The Marxism of Mike Davis

So how did Davis arrive at this remarkably profound pessimism? One could not find such an argument when in 1975 he published “The Stopwatch and the Wooden Shoe: Scientific Management and the Industrial Workers of the World” in Radical America, an early New Left publication then taking a decided turn toward the working class. Davis’s study of Industrial Workers of the World resistance to Taylorism put him squarely within the historiographic world being constructed by Gutman, Montgomery, and others influenced by E. P. Thompson, the scholar who did so much to found the new labor history. This Davis essay is an excellent example of the genre, exploring the mentality, values, and successful shop-floor resistance of a variety of American workers and their unions to managerial power and manipulation.

By 1976, Davis was in the United Kingdom on a fellowship paid for by his father’s union, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters. Here he came in contact with the New Left Review (NLR) intellectuals. “We were all very impressed with Mike’s amazing intellectual energy,” recalled Tariq Ali, another NLR editor of that time, “and he had a desire to learn. He was always asking what he should read.” Perry Anderson mentored Davis, and the latter adopted much of Anderson’s sharp and lucid style.

This was the end of a decade or more when many New Left Review writers were seeking a more structural understanding of how and why the forward march of labor had come to a halt, a conclusion reached by none other than Eric Hobsbawm in 1981.

Tom Nairn and Anderson had already published a series of articles emphasizing the degree to which any sort of genuinely bourgeois revolution in Great Britain had been distorted and constrained by the continuing ideological and political power of the old aristocracy, a condition that accounted for both the relative decline of the British economy after 1880 and the stolid Labourism of the British working class. As Anderson put it in the mid-1960s,

The late Victorian era and the high noon of imperialism welded aristocracy and bourgeoisie together in a single social bloc. The working class fought passionately and unaided against the advent of industrial capitalism; its extreme exhaustion after successive defeats was the measure of its efforts. Henceforward it evolved, separate but subordinate, within the apparently unshakeable structure of British capitalism.

Such an outlook contrasted sharply with that of Thompson, who emphasized the role of consciousness as the wellspring of social and political agency. To Thompson, socialism could be achieved if people, imbued with socialist ideas, willed it so. Thus it did not matter if Great Britain was some sort of capitalist laggard. Because of the vibrancy of working-class culture, “made” more than a century before, the nation was overripe for socialism. By contrast, the New Left Review authors thought that Britain’s upper class had not yet completed a successful transition to bourgeois modernity, thus forestalling any fundamental radicalism from below.

Begun in the 1960s, this debate reached a climax in the years when Davis joined the NLR editorial board. After Thompson published The Poverty of Theory in 1978, Anderson replied with Arguments Within English Marxism in 1980. That work acknowledged Thompson as “our finest socialist writer today” but also took him to task for a muddy and contradictory understanding of working-class “agency,” even in such classic works as The Making of the English Working Class and Whigs and Hunters.

Davis joined in shortly thereafter, although the terrain of dispute shifted to the nature of the new Cold War that had begun with the rise of Soviet influence in Afghanistan, Angola, and Central America, the Reagan military buildup, and the NATO decision to place medium-range missiles in West Germany. Thompson thought the renewed threat of nuclear confrontation had engendered an existential danger so threatening that he labeled it “exterminism.” It was a new, increasingly irrational phase in the Cold War, requiring the mobilization of a transnational, trans-bloc response if a nuclear holocaust were to be averted. To his great credit Thompson plunged into a public, political, agitational role as a key leader of this antinuclear mobilization.

While the New Left Review editors were as hostile to this heightened bipolar militarism as Thompson was, they thought his analysis once again privileged radical humanism and populist agency, failing to grapple with the actual geopolitical uses to which both sides in the Cold War, but mainly that led by the United States, deployed the nuclear threat and actual military force to suppress anti-capitalist insurgencies and nationalisms in the Global South. Anderson and others therefore gave their thirty-five-year-old American comrade the lead role in critiquing the great historian.

In an extraordinarily wide-ranging essay titled “Nuclear Imperialism and Extended Deterrence,” Davis offered Thompson a sharp rejoinder, emphasizing the degree to which nuclear weapons played a rational and functional role in maintaining the US-led imperialist world order. Not only did the United States use the arms race to economically pressure the USSR; the nuclear threat also provided an umbrella enabling the free use of conventional forces in a series of counterrevolutionary actions. To Davis, the Cold War was not an anachronistic, irrational feud staged essentially in Europe but a rationally explicable and deeply rooted conflict of opposing social formations and political forces whose center of gravity was the Third World.

