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Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx's Lost Theory
Audio Book
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Publisher: Tantor
Published: Apr 28 2026
Language: English
Marx has returned, but which Marx? Recent biographies have proclaimed him to be an emphatically nineteenth-century figure, but in this book, Mike Davis's first directly about Marx and Marxism, a thinker comes to light who speaks to the present as much as the past. In a series of searching, propulsive essays, Davis, the bestselling author of City of Quartz and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, explores Marx's inquiries into two key questions of our time: Who can lead a revolutionary transformation of society? And what is the cause--and solution--of the planetary environmental crisis?
Davis consults a vast archive of labor history to illuminate new aspects of Marx's theoretical texts and political journalism. He offers a lost Marx, whose analyzes of historical agency, nationalism, and the middle landscape of class struggle are crucial to the renewal of revolutionary thought in our darkening age. Davis presents a critique of the current fetishism of the anthropocene, which suppresses the links between the global employment crisis and capitalism's failure to ensure human survival in a more extreme climate. In a finale, Old Gods, New Enigmas looks backward to the great forgotten debates on alternative socialist urbanism (1880-1934) to find the conceptual keys to a universal high quality of life in a sustainable environment.
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