The climate crisis is not just a climate crisis—it is a planetary crisis threatening the very continuation of life and civilization as we know it. If humanity continues to lolligag its way to an apocalyptic future without drastically addressing this planetary crisis, “We are ensuring at best abominable lives for ourselves and our children,” Malcolm Harris writes in his new book What’s Left. But, Harris continues, “I refuse to believe that we have no alternative to the universal human project’s erosion into parochial barbarism and petty domination. That is an unacceptable outcome, and its giant advancing outline visible through the mist of the near future compels immediate radical action.” In this podcast, recorded at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore and Cafe in Baltimore on April 29, 2025, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Harris about his new book and about three practical paths humanity can take to save itself from apocalypse.
Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
John Duda:
Tonight we are here to talk with Malcolm Harris about what’s left three paths through the planetary crisis. I was thinking about how to introduce this book and I made the mistake of starting to read some of the reviews that had appeared of it. There’s one by Adam Twos in the New York Times, and I like Adam twos. He’s okay. He does good stuff, sends nice emails, nice charts, big books on economic crisis. But I thought his review was really fundamentally wrongheaded because he is basically saying, oh, this is a beautiful, lovely book about the beautiful dream world we could have been in had Trump not won. But now that Trump has won, we have to scale back all our radical ambitions and focus on, I think he says rebuilding the institutions of civil society or something like that. And I thought that was fundamentally just totally wrongheaded based on the book and based on what I know about how radical ideas function in times when they’re not immediately able to be put into place, it’s not for nothing, right?
For instance, just on a policy level, right? It’s not for nothing that the Heritage Foundation wrote Project 2025 before Trump was elected the second time, right? They didn’t wait around until they had permission to do it and then lay out a plan for their evil shit fuckery that they’re doing. They went ahead and they created a plan for what they wanted to see in the world when they were out of power so that the minute they were in power, guess what? We’re fucked. Likewise, you don’t retrench your radical visions in the middle of crisis. You don’t step away from your desire to remake the world or your desire to deal with the Onrushing planetary crisis that’s coming our way just because you have a setback. In fact, I think those are the times when you redouble it. So I’m really excited to have Malcolm here tonight because this book is a really, really great roadmap to the strategic and tactical possibilities and imperatives that we are facing as a movement or as a movement of movements. And I’m really thrilled to have ’em here in person to talk through it. I’m especially thrilled to have Maximilian Alvarez here. Max has been doing some fantastic work if you haven’t seen it. And I’m tracing the connections between capitalists, hyper extractivism exploitation, and the effects on basically sacrifice communities in the United States. And I think it’s a really dramatic way of illustrating some of the conjunctions and hinge points that Malcolm’s book talks about in a larger sense. So please join me in welcoming both of them to Red Emmas.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright, thank you so much, John, thank you to everyone here at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore, cafe and gathering space. Thank you all for making the trip out tonight. Just wanted to encourage y’all to please continue to support Red Emma’s however you can. We need spaces like this now more than ever, and I couldn’t be more grateful to be back here with Brother Malcolm and to talk about his really important challenging and thought provoking new book, what’s Left Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis. And Malcolm, first of all, I just wanted to congratulate you on publishing another book right after you just published one that it would take me two lifetimes to write. So congrats asshole.
Malcolm Harris:
They don’t pay you if you don’t keep writing. I have realized. So when people say another book, I say like, wow, you went to work again this week, didn’t you go last week? So stay tuned. There’ll be more of them.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I mean, you feel that in reading your works, right? I mean that these are words that even if you could turn the faucet off, well you couldn’t turn the faucet off, right? I mean, that’s the sense that I get that you’re a natural born writer and you need to write and think, and it’s such a pleasure to behold that as a reader and to be in conversation with you about it. And I wanted to sort of start by way of getting us into the discussion, and I’ll give everyone the same disclaimer I give when I do these events that there’s no possible way that we could condense this entire book into a 35 minute discussion and q and a afterwards. So our goal here is to really give you an overview and hopefully encourage you to go buy the book, read it, talk to us and Malcolm about it, talk to your friends about it, strategize with it.
That’s our goal here today. So we are going to talk about it for about the next half hour, then we will open it up to q and a. And I wanted to just by way of getting us started from Malcolm’s introduction where he writes and gives a pretty succinct, I think kind of picture of where we’re at right now. So Malcolm writes, clearly the humans of the 21st century have a problem with the way we handle our collective problems. We seem to be acting out the fable about the frog. The pot on the stove who only perceiving small increases in temperature eventually boils to death. But since we’re humans, we get the added benefit of being able to have a conversation about the fact that we’re slowly boiling to death while we slowly boil to death.
In so far as that is what we should reasonably expect as the outcome of our present social direction. We are ensuring at best abominable lives for ourselves and our children. I refuse Malcolm Wrights to believe that we have no alternative to the universal human project’s erosion into parochial barbarism and petty domination. That is an unacceptable outcome and its giant advancing outline visible through the midst of the near future compels immediate radical action. So Malcolm, before we really dig into the three paths out of the current planetary crisis, I wanted to just meditate a bit on the problem that you write about in the introduction, not just the crisis itself, but what’s keeping us stuck in this pressure cooker of mutually assured destruction.
