Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory

Old Gods, New Enigmas is the highly anticipated book by the best-selling author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums. Mike Davis spent years working factory jobs and sitting behind the wheel of an eighteen-wheeler before his profile as one of the world’s leading urbanists emerged with the publication of his sober, if dystopian, survey of Los Angeles City of Quartz. Since then, he’s developed a reputation not only for his caustic analysis of ecological catastrophe and colonial history, but as a stylist without peer.

Old Gods, New Enigmas is Davis’s book-length engagement with Karl Marx, marking the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth and exploring Davis’s thinking on history, labour, capitalism, and revolution-themes ever present from the earliest work of this leading radical thinker. This is his first book on Marxism itself.