well hello, everyone.
I’ve long promised friends and family that I would make a substack once I hit 500 twitter followers, which happened a while ago, but I think it was mostly bots there for a bit. Thanks, Elon!
It wasn’t until I realized that my procrastination about reviewing the last book that I read was preventing me from finishing the book I’m currently reading that I finally decided to start this here website. Basically, I plan on using this to informally review whatever I finish reading (unless I plan on pitching a review elsewhere) and allow people to pay me if they want. I’ve done this on other websites, most recently my own, but started running out of storage on wordpress and didn’t want to buy more.
I set up the minimum possible payments at every juncture if you choose a paid subscription and am not really expecting anything to come of what I envision being a pretty informal outlet, so really don’t feel any pressure to contribute. I just happen to be between jobs with time on my hands and a desire to write about the books I like so they stick in my own brain a little better.
The title of this blog, Purple Streetlights, comes from a Diane Di Prima poem “APRIL FOOL BIRTHDAY POEM FOR GRANDPA” that she opens her Revolutionary Letters with. In the poem, she promises to turn the streetlights purple in honor of her fellow anarchist, Oscar Wilde.
One last bit of housekeeping before getting to Mike Davis, but I’ll try to always link to books on Pilsen Community Books’ website because they are worker-owned and truly community-oriented, so I try to support their work when possible. If you are moved to buy something I review, I suggest doing so from them.
Now, onto the late, great Mike Davis
Mike Davis - Prisoners of the American Dream (first published by Verso, 1986)
Despite learning of Mike Davis only shortly before his untimely death in 2022, it’s now hard for me to remember a time when his thinking and writing were not so foundational to my own. I drew heavily on his City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear in my master’s thesis and read his essays in just about every class I took in grad school. One of my professors mistakenly introduced me to her colleague as a historian, likely because of the influence of Davis’ historical materialism on my own research interests.
Calling Davis a historian, though, would be to sell his work short. Davis was a political activist first and foremost who wrote from the obvious, but sometimes inconvenient, perspective that our current distribution of resources and the power structures that enable it are untenable. His training in history and Marxism are most frequently used to elucidate particular moments in which, for lack of a better term, things could have gone differently, but didn’t.
Though he’s most well-known for writing about California’s politics and history, Prisoners of the American Dream takes the 1984 presidential election as its main subject. I didn’t know much about that election, other than the unfortunate fact that Reagan won, but Prisoners opens with a chilling anecdote that makes its relevance to our contemporary moment obvious:
“…a television news camera depicted a group of modern Philadelphia workers arguing in their local tavern over the candidates in the 1980 presidential election. Against a background of irreverent catcalls and hisses, one worker tepidly defended Carter as the ‘lesser evil’, while another, with even less ardor, tried to float the idea of a ‘protest’ vote for Reagan.”
That elections would continue to heavily feature protest votes and votes for the “lesser evil” would have been entirely unsurprising to Davis, who wrote in the introduction to the 2018 paperback edition that “US hegemony is not so much ‘declining’, as commonly asserted, as being reshaped around a more unilateral practice of economic and military intervention.”
The decline that most interests Davis is the decline of organized labor’s impact on electoral politics, which he traces from the early 1800s through the ‘84 election. Without making a value judgment, it would be hard to deny that there had been a major decline between the foundation of the first “Labor Party” in the world in 1828 to the precarious position that organized labor found itself in when November 1984 rolled around.
Davis does his best to provide a comprehensive history of everything that happened over that century-plus in the labor movement, arguing that American labor history should be considered on its own, as a distinct entity from European socialist and labor movements. Most compelling to me, however, was his post-mortem on the 1984 Democratic primary.
In Davis’ retelling, Jessie Jackson’s ascent to real political power on the heels of Harold Washington’s mayoral campaign posed an unexpected challenge to the Democratic Party and its existing power structures. Labor and civil rights campaigns in the 40s and 60s created a bureaucratic apparatus that had been able to successfully absorb community organizers and activists before, but Jackson’s campaign presented an ideological challenge to the capitalist, imperialist world order the Democrats increasingly sought to preserve.
Once enough capital, political and literal, aligned to prevent Jackson from winning, Jackson was forced to decide between trying to pull the party left or running as an independent candidate. The progressive movement, as Davis saw it, was dead. “…the conservative ‘revolution’ of the early 1980s was, when finally achieved, the result more of prior exclusion and disorganization of the majority than of its conversion to a new ideological agenda.”
Unfortunately for all of us, this was not a rightward revolution that stopped or even slowed much after the 1980s. Davis knew as much when he wrote, “Into the foreseeable future, the historic agenda of the civil rights movement will become increasingly incompatible with the tendencies of capital accumulation and distribution of political and social power now operative in the U.S.” A recent peek at the Supreme Court docket would seem to confirm as much, with affirmative action, reproductive rights, and sexual liberation all on the chopping block, legislatively speaking. If the court goes through with overturning Chevron, even a truly progressive candidate would be limited in what they could accomplish in the White House.
One doesn’t generally step away from a Mike Davis book feeling optimistic about the state of things, but the silver lining to Prisoners is that its pessimism is confined to electoral politics. Though Davis himself stops short of expressing anything like an endorsement of extra-legal (or maybe sometimes just illegal) political activity, his grim - and exceptionally prescient - prognostication of American politics post-84 leave only one conclusion: whatever gains the progressive movement makes will not come at the ballot box.
Through this lens, the current moment feels less bleak. In the face of Right to Work laws and an impotent NLRB, unions remain popular and have won historic victories in previously, non-unionized sectors. Across the country, academic workers are putting their livelihoods on the line in solidarity with students, staff, and their academic colleagues in protest of the genocide in Gaza. A writers’ strike brought Hollywood to a complete halt for five months last year over the threats that workers face from AI.
People are working collectively in ways that can’t be quantified by things like exit polls, election turnout, or even union membership. Though Davis would likely be alarmed by the lack of electoral enthusiasm in this moment, it also reflects a heightened recognition of one of his core theses in Prisoners - that civil rights are not compatible with American capitalism and the government that exists to protect it. Electoral apathy has just pushed progressivism to other avenues.