear Corporation, a General Electric subsidiary. Between 1944 and 1986, companies pulled nearly thirty million tons of uranium ore out of Navajo lands under leases with the Navajo Nation, first for the bomb program and then for the reactor era.2 When the ore ran out, the companies moved on, leaving behind only the waste and the families who had to live with it. In 1979, the dam at United Nuclear’s Church Rock mill failed, releasing more than ninety million gallons of radioactive tailings solution into the Puerco River, among the largest releases of radioactive material in United States history. It came four months after Three Mile Island but drew a fraction of the attention. Edith Hood, who has lived in the area for decades and worked at a nearby mine, told a reporter that no official warned residents of the danger during the peak years of extraction. Three medicine men lived in her valley. “These things started happening,” she said, “and they started passing.”3

So this ceremony inaugurates the un-breaking of ground, four decades late. The cleanup will cost nearly $63 million, with General Electric covering only 70 percent and the Department of Energy assuming responsibility for the site in perpetuity.4 And the waste is not going far: it will be moved from the mine to the old United Nuclear mill site, just across the road from Navajo Nation land.

Across the road.

A few days later we walked the base of El Morro, the sandstone headland southeast of Gallup that travelers have written on for centuries. Petroglyphs cut by the ancestors of the people whose pueblo still crowns the summit. Then Juan de Oñate in 1605, pasó por aquí, passed by here: an inscription of passage that functioned as an inscription of possession. In 1849, a year after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, United States Army surveyors added their names. Then, in 1906, the Antiquities Act made El Morro a national monument and any further inscription a federal offense.

Each regime recorded its claim on the same rock. Monument status may be the most democratic arrangement El Morro has ever had. But it rests on the cancellation of every arrangement that came before. That is one of the things monuments do: they turn a living dispute over ownership into a finished exhibit about the past.

I had watched a documentary on the flight in about Reies López Tijerina, the preacher who spent the 1960s organizing dispossessed land grant heirs in northern New Mexico.5 In June 1967, Reies López Tijerina and members of his Alianza entered the Rio Arriba County courthouse in Tierra Amarilla intending to free several arrested comrades and make a citizen’s arrest of District Attorney Alfonso Sánchez, whom they accused of illegally suppressing an Alianza meeting two days earlier. Tijerina reportedly wanted the action carried out without bloodshed and instructed his followers not to shoot. But Sánchez was not at the courthouse, and the detained Alianza members had already been released. In the confusion that followed, gunfire wounded two law enforcement officers and the raiders fled with two hostages. The incident triggered one of the largest manhunts in New Mexico history. Tijerina became a national figure with coverage centering on the incident instead of his lifelong struggle over dispossessed land grants.

The Alianza demanded the restoration of the ejido commons promised to land-grant communities under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It may have been the closest thing the postwar United States produced to a mass movement organized around the decommodification of land. The courts treated the question of title as settled. Tijerina’s entire politics consisted of insisting that it was not. There were trials for storming the courthouse, but none for dispossessing the communities that sent them there. I arrived, in other words, already looking for the question.

At El Morro, the question of ownership sits behind a railing. In Tierra Amarilla, it was denied a hearing. And outside Gallup that Thursday, nothing got settled except the dust on their lapels. Stephen Etsitty, director of the Navajo Nation’s environmental agency, refused to let it disappear. The Navajo community wanted the waste gone; instead, the official plan leaves it in their backyard, trusted to engineering promises no one will be alive to keep. Etsitty called the plan an improvement without mistaking it for a resolution.6

Nobody at that groundbreaking chose the arrangement they were operating inside. That is what makes it an arrangement rather than a decision. A million cubic yards will move, which is not nothing to the families who have lived beside it for forty years, but every part of the remedy operates inside the property arrangement that produced the harm.

Tijerina's insistence, the one the courts declined to hear, was that the arrangement itself was the injury. What the Alianza demanded was not that the land be placed beyond claim, which is what El Morro accomplished by extinguishing every party to the contest. It was that the claim be returned to the people holding it in common. The shovels went into the ground in good faith. They were never going to dig that deep.