This theme would appear in Prisoners of the American Dream, in City of Quartz, and in several of his other interventions. In the foreword to Prisoners, Davis wrote, “It is a central thesis of this book that the future of the Left in the United States is more than ever before bound up with its ability to organize solidarity with revolutionary struggles against American imperialism.” In sympathy, another NLR writer declared of the Davis role in his debate with Thompson, “Whatever the errors of its ‘immaturity,’ the (American) New Left should not be disparaged for having emphasized the dependence of the hopes of socialism in the Northern hemisphere upon the desperate and courageous battles being waged on the other side of the world.”

One can find echoes of the initial Anderson-Thompson debate throughout Prisoners of the American Dream. The book emphasizes the degree to which the racial and ethnic divisions within the American working class cut across any larger sense of social solidarity, a view that Thompson’s American followers were not willing to embrace. For example, Herbert Gutman structured his famous 1973 essay “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America” in terms of the radicalism generated when wave after wave of immigrants came in contact and confrontation with industrial life, but Davis, who may never have actually read that Gutman essay, saw these waves of immigrants as creating a hard “internal stratification” within the American proletariat.

Prisoners also provided insight into the character of the US bourgeoisie and its peculiar vibrancy. Such scholarship was largely missing from the new labor history, and it would take another quarter century before historians like Sven Beckert, Jon Levy, Richard White, and Michael Zakim would begin to rectify the situation. Davis argued that the American bourgeoisie was unusually coherent and self-confident, both in terms of sheer economic and political power and in terms of the ideological hegemony it exercised.

Thus, in the United States, unlike most of Europe, the existence of the white male franchise meant that most nineteenth-century economic struggles were largely divorced from the quest for working-class political participation. This preempted the fusion of these two demands — for both an economic and political voice — which had nurtured socialism on the European continent and a species of laborism in Great Britain. A striving individualism flourished, while ideas of socialist collectivism, except in some immigrant neighborhoods, were marginalized.

To a degree this sounds like Louis Hartz, but Davis also used Prisoners to deploy his own version of the Marxism arising out of France, a schema that would also do much to structure the argument put forward in City of Quartz. In 1978, Davis published, in the Fernand Braudel Center’s journal, Review, a sixty-three-page exposition, appreciation, and critique of the work of Michel Aglietta, whose Regulation and Crisis: The Experience of the United States, had just appeared, but only in French. Aglietta’s book was among the first of the French “regulation school” studies to achieve wide influence in Anglo-America, especially after the NLR’s Verso imprint published an English translation a few years after Davis’s essay. This French interpretation of US political economy played a large role in popularizing the concept of “Fordism” as an explanatory framework linking the rise of both mass production and mass consumption with a Keynesian state and powerful labor movement.

When I was writing this essay, I emailed both Anderson and Brenner to ask if either had introduced Davis to Aglietta’s work. Both declared they were astounded by Davis’s unexpected engagement with this new way of looking at capitalist development. The NLR editors, according to Anderson, were “blown away” when they read Davis’s review, which “taught us (not the other way around) about the existence of Aglietta and his book.” Shortly thereafter they invited Davis to become a member of the NLR editorial collective. From 1980 to 1986, Davis worked out of the journal’s London offices.

Aglietta and others in the regulation school held that neither politics nor ideology reflects merely economic forces. Instead, “configurations” exist in which political parties, social ideology, and economic structures reinforce each other, sometimes in conditions of great stability and in other instances as a moment when crisis engulfs the system. The particular configurations with which Aglietta was concerned were “regimes of accumulation,” which were “regulated” by a specific set of political and economic institutions. Such regimes of accumulation were the crucial, limiting context within which working-class agency might make itself manifest.

Davis put Aglietta’s regimes close to the heart of Prisoners of the American Dream, especially in the second half, where he discusses the New Right’s road to power and the political economy of late imperial America. Those regimes — “extensive” in the late nineteenth century, “Fordist” during the middle decades of the twentieth century, and “overconsumptionist” in the era of Ronald Reagan — were a product of the interplay between the structures of capital and the capacity of the working class to influence the way political elites searched for regimes of stability and profitability. Because Aglietta took the United States as a case study, he focused on what many left intellectuals in the 1970s were coming to call the “Fordist regime,” whose rise explained both the remarkable character of the postwar boom and the strength of the post–New Deal labor movement. And to the degree that the Fordist regime had begun to crack, so too did US trade unionism enter an era of crisis and retreat.

