Mike Davis: The Road to <i>City of Quartz</i> and Beyond

Abstract This essay explores the historiographic ideas and political experiences that influenced the work of Mike Davis, the prolific Marxist historian who died in 2022. His first two books, Prisoners of the American Dream and City of Quartz, were shaped by his time as an editor of New Left Review in the early 1980s. Davis sided with Perry Anderson and other structuralists in their historiographic debate with E. P. Thompson. The former emphasized how the peculiar evolution of capitalism in both the Britain and the United States limited and distorted working-class organization and consciousness, while Thompson highlighted the capacity of plebian strata to themselves create a socialist movement and a working-class sense of identity. Prisoners and City of Quartz were therefore structurally pessimistic in narrating the history of working-class consciousness and trade unionism and the resultant hegemony of American capital, earning Davis the title the “prophet of doom.” Yet Davis remained a radical critic of the racial and capitalist status quo, always searching for those elements of the body politic in revolt. Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties (2020) celebrates the creative agency of a youthful, multiracial Los Angeles in a fashion that Thompson might well have approved.