A Mike Davis Reader

Plus a footnote about Mike Davis's rock collection

Toward the end of his appearance on the great podcast Time to Say Goodbye in 2020, the historian, writer, activist, academic, and revolutionary socialist Mike Davis discussed his hobby of collecting igneous rocks:

I collect unusual igneous geological formations¹. I may be the only person in the world apart from actual scientists who does this. I’ve been an amateur geologist since I was eight or nine years old. Not minerals, or crystals -- I could care less about minerals or specific crystals. I’m interested in things like abducted pieces of ocean crust, or parts of the upper mantle that ended up on the surface. And California is probably he greatest place in the world for exotic and weird geology. Anybody who’s listening out there and lacking a hobby: Combine revolutionary politics and igneous petrology and you’ll be happy for the rest of your life.

Davis died yesterday at the age of 76. You gotta be careful with on-the-nose quotes like that, but it’s hard to think of a better way to sum up his life and work: a fascination with the material, a focus on the rough-hewn and overlooked, and an abiding love for California in all its particular strangeness. Plus the revolutionary politics.

This newsletter is, ostensibly, “about the future,” and an irascible Marxist historian might seem like a sort of odd fit. But in some sense Davis’s interest in history worked in two directions, both toward the past and toward the future. He wasn’t a writer of science fiction, and I’m not going to try something cute here and claim he “actually” was, but one of his great gifts was his ability to see the future in the present -- in Los Angeles, in Manila, in Dubai. You could write a whole cyberpunk universe just off of a chapter or two in a Mike Davis book. Or you could wait 10 years and experience it yourself.

If you’ve read a little bit of Mike Davis, chances are you’ve read a lot of Mike Davis. Both because, if you are of a certain disposition and read him at a certain time in your life, it’s likely that he significantly shaped your intellectual and political development, but also because he was a writer of such scope and restlessness that he never became boring or predictable, and every new book or essay offered something strange, fresh, and worth reading.

For people who’ve read no Mike Davis, or who are looking for more to read, I thought I would do a quick special edition of the newsletter sharing some of my favorite writing by (and about) Davis. This is not really a “best of” list, nor necessarily a “hidden gems” list, just a collection of writing that left an impression on me, and that I think people should read. If you’re reading some of the tributes and wondering where to start with Davis, maybe this can be a guide:

Essays and columns

“Let Malibu Burn,” LA Weekly, 1996

Possibly Davis’s most famous essay, and one that shows off his overlapping interests in ecology, class, California, and rhetorical bomb-throwing. I am stubbornly attached to this original version, with the more incendiary imperative title, than the version published in Davis’s Ecology of Fear under the tamer “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.”

“Fear and Money in Dubai,” New Left Review, 2006

A fierce, comprehensive, exhilarating analysis of “Speer meets Disney on the shores of Araby.”

“Who Will Build the Ark?,” New Left Review, 2010

Davis’s great essay on climate change, rehearsed as a debate between pessimism and optimism: “Since most of history’s giant trees have already been cut down, a new Ark will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science and forgotten utopias.”

“The Coming Desert,” New Left Review, 2016

A totally fascinating piece of history: the Russian anarchist Kropotkin’s 19th-century theory of climate change, fears of desertification, and Victorian crazes for Mars. One of those essays that unmuffles all kinds of strange historical resonances.

“Marx at the Chicken Shack,” Verso, 2018

A lovely, approachable almost breezy blurb for Daniel Bensaïd’s book Marx for Our Times that serves as an assessment of 20th-century readings (and critiques) of Marx.

“Thanatos Triumphant,” Sidecar, 2022

The bracing essay that made thousands of Twitter leftists read the Wikpedia pages of “Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, Alexander Berkman and the incomparable Sholem Schwarzbard.”

Books

My sense is that no one needs me to recommend City of Quartz, Davis’s famous history of Los Angeles. (Or, for that matter, Late Victorian Holocausts or City of Slums, his other masterpieces.) But let me plug Buda’s Wagon, a 2007 history of the car bomb that I read for the first time a few years ago. Davis, writing at the height of the war on terror and IED attacks in Iraq, tracks the development and use of car bomb through the 20th century as a technology adapted to the built environment, power distribution, and political logic of the contemporary epoch. It’s a short, approachable book that’s also a model of how to approach the present through rigorous research into the past. There’s an abridged version of it available at TomDispatch here.