Davis divided Prisoners of the American Dream into two parts. The first three chapters account for the weakness of American labor and the ideological and cultural illusions that constituted and subverted the American dream. The first chapter, “Why the U.S. Working Class Is Different,” was the most provocative. In an expansive forty-eight-page survey, Davis argued that a species of American exceptionalism thwarted the kind of class consciousness that had arisen, if imperfectly, in Europe.

In a review of the book, Montgomery wrote that Davis was a defeatist, contemptuous as to the possibilities for the rise of a majoritarian opposition to American capitalists, of either Gilded Age or New Right character. “Davis’s perceptive and rigorous structural analysis glides silently up to the dock of political passivity,” wrote the most distinguished labor historian in the United States. “The reader gradually realizes that the workers themselves have virtually disappeared from view.” To such criticism Davis might well have replied, as he did in Prisoners, that he was only as pessimistic as reality itself.

Davis’s second chapter, titled “The Barren Marriage of Labor and the Democratic Party,” considers labor’s political weakness during the era of high Fordism and why even under those favorable conditions labor could not consolidate itself as an institution functional to a mass production economy. He integrated his account of the pacification of the insurgent working class that briefly emerged onto the political scene in the 1930s and 1940s into a structural analysis of how postwar US capitalism, now at the center of the global system, was able to offer the white industrial working class rising real wages and a largely privatized welfare state.

This chapter and a third denouncing the postwar failures inherent in firm-centered collective bargaining reflect the views of many post–New Left critics of the union movement, including Peter Friedlander, Moody, Brenner, Staughton Lynd, and myself. If all this struck the reader as “unduly pessimistic,” wrote Davis, that was because “political and economic supports for a more humane capitalism no longer seem to exist.” Better to prepare for the colder climate ahead than to take hope from the “make believe social democracy” that tepid socialists like Michael Harrington still projected.

This austere vision animated Davis’s 1990 masterwork, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, a hugely capacious exploration of the dystopia created by the hard power of a regional bourgeoisie. The book highlights the desperate illusions of so many in a Southern California landscape reshaped by a predatory capitalism virtually unfettered by any of those forces whose demise Davis charted in Prisoners of the American Dream. Explaining the title of the book, Davis remarked to an interviewer that Los Angeles was like quartz, “something that looks like a diamond, but is really cheap; translucent but nothing can be seen in it.”

To get at the essence of Los Angeles, Davis would therefore have to uncover layer after layer of geographical and historical obfuscation. In the epilogue of Prisoners, Davis outlined the class/spatial framework that structures City of Quartz. At one pole are the sumptuary suburbs and gentrified neighborhoods occupied by the middle classes, the wealthy, and elements of the skilled white working class. Undoubtedly, writes Davis, “neo-liberalism will seek to preserve the superstructures of social liberalism — sexual toleration, free and virtually unlimited choice among cultural commodities . . . while building new parapets between this gilded paradise and the other social orders.”

This is the realm of “overconsumption” as delineated by Aglietta. That did not mean billionaires buying yachts or homeowners purchasing another color TV. Instead, “overconsumption” referred to the tax and spending policies that led to the political subsidization of a sub-bourgeois layer of managers, professionals, entrepreneurs, and rentiers, often in finance and real estate. Faced with rapidly declining organization among workers and minorities, they have been overwhelmingly successful in profiting from both inflation and expanded state expenditure. Thus, Davis endorsed the newspaper headline that called California’s Proposition 13 “the Watts riot of the middle class.”

And then, beyond this overconsumptionist strata lay the first circle of the damned, those living in ghettos and barrios, now joined by déclassé and deindustrialized layers of the white working class. Possessing “citizen rights to a minimal social safety net,” this enlarged low-wage working class would remain politically divided and disenfranchised as the influence of labor and minorities within the political system declined. “Social degradation and relative impoverishment,” Davis wrote, is the fate of this element of the working class most traumatized by the collapse of the Fordist order. Then Davis postulated a still more debased strata in an outer perimeter of US society composed of workers without citizen rights or access to the political system at all: an American West Bank of terrorized illegal laborers, a social layer of twenty to thirty million people, a poor Latin American society thrust into the domestic economy.

