Like a Meteorite: The Life of Mike Davis

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.

On October 25, 2022, Mike Davis, born in 1946, in the Fontana suburb of Los Angeles, California, died. The child of working-class, Irish-Catholic parents, Davis's family moved to San Diego when he was young, and it was there that Davis was forever altered by the civil rights movement. He immersed himself in the work of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), organized for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and, in the same era as Angela Davis, became a member of the multiracial Communist Party of Southern California. To make a living, he worked as meat-cutter and long-distance truck driver, while also serving as a rank-and-file activist in the trade union opposition (Southern California Teamsters).

In the 1980s, Davis moved to London, becoming a long-time editor of the New Left Review until his passing.² Davis also edited Verso's Haymarket Series, dedicated to the legacy of Chicago's Haymarket martyrs who were murdered for their tireless activism for labor and immigrant rights in the aftermath of the May Day uprising of 1886—itself part of the international struggle for the eight-hour workday.³ Davis's brilliant Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class came out in 1986, on the hundredth anniversary of these struggles, and a half-century after the sit-down strikes of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). As labor historian Gabriel Winant noted in a perceptive review of both Prisoners and Davis's oeuvre, he seamlessly integrated political economy with social and political history, entwining questions of race, ethnicity, religion, city, community, neighborhood, and more.⁴ As the Brazilian historian Emilia Viotta da Costa once put it in the pages of ILWCH, some scholars sought to overcome the divide between experience and structure in labor history. Davis's work certainly aimed at exactly such a synthesis.⁵ Ever-present in Davis, too, were his spirit of generosity and visions of alternative urbanisms that could serve the laboring classes, remaking the world on socioecologically sustainable foundations.⁶

The first chapter of Prisoners, “Why the American Working Class is Different,” starts off by noting that in 1828, “a group of Philadelphia artisans organized the first ‘Labor Party’ in world history.”⁷ And of course, the struggles in the United States for the eight-hour workday, notably in Chicago's Haymarket Square, helped give birth to May Day, the international holiday commemorating labor worldwide. All the more striking then, that the United States today stands apart from all other advanced capitalist states, not to mention countries such as Brazil, in the absence of any independent labor or socialist party. Hence Davis's query: “Why has American labor, for all its cultural and organizational assets, been so weak as a class force?”⁸

In later chapters of Prisoners, “The Barren Marriage of American Labor and the Democratic Party” and the “Rise and Fall of the House of Labor,” Davis interrogates these central questions of American exceptionalism so as to examine the possibilities for a revival of the labor movement today. These essays still retain their relevance for understanding the right turn in the United States, and globally, as well as the crisis of actually existing democracy.⁹ As with W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction, Davis long argued that the failure of the US labor movement to align itself with the Black freedom struggle, and workers of color more generally, contributes to its declining power. This weakness is revealed today in the continued shift of workers without a college degree, especially white workers, toward an increasingly extremist Republican Party, which continues to successfully capture large shares of these voters through nativist and racist appeals.¹⁰

Prisoners went on to chronicle the fate of labor in the aftermath of these failures, in the eye of Ronald Reagan's counterrevolutionary hurricane. It specifically sought to signal what Davis called “those real historical forces which do exist to sustain the project—and the responsibility—of an internationalist Left in the United States.”¹¹ As part of this larger project, his multivolume, The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook, took up many of these same issues starting in 1985. Shortly after these timely interventions, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, arguably Davis's most famous work, was published, earning him a 1998 MacArthur genius award. Two other widely read books Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998) and Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001) soon followed.¹² In fact, though, Davis's earliest interventions in articles like “The Stopwatch and the Wooden Shoe: Scientific Management and the Industrial Workers of the World,” were as a historian of labor and capitalism, it was through books like City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts that Davis revealed his unique socioecological perspective as well as his deepest hopes and motivations¹³ As Davis told one interviewer in the early 1990s:

I never expected that we would be so much in the position of fighting not just over the nature of the future, but to defend the past, to defend the millions of human beings who died in the struggle for labor and socialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now obviously for socialists this is the hour of the furnaces, it's the most trying time imaginable, but I still can't believe, that there is any alternative for humanity except to figure out some way to…democratically organize the means of production.¹⁴