Malcolm Harris:
Yeah. Well thanks Max, first of all for that wonderful intro and John as well, and everyone at Red Emmas for having me back again and all of you for joining me this evening. So I started this book, or the premise for this book comes from an experience I had in 2019 when I was consulting for the oil company Shell. And you might wonder why on earth would the oil company, shell ask Malcolm to go consult for them? And the answer is that my first book was called Kids These Days and it’s an analysis of the millennial generation. And I didn’t know at the time that all generational analysis is advertising copy. It’s just a promo for corporate consulting services. So every person that you’ve ever seen write a generational book, the way they actually make their money is by telling companies how to sell stuff to that generation, which I did not know at the time I wrote this book.
I thought it was important only to find out that that’s what the whole game was. And so Shell Oil, which has been conducting these future scenario exercises for decades where they try to imagine what’s going to happen deep into the future and try to adjust their business according to it, wanted me to come to London and work on one of these exercises with them. And these corporate consulting deals are such a good deal for writers compared to actually writing that they don’t think anyone’s going to screw it up. And so they don’t even make you sign nondisclosure agreements. And I am stupid enough to screw that up. And so I emailed my editor at New York Magazine and said, look, I’ve got a great story. And then I told she I’m going to be happy to go. I can’t wait to talk to C level executives about how they think about climate change.
And I did write that article, Michelle was not happy about that article. They refused to cooperate in any way with it, but didn’t deny anything that I wrote, which is great. But what really stuck with me was a conversation I had with this one shell analyst who had started working at a green company and his company got bought by Shell. And so he wasn’t even happy to be working there, but he was trying to figure out what his job was going to be. I was asking him what happens to oil wells when shell decarbonize them? And he said, oh, we sell them. I said, okay, who do you sell them to? And he says, well, we sell them to shady operators who are going to operate them with worse environmental conditions and worse labor conditions, and they’re going to start flaring the gas from these wells and we know that’s what’s going to happen.
And I was like, well, that doesn’t sound like a very good decarbonization plan for society, even though if that’s what accounts for Shell. And he looked at me and he said, well, we don’t plan to lose money. And that was a sense that really stuck with me for years, even after the article came out, because we need someone to plan to lose money. We need someone to strand some of those oil assets, not to end up burning them somehow or some way, but to actually leave them in the ground. And that requires somebody to plan to lose money. And there isn’t much of a volunteer pool for that, especially with companies like Shell who cannot plan to lose money and this analyst couldn’t plan to lose money and his boss couldn’t plan to lose money or they would both be fired and replaced by somebody who would.
And that’s not really how we think about the climate crisis. Usually we think about it as personal greed of people who are powerful and rich or shortsightedness of policy makers or whatever. But this is a deep structural problem that goes to the core of how our society arranges itself in the first place, not something that we can solve with a personnel change or even a change to our leadership. And so that was the premise attacking this book is that climate change isn’t the problem we think it is so far and not the way that people have written about it so far.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and John mentioned in the introduction that for the past couple of years I’ve been interviewing working class folks around the US living in so-called sacrifice zones, starting with the community in and around East Palestinian, Ohio where a Norfolk southern bomb train derailed and exploded unnecessarily three days later exposing all these residents to toxic pollutants that are accumulating in their bodies as we speak right now. And that was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg as I connected with residents in South Baltimore who were being poisoned just 20 minutes away from where we’re sitting, cancer alley, Louisiana, red Hill in Hawaii, so on and so forth. And it’s a really critical, and I think eyeopening test case for what you’re talking about because what I’ve learned going to and talking to folks living in these different communities is that if we’re talking about the jobs that are needed in today’s society and the vast scope of work that could be done, like New deal style, putting people to work, it’s remediation, it’s climate remediation, it’s cleaning up all the damage that we’ve done to our communities, to our land, to our planet over the past few centuries, but there’s no profit motive there.
And so it’s not, even though everything else tells you that this is what society needs, the imposition of the profit motive makes it just not even something worth considering. And I feel like that trap that’s keeping us in the boiling water that you’re talking about,
Malcolm Harris:
Absolutely. And people will, because we’re compelled to, we all have to find ways to make livings for ourselves individually. And so people will fight for those jobs destroying their own ecological communities. They’ll fight for oil jobs, they’ll fight for construction jobs for gas fired powered Bitcoin. Mines like the worst possible environmental and social planning. And we have union workers fighting for these jobs and it’s because we are constantly required to make ourselves valuable. So that’s the other side of this oil well, right? The oil well that shell is decarbonizing and this has been verified through reporting that they actually do this. They’ll sell off these oil wells to inscrutable new owners, owners you can’t even find the corporate name for, who will operate it with little to no oversight, with disregard for the law as their plan in ways that are hazardous not just to the environment as a whole, but to the actual workers who are working there approximately.
