Wauna Mill, Westport, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Malcolm Harris, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis (Little, Brown and Company, 2025)
Anthony Galluzzo, Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today (Zer0 Books, 2023)
One of the more predictable outcomes of Trump’s return to the White House is the common liberal assertion that leftist politics, particularly following the George Floyd protests, had gone too far. Even before the 2024 election, some writers were pointing to radical demands such as police abolition to explain why the effort to achieve significant national reforms failed. Trump’s victory, along with the dismantling of DEI programs across the government and private sector, seemed only to confirm the view that the rightwing backlash was the inevitable reaction to a movement that had outpaced its popular support.
It is therefore impressive that Malcolm Harris’s What’s Left forcefully and unapologetically argues that when it comes to climate change left politics in fact needs to go much further. A survey of three responses to the climate crisis, the book evaluates liberal, socialist, and communist strategies, arguing that any likely solution will incorporate portions of all three in a Venn diagram or “metastrategy of coherence” (Harris cuts to the chase by rejecting conservative and tech-utopian solutions prima facie, asserting that they are, respectively, discredited and delusional).
In the book’s first section, Harris examines the liberal strategy of marketcraft: the state’s manipulation of production toward green energy and away from fossil fuels and other flagrantly destructive resources. Harris is generous in his evaluation, focusing among other things on the ways in which the Biden Administration bypassed the traditional “regulation/deregulation” toolkit to instead affirmatively cultivate more climate-friendly policy outcomes through subsidies and incentivizing venture capital toward decarbonization. Harris uses metaphor nicely and describes marketcraft alternately as a steak thrown to redirect the hound of private investment and as the parent/state restricting the teenager/market’s freedom in the bedroom of the “state’s house.”
Assuming that it is even feasible to “trick” capitalists into “financing their own euthanasia,” there are of course, Harris notes, deep contradictions in attempting to direct private enterprise toward the public good, not least of which is that companies are motivated first and foremost by the pursuit of profit derived from the exploitation of labor and view the natural world as a cheap resource and dumping ground. Capitalists are therefore disinclined, no matter the subsidies, to invest in long-term projects – including the types of financially risky infrastructural projects required for transitioning to a “green economy” –and have no general interest, to put it mildly, in the common good.
Nowhere are marketcraft’s contradictions clearer than in the promotion of electric vehicles. While it might appear sensible at first glance to promote electric vehicles in order to jettison gas fueled cars, emissions, Harris emphasizes, primarily result from “indirect consumption of fossil fuels – through agricultural products, plastics, and basically everything we consume.…” This is not to mention the lithium, plastics, and endless rubber that are required for EVs and the unending wealth extracted from drivers to maintain subsidiary industries such as insurance companies, law firms, and the aesthetically and environmentally abominable parking lot industry.
The shift to EVs does not merely represent a missed opportunity for developing more rational forms of travel and city design – say, ones that contain large and attractive open spaces where humans could comfortably move without fear of being honked at or killed. Our move to EVs also indicates the extent to which our political decision making, lives, and imaginations are held hostage to the needs of capital, leaving us in a world in which “saving the environment” becomes a meaningless (and erroneous) abstraction amid an ever-lengthening rush hour (sic) where cars sit backed up for miles, their drivers, stressed and aching, fearing collision with a Cybertruck or simply being rear-ended by a phone-addled commuter. Who would want to save the environment, instead of drive over a cliff, in such a world?
Necessary but not sufficient, marketcraft, Harris argues, needs to be supplemented by other, more radical, strategies. Public power, in contrast to marketcraft, bypasses the short-term and narrow interests of private investors and enables the state to engage in comprehensive planning for the benefit of, if not all, at least the majority. Public power’s deployment of nationalization, for example, could enable the federal government to not only expand the electrical grid but also redirect it for rational use outside the myopic and astronomically wasteful incentives of private profit. Calling on the work of Matt Bruenig and other analysts, Harris notes that there already exists public power infrastructure that could simply be expanded and repurposed toward clean energy production and decarbonization: a green and nationally extended Tennessee Valley Authority. Similarly, labor unions – “the subject and object of the public power strategy” – already provide the organizational structure and class-orientation required to politically challenge the fossil fuel industry and other entrenched polluters. Acknowledging that some unions are politically conservative, Harris stresses that radical political consciousness cannot be assumed but instead must be “built.” That is, the heart of the battle over climate change is ultimately neither organization nor strategy but values that must be fought for.
Nevertheless, as with marketcraft, public power contains its own contradictions, first and foremost concerning just what “the public” entails. The TVA, for example, destroyed Native American burial sites and refused for decades to return the remains. As Harris notes, “Native social metabolic orders are distinct sets of values” that can conflict with not only capitalism but also public power itself. Emboldening state power in the name of a preconceived “public” can exclude if not destroy the particular in the name of the general and forfeit opportunities to incorporate indigenous capabilities into a reconfigured and more environmentally sustainable world. Public power, Harris continues, can also overlook existing social divisions and their implications on constituency-building. Why would men, say, support eliminating a status quo that furnishes them a variety of household and workplace privileges? Alternatively, how do you get unions to overcome Joshua Clover’s “affirmation trap,” in which labor, fearing for its survival, embraces its own exploitation? Harris ultimately circumnavigates such questions by relocating the central site of struggle from the workplace to his third and final strategy: the commune.
