Old Gods, New Enigmas - Marx's Lost Theory

Author(s): Mike Davis

Politics

Is revolution possible in the age of the Anthropocene?


Marx has returned, but which Marx? Recent biographies have proclaimed him to be an emphatically nineteenth-century figure, but in this book, Mike Davis's first directly about Marx and Marxism, a thinker comes to light who speaks to the present as much as the past. In a series of searching, propulsive essays, Davis, the bestselling author of City of Quartz and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, explores Marx's inquiries into two key questions of our time: Who can lead a revolutionary transformation of society? And what is the cause--and solution--of the planetary environmental crisis?


Davis consults a vast archive of labor history to illuminate new aspects of Marx's theoretical texts and political journalism. He offers a "lost Marx," whose analyses of historical agency, nationalism, and the "middle landscape" of class struggle are crucial to the renewal of revolutionary thought in our darkening age. Davis presents a critique of the current fetishism of the "anthropocene," which suppresses the links between the global employment crisis and capitalism's failure to ensure human survival in a more extreme climate. In a finale, Old Gods, New Enigmas looks backward to the great forgotten debates on alternative socialist urbanism (1880-1934) to find the conceptual keys to a universal high quality of life in a sustainable environment.


Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9781788732161
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : Verso Trade
  • : 0.508023
  • : June 2018
  • : 1.15 Inches X 5.83 Inches X 8.52 Inches
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Mike Davis
  • : Hardback
  • : 1808
  • : English
  • : 320.5322
  • : 320
  • : HPS