For years, the writer and critic Malcolm Harris has been helping readers make sense of the amorphous implications of capitalism. In Palo Alto, Harris took on the history of Silicon Valley and the Big Tech-venture capitalist worldview that has now ascended to the highest levels of American power. In Kids These Days, he showed what happens to millennials following the collapse of the stories about how the world works with which they/we were raised – that work is life, life is work, and all of it is in service to perpetual economic growth.

Now Harris’s new book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis, also aims to bring clarity to one of capitalism’s consequences – but this time for the biggest, most existential consequence of them all.

In What’s Left, Harris argues that despite decades of climate denial, disinformation, and delay, there are still plausible paths we can take to solve a problem that feels increasingly unsolvable. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the “we” tasked with doing the solving is the broadest possible “we”: all of humanity. What’s Left delivers important messages to some of humankind’s subsections – climate activists, the United States, the global working class – but one of Harris’s foundational points is that approaching this planetary crisis as anything less than a planetary crisis is a form of denial. And at this point, denial is no longer something the collective “we” can afford.

In March I spoke with Harris about the intrinsic links between fossil fuels and capitalism, how tackling climate change is a form of class conflict, and why progress on this crisis demands facing uncomfortable truths head-on – starting with the fact that it’s probably even worse than we think. That’s a painful reality to accept, Harris says, but ultimately a liberating one.

This conversation has been condensed and edited significantly for clarity and accuracy.

Prefer to listen? Check out the podcast version of this interview here, or wherever you get your podcasts:

I have my own theory, but I’m curious what you see as the purpose of your book.

At first I thought, “I’m going to write about why I’m right and everyone else is wrong. I have the only explanation for how we get through the climate crisis, and when people read my brilliant explanation, they’ll have no choice but to agree with me.” And then I thought about that. That won’t happen, even if I make a spectacular argument. We live in a society, and I wasn’t going to remake that society by making an argument.

I decided the most useful thing I could do was, operating from some base of shared understanding, give a showcase of what I think are the relevant ideological paths that the left has open to it right now [to solve the climate crisis] – from the left wing of the Biden economic team all the way to insurgent communists. This book was my attempt to give the strongest presentation I could of these different paths, even if I don’t agree with everything in there.

As a reader, what was your take?

What it felt like to me was essentially a bracing bucket of cold water. There’s no benefit to pretending that the problem is not as bad as it is, and that the crisis is not as acute and real and world-spanning as it is. There is a sense of inertia, the way that capitalism works, that all of us can get very comfortable with. What [the book] felt like to me was you repeatedly reminding people that it’s as bad as you think, probably worse, and we don’t do ourselves any favors by avoiding the discomfort of that reality.

Well, that’s just true. I’m against deluding ourselves. I’m interested to see how much people will think about it as an optimistic or pessimistic book, hopeful or hopeless. I try not to work within those boundaries. They don’t guide us in the right directions because there is hope even in the most hopeless moments, and there’s despair even in our best strategies. I think that’s a premise for the project: that there’s no point deluding ourselves. I’m not going to lie to my readers about what I understand the situation to be. The situation is pretty dire.

But people have been in dire situations for a long time. We’re not the first people to see the end of the world, and we can learn from other experiences with that. For me, it’s a forward-looking book, not a despairing book. I’m thinking about where we are [and] where you go, and to go anywhere, you have to start from where you are. You can’t imagine you’re somewhere else. That is not a path for movement.

You also write early in the book, “I’ll assume from the beginning that success is possible.”

I cite the late and great Mike Davis, who says, “On the basis of the evidence before us, taking a ‘realist’ view of the human prospect, like seeing Medusa’s head, would simply turn us to stone.” We have to be realistic, even about our realism. You can look at the situation and see how bad it is and freeze. There’s a real temptation to do that, and there’s a temptation to ignore it, to just not look. I think [being] realistic about our realism is to find a middle in between those and say, the situation’s bad – and we can still move. We are not stone. We have the ability to think and we have the ability to act, and we can do both collectively.