Share

“You will never see socialism in Beverly Hills or in any community where people want to truly better themselves.”

A commenter, under the first post this publication ran.

He is right, in the narrow way that matters least. You will never see the word. No chapter meetings above the boutiques on Rodeo, no reading group working through Capital in Beverly Gardens Park. The word will never be welcome there, and by the end of this I hope the reason is obvious, because the reason is the point. Beverly Hills does not need socialism. It has enjoyed the most successful program of collective provision in California for a century. It simply keeps the membership closed.

Start with the deeds. In 1906, a syndicate that had drilled the local lima bean fields for oil and struck mostly water reorganized itself, with admirable honesty, as the Rodeo Land and Water Company, and began subdividing the future Beverly Hills. The lots were sold as “restricted,” which was the advertising language of the era, and what it advertised was a promise among buyers: no sale or rental to anyone who was not white, domestic servants excepted. A racial covenant looks, from one angle, like a private preference. Look again and it is a cartel: a collective agreement among property owners to protect asset values, binding on every future buyer, enforced not by the homeowners themselves but by the courts. The residents of the new subdivision did not call this socialism. They called it good planning.

Then came the federal layer. When Washington began insuring mortgages in the 1930s, the Federal Housing Administration’s underwriting standards favored exactly these covenanted, “protected” subdivisions, and public credit flowed toward the places that had organized themselves most thoroughly against integration.1 The Supreme Court ended judicial enforcement of the covenants in 1948, in Shelley v. Kraemer, but by then the work was done: four decades of compounding, publicly underwritten value, distributed by race and defended by the state.2 Readers of the Rothstein note last month have seen this machinery up close. Beverly Hills is what it built at the luxury end.

The independence story runs the same direction. Beverly Hills incorporated as its own city in 1914, and it has spent a century cultivating the impression that its separateness is a kind of rugged self-reliance. The record is more entertaining. In 1923, the question of annexation to Los Angeles reached the ballot, and the argument for joining was the argument that built half of modern Los Angeles: the Aqueduct’s water. Eight of the most famous movie stars alive, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks and Will Rogers among them, campaigned for independence, and independence won. There is a marble monument to them near where Olympic meets Beverly Drive, honoring the stars who saved the little city from the big one. What the monument does not mention is what happened five years later, when Beverly Hills joined the newly formed Metropolitan Water District of Southern California as a founding member, buying into the vast public agency that would carry the Colorado River across the desert to the coastal plain.3 Independence from the city; membership in the collective the moment the collective was building something worth having. Beverly Hills has been drinking socialized water for nearly a century, and sees no contradiction, because there is none. Collective provision was never the objection. Sharing it was.

Two more layers hold the arrangement in place. The federal mortgage interest deduction remains the largest housing subsidy in the United States, and it flows upward by design: the bigger the mortgage, the bigger the public check. And Proposition 13, written into the California constitution in 1978, caps property taxes at one percent of assessed value and lets assessments rise no more than two percent a year until a sale. In a city where houses appreciate like tech stocks, this is a public guarantee of private position. A mansion changing hands for twenty million dollars sits next to an identical one still taxed on its 1975 valuation, drifting up two percent a year while its market value multiplied twenty times over. Means-testing, run in reverse, secured in the constitution of the state. The standard defense of the freeze is the retiree on a fixed income, and the fear was real in 1978, when assessments were chasing a housing boom and pensions were not. It is real now, and in this city its truest face is the Black family home in Leimert Park or the Latino family home in Boyle Heights, held for decades by the families the covenants were written against. But that home and a twenty-million-dollar mansion enjoy identical protection under the current arrangement, and one is the argument while the other is the beneficiary. There are ways to shelter the first without gifting the second, and they get their own entry, because the distance between those two houses is where the whole debate actually lives.

