“Old school socialist”

Abstract

What did Mike Davis mean when he referred to himself as an “old school socialist”? In this tribute, I argue that Davis laid out a theory and praxis of revolutionary ethics. With a focus on Davis's first book, Prisoners of the American Dream, I show how he gives us one of the earliest and sharpest critiques of neoliberalism while being hopeful about multiracial insurgency. I argue that even in the bleakest of times, Davis maintained a Gramscian commitment to worker rebellions, with a keen analysis of the ebb and flow of worker power. Most of all, he knew that the work was necessary and that the work entailed fighting and organizing—as an old school socialist.

Mike Davis liked to refer to himself as an “old school socialist.” When the Algerian journalist Mohsen Abdelmoumen asked him why and what that means, Davis offered up more than a definition of “socialist.” Instead, he laid out a theory and praxis of the sort of revolutionary ethics to which we all should aspire. Here is what he said:

First, socialism—the belief that the earth belongs to labour—is my moral being. In fact, it is my religion, the values that anchor the commitments that define my life.

Second, “old school” implies putting in work year after year for the good cause. In academia one runs across people who call themselves Marxists and go to lots of conferences but hardly ever march on a picket line, go to a union meeting, throw a brick or simply help wash the dishes after a benefit. What's even worse they deign to teach us the “real Marx” but lack the old Moor's fundamental respect for individual working people and his readiness to become a poor outlaw on their behalf.

Finally, plain “socialist” expresses identification with the broad movement and the dream rather than with a particular program or camp. (Abdelmoumen, 2018)

I never got to know Mike very well, partly because he returned to Los Angeles from London in 1986, after several years with the New Left Review (NLR) and I completed my doctorate and left L.A. a few months later. Still, our paths crossed many times over the years, and I would not hesitate to call him a friend and comrade. My intellectual debt to Mike should be evident in my work. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990), literally changed my life. It informed and inspired my very first article in The Nation, written in response to the L.A. Rebellion (Kelley, 1992). ¹ But it wasn’t my first encounter with his work. The Mike Davis I came to know when I began reading him in NLR 40 years ago was that “old school socialist.”

I remember “discovering” Mike Davis as if it were yesterday. Barely 20 years old and a rising senior at California State University at Long Beach, I spent the entire summer of 1982 reading Marxism and labor history. Every day I would arrive at the Lakewood Public Library as soon as it opened and stay until closing time, reading Marx's Capital (volume 1), The German Ideology, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, and I tried to systematically read through publications such as Radical America, The African Communist, History Workshop Journal, Monthly Review, and, of course, The NLR. There I found two articles by Davis, “Why the U.S. Working Class is Different” and “The Barren Marriage of American Labour and the Democratic Party,” both appeared in NLR in 1980 (Davis, 1980a, 1980b). ² I thought I knew something about labor history, but Mike's essays presented a capsule history of the U.S. working class, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. “The Barren Marriage,” in particular, proved timely because the Black movement with which I identified was debating its position vis-a-vis the Democratic Party. Remember, Ronald Reagan had just been elected president, marking what we believed to be a clear and present right-wing danger. In response, various Black movements (nationalists, left social democrats, and even civil rights liberals) came together and formed the National Black Independent Political Party and the National Black United Front. Davis turns his attention to the history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during the 1930s to show what was possible in that decade growing out of mass workers insurgency. There was an opening for independent labor politics, he argued, but that window abruptly closed, in part because the Democratic Party managed to incorporate organized labor through the New Deal and the postwar settlement, as well as crush worker insurgencies—namely the postwar strike wave of 1945–46 and the CIO's Southern organizing drive, Operation Dixie. Of course, anticommunism was key to weakening labor, facilitated in part by what Davis described as the Communist Party's “over-dependence on bureaucratic alliances with ‘center’ forces,” which is to say, the CIO (Davis, 1980a: 61).

Then in 1986, Mike dropped his first book, Prisoners of the American Dream, which included those two essays. At the time, I was finishing my dissertation on the Communist Party in Alabama and had been ostensibly “trained” in labor history. But again, Mike's book was jaw-dropping. Focusing on the mid to late twentieth century, he argues that the working class, or at least a large segment of it, was bought off by an expanding consumer market created by a shift from Fordism to Overconsumption. He attributed the problem or crisis of overconsumption to “a growing social subsidization of the new middle strata through ongoing degradation of job creation and erosion of mass Fordist consumer norms” (Davis, 1986: 219). While this same period witnessed heightened resistance by Black, Latinx, Indigenous, feminist, student, queer, and antiwar movements (of which Davis himself was a part and which he also understood as expressions of class struggle), the recomposition of the working class did dampen class antagonisms by incorporating a large segment of workers into the middle class. So when the hammer of the Right-wing turn fell—first on these insurgent movements in the name of law and order, and then on a downwardly mobile working class thanks to the global slump of the 1970s and deindustrialization—labor's power was severely weakened.

A portion of the newly expanding middle class continued to thrive (those he called “overconsumptionist” yuppies) while most of the working class faced job loss, capital flight, and plummeting downward mobility. They fell hard, though not as hard as Black working people faced with organized abandonment and prison, and, in Davis's words, “a large outer perimeter of US society composed of workers without citizens’ rights or access to the political system at all” (Davis, 1986: 305). Driving this restructuring was military spending, especially in the Sunbelt where the postwar defeat of the Southern labor movement kept wages low and labor flexible and vulnerable. What amounted to state-funded and subsidized overconsumptionism of the yuppie strata, the decline of heavy industry, and a national tax revolt uniting corporate power and middle-class homeowners, conspired to thoroughly crush the poor.