Given this geographically inflected class schema, Davis made the case, in both Prisoners and City of Quartz, that it was Southern California, not the ex-Confederate South, that served as the prefigurative laboratory for the rightward drift of national politics. California’s internal antinomies usually anticipated the form and content of social conflicts elsewhere. Within the state, Berkeley, Watts, and Delano constituted the imaginative army of progressive disruption, while Orange County and similar suburbs provided the troops for the rise of the New Right.

Davis continued to write as a socialist and a radical, always searching for those conjectures that might spark the struggle for liberation, either at home or abroad. But it was his understanding of social and political defeat — “Junkyard of Dreams” is the title he gives to the chapter about the rise and fall of his Fontana birthplace — that actually proved enormously liberating when it came to the socioeconomic Southland tour that he offered readers in City of Quartz. Davis spent little time on resistance, working class or otherwise, but traced in diabolical detail the successful ruling-class effort to transform a built environment to their liking. Davis saw the exercise of class power manifest in every zoning ordinance, highway project, urban redevelopment, and municipal annexation.

In the years before Davis left for the United Kingdom, he had driven trucks and buses throughout Los Angeles, watching the fortress-like hotels and skyscrapers arise in the midst of an urban streetscape never entirely cleansed of a semi-employed black and brown working class. In 1985, shortly after literary critic Fredric Jameson published a celebrated essay in the New Left Review, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Davis weaponized his intimate knowledge of the city to once again cross swords with an eminent scholar. Like Davis, Jameson was a Marxist who rejected any deterministic schema driving history from one epoch to the next. His championship of a postmodern sensibility celebrated playfulness, fragmentation, pastiche, and paradox, cultural elements he found among those architects who rejected the angular, glass-walled International Style that typified the corporate headquarters and sleek hotels characteristic of so much postwar urbanism.

Davis did not dissent from that sort of postmodern critique, but he was enraged when Jameson deployed that vision to declare the new Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles something close to a “populist insertion into the city fabric,” with a verdant, parklike interior full of “spectacle” and “excitement,” a “postmodern hyperspace” that promised “a new collective practice.” Instead, Davis saw hotels and office buildings like the Bonaventure as “fortified skyscrapers” that turned their back on the city, analogous to the armories and gated mansions constructed after the violent railroad strike of 1877.

The fundamental logic of such structures, wrote Davis in rejoinder to Jameson, “is that of a claustrophobic space colony attempting to miniaturize nature within itself.” Writing along lines that would be amply extended in City of Quartz, Davis concluded, “This profoundly anti-urban impulse, inspired by unfettered financial forces and a Haussmannian logic of social control, seems to me to constitute the real Zeitgeist of postmodernism . . . a sympathetic correlate to Reaganism and the end of urban reform.”

Ironically, the enormous success enjoyed by City of Quartz proved an indication that Davis was no lonely Cassandra. In 1992, the Rodney King riots seemed to validate the author’s darkest visions. More importantly, Southern California was on the verge of a shift leftward as both the labor movement and the Latino community increased their power within and beyond the Democratic Party. Southern California became, over the course of the next three decades, an epicenter for the nation’s union revival and a liberalism that sometimes extended even into Orange County itself. Of course, there were old-fashioned Los Angeles boosters who decried City of Quartz and the follow-up, Ecology of Fear, published in 1998, but their denunciation of Davis’s dark vision seemed far more of a Babbitt-like self-parody than any kind of critical threat.

In the 1940s, by way of contrast, the Popular Front journalist and activist Carey McWilliams had also debunked the pretensions of the Southland Anglo elite in a series of engaging books and articles. But his work was quickly marginalized, consigned to the guidebook literature suitable for out-of-town tourists. McCarthyism soon sent McWilliams to New York, where he became editor of the Nation and defended an embattled postwar liberalism. Davis did not have to get out of town, although academic mandarins made sure he never won the secure, high-profile professorial post he clearly deserved. City of Quartz was such a tour de force that it made other great books of urban conflict and reconstruction, including Robert Caro’s celebrated biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, seem far too narrowly cast.

The best chapter in City of Quartz is the eighty-page “Sunshine or Noir?,” an all-encompassing survey of Los Angeles intellectuals and writers. These Davis categorizes as boosters, debunkers, noirs, exiles, scientists, and mercenaries, each of whom offered a set of ideological and cultural ambitions appropriate to their individual social strata and economic sector. In an epilogue to the chapter, titled “Gramsci vs Blade Runner,” Davis offers his own contested vision of the Los Angeles future. He poses a question characteristic of the entire Davis oeuvre: Will Los Angeles become a world city dominated by a neoliberal elite, or will the powerful, ethno-radical political and social impulses surging out of Compton and East Los Angeles generate a new cultural hegemony reflecting the city’s multiethnic majority?

