Mike Davis, the Trucker and Meatcutter Turned Marxist Legend

Hello!

We’re extremely excited about today’s episode, which includes a lengthy interview with Mike Davis, a friend of the international working class and the author of works such as Prisoners of the American Dream, City of Quartz, and Planet of Slums. We talk about “this moment,” and the need for dissent, street protest and the refusal of the false choice laid out in front of working people between risking their health and complete financial ruin. He also tells us about his rock collection.

Mike has been writing and giving a lot of interviews during the pandemic, as many have discovered his prophetic 2005 book, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. And earlier this year, Mike and his friend, Jon Wiener, published Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, a stunning history of social movements—led by black, Chicano, and Asian Angelenos—that reads like a playbook for organizing against our terrible present. 

1:20 - Mike describes his holed-up multigenerational homelife in San Diego—with his wife, the curator and professor Alessandra Montezuma, twin high-schoolers, and Alessandra’s aunt. Also: why working-class leftists should protest the false choice of lockdown or death; and why Biden should be more like AOC. “We cannot yield the street,” Mike tells us.

18:08 - Central to the US Covid response has been the literal sacrifice of elders and disabled people in nursing homes. Mike tells us why this constitutes manslaughter, and predicts that Filipino/a health care workers may be among the top casualties of the pandemic. Plus: why food insecurity in Africa, South Asia, and South America should be everyone’s concern. 

35:48 - “The Yellow Peril is back,” Mike says. He talks about Trump’s and Biden’s demonization of China, and their neglect of the risk of nuclear war. And he explains why “the world described in Karl Marx’s Capital is most true in China.” 

55:00 - Mike is still in touch with white working-class pals from 1952 (some of them Trumpers). He describes multiculturalist thinking as “Janus-faced,” but praises young activists, including his twins, for their instinctively radical conceptions of race, class, and gender.

1:08:43 - Can housing organizing be as powerful a vehicle for working-class movements as labor organizing? Mike offers a historical perspective. And a Time to Say Goodbye exclusive: Mike’s extensive rock collection. 

Click here for a transcript of our conversation.

ABOUT US

Time to Say Goodbye is a podcast—with your hosts, Jay Caspian Kang, Tammy Kim, and Andy Liu. We launched this thing because, like you, we’ve been sheltering in place and wanted an outlet for our thoughts on the coronavirus, Asia, geopolitics, and Asian Americans.

A short introduction to your hosts:

Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine and the author of the forthcoming book The Loneliest Americans.

E. Tammy Kim is a magazine reporter, a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, and a retired lawyer. She co-edited the book Punk Ethnography.

Andrew Liu is a historian of modern China. He wrote a book called Tea War, about the history of capitalism in Asia. He remains a huge Supersonics fan.

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