There’s a familiar structure to books about climate change. They review the basic science, foretell the doom that awaits if we don’t change course, detail the many obstacles to doing so, and end on an utterly unconvincing note of anemic hope. What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis by the writer, organizer, and general rabble-rouser Malcolm Harris is a climate book that starts where most end: with the political challenges and possibilities before us, presented not by way of tired gestures to optimism or pessimism but clear-eyed assessment of their prospects. Harris takes the fact of the climate crisis for granted, in a good way — assuming, reasonably, that readers know enough about the problem itself and far too little about possible ways forward. Rather than reiterating the familiar litany of calamities to come, in other words, What’s Left is interested in the most classic of left questions: What is to be done?
Harris’ analysis of climate change and capitalism is at once rigorous and accessible, informed by Marxist value theory but not bogged down in technical details. Value is a tricky concept: The ways we think about what we value as individuals or communities often have very little to do with how value, understood in economic terms, is produced within capitalist societies. Harris offers an agile review of how Marxists have thought about this divergence and a useful heuristic for thinking about capitalism and fossil fuels: what he calls the Oil-Value-Life chain. The trouble is twofold: Oil is valuable, so fossil fuel companies won’t stop producing it unless they’re made to; oil is also necessary for life as presently organized, so we can’t just dump it immediately. Within capitalist societies, the reproduction of human life is linked to the production of value. We’re all bound up in the system of wages and profits, however much we wish we could escape it. It’s crucial, then, to break the chains between these three elements so that life — human and non — is no longer reliant on the distinctive “social metabolism” of fossil capitalism.
Oil is valuable, so fossil fuel companies won’t stop producing it unless they’re made to; oil is also necessary for life as presently organized, so we can’t just dump it immediately.
That, of course, is a tall order. How do we fill it? When it comes to political options, the book’s scope is explicitly circumscribed: Harris is interested in left climate politics, broadly conceived (“from the kind of left-liberal politics embraced under the Joe Biden administration to world communist revolution”). He doesn’t bother refuting market fundamentalism, techno-utopianism, or climate denialism — let alone the nationalism and fascism on offer from the far right. But within this progressive terrain, What’s Left ranges widely, oriented by what Harris calls “metastrategic pragmatism” — a “strategy of strategies” rather than a rigid insistence on a single way forward. It offers not one answer to its titular question but three, loosely glossed as liberal, socialist, and communist (of an anarchist bent). Harris is, as he states up front, most sympathetic to one of the three, though he doesn’t say which (it’s the third one) — but for the most part, he doesn’t stack the deck in favor of his preferred path. Each, Harris recognizes, has genuine advantages and limitations; none can succeed on its own. The point of identifying the problems with each isn’t to condemn any one of them but rather to figure out how the “jagged coastlines of the real, flawed plans we have” might fit together into some kind of coherent project.
Harris calls the left-liberal position “marketcraft,” following the political scientist Steven Vogel. Whereas market fundamentalists think that state intervention distorts markets from functioning effectively, advocates of marketcraft understand markets to be fundamentally shaped by the state — and typically argue for using the state to make markets function in the public interest. Instead of subordinating society to the market, in other words, marketcrafters believe in making markets work for society, whether by regulating carbon emissions, raising wages, or rewriting the rules of the markets themselves. Carbon markets, for instance, are entirely crafted by the state: They exist only where states have regulated carbon emissions, forced companies to buy carbon credits, designed markets on which those credits can be traded, and monitored carbon reductions. Even markets in more conventional commodities often require a huge amount of logistical and infrastructural work behind the scenes. Take the automobile, one of the most classic commodities there is — the motor, literally, of twentieth-century American prosperity. To replace hundreds of millions of gas-fueled vehicles with electric ones will require developing the technology that powers the cars themselves, of course — but it will also require a huge amount of infrastructure. For people to drive EVs as unthinkingly as they do gas-powered cars, drivers will have to be able to rely on an abundance of charging stations with standardized plugs and payment systems — not a fragmented mess of manufacturer-specific plugs and apps. That coordination, in turn, will require various forms of state intervention, from direct infrastructure buildout to regulations that set industry-level standards across companies.
