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Like a Meteorite: The Life of Mike Davis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2023

Tom Reifer
Tom Reifer*
Affiliation:
University of San Diego, USA
*
Email: reifer@sandiego.edu
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Abstract

This article surveys the lifetime work of scholar-activist Mike Davis, and his attentiveness to the wide-ranging synthesis of the global political economy and ecology of capitalism and militarism, focusing on labor and social history, and to inequalities of race, class, gender, and nation, and struggles for diversity and inclusion, marking his distinctive style. Covering themes ranging from American exceptionalism, working-class formation, struggles for the eight-hour workday, the political economy and ecology of the Third World, and the growth of today's informal proletariat, the article underlines the author's deepest commitments to a lifetime of scholarship. These include democratic control over the means of production, and the remaking of the global system on new and enlarged, more peaceful and just socioecological foundations, now essential if humanity and other sentient beings are to survive and thrive.

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Footnotes

Davis was an avid meteorite collector, part of his engagement with the scientific theory of catastrophism, and related concepts such as punctuated equilibrium, versus the earlier assumptions of uniformitarianism, which increasingly provided inspiration for his many works. See Maria Golia, Meteorite: Nature and Culture (London, 2015); Richard Hugget, Catastrophism (London, 1997); and Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA, 2002).

References

Notes

2. For the distinctive project of this journal in general and the achievements of Davis in particular, see Perry Anderson, “Ukania Perpetua?” New Left Review 125 (September/October 2020): 60–62.

3. See Avrich, Paul, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton, NJ, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Gabriel Winant, “Mike Davis's Specificities: Repetitious and Reductive Appeals to the Universal Never Satisfied,” N + 1, November 16, 2022, https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/daviss-specificities/.

5. Bergquist's, Charles Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Columbia (Stanford, CA, 1986)Google Scholar, inspired by the new social history and world-systems analysis, is particularly noteworthy in this regard. For an important appreciation, see Hylton, Forrest and Legrand, Catherine G., “Charles W. Bergquist (1942-2020),” Hispanic American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (2021): 491–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar6.

6. See Roger Keil's beautiful essay, “Mike Davis: Remembering a Giant of Generosity,” Azure (January 30, 2023).

7. Davis, Mike, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (New York, 2018), 4Google Scholar. See also Sellers, Charles, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York, 1991), 282–88Google Scholar.

8. Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, x.

9. See also Cornell, Angela B. and Barenberg, Mark, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Labor and Democracy (New York, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. See Bois, W.E.B. Du, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880, Eric Foner and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. (New York, 2021)Google Scholar; Battistini, Matteo, “Karl Marx and the Global History of the Civil War: The Slave Movement, Working-Class Struggle, and the American State Within the World Market,” International Labor and Working-Class History 100 (Fall 2021): 158–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an important analysis, which draws on Davis's Prisoners, see Riley, Dilan and Brenner, Robert, “Seven Theses on American Politics,” New Left Review 138 (November/December 2022): 5–27Google Scholar. For an earlier attempt to grasp these realities, see Davis, Mike, “The Great God Trump and the White Working Class,” Lance Selfa, ed., US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty (Chicago, 2017), 61–84Google Scholar, and Davis, Mike, “Trench Warfare: Notes on the 2020 Election,” New Left Review 126 (November/December 2020): 5–32Google Scholar. See also Rauchway, Eric, “Neither a Depression Nor a New Deal,” Julian E. Zelizer, eds., The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton, NJ, 2018), 30–44Google Scholar.

11. Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, xiii.

12. For a recent important work exploring similar themes, see Tariq Omar Ali, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta (Princeton, NJ, 2018).

13. Mike Davis, “The Stop Watch and the Wooden Shoe: Scientific Management and the Industrial Workers of the World,” Radical America 9, no. 1 (January-February 1975): 69–95. Mike Davis, “‘Fordism’ in Crisis,” Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations II, no. 2 (Fall 1978): 207–69. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York, 2018).

14. “An Interview With Mike Davis,” Michael Frommer, Chicago Review 38, no. 4 (1993): 38.

15. Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City (New York, 2000); Justin Akers Chacon and Mike Davis, No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence at the U.S.-Mexican Border (Chicago, 2006); Mike Davis, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (New York, 2007); Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene V. Debs (Chicago, 2007); Mike Davis, In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (Chicago, 2007); Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, eds., Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (New York, 2007). Most recently, Davis co-authored (with historian Jon Wiener) Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the 1960s (New York, 2020) and published The Monster Enters: COVID 19, the Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (New York, 2022).