And yet people will fight for these jobs in every one of those flaring oil wells. People will feel compelled to sell their labor at those places of work. And it’s not because mostly someone’s put a gun to their head and said, you have to go work at this oil well tomorrow or I’m going to kill you and your family. And it’s not mostly because people think, oh, if I go work at this oil well, I’m going to get rich and I’m going to be able to do something completely different with their life. It’s the same reason people go to work all around the world. They know on some level if they can’t make themselves valuable to the system, that the things that they need in order to live will be taken from them, their access to shelter will be taken from them, their access to medicine will be taken from them, their ability to care for the they love will be taken from them. And in the face of that which is an individual task, the question of a clean atmosphere or decarbonized atmosphere or clean water or clean air, even though we know we need all of those things collectively, those questions go out the window because everyone individually has this responsibility to make themselves valuable. And fossil fuels are valuable, right? Fossil fuels can do a lot of work and they will find places where people can put them to work and can sell them.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I mean, I can tell you guys there is an openness, at least from the hundreds of workers that I’ve interviewed in industries like this, there is at least an openness to the possibility of transition. I remember when coal miners in deep red Alabama were on strike for two years at Warrior Met Coal.
We reported on this struggle. We talked to folks there and they themselves understood that coal is a dying industry and a dying product. But when they were basically saying what Malcolm is saying, it’s like, what are you going to do for me and my family? And as long as we get more than empty promises of some solution down the road, if you have a tangible concrete plan for us to maintain our livelihoods, we’ll leave this damn coal mine. But until you present that, those are the options that we have. And so I think that for all of us need to think about that and how to break that kind of hold, the existential hold that this system has on us that keeps us in this death cycle. And I want to talk Malcolm a little bit about the kind of three paths that you write about in this book that you see as presenting potential ways out of this crisis. But by way of getting there, I guess to cite like Bernie Sanders would say, our good friend Adam Ts, what path would you say we are on now with the current Trump administration, this drill, baby drill, let’s take Greenland. Where are we headed right now with this administration
Malcolm Harris:
For a Chinese century? And I say that jokingly, but a little bit not. I think it’s important to displace America as the central actor. From our analysis objectively of the world, which the world is in the process of doing right now, we’ve taken for granted that whatever was going to be happening this century or over the relevant time period for climate change was going to be happening in an American led order, if not an American dominated unipolar order, which has sort of been the assumption for a while. I don’t think that’s a good assumption going forward. And certainly if we’re looking for answers, it’s not starting now. We’re not showing climate leadership or Donald Trump has undermined America’s position as the world’s climate policy leader or whatever. That’s just not true. We haven’t, by no metric are we leading the world in climate policy. And so when people say like, oh, don’t we need a policy to build or something, we just need a abundance construction policy or whatever, I say, well, even if that was the answer, even if that were the answer, even if that’s what I was talking about, you wouldn’t look to America for it.
We’re not doing that by any standard. And other countries are way ahead of us, specifically the People’s Republic of China. So for me, I find it a relief not to be stuck in a perspective that assumes America’s going to be leading the world. And I think if we really dig our nails into that position, we’re going to get confused. We’re going to find ourselves advocating for positions that make no sense, not just the tariffs, but even the Biden era subsidies on American electric vehicles. Were just more an attempt to fight the Chinese electric vehicle market than they were an attempt to actually do climate policy paying people the $7,500 cost difference between an American electric vehicle and an Chinese electric vehicle so that they buy the American one is not actually climate policy, not any more than shell selling off an oil well is right.
You’ve got the same stuff happening in these scenarios. And I think we really do need world scale policy at this point. We need a global perspective on what really is a planetary crisis. And I don’t say the climate crisis, that’s not the title of the book. It really is a planetary crisis that exceeds just the numeric analysis of temperature increase. It goes to our social metabolic order, is what I call it. And really at the planetary level that these dynamics that we’re talking about are happening in every community, in every country in the world, whether that country is a socialist country committed to a ecological future or America, they still face these same problems. And we see socialist countries, it’s not like the socialist countries of the world have decided, oh, we’re not going to use fossil fuels anymore. Those people would, if that’s what the leadership of Venezuela decided, they would be removed and the people would install different leaders because the people of the country depend on those fossil fuel assets in order to make livings for themselves in this global economy, right? States have been unable to insulate their populations from those injunctions sufficient to be able to take a leadership stance. No state has been able to take that kind of leadership stance, and it’s not a coincidence.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And like I said, there’s no way that we’re going to be able to encapsulate the totality of all three of the kind of key paths out of this planetary crisis that you write about in this book. But I want to maybe give folks a bit of an overview of the three paths that you write about. And also could you say a little bit quickly about how you sheared away the options that you weren’t going to consider? I think you have a very effective way in this book of saying, yeah, there are many proposed solutions or paths out of this, but here are all the ones that I’m not even going to entertain because
Malcolm Harris:
Yeah. So originally I was going to use the whole book as an argument for why the climate crisis means everyone has to be a communist and they have to use value form theory to understand the climate crisis. And only by severing the connection between value and life at the planetary level, can we even find an analytically viable solution to the climate crisis. And then I thought about that for a little while and decided it was maybe not the most advisable argument to make one, because it turns out it’s not true. There are other analytically viable solutions to the climate crisis, which I’ll discuss. But two, and maybe more importantly, I don’t think it gives me a lot of rhetorical credibility. And I don’t think in the time period that we’re talking about, which is years, maybe some decades, not centuries, I don’t think any one position is going to be able to convince everyone, every progressive actor on the world stage to give up what they believe and follow one strategy.