As this example suggests, marketcraft doesn’t aim to radically remake the world — but it does try to make the world we live in function better for more people. This is both its strength and its weakness. Marketcraft doesn’t do anything to reduce U.S. reliance on cars; it just swaps out gas-powered ones for electric. It also doesn’t address systemic issues like global terms of trade or resource use. Thus, green industrial policy — a classic illustration of marketcraft — has resulted in increasing competition amongst the U.S., E.U., and China while leaving parts of the world that aren’t able to spend lavishly on subsidies for cleantech to lag behind. If you think the problems with our current political economy go beyond carbon emissions, in other words, you’re likely to find marketcraft disappointing. But marketcraft will also struggle to succeed on its own terms insofar as it’s pitched primarily as a mode of benign technocracy. Capital may be happy to drink from the tap of public spending, but it will also resist regulation at every step. And although capitalists are often in competition with one another, they also tend to be organized as a class, ready to counter any infringement on their authority. To succeed even in modest reforms, then, marketcraft needs a source of countervailing power.
This is where socialism comes in — what Harris dubs the “public power” option. Public power is committed to building mass, working-class movements and using the state to provide universal goods and services — including, most significantly, carbon-free energy. It’s effectively a rebranding of the Green New Deal. Public power is about seizing the means of production — including the means of energy production — and putting them to work for the public good. Public power means, Harris argues, “that we have to face choices about what kind of society we want to make head-on.” If capital won’t build the energy systems and social infrastructures necessary to ensure that people can have good lives without destroying the only known habitable planet in the universe — and so far, there’s vanishingly little evidence that it will — then the state should just step in and do it instead. This vision of public power is one in which people, rather than investors, are responsible for building the world we want.
Harris has argued — convincingly — that under socialism, Americans wouldn’t eat many bananas.
The problem with the public power option, Harris argues, is that it often takes the “public” too much for granted. Public power advocates tend to embrace the good of all — but in the process, they can end up neglecting the rights of minorities, such as Indigenous communities opposed to the siting of renewable energy facilities or mineral extraction for green tech. As a strategy oriented toward state power, moreover, it tends to operate domestically and thus threatens to prioritize the interests of relatively well-off Americans over those of people elsewhere, including those who are most vulnerable to climate change and least responsible for it. It also tends to be reliant on the power of organized labor — a force that, Harris argues, has an incentive to defend jobs in the near term rather than building the power to truly challenge capitalism. Fossil fuel workers who resist decarbonization measures are only the most obvious illustration of this much broader phenomenon — and unions have been “unreliable all[ies]” of the public power movement as a result. Labor struggles are important, Harris argues, but they aren’t enough — and this brings us to the third option, which he describes as communism.
Communism, for Harris, is emphatically not the state communism of the Soviet Union. It is, rather, a form of life in which the capitalist system of value is abolished altogether and human metabolic connections to the land are reestablished — in other words, a communism rooted in the commune. Its organizing principle is the classic “for each according to their ability, to each according to their need” — FETE, for short, indicating for each, to each, while also invoking fête in the celebratory sense. Tactically, communism tends toward direct action, from school strikes to squatting to sabotage. It embraces, too, what Harris calls “rose theory,” following the Kurdish political leader and theorist Abdullah Öcalan — the idea that even roses defend themselves with their thorns. Communism is also more explicitly internationalist than either the marketcraft or public power strategies — or perhaps more accurately, anti-nationalist, oriented toward creating solidaristic communities that cross borders and defy the boundaries of politics as presently organized.
If communism is the most visionary program, it is also the most demanding. A revolution that truly abolishes the Oil-Value-Life chain, Harris acknowledges, would require drastic changes to the affluent world’s ways of living — ones more extreme than mainstream climate politics tends to recognize. The total transformation of production and consumption would mean not only fewer flights and hamburgers but less cement and steel. (Harris has argued elsewhere — convincingly — that under socialism, Americans wouldn’t eat many bananas.) We’d probably all do more “earthcare,” producing our own means of subsistence while caring for the land that sustains us; a communist society would likely be a more locally oriented, agroecological one than the globally networked, largely urban and industrial world that many of us are accustomed to.
If communism’s strength lies in its vision of a radically different way of life, its weakness is in the fact that the world it envisions seems, to most people, a fantasy — and perhaps, to some, a nightmare. It’s arduous at the level of praxis, too: Communism asks people to build a new world while also trying to destroy the old one, to cultivate habits and practices that are orthogonal to those capitalism tends to produce. It requires people to sustain heroic levels of self-discipline and commitment in the face of incredibly long odds. And insofar as communism is the strategy that presents the most radical challenge to capitalism, it is usually the riskiest. When communists appear threatening, they tend to be disciplined, disappeared, or murdered outright. The most successful examples Harris cites are familiar movements like the Zapatistas and Rojava, which have inspired the anarchist left for decades but have struggled to realize their visions on a larger scale.