The commune, for Harris, is distinct from the first two strategies since it does not attempt to compete against capitalism from within but is external to it. Unlike public power, it does not prioritize the working class’s control over work but seeks to abolish a system in which “work itself (is) the center of life… a strategy in which the planet’s exploited people abolish capital’s system of Value and impose a new world social metabolism based on the interconnected free association and well-being of all – and not just humans.”
The orienting principle of the commune, Harris writes, is not capitalism’s “Oil-Value-Life chain” but the revolutionary dictum: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Adhering to the principle of need to ensure that all are housed, clothed, and well-fed would allow us to eschew the mumbo jumbo of a merit-based society, while focusing on ability – versus, say, equality – would enable us to stop imagining that an 80-year-old woman and a 25-year-old man are equally capable of manual labor and thereby equally deserving of the remuneration that accompanies it. Harris’s second orienting principle for the commune is another Marxist dictum: The ruthless criticism of everything existing, an epistemological orientation recognizing that answers to our problems are frequently as suspect as our problems themselves, if only because the answers emerged from the same conditions and ideological presuppositions that helped produce the problems in the first place. A revolution in permanence, guided by the principle of collective well-being, is a prerequisite for escaping the trap.
What’s Left is at its most subversive, however, when addressing the question of the police and violence. Harris identifies the police as the primary impediment to revolutionary change, rejecting the notions that the police are merely fellow workers and what has been called the pathology of non-violence. Harris specifically invokes so-called Rose Theory in observing that all living creatures are designed to protect themselves (a la the rose’s thorns) and that it is only natural and proper for humans too to defend themselves from, in this case, life-threatening pollution and heat. Historically speaking, the efficacy of political violence is relatively uncontroversial, as even adherents to non-violent civil disobedience, famously Gandhi and MLK, have leveraged the threat of external violence to advance their goals. That is, violent and non-violent resistance are not mutually exclusive but symbiotic. Prima facie rejecting out of hand the former represents not only bad history but is also morally irresponsible, as it is our duty, no less than the rose’s, to defend ourselves.
Notably, Harris insists that these three strategies must all be included in the plan in order to combat climate change (practically speaking, he assumes that you won’t convince liberal marketcrafters to become communists and vice versa), but it is not entirely clear what is to stop the strategies from combating each other. Marketcraft preserves capitalism, which of course never stops accumulating and would like nothing better than to privatize the nationalized sectors promised by public power. At a minimum, the tripart strategy can only be made for the short-term befitting an “emergency siren” (or “brake”). Still, one wonders about the long-term dangers of such an unholy alliance, and Harris isn’t always convincing here. Harris counsels, for instance, that we exploit divisions within capitalists, noting that even John Brown received support from anti-slavery capitalists (John Brown, though, was not a communist). However, in his criticism of marketcraft Harris notes that British commerce’s successful abolition of West Indian slavery was followed by its quick embrace of U.S., Cuban, and Brazilian slavery. That is, exploiting capitalist divisions, fighting merely over which commodities to use, can squander our own energies while sidestepping the problem.
While Harris refers to the superior environmental practices of many indigenous societies, he is wary of romanticizing the pre-Columbian past and is quick to invoke José Carlos Mariátegui’s assertion that “the past is a foundation not a program.” Yet, in concluding that we cannot go backwards, which we of course cannot, it can be tempting to overlook the ways in which the destruction of the environment is an outcome of not merely capitalism but modernity itself. Putting aside the debate over whether the USSR was authentically socialist, Chernobyl was one of the biggest environmental catastrophes in world history, not mentioning the pollution produced by other non-capitalist states. We might not be able to exit the 21st century, but we should surely cultivate critical detachment from the hegemonic ideologies of the modern world.
In this regard, Anthony Galluzzo’s Against the Vortex provides a critical supplement to the discussion. Criticizing the “rational-empiricist yet implicitly religious logic of modernity,” Galluzzo argues that the source of the ongoing destruction of our physical environment is not capitalism per se but the “developmentalist imperative that defines the modernization process,” representing a revolt against finitude, limits, and death itself. This process spans the ideological spectrum, informing Musk and other tech oligarchs’ transhumanism as well as the so-called “fully automated luxury communism” and accelerationism of significant portions of the left. Developing his discussion through a critical viewing of John Boorman’s cult classic Zardoz, Galluzzo argues that, “flourishing starts with an embrace of our mortality and natality, our embodiment and animality, of our fragility and the interdependence that follows from this.”
Harris apparently rejects none of this, but the incorporation of marketcraft and public power into an otherwise revolutionary response to our climate catastrophe reproduces forms of domination that helped get us into this mess in the first place. Communism, too, which expresses a necessary and appropriate self-confidence in humans’ capacity to shape and improve our world, can slide into hubris. Nowhere perhaps is this more evident than in Harris’s discussion of family abolition. It is not difficult to imagine how such a policy would develop in our current political reality, that is, in the hands of opportunistic reformers who in grafting utopian solutions onto an existing dystopia wreak havoc and discredit revolutionary politics for years. Even in a revolutionary scenario, it is debatable, to put it modestly, whether not just men but most people would welcome the abolition of our most intimate form of social organization.
Addressing the heart of the matter, Galluzzo asks: “How to exit the dead end of industrial modernism and its legitimating fictions – utilitarianism, Prometheanism, productivism and its ecocidal dreams of endless growth or secular immortality – in the face of interrelated material, ecological, and spiritual crises but without sliding into the reactionary antimodernism that, for example, led certain disillusioned Western intellectuals to embrace the Iranian revolution at the end of the Seventies?” Harris provides many answers, some of them exceptionally valuable: without revolution we are doomed. Yet without humility we are lost.
