A Transcript of TTSG's Interview with Mike Davis
As a bonus to our subscribers, we’re releasing transcribed highlights from our interview with Mike Davis. If you’re new to Mike’s work, here are some good places to start.
The Monster Enters, New Left Review
The Case for Letting Malibu Burn
And you can find many of his books on sale at Verso right now.
As always, please help out our efforts here by subscribing for free to TTSG, either here on Substack (hit the button!) or on Apple or any of your favorite podcast providers. And please rate and review, if you can.
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TTSG ep. 1.7 INTERVIEW WITH MIKE DAVIS
Tammy
Hi Mike! Thank you so much for giving us your time. Maybe you could start just by saying a little bit about where you are right now. Are you sheltering in place with your family? What's that been like?
Mike Davis
Well, we have a big household and a fairly small house. There are five of us. So I'm living out in the garage with the dog and a couple pints of Guinness.
My wife is Alessandra Montezuma, and she comes from Mexico City. But most of our family ended up in Baja, California or here in San Diego. And so the closing of the borders, cut our extended family and half. Half of them on the other side. Tijuana is the epicenter right now - the worst area in Mexico, including the refugee camps. But closing the border doesn't prevent COVID from jumping back and forth. And so even though San Diego's had a mild go of it so far,, a second wave could be much larger than what we've experienced. I mean, you can’t have two cities with such profound inequality between them, such difference in medical provision, and not see the virus opportunistically travel back and forth.
TK
You've been doing a lot of interviews recently, both because you have this new book out but also because of your 2005 book about the avian flu. What have you been wanting to convey in these talks and interviews you've been doing?
MD
Well, let me put it this way. You may have seen on television, an old movie called Sophie's Choice with Meryl Streep in it. And in the film, she plays a mother who is sent to Auschwitz with her two children. And she begs the sadistic Nazi doctor to save her lives. And he says, Well, you have a choice. I can kill both your kids. And this is really this situation that millions of people in this country find themselves in right now. People who've had to work all along in warehouses and food distribution and health care people going back to work now.
The Washington Post pointed out this morning In addition to the fact that in March alone, 40% of the low wage workers in this country lost their jobs, but it pointed out that 30% of the people who are working or going back to work either have a pre existing condition, hard trouble, diabetes, respiratory problems, or they have someone in their household who does. And of course, imagine you're in an inter-generational family. You're a waitress at Truck Stops of America in Laramie, Wyoming. Wyoming hasn't closed down. The boss tells you, “Well, I don't want you wearing a mask.” This is a single mother with a 12 year old and her own mother who suffers from emphysema living with her. That's Sophie's Choice. And it's a choice millions of Americans confront without any kind of advice, without any kind of assistance on how to make choices between the income and saving the mortgage and between the health and safety of the members of the family.
Jay Kang
Have you been surprised by the lack of some sort of movement politics around around workers and the Sophie's Choice that you talk about? From my perspective, at least you see all the energy that went into the Bernie campaign and the claims that it was a movement and that you have images everywhere of the culinary workers in Las Vegas, for example. I think I agree with you in a sense, or at least what I think you're saying that a lot of that energy is dissipated, you know that you can't find it and that I just don't know where it went like, I mean, where do you think it went?
MD
There's no reason why we can demonstrate safely while respecting social distancing. In 1941, the Ford workers were organizing the biggest factory in the world River Rouge in Detroit, and the Ford security force had beaten people on picket lines, they got tear gas, so they got tired of that. So 1000 of them piled into the jalopies and circled the plant and shut it down.
There's absolutely no contradiction between political activity, political protests in public space and being safe. I mean, look at the democracy movement in Hong Kong. You know, they're all suited up with masks and gloves, but they're not giving up the struggle particularly as government attempts to arrest so many of them and implement the crackdown. So we should have been behind the healthcare workers and other workers from the beginning. And we should have anticipated the fact that people are going back to work or being forced to go back facts worth unsafely, that's an issue the left should own and we should own the jobs issue too.
In the case of the Sanders campaign, you're right: it has collapsed totally into an attempt to negotiate with Biden in putting up good legislation. But that legislation can never be adopted unless there's protests on the streets demanding it. I was hoping that Sanders campaign would take the fight to the platform to the convention platform committee can get the Warren delegates and others behind it because we absolutely need universal free health care.