So any claim that we’re going to collapse behind some specific strategy I think is unrealistic. And I wanted to write a realistic book. I think there are enough unrealistic solutions to the climate crisis out there, enough unrealistic books about the climate crisis. I wanted to do a realistic one, and that meant being realistic about the political field that I was operating in as well. But at the same time, I won’t anyone write about progressive solutions to the climate crisis. And so I had to draw a line between what I was willing to consider and what I wasn’t willing to consider. And where I put that line for me is that you have to agree that it is society’s prerogative to plan society, that the planning prerogative within society does not belong to a fraction of the capitalist class that is able to control investment under the current status quo.
It belongs to the entirety of a planetary society on our collective behalf. And that any solution that assumes that either that the market is some ancient God that we have to appease or a fundamental part of human nature or whatever, that we have to accommodate the market rather than perhaps using it as a tool ourselves. I wasn’t going to consider, it’s just like that’s not the purpose of this book. And I made the same decision about parochial strategies. If your strategy is build a bigger border wall around your country or build a wall around your city or pay more border guards and put people on gun boats, which again may be the dominant strategy right now as far as dealing with the climate crisis, but it’s not one I was willing to consider at the beginning. Max quoted me, I still believe in a solution by the planet for the planet, and I believe we’re going to be able to do this together and that we really will win. And that’s the position with which I wrote this book, and the question is how. And so the three strategies that I talked about, I tried to use really non triggering names for the strategies ones that anyone would be able to hear it and still work through the strategy on its own terms, rather than being like, oh, I’m not a liberal. I don’t want to hear about the liberal strategy, or I’m only going to read this chapter to see why they’re wrong or whatever. And so I named the strategies market craft, public power and communism.
I didn’t quite make it with the third one, and I’ll explain why, but first I’ll go through the first two. So market craft is, you could call it the liberal solutions. And it’s the idea that, and I take this term from the political scientist, Stephen Vogel, that markets are a tool that societies of people use to accomplish what they need and that we can use the tools of market crafting to create the market for the decarbonization goods that we need and the decarbonization outcomes that we need. And we don’t have to submit ourselves to the market, rather, we need to structure the rules and the ground in which they play. I use a metaphor that from the market craft perspective, complaining about the market outcomes of decarbonization is complaining about the quality of the cucumber sandwiches at your imaginary tea party with your stuffed animals, right?
It’s like it’s your tea party. You got to take responsibility for the quality, the outcomes. And so it means we’re not crafting the market very well. And in that strategy, I point to the People’s Republic of China as even though this is a capitalist strategy, but as people who are pursuing a much more successful market craft strategy than the United States. Second strategy is public power, which refers both to the power of the public and specifically organized to take control of what happens within society directly and decide what happens and make it happen rather than depending on unreliable market actors. But it also refers to public power as in publicly owned and operated utilities like literal public power. And the best example of the combination of both in the United States context is probably the Tennessee Valley Authority, which I talk about a lot in this section where under FDR, they decided, look, if capital doesn’t want to electrify the south, if it’s not worth it for them to develop this area of the country, then we’re going to just go in and do it ourselves. We’re going to set up a government agency and we’re going to backstop it with the federal government and their balance of payments, and we’re going to build the things we’re going to need, we’re going to build the dams we’re going to build. I talk about pump storage, hydro power a lot in this section, which is how 95% globally of grid scale energy is stored, which people may not know because the battery companies don’t want you to know.
And then communism, which I swear I tried different words. I was like, I’ll call it commenting or community or something that would let people experience the argument without getting reactive. And I ultimately decided that that was a violation of my implicit agreement with the reader to use always the best words that I could find because I think readers can tell when you’re being dishonest. Readers can tell when you’re trying to manipulate or play them or not, say what you really mean and just say something so that they believe it. And I trust my readers a lot. I trust them enough to use that word communism to describe this section, even if I don’t trust the reviewers of the New York Times to not freak out about it. I trust my readers more importantly to be able to read the book. And I’ve got a footnote in that section where I sort of explain this and I say to the reader, please trust me to communicate what I mean by this, which is that society should be organized from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs with the idea that something we all need collectively right now is to decarbonize our atmosphere urgently.