During the thirty years of enormous productivity following publication of City of Quartz, Davis offered some answers. He wrote a huge variety of books, essays, and other interventions. One can divide them into roughly three periods and subjects, each a decade in length and each devoted to yet another way to understand how class, race, nationhood, and an ever-shifting system of capitalist exploitation shaped Los Angeles and the world. In the 1990s, Davis published two more Los Angeles books, both of which extended themes first introduced in City of Quartz. They also signaled Davis’s interest in innovative questions about the relationship between changes in the natural world and those evoked by a predatory capitalism.

Davis began to win a reputation as a prophet of doom with the publication in early 1998 of Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, another bestseller that contained a sensational chapter titled “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” Pointing out that naturally recurring fires were destined to periodically destroy hundreds of exurban houses each decade, Davis called for an abandonment of the residential push into the mountainous hillsides and exurban terrain most prone to such conflagrations. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars defending these bourgeois abodes, the money might be better used to fireproof downscale urban apartment houses. Real estate interests denounced the book, but in the wake of the hyperdestructive California fires of recent years, Davis’s once-outré proposition has become something close to the conventional wisdom.

Ecology of Fear showed that the Los Angeles style of urbanization amplified not just natural disasters but also the routine ebb and flow of the Mediterranean climate: the heavy rain, periodic droughts, and other episodic events created havoc when visited upon a metropolis structured by class and racial inequalities. This kind of climatological dialectic became a hallmark of books Davis published just a few years later, but there were other chapters in Ecology of Fear whose darkness mirrored and extended the racial dystopia found in City of Quartz.

For example, “The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles” is less about the earthquakes, fires, and floods that so many writers and filmmakers have imagined than the racial wars projected to accompany these disasters. Davis catalogued scores of novels, films, stories, and other prognostications that from the late nineteenth century onward forecast a bloody race war, sometimes a product of foreign invasion, usually from Japan, but just as often arising out of a homegrown conflict. Needless to say, in most of these fictional conflicts a brave and embattled cohort of Anglo men and women prove murderously victorious.

But Davis was not all doom and gloom when considering the Los Angeles future. In Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City (2000), Davis celebrated the rapid growth of Latino Los Angeles, observing that this vibrant population was “bringing redemptive energies to the neglected, worn-out cores and inner suburbs of many metropolitan areas,” first among them those of Southern California, where immigrant homeowners were the “anonymous heroes” of a more exuberant urbanism.

Especially important was the revival of the labor movement, now increasingly under Latino leadership. Davis had neglected that topic in his other Los Angeles books, but now he could write, “Over the last decade, Latino rank-and-file workers have made the Los Angeles area the major R&D center for 21st century trade unionism.” And beyond that, Davis happily confirmed the existential fears animating contemporary immigration restrictionists: “The Anglo conquest of California in the late 1840s has proved to be a very transient fact indeed.”

Davis would not be finished with Los Angeles, but during the next decade he lifted his sights beyond Southern California and toward a global political ecology designed to explain the environmental cum capitalist-made disasters that had enveloped the Third World and might yet come crashing home on the First. He published an astonishing four books in six years, animated by a scientific curiosity, evident since childhood, that now made Davis conversant with some of the latest developments in geology, astronomy, climatology, virology, and demography.

Developing on a world scale the socio-environmental analysis first offered readers in Ecology of Fear, Davis plunged into the writing of books that showed how ecological dysfunction turned deadly in a world of imperial hubris. Late Victorian Holocausts (2001) recovered for our time the famines that killed thirty to fifty million Asian and African colonial subjects between the 1870s and the turn of the twentieth century. Their deaths were exacerbated not just by imperial oppression but also by an international grain market disrupted by dislocations in the transpacific El Niño weather pattern: “Suddenly,” wrote Davis, “the price of wheat in Liverpool and the rainfall in Madras were variables in the same vast equation of human survival.” Insights of this sort were further advanced by Scott Nelson, Beckert, Greg Grandin, Steve Striffler, and other students of commodity markets cum capitalist development during the last two global centuries.