16. Most recently, see Jan Breman, Fighting to Become Free Again (New Dehli, 2023), Jan Breman and Ganshyam Shah, Gujarat, Cradle and Harbinger of Identity Politics: India's Injurious Frame of Communalism (New Dehli, 2022), and Ashwani Saith, “A Defiant Sociologist and His Craft: Jan Breman; An Appreciation and Conversation,” Development and Change 47, no. 4 (July 2016): 876–901.

17. Mike Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx's Lost Theory (New York, 2018), xvi–xvii, 1–2. “History in the ‘Age of Extremes’: A Conversation with Eric Hobsbawm,” International Labor and Working-Class History 83 (March 2013): 19. See also, Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York, 1994, 2010), and Mark R. Beissiner, The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion (Princeton, NJ, 2022).

18. Mike Davis, “Planet of Slums,” New Left Review 26 (March/April 2004): 30.

19. Davis, “Planet of Slums,” 33. For an update, with a focus on the centrality of Africa, see Washington Post, Max Bearak, Dylan Moriarty, and Julia Ledur, “Africa's Rising Cities: How Africa Will Become the Center of the World's Urban Future,” (November 19, 2021) https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2021/africa-cities/, as well as the important assessment by Giovanni Arrighi, “The African Crisis: World Systemic and Regional Aspects,” New Left Review 15 (May–June 2002): 5–38. On the radically different experience of China and East Asia, see Ju Li, Enduring Change (Berlin, 2019), Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, and Pun Ngai, Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China's Workers (Chicago, 2020), Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century (New York, 2009), Ivan Franceschini & Christian Sorace, eds., Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour, London: Verso & Made in China Journal, 2022.

20. Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas, 20–21.

21. Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas, 7. For two more recent contemporary explorations of the implications of our so-called neoliberal present, see David G. Blanchflower, Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? (Princeton, NJ, 2019), and Carl Benedikt Frey, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation (Princeton, NJ, 2019).

22. Since attempts at such periodization are fewer than might be hoped for, future scholars might fruitfully interrogate the work of Davis through the lens of Giovanni Arrighi's “Marxist Century, American Century: The Making and Remaking of the World Labour Movement,” New Left Review 179 (January/February, 1990): 29–64; “World Income Inequalities and the Future of Socialism,” New Left Review 189 (September/October 1991): 39–66, as well as assessments of the trajectory of the labor movement in this journal. For the latter, see “Scholarly Controversy: Global Flows of Labor and Capital,” International Labor and Working-Class History 49 (Spring 1995): 1–55, with contributions by Charles Tilly, Immanuel Wallerstein, Aristide R. Zolberg, E.J. Hobsbawm, Lourdes Beneria.

23. Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas, 31–33, 136–43.

24. Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas, 143.

25. Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas, 123–27. Cross, Gary, A Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840-1940 (Berkeley, CA, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. See especially, Davis, Mike, “Ward Moore's Freedom Ride,” Science Fiction Studies 38, no. 3 (November 2011): 385–92Google Scholar.

27. See the important work of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst: https://peri.umass.edu/component/k2/item/1404-impacts-of-the-reimagine-appalachia-clean-energy-transition-programs-for-west-virginia, Craig Calhoun and Benjamin Y. Fong, eds., The Green New Deal and the Future of Work (New York, 2022) The Climate Book, created by Greta Thunberg (New York, 2023), and Mike Davis, “Who Will Build the Ark?,” Old Gods, New Enigmas, especially 217–22. See also Rob McFarland, Georg Spitaler, and Ingo Zechner, eds., The Red Vienna Sourcebook (Rochester, NY, 2020).

28. Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas, 52, 51–55. For an important recent exploration in the aftermath of the global Me Too Movement, see Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 19, no. 1 (March 2022), Special Issue on Class and Consent, ed. Christopher Phelps.

29. Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas, 101–03. See Tristan, Flora, The Workers’ Union, trans. and intro. Livingston, Beverly (Urbana, IL, 2007 [1843])Google Scholar; Dijkstra, Sandra, Flora Tristan (New York, 2019)Google Scholar; Kohn, Margaret, Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Ithaca, NY, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose, Jonathan, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, CT, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. For four powerful works here, see Stromquist, Shelton, Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism (New York, 2023)Google Scholar; Fogelson's, Robert M., The Great Rent Wars, New York, 1917-1929 (New Haven, CT, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Working-Class Utopias: A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City (Princeton, NJ, 2022); Kern, Leslie, Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (New York, 2021)Google Scholar.

31. Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas, 21.

32. Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas, 153.

33. See Davis, Mike, “Nuclear Imperialism and Extended Deterrence,” New Left Review, ed., Exterminism and Cold War (New York, 1982), 35–64Google Scholar, and Dead Cities (New York, 2002).