Mike Davis Revisits His 1986 Labor History Classic, Prisoners of the American Dream
The late socialist writer Mike Davis’s first book was Prisoners of the American Dream, a deep exploration of how the US labor movement became so weakened. Nearly four decades later, Davis revisited the book in an interview with Jacobin.
Mike Davis published his first book, Prisoners of the American Dream in 1986. (Verso Books)
The death of the legendary socialist writer Mike Davis last week of esophageal cancer at age seventy-six has produced an outpouring of tributes and remembrances of Davis, including several here at Jacobin. But particularly in mainstream outlets, few have spent time on Davis’s first book, published in 1986: Prisoners of the American Dream. His New York Times obituary said little more than “the formidable title was off-putting, and so was the text”; his Los Angeles Times obituary didn’t even mention it.
But Prisoners is one of the most rigorous, searching explorations of American labor history in the last half century. Which is why, last summer, Davis spoke with Daniel Denvir, host of the Jacobin Radio podcast The Dig, to revisit the book as part of a discussion of how labor ended up in such a desiccated position today. You can listen to the full interview here. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Origins
Daniel Denvir
In your book, Prisoners of the American Dream, written at the height of the [Ronald] Reagan era, you set out to determine why the United States had long been so exceptional. You write, “A signal absence of working-class self-organization and consciousness comparable in scope to that represented in every other capitalist country by the prevalence of laborist, social-democratic, or Communist parties is the specter that has long haunted American Marxism.”
Mike Davis
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