Biden’s hiding out in a basement somewhere. He should be out there talking to people with proper protection. It’s an incredible example of yielding the battlefield to the enemy. We have to stop now and bring the movement back and we have to focus it. And I don't think there's a better single issue than this whole question of Sophie's Choice and workers safety.
TK
As I’ve talked to organizer friends in different constituency groups around the country, I do feel like there's been a hesitation to Call for mass protests even when the nurses were doing them. Even when Amazon workers were doing them because they didn't want to be accused of being anti scientific or getting people sick or in trouble. But now I think that we're a little bit less nervous maybe about being outside and especially distance, we can maybe make that call and there can actually be organizing of mass occupations.
MD
I don’t think we should have had any hesitation about this. The very first thing I wrote about back in March, was saying we cannot yield the street. The left never yields the street to the right ever. An exception might be, for instance, in Manhattan with the density as such, but then again, Hong Kong has density, too, and, the activists are carrying on the struggle. We should embrace their example. We've let them off the bastards off the hook. It’s not enough to give news conferences or to debate on a totally empty congressional floor so that CSPAN can get the soundbite.
People in this country are raging, they're angry. They're being destroyed and we need to become the lightning rod for that.
JK
In The New Left review you talked about nursing home workers in Kirkland, Washington. They live in high rent places and make $10 an hour, which necessitates them having to go from nursing home to nursing home. They can't take off time because they have families. And many of these nursing home aides are black, Latino, Asian. Do you think some of the lack of organizing or the lack of outrage that is on the left comes from the fact that the workers that that are most at risk are minorities?
MD
In one of the first things I wrote, I interviewed, Jim Straub is an old friend of mine and union organizing, kind of very romantic guy used to, you know, jump freight trains to go from SEIU organizing campaign to campaign but he, he works with the nursing on workers in Seattle. And he said right at the beginning: The public health people come and they pay no attention to the workers. They don't interview them. They don't understand why they're moonlighting on these $10 an hour jobs, or why the virus immediately spreads to 10 other nursing homes.
It was obvious that this was a conflagration they would not stop and that it would march across the country. And now in the bill that the House passed yesterday, there's a thing in it calling for emergency Task Force, national task force to go to nursing homes. This is after something over probably 30,000 or even 50,000 people have died.
Nursing homes are really a criminal racket. They are owned by hedge fund by private equity and other private investors and these big chains. They're always understaffed. People aren't given training, and conditions are awful. And I know that my father ended up in a place like that. They'd rather pay fines than reform anything. They pile bodies up and hide them in places, and until recently have not been under any obligation to report Coronavirus deaths in the homes, I mean, we're talking about manslaughter on a national scale, and instead of giving these people immunity from lawsuits, which is the Trump administration's position, we should be indicting the people who are responsible for these conditions. They should be charged with manslaughter straight out.
In California, I know that so many of the nursing home workers are Filipinos. And I think at some point you sit back and calculate and look at different groups. I think Philippine healthcare workers are going to make up the probably the single largest group of people who suffer death or serious disease as a result of this.
AL
Mike, your, your comparisons to America to the rest of the world is really striking to us. We were talking about in your New Left Review piece. At the very end, you had this very striking conclusion about your diagnosis of the US left. Sorry to read this back to you. But you say that, there's a disturbing element of national solipsism in the US progressive movement that is symmetrical with the new nationalism. We tend to talk only about the American working class and American radical history in what sometimes veers close to a left version of American first ism.
I've heard you on other media talking about how, in fact, the USSR was a good thing, in that it forced Americans to be honest with the rest of the world, in order to win over other countries. We want to hear more about this basically, how did you what what, what put what pushes you in this direction? Why do you have this perspective?
MD
A long time ago, a couple of young German guys got together with some other guys, tailors and shoemakers. And they wrote this pamphlet, and it said that the role of communists in the broad movement differs from the broad movement, in general, in only two ways: One is in struggles to the present, they represent the future and in struggle to the local or the national, they represent the global working class as a whole. And I've always taken this is kind of the first commandment laid down from whatever garret they were writing this in.