And only by breaking this question of our needs from the question of value, can we even approach them in the first place? So one way I talk about this is that the question, how many shoes does the people in this room need under capitalism and other value-based systems? It’s not a question about feet, it’s a question about how much each of our labor commands on the labor market and what kind of priority we place on buying shoes and what the shoe production system is and what wages are in the shoe system where shoes are produced. All these other questions that don’t have to do with the fact that we all have two feet and that we’re people who need shoes for our two feet, and we have a need for decarbonization that is much more like our two feet than our needs for shoes under the current system. And in fact, if we treat our need for decarbonization like shoes under the current system, we’ll never get it because you can’t buy decarbonization individually. You can only buy shelter from the consequences of an increasingly carbonized world. And so the communist strategy says we really have to seize control the basis for the arrangement of society as a whole if we’re going to solve a question of needs like that. So those are the three strategies.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So we got about five minutes here before we open it up to q and a. And I wanted to kind of quickly follow up there and ask, how would you evaluate the Biden years? I don’t think we should call Biden just an extension of neoliberalism. What you write about in this book, like the industrial policy of the Chips Act, the infrastructure or the Inflation Reduction Act, and that sort of market craft represented something, a breakage if it were from the neoliberal consensus. So would you put the Biden policy under the market craft form of addressing this crisis?
Malcolm Harris:
Yeah, not a particularly strong example when we think globally, and I think we have to think globally, and that was a problem with some of the left reception of the inflation reduction Act, was that it was based on the standards of what we thought we could achieve in the American political system, by which standards it was a victory. And I say so and even a surprising victory, but by the standards of the problem, by what we actually need to accomplish, it was relatively weak. And I think one of the problems with the Biden market craft approach is that they didn’t rely enough on public power to be able to say, look, some of these problems we just need to deal with directly, like the electrical grid is currently badly set up. We need to think about how we actually reform the electrical grid from the ground up.
If we were to approach this right now, how would we do it not struggle through the deregulation legacy of the nineties or whatever, which is currently what they’re doing. And so without that recourse to public power, without the recourse to saying, we’ll, just do it ourselves, if you don’t want to do it, we’ll just do it. You get stuck. And the way I talk about the three strategies is not like we’re looking for the key to the lock. I don’t think any of the strategies is the key to the lock. Instead, I talk about them as puzzle pieces. And the thing about puzzle pieces is that they have to be uneven. They have to have these inlets and protrusions. They can’t have all the answers. They can’t be solid, they can’t be square shaped or circles or whatever. Then they can’t lock together. And so the fact that all of these strategies have these problems, and I try to be very fair about how I present all of them.
I give five subsections about why they’re good strategies and three subsections for each of them about what problems there are, maybe those little inlets. But those problems and those advantages are what allow them to link together. And that’s what allows us, I hope, to be able to look back from a victorious future where we’ve won, which I really do believe we’re going to do. I do not think that there will be a thousand year Trump rike. It’s not going to happen. We’ll see if they get to six months, they’re not there yet, maybe four years, I don’t believe it. They’re not going to win. And so the question is how we are going to win and to think backwards. And if you look at every turning point historically of major progressive action, whether that’s the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the American Civil War, there’s always this composition of social forces where you look back and you say, well, those groups did not all agree together, right?
Abe Lincoln did not agree with John Brown about a lot of stuff, and yet we can look back and see the abolitionist movement take shape across these differences. And that’s the same thing in the French Revolution. The same thing in the Russian Revolution. Any sort of history, historical conflicts in the modern era has a composition, a progressive composition that looks a lot like this one, the one that I described in this book that goes from liberal all the way to radical, right? Karl Marx actually calls it the Party of anarchy, which is not the slogan for the book, also not maybe rhetorically the way to present the climate answers. But at Red, Emma, as I can call it, this is the party of anarchy. And I do think that that’s how the system will perceive it once we get a little more coherence on the left, that it will show itself to be a threat to the system, and the system will regard it as such.
And then it’s about holding together in that moment. And so a lot of the end of the book is about how we find this coherence across these lines of difference, even when we disagree, even when people stab each other in the back, even when people break promises and make mistakes, that we have to be able to find this coherence and pull this left wing coherence out so that we will able to look back and say, that was the climate movement, that was the alignment to progressive social forces that got us from where we are now to really where I believe that we’re going to be, and more importantly where we have to be. I don’t think we have an option than to fight for a planetary solution to our planetary problem. And so I look forward to doing it with all of you, and I hope this gives us some models about how we might cohere that framework and cohere into the movement that we need to be. So thank you all, and I’d love to hear your question.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s give it up for Malcolm Harris
John Duda:
So I can come around with the mic for q and a. I do want to mention that we do have a big stack of Malcolm’s book in the bookstore. So if you do have to leave, you can exit through the book shop and you can pick one up, and if you can stick around, you can get it signed after the QA. Alright, so who’s got some questions?
Audience Member 1:
So what’s an example that’s come out, I don’t know, since the book went to press that’s made you really go, wow, I wish I I could have put that in the book. That’s such a targeted example of exactly what I was talking about in this section.
Malcolm Harris:
I dunno. I mean, I try to write books non actively. And so even for my last one, Palo Alto, which was very in the news cycle, whatever, people were like, oh, don’t you wish you’d added a section about crypto at the end? And I was like, no. The point is that it’s a longer term analysis that’s taking larger cycles into consideration. And so my fear about being responsive or reactive to the things that happen right in front of our face is that it can kind of throw our perspective off and we assign unusual importance to the things that are happening in front of us because they’re happening in front of us and they’re happening to us now, which is an understandable survival mechanism. You have to deal with the things that are in front of you right now, but hopefully one of the things I have to offer as an author is a sort of step back perspective to say, what’s really going on here and on what kind of cycle is it happening?
