Mike Davis and Disaster Capitalism: Memorial Teach-In [$20 Suggested]

Instructor: Jaime Acosta Gonzalez | Thursday | November 10 | 7:30-9:00 PM ET

The future often seems foreboding, even apocalyptic, and it’s hard to know how to respond. Mike Davis was the rare thinker who provided a roadmap for what is to come. On October 25, 2022, the self-described Marxist Environmentalist passed away from esophageal cancer, but he leaves behind a powerful legacy, which we will explore in this teach-in.

The writings of Mike Davis defy simple categorization. A former truck driver, meat cutter and political activist, his books chronicle episodes of capitalist crisis in the widest possible sense, moving deftly across ecological, economic, political, and social terrains. From the explosion of the L.A. Riots in 1992 to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, Davis has seemingly been one step ahead, projecting the unstable future from the intolerable present, writing about forms of disaster before they fully take shape.

For this teach-in, we will focus on his famous essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” which appears in Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998). This essay contains central themes that stretch across Davis’ entire writing career, including questions of anti-democratic land use, urbanism, economic inequality, and ecological disaster. You can read the essay in advance, or simply join to look at key passages with us and discuss. This teach-in will serve as both an introduction and memorial study for an important thinker.

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