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.
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Mike Davis. Old Gods, New Enigmas
OLD GODS, NEW ENIGMAS
Contents
Preface. Marx at the Chicken Shack1. READ MARX!
SURFING THE COLLECTED WORKS
THE CHAPTERS
1. Old Gods, New Enigmas
THE UNIVERSAL CLASS
A new Third Estate
The missing links
THE AGE OF CLASS WAR
Periodizing the Class Struggle: 1838–1921
THESES. I. Radical Chains
II. Factories and Unions
III. Mass Strikes and Workers’ Control
IV. The Industrial City
V. Proletarian Culture
VI. Class Struggle and Hegemony
VII. Class Consciousness and Socialism
2. Marx’s Lost Theory
NATIONALISM WITHOUT THE NATION
MARX CONTRA MARX
CLASSES AND NATIONALISM
CALCULATING INTERESTS
3. The Coming Desert
EXPLORATION OF SIBERIA
DESICCATION OF ASIA AND MARS
PATHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
4. Who Will Build the Ark?
I. PESSIMISM OF THE INTELLECT
Spontaneous decarbonization?
Return of King Coal
A green recession?
Ecological inequalities
2. OPTIMISM OF THE IMAGINATION
The city as its own solution
Beyond the green zone
Notes. PREFACE
1. OLD GODS, NEW ENIGMAS
2. MARX’S LOST THEORY
3. THE COMING DESERT
4. WHO WILL BUILD THE ARK?
Index
Отрывок из книги
OLD GODS,
NEW ENIGMAS
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Over the years my Marxism became rusty, to say the least. But there comes a time when every old student must decide whether or not to renew their driver’s license. And reading Daniel Bensaïd’s Marx for Our Times, a spectacularly imaginative reinterpretation that breaks free of talmudic chains, whetted my appetite for a fresh look at the “non-linear Marx” that Bensaïd proposes.5 Retirement from teaching, then a long illness finally gave me the leisure to browse through the Collected Works of Marx and Engels now in English and, in a pirated version, available for free online.6 Amongst recent writers who have made brilliant use of the Collected Works are John Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review, who has carefully reconstructed Marx’s powerful ecological critique of capitalism—a new and exciting topic, particularly in light of later socialism’s fetishism of large-scale agriculture; and Erica Benner, whose invaluable recovery of Marx’s usually misrepresented views on nationalism is discussed in Chapter 2 (“Marx’s Lost Theory”). And the mother lode has hardly been mined out: for example, Marx and Engels’s hundreds of pages of acerbic commentaries on the deep games of nineteenth-century European politics, especially the geopolitical chess match between the British and Russian empires, clearly warrant a major new interpretation. Likewise, it would be illuminating to compare his theoretical writings on political economy with his concrete analyses of contemporary economic crises such as 1857 and 1866, topics usually assigned to the footnotes. More generally, I suspect, “Marx on the conjuncture” should become the new slogan of Marxologists.
The panoramic view of the oeuvre now available also makes it easier to recognize the blind spots and misdirections in the collaboration of Marx and Engels. The former, for instance, never wrote a single word about cities, and his passionate interests in ethnography, geology, and mathematics were never matched by a comparable concern with geography (later the forte of anarchists such as Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin). He was relatively untraveled, and only at the very end of his life, desperately sick and seeking the sun, did he venture outside Western Europe. His letters from Algiers, praising the culture and dignity of the Arabs, indicated his capacity to transcend Eurocentric categories and revel in the newness of other worlds. (Alas, if only he hadn’t been so wracked by illness and family tragedy.) The United States was another paradox. Its protean future was often on his mind—he was after all a correspondent for the New York Tribune—and he and Engels worked mightily to win support for Lincoln and Emancipation within the British labor movement. Yet, despite having read Tocqueville, he never focused on the unique features of its political system, especially the impact of early white-manhood suffrage on the development of its labor movement.
