It balances Mike Davis' two skills - careful historical detail and rousing political polemic - unusually well. It's long, and rich, and I'd like to read it again. We learn about everything from socialist bike clubs to sailor mutinies to slum riots against coal shortages. It raises some deep and significant questions about the future of political organising, and though I wouldn't say it answers them it at least directs us towards places to look for an answer. Mike Davis - Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx's Lost Theory Mike Davis is the author of many excellent socialist books, two of which have been highly influential on me - … In But how, then, would the gap be bridged between capitalism’s deskilled workforce and a polyvalent socialist society? Professor Davis is an esteemed scholar who brings a lifetime of study, teaching and activism to the subject. Starting from scattered clues left by Marx and his successors, above all Rosa Luxemburg, this essay outlines a theory of class formation and socialist hegemony in consonance with the historical, revolutionary experience of the working class’s actual lives and ideas. His chapter on revolutionary working class politics synthesizes a huge body of research on centuries of class struggle. Trade unions, however weakened or dispirited, continue to articulate a way of life “based around a coherent sense of the dignity of others and of a place in the world.”At a high level of abstraction, the current period of globalization is defined by a trilogy of ideal-typical economies: superindustrial (coastal East Asia), financial/tertiary (North Atlantic), and hyperurbanizing/extractive (West Africa). While the introduction sets up the theses as an account of revolutionary agency that can speak to the present, the argument is a bit undermined by Davis' omission of both theoretical and historical events between 1917 and today. The typical The most celebrated example of a proletarian counterculture was the vast universe of cycling, hiking and singing clubs, sports teams, adult schools, theater societies, readers groups, youth clubs, naturalist groups, and the like that were sponsored by the SPD and the German unions.
So, turns out author Mike Davis recently retired and got on to the total of Marx's collected works, much of it which wasn't available in English when Davis first studied Marx. “Old Gods, New Enigmas” by Mike Davis is an ambitious work of historic Marxism for our times.
The ideas of socialism and anarcho-communism became embodied in literate and well-organized popular countercultures that projected the solidarities of the workplace and neighborhood into all spheres of recreation, education, and culture. … It introduced new political language and cultural activities by reinterpreting Korean history and reappropriated Korea’s indigenous culture from the The spatial propinquity in the industrial city of production and reproduction, satanic mill and slum, reinforced autonomous class consciousness. We might add a fourth ideal-type of disintegrating society whose chief trend is the export of refugees and migrant labor. Mike Davis.
Amazon calculates a product’s star ratings based on a machine learned model instead of a raw data average. Nelson Lichtenstein notes: “Because of their self-confidence and their vital place in the production order, skilled craftsmen could be found both in the vanguard of those who posed a radical challenge to the existing industrial order and, almost simultaneously, among those workers who were most entrepreneurial and career-conscious in their outlook.”Because of its position in social production and the universality of its objective interests, the proletariat possesses a superior “epistemological capacity” to see the economy as a whole and unravel the mystery of capital’s apparent self-movement (see Lukács’s theses)The bourgeoisie and the proletariat are the only “pure classes” in modern society, but they are not symmetrical in their internal formation or capacity for consciousness.
While the conclusion seems a bit catastrophist and I have minor quibbles about his uLike all of Mike Davis' books, this is an intellectual tour de force and the culmination of a lifetime of erudition. In his important 1985 book The real weakness of the German counterculture, Lidtke says, was the SPD’s emphasis on democratizing bourgeois high culture rather than exploring the “possibility that workers… might develop a unique culture of the labor movement, one that would draw its inspiration directly from the lives of workers themselves.”The workers’ movement can and must confront the powerMarx and Engels, for example, clearly believed that mass socialist consciousness would be a dialectical alloy of the economic and the political, of epic battles over rights as well as over wages and working hours, of bitter local fights and great international causes.
As with other work by Mike Davis, such as his 'Planet of Slums' and his recent analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic, it combines incisive Marxist theorising with an incredibly wide knowledge base. The centerpiece essay is his commentary on Marx, using his vast knowledge of 19th and 20th century labor history as a kind of practical exploration of Marx's theory of class struggle. Davis, M., "Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx's Lost Theory" (2018)