Glimpses of a homegrown revolutionary: An interview with author Mike Davis

In praise of writer Mike Davis: prophet, burr, spellbinder and friend.

By Rubén Martínez for Capitol & Main

A transparency is a positive photographic image imprinted on plastic or glass, through which light is projected onto a wall or screen, dramatically enlarging its viewing surface.

I’ll show a few “slides” that depict moments with author Mike Davis, the most consequential writer and thinker on Los Angeles since … perhaps ever. But his work roams far beyond Los Angeles, including popular and scholarly work on environmentalism, Marxist theory, urbanism, and public health. He is also conversant in “hard” sciences like geology, and can read specialized literature in fire science and climatology. Over the years, he’s blurred the lines between these disparate fields. He braids them together with an indefatigable faith in a revolutionary project: nothing less than the liberation of humanity from human exploitation, which today also requires the end of humanity’s malevolent exploitation of the natural world.

His faith in revolution is historically situated, pointing toward a string of moments in which “utopian” visions have flourished in the here and now, before crumbling under the weight of counterrevolutionary forces and internal contradictions, only to be taken up again. There have been large-scale experiments such as the Paris Commune or the Spanish Republic, and countless small-scale ones, like Christian Base Communities in 1980s rural Central America. Mike tells us that the future must be “excavated in the past,” rescued from under the ruins of reaction. The slides throw light on scenes from across the 30 or more years I’ve known Mike.

The occasion for this appreciation is the recent announcement by his wife, the artist and curator Alessandra Moctezuma, and later by Mike himself in interviews, that he has suspended treatment for cancer and is in palliative care. He said that he will avail himself of California’s End of Life Option Act and is spending his days at home “surrounded by love and incredibly pampered.”