Ghost Dance Against the Silence of Money

A review of Dead Cities & Other Tales by Mike Davis.

‘Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for surveying the past, but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities are buried. Whoever wants to approach his buried past must behave like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.’’ – Walter Benjamin

If there could be one word which could be used to describe Mike Davis’ work it would be that which summarises concisely the Benjamin quote above – excavation. The subtitle of his first book City of Quartz was ‘Excavating the Future in Los Angeles’, and it is this work Davis continues in the new Dead Cities & Other Tales, recently republished by Haymarket Books. Written between 1992 and 2002, and explicitly marketed on the blurb as a continuation of Quartz, the book shows Davis doing what Benjamin describes – returning again and again to the historical past of the US along the Pacific. The book is a series of episodic chapters, essays which lead on into the following chapter in some way or another, but are self-contained in both their object of focus and their writing so that they can be read individually. Covering a variety of subjects, Davis builds a historical constellation of the book’s overall focus – as described in the blurb, ‘the radical contingency of the metropolis.’

Davis unveils two forces which were crucial to how the American city worked in the latter half of the 20th century – finance capital and the military industrial complex. The way these factions of American society have wrought their destructive power upon the lives of the dispossessed & exploited have baked themselves into the very soil of the country. To uncover them is to require precisely that historical excavation, and in doing so, Davis performs the historical materialist’s task, which is to ‘to brush history against the grain.’ Through this effort, he also brings out a tradition of resistance and revolutionary politics which we can learn from today. He begins with the Ghost Dance, a pan-indigenous millenarian movement which sprung up amongst the First Nations after its leader Wovoka saw it in a vision in 1888/89. This and all resistance that followed, as Davis sees it, is a world-ending politics which seeks to put a stop to what the Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca called ‘the cruel silence of money.’

Historically and geographically, Davis starts outside the city. This is partially a critical move to give himself distance from the urban centres he will go on to write about, but also because the violence that birthed the West Coast began in the movement of expansion – in American settler colonialism and the ecological destruction this settler colonialism perpetuates today. In the first few chapters of the book, Davis covers how lands stolen from various Indigenous nations in Nevada would go on to become Nuclear testing grounds, and the cost to biospheres and lives in the area this would entail. In these spaces, considered sacred by the First Nations (Kazakh, Paiute, Shoshone are some of the few Davis mentions), the military industrial complex was developing its technologies and techniques. This settler colonial approach to the land was on a global scale an imperialist approach to life, as Davis turns a harshly critical eye to things like the Allied Bombing campaign of Japan & Europe in WW2, where model cities built in Nevada were used as a means to perfect the death toll from firebombing.

Deciding that practising nuclear warfare in the supposedly barren desert was better than allowing Indigenous people to have their “terra nullius”, the military then turned to private contractors to dispose of the toxic waste. This reliance on private companies to perform public services (a running theme in the book) was an attitude that would prove crucial in determining the route Las Vegas would take in its approach to space: gobbling up land, stealing water and decimating any opportunity for public space whilst impoverishing and segregating its racialised minority workers. If the military saw the desert as a laboratory space, the capitalists in Las Vegas saw land clearing destruction as a means to invest in the creation of further fantasies. Where it hasn’t copied its approach from the military, Las Vegas copied similar approaches to land from Los Angeles. This is but one of the cities covered in the book, alongside LA, San Diego and Hilo. Step by Step, through careful historical investigation, Davis finds himself in the city once more.

The book is split into four parts, each centred around a specific theme – ‘Neon West’, ‘Holy Ghosts’, ‘Riot City’ and ‘Extreme Science’. Each chapter, including the foreword and preface, opens with a picture, whether a photograph or a work of art. The images seemed to be included as an attempt to create a ‘dialectical image’, where the historical analysis of the chapter is halted to a standstill (Benjamin: ‘Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast.’) These images are pregnant with interpretations that can only explode out of the visual record by reading the work. But at the same time, they bring a concrete element to what is written, putting faces and materiality to abstract words. A prime example of this is the photograph Dead Animals #327 (taken by Richard Misrach) which serves as the accompaniment to chapter 2 ‘Ecocide in Malboro County’. A black and white picture of a dead horse buried in dirt and sand looks back at the reader, creating a scene which reminds you of the horse in Picasso’s Guernica. The image is the flashpoint of the essay, and the essay is the deepening of the image’s meaning.