The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, and also the United Nations World Food project have been warning since the end of last summer and certainly through the fall that 2020 might have the largest starvation crisis since the Second World War. 235 million people will face huge food shortages and there's potential here for people that start dying and the rate of 30,000 people or more a day. Now that's been out there like I said since the beginning Democratic primary debates.It was never brought up nothing about world poverty or inequality was bought up.
AL
Why do you think that this though? Why is this global perspective lacking?
MD
Well, I think there's political calculation even amongst people we do believe in and admire like Bernie Sanders to not get out and get involved in international stuff, because his strong suit is running on you know, domestic New Deal. But then again, you don't expect the candidates to do this. You expect the people who support the candidates, the organized through some movements, to light the fire under their feet and to be tribunes of the working class and poor people everywhere at a time when so many hundreds of millions of people are refugees, victims of war, farmers and others faced with famine.
We need to accurately conceptualize what what's going on here. It isn't just a disease outbreak that's so serious in which we've been so unprepared and now we have a recession as well. This is a snowballing event and we're in a new historical epoch, just as we are in a new geological epoch, and we'll see more emergent diseases, we'll see more natural disasters. And as we're seeing now we're seeing how global warming is a threat to human health first, and above all, because of its threat to food security.
Everybody agrees and has agreed for years, the need to increase the food output output of the planet by 50% to accommodate the population coming in 20 years. That's not happening in Africa, where the need for increased agricultural productivity is the greatest - the population grows two and a half percent a year. And the latest estimate is that the GDP of sub Saharan Africa as a whole will decline by least 5%. That may not seem a big figure, but it's a catastrophic figure, in fact.
I tried to warn in the past that based on the 1918–1919 experience, the Spanish flu, almost all the attention has been placed on what happened in North American Western Europe. And the fact that it seemed to select healthy young young adult soldiers and trenches and young nurses and so on. But in fact, 50 to 60% of the mortality occurred in India among famished people.
You look at it, and right now we have all the structures of callousness and emotional distances, to allow our governments to simply abandon a big part of the world. Now, ironically was different during the Cold War because there wasn't a single, single little island anywhere that wasn't valuable property, so both sides had to pretend that they stood for the emancipation of humanity and modernism, you know, five year plans. But once the Cold War died, part of humanity just became politically dispensable to the superpowers at the same time to global capitalism, their labor became unnecessary. And of course, the majority of the workforces in all the major cities of Africa and in most countries in South America exists in this sector called the informal sector, which is basically a euphemism for structural unemployment and people earning subsistence by various kinds of activities.
On the horizon if we're willing to look and be realistic about it… genocide is on the on the horizon and we're heading in that direction. That's why I was so fervent on this question of internationalism and unifying with anybody who understands the problem in those terms, and as far as I can see amongst world leaders, only two people I can think of are the Dalai Lama and this Argentine soccer fan guy who lives in a big house in Rome.
TK
On that note, speaking of the Cold War, how are you thinking about our alignment with China right now? Obviously, it's become a sort of subject of demonization on the campaign and through this pandemic.
MD
The yellow peril is back. Big time. And the problem is that it suits both Trump and Xi to appeal to extreme nationalism. Xi faces incredible contradictions at home. I mean, look at the decline in exports. China has been attempting for 20 years to wean itself away from relying on exports or relying on giant infrastructural investments and hasn't been able to do it. It now has the mother of all debt bubbles. And unlike 2008, when Chinese stimulus led the world economy out of the bottom of the recession that's virtually impossible today.
I've written very often pointing to the fact that the world described Karl Marx's capital is most true. In China. This is most enormous working class in world history. People are militant, you know, given, given the chance. But at the same time that survival in the contemporary rule depends on cooperation between China and the United States, to meet emergencies in the global south and above all in science. I mean, this story is about the Chinese covering everything up. Well, the leadership and Hubei and Wuhan covered their tracks, but the scientific leadership is, you know, has been absolutely stellar and in many ways, particularly in communicating all this stuff.
There's absolutely no reason why we can't be in total solidarity with democracy protesters and you know, workers in the poor in China, but at the same time realize how utterly dangerous stupid and inherently racist all this is and the Democrats are buying into it. Biden buys into it. Biden's gonna be telling you how he's tougher in China than Trump.