And I didn’t write this book assuming good things were going to happen in the near term. And I don’t think I’ve written any of my books assuming that good things were going to happen in the near term. And I’ve been right every time so far, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not committed to progress over time. And every book that I’ve written also contains the possibility that struggles will erupt. And in the 10 plus years that I’ve been writing now, those struggles have intensified, right? It’s true that things have gotten worse. It’s also true that the progressive forces within society have stepped things up, have changed so much just since I’ve been writing. I mean, I graduated high school in 2007, and so the way things were politically in 2007, which was only less than 20 years ago or whatever, completely different from what we began.
There was no organized left of any sort in the United States. It felt like at the time there was the anti-war movement and that was it. And that has changed so much. We’ve seen some of the largest movements in this country’s history since then, some of the largest uprisings in this country’s history since then. And I placed my hope in those conflicts. And so I definitely would’ve talked about what’s happening now, whatever. But it’s an example of what I write in the book and I write about the rise of fascist right wing, petro capitalist regimes throughout the world. And if you were sitting there a couple years ago thinking the United States could not be an example of a country where we had a right wing fascist, petro capitalist regime come to power, then I don’t think you’re paying very good attention, right? This guy got reelected, so you getting like, I can’t believe Trump got elected president, right? It’s like, so yeah, I insist on my ability to have written the book I wrote and have it still be absolutely relevant in this moment.
Osita Nwanevu:
First of all, congratulations,
Malcolm Harris:
Good to see you again.
Osita Nwanevu:
Thanks. I see you. I was wondering if you could say more about how you think that these three approaches could be knitted together organizationally and institutionally and politically. It is one thing to say conceptually that none of these approaches works on its own and we have to knit them together. But what does it actually look like as far as organizing? How do the communists organize with the market craft people? What do those spaces look like? What do those political forms look like?
Malcolm Harris:
Well, we’re going to have a talk about Stop Cop City pretty soon, right? What’s the date on the Stop Cop city talk? John May 21st. May 21st. So that’s one of the examples that I use in the text, absolutely that it’s a really good example of how, because also you had people on the boards of companies or whatever and people lobbying the boards of companies to pull out of Cop City to say, this isn’t worth it for you as a market actor because we’re going to put grassroots pressure on you in that way. It’s not just that we’re going to burn the construction equipment, which they did burn the construction equipment, but they also worked within the financial system to say, think about this board members of this construction contractor. You don’t want this. It’s not worth it for you. And I think that’s a negative example because you’re trying to stop cop city, but it’s a good one. It’s one of the examples I put in the middle of the Venn diagram where you had people in all three, you had people working for the state who were trying to stop it. You had people voting in a referendum, you had people making economic cases to the market actors, and then you also had communists halting construction enough to have these debates to be able to theoretically have the democracy weigh in the first place. And to do that, they had to burn construction equipment.
How we can think more productively, I think that’s not enough, right? It’s not enough to try to stop cop city and maybe to stop cop cities more in the future. We also have to build stuff and build power. And I advance in the final pages of the book speculative structure I call disaster councils that could include people working in all three strategies at the same time to plan in advance to think about what are the disasters likely to befall our communities and how can we all three as progressive elements within society plan for that eventuality? And one specific example I think is after the floods in Asheville and North Carolina, one of the most resonant images was police out lined up outside a grocery store with long guns and angry parents saying, please, I need to get inside to buy baby formula. And they weren’t trying to loop baby formula, they were just trying to buy baby formula, but the state’s reaction was to just clamp things down.
But the progressive forces within society could plan for such an eventuality, and so we could plan in advance with grocery store workers, with target workers, which vises that sell baby formula, that when these disasters come down, we know there’s going to be a flood in the next five years. We know this is what it’s going to look like when it happens. We’re going to move baby formula, we’re going to take the pallets out of the store and we’re going to move them to these five checkpoints and we’re going to have quarter sheets to let people know that that’s where they can come get free baby formula for their kids in an emergency situation. And that’s doable without raising a billion dollars. That’s doable without taking over the Democratic party. And that’s doable hopefully without getting shot. That’s something that we can plan in advance, and I think we can exercise leverage at that point because it’s not just about charity in that eventuality. It’s not even just about mutual aid that’s about building power and taking power to say that this is how we’re going to distribute things and this is how our society’s going to work in this moment. And because there is such a vacuum around those disasters and because we know they’re going to happen, I think that’s a place where if we’re being thoughtful and exercising foresight that the left in the United States can start exercising leverage right now
Maximillian Alvarez:
I also want to just quickly throw in, because OCE a’s question really got my brain churning about some of the nascent examples that exist already, where granted this symbiosis between the three paths out of our planetary crisis have not come together in a full unison, but there’s crossover there. I mentioned for example, I’ll use the labor movement as an example within the labor movement you can see traces of these three paths, right? Absolutely. And sometimes they’re directly at odds with each other within the same union. But I mentioned the Warrior Met coal strike in Alabama. A strike on its own is already a form of market craft or a strategy of market craft, as it were, where workers are using their collective labor power to discipline the company and use that force to hurt its bottom line and change its behavior because of it. So just from the nature of the strike itself, there was a market craft strategy there, but then when you also considered that this was happening in the coal industry that had added importance. But then when you add in the fact that the local DSA were some of the folks who kept showing up, even though those coal miners were not socialists, but after a while they were like, Hey, the socialists are the guys who keep showing up. And so you
Malcolm Harris:
Start or the anarchists
Maximillian Alvarez:
Or the anarchists, you start seeing those social bonds and the ideas and the relationships start to change people a little bit. But I would also point to, and Kim Kelly, the great Kim Kelly did some great reporting for us on this, how after a while when the strike itself wasn’t working, the union made the decision to fly a bunch of those coal miners up to New York and go protest outside of BlackRock, who was the number one like investor in Warrior Met Coal. And so that’s perhaps one example where you can see these paths sort of coming together. The last one I’ll mention just quickly is I also mentioned East Palestinian, Ohio, where I’ve been interviewing residents who’ve been poisoned by that train derailment. Prior to that, I was interviewing railroad workers who were working for companies like Norfolk Southern and who were prepared to go on a national strike about it before Biden and both parties in Congress conspired to crush that strike.
