One of the great figures of the American New Left, Mike Davis, has died. He was 76 and had been fighting with laryngeal cancer for several years.
I first encountered Davis's work when I read his monumental and brilliant history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, as a graduate student at Sussex. I was already interested (but characteristically under-read) in the growing field of Marxist urbanism and geography - featuring writers such as Neil Smith, David Harvey and Edward Soja. Davis was less a theorist than a historian, but it was always clear that he was steeped in the Marxist tradition, and also that he matched Marx and Engels's marvellous mix of intellectual penetration and omnivorous erudition. City of Quartz is a history which the novelist James Ellroy and the film-maker Michael Mann would find conducive - a stylish, unblinking exposure of the dark seamy side of the City of Angels, where the American dream is subtended by boosterism, hyper-capitalism, immigration, a notoriously corrupt police force and environmental degradation on an epic scale. Yet Davis clearly loved Los Angeles, and was endlessly curious about how it worked, its industrial zones as much as its faux Latin suburbs. If Mann - hardly a leftwing filmmaker - can make thrillers which are also visual paeans to LA's nightscapes, its highways, container farms, warehouses - films like Heat and Collateral - these elements of the megalopolis's anatomy, its skeleton, musculature and innards, also fascinated Davis.
What I didn't know at the time was that City of Quartz was the work of a writer already creating a torrent of essays and books which joyfully, contentiously ignored scholarly boundaries and caused trouble everywhere. Written in a deliciously mordant, pithy, ruthless noir prose, Davis was on course to become not only the greatest chronicler of the American working class (Prisoners of the American Dream), but also a radical scholar of disaster - Ecology of Fear and Late Victorian Holocausts stand out. He anticipated global health catastrophe (The Monster Enters), and wrote a brilliant study of the car-bomb (Buda's Wagon). Even more, Davis was always conscious of the poisoned nexus between capitalism and the environment: he skewered 'green capitalism' before it even had a name. And he could write the most scathing polemic - 'The Case for Letting Malibu Burn', a chapter of Ecology of Fear, argued that municipal fire safety budgets would be better spent on protecting poor inner-city districts than on preparing to rescue the pampered idiots who had built themselves ugly mansions in remote hillside fire-zones.
Davis was not only an original scholar but also could absorb, summarize and render accessible the discourses and ideas of disciplines far from his own. For me, the stand-out here might be 'Cosmic Dancers on History's Stage? The Permanent Revolution in the Earth Sciences', an extraordinary article surveying, condensing and extrapolating from recent scholarship in earth science. Most striking in this essay was its explanation of 'coherent catastrophism' - the theory that the planet's geological, biological and maybe even human history has evolved in a complex rhythm shaped in part by elements external to the system - principally, asteroid or comet hits.
Davis was an activist and union organiser long before he became a scholar, and his work was always firmly grounded in the political realities of the American left. Although he held academic positions, he also was a MacArthur grant winner, which allowed him a freedom of manoeuvre in intellectual and research terms. But Davis was a tough driven man, who would always have made his own way. More than most left scholars, he retained a strong sense of the necessary relationship between putatively 'radical' scholarship, and the nitty-gritty street-fighting world of organisation, campaigning and protest. A figure of the 'New Left', he never lost touch with the 'old left' of his parents' generation, and he always realised that the academy and the street sit in a dynamic relationship, where the latter is most often in the van. Here he is, on being called an 'old school socialist':
First, socialism — the belief that the earth belongs to labor — is my moral being. In fact, it is my religion, the values that anchor the commitments that define my life.
Second, “old school” implies putting in work year after year for the good cause. In academia one runs across people who call themselves Marxists and go to lots of conferences but hardly ever march on a picket line, go to a union meeting, throw a brick or simply help wash the dishes after a benefit. What’s even worse, they deign to teach us the “real Marx” but lack the old Moor’s fundamental respect for individual working people and his readiness to become a poor outlaw on their behalf.
Finally, plain “socialist” expresses identification with the broad movement and the dream rather than with a particular program or camp. I have strong, if idiosyncratic, opinions on all the traditional issues — for example, the necessity of an organization of organizers (call it Leninism, if you want) but also the evils of bureaucracy and permanent leaderships (call it anarchism if you wish) — but I try to remind myself that such positions need to be constantly reassessed and calibrated to the conjuncture. One is always negotiating the slippery dialectic between individual reason, which must be intransigently self-critical, and the fact that one needs to be part of a movement or a radical collective in order, as Sartre put it, to “be in history.” Moral dilemmas and hard choices come with the turf and they cannot be evaded with “correct lines.”
Mike Davis was one of the greatest exemplars of the scholar-agitator of recent times. His death is a huge loss; his work remains a resource to be treasured.
Conor
Here is some material by and about Davis:
Obituaries
The Nation Mike Davis: 1946–2022
The Los Angeles Times
Tariq Ali, for Verso Books
A brilliant radical reporter with a novelist’s eye and ain
Micah Uetricht, at Jacobin