Finance capital in LA was able to make sure they never lost out, even if their plans for creating a new Downtown never came to fruition. Slums like Skid Row and Bunker Hill were cleansed from the face of California, replaced with condos and office buildings. All of this urban redevelopment included, of course, the USA’s signature geographical redlining that condemned Black and (predominantly Latino) communities into certain areas, to absurdly long commutes and to work that Davis describes as ‘peonage’. The next part ‘Riot City’ shows how much of the background for this historical present resulted in the repeated unrest over the years, from the youth riots in Californian cities in the 1950s to the famous Watts rebellion in 1965 to the 1992 Rodney King riots. In particular, Davis highlights how the unrest, created by austere policies towards public sector funding, was then used to justify gutting funding for cities even further, a ‘de facto war against cities’ which ‘has been one of the strategic pillars of modern conservative politics’ (p.245). Successive administrations, from Reagan and Bush to Clinton’s two terms, attacked big cities and the racialised minorities with which they were associated. As Davis puts it:

Washington’s policy towards the city has come to resemble the international politics of debt. In the Reagan-Bush era the big cities have become the domestic equivalent of  an insolvent, criminalised Third World country whose only road to redemption is a combination of militarization and privatisation. (p.245)

The bourgeois need for security has spread out onto the streets, the atomised and alienated space providing ripe ground for the growth of a security state, the workings of which closely mirrors America’s international policy. Césaire’s boomerang: Neo-colonialism as neoliberal domestic policy. It is here that the earlier chapters take on new meaning, the childishly cruel experiments of the American War Machine finding new purpose in the bloated funding of the police force in the metropolis. Descriptions of the US Armed Forces re-creating German and Japanese urban environments to find out how best to destroy them and the civilians living inside them haunt the ongoing battle to prevent Cop City in Georgia, Atlanta. The mockery and contempt with which racial capitalism treats the lives of those it is always attempting to erase and subjugate can be heard in every detail of how the city is constructed. Streets speak to the urban wanderer in a different language: no longer does the flaneur encounter the snapping of dry twigs, but rather the clicking of the security camera, the roar of the bomb, the hiss of the gas chamber. 

In the same way western countries shift the blame and cost of pollution to the global south nations which produce for them, cities export their problems elsewhere in the state or country, and likewise import the base for their sustenance. Davis argues that understanding ‘the city-nature dialectic’ is crucial for dealing with the problems of urban ecology. To do this, he looks at ‘Dead Cities’, a term which refers to marginalised and abandoned urban environments. By carefully examining the literature and history, it helps us to understand the city’s historical place and find ways to oppose racial capitalism within that space without falling into eco-fascism. The refusal to see cities as an ecological space and instead simply as sites for profit, has led to things such as firestorms, rodent overpopulation and the spread of HIV as municipal services which could have dealt with these issues have been cut on the advice of capitalist think tanks such as the RAND institute. 

The question then remains: how are we to resist these catastrophes, or to make our own apocalypse, the undoing of the racial capitalist world order? Answers are provided throughout the book. Davis’s counter-history of the city covers not only the destructive consequences of urban and ecological policy, but the people who felt those consequences. The first few chapters are devoted to the resistance waged against capitalist destruction by the First Nations, Hawaiian workers and environmental activists. We move on to how broad coalitions banded together to fight settler colonialism. Bus users formed their own union to protest the gutting of public transport. Youths both black and white revolted against post-war order. Pentecostal movements crystallised class and anti-racist consciousness amongst the LA working classes. Gangs negotiated truces and dealt with civil unrest where governments failed. Much of the focus is on those workers and people who have fallen through the widening cracks of American society. The multiplicity and particular forms of revolution are clear from the very first chapter. 

While some Marxists refuse to engage with any decolonial, indigenous praxis on its own terms, in ‘White People Are Only A Bad Dream’ Davis provides a refreshing humility and open-mindedness, seeing Wovoka’s (Pauite prophet) Ghost Dance as ‘the moral stamina to outlast this great mirage.’ The indigenous people who took up the Ghost Dance were aware of the truth that Davis excavates in the book: that if the city is contingent, then so too is the civilization that created it. One indigenous activist puts a question to Davis: ‘Do you really think all this can last?’ (p.30) The West cannot live forever, capitalism will die. As Davis puts it:

An apocalypse is literally the revelation of the Secret History of the world as becomes possible under the terrible clarity of the Last Days. It is the alternate, despised history of the subaltern classes, the defeated peoples, the extinct cultures. (pp. 30-31)

The catastrophe is coming. What remains for us, Davis prophecises, is to decide what catastrophe it will be: the world becoming Los Angeles, the end of human life and many of the planet’s ecosystems, or the end of capitalism, a destructive point of renewal and creativity for the wretched of the earth. When Western imperialism shuts down city spaces used for protest against the Israeli state, when that settler colonial outpost seeks to flatten Gaza and now is turning on the rest of the region to wreak its destruction, when fossil fuel companies seem to have every government on earth captured by its accumulation drive, this kind of work and message is needed now more than ever.