Mike Davis – Rest in Power

Mike Davis – Rest in Power

Mike Davis (1946-2022) was one of the outstanding socialist and ecosocialist writers of our times. He was an unrepentant Marxist of the ‘old school’ in that he always remained focused on the working class and returned again and again to the question of proletarian agency especially in Old Gods, New Enigmas. At the same time he was also always ahead of the game in never losing sight of the complex dialectical relationship between human beings and their natural environment. This was true of his work as a whole, which was hugely prolific, but was exemplified in his Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, which combined an almost unreadable account of human suffering with a coruscating critique of imperialism and a hugely impressive scholarly investigation of ecology and weather.

His 2005 book The Monster at Our Door: the Global Threat of Avian Flu was prophetic in its anticipation of the deadly threat posed by the zoonotic transmission of viruses, long in advance of the Covid pandemic, which he also wrote about with great power. In this context the Global Ecosocialist Network is particularly indebted to Mike for the stunning public meeting he did for us alongside the superb Marxist epidemiologist Rob Wallace on Covid, Capitalism and Ecology in October 2020 which can be viewed here  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vogGuk2VIw&t=5s

But that is just one small instance of the much wider debt which all ecosocialists, socialists, activists, and working class militants owe to this great writer and activist.