"Preparation is a form of building power"
A Q&A with Malcolm Harris
In his new book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis (out today), Malcolm Harris explores different visions for confronting the challenge of climate change that have emerged on the left. The first, marketcraft, stipulates that governments already form and reform the market in all kinds of ways — and so policymakers should do so intentionally to reduce carbon emissions, incentivize green production, and pursue other climate-friendly goals. The second, public power, proposes that sectors like energy production be put under democratic control, rather than left to the markets. The third is communism.
Harris might surprise readers familiar with his unabashed radicalism — the announcement in his 2022 Drift essay, for instance, of an “immediate need for different ways to live” — by advocating for an approach that combines all three. “We can’t treat the planetary crisis as an occasion for a friendly contest between groups of partisans acting out their strategies in isolation,” he writes. “The challenge is to produce a model of how these strategies might click together in practice without requiring the unrealistic suppression or domination of one by another.”
Our essays editor, Lyra Walsh Fuchs, asked Harris why he wrote a climate book now — and about DOGE, fires at Tesla dealerships, and more.
A lot has been written and theorized and proposed about climate change. Why did you decide to write this book? What makes it different from the others?
In a way climate change has been under-theorized and -written about, even on the left. It’s the planet’s predominant fact. And yet we’re unable to act like it — and I don’t just mean “we” Americans. Nobody in the world has been able to address climate change appropriately, and I wanted to work through why that is. I don’t believe that’s because we’re all stupid, and lazy, and greedy, and careless; I’m not a misanthrope. Instead I think our problem has something to do with a world where almost everyone has to find a way to make themselves valuable in order to access the things they need to live.
Capitalism is an impersonal system that organizes life on this planet, among other things. Even if we had societies and governments that were much more dedicated to ending fossil fuel emissions than ours are, trying to fight a war on fossil fuels under capitalist conditions is a lot like trying to fight a war on drugs. We need a strategy with an analysis that can deal with that reality, and I see three of them: marketcraft, public power, and communism. Most of the book is me trying to give the strongest account of each of those strategies that I can. If there’s another climate book like that, I haven’t read it.
The truism that bad news travels fast seems especially true of late. The Trump administration is apparently devoted to a strategy of overwhelming the media, and we’re all left trying to keep up. Has anything happened since you sent your book off to the printers that would have changed any part of your analysis?
Every book I write, I get accused of being too pessimistic. And then reality happens and it’s way worse. And then I try to compensate with the next book, and I still can’t catch up. But I didn’t write this one assuming that the Democrats would be in the White House or that the situation would improve in the near term. I’m sure my tone would have changed, but I hope my analysis is based on longer-term dynamics rather than American electoral cycles. One of the benefits of not being a liberal is that I don’t have to rethink everything I believe every couple years based on the voting behavior of mere tens of thousands of Americans.
Have DOGE-led developments impacted your calculus on the effectiveness of marketcraft, the climate-change fighting model in which government policies such as subsidies, penalties for polluters, and public green equity funds shape the contours of the economy? Have we entered a new era of opposition to government spending? Is it too late to change course?
All the left strategies have taken a hit, which makes sense. I wish I could say it’s just marketcraft. But Trump has incapacitated the Tennessee Valley Authority by firing board members so that it can’t reach quorum. Even self-funded public agencies are subject to “budget cut” sabotage. And we’ve seen the administration adopt red-scare tactics to deport foreign-born Americans who take part in left-wing resistance movements, or merely support them. So the whole left is hurt by the rise of the right. That said, yes, I think capital has scurried away from the green energy transition and it’s going to be even harder to lure it back. If Biden was the first climate president, then the second climate president is going to have to be much harsher when it comes to wringing capital out of the fossil fuel sector.
One of the things I clarified for myself by working on this project is that the left starts at the point where you recognize that the social planning prerogative belongs to society itself, not to the capitalist class. So when I read Saule Omarova’s proposal for a national investment authority, or Lina Khan talking about using antitrust to free up productive potential, or Isabella Weber on price controls, or Michael McCarthy on democratic finance, I see some important commonality.
Speaking of Elon… you write that SUV dealership arson “probably does not qualify as public or democratic, but it’s still social planning.” How should we think about recent reports of Teslas being vandalized, and even dealerships being set on fire?
I’d distinguish between the Tesla demonstrations — which are protesting Musk via his overvalued car company — and sabotage of the SUV system. I don’t think the Tesla protests are about keeping Tesla vehicles off the road. Though it’s interesting that the same inflated stock that gave Musk his authority as richest man in the world is now a physical network of financial vulnerability. His worry isn’t that protesters will smash car windows, his worry is that they’ll smash Tesla’s stock price.
You write that “there’s a danger of communism devolving into localism, which would involve rejecting the best thing about the long twentieth century: the emergence of a true world society.” Many of the examples you use in the book are, perhaps by necessity, local: zine makers in Minnesota who write “Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest,” for example, or activists who squat in buildings in Exarcheia, Athens. What distinguishes these examples from localism? How might all of these disparate actions cohere into a mass organized movement?
A lot of commentary on the left makes the mistake of contrasting place-based struggles with world-scale movements. No one talks about “alter-globalization” any more, but people have been actively, consciously stitching their movements together for decades at least. And part of that is participants traveling around and sharing experiences with comrades in different places. So Exarcheia and the Greek crisis situation had a big impact on Occupy Wall Street, for example. There were Greeks in New York, and New Yorkers who’d been to Greece. We were reading material from Greece. Tactics travel, analyses travel. In global capitalism, no one struggles all alone.
A coherent organized global mass movement is a higher bar. I admire what I’ve seen from the Progressive International, which seems like an attempt to do that. It’s a big swing. If I had the secret formula, I promise I would share it. I don’t think the problems the world’s progressive forces have had organizing are mostly a product of our personal or personality flaws. We really are in a tough situation. The gambit at the end of the book is that we on the left could use this tough situation as a basis for organization and collective struggle, somewhat analogous to the way the workers’ movement used the catastrophe of proletarianization in the nineteenth century. Our shared vulnerability to the social-ecological disasters that are already here and the ones that we know are coming — though not exactly when and where — organizes us whether we like it or not. Mostly not.
As it stands, our disaster response plans are insufficient, and they will continue to be insufficient as long as they don’t include society as a whole. That is an opening for the left, which has an opportunity to exercise a lot of leadership, and without having to raise absurd amounts of money and/or take over the Democratic party. Who is planning to make sure babies in your neighborhood can get formula and diapers if there’s a big fire? Who is organizing pharmacists so people can get the medication they need when there’s a flood? That’s not about charity or even mutual aid; preparation is a form of building power. Realistically, right now, it’s one of the few forms I think the left can get our hands on.