The stark future facing left politics today makes the case for a metastrategic pragmatism stronger.
Largely for these pragmatic reasons, my own immediate political sympathies have tended to lie with versions of the public power strategy, as expressed in projects like the Green New Deal. Harris, in my view, overstates the centrality of labor politics to this model. While some public power advocates have argued for a narrowly union-focused strategy, many others have emphasized the importance of struggling around transit, housing, health, and other elements of daily life in building a mass working-class movement — all of which would also strengthen the position of organized labor against capital. The public power option, in other words, doesn’t require privileging labor as the vanguard of politics or the primary agent of change — even if it does tend to recognize that workers have distinctive forms of leverage beyond the electoral process. But these are minor quibbles with what is, overall, a remarkably fair and reasonable assessment of each strategy’s strengths and weaknesses.
“Diversity of tactics” is usually invoked as a euphemism for militant action that departs from the nonviolent standard of most contemporary protest movements, often advocating the use of force and even armed resistance. In its refreshingly nonsectarian, comradely approach to political disagreements, What’s Left offers a genuine diversity of both tactics and policies. Instead of either indulging the narcissism of small differences or trying to smooth substantive disagreements into a false harmony, Harris recognizes the real differences in orientation and analysis between the tendencies he describes but argues that they can be productively complementary rather than contradictory. Socialist advocates for public power need a radical, even revolutionary flank to make ideological space and motivate electoral compromise; revolutionaries need material resources and state leniency; liberal marketcrafters need working-class power to back rigorous reforms and communist “verve” to inspire action. Those who have followed Harris’ work over time might be surprised to see him adopting such a politically expansive vision. He initially made his name as an enfant terrible of the millennial anarchist left, approaching politics with an impertinence that people tended to find either invigorating or infuriating. His early work staked out a generational take on class struggle, as expressed in forms ranging from the inspired Twitter slogan #nodads to the more considered analysis offered by his 2016 book Kids These Days. For Harris, youth politics has often been a matter of style as well as substance: He knows how to get a rise out of people and is adept at deploying brattiness as a political tactic. And he’s rarely shied away from political controversy, whether he’s comparing striking public school teachers to prison guards or ridiculing those benighted enough to vote.
But in What’s Left, Harris seems to have, dare I say, grown up a bit — although thankfully, not too much. Where once he dismissed everything short of insurrection as hopelessly inadequate, here, he takes more seriously the constraints of actually existing politics and the usefulness of reforms — but crucially, without renouncing his irreverence or abandoning an audacious sense of possibility. What’s Left acknowledges the limits of the possible without ceding ground for more radical visions; it digs into the mundane details of policy while maintaining a cheeky playfulness around the edges. We may have to work within the limits of capitalism and electoral politics for now, Harris concedes, but wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t? What’s Left covers the policy bases of renewable energy, public transit, and so on but also sprinkles more imaginative visions of an ecosocialist future throughout — like a proposal to turn golf courses into public forests that could be used for both agroecology and surreptitious sex or the suggestion that a West Papuan cassowary displaced from its forest home and left scrounging for scraps in a nearby village might be classified as “semiproletarian.”
Public power is about seizing the means of production — including the means of energy production — and putting them to work for the public good.
Consequently, What’s Left is a genuinely fun read. Disquisitions on value theory and policy measures are leavened by light-hearted examples and illustrations taken from real-life politics but also literature and film, culture both high and low. Fossil capitalists are compared to the Grinch; climate denial is illustrated by way of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People; public finance is imagined as a community ice cream parlor that doles out cheap scoops.
If Harris no longer turns up his nose at electoral politics, however, he also refuses to affirm nonviolence for its own sake. Like Andreas Malm, he defends property destruction and other forms of eco-sabotage; he stops just short of endorsing political assassinations. To some readers, these tactics may seem extreme — but as he notes, each of the three strategies on offer uses “coercive force” in its own right. Even liberals ultimately rely on the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence, after all. Harris insists, moreover, that the rote ratification of nonviolence can, however inadvertently, serve “as an excuse for an extremely violent status quo.” He is rightly uncompromising on this point: Capitalism kills people every day, and state policies that harden borders against climate migrants will kill even more.
