OLD GODS NEW ENIGMAS - MIKE DAVIS

Always good to tap in with uncle Mike Davis. After his death, a year or so ago, I was pretty bummed. Davis was the rare sort of author who was a total fucking genius, seemed to have had some real life experiences and was almost always on the right side of important political questions. City of Quartz is probably the best book written about any city, full stop, and his other work, on slums and famines and 60’s history all knock insanely hard. This one is a bit different than the others I’ve read. It’s less historical and more theoretical. It is a collection of 4 essays, one of which is book-length by itself, about more abstract themes. Two of them are about climate change and the history of science w/r/t climate change. Did you know Kropotkin, of “bread book” fame, discovered the ice age? Weird stuff. He talks about how climate change has been thought of historically, and what we can all expect going forward. Spoiler alert, it’s bad, and we’ll need a truly unprecedented level of planetary solidarity to avoid the worst. Davis has long banged the drum of climate catastrophism, and here, in one of his last books, I think he lays the problem out clearly and suggests a beautiful vision of urban, environmentally balanced living (the man loves the city as an idea like almost no other) but it’s hard, sitting here in Babylon in 2025, to see this coming to pass. Otherwise, there is an essay about Nationalism and the long piece, the heart of the book, that seeks to trace out how the working class came to think of itself as such, and how class consciousness came to be. Historically, these are fascinating. He does a great job linking various struggles across the world and shows how they draw from and build on one another. Theoretically, Davis is less rigorous. Maybe since I’m reading Capital at the same time, the level of academic rigor I’ve grown accustomed to has been raised artificially high. But he’ll do things like conflate the working class and proletariat or talk about labor as a whole and productive labor in the same way that doesn’t feel as sharp to me. He takes some shots at Stalin and the Soviet system that I wish he’d investigate further. Now, part of this is my fault. I feel like one comes to David for the history and quality writing, and that is here, but he presents this book as one about theory and Marxism (it’s in the subtitle) and when I see those words together, I expect the book to get very granular and specific. This level of clear-headedness is one of the many virtues of marxism as a leftist tradition against something more vibes-based and less rigorous like anarchist writing. All that being said, Davis rocks, I’ll continue to read anything he wrote.