Mike Davis > Quotes

“The car bomb is the poor man’s air force.”
― Mike Davis

“If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed into a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India’s per capita income from 1757 to 1947.”
― Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

“Despite the wishful thinking of evangelicals impatient for the Rapture or deep ecologists who believe that Gaia would be happiest with a thin sprinkling of hunter-gatherers, megacities like Los Angeles will never simply collapse and disappear. Rather, they will stagger on, with higher body counts and greater distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts; while vital parts of the region’s high-tech and tourist economies eventually emigrate to safer ground, together with hundreds of thousands of its more affluent residents.”
― Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

“At the end of the day, the best measure of the humanity of any society is the life and happiness of its children. We live in a rich society with poor children, and that should be intolerable.”
― Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

“Although it costs taxpayers more than twice as much to send an 18-year-old to prison as to university, politicians reap greater rewards from lobbyists and conservative voters for building cells than for building classrooms.”
― Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

“Despite the mountain of gold that has been built downtown, Los Angeles remains vulnerable to the same explosive convergence of street anger, poverty, environmental crisis, and capital flight that made the early 1990s its worth crisis period since the early Depression.”
― Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

“They did not overthrow the elected government of Mossadegh in Iran; support the genocide of eight hundred thousand leftists in Indonesia; intervene on behalf of the fascist Phalange against the Palestinians in Lebanon; fight a dirty war against Dhofarian insurgents; underwrite absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia, the shah of Iran, Morocco, and the Gulf Emirates; build with billions of U.S. tax dollars the golden throne upon which Mubarak sits like a modern-day pharaoh; arm Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and turn a blind eye to his genocide against the communists and Kurds; then kill seventeen thousand Iraqi civilians in bombing raids during the Gulf War, including more than four hundred women and children incinerated in the Amariyah bomb shelter. Nor did they stir the Shias of southern Iraq into revolt, then abandon them to Saddam Hussein’s executioners because George Bush senior calculated that the total destruction of the regime would create an impermissible power vacuum that Iran might rush to fill.”
― Mike Davis, In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire

“Mindless punishment and super-incarceration have been societal disasters: locking away tens of thousands of young people in hyper-violent prisons, dominated by institutionalized race wars, without any semblance of education, rehabilitation or hope. The real function of the prison system, indeed, is not to safeguard communities, but to warehouse hatred for the day when it returns to the street.”
― Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

“South Central Los Angeles, for example, is a data and media black hole, without local cable programming or links to major data systems. Just as it became a housing-and-jobs ghetto in the postwar period, it is now evolving into an off-net electronic ghetto.”
― Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

“Thus, the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.”
― Mike Davis

“Here, one wants to create the Paris of the Far West. Evening traffic on Hollywood Boulevard attempts to mimic Parisian boulevard life. However, life on the Boulevard is extinct before midnight, and the seats in front of the cafes, where in Paris one can watch street life in a leisurely manner, are missing. . . . At night the illuminated portraits of movie stars stare down from lampposts upon crowds dressed in fake European elegance – a declaration that America yearns to be something other than American here. . . . Yet, in spite of the artists, writers and aspiring film stars, the sensibility of a real Montmartre, Soho, or even Greenwich Village, cannot be felt here. The automobile mitigates against such a feeling, and so do the new houses. Hollywood lacks the patina of age.75”
― Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

“The real function of the prison system, indeed, is not to safeguard communities, but to warehouse hatred for the day when it returns to the street.”
― Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

“Yet we must avoid the idea that Los Angeles is ultimately just the mirror of Narcissus, or a huge disturbance in the Maxwellian ether. Beyond its myriad rhetorics and mirages, it can be presumed that the city actually exists.”
― Mike Davis

“The minimalist role of national governments in housing supply has been reinforced by current neo-liberal economic orthodoxy as defined by the IMF and the World Bank. The Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed upon debtor nations in the late 1970s and 1980s required a shrinkage of government programs and, often, the privatization of housing markets. However, the social state in the Third World was already withering away even before SAPs sounded the death knell for welfarism.”
― Mike Davis, Planet of Slums

“Famines are wars for the right to existence”
― Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

“We live in a rich society with poor children, and that should be intolerable.”
― Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

“First, socialism — the belief that the earth belongs to labor — 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. I have strong, if idiosyncratic, opinions on all the traditional issues — for example, the necessity of an organization of organizers (call it Leninism, if you want) but also the evils of bureaucracy and permanent leaderships (call it anarchism if you wish) — but I try to remind myself that such positions need to be constantly reassessed and calibrated to the conjuncture. One is always negotiating the slippery dialectic between individual reason, which must be intransigently self-critical, and the fact that one needs to be part of a movement or a radical collective in order, as Sartre put it, to “be in history.” Moral dilemmas and hard choices come with the turf and they cannot be evaded with “correct lines.”
― Mike Davis

