Mike Davis. Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory

Mike Davis. Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory. (London and New York: Verso, 2018). 294 pp. $26.95 / £17.99.

To say that the second centenary of Karl Marx’s birth arrived at an opportune moment would be an understatement bordering upon cruelty. Our conjuncture unites the accelerating horror of capitalism’s immanent destructiveness—seen only most explicitly as climate crisis and die-off—with the hope of the only social formation (eco-enhanced, of course, and now notably female-driven) that might impede and transcend it. Even as carbon warnings exponentially worsen, socialism has seen an explosive public presence that many describe as having had no precedent since the early 20^th century. A mass, multiform return to Marx is inevitable and essential.

In Old Gods, New Enigmas, Mike Davis seeks to reconstruct Marx as a man who “saw far beyond the horizon of his century” (xiv) and whose theoretical and political efforts collectively comprise the single best possible toolbox for our rescue and emancipation. Because, however, medical and fiscal misery bullied Marx’s petite-bourgeois London life, curtailing the realization of many facets of his omnivorous intellect, a full-bodied application of Marxism to our situation remains difficult. Might this be the problem to which Davis’s subtitle, Marx’s Lost Theory—“lost” as in omitted, forgotten, or discarded—alludes? Hard to say. As a fusion of a long original chapter (comprising two-thirds of the volume) and three previously published NLR essays, the book turns from wide-ranging “Notes of Revolutionary Agency” to the challenge of climate change, but without, unfortunately, articulating the relationship between restorative ecological redemption and Marx’s output.

Indeed, on a specific point of strategy central to Davis’s work—rebuilding our growing cities, “the ground zero of convergence” where not just demographics but also “the consistent affinity between social and environmental justice” beckon us—the author acknowledges

the blind spots and misdirections in the collaboration of Marx and Engels. The former, for instance, never wrote a single word [Davis’s emphasis] about cities, and his passionate interests in ethnography, geology, and mathematics were never matched by a comparable concern with geography (later the forte of anarchists such as Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin). (xiv)

Davis’s hyperbole is unfortunate. John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology summarizes the richness of Marx’s ideas on the “metabolic rift,” an organic saturation/depletion feedback loop resulting from nineteenth-century urbanization, when feeding and housing industrial workers meant dead rivers and transnational guano wars. Contra Davis, Bellamy Foster quotes Capital 3 directly: “In London… they can do nothing better with the excrement produced by 4 ½ million people than pollute the Thames with it, at monstrous expense” (163).

For all that, Marx the Polymath is not, in the end, the book’s charge. Nor should it be. Whether or not Marx theorized capitalist ecology to Davis’s satisfaction, any negative assessment of his œuvre rests on the sandy conception that a single human being could exercise supremacy in all fields. (Indeed, when placed in Davis’s own framework of a two-man “collaboration,” the work of “Marx” expands greatly when we factor in Engels’s contributions on urban sociology, anthropology, and gender.) More to the point, any of Marx’s thoughts on urban life could not have anticipated the city’s importance, for Davis, in the specific context of the greenhouse effect.

The obvious strength of Old Gods is the first chapter, “something like a historical sociology of how the Western working classes acquired consciousness and power” (xviii). Its historical breadth (1838–1921), punchy organization, and streetwise angle of vision would make it an excellent, pocket-ready primer for historicized militant organizing (think a Benjaminian ABCs of Socialism)—were it not, that is, so arbitrarily positioned among the other chapters. So that emphasis falls upon the book’s assets, let’s consider them in reverse order.

Published initially in 2010, “Who Will Build the Ark?” can only suffer, unjustly, from failing entirely to predict the future. Its pessimistic prognostication about, say, the global capacity of renewable energy relies upon 2008 data that assigned it at 1%, whereas current IEA reports predict that electricity-sector renewables could provide almost 30% of demand in 2023. Perhaps more important, the shocking stasis that confronted Davis a decade ago has shattered. Rejection of climate science has plummeted in the USA now that its president and his unctuous courtiers have so insistently aligned denial with the crudest extractive, business-friendly mantras. More important still, the growing global student strike with Greta Thunberg at its head puts into stark generational opposition existential militancy and the moral bankruptcy and logistical ineptitude of nations and their international governing bodies. Mocking the neoliberal credo of hope, progress, and profitability, the new provocateurs’ devastating précis is that exam prep and self-betterment are fools’ errands in the face of biospheric implosion. Only a wish at the time, the “call to the barricades” invoked on the last page of Old Gods has been uttered, and a list of enemies (among them the Deadbeat Dads of Davos) written up—even if not always adequately identified as capitalists.

