Ice shelves larger than the largest U.S. states collapse, and barely make headlines. Imperial powers return to brinksmanship and open conflict, and our politicians assure us they are ready and willing to build more charnel houses. Plague floats like a film over our collective future, and we’re asked to face it with a stiff upper lip for the sake of the Economy. And these are just the most recent of the festering horrors to grow from capitalism and threaten the very existence of humanity.

As the profit system has spawned disaster after disaster, few analysts, pundits, or commentators can claim to have addressed the mounting number of catastrophes with as much insight or clarity as Mike Davis. And none have combined his unflinching honesty with an unwavering commitment to the necessity of a revolutionary break from our entire social system. From his magisterial City of Quartz, to the more recent The Monster Enters, Davis has been cataloging and raging against capitalism’s slow burning (though rapidly accelerating) apocalypse(s) in his invaluable books for decades. He will join our Salvage Live hosts, Annie Olaloku-Teriba and Richard Seymour, for an urgent discussion of the crises we face, and what it means to confront them with eyes open and desolation in our hearts.

Speakers:

Mike Davis is professor emeritus of creative writing at UC Riverside. He joined the San Diego chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1962 at age 16 and the struggle for racial and social equality has remained the lodestar of his life. His City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles challenged reigning celebrations of the city from the perspectives of its lost radical past and insurrectionary future. His wide-ranging work has married science, archival research, personal experience, and creative writing with razor-sharp critiques of empires and ruling classes.

Annie Olaloku-Teriba is a writer and podcaster whose research focuses on how neoliberalism has transformed the theory and practice of ‘race.’

Richard Seymour is a writer and broadcaster from Northern Ireland and the author of numerous books about politics including Against Austerity and Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics. His writing appears in The New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, Prospect, Jacobin, and innumerable other places including his own Patreon. He is an editor at Salvage magazine.

This event is co-sponsored by Haymarket Books and Salvage.