The legendary Marxist thinker and activist Mike Davis explored political power and social class for decades. As a long-time editor at New Left Review, and contributor to Los Angeles Review of Books, Socialist Review and others, his sharp analysis and glittering prose criss-crossed over urban studies, political economy, social theory, and US history to reveal the ravages of global capitalism on people and planet as well as areas for resistance.

See all his writing below.

Read an excerpt from Ecology of Fear on LA wildfires here.

The Essential Mike Davis

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Listen to Mike’s close friend and comrade Ruth Wilson Gilmore, in conversation with Owen Hatherley on The Verso Podcast discussing his life, legacy, and the geography of struggle.

Ecology of Fear

by Mike Davis

Counterpointing Los Angeles’s central role in America’s fantasy life – the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909 – with its wanton denial of its own real his...

The Monster Enters

by Mike Davis

In his book, The Monster at Our Door, the renowned activist and author Mike Davis warned of a coming global threat of viral catastrophes. Now in this expanded edition of that 2005 book, Davis expl...

Planet of Slums

by Mike Davis

According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically u...

City of Quartz

by Mike Davis

No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mi...

Set the Night on Fire

by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener

Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade’s political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power—where Malcolm ...

Prisoners of the American Dream

by Mike Davis

Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis’s brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world’s most industriall...

Late Victorian Holocausts

by Mike Davis

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship betw...

Buda's Wagon

by Mike Davis

On a September day in 1920, an angry Italian anarchist named Mario Buda exploded a horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and iron scrap near New York’s Wall Street, killing 40 people. Since Buda’s...

Magical Urbanism

by Mike Davis

Foreword by Román de la Campa

Winner of the 2001 Carey McWilliams AwardA CONTEMPORARY CLASSIC, Magical Urbanism focuses on how Latinos are attempting to translate their urban demographic ascendancy into effective social power. ...

Old Gods, New Enigmas

by Mike Davis

Old Gods, New Enigmas is the highly-anticipated book by the best-selling author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums. Mike Davis spent years working factory jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an...

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