My lifelong ideals at last! Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood — were found in the commercial baths!

— Peter Shumakher, 1876

"Bodnik" is a word coming from "bod" (Yiddish for "bath") plus "-nik" (Yiddish/slavic suffix meaning a person related to something). So a bath person.

For us, A bodnik is someone who understands 3 things:

1. The importance and pleasure of repose, or non-doing
2. Bathing as a way of non-doing.
3. The importance of the counterpart and material foundation of repose: doing, or in other words, human labor acting on natural processes.

Let us elaborate.

In our ordinary lives, we are often trying to effect a change in the world. To create something, to earn a wage, to cook, to make the bed, to play the violin, to win someone's affections. We may have chosen to do it on our own, we may feel compelled to do it. We may take pleasure in it, we may not take pleasure in it. This we can call doing.

Complementary to doing is repose. Stopping doing things. Letting the world move on its own. "Rest" is of course necessary to sustain the sphere of "activity", but it should not be seen merely as a subordinate process or a "necessary evil." It has its own charms, its own achievements, and is completely neglected and degraded in capitalist society for straightforward reasons.

Repose found a somewhat comfortable place in past class societies, in the lives of certain segments of the ruling classes at least. In capitalist society, it has no easy home. In our society, even the bourgeois churn and hustle ceaselessly. Many of them even turn recreation into a social media status competition.

We believe that for a good life, this sphere must be expanded from its present state which is either the anemia of a few hours of proper enjoyment in between workdays or work-weeks, or the pseudo-repose of junk food and short-form video throughout the day.

Bodnik of course is about bathing in particular. Whether bathing immediately resonates with someone as a form of non-doing has to do with their cultural heritage and ultimately their own personal life experiences.

To quote WET Magazine's "Gourmet Bathing: A Long Overdue Introduction": "Gourmet bathing is a means of enjoying the world. Not a system or a therapy or a philosophy; at most a point of view having something to do with sensuality, humor, humility, and taking such pleasure in small things that they stop being small."

However it does not make sense to stop our understanding at the level of the individual experience. We hold:

We do not forget the position of repose in the "whole" of social life. We do not live in the Garden of Eden where fruits simply fall off the tree into our mouths, or even the Wall-E ship where robots do everything necessary and we can just sit in our sci-fi floating mobility scooters.

The reason for this is very simple: repose means "to leave the world alone." But the world imposes itself eventually. We need to labor for food, electricity, shelter, etc., to shore up the "material" foundations of the womb of repose.

Even more importantly, we must stress that we do not conflate our mission (restoring repose to its rightful status) as simply a matter of increasing our individual experiences of repose and pleasure, as though it were simply a matter of taking part in more orgies or Burning Mans. This is bourgeois ideology pure and simple, which cuts out the individual from the social and natural historical processes of which they are a part, puts them on a tray, and then concocts a "beautiful" (false) world in a petri dish.

Ours is a historical, social, and ecological mission. Individually reposing does nothing to solve the social and historical problems we are facing. History has teleologically produced capitalism, a society that wants to turn everything into ceaseless labor, an opposite of repose. They would eliminate or transform even sleep if they could. Therefore we must transform (not leave or destroy! since any "fresh start" will come back here) the society we find ourselves in.

But it is even deeper: the failure to accept repose as a species is what produces class society: the local accumulation of surplus, which then forms the means to shore up the ruling class's own position of domination. What is surplus? Working more than necessary! The pure opposite of repose.

Isn't this insanely grandiose for a bathhouse?

The bathhouse itself is (at the risk of stating the obvious) is not the organization that will effectuate the social transformation we are speaking of. It is a bathhouse. However, it aims to play a minor supporting role in an ecology of organizations which has some shot at making that social change.

Humility aside, we hold there is nothing embarrassing about seeking to support a fundamental change in the structure of society, even in a small way. The idea that an establishment should be a business and try to do nothing else is capitalist ideology. To give the final word to Badiou:

To put it in a nutshell: we have to be bold enough to have an idea. A great idea. We have to convince ourselves that there is nothing ridiculous or criminal about having a great idea. The world of global and arrogant capitalism in which we live is taking us back to the 1840s and the birth of capitalism. Its imperative, as formulated by Guizot, was: 'Get rich!' We can translate that as 'Live without an idea!' We have to say that we cannot live without an idea. We have to say: 'Have the courage to support the idea, and it can only be the communist idea in its generic sense.

With that, let us now discuss the specifics of how our operation can support the aforementioned social transformation.

The practicalities

1. Membership is for workers and organizers who are active, or who are resting between periods of activity. This includes artists who lend their talents to the class struggle.
2. Bodnik is a place for making connections between partisans.
3. Entrance will always be less than a sandwich.
4. We will provide space for meeting in the non-bathing spaces.
5. Bodnik will promote artistic and intellectual development as well as physical and social: with film screenings & member talks.

Finally: on the price

Here is a quote from a recent article on the new luxury bathhouse enterprises which have been cropping up:

“Investors don’t even believe the margins,” said Robert Hammond, Therme U.S. Group president and chief strategy officer. “Most of the people are deflating the margins to investors. You can have 25, 40, 60 percent.”

Offensive doesn't begin to describe this state of affairs. Bathing is a basic physical and spiritual pleasure and obviously its availability should not depend on one's wealth, even leaving aside moral considerations and remaiing within the logic of capitalism because: the requisite heat and water is relatively cheap and the construction can be done cheaply enough.

We aim to make such extractive bathing enterprises impossible to run in the Bay Area, by producing an abundance of cheap and excellent bathing spaces.