Four years later, Davis published The Monster at Our Door (2005), which raised the possibility of a disastrous global pandemic, exacerbated by a disjointed system of public health provision in the Global North and endemic poverty and urbanization in the Global South. That a “viral asteroid” might strike Earth seemed to solidify the Davis reputation as prophet of doom — and then it became a deadly reality in the spring of 2020. That book was quickly followed by Planet of Slums (2006), which captured in a truly expansive time frame the demographic transformations reshaping the megacities of the Global South. If outright imperialism had underdeveloped India, Africa, and Latin America, then a century later the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and associated financial institutions continued that work.

The staffers at the IMF were the “postmodern equivalent of a colonial civil service,” opening those economies to market forces that undermined peasant agriculture and low-tech manufacturing, thereby sending hundreds of millions toward the bloated Third World cities denuded of industrial employment. Davis noted that as a result, a “watershed in human history, comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial Revolutions,” was on its way: “For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural.”

Such chaotic and impoverished urbanization, the product of a postcolonial neoliberalism, generated an explosive discontent, which Davis explored in the Planet of Slums spin-off book, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, published in 2007. That referenced wagon, a horse cart, was the property of anarchist Mario Buda and killed forty bystanders when it exploded on Wall Street in 1920. It was the first of many wagon, car, and truck bombs to follow, “a modern technology” that would constitute the “poor man’s air force” in the urban warfare that began decades before the deaths of American soldiers and contract mercenaries in Iraq, not to mention even more local civilians, were being counted up on the nightly news.

Davis condemned such weapons as immoral and politically ineffective but acknowledged that they were nevertheless hugely impactful. The incessant fear of such vehicular explosions had begun to transform many an urban streetscape, as privileged centers of power increasingly surround themselves with “rings of steel” against a weapon hidden within the traffic flow generated by thousands of ordinary cars and trucks.

In the third and last phase of the Davis oeuvre, he returned to the subject matter he had first grappled with in the 1980s. But now Davis would give to the nineteenth-century working-class movement and to twentieth-century Los Angeles a very different flavor, one that found agency, radical consciousness, and a far more unified and effective set of insurgencies than anything he had chosen to highlight in Prisoners of the American Dream or City of Quartz.

He wrote the new studies largely in the second decade of the twenty-first century. As early as 2003, Davis told historian Jon Wiener that writing a history of the multifaceted social movements that erupted during the Los Angeles 1960s was his “day job.” A first slice of it came out in 2007, when Labour / Le Travail published “Riot Nights on Sunset Strip,” a celebration of the white teenagers who defied city curfews and the police to party in West Hollywood. Wrote Davis, “Los Angeles, in the eyes of the establishment, suddenly seemed like a besieged patriarchy.”

In 2020, Davis and Wiener coauthored Set the Night on Fire, a sprawling account of radical Los Angeles in the 1960s. Although not a memoir, the book celebrates many of the comrades and social movements Davis encountered during his activist youth. Some of the oppressive institutions deconstructed in City of Quartz are present, among them the militarized Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and its chief, William H. Parker. Davis calls him the “warden of the ghetto.” The most powerful public official in the city in Davis’s opinion, he was an ever-present foil to the multiracial left that would repeatedly challenge the LAPD for control of the streets and other public spaces.

Davis and Wiener proved a good team, with Wiener writing chapters on the largely white institutions and movements that came to sustain the Los Angeles left (radio station KPFK, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Free Clinic, gay liberation, and the movements against the Vietnam War and for women’s liberation), while Davis wrote the chapters that stood at the heart of the book: a detailed and evocative narrative of the civil rights movements, the Watts Riot, the Latino high school “blowouts,” and the even more spectacular Latino antiwar mobilization. Davis got right inside these movements, with particularly insightful discussions of the conflict at UCLA between the Black Panthers and the nationalist group led by Ron Karenga, the fight to keep Angela Davis out of jail, and the campus activism that created new departments devoted to black and Latino studies at several Los Angeles area universities.

The book was not just another regional 1960s history, because Davis and Wiener paid close attention to what made Southern California different. For example, in the Bay Area, Boston, and at Madison and Ann Arbor, one or two giant universities anchored the movement and provided the terrain of struggle. But in Los Angeles, the University of Southern California was still a Republican bastion, while UCLA was a commuter school located in a high-rent enclave.

