Mike Davis

Mike Davis (born March 10, 1946, Fontana, California, U.S.—died October 25, 2022, San Diego, California) was an American historian, urban theorist, and political activist whose works reflected his commitment to Marxist ideology. He lived most of his life in southern California, and much of his work sought to explain the region’s geography and political economy. His 1990 book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles is widely regarded as a masterpiece of urban history and one of the best books ever written on California’s largest city. By the time of his death, Davis was often credited with having a singular ability to predict future catastrophes in American society.

Davis’s parents were from Ohio, and his father was a meatcutter. When Davis was young, the family relocated to San Diego county in California. As a teenager, he had conservative views: “right-wing, ultra-patriotic,” he once told a newspaper reporter. His father had a heart attack when Davis was 16, and, to support the family, Davis took time off of school to drive a delivery truck. A friend of his father’s, who was a cook at a chicken shack where Davis made deliveries, would often talk with him about politics. At the end of every conversation, Davis later recalled, “he’d slap me on the back and say, ‘Read Marx!’ ” Davis often cited these encounters as an important part of his political conversion.

During a brief stint at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, he connected with Students for a Democratic Society, and he became the group’s first regional organizer in southern California after he returned home, helping to plan anti-war rallies. In 1968 he joined the Communist Party and ran its Los Angeles bookstore. He was thrown out of the party a year later after he confronted a Soviet diplomat, and he went back to driving a truck and, later, a tour bus. At age 28, he went back to school once more, this time at the University of California, Los Angeles, and completed Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in history. He did much of the work for a history Ph.D. but never finished his dissertation.

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Davis worked at New Left Review’s offices in London for six years in the 1980s, then turned his attention to writing. His first book, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class, deals with the fate and prospective future of organized labor in the United States. It “soon became essential reading for anyone concerned with U.S. unions and their history,” editor Micah Uetricht wrote in The Nation in 2021, “even if its conclusions were bleak.”

Davis returned to Los Angeles in 1987, and he wrote City of Quartz while teaching at local colleges. In that book, Davis chronicled the ways in which real-estate developers, politicians, the police department, and the military-industrial complex had reshaped the city over a period of decades, enriching themselves while making the city increasingly inhospitable to the working class and most people of color. He argued that Los Angeles had “come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.” Released in 1990 by the small left-wing publisher Verso Books, City of Quartz became a surprise hit. Soon Davis was being offered teaching positions and speaking engagements at universities, and he received a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation.

In several books that followed, Davis shifted his focus firmly to the environment. In 1998’s Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, he showed how the city’s built environment was exacerbating natural disasters, including fire and drought. In its most famous chapter, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” he argued that precious city resources, which were desperately needed by the urban poor, were being squandered to battle fires in a beach community that was small but rich. In his 2000 book Late Victorian Holocausts, Davis demonstrated that economic and political decisions made by colonial powers were responsible for the famines that swept India, China, and Brazil between 1870 and 1914, resulting in tens of millions of deaths.

Davis’s 2005 book, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, argues that a combination of poor government planning and a consolidation of resources in the hands of profit-obsessed pharmaceutical companies has left the world—and especially its poorest populations—dangerously vulnerable to pandemics. (The book was widely praised for its foresight during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and it was expanded and republished that year as The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism.)

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Davis continued writing prolifically throughout the 2000s and 2010s, authoring or coauthoring some 20 books altogether. A common theme, Uetricht noted, was Davis’s argument that capitalism is incompatible with “the ecological limits that make history.”