Jacobin Radio: Remembering Mike Davis (Part 1)

We pay tribute to Mike Davis, who died on October 25. Mike was a prolific writer, historian, political activist, urban theorist, and author of dozens of books. There has been an avalanche of tributes and obituaries, a testament to Mike’s powerful and distinctive influence, his generosity, his tireless life as a fighter against everything that diminishes human dignity and ravages the planet. He was also a dear friend and a friend of this podcast: I counted at least 30 interviews with him over the years.

We'll hear from those conversations: first, a 2005 interview just a week after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast; and then, two interviews, a decade apart, on the intensifying California wildfires and his famous argument for “letting Malibu burn.” Finally, we round out this podcast episode with an interview with Mike from March 22, 2020, just at the beginning of the COVID lockdown. Fifteen years earlier, his book The Monster at Our Door warned of a coming global threat of viral catastrophe. In this interview, Mike considered the coronavirus pandemic as the familiar monster now at our door, a biological crisis that poses huge challenges for neoliberal global capitalism. Mike called it a "medical Katrina," one that exposes the woeful unpreparedness of our disinvested public health system as well as the stark class divide of health care in the US.

Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman features conversations with leading thinkers and activists, with a focus on labor, the economy, protest movements.