Against Confusion: Mike Davis’s Storytelling as Political Clarity

To the disappointment of my closest companions, I never tire of the opening lines of Mike Davis's Planet of Slums. In fact, I try casting bardic inspiration on my students every semester by reading the opening lines aloud to them with as much gusto as I can muster, hoping my enthusiasm will infect them with the desire to read the whole book closely. Here's what the opening lines say:

This sentence is remarkable because it is both vague and particular. While we have learned something about three people, it tells us neither the names nor any uniquely identifying features. That is because these three people are fictionalized prototypes: each one is a stand-in for hundreds of thousands of people like them. This description of these three people is both evocative and yet nondescript. Davis continues: "The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed."2 See, nobody noticed, so it makes sense that you missed it too. So then why is Davis telling us about these people? As it turns out, these everyday events — giving birth in a slum, individuals moving from a village to a city, or farmers becoming poor and leaving their land —  are not so everyday. Together they constitute a world historical transformation: "Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history, comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions."3And there is the punchline: it turns out those three nameless fictionalized people have the exact same historical significance as: a.) entrepreneurial cavemen who created the stone tools that enabled the agricultural revolution which allowed permanent human settlements; and b.) Eli Whitney, whose cotton gin undergirded mass production, proletarianization, and industrial capitalism. Amazing, right? Davis has managed to capture the everydayness and paradoxically render spectacular this watershed moment when for the first time in the history of our planet, humanity is more urban than rural and it is everyday people who make it so, in spite of the fact that they didn't invent iron tools nor the cotton gin.

The remainder of Planet of Slums is a book relentless in its simultaneous insistence on a "global" birds-eye view and brutal ground-level details. Pulling off that kind of dual-scale analysis and description takes much more than a crafty story teller, a title Davis can already claim.4 Page after page, chapter after chapter, we learn of the macro-dynamics that constitute the "watershed" event in human history while also coming down to a ground-level perspective and observing the very concrete and particular ways specific people are agents and victims of capitalist greed and exploitation.

Davis has been lauded for numerous of his talents: he is a phenomenal story teller, an activist, and even possesses an uncanny ability to predict the future. But what is most remarkable to me is his simultaneous breadth and depth of learning. Can you believe that Ecology of Fear was published just three years before Late Victorian Holocausts? What does it mean to have pulled that off; how did he do it? The first book is about contemporary Los Angeles and steeped in American urbanism, policing, media, and environmental decay. The second book is about the British Empire in nineteenth-century India. Each book alone would have required immense study, along with an intuition for the complex workings of  power. Each book requires the courage to risk disappointing specialists in each subject. To do these things for two books about two totally different periods and places is almost unbelievable.

Being a historian of colonial India, Planet of Slums and Late Victorian Holocausts  have had the biggest influence on my work. Every time I read or teach these books, I am struck by how exceptional Davis is as an American thinker. Davis doesn't suspend the analysis of class and power that informs his work on American history when writing about other places. Instead, dynamics in colonial and postcolonial India are subject to the same ground-level class analysis he has perfected for LA for instance,  not driven by an engulfing west-on-rest power. As a result, Davis manages to reveal as worthy of criticism the class politics driving social life in places he may have never been. This aspect of his work has been most important to my own thinking about the concrete way in which imperial power works, down to a ground-level reality that cannot be glossed over simply by describing the evils of the ruling party or glossing relations as "imperial" without asking what imperial means in a specific time and place.

Capitalist and class dynamics drive social life across city and country in colonial and postcolonial India — an idea that was clarified for me in both Late Victorian Holocausts and Planet of Slums. It is hard to forget the evocative images in Late Victorian Holocausts of starving coolies loading up grain for their colonial and native masters in the ports of Bombay or Calcutta onto ships headed elsewhere, while they dropped dead like hungry flies due to the callousness of the state. Or the images of petty landlordism constructed in the slums of Nairobi or Rio when slum dwellers aspire to become slumlords over fellow slum-dwellers. As Davis states, "landlordism is a fundamental and divisive social condition."5 Rather than ally with each other against city governments and developers who have colluded against them, working class urban residents across the Global South sometimes recreate capitalism at the very bottom of the social ladder.

