Davis, Mike

Mike Davis (1946–) is a prolific Marxist labor historian whose renown stems from a memorably trenchant, provocative mix of scholarship and reportage on urban issues, especially those concerning Los Angeles. Davis labels himself a “writer-activist,” “former meat cutter and long-distance truck driver,” and “Marxist-environmentalist”; his perspective on American cities is consciously that of someone who grew up in a southern California marked by deindustrialization, suburbanization, and racism. Alongside these working-class credentials stand prestigious MacArthur and Getty fellowships, two books—City of Quartz (1990) and Ecology of Fear (1998)—on the Los Angeles Times bestsellers list simultaneously, and celebrity status within and outside of academia.

Davis has directed much of his analysis and critique of urban conditions toward the detrimental effects of economic restructuring and welfare state shrinkage for the urban working class. Nevertheless, [Page 206]he has an expansive understanding of the forces affecting cities. Davis tackles such core urban issues as land uses, crime control, and ethnic politics, but also less obvious topics that range from pandemics to avocado farming. Throughout, Davis insists on the class-based, materialist core of Marxist analysis, although a non-orthodox version that replaces the proletarian revolution with pessimistic scenarios for workers and the poor and grants spatial relations some independence from the economy. Although Davis was among the academics who conceived of the Los Angeles School of Urban Studies (and reportedly was the first to use that name, in City of Quartz), his attachment to economic structure and uneasy relationship with postmodernism leaves him somewhat outside the school as it has evolved.

Davis began a PhD at the University of California at Los Angeles, then left for Britain and worked during the 1980s for the socialist journal New Left Review. His intellectual influences include key thinkers such as the Marxist historian Perry Anders on and the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. While in Britain, Davis published his most theoretical book, Prisoners of the American Dream (1986). It is an account of the party system's abandonment of the working class in light of a White, suburban, middle-class electoral majority—ultimately, the Ronald Reagan coalition—along with organized labor's hostility to African Americans, women, and immigrants.

In the late 1980s, Davis returned to the United States and turned his attention to the ills of Los Angeles and the widespread erosion of central cities. Davis's best-known and academically most celebrated book is City of Quartz (1990), now an urban studies “classic.” Davis makes a scathing, sweeping, and historically grounded indictment of the control of Los Angeles by business and political leaders, property developers foremost among them. He highlights the mobilization of the police state against, especially, young minority males, homeless people, and illegal immigrants—among the compelling images in City of Quartz is that of “Fortress L.A.” Although affluent White homeowners and international investors increasingly competed for power with the traditional local elites, all shared an interest in fortifying Los Angeles against perceived threats coming from lower-class “others.”

City of Quartz appeared in paperback in 1992, the year of the Rodney King rebellion in Los Angeles. Among Davis's most angry and captivating works is an informal coda to City of Quartz (and to Prisoners of the American Dream), “Who Killed Los Angeles?” There, Davis detailed the “fed-eralized and federally driven”—heavily militarized— strategies that were already used in antidrug, antigang, and anti-immigrant efforts but that were perfected in reaction to the breakdown of law and order. At the same time, the bipartisan consensus in California and in Washington against spending for public employment and services “figuratively burned down the city a second time.”

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