That was another form of market craft, right? The Railway Labor Act is it’s a codex of market craft preventing workers on the railroad from taking those sorts of actions. But anyway, I digress. The point is that we at the Real News put railroad workers in touch with East Palestine residents saying, why aren’t you guys talking to each other? You’re fighting the same company. And so out of those discussions, coalitions form and people start to realize the common bonds that they have and how they can work together to address these big monstrous corporate opponents that are hurting all of us. And out of this railroad labor, the more radical side of the rail labor movement, you have a national proposal for nationalizing the rails and electrifying them and turning them into a green rail system. So there are nascent, I think, examples of this, but I can tell you right now, no one has figured it out and they need a lot of pushing. And the old guard of the labor movement is not going to get us there. They need new thinking. They need new actors from community side, from the communist side, from all different sides
Malcolm Harris:
Who have played important roles in a lot of these actors, whether it’s UAW Wildcat strikes among the grad student workers or a trans anarchist contingent that blocked that coal train until the workers got paid. And they were ones who were holding down that encampment who said, if you guys need to go home to your families, go home to your families, we’ll hold it down even though we don’t have jobs here because we recognize that this is an important social struggle and what I call that communist ve, it can be very important, even just buying enough time to start up the public power struggle. I do in the closing sections, I really do talk about all the little overlaps and I give examples of, okay, what does it look like to do market craft and communism at the same time? What does it look like to do market craft and public power?
And what are examples of all of these? So I do talk about the specific overlaps, and it’s not only not impossible, but not even particularly hard to find examples. There’s a lot of constant crossing of lines in terms of our actual practical strategies. And one of the goals of the book was to get people out of a sort of identity reactive frame about their politics, which I think people on the left can certainly fall into where they’re looking for buzzwords, they’re looking for keywords so that they can figure out, okay, where’s this book positioned and where am I positioned in relation to it so that I know the politically correct positioning? And that’s more important than the logic that’s more important than the argument. And actually thinking through what it says. And I tried to give people as few of those as possible few places where they can just orient themselves cleanly in terms of their political identity. And so my hope is that that will result in people being more open to the arguments and more open to the overlap strategically and come out of it thinking of a lot of things they could do as opposed to things they don’t want to do or people they don’t want to work with.
Audience Member 2:
So I appreciate the fact that you’re talking a lot about things being together in the same timeframe in terms of these strategies overlapping and interacting. I’m curious if you also play with time in the book and escalation and building in these strategies and how one form might move into another form with time.
Malcolm Harris:
So I didn’t actually think about them as stages, which I’ve gotten a lot of questions about. Like, oh, is it one market craft, then public power, then communism, which is not how I thought about it because I think, like I said, the relevant period that we’re talking about is years and maybe a couple of decades. And in that period of time, I don’t think we’re going to see that full progression from one strategy to the other. I think there are going to be people working diligently, honestly and progressively within each of those strategies in the whole relevant time period that we’re talking about. Even if at the last minute people have to abandon one for the other or one of them wins or something in a particular moment, which historically happens, like the Bolsheviks win this power struggle, the liberals win the French Revolution power struggle.
It doesn’t become a proletarian movement in the same way. And I imagine that that will happen in this situation, and I think it’s too soon to tell in what way or in what direction. And so I talk about how we have to walk down all paths at the same time. So I lied. I do talk about it temporarily, but unfortunately it’s in terms of quantum mechanics in which the regular rules of time are suspended. And my argument is that in the big scale of things, what we’re talking about in the time period we’re talking about and the place we’re talking about is so tiny that that could happen, that the regular rules for time and space don’t have to apply, that we could walk down all three paths at the same time and find ourselves at the end of one that works. And that’s what I think we have to do. I also compare it to a football play at one point. There were a bunch of fun metaphors at the end, and I hope that one of them works for people, right? It’s like all of the metaphors don’t have to work as long as you find one that you can hold onto. But yeah, the time is a little complicated. I think thinking about it temporarily is tough. And that doesn’t mean we can escape from that. It means we have to go through it.
