Walk through downtown Los Angeles on a weekday afternoon and notice what your body does. It tightens at intersections. It tracks the distance to the nearest car. It registers, without conscious thought, which doorways belong to whom. The city teaches itself into our nervous systems. We learn, before we learn much else, that public space is dangerous and private space is a privilege, that other people are obstacles, that to belong somewhere is to have paid for it. This is not metaphor. The therapist Resmaa Menakem, writing about racialized trauma, observes that culture is how our bodies retain and reenact history, and that when strategy competes with culture, culture wins every time.1 The left in Los Angeles has a strategy problem that is really a culture problem, and the culture problem is really a problem of bodies.
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.
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.
Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017), 281-285. The “re-memberings” summary appears at the close of Menakem’s chapter on creating culture; the formulations on bodies, belonging, and the primacy of culture over strategy run throughout the book.
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990), 221-263. The chapter “Fortress L.A.” treats the privatization of public space and the militarized architecture of the postwar metropolis; “The Hammer and the Rock” extends the analysis to policing and the racial geography of the region.
Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands, 282. The inventory of cultural elements is Menakem’s; the application to socialist organizing is mine.
On UNITE HERE Local 11 and the 2023 hotel workers’ strike, see Erin Hatton, ed., Labor in the Time of Trump (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2020), and the union’s own organizing history at unitehere11.org. The strike is worth studying as a living example of what a labor counter-culture looks like when it has been sustained across decades.
For the substantive proposals, see the work of the Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission, established by the City Council in August 2024, with recommendations expected for the November 2026 ballot. Council File 24-0989 contains the establishing ordinance and ongoing commission materials.
Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands, 283.
On the garment strikes and the longer Boyle Heights political tradition, see George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; repr. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1973).
YES yes yes this neatly articulates something I’ve been trying to communicate for a long time