WHAT’S LEFT: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis, by Malcolm Harris
The political commentator Malcolm Harris would love to offer the world a road map. “I refuse to believe,” he declares in “What’s Left,” his impassioned guide to our current impasses over global warming, “that we have no alternative to the universal human project’s erosion into parochial barbarisms and petty domination.” We need, Harris writes, a “reasonable alternative to boiling ourselves alive.”
Those alternatives must be dramatic and capacious because, as Harris clearheadedly insists, we can’t simply “stop.” We are caught in a “noxious social metabolism,” a “giant perpetual motion machine that automatically puts people and materials to work and spins off ever increasing amounts of value.”
“If oil is valuable,” he writes, “and if value is the principle by which we organize life on earth, then oil is life, even if its continued extraction and combustion also assuredly means death.”
We can’t just consume more responsibly, or recycle more thoroughly. We need to change the system and we need to do so globally, because the social metabolism is a planetary system.
If this sounds to you like a revival of an almost zealous hope of physical and spiritual transformation, you are not wrong. Harris often presents himself as an uncompromising voice of clarity on the left, someone who prefers radical purity to compromise. His books about the history of California and the angst of the millennial generation are Marxist examinations of social ills, especially labor exploitation and economic inequality, and his targets are more often the liberal institutionalists most likely to be sympathetic to his concerns than they are the conservative and alt-right pundits for whom he barely registers.
In “What’s Left,” however, he adopts an ecumenical approach. He canvases a wide set of policy proposals to fight environmental destruction, ranging from market incentives to central economic planning. “The truth is that we have no shortage of right answers,” he notes, optimistically, before turning that smile into a frown: “If we have so many answers to our urgent planetary problems, then we can deduce the formidable strength of the force that is preventing us from devoting our time and energy and other resources to enacting them.”
His big-tent coalition comes in three parts. The first is populated by what the political scientist Steven Vogel calls marketcrafters, liberals who champion things like the subsidies for electric vehicles and solar panels that the Green New Deal (and the greener parts of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act) would provide. According to Harris, marketcrafters believe that — through tax breaks, government funding, targeted red tape and fines — they can summon a combination of “suppressive regulation and superabundant carbon-free electricity” to “overwhelm the fossil fuel industry” and drop the price of oil so low that “it ceases to be worth the trouble.” It’s a strategy to pit the capitalists against themselves, nudging them toward self-reform.
But Harris doesn’t assume that oil executives and automotive manufacturers will go quietly, and so, in the second part of his plan, the government takes control over utilities, no longer asking nicely but instead forcing the transition to hydro and solar power by running artificially cheap, renewable energy into the grid from government-run plants, outcompeting fossil fuels directly and putting the money saved toward other public services. Capitalists are shortsighted, he suggests, and only a government can act on a large enough scale, in time and space, to bring atmospheric carbon under control. (After less than 100 days of the Trump presidency, one can’t help pining for the kind of steady hand of government that Harris presumes.)
The third part, the radical climax of the book, is nothing less than a call for communist revolution. (Yes! You read that right.) Taking inspiration from models of Indigenous land management, migrant aid networks and headline-grabbing acts of property destruction, he hopes to draw the value of life itself into sharper relief and to force fossil fuels out of the value chain. It’s essentially an argument to direct revolutionary mobilization in the service of degrowth.
The key insight of “What’s Left” is that these three approaches, rather than being mutually exclusive, actually all need one another: “Public power needs the radical threat; communists need bail money; marketcraft needs an organized working-class constituency.”
In many ways, Harris might be thought of as the left-wing alter ego to the liberal journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. In their recent policy book “Abundance,” they too seek economic renovation and human thriving by encouraging innovations in clean energy and transportation. Like Harris, they also suggest a liberal-to-left coalition, inspired by the futurist spirit of Marxist political tracts like the radical podcaster Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism.”
But there are differences. Rather than Indigenous movements, the authors of “Abundance” are spurred on by China’s extraordinary track record on things like infrastructure and manufacturing. The biggest distinction is that Klein and Thompson are pro-growth; they want to remove the marketcrafters’ environmental red tape to encourage economic expansion, at least until the high-speed rail lines and nuclear power plants are built.
Both books have arrived at an awkward moment. Even more than “Abundance,” a book that might well have set the agenda for a Kamala Harris presidency, “What’s Left” is painful to read. Not because it is poorly written, or wrongheaded, or inadequately researched — but because its rationalism and its futurism belong to an era, an epoch, a framing that is no longer ours. Of course we may still prefer to discuss bold and sensible solutions. We probably should. But we have to reckon with a present reality that is not just more dangerous, but heading in a worse direction.
The sense of distance is not just dispiriting; it’s revealing. What kind of world supported such lightweight speculation about how “we” would fight environmental catastrophe? Succumbing to Harris’s charming flow, the reader happily whiles away an afternoon pondering the relative merits of “the kind of left-liberal politics embraced under the Joe Biden administration” as compared with “world communist revolution,” only to be jarred awake in the chilly spring of 2025, the spring of Trump’s Liberation Day and the re-acceleration of killing in Gaza, the ongoing slaughter in Ukraine, the spreading violence in Sudan, a devastating earthquake in Myanmar that goes ignored, with any prospect of climate talks stalled and disaster aid budgets being slashed around the world.
I felt the same sense of dysphoria when reading “Abundance,” but here it’s worse; at least Klein and Thompson’s preoccupations seem grounded in the parochial concerns of the Bay Area. If Harris’s vantage point — embracing everything from bland tax incentives to armed revolt — would thrive anywhere, it would be in a university seminar room in 2022, before the fight for survival and sanity amid the political bombardment of ICE raids and savage funding cuts.
Whatever the world was in which it was possible to imagine American policy approaches to global problems — a world in which we debated the relative merits of Bidenomics versus Indigenous revolution — it is no longer ours.
Indeed, with only a few months of distance from last year’s election and the beginning of this administration, the obvious follow-up question is how anyone ever imagined that this was “our world.”
And the question for a historian reading “What’s Left” will be how in the space between the Sunrise Movement of the 2018 midterms and Kamala Harris’s campaign theme of “joy” last year, this febrile, distinctly American vision of progressive politics was conjured up.
If MAGA types fight trade wars with penguins, and “Abundance” marks the imaginary extension of Bidenomics, “What’s Left” stakes out the radical corner of a thoroughly disoriented political culture. In light of the mayhem unleashed by President Trump and the extraordinary lack of resistance from America’s core institutions, we surely need something more modest and, admittedly, conservative than what Harris suggests. In the immediate aftermath of this hopefully singular period, it won’t be time to build, revolt, grow or shrink. Instead, we’ll have to put ourselves to a humbler task: the profound reconstruction of America’s basic civil functions.
WHAT’S LEFT: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis | By Malcolm Harris | Little, Brown | 310 pp. | $30
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