John Duda:
Got time for one more question.
Audience Member 3:
Hi, I enjoyed your talk. I guess I was wondering because a big issue I had with Biden personally was that I kind of saw him as being very hawkish on the international stage.
Audience Member 1:
Absolutely.
Audience Member 3:
And I think a lot of his green policy was tied to that. I think there was an interesting jet here article about how kind of biden’s his whole idea of the new deal. It was intertwined with kind of Scoop Jackson hawkish Cold War liberalism, which to me, the most depressing thing recently in terms of the democratic qualities politics has been the influx of neocons and the insistence of us pursuing primacy on the international stage in terms of confronting Russia, which I don’t really approve of Russia’s actions, but some of the stuff like the fact that they went from piping in natural gas through pipelines to liquified natural gas that goes through Spain or selling all their oil directly to Europe to selling all their oil, unrefined oil to India, that then gets rerouted to Europe through tankers in a much more costly fashion. It’s clear that you can’t have this type of drive for US primacy overall and also get to carbon neutrality. How do you go about addressing both domestic problems where the Democrats have become the hawkish party as well as kind of, I don’t know. I mean, I think Trump to some degree is doing it right. He’s kind destroying the US empire.
Malcolm Harris:
That’s true.
Audience Member 3:
And if there is a silver lining, right, there’s that. But yeah, I don’t know. What do you think emerges in 2028 maybe with another democratic presidency? I have trouble, I mean, I talked to somebody at a coffee shop after that election and she was just talking about how it’s good that Liz Cheney was invited into the Democratic party. And I just want to scream when I hear people talk about that, but sorry, I’m kind of all over the place.
Malcolm Harris:
No, no, I follow exactly. And that’s a big issue in the book. That’s one of the drawback sections for market craft. That market craft is traditionally organized nationally. And then you have, you find yourself paying $7,500 for everyone who buys a US electric vehicle just to stick it to China. And that’s your whole climate crisis or whole climate policy. But I think at a deeper level, this goes back to the coherence question because, and the Biden question, because we did under the Biden administration, saw a surprising amount of left-wing coherence and you saw pretty radical some of these market craft thinkers making headway into the administration and saying with some pretty relatively radical economic ideas that if we want to build something, we can build it. And if we want to do something, we can do it. And that led to the Biden administration spending a lot more money and pushing for bigger bills than it would have otherwise.
And it did feel for a moment like we were all part of the same conversation. And then the Biden administration broke that and they broke that with the slaughter of Gaza and they refused to take any responsibility for breaking that moment of coherence. And it’s entirely their fault. And we need to keep that blame where it belongs on those elements within the Democratic party that we can’t work with. Because there is a place where you can step past a line and make it so that people can’t work with you. And I was a big believer in the uncommitted movement, which gave them so many chances to cross back over and said, we understand everything about the situation, but we need you to show some kind of movement. We need you to reach your hand in some way back towards this part of the line and they wouldn’t do it.
And we are every day dealing with the direct consequences of that choice. That’s what we are currently experiencing. And so this is an important lesson about what happens if you fail to rally around those points of coherence. And I think one of those points of coherence needs to be internationalism. And we need to say we’re not afraid of the people of China, that they have the same problems we do and they’re looking for the same solutions we are. And we don’t hear that much in the Democratic party. We haven’t heard that much from our liberal representatives, but I think it’s a very popular position among Americans themselves. I don’t think Americans necessarily want war with the rest of the world, and I certainly think we can be talked out of it. And so the question is, are we going to see some leadership from the internationalist parts within the Democratic party to come out and say, this is fearmongering, all this tariff stuff is fearmongering, all the military stuff is fearmongering.
We need to reduce the military industrial complex and we need to spend that money instead of building bombs that are purely destructive. We need to build things that we can use and that solve our problems. And I think that means for those of us in the radical left, we need a direct front against the military industrial complex. I think as Americans, that’s one of the few things that we can offer very directly to the rest of the world, right, is to contest that planning element within society that says we plan for more bombs and more bombs and more bombs. It’s on us to stop them. And I think that’s the most internationalist thing we can do is stop the weapons industry. And that’s would show real leadership, not just nationally, but globally, and that we understand the planetary crisis and maybe we can drag parts of the Democratic party with us. I think that is ultimately a popular message. I think people understand that bombs are destructive, and I think people, liberals, the abundance liberals or whatever, who aren’t willing to say, we should build fewer bombs, our cowards, they’re cowards or they’re bigots one of the two, and neither puts them in an appropriate position to lead. And we should say. So.
John Duda:
Alright. Well thank you Malcolm. Thank you Max. Thank you everybody for coming. As I mentioned, the book is for sale in the bookshop. We’ll be open for a while. Grab a drink if you want one. Hang out, get your book signed. And thank you both. Thank you.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Maximillian Alvarez.