RIP Mike Davis
I talked to Mike Davis almost exactly 9 years ago on October 31, 2013. I wasn’t sure if I still had the audio from the interview. But turns out that I do. So I decided to publish it in honor of his passing.
I used to work as a contributor for the now-defunct Prime Russian Magazine, a vaguely left-wing cultural magazine published in Moscow. I talked to Mike Davis for an issue the magazine was doing on the subject of poverty — and that’s where this interview is from.In it, Davis talks about the evils of micro-financing, praises Islam for banning usury, and laments the failure of the Occupy Wall Street movement (which was still fresh back then) due to lack of any strategic planning. As David said, “politics is depoliticizing people in this country on unimaginable scale.”
The interview starts at about 40 minutes — after an intro where Yasha and I talk about Prime Russian Magazine and the media world in Moscow when things were all positive and happy back in the day.
—Evgenia Kovda
P.S. I did this interview for print so the Skype audio recording isn’t the best quality. But it’s clear enough, so bear with it!
Want to know more? Check out previous episodes of The Russians.
RIP Mike Davis
Thanks Evgenia for resurrecting this interview. Have read a lot by Mike Davis over the last thirty years and had come to really enjoy and respect the wide range of topics he wrote on. Surely not acknowledged enough today, even by the Left. From chronicling the development of the urban hell of Southern California, to a background on influenza epidemics, to a history of the car bomb and much more. One of his least known works is “Late Victorian Holocausts” provides a history of how the deliberate economic policies of western capitalist and imperialist powers greatly exacerbated and intensified famines from Brazil to India at the cost of tens of millions of lives. A good rebuke to those ideologues who constantly focus on the economic policy mistakes of socialist countries which lead to much needless suffering - the Ukrainian famine and Great Leap Forward comes to mind. His intellect and writing will be sorely missed.
RIP Mike Davis; someone over at one of my regular blogs wrote a very stirring obit for him last week.
Is there a time stamp for the part about Occupy Wall Street? I scanned through quickly here at work and also checked the Internet Archive but I couldn't find any direct reference to it.
The only reason I ask is that I literally just had open these two articles at the time your podcast hit my inbox. I've been researching the supposed failure of the Occupy movement and the picture that's emerging is that it was infiltrated and ruined from the "inside" by various LEAs.
https://tomdispatch.com/todd-gitlin-are-intelligence-and-instigation-running-riot/
In which the writer details the level of organized scrutiny being paid to Occupy protesters and movements and also the infiltration. Which of course led to the larger law enforcement apparatus missing the Boston Marathon plot.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/unaware-tsarnaev-warnings-boston-counterterror-unit-tracked-protesters-flna1c9870835