Mike Davis, California's 'prophet of doom', on activism in a dying world: 'Despair is useless'

[Algernon Moncrieff]

The Guardian

What do you think Americans should be doing right now?

Organize as massively as possible: non-violent civil disobedience. Instead of just fighting over environmental legislation in Congress, ending up in a bill that’s as much a subsidy to the auto industry and to fossil fuel as anything else: start sitting-in in the board rooms and offices of the big polluters, all these meetings where the Kochs and other oil producers sit down with Republican politicians.

In 2020, there were massive street protests all over the US, and the world, after the police killed George Floyd. Yet you’ve argued the left in America has surrendered the streets to the far right. Why?

Republicans are doing a splendid job of combining protest movements with electoral politics. It’s not only that Republicans have mastered low-intensity street-fighting, it’s that they’ve also been able to sustain a dialectic between the outside and the inside in a way that progressive Democrats haven’t been able to do.

Both of our kids [the couple’s now 18-year-old twins], all their friends turned out for Black Lives Matter. So much attention was given to the participation of whites in the protests, but I think the most exciting part was the number of new immigrant kids, Latinos, who were in the thick of it. After summer 2020, they kind of became orphans. What to do, where to protest, what to join, how to conceive of the possibility of a life dedicated to struggling for social change – all of that went unanswered.

The base for a more activist, more aggressive, but also more strategic left politics exists. Students in inner-city high schools in California are a sleeping dragon. If you measure things by opinion polls, this generation is more leftwing than the 1930s. A huge number of people under 30 say they’re in favor of socialism or they’re prepared to listen to arguments for socialism. That’s astonishing.

[brooklynite]

1. Q.1: Who's Mike Davis?

Q.2: What evidence is there that massive civil disobedience is an effective strategy? (nb: "the right wing does it" doesn't answer the question)

[DBoon]

3. 1. This is Mike Davis

Mike Davis (born 1946) is an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in his native Southern California. His most recent book is Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener.
...
Davis is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, and an editor of the New Left Review. Davis has taught urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and at Stony Brook University before he secured a position at University of California, Irvine's history department. He also contributes to the British monthly Socialist Review, the organ of the British Socialist Workers Party.[8] As a journalist and essayist, Davis has written for, among others, The Nation, Jacobin, and the UK's New Statesman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Davis_(scholar)

His best know work is City of Quartz

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles is a 1990 book by Mike Davis examining how contemporary Los Angeles has been shaped by different powerful forces in its history. The book opens with Davis visiting the ruins of the socialist community of Llano, organized in 1914 in what is now the Antelope Valley north of Los Angeles. The community moved in 1918, leaving behind the "ghost" of an alternative future for LA.

Davis then explores intellectuals' competing ideas of Los Angeles, from the "sunshine" promoted by real estate boosters early in the 20th century, to the "debunkers," the muckraking journalists of the early century, to the "noir" writers of the 1930s and the exiles fleeing from fascism in Europe, and finally the "sorcerers," the scientists at Caltech.

The rest of the book explores how different groups wielded power in different ways: the downtown Protestant elite, led by the Chandler family of the Los Angeles Times; the new elite of the Jewish Westside; the surprisingly powerful homeowner groups; the Los Angeles Police Department. He covers the Irish leadership of the Catholic Church and its friction with the numerically dominant Latino element. The book concludes at what Davis calls the "junkyard of dreams," the former steel town of Fontana, east of LA, a victim of de-industrialization and decay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Quartz

[Just A Box Of Rain]

2. And where is the evidence that MAGAts have "mastered low-intensity street-fighting?"

A bunch of hooey, if you ask me.

[maxsolomon]

5. They've thought about it, at least.

Look at Portland OR; those street fights were RW Paramilitary groups coming in to town and provoking fights with Leftists/Antifa.

They carried all the same weapons used at the Capitol Insurrection.

They also rode in the beds of pickup trucks through downtown, spraying bystanders with Bear Spray.

[Just A Box Of Rain]

6. My memory of the truck convoy's mastery of the streets:

[ColinC]

4. Took a class from him in college.

Love every bit of it! He is incredibly well-versed in the major political and social movements of our country.

[Mr.Bill]

7. The problem in the present is

in many states loose open carry laws have added another dimension to protests. Call it the Rittenhouse effect. It may be relatively safe in California, but I have no interest in being in the middle of a protest where 17 year-old kids are walking around with AR-15s thinking it's legal to shoot people.

[JanMichael]

8. Never have heard of the Flutter of an Eyelid. Looks amazing.

Thank you Mike Davis for recommending Myron Brinig.