“Mike Davis is the most consequential writer and thinker on Los Angeles since… perhaps ever. But his work roams far beyond Los Angeles, including popular and scholarly work on environmentalism, Marxist theory, urbanism and public health. He is also conversant in ‘hard’ sciences like geology, and can read specialized literature in fire science and climatology. Over the years he’s blurred the lines between these disparate fields. He braids them together with an indefatigable faith in a revolutionary project: nothing less than the liberation of humanity from human exploitation, which today also requires the end of humanity’s malevolent exploitation of the natural world.
His faith in revolution is historically situated, pointing toward a string of moments in which ‘utopian’ visions have flourished in the here and now, before crumbling under the weight of counterrevolutionary forces and internal contradictions, only to be taken up again. There have been large-scale experiments such as the Paris Commune or the Spanish Republic, and countless small-scale ones, like Christian Base Communities in 1980s rural Central America. Mike tells us that the future must be ‘excavated in the past,’ rescued from under the ruins of reaction…
At the core of Mike’s work is how he values the dignity of life itself — lived as equitable, healthy, sustainable. And not just human life. He identifies class struggle as the primary engine of modern human history, and he is also an environmentalist because capitalist exploitation violates not only the bodies of workers but the Earth itself.”
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