“The most disastrous obstacle to labor unity in the 1850s was the reaction of native workers to the arrival of several million impoverished Irish and German laborers who came in a flood after European crop failures of the 1840s. These new immigrants provided cheap labour power for the growth of New England factories as well as armies of raw muscle for railroad expansion and coalfields. They were met by the universal hostility of a native working class which rioted against them, evicted them from workplaces, refused them admission into trade unions, and tried to exclude them from the franchise. Partly rooted in economic rivalries in the labour market, the Yankee-versus-immigrant polarization in the working class also reflected a profound cultural antagonism that would hinder the efforts at labor unity for more than a century.”
― Mike Davis

“There was no ‘linkage’, in other words, between corporate-oriented public investment and the social needs that desperately fought for attention in the rest of the city budget.”
― Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

“Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash. Morrow Mayo”
― Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

“we live in the age of the city. The city is everything to us it consumes us and for that reason we glorify it"
-Onookome Okome”
― Mike Davis

“A recent Chicago study, for example, has shown that it costs $60,000 to hook up a new house in an outer suburb to the utility infrastructure as against $5,000 for the same house in an existing suburb. “Who foots the bill? Taxpayers in the established suburbs.”72”
― Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

“In 1945-50, and within the first eighteen months of the Alianza, there were five coups against eighteen constitutional governments, while only two countries – Mexico and Venezuela, even bothered to propose credible agrarian reform. Above all, American corporate capital which had developed historical interest in promoting mass consumption in Western Europe, approached Latin America via a series of special relations of domination and alliance with local oligarchies.”
― Mike Davis

“National Black voter registration during the 1970s reached scarcely more than half its potential. Hispanics remained equally unmobilized, while only a quarter of the unemployed – of all races – bothered to vote. Enfranchising 25 million 18-20 year old’s would create a left-liberal electoral majority, only 23 per cent of potential voters under thirty participated in the 1970 mid-term election. Overall, the effect of this increasing abstentionism was approximately the same as if a property-franchise limitation had been introduced to guarantee a middle and upper-class electoral majority.”
― Mike Davis

“Overall, Reagan’s first term witnessed a decline in the density of unionization that was unprecedented in the postwar experience of any OECD nation. Private sector unionization which stood at nearly 35% in 1953 has plummeted from a fifth to a sixth of the labor force. The contrast with the Canadian experience is dramatic: from 1940 to 1965, unionization in both countries was synchronized in trend, from 1965, however, there has been a sharp divergence, accelerating since 1975.”
― Mike Davis

“In per capita terms, the United States is monumentally overstaffed with line managers and foremen (twice as many as Germany), salesmen (two-and-a-half times as many as France) and lawyers (twenty-five times as many as Japan). Thus of the 3.6 million manufacturing jobs added to the American economy since 1948, 3 million were filled by non-production employees and at least half of those were managerial posts.”
― Mike Davis

“The brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization since 1978 are analogous to the catastrophic processes that shaped a “Third World” in the first place, during the era of late-Victorian imperialism (1870–1900). At the end of the nineteenth century, the forcible incorporation into the world market of the great subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa entailed the famine deaths of millions and the uprooting of tens of millions more from traditional tenures. The end result (in Latin America as well) was rural “semi-proletarianization,” the creation of a huge global class of immiserated semi-peasants and farm laborers lacking existential security of subsistence. As a result, the twentieth century became an age not of urban revolutions, as classical Marxism had imagined, but of epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of national liberation.”
― Mike Davis, Planet of Slums

“In 1980 corporations spent over $10 billion suing each other (an amount almost equivalent to the entire federal foodstamp program); while in the following year, $83 billion was expended on corporate take-overs, mergers, and demergers – paper transactions that involved $11 billion more than the total new productive investment in basic plant and machinery.”
― Mike Davis

“According to the Congressional Budget Office, low-income families have so far lost at least $23billion in income and federal benefits, while high-income families have gained more than $35 billion (Expressed another way: 20.2 million poor households – earning under $10,000 – lost an average of $400 each in benefit cuts, while 1.4 million wealthy families - $80,000+ - received an average of $8,400 in tax cuts).”
― Mike Davis

“Unlike predominantly home-centred industries, the primacy concern for large firms was not so much to cut wages as to cut their workforce through robotization and subcontracting. On the other hand, internationalizing core advanced industries has also been in the vanguard of efforts to reduce social overhead costs of production in the United States. That is to say, as they traded national oligopoly for world industry status, they have become increasingly concerned with reducing costs of inputs that are not internationally competitive, including health provision, communications, domestic transport, construction, as well as safety and environmental regulation.”
― Mike Davis