In the first decade of the new millennium, Davis published books on immigration, empire, neoliberalism, the car bomb, and an introduction to a biography of the US socialist activist Eugene V. Debs.¹⁵ Yet arguably Davis's most important and widely read book of greatest relevance for labor scholars and activists continues to be his 2006 examination of urban inequality Planet of Slums. A powerful indictment of contemporary capitalism in the longue duree (which led the Vatican to invite the author to meet the Holy See), Planet of Slums was inspired by the heroic labors of Jan Breman, one of the world's pioneering scholars of labor and informality.¹⁶ In the book, Davis asks the question of whether this burgeoning informal proletariat, the fastest-growing class on the planet, can exercise historical agency. As Davis notes, the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm raised this burning issue in a 1995 interview in ILWCH, shortly after the publication of his The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991.¹⁷

In a 2004 article in New Left Review, Davis laid out the existential challenges confronting a surplus humanity in the twenty-first century. In a section of that essay, titled “Marx and the Holy Ghost,” Davis revealed his longstanding concern with the religions of the poor, observing that “for the moment at least, Marx has yielded the historic stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost. If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution, he has risen again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world.”¹⁸ A series of questions peppered a review of the role of urbanization, industrialization, proletarianization, and secularization in classical social theory, just as such processes were undergoing fundamental reversals. In today's era of urbanization without industrialization—recapitulating in part the experience of Dublin and Naples, and excepting East Asia—to paraphrase Davis: Pentecostal Christianity, populist Islam, and the cult of Shivaji, or Hinduvata, occupy analogous social spaces of earlier ideologies of socialism and anarchism across the burgeoning slums and cities of the Global South. Global Christianity, now primarily a non-Western religion with believers living primarily outside its historic home of Europe and North America, is today energized by Pentecostalism, which with its African American origins, “retains a fundamentally exilic identity.”¹⁹

If Prisoners and Planet of Slums are among the most important works by Davis, for labor historians, his 2018 Old Gods, New Enigmas is the most appropriate bookend for Davis's engagement with labor and working-class history, an issue that was always at the center of his life's work and hopes and dreams for a better future. Here, Davis explores the question of revolutionary agency, putting forward what he called a “historical sociology conforming to the ideal-type of a socialist working class in the eras of the First and Second Internationals … designed primarily as a comparative matrix for thinking about agency in the radically changed conditions of contemporary class conflict.”²⁰ What follows is an extraordinary tour of European and US labor history from 1838–1921, with forays into Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, and the present. Designed to grapple with the shift of the vast majority of Marx's industrial proletariat outside the United States and Europe (most notably toward China, the new workshop of the world), as well as processes of deindustrialization and automation, Davis scans the future to try to “solve the puzzle of how heterodox social categories might be fitted together in a single resistance to capitalism.”²¹

Grounding the argument in the volcanic eruptions of US and European working classes seeking bread and dignity starting in the nineteenth century, Davis attempts a periodization that captures the shifting terrain of class struggle, from the early rise and proliferation of socialist theory, to the defeat of the Revolutions of 1848 and the discovery of gold in California, to the rise and fall of the First and Second Internationals through the US Civil War, the Paris Commune, and beyond.²² Coming into view here are the Great Depression of 1873–1896, including what Davis calls the Sturm-und-Drang of the workers’ movement in Europe and North America (1878–1889), socialism's long spring (1890–1906), which included the Russia, Revolution of 1905 (an event that “reset all the clocks in Europe,” with reverberations throughout the world), and the Third European Revolution (1916–1921). This latter period saw the fiery spread of revolution throughout wartime Europe, as war and industrial mobilization became transmission belts for socialist-inspired revolution and counterrevolution. The latter tragically planted seeds for the spread of fascism and barbarism throughout much of Europe, especially after the Great Depression, at least until the Red Army ensured the American Century, rather than the Thousand Year Reich, would prevail.²³