Mike Davis spent a chapter of City of Quartz on Southern California homeowner politics and concluded it was among the most effective grassroots movements in the region’s history: organized, disciplined, and devoted to the single cause of defending home values.4 He was writing about the whole Southland. Beverly Hills is the form perfected. Pooled risk. Protected values. Publicly enforced exclusivity. Water from a shared aqueduct, credit from a shared treasury, position guaranteed by the state constitution. The wealth of Beverly Hills is not the absence of collective provision. It is collective provision, captured.

Which brings us back to the specimen, and to the work it does. “Any community where people want to truly better themselves.” The sentence moralizes a map. It offers the rich place as evidence of virtue and the poor place as evidence of its lack, and in doing so it hides everything this note has described: the covenants, the underwriting manual, the aqueduct, the deduction, the freeze. If Beverly Hills is simply what wanting to better yourself looks like, then no one has to ask who was barred from the bettering, or whose treasury underwrote it. The belief is not idle. It is load-bearing. It converts a century of captured public provision into a parable about character.

Some will read all this and conclude it argues for less government rather than more: strip the subsidies, end the capture, let the market rule. Fine; strip them. But notice what the objection has become. It is no longer that collective provision fails. It is that collective provision works so well the rich secured it for themselves and wrote the arrangements into law. That concession is the entry’s whole point, and a century of compounded advantage does not un-compound on its own.

And here is the sense in which the commenter is simply correct. You will never see socialism in Beverly Hills, for the same reason you will never see a man campaign to open a club he already belongs to. The people inside have no need of the shared version; they secured the members-only version generations ago and wrote its protections into the deeds, the tax rolls, and the state constitution. Socialism works fine in Beverly Hills. It has for a century. The membership committee is just very selective.

Share

“Socialism is a myth built on lies... it creates an equal amount of poor people who have no motivation to do better... The wealthy and the doers create the jobs and the taxes from all of that run the system... You will never see socialism in Beverly Hills or in any community where people want to truly better themselves... Capitalism may not work for everyone, but socialism works for no one. Give me the American dream.”

The hostility is unremarkable; hostility is the weather out here. The fluency is the interesting part. Read the comment again and notice that nothing in it is responsive. It has the cadence of a thing said many times before, under many different posts, needing nothing from any of them. Each sentence arrives pre-assembled: the makers and the takers, the moochers and the doers, the dream that works for anyone willing to work it. The comment is not an argument. It is a recitation.

Gramsci had a name for the reservoir this kind of speech draws from. He called it senso comune, common sense: the sediment that history deposits in all of us, fragments of religion and folklore, dead science and living prejudice, absorbed rather than reasoned into, contradictory and yet experienced as obvious.1 Common sense is what thinking sounds like after hegemony has done the thinking for us. None of which means the commenter is stupid. It means he is fluent, and fluency has a supply chain. Somebody manufactured each of those sentences, and they keep circulating because they do work. Ask what the work is and the comment becomes genuinely interesting. Who benefits when “the doers create the jobs” feels obvious? What becomes invisible when poverty is explained by motivation? What does the Beverly Hills line protect from examination?

So: a series. I am calling it Common Sense, and it will run here in Marginalia, one objection at a time. Each entry takes its title from the objection itself, in quotation marks, in the words it actually arrived in. Each entry asks two questions of its specimen: whether it is true, and what work it does regardless. And each entry routes through Los Angeles wherever the city offers material, which is more often than you would think, because the vernacular catechism of anti-socialism runs aground on this city in instructive ways. Who will pay for it? The voters of the City of Los Angeles answered that at the ballot box in 2022, and Planned Walls looked at what the money is buying and what stands in its way. It has never worked anywhere? The largest municipally owned utility in the country delivered the water in the objector’s glass this morning. You will never see socialism in Beverly Hills? Beverly Hills, a separate city that likes to be mistaken for a neighborhood, may be the most collectively provisioned real estate in America: racially covenanted into existence, subsidized by the federal mortgage interest deduction, shielded by a California constitutional amendment passed in 1978. The wealth there is collective provision, captured. Readers of the Rothstein note already know half of that story; the entry will tell the rest.

