Reshaping the US Left: Popular Struggles in the 1980s

by Mike Davis, Michael Sprinker

This volume is the first account of the lesser-known side of the Reagan the unexpected resurgence of the popular left across the United States. It challenges political conservatism and individualism, showcasing a vibrant range of community-based oppositions and subcultures. The book brings together various experiences in a shared perspective, detailing radical struggles like Central America solidarity campaigns, the Sanctuary movement, the 'Freeze', women's peace movements, and eco-socialism. It also examines key labor struggles like P-9, Watsonville, and GM Van Nuys, and compares them with Canadian labor's resistance against the New Right. Finally, it reevaluates the language of class in American history and provides fresh insights on racism and the representation of the white working class.

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Mike Davis was a titan of radical scholarship, a "Marxist-Environmentalist" whose work redefined urban theory and California history. Born in Fontana and raised in the working-class community of Bostonia, Davis was shaped by the rugged landscape of San Diego’s East County and the visceral realities of class struggle. His "burning bush" moment occurred in 1962 during a CORE demonstration, propelling him into a life of activism. He became a key organizer for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), coordinating anti-Apartheid sit-ins and draft resistance while befriending lifelong mentors like Levi Kingston.
Before entering academia, Davis lived a quintessentially proletarian life as a meat cutter and long-haul truck driver. This "on-the-ground" perspective fueled his most influential work, City of Quartz (1990), which stripped away the sun-drenched myths of Los Angeles to reveal a fortress-like city defined by surveillance, police brutality, and spatial apartheid. He followed this with Late Victorian Holocausts, a harrowing examination of how colonial policy and El Niño weather patterns collaborated to create famines that killed millions, framing these "natural" disasters as products of global capitalism.
Davis was a master of prose, blending rigorous historical research with an apocalyptic sensibility that critics sometimes labeled "masculinist" or "overly bleak." Despite controversies regarding his journalistic "scene-setting," his insights into "the ecology of fear" and the "monster" of global pandemics proved prescient. A MacArthur "Genius" Fellow and Distinguished Professor at UC Riverside, he remained a defiant socialist until his death from esophageal cancer. He spent his final months "extraordinarily furious," regretting only that he could not die on a barricade. He is remembered as the primary cartographer of the "American Dream’s" dark underbelly.