Mike Davis wrote Prisoners of the American Dream in the context of Reagan's re-election to a second term when it seemed that the working class had been defeated and trade union leadership had made its peace with the neoliberal turn. He wanted to know how this happened and what were other possible outcomes. Consequently, he ends up penning one of the earliest and sharpest critiques of neoliberalism and the financialization of the economy. In fact, he argued back then that “Reaganomics” or the escalation of the neoliberal turn, began in 1978 under Jimmy Carter's presidency, when the Democrats overwhelmingly controlled Congress but still “endorsed the legislative agenda of the Business Roundtable by freezing social spending, deregulating the transport and phone industries, and supporting Carter's move to higher interest rates” (Davis, 1986: 136). Was he arguing that the outcome was inevitable? That the hegemony of neoliberal ideology meant there was no alternative, no way out?

Absolutely not! Let's remember the context. Reagan's re-election occurred at the tail end of Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential bid, which, when you remove the glitter and cult of personality, was the most dynamic, independent multiracial-labor grassroots movement of the post-Civil Rights era. Thus, his analysis of both the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party and the potential of the Rainbow coalition as a rising class-conscious, multiracial insurgency, was intended as a critique of the left intelligentsia and social democrats who had (once again) written off the Black freedom movement, to their peril. Davis wryly notes, “For all the theoretical white smoke of the 1970s, including the endless debates on crisis theory and the nature of the state, the decisive problem of the fate of the Second Reconstruction was displaced beyond the field of vision” (Davis, 1986: 257). We know what came next: the disintegration of the workerist Left and a sharp decline in union membership overall. Some socialist types, such as Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, and many others, believed the only vehicle remaining for a progressive movement was the Democratic Party. Three decades later, left-liberals like my friend Michael Kazin (2022), are singing the same song.

In the end, Mike Davis predicted, correctly, that neoliberal forces will take over the Democratic party and further marginalize labor and people of color. He concluded:

[I]f there is to be any popular left in the 1990s, it will develop in the first instance through the mobilization of the radical political propensities in the Black—and, perhaps, Hispanic—working classes. Reciprocally, the validity and popular appeal of any socialist program or strategy will depend on the degree to which it addresses the axial problem of the revolutionary–democratic struggle for equality. To do so, leftists must reject the “majoritarian” fallacy, nurtured by fellow-traveling in the Democratic Party, that all socialist politics must be cut to fit the pattern of whatever modish liberalism is in fashion or to conform with the requirements for securing “practical” Democratic pluralities. The horizon of the possible—and the necessary—is not the quixotic project of becoming a “loyal” fringe of one or another of the capitalist parties, but the fight to build an independent left politics that has real and effective social anchorage. (Davis, 1986: 312)

One can imagine how this pissed off many leftists and social democrats who were pushing the position that class politics meant subordinating other struggles against oppression—race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc. In their mind, these struggles amounted to narrow identity politics. Steve Rosswurm's review of Prisoners was outright indignant: “Davis writes off the white working class. They have not behaved as they should; therefore, he anoints a new vanguard. … Davis's analysis becomes increasingly moralistic and less class oriented as he moves nearer contemporary events” (1988: 390). He accuses Mike of having “nullified the possibility of independent politics coming from the white working class” (1988: 391). Mike's sin was not ignoring the white working class but dethroning it from its assumed leadership of the whole working class. Rosswurm asks rhetorically, “From where will [independent labor politics] come? From black and Hispanic peoples” (1988: 391). To be clear, his answer is disparaging, meant to cast doubt on the capacity of workers of color to lead the class struggle. He ultimately dismisses the book as “bad history” and “bankrupt politics” (1988: 391).

Finally, critics and even fans have called Prisoners of the American Dream, a bleak, pessimistic book—a compendium of worker defeats written at a time when U.S. labor historians were celebrating workers’ resistance (see, e.g. Wolfe, 1987). True, it was written during bleak times, when everyone was scrambling to figure out how an ultra-conservative B-list actor became president, and why did he win over so many working-class whites and the middle class? But when I read Prisoners then, and re-read it now, it does not come across as defeatist or pessimistic. He examines victories and defeats but applies a conjunctural analysis to the ebb and flow of workers’ power, shaped by differentiation within the class (race, ethnicity, immigrant status, religion, gender, etc., not to mention “skill”). To analyze the catastrophic conditions facing workers is not the same as accepting those conditions as inevitable or insurmountable. Antonio Gramsci identified pessimism as a form of “political fatalism” (Gramsci, 1924). In his 1924 essay, “Against Pessimism,” which he wrote two years after Mussolini came to power, he accused his comrades in the Italian Communist Party (PCI) of underestimating the threat of fascism. The catastrophic economic conditions had convinced many of his comrades that capitalism's collapse was imminent, and therefore they needed to wait it out and withdraw from what was temporarily a losing battle. Gramsci implied that the Communist International (Comintern) had constrained the Communists’ work to resist fascism but that more was required. The PCI needed to return to the earlier period of workers’ rebellions when they were “trying to open new roads towards the future.” “With that in mind,” he advised, “all the energy of our leaders will be needed, the best form of organisation and concentration of the party's mass, a great spirit of initiative and a great rapidity of response” (Gramsci, 1924). The pessimists, however, did not think this work was necessary, believing that to repeat it was to go backward.

Mike Davis stood against pessimism. He knew the work was necessary, no matter the odds. And here's the proof: what was Mike doing after he published Prisoners of the American Dream? Organizing! He was still fighting—leaping headlong in the struggles of labor, the sanctuary movement, fighting against police violence, fighting for housing, fighting to end the war. But of course, he's organizing. What else would you expect from an old school socialist?

Mike Davis, Presente!