On a Sentence That Has Been Working on Me
Where Davis, Menakem, and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) converge
I have lived in Los Angeles for eight years. My girlfriend, who has read more carefully than I have for longer, suggested early this year that I finally read Mike Davis. City of Quartz sat on my desk for a while before I opened it. When I did, the experience was the one anyone who has read Davis well will recognize: the city I had been walking through for years suddenly had an explanation, and the explanation was not flattering. The dismantled streetcars, the freeways routed through neighborhoods chosen for their political weakness, the privatized public space, the architecture of the fortress home. None of it was accidental. All of it was a project.1
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.
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990).
On the SPD’s parallel cultural infrastructure, see Vernon L. Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017), 281-282.