Writing about Davis

There have been a number of great profiles of and interviews with Davis, many of them published in the last couple years, each of them containing at least one eye-popping anecdote or memorable quote. Some of my favorites:

“The American Earthquake: Mike Davis and the Politics of Disaster,” Adam Shatz, Lingua Franca, 1997

By and large, however, the NLR board was elated to have a precocious American--better yet, a precocious working-class American--wash up on its shores. "Marxists have long had this feeling that America shows us our future," explains Blackburn. "Mike's very robust, American working-class style further contributed to his charm." Yet, as even this circumspect editor concedes, "tact wasn't his strong suit." Some staffers thought Davis exploited his background. "Mike could be psychotic. He was very in-your-face about his identity," says a former NLR editor. As Davis himself admits, "I've always had a sort of truck-stop attitude toward effete intellectuals." […]

Davis's confrontational pose made for an unusually anxious workplace. At one NLR meeting, he stunned his audience into silence with the letter he had sent to Eugene Genovese, who had complained of being spurned by the journal: "Dear Professor Genovese, Fuck you." Then there was Davis's terrifying collection of pets. The centerpiece of the office was his atrarium, filled with a garter snake, an axolotl, and a carnivorous African toad. At an explosive moment toward the end of his tenure, recalled by everyone who witnessed it, Davis spilled his reptiles onto the office's lush carpet.

When I ask Davis about this, he strikes a remorseful note. "If anyone was guilty of wild or outrageous behavior, it was me," he concedes. In the end, though, he says he never felt a part of the Etonian clique around the journal: "Ultimately you couldn't really understand these guys unless you'd taken showers with them when you were ten." He longed to go home.

Prof. Mike Davis: “There was once a generation of lions,” Mohsen Abdelmoumen, 2018:

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: You call yourself an ‘old school socialist’. Can you tell us why?

Mike Davis: Hm, ‘old school Socialist.’ I suppose I’m making three claims. First, socialism—the belief that the earth belongs to labour—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 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’.

“theLAnd Interview: Mike Davis,” Jeff Weiss, LAnd

I’d regale students by getting them to think outside of books and the conventional concepts of history. I’d say that I knew a woman, who knew a man, who saw the emperor Napoleon. And that was [midcentury Communist Party activist and Davis mentor] Dorothy Healey’s mother, Barbara Nestor, who died at around 98. She grew up in Slovakia in a Jewish village outside of Bratislava, and the most famous man in the village was a veteran of the Austrian Army who had been at the surrender of Austerlitz. So she sat at his knee and heard these stories and I sat at her knee. A lot of them had grandparents who were my age or younger, and were blown away by the idea that I had a grandfather who fought in the last war of the 19th Century, or that I knew someone, who knew someone, who knew Napoleon.

“Mike Davis is still a damn good storyteller,” Sam Dean, Los Angeles Times, 2022

MD: To put it bluntly, I don’t think hope is a scientific category. And I don’t think that people fight or stay the course because of hope, I think people do it out of love and anger. Everybody always wants to know: Aren’t you hopeful? Don’t you believe in hope? To me, this is not a rational conversation. I try and write as honestly and realistically as I can. And you know, I see bad stuff. I see a city decaying from the bottom up. I see the landscapes that are so important to me as a Californian dying, irrevocably changed. I see fascism. I’m writing because I’m hoping the people who read it don’t need dollops of hope or good endings but are reading so that they’ll know what to fight, and fight even when the fight seems hopeless.

(Dean also has a bunch of transcripts of cut portions of his interview on his personal site, like this excellent bit about Davis’s life in Belfast.)

“Mike Davis, California’s ‘prophet of doom’, on activism in a dying world: ‘Despair is useless,’” Lois Beckett, The Guardian, 2022

What are you and your family doing with the time you have left?

Avoiding this trap where writers feel they must weigh in with famous last words or a long essay on dying. We’re watching a lot of Scandinavian noir on HBO. In the last month, I’ve started consuming immense amounts of military history, an infantile throwback. I find the counterfactuals – this battle, what did it decide, what was the alternative – deeply fascinating.

You can’t expect to die at a very heroic moment. It’d be nice to die in 1968, or with the liberation of Europe in 1945. You’re on the barricades in 1917, 1919. Go out of life with the red flags flying. But despair is useless.

1. Davis doesn’t seem to have publicly discussed his hobby much, at least that I can find, but the blog This Long Century once published an extreme close-up photograph by Davis of one of his rocks, under the title “The terminus of the Dialectic as a photomicrograph”:

There are dozens of photographs of rocks submitted by a “Mike Davis” to the public geology website GeoDIL, but don’t get too excited: GeoDIL administrator Dexter Perkins tells me “the Mike Davis who contributed to GeoDIL was a different guy.”