There was an outpouring of affection and respect and many articles: premature obits. Several weeks ago, rumours spread on the social networks suggesting he was dying. ( Late Victorian Holocausts was a devastating critique of the British in India). He could be didactic, lyrical, funny, truculent, ferocious when he needed to be, but his principal target was usually the same: the economic, political, and military apparatuses of the US state machine and the brutalities of empires in general. Many of Mike’s essays and most of his books were published in the New Left Review and by New Left Books/Verso from the early Eighties onwards. Intellectually always vigorous, he was very generous with his time. And he was usually persuadable to transform a blog or a private communication into a text, short or long. Close to the end he took his own editorial duties very seriously, exchanging mails with NLR commenting on recently submitted articles. He never stopped writing essays and notes. He had been ill for many years, but that never really softens the shock of actual death. Verso is extremely sad to announce the death of our friend and comrade Mike Davis. I’m writing because I’m hoping the people who read it don’t need dollops of hope or good endings but are reading so that they’ll know what to fight, and fight even when the fight seems hopeless. Everybody always wants to know: Aren’t you hopeful? Don’t you believe in hope? To me, this is not a rational conversation. If I have a regret, it’s not dying in battle or at a barricade as I’ve always romantically imagined - fighting.
But I guess what I think about the most is that I’m just extraordinarily furious and angry. Thanks to California’s aid-in-dying law, I have control over the final act.
I’m a fatalistic Celt, and I have the example of my mother and older sister, who died like Russian soldiers at Stalingrad.
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