Mike Davis

The hidden story of L.A. Mike davis shows us where the city's money comes form and who controls it while also exposing the brutal ongoing struggle between L.A.'s haves and have-nots.

Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

City of Quartz

An exploration of modern-world urbanization cites a concerning rise in slum life that currently accounts for nearly one-fifth of the world's population, arguing that urban populations are disconnected and exempt from the formal world economy and may represent an explosive convergence of ethnic, religious, and political unrest.

Planet of Slums

Shows how the droughts affecting northern Africa, China, and India in the 1870s and 1890s are consistant with El Niäno effects, and discusses the economic, racial, and political forces that allowed fifty million people to starve.

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World

A glimpse into the history of disaster in Los Angeles--both natural and man-made, real and fictional--documents the danger created by forces of nature, greed, and politics

Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

Ecology of Fear

Mike Davis's brilliant exegesis attempts to answer the question: Why has the world's most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class?

Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class

Prisoners of the American Dream

Jon Wiener

Los Angeles Times Bestseller "Authoritative and impressive." –Los Angeles Times "Monumental." –Guardian A magisterial, riveting movement history of Los Angeles in the Sixties Los Angeles in the sixties was a hotbed of political and social upheaval. The city was a launchpad for Black Power—where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation. The city was home to the Chicano Blowouts and Chicano Moratorium, as well as being the birthplace of “Asian American” as a political identity. It was a locus of the antiwar movement, gay liberation movement, and women’s movement, and, of course, the capital of California counterculture. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with principal figures, as well as the authors’ storied personal histories as activists. Following on from Davis’s awardwinning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a historical tour de force, delivered in scintillating and fiercely beautiful prose.

L.A. in the Sixties

Set the Night on Fire

Setting the Night on Fire

Justin Akers Chacón

Julián Cardona

Countering the chorus of anti-immigrant voices, Mike Davis and Justin Akers Chacon expose the racism of anti-immigration vigilantes and put a human face on the immigrants who risk their lives to cross the border to work in the United States. |A rare combination of an author, Mike Davis is Rachel Carson and Upton Sinclair all in one.| - Susan Faludi |Davis' writing is perceptive and rigorous.| - David Montgomery, The Nation

Fighting Violence and State Repression on the U.S.-Mexico Border

No One is Illegal

Ray Ginger

This moving biography presents the definitive story of the life of and legacy of the most eloquent spokesperson and leader of the US labour and socialist movements. Eugene Debs was a railway organiser and socialist. He ran for president five times, once from prison. With a new introduction by Mike Davis.

A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs

The Bending Cross

Is revolution possible in the age of the Anthropocene? Marx has returned, but which Marx? Recent biographies have proclaimed him to be an emphatically nineteenth-century figure, but in this book, Mike Davis’s first directly about Marx and Marxism, a thinker comes to light who speaks to the present as much as the past. In a series of searching, propulsive essays, Davis, the bestselling author of City of Quartz and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, explores Marx’s inquiries into two key questions of our time: Who can lead a revolutionary transformation of society? And what is the cause—and solution—of the planetary environmental crisis? Davis consults a vast archive of labor history to illuminate new aspects of Marx’s theoretical texts and political journalism. He offers a “lost Marx,” whose analyses of historical agency, nationalism, and the “middle landscape” of class struggle are crucial to the renewal of revolutionary thought in our darkening age. Davis presents a critique of the current fetishism of the “anthropocene,” which suppresses the links between the global employment crisis and capitalism’s failure to ensure human survival in a more extreme climate. In a finale, Old Gods, New Enigmas looks backward to the great forgotten debates on alternative socialist urbanism (1880–1934) to find the conceptual keys to a universal high quality of life in a sustainable environment.

Marx's Lost Theory

Old Gods, New Enigmas

COVID-19 and the Plagues of Capitalism

The Monster Enters

Old Gods, New Enigmas is the highly-anticipated book by the best-selling author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums. Mike Davis spent years working factory jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an eighteen wheeler before his profile as one of the world’s leading urbanists emerged with the publication of his sober, if dystopian survey of Los Angeles. Since then, he’s developed a reputation not only for his caustic analysis of ecological catastrophe and colonial history, but as a stylist without peer. Old Gods, New Enigmas is Davis’s book-length engagement with Karl Marx, marking the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth and exploring Davis’s thinking on history, labor, capitalism, and revolution – themes ever present the early work from this leading radical thinker. This will be his first book on Marxism itself.

Marx’s Lost Theory

A Brief History of the Car Bomb

Buda's Wagon

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.

El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

Late Victorian Holocausts

The Atheist's Introduction to the New Testament

Coronavírus e a luta de classes

Daniel Bertrand Monk

A collection of essays by top eclectic thinkers meditates on the dangers of capitalist-driven societies as reflected by "utopian" construction practices occurring throughout the world, citing the roles of such developments in promoting economic inequality, human slavery, and drug trafficking.

Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism

Evil Paradises

Jim Miller

Kelly Mayhew

An anti-tourist guide that debunks San Diego's sunshine myth for locals and visitors alike. For fourteen million tourists each year, San Diego is the fun place in the sun that never breaks your heart. But America's eighth-largest city has a dark side. Behind Sea World, the zoo, the Gaslamp District, and the beaches of La Jolla hides a militarized metropolis, boasting the West Coast's most stratified economy and a tumultuous history of municipal corruption, virulent antiunionism, political repression, and racial injustice. Though its boosters tirelessly propagate an image of a carefree beach town, the real San Diego shares dreams and nightmares with its violent twin, Tijuana. This alternative civic history deconstructs the mythology of "America's finest city." Acclaimed urban theorist Mike Davis documents the secret history of the domineering elites who have turned a weak city government into a powerful machine for private wealth. Jim Miller tells the story from the other side: chronicling the history of protest in San Diego from the Wobblies to today's "globalphobics." Kelly Mayhew, meanwhile, presents the voice of paradise's forgotten working people and new immigrants. The texts are vividly enhanced by Fred Lonidier's photographs.

The San Diego Tourists Never See

Under the Perfect Sun

The brilliant and disturbing 100-year history of the “poor man’s air force,” the ubiquitous weapon of urban mass destruction On a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near New York’s Wall Street, killing 40 people. Since Buda’s prototype the car bomb has evolved into a “poor man’s air force,” a generic weapon of mass destruction that now craters cities from Bombay to Oklahoma City. In this provocative history, Mike Davis traces the its worldwide use and development, in the process exposing the role of state intelligence agencies—particularly those of the United States, Israel, India, and Pakistan—in globalizing urban terrorist techniques. Davis argues that it is the incessant impact of car bombs, rather than the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bio-terrorism, that is changing cities and urban lifestyles, as privileged centers of power increasingly surround themselves with “rings of steel” against a weapon that nevertheless seems impossible to defeat.

Mike Davis

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