The real action took place at the Cal State institutions, Northridge above all, and among high school and middle school students, black and brown, whose solidarity and activism was facilitated by the dense, segregated neighborhoods from which the secondary schools drew their students. But sociology was not enough, and Davis had no truck with spontaneity. Leadership and cadre were essential to any social movement, so Davis took pains to identify the key spark plugs, the on-the-spot publications, the new organizations and sympathetic politicians who provided the context for the eruptions that so puzzled outside elites.

As with Set the Night on Fire, the search for agency — “revolutionary agency” — stands at the heart of Davis’s Old Gods, New Enigmas, an essay collection that appeared in 2018, written almost in tandem with the Los Angeles ’60s narrative. The keynote article, a 154-page history of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European American working class, covers a good deal of the same social and political terrain as the labor history in Prisoners of the American Dream, but it could hardly be more at odds with the argument and spirit of that late 1980s book.

Davis began this long essay as a follow-up to Planet of Slums. If the proletariat of the North Atlantic has been eviscerated through automation, outsourcing, deunionization, and right-wing politics, how could the billions-strong workforce of the Global South, impoverished and contingent, find the agency to move the world? “Contemporary Marxism must be able to scan the future from the simultaneous perspective of Shenzhen, Los Angeles, and Lagos,” wrote Davis, “if it wants to solve the puzzle of how heterodox social categories might be fitted together in a single resistance to capitalism.”

Car bombs were not the answer. But neither did Davis offer any extended probe into just how that Asian/African class of hyperexploited workers might reach for power. Instead he does something almost as good, returning to ground well trodden by Marx and his successors so as to “mine our current understanding of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century working-class history — the fruits of hundreds if not thousands of studies since 1960 — to highlight the conditions and forms of struggle through which class capacities were created and the socialist project organized itself.”

In nineteenth-century Europe, just as in the twenty-first-century Global South, no such thing as a classical proletariat existed. “Exceptionalism” was not confined to the United States. As in Prisoners of the American Dream, the working class was stratified and of varying degrees of consciousness, but those fractures and peculiarities were not necessarily debilitating. “Militant workplace society . . . was the product of a synthesis of partial group interests around a common resistance to exploitation and employer despotism.”

Davis was looking for agency, for “a historical sociology of how the Western working classes acquired consciousness and power.” And he was finding it. In Prisoners, Davis had heaped scorn on a northern European aristocracy of labor that often saw itself as aloof from the struggles waged by the immigrants and lesser skilled. But in Old Gods, New Enigmas, he highlights, along with Montgomery and other historians influenced by Thompson and Hobsbawm, the vanguard role that highly skilled labor could play, from Glasgow’s Clydeside to the Berlin armament factories and on to Homestead and Dearborn.

Had Davis changed his mind? Was he now rejecting the New Left Review structuralism that had framed so much of his output? The answer is probably twofold. First, Davis never let his understanding of capitalist power and elite hegemony blunt his engaged, insurgent outlook. As he told a reporter just weeks before his death, “I’m just extraordinarily furious and angry. If I have a regret, it’s not dying in battle or at a barricade as I’ve always romantically imagined — you know, fighting.” Thousands of readers, students, and movement activists saw him as a radical because even in his darkest books, he was constantly searching for those elements of the body politic ready to rebel. They might not be the classical proletariat, but if another formation was ready to challenge power and privilege, Davis was its champion.

Second, times changed. With Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ascendant in the 1980s, Davis had joined the New Left Review in an exceedingly dark hour. Arguably, there was a good deal more progressive light in the second decade of the twenty-first century, with the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and the rise of Bernie Sanders animating the Left even in an era that saw President Barack Obama disappoint and Donald Trump win both power and a massive following. So Davis found enormous potential in a new generation of young people.

Indeed, in Old Gods, New Enigmas, he seemed positively Thompsonian when it came to the construction of a socialist consciousness. In that book, Davis celebrates the labor temples, sports organizations, rent strikes, and proletarian reading circles that contributed to the growth of working-class self-confidence. “Proletarian subjectivity,” wrote Davis, also requires “moral self-recognition through solidarity with the struggle of a distant people, even when this contradicts short-term self-interest.”

Just as the Lancashire cotton workers hailed Abraham Lincoln and the Northern cause, so too might twenty-first-century workers someday link their fight to that of the Global South multitudes. Socialism, wrote Davis, required men and women “whose ultimate motivations and values arise from structures of feeling that others would deem spiritual.” The prophet of doom had come a long way since his London sojourn at the New Left Review.