A little dense but still good

Just so dense... not bad, but each chapter felt like its own book, so crammed full of information. Written in the midst of the 80s, Davis has much to say about the rise of Reaganism and decline of the labor and civil rights movements. This from the epilogue, though, seems to me one of most critical (and under-appreciated) contributors to the decline of working class / multiracial power that occurred in the US amid Reaganism:

... the failure of the postwar labor movement to form an organic bloc with Black liberation, to organize the South or to defeat the power of Southern reaction in the Democratic Party, have determined, more than any other factors, the ultimate decline of American trade unionism and the rightward reconstruction of the political economy during the 1970s.(L5375)

I will never look at American politics the same way again after reading this book. This is like the adult version of Zinn's people's history, with a Brumaire like grasp of how class blocs work. Also absolutely mortifying the political parallels between the Reagan-era and today. A little bit more emphasis on the 80s than I was expecting, but that's when the book was written after all.

Even though Mike Davis' writing is very dense, obtuse, and a bit difficult to get through, this book provides such an essential understanding of the history of the American working class movement that it's worth reading (with a dictionary close by)

Typical Mike Davis... fascinating stuff, but dense as a brick. I couldn't make it through the book, despite wanting to know what it was telling me.

Stone cold masterpiece.

Bunu okurken notlarını güzel tutmadığım için Californization of US politics, interest groups filan gibi bir iki jenerik şey kaldı aklımda. Tam şu bölümleri okudum bile diyemiyorum. Ertelemenin zararları.

it'd be one thing if a history of the American labour movement, an account of the New Right as a revanchist answer to the social militancy of the sixties, the birth of contemporary American anti-politics in California, a diagnosis of the neo-rentierist social base of Reaganism was all that was going on here. it's the account of the American working classes relationship to the projects of political, economic and social re-shaping that America has embarked upon on more or less every continent (with Europe being the only wholly successful* one to date) that knocks this great book into the stratosphere. absolutely mandatory

An absolute classic for a reason. Probably Davis' masterpiece and one if the best pieces of political and social historiography on the US out there. Must read.

Dense and prophetic (he wrote this in the mid-'80s); Davis unflinchingly outlines and indicts the social currents within the American Left and bureaucratized trade unions that betrayed Black Americans and the working class and failed to stop (and in fact abetted) the rise of Reaganism. Whatever dwindling significance I placed on electoral politics was further diminished after reading this book.

3 stars only because some chapters were incredibly difficult to understand. Davis constantly coins seemingly off-the-cuff "-isms" and "-izations" to describe movements and phenomena in such a way that assumes you have some prior familiarity with what he's talking about. Nevertheless, a valuable "how did we end up here" resource and I will be re-reading someday

I feel like I’ve deprived myself of this one for way too long. Opened my mouth almost every page.

Still really good