Old Gods New Enigmas is the highly-anticipated book by the best-selling author of City of
Quartz and Planet of Slums . Mike Davis spent years working blue collar jobs and sitting behind
the wheel of an eighteen wheeler before his profile as one of the world’s leading urbanists
emerged with the publication of his sober if dystopian survey of Los Angeles. Since then he’s
developed a reputation not only for his caustic analysis of ecological catastrophe and colonial
history but as a stylist without peer. Old Gods New Enigmas is Davis’s book-length
engagement with Karl Marx marking the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth and exploring Davis’s
thinking on history labor capitalism and revolution – themes ever present the early work
from this leading radical thinker. This will be his first book on Marxism itself. In a time of
ubiquitous disgust with political and economic elites explores the question of revolutionary
agency—what social forces and conditions do we need to transform the current order?—and the
situation of the world’s working classes from the US to Europe to China. Even the most
preliminary tasks are daunting. A new theory of revolution needs to return to the big issues in
classical socialist thought such as clarifying "proletarian agency" before turning to the
urgent questions of our time: global warming the social and economic gutting of the rustbelt
and the city’s demographic eclipse of the countryside. What does revolution look like after the
end of history?