Chapter 3, “The Coming Desert: Kropotkin, Mars, and the Pulse of Asia” (published in 2016), performs an insightful intellectual history, prefatory to the fourth “Ark” chapter, supporting the established argument that global warming derives from relatively recent, socially complex human systems, not from cycles whose observable impact accumulated incrementally: “Climate change, like evolution, was measured in eons, not centuries,” by most Victorians (180), and consequently even

Marx and Engels never speculated on the possibility that the natural conditions of production over the past two or three millennia might have been subject to directional evolution or epic fluctuation, or that climate therefore might have its own distinctive history, repeatedly intersecting and overdetermining a succession of different social formations. (185)

By contrast, Kropotkin asserted “a continuity of global climatic dynamics between the end of the Ice Age of modern times” in order to produce a theory of “progressive desiccation” (186, 187) that would usefully anticipate current models.

Chapter 2, “Marx’s Lost Theory: The Politics of Nationalism in 1848” (from 2015), insists that Marx’s sophisticated responses to 1848 constitutes “an incipient political sociology of the middle landscape between the relations of production and the collision of politically organized economic interests” (163). Close attention to texts like the 18^th Brumaire reveals a Marx sensitive to the fields of ideology, representation, and political détours—altogether, the necessary complement to the critique of capitalist production that absorbed the man. As with so many other projects, Marx was most capable of generating “a materialist political theory” (170): limits of time, opportunity, and health—not of inclination or aptitude—opposed him. Davis establishes no link, however, between the nation-state as a political field and a global strategy to mitigate climate change.

Are answers to be found in “Old Gods, New Enigmas,” which I have reserved for last? Davis describes his project in this quasi-narrative, non-Marx-centric “chapter” thus:

I propose, in other words, an idealized, maximum argument—presented in the form of theses, for the traditional working class as the gravedigger of capitalism. Imagine, if you will, the proletariat being asked by the World Spirit for a résumé of its qualifications for the job of Universal Emancipator. (21)

Ending as it does in 1921, this otherwise productive survey yields no historical precedent provided for (again) the formation and deployment of the ecosocialist vanguard. What is sketched, as the foundation for that vanguard, is a heterogenized concept of the Subject of History with a balance-sheet of how strikes and revolutions were previously carried out while attending to how new (or renewed) sites of militancy and cooperation open and aggregate: “The whole class (the formal working class) might be envisaged as a huge power grid, with the [industrial] core as the chief dynamo, generating resistance to capital and leveraging the weak economic power of other sectors” (24)—among them peasants, women-led households, semi-servile labor, artisans.

Davis’s lexical reflex to traditional working class and proletariat draws us, however, toward familiar formulations that privilege Western, masculine, formal wage-labor at the industrial-logistical lynch-pins of capital flow. Any male-skewed apportionment in the taxonomy of the global working class will tumble us into old, fatal errors. Might it be possible to imagine a new “core” equally integral to the social reproduction on which capital flows depend? Pierre Rimbert has recently imagined a revolutionary salariat spearheaded by the female-dominant work sectors that supply “the services that weave together the collective life.” Rimbert then indulges in the retrospective vision of a nationwide strike rooted in households, schools, daycare centers, hospitals, etc., without which few workplaces function. “After five days of chaos, the government capitulated.”¹

Aware himself that white “patriarchy was the true Achilles’ heel of the labor movement” (51), Davis duly recollects in his Theses (if only up to the early Soviet experiment) women’s underappreciated and untapped economic muscle in those same vital, intimate spheres of activity. Women led rent strikes and bread riots and made up a major part of the Western workforce as the bourgeoisie’s domestic servants. Perhaps, then, Marx’s “Lost Theory” should be understood as the space to be filled by all that we have come to conceive about the Subject of History but that the Moor was unable to canonize.

Carl Grey Martin
Norwich University
Northfield, VT
cmartin7@norwich.edu