Description
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.
Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso
Published: 10/06/2020
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 7.80h x 5.00w x 0.90d
ISBN13: 9781788732178
ISBN10: 1788732170
BISAC Categories:
- Political Science | Commentary & Opinion
- Political Science | Political Ideologies | Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
- Political Science | History & Theory | General
About the Author
Mike Davis is the author of many books including Set the Night on Fire, Prisoners of the American Dream, Old Gods, New Enigmas, Late Victorian Holocausts, City of Quartz, The Monster at Our Door, Buda's Wagon, and Planet of Slums. He is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Diego.