There is no doubt that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are to blame for "SAPing the Third World," as Davis has termed the imposition of structural adjustment programs on poor countries.6 Global institutions did push policies that demanded states withdraw any semblance of welfarism: abandon agricultural subsidies (despite the fact that United States subsidizes its agriculture), cut back drastically on health care and education spending, and scale back government agencies so that even ex-bureaucrats became informal slum-dwellers. Rather than "developing" and shrinking world poverty, the IMF and World Bank have presided over a staggering rise in it, with over 1 billion people more entering into poverty since the 1980s. As documented by scholars like Jason Hickel, this has been cleverly hidden by the World Bank, which changed its goalposts in the 1990s so that, through a mathematical sleight of hand, it would seem as though poverty had been reduced. Sadly, far too many media outlets, and of course the World Bank's own media team, have repeated this falsity again and again so that many mistakenly believe poverty has fallen in the past few decades.7

Yet, in Davis's telling, local agents are not off the hook. We learn in a precisely titled chapter, "Haussman in the Tropics," how postcolonial municipalities, governments, capitalists, developers, police, and planners aim to rid their cities of pollutants, nuisances, political challengers to the status quo, and crime by displacing the working class and poor. Cities of the Global South are being "cleaned up" to attract investments not just during world events like the Olympics or the World Cup, but more regularly for the eyes of global investors and their funds, In this fifth chapter from Planet of Slums, Davis concludes that the problem is, in his words, a "middle-class secession from public space-as well as from any vestige of a shared civic life with the poor." This amounts to a  "'disembedding' of elite activities from local territorial contexts."8 As a result, "Third World urban bourgeoisie cease to be citizens of their own country and become nomads belonging to, and owing allegiance to, a super-terrestrial topography of money; they become patriots of wealth, nationalists of an elusive and golden nowhere."9

Simultaneous with the rise of world poverty, which has become more concentrated in cities than ever before, is the rise of economists' expertise on the matter.10 The way experts harden relations between power and knowledge has been studied rather theoretically by most scholars, often without any attention paid for how this expert knowledge impacts everyday people. But in Davis's hands it is through the eyes of everyday people that we see the damage technocratic expertise does. Davis reminds us that according to the World Bank and other internationalist organizations that advocated for neoliberalism, the 1990s should have been a "Utopian decade." He discusses how the World Bank expected, because of its use of neoclassical theory, that after a decade of structural adjustment, "the pain of adjustment should have been followed by the analgesic of globalization" because the 1990s "were the first decade in which global urban development took place within almost utopian parameters of neoclassical market reform."11  Davis even reproduces the UN report's own admission of defeat:

But none of this was true; structural adjustment, dismantling social welfare, and dropping the floor on Third World peasants and farmers did not open up the market and its opportunities. Instead, "In 46 countries people are poorer today than in 1990. In 25 countries more people are hungry today than a decade ago."13

What precisely makes Davis a great storyteller is his immense political clarity on who has power over whom and what they do with it. As he lives out his final moments, I can't help but hope that everyone who dismissed Davis for decades can now see more clearly how wrong they were. Davis saw much earlier what some of us are only waking up to now. Capitalist greed, ecological destruction, exploitation of the poor, and the de-democratization of political life have all gone hand in hand to produce our pandemic-ridden and increasingly uninhabitable planet, all while the wealthy seek to colonize outer space. Davis saw this coming not because he is a cynical prophet of doom but because he paid immense and close attention to how power works down to the ground level. Indeed, it takes not just the kind of analytical clarity one is supposed to learn in graduate school but a deep human sensitivity to understand how and why people suffer both here and elsewhere, often in the same ways in spite of the fact that "expert" economists regularly tell us that countries of the Global South "are . . . political exceptions."14

I read Davis's Planet of Slums when I was a graduate student — it was assigned in exactly zero of my classes but luckily an outside mentor recommended it to me. I couldn't help but read Late Victorian Holocausts afterwards and have since read numerous of his books. In fact, if I hadn't read Davis when I did, and if it wasn't for his sensitivity in rendering people of my home country so carefully, I would have abandoned graduate school. I came to realize that analytical skills or crafty writerliness can only take a person so far. It was Davis's brutal honesty that woke me up to the political stakes inherent in any analysis, and it is what makes him an excellent storyteller beyond his great technical knowledge of how to string a tale together. Davis used his honesty to teach us not just about decades of American disenfranchisement but of how imperial and local politics combined in the Global South to dispossess millions across the world daily. In doing so, he exemplified a truly international vision of history as class warfare.

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Sheetal Chhabria is a historian of South Asia whose research and teaching focus on the production of poverty and inequality. Her first book, Making the Modern Slum: the Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay (University of Washington Press, 2019), won the American Historical Association's 2020 John F. Richards Prize for South Asian History. Sheetal's current research is focused on the imbrications of caste and capital in the subcontinent's long history and the failures of decolonization.

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