Mike Davis on Elites and New Forms of Struggle

At the Socialism 2009 conference in San Francisco, two of California's best-known radicals, Mike Davis and David Bacon, led a discussion about the causes of the crisis and the struggle ahead. Here, we publish the presentation and concluding statement of Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz, a brilliant social history of Los Angeles, and more recently, the essay collection In Praise of Barbarians.

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I TOOK my 15-year-old son last night to the movies in Berkeley to see the remake of The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. I kept thinking: is this set in Sacramento?

Here you have the governor and his gang of Republicans, and they're holding the people captive and threatening to shoot them one by one unless their demands for budget cuts and a new stage in the Republican fiscal revolution occurs. And then on the other hand, you have the leadership of the Democratic Party in Sacramento, Karen Bass and Darrell Steinberg, and they're saying "Oh, no, no, no, don't shoot all the passengers, just shoot half the passengers."

If you compare--as the California Budget Project has--the governor's proposals for destroying what remains of the social safety net in this state with the Democratic-dominated Budget Conference Committee in the legislature, you come up with the following proposals: the governor wants to eliminate CalWORKS , home support services, healthy families, maternal and child health, domestic violence, rural migrant clinics and poison control.

If these programs are just shut down completely, it would affect a million poor kids, half a million poor families, and doom as many as 400,000 people to the possibility of early death from disease for the lack of access to medical services or home care.

The Democratic response to this has been to say, "Oh no, don't do that--cut these programs by margins of 20 percent to 60 percent."

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