AL
Listening to you talk about how Corona will wind up being a sort of de facto genocide in the south really reminds me -- I read your Late Victorian Holocaust years ago and also your broader point that China today looks a lot like Karl Marx's 19th century… This seems like it's a theme in your work that the world that we live in today seems to be a return to the 19th century, and that the 20th century Cold War in the middle was the real kind of aberration. But if we were to map capitalism as a whole, the mid 19th century in the 21st century, they kind of constitute the majority of its history, right? And this 20th century, golden age of wealth --Rooseveltian state welfare -- is the exception. I mean, is that a fair characterization of, of your arguments or your work?
MD
Marx himself did not believe that parliamentary democracy was the default state condition of European and North American capitalism. Capitalism in its periods of greatest energy - the greatest transformation and the technical conditions of production - has always been driven by labor uprising exposed strong labor movement. It's always, “why not have the workers work 16 hours a day, right? And don't worry, just sit back and watch the money flow in?”
But the workers go on strike and they win, as British working class fit in the 1850s, the 10 hour day. Suddenly you think oh my god, it's time to invest in new machines. I heard there's an inventor named Arkwright somewhere, let's buy him. What I'm saying is that inherent in capitalism itself, the imperative to improve and advance the forces production only partially lies in competition between groups and capitalists. They also find it convenient just to make deals with each other. But the really driving force behind the increase in productivity and the application of science to the economy has been the power of the labor movement.
This is something Keynes looked at as well. The natural tendency for capitalists just to become rentiers. Big Pharma today does very little research and development anymore. Innovation comes from small companies, and they'll buy them up for their product or if the product competes with theirs,they'll buy them up and then close them down. They just have their patents and they collect rents, from their, their patents and put all their money. into advertising into political corruption.
2008 led to something very strange in that disconnected power, for instance, in Washington, from the very largest banks and corporations. Look who’s power now. I call them the small billionaires who, my friend calls them the Lumpen Capitalists. I wrote something recently about Cleveland, Tennessee. What is Cleveland, Tennessee? It is kind of the Trumpian utopia. It's this small industrial town, northwest of Chattanooga. And it has a lot of non-union, small factories and the two richest men in town. Who are they? Well, one guy owns the second biggest nursing home chain in the country, including the one in Kirkland, Washington.
The other richest guy in town owns the second largest payday credit chain, you know, where, you know, he'll cash your check, and then lend us some money on top of it, but comes the next week, you can’t meet it and you'll owe more. And in a month or so, you become slave to this guy. And it struck me that this is an absolute microcosm of who holds political power right now is regional small time super exploitative. capitalists like the DeVoses in Michigan, and so on.
AL
So when I hear you talk about that, like I signed the historian of the group, I am also I read capital and I try to think is this the world that we live in today and there are similarities but you've read capitals, you read about the 19th century. It's all about innovation, about large factories, people working together on the shop floor, but it Your own work. You've described how we, we have the top crisis in the world today that there are fewer jobs than ever before, which has produced this thing we know as contingent labor, the precarious labor. And it seems like rather than innovation, capitalists just invest in rent - rentierism as you've just been describing. How do we square this 21st century world, with the 19th century world that Marx came up with, and I know that's something you wrote about in the book you published last year...
MD
Well, it's a world driven by the imperative of using up in exploiting all the good things of the earth in your lifetime and not leaving anything behind. It's a scorched earth mentality. And I'd argue that capital, in its current form is a threat to human survival in four ways.
First, it cannot guarantee food security to carry out the revolution needed to feed the world button, mid century agricultural futures markets and multinational companies have become threats to food security.
Secondly, it can't decarbonize the world economy, or what to me is equally important is mitigation: It cannot and won't supply any of the funds to allow poor countries - which are directly in the headlights of climate change, but played very little role in creating it - to adapt to the threats of climate change in terms of sea levels, their agricultural systems, or irrigation.
Third, capitalism doesn't create jobs anymore outside of East Asian, and it doesn't provide people with any means of income or give them necessary and important social roles in society. I’m not one of these right-to-be-lazy people... Work is one of the fundamental ways we're socialized. It’s an absolute necessity to people and right now we live in a world where it's technologically possible to reduce the working day and begin to move toward what Marx envisioned as a poly skilled work life.