These interrogations are leveraged to adumbrate theses on the role of the working classes in the formation of hegemonic alliances and historic social blocs. Davis highlights, for instance, the central role of international solidarity in forming new global subjects, bound together in chains, yet struggling for a new birth of freedom and a better world. Davis quotes the Chartist George Julian Harney, who at the first supper of the Fraternal Democrats in London in 1845, proclaimed “We repudiate the word ‘foreigner’—it shall exist not in our democratic vocabulary!”²⁴ So too in writings on the US Civil War and during the founding of the First International did Marx himself emphasize the indispensable role of international solidarity of working people and their allies across the globe, particularly in calls for the eight-hour workday. This quest for time crystallized transnational workers’ struggles in this era, laying the foundations for the Socialist International, although not until the Russian Revolution, and the titanic class struggles that followed, did this demand triumph throughout much of Europe.²⁵

Central in these struggles were the memory of martyrs fighting for another world—whether it was in the US Civil War, during the years of Black Reconstruction, the Paris Commune of 1871, the nation-wide US strikes of 1877, or the Haymarket uprising of 1886.²⁶ More recently, we can also point to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations in the aftermath of the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, which echoed around the world to commemorate their lives and further the struggle against police violence, as well as Greta Thunberg's Friday for Future global climate strikes. Today we see increasing efforts to combine environmental and labor movements as part of a Green New Deal. Though such alliances go back to the 1999 Battle for Seattle, Davis, in his powerful essay on climate change, “Who Will Build the Ark?”, traces their earlier origins to the utopian dreams and experiments of radical urbanists, anarchists, and socialists, through Red Vienna and beyond.²⁷

Underscoring class consciousness as a project, at first largely defensive, then increasingly assertive as part of the move toward collective moral transcendence of the socioecological relations of actually existing capitalism, Davis has long paid attention to the Achilles’ heels of the labor movement during this period: white supremacy and patriarchy. Emphasized here, too, are the oftentimes ethnoreligious and national bases of class conflict, as well as the related struggles of women against exploitation and sexual harassment inside workplaces and in the community. As Davis notes, such struggles are intimations “of the gender-equal liberating force that the socialist movement had to become, yet largely failed to be.”²⁸ Here, Davis invokes the legendary figure of Flora Tristan, who even before Marx called for an international of workers linking socialism and feminism. In the early 1840s, Tristan also called for the construction of Workers’ Palaces, or the labor temple, as the socialist alternative to the bourgeois public sphere.²⁹

Davis emphasizes the centrality of both the agrarian question and the city for the trajectory of labor, including through constructions of communal and residential associations and cooperatives, struggles for shelter, and movements for municipal socialism.³⁰ In a poignant passage, Davis reminds us of the deepest well-springs of labor's struggle for self-emancipation, and that of humanity as a whole. He recounts a legendary tale of a caterpillar that only crosses the “threshold of metamorphosis by seeing its future butterfly,” alluding to the butterfly effect, wherein chaotic systems provide nonlinear paths to alternate futures—in this instance, a more peaceful, solidaristic, and ecologically sustainable world.³¹

Intimately related to this is Davis's final thesis in Old Gods, New Enigmas: “Labor must rule because the bourgeoisie is ultimately unable to fulfill the promises of progress. If the socialist project is defeated the result will be the retrogression of civilization as a whole.”³² Such impassioned analysis, accompanied by tireless activism, are essential if humanity is to overcome the threats of catastrophic climate change, global militarism, the very real possibility of a nuclear holocaust, and the hollowing out of the dreams of future generations, in the face of today's astounding inequalities of wealth and power. All of Davis's work, including his laser focus on the political economy and ecology of militarism, and related struggles for peace and justice, were firmly rooted in the finest traditions of progressive left internationalism, and his lifetime of scholarship and activism sought to make such international solidarity a reality.

In a world where catastrophic militarism and climate change, xenophobia, ethnoreligious nationalism, and resurgent patriarchy seem to be the order of the day, Davis sought to help movements understand the world and change it.³³ Hopefully, today's generation will heed this clarion call for international solidarity so as to light the way for better futures.