Two commitments, so the series does not become a shooting gallery. First, every objection gets its strongest available form. When the entry concerns economic calculation, the interlocutor will be Hayek, not a comment section; if an answer cannot survive the serious version of the objection, it has not earned the easy one. Second, the objections stay in their own words. The series is a study of how these beliefs circulate, and the circulation happens in kitchens and comment sections, in the vernacular, in the exact phrases that come out at Thanksgiving. The phrasing is data.

Which is where you come in. Send me the objections as you have actually heard them: from the cousin, the coworker, the guy at the gym, the official in a hearing, the comment under the post. Skip the polished think-tank versions; send the sentences as they arrived, verbatim as memory allows. Reply to this email or leave them in the comments. Sources stay anonymous, wording stays intact, and the best specimens become entries.

Readers of The Colonized Horizon will recognize this as the same question worked from the other end. That essay asked why we dream in the language of capital. This series inventories the phrases the language is made of.

Gramsci one more time, because he saw all of this from a prison cell. History, he wrote, deposits in each of us an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory, and the first task of critical thought is to compile one.2 The commenter closed by telling me I needed to wake up. On that much we agree. This is what waking up looks like: the inventory, compiled in public, one obvious sentence at a time.

Share

Share

The vote to draft the police measure was 9 to 6. A vote to draft is not a vote to place, and some members were quick to say so. True enough. But a majority does not order the City Attorney to draft a measure it means to bury, and nothing in the language that came back explains what changed. “More study” is the stated reason. Democracy deferred is the result.

The timing is not subtle. On June 18 the Los Angeles Police Protective League sent the City a letter demanding a meet and confer process and threatening to sue if the police accountability measure was not pulled. On June 30 the Council pulled it. The union got the outcome its letter asked for, days before the ballot deadline.

The demand had no merit. The amendment changes no wage, hour, or condition of employment, the changes that would require bargaining under state law, and it leaves the discipline of individual officers untouched. The union's own letter conceded the measure would bring greater accountability. The Board of Police Commissioners and the department had already declined to join the reform process, promising their own reforms by March; a meet and confer demand at the deadline asked for a closed-door redo of the open process they skipped.

Keeping the measures off the ballot costs more than the measures themselves. A ballot campaign is itself democratic education: it forces a citywide argument, in the press and on the doorstep, over who controls the police and who belongs to this city. Win or lose, that argument reaches hundreds of thousands who will never read a commission report or sit through a committee hearing. Referral cancels it before it can begin, and the reforms wait in committee while the conversation a campaign would have forced never happens.

This is the move the Council has used before. Council expansion and ranked choice voting were already sent back for study. Police accountability and residential voting now join them. The ad hoc committee has no deadline. Reforms that go in are not required to come back.

If the Council will not place these reforms before voters, Angelinos still have a route of their own. A charter amendment can reach the ballot by petition, without the Council’s approval. That path is slower and more expensive than a Council vote, but it is the one lever the Council does not control. A qualified initiative, or the credible threat of one, changes the Council’s incentives. It makes inaction cost something. It puts the committee on a clock.

Subscribe now

There is a sharper reason to take that route than speed or leverage: the versions the Council drafted are the versions the Council could tolerate. The residential measure only permits some future Council to extend the franchise, and the police measure moves policy authority without binding it to anything. A petition is written by the people who file it, which means it can extend the franchise on adoption rather than defer it, and carry the accountability the Council left out: an end to the Board of Rights, the Chief's authority to terminate, a Council override on retention. The petition is where we stop asking the Council for the thin version of what we came for and write the one worth passing.

The work now is to make that threat real, which means holding the coalition together and keeping the residents who came to testify engaged, confirming what it takes to qualify a charter amendment by petition, the signature count and the filing deadline, and identifying the next election it can reach. Pressing the ad hoc committee at the same time. The initiative is what gives that pressure teeth.

The Council had the votes and chose committee. The voters do not need the Council’s permission to amend their own charter. That is where we go next.