Finally, the fourth thing is there is an extraordinary revolution in genomics in biological design going on, and the application of artificial intelligence and the ability to design proteins trying to be atomic level. I mean, this is an extraordinary revolution, it's probably comparable in its own way to his several original industrial revolutions. Capitalism cannot translate that into public health for the people in the world.
If I were to add all four of these things together, and I'm kind of old school Marxist way, I'd say that the current form of capitalism is become an absolute fetter on the development of the productive forces needed to ensure human survival and dignity in the 21st century.
AB
Does that mean you're pessimistic that there are these conditions for the working class to organize today? Unlike the 19th, and like the early 20th century?
MD
Well, like we talked about earlier, there's one part of the world where the industrial working class has tremendous potential to kick some ass over the next decades in East Asia.
I wrote this little book Planet of Slums that looked at examples of organization and resistance by people outside the factory floor, whether those are former industrial workers in Argentina, slum dwellers and, you know, Nairobi, look across the world. And of course, the first thing you discovered is that people are incredibly ingenious at finding new sources of power by simply blocking the roads into a city. The real problem is not so much through detachment from the socialized workplace because they have other forms of sociality, it is that an informal economy has basically so few activities by which people survive. Not a rain forest ecosystem, no more like a desert ecosystem. So people are competing in an intense way over scarce jobs, scarce opportunities for shelter and so on. And so what happens is that racial, or ethno-religious organizations insert themselves to control and ration those scarce resources. The only place in the world which hasn't seen that, in a rather amazing extent, is in the Western Hemisphere and Latin America and in the Caribbean. Of course there are racial ethnic conflicts, but nothing comparable to what's going on in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
JK
In your book, you mentioned the Third World Liberation Front. I know that there are students right now who are trying to organize around that sort of idea again. It's very small. It's generally at elite universities. Do you see a potential in the student movement around those ideas around sort of pushing things towards international concerns around this idea of solidarity through third world movements?
MD
Well, I take my leadership here from a guy named Michael Zinzun who died about 10 years ago. He was someone I greatly admired and worked with for years. And he's a former Black Panther who got his eye knocked out by the Pasadena police and then used settlement to set up a cable public access television program to attack the police. There were a couple of us - a couple white and black college people who were active with the group, but basically it was just kids in the community. And he and his wife basically operated a created little miniature ark to ensure kids had food, a place to sleep, tried, tried to get them jobs, and they devoted themselves full time to solidarity with South Africa. The Davis Cup was held in Newport Beach. He jumped in the middle of the tennis court with the banner and got beaten up, but was laughing while he was being beaten up. And it's people like that we need.
We need to organize internationalism, it won’t necessarily grow out of the immediate struggles that were involved in. And frankly, we have to understand multiculturalism as a Janus faced process. On the one hand it's a means of integration and pacification, that on the other hand, it's a question of fighting alliances.
I know an awful lot of people old people like me were active in the 60s, and they will complain endlessly about identity politics and political correctness and I've seen middle class people kind of pimping off of affirmative action instead, to me that that's really trivial. What we're talking about is the equal rights struggle. We need to continue it. We need to acknowledge the fact that it's always, you know, under threat and the importance of people doing what John Steinbeck in a famous passage from Grapes of Wrath talked about. These Okie men pull over and with their families on the side of a road - three or four Model T's worth of people - and they get out and squatting on the side of the road. And one of them's drawing a circle with a stick. And they start talking “Well, I lost my farm” and “I got driven out even the year before you did.” And Steinbeck in this brilliant passage talks about the transformation of my an eye into we and all
I see this because I have four children. Two of them are Irish. My oldest, Roisin, is in Belfast, right now. Born in Belfast comes from West Belfast. So she and her brother are not Americans by any stretch of the imagination. But my two younger kids in their junior year in San Diego High School. They run with this incredible crowd, both of them that the crowds are different: My daughter's more into performance and music concert... my son runs with… the brown STEM saga as they call themselves. I think altogether they have one white friend, but they're just a Wild Bunch all Mexican kids, except for mine are sons and daughters of recent immigrants, poor black kids, a Somali girl and my daughter particularly is ferocious. She's constantly getting suspended in trouble with the cops on campus because she sees blatant racism constantly on the San Diego High School campuses. She goes to an inner city high school that's internally divided into these different programs. Their consciousness of themselves, their unity also their their sexual and gender politics are just extraordinary to me.