Harris’ newfound generosity is presumably partially a matter of his own political development. But grappling with climate change seems to have a similar effect on political thinkers more broadly, pushing many to think both more pragmatically and more experimentally; to contemplate things outside their usual comfort zones. From the opposite end of the progressive spectrum, left-liberals like Ezra Klein have flirted with the notion of blowing up pipelines when legislative strategies seemed to be hitting a dead end. Climate change is such an enormous, intransigent, multifaceted problem, requiring such drastic action on so many fronts and timelines that no single program, orientation, or strategy could plausibly address it entirely. It’s indisputable, too, that U.S. climate action, such as it is, has lurched unsteadily forward through the combined efforts of a range of actors: militant movements to block fossil fuel infrastructure through direct action, efforts to win mass support for decarbonization through ambitious public programs like the Green New Deal, and policy engineering oriented toward achieving some measure of decarbonization in the face of political setbacks, like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). It’s only by braiding these strands together that the movement becomes strong enough to succeed, even if only partially.
The question looming over the book is the obvious one: Is any of this relevant in Trump’s America? Although What’s Left aspires to global solidarity, its strategic considerations are mostly oriented toward the concerns of U.S.-based movements, and it largely reads as a book borne of the Biden era. After all, the left coalitional strategy, wherein public interest-minded bureaucrats chip away at progress within the limits of political possibility while more radical movements try to expand those limits, works best when progressives of some variety actually are in power, such that state power can be deployed toward decarbonization, however gradually, and more radical movements are tolerated, however begrudgingly. It’s less clear how the iterative process of benevolent marketcrafting, public power-building, and communist horizon-envisioning works when those in control of the state are instead bent on eradicating the regulatory capacities through which effectively all modern environmental protection has been advanced, all while using its repressive ones to crush political enemies.
So where do each of these tendencies stand in our frightening new era? It is, admittedly, not an auspicious time for climate activism. The EPA is now oriented toward lowering costs rather than toxin levels; the Trump administration is threatening to undo even the modest marketcrafting of the IRA. The venerable environmental organization Greenpeace is being sued, potentially out of existence, for participating in the Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the harassment and detention of Palestine solidarity activists casts a pall on the prospects for radical action more broadly. Even the new liberal rallying cry for “abundance” marks a lurch toward the center-right in its admonishment of the left and call to get the government out of its own way —including by jettisoning the kinds of labor conditions that might help build public power.
Communism asks people to build a new world while also trying to destroy the old one, to cultivate habits and practices that are orthogonal to those capitalism tends to produce.
And yet, the stark future facing left politics today ultimately makes the case for a metastrategic pragmatism stronger, even if some of the particulars diverge from those outlined in What’s Left. In facing up to the right-wing onslaught, liberals will have to get more comfortable with breaking the law; socialists with questioning public authority; communists with defending parts of the state. Even in this bleak terrain, moreover, new red-green shoots are emerging — the brightest of which may be Zohran Mamdani’s public power campaign for mayor of New York, which champions fast and free buses, a drastic expansion of affordable housing, and a “public option” for grocery stores.
Such shoots, of course, aren’t nearly enough. On its own, nothing is. We are in an emergency, after all; we need all hands on deck, doing everything at once. What’s Left is insistent on this point, aiming to “induce a sort of vertigo” that comes with recognizing the depth and breadth of the crisis we face. That feeling of vertigo, I suspect, will be all too easy for most readers to access today when each morning brings a stomach-churning array of headlines. Yet if What’s Left doesn’t quite provide a guide for how the climate movement might get through the dark times ahead, it does offer at least one place to start. While climate change makes the future radically uncertain, one thing we can count on is a growing number of disasters: floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts. We should plan for them, Harris argues — not only logistically with evacuation plans and response teams but politically by forming “disaster councils” that can provide spaces for people to regroup and plot ways forward. Disaster councils, in other words, could make adversities into catalysts for organizing. Harris has climate disasters in mind, but the idea could work for political catastrophes too. Emergencies don’t “wake people up,” and they don’t necessarily produce any particular politics — but they can spur forms of both creativity and unity. The right-wing resurgence makes the way forward for the left tougher, but it might also make it clearer that no one can hope to go it alone. What’s left? The only thing we’ve ever had: solidarity, forever.
Alyssa Battistoni teaches political theory at Barnard College. She is the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019) and Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, out with Princeton University Press in August.
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