The American writer and activist Mike Davis, who has died of cancer aged 76, was billed as an “urban historian”, but his work also took in geography, politics, economics, sociology and literature. His main subject was the dislocation and separation brought on by capitalist society: people from land, work from ownership, individuals from each other, all in the service of profit.
Although he was, in the words of one critic, an “old-fashioned countercultural Marxist”, he wrote from the inside out, imposing his topics on the theory, rather than the other way around. Crucially, he also tried to separate historical myth from reality.
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