Is revolution possible in the age of the Anthropocene?
Marx has returned, but which Marx? Recent biographies have proclaimed
him to be an emphatically nineteenth-century figure, but in this book,
Mike Davis's first directly about Marx and Marxism, a thinker comes to
light who speaks to the present as much as the past. In a series of
searching, propulsive essays, Davis, the bestselling author of City of
Quartz and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, explores Marx's
inquiries into two key questions of our time: Who can lead a
revolutionary transformation of society? And what is the cause--and
solution--of the planetary environmental crisis?
Davis consults a vast archive of labor history to illuminate new aspects
of Marx's theoretical texts and political journalism. He offers a "lost
Marx," whose analyses of historical agency, nationalism, and the "middle
landscape" of class struggle are crucial to the renewal of revolutionary
thought in our darkening age. Davis presents a critique of the current
fetishism of the "anthropocene," which suppresses the links between the
global employment crisis and capitalism's failure to ensure human
survival in a more extreme climate. In a finale, Old Gods, New Enigmas
looks backward to the great forgotten debates on alternative socialist
urbanism (1880-1934) to find the conceptual keys to a universal high
quality of life in a sustainable environment.
