On Wednesday 25th October 2023, from 7.30-9.30pm, Stroud Radical Reading Group will discuss Old Gods, New Enigmas by Mike Davis. Davis died on October 25th last year, and we will meet to honour his life and work on the anniversary of his death. Davis was an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He was been described as the “Best Socialist Writer of the Last Half Century“.

As usual we’ll discuss what we made of the book and how it might be relevant to us in our own lives. We will focus on Chapter 4 – “Who Will Build the Ark?” which explores global warming, how “city life is rapidly destroying the ecological niche-Holocene climate stability-which made its evolution and complexity possible”, and “the city as its own solution”. We enourage people to read the whole book but you are also welcome even if you haven’t read even the Chapter – to listen to the discussion and ask questions.

On this webpage you can find free resources, details to buy the book at a discount, and information about the author, the book, how our sessions work, and the venue. We’re planning to once again be at the SISTER House – as this is a building Stroud in Internationalist Solidarity Together for Earth Repairs (SISTER) have reclaimed on Lansdown Road.

You can currently get a 20% discount on Old Gods, New Enigmas from publishers Verso – making it £9.59 instead of £11.99 RRP.

Freely available resources related to the book are available below. We like to ensure everyone can attendee our sessions and get something out of them even if they can’t afford to buy a copy of the book or the time to read it. We would encourage people to read/listen to as much as possible, but you are welcome to attend and listen along even if you are unable to engage with any of the below. Audio/visual materials are provided for anyone who prefers these to reading – don’t feel you have to read content to attend the ‘reading’ group. The aim is to discuss the ideas – however they have been presented.

Free resources

• Free Chapter – Who Will Build The Ark? (18 page online pdf, 106kb)
• Free excerpt – “Marx at the chicken shack” – the Preface from the book, (11 page pdf download, 340kb). Alternatively read abbreviated version on the Verso website: “Mike Davis on becoming a Marxist“
• Free excerpt – “Notes on revolutionary agency (19 page pdf download, 525kb)
• 30 minute video interview with Mike Davis in 2009 (embedded below)
• 90 minute video “Capitalism & the Apocalypse: Mike Davis in Conversation” with Richard Seymour from Salvage (embedded below)
• “Obituary: Mike Davis Was the Best Socialist Writer of the Last Half Century” by Owen Hatherley.

This book is the second in a 3-part series on Crisis, Mutual Aid, and Radical Action, which will also cover work by the Care Collective (full details to follow). You can come even if you didn’t attend the previous event, and you don’t have to come to the next one.

About the author and the book

Publishers Verso say:

“Mike Davis spent years working factory jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an eighteen wheeler before his profile as one of the world’s leading urbanists emerged with the publication of his sober, if dystopian survey of Los Angeles. Since then, he’s developed a reputation not only for his caustic analysis of ecological catastrophe and colonial history, but as a stylist without peer.

Old Gods, New Enigmas is Davis’s book-length engagement with Karl Marx, marking the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth and exploring Davis’s thinking on history, labor, capitalism, and revolution – themes ever present the early work from this leading radical thinker. This will be his first book on Marxism itself.

In a time of ubiquitous disgust with political and economic elites, explores the question of revolutionary agency—what social forces and conditions do we need to transform the current order?—and the situation of the world’s working classes from the US to Europe to China. Even the most preliminary tasks are daunting. A new theory of revolution needs to return to the big issues in classical socialist thought, such as clarifying “proletarian agency”, before turning to the urgent questions of our time: global warming, the social and economic gutting of the rustbelt, and the city’s demographic eclipse of the countryside. What does revolution look like after the end of history?”

Endorsements:

“There is no one better at building on Marx’s legacy of profound and engaged politcal analysis than Mike Davis” – Leo Panitch

“The heterogeneity of Davis’s latest book Old Gods, New Enigmas reflects his decades of accumulated interests…a formidable intellectual, and this collection contains many gems.” – Troy Vettese,  Boston Review