This is a fantastic generation of kids. The millennials are getting hit with sledgehammers right now, the Generation Y or whatever they call, are even worse off. They're going out into the coldest night in a way in American history for a generation, with the least prospects, the most apocalyptic scenarios to look forward to. And the imperative is to help them organize themselves as activists. People can say that socialism, or go about the proletariat this or that. But unless you're willing to help create organizations that young workers can join and you know, and can help lead
Let's be honest, lots of people get very radical when they're in college for a while. And then they move on and they probably stay liberal, you know, even radical, but they move on into careers to start worrying about, “How am I going to get my kid into Harvard? I know she's only four years old, but we really spent thinking that I don't want to send my kid to public school, we need to go to that charter school or magnet school or something like that.”
We need an organization of young fighters similar to what the Black Panthers and other groups were in this 60s, similar to what the communists like was the 1920s.
TK
Over the past decade or so, I've noticed a lot of friends who have been involved in a lot of work are turning their attention to housing, and think of the unemployed and the unhoused as a site for the kind of organizing We've historically thought about more as lying with workers. I'm curious what you think about that, you know, given this kind of wave of rent strikes, and obviously the crisis of housing and homelessness we've seen over the past decade or 15 years.
MD
As the system regresses back to the 19th century, we also regress to some of the finest moments in American working class history like rent strikes, like the fact that people back then fought evictions tooth and nail when a result came out and threw stones at the the marshals. People should not underestimate people's anger or what a positive thing that can be.
But people ask me a lot about gentrification and my position is look, you can't do anything about it until you look at the private market and land. Henry George from San Francisco, the newspaper man who became the most popular radical social thinker in the English speaking world in late 19th century was totally right about the rentier class and private ownership of land. Fix your neighborhood up your inner city neighborhood and it will soon be on the sales block. A young group of starving artists wave into a warehouse and turn it into an exciting neighborhood… you're gone.
I mean, in terms of immediate struggles, rent strikes are so important because they depend on neighborhood organization and neighbors and support from people's unions.
But in terms of what we tell people the solutions are, we need to be frank about it. We need public housing. Just like we need public employment. That's the only place a good jobs going to come from and seeing these things right now, just like Bernie's warmed-up version of Roosevelt's 1944 platform is no longer reformist. It has a it has a partially revolutionary dynamic to it. It's far more like what Trotsky saying that transitional demand is one that is necessary and urgent for people. It doesn't directly call for socialism. But in fact, it's a reform, it's impossible in the present balances of forces. So in fighting for it, you're driven beyond the usual limits of reform struggles. That was the exciting thing about Bernie's campaign.
In 1948, when Truman was running, much of the same demands were in the Truman program, and they seem perfectly accomplishable at the time. But in the world we live in these demands correspond to people's deepest needs to the crisis in their lives, but at the same time, they reach beyond the limits. And now we're in a period where on one hand, we have to fight through those kinds of demands, but the solutions can only be through things that really raise the question of private property and public ownership. So I was very excited when Elizabeth Warren proposed the public production of prescription medicines. And I know a lot of people on the left don't think she's a radical, just a spoiler or something. But she's often been absolutely to the left of Bernie. She proposed a wealth tax. Not an income tax. Wealth tax is far more radical, like public production of medicine small more radical than a plan to force drug companies to reduce the price of medicine. We see right now. People are dying, because we've left those drugs up to big pharma which has failed to produce them.
One of the most interesting documents and run up to the pandemic was in September of last year, when Trump's economic Council of Economic Advisers issued a report on pandemics and they pointed out in impeccable logic why it was impossible for the big good drug companies to make the vaccines, lifelines, antivirals and antibiotics that were necessary.
In other countries, it may be that the result of the pandemic is to blow wind in the sails of the Neo Nazi right of the far right But in the United States potential on the left is gigantic. I mean, it really is as long as we don't march to the tune of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.