Subscribe now

The pitch was about Genoa. Silvia Salis, the former Olympic hammer thrower who took the city from the Italian right last year and now gets described, in the liberal press at least, as the woman who might unseat Giorgia Meloni.1 The argument I wanted to make was simplistic. Los Angeles hides behind its sanctuary status, built up since Special Order 40 in 1979 and finally codified in a 2024 city ordinance, the way you pull a jacket over your head in the rain. Salis does the opposite. She throws a techno rave in the central piazza the same year Meloni’s government bans them. She puts a wage floor in the city’s contracts. She opens a municipal office for queer Genoese and registers the children of same-sex couples the national government would rather pretend do not exist. Stop hiding, I want to tell our side. Pick up the hammer and throw.

Then my fiancée brought me north to Torre Pellice, where she grew up, and the valley took the argument apart.

You can stand in the middle of this place and not realize where you are. It looks like any small mountain town: one main street, a handful of shops with old family names over the doors, kitchen gardens running back toward the tree line. In summer the forested slopes fill with hikers and mountain bikers. But Torre Pellice is the capital of a people who spent the better part of four centuries being hunted. The Waldensians began in the twelfth century as the poor of Lyon, were excommunicated and driven underground, and survived as a Protestant minority in exactly one corner of Italy: these valleys, narrow, defensible, easy to disappear into.2 Edmondo De Amicis, passing through in the next century, called Torre Pellice the little Italian Geneva and the valley above it a Waldensian Thermopylae.

But the history here is not a story of hiding. In 1686 the Duke of Savoy offered them the choice every minority is eventually offered: assimilate, leave, or die. Most left. Three years later about nine hundred of them marched back from Switzerland, armed, and took the valleys again by force. They called it the Glorious Return, and before the fighting they swore an oath to hold together until every valley was reclaimed. Full civil rights did not arrive until 1848, more than a century and a half later. And when fascism came in the next century, these same valleys became one of the most active centers of the armed Resistance, so much so that in February 1945 the Germans bombed Torre Pellice, Bobbio Pellice, Villar Pellice, and Prali, the valleys’ towns, from the air.3

Here is what I had gotten wrong. I assumed sanctuary and resistance could not share the same ground, that you lose your shield when you pick up the hammer. But the valley was always both at once. Hiding was how a hunted people stayed alive long enough to return and fight. We treat resistance as a threat to the sanctuary; the valley says the reverse. The sanctuary exists because the danger is already there, only obscured. Keeping your head down does not avoid the fight. It only hides that the fight has already begun.

Which brought me back to Salis with more discerning eyes. Read without the romance, she is not a battering ram against the Italian Right. The Italian Left is right to be wary of her; she is a growth-first pragmatist whom the establishment press is grooming precisely because she has no socialist past to defend. And the move I most admired, the civil registrations, is the fragile one. When the mayor of Milan tried the same thing, the national interior ministry sent a letter, and he was forced to stop. A city can defy a hostile national government right up until that government decides to notice. The rave was real and the wage floor is real, but one was counter-programming and the other is a standard Los Angeles already exceeds, for now.

So the lesson I am taking home is not the one I packed. We have already seen what federal power does to a sanctuary that is only paperwork, and worse, what our own police do beside it. In June 2025, immigrant rights advocates watched LAPD officers hold the perimeter near downtown while federal agents loaded local workers into unmarked vehicles, the families too afraid to come for them until the police had gone.4 The chief calls it crowd control. Our ordinance turned out to have been a wish, not a shield. The question the valley puts to us is what kind of sanctuary we are building: the kind that files an ordinance and hopes Washington looks away, or the kind that keeps people fed and housed and organized and alive.

That infrastructure is not built in City Hall. It is built in block-by-block tenant unions that refuse evictions, mutual defense networks that protect their neighbors, and labor coalitions ready to grind the city to a halt when the raids redouble. We build the infrastructure of survival first, so that there is a community left to make the return.

The Waldensians did not survive because they hid well. They survived because the place they hid became the place they fought back from. That is the only sanctuary worth the name. Los Angeles has the paperwork. It does not yet have the valley.

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.

Share The SoCalist

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now