In understanding the state of the present moment, you talk about the “oil-value-life chain.” Can you explain what that is, as a premise for where we are right now?

The concept for this book is this “oil is life” syllogism, which I awoke from a dream with. I was going to pitch a whole different book. The night before the conversation with my agent, I woke up [from] a dream with this phrase, “oil is life.”

Fossil fuels are in your brain.

They are in so many ways, microplastics alone.

Yeah, that’s a good point.

But in another way, oil is life. We know the phrase “water is life” from the Dakota Access struggle. And that’s true. Everyone knows that you literally can’t live without water. We know that, and that should be decisive. Everything should flow from that fundamental truth if we are operating rationally. And yet the truism that “water is life” has not shifted our politics. It has not shifted our state behavior. It hasn’t affected the path we’re on that much, except in this insurgent way. And so the question is, why? There has to be something truer, at least in our society, than “water is life.”

Oil is people’s lives. People’s lives are tied up very literally in the fossil fuel system. Certainly the gas that they put in the car or the polyester clothes that they put on their children, but also the dividends from the Exxon check that is going into their pension fund. People’s lives are really tied up in these systems – [beyond] their need for consumable energy that can be replaced with a solar panel.

Until we’re realistic about that, unless we acknowledge that, we can’t change it. That, to me, explains why every group, every agency, every state, every community that has tried to address this imminent crisis, this currently elapsing crisis of climate change, has found itself totally unable to do it at the scale that is necessary. Even China, which has, as a state, maybe done the most to address the exigencies of climate change at scale – it’s not there. [This lack of action] is not a reasonable reaction to what’s happening in the world. We’re not able to do that. It’s because oil makes our life – for everyone in the world, almost – that we face this block.

And you need “value” as that center term [in “oil-value-life”] to explain why it’s not just oil itself that shapes our lives, but the fact that oil is valuable, and “value” is the structure that explains and organizes the entire social metabolism. As long as fossil fuels have value, which they do because you can use them to accomplish a whole number of things, and as long as value is the term that structures our whole world, we’re going to find ourselves unable to control our social [and] ecological situation.

One of the points that I found clarifying was the idea that our entire society is structured around the idea of value for value’s sake. Value production for value production’s sake is an inherent good. That’s the basis for this whole system we live in. As long as that’s the case and oil is valuable, then that [oil-value-life] chain will be unbroken.

We can see the implications very simply. I start with the story of going to this Shell conference where they wanted me to speak and talking to this engineer-slash-finance guy for Shell who’s explaining, “When we stop using a well because of climate pressure, we sell it to somebody else, and they’re going to use it. The oil in that well is still going to get used even though we’re complying with our climate commitments.” That oil is valuable.

If you replace 200 million gas-powered internal combustion engine vehicles in the United States with electric vehicles, those cars don’t just disappear. They’re going to be sold somewhere where they don’t have as many cars because suddenly you can get a car for way cheaper. And those cars are still going to need to be powered with gasoline that someone will find money in being able to supply. That person who’s able to sell the gasoline for that car is going to be able to live. Maybe they’re going to be able to improve their lives and the lives of the people around them and their loved ones. I’m not going to be able to convince them not to do that. You’re not going to be able to convince them not to do that. State regulations aren’t going to be able to convince them not to do that.

I compared it to the war on drugs. There’s theoretically a war between every government in the world and drug dealers, and drug dealers are winning that war and have been winning that war for decades. And it’s not because they have bigger armies or whatever. It’s because drugs are valuable, and value is the way that we find our way to life.

You organize this book around three “collective strategies,” as you call them, [that society could still take to solve climate change]. Can you give an overview?

“Marketcraft” is using the state to intervene to break the connection between fossil fuels and value by building a clean energy economy and regulating fossil fuels out of existence. It’s a term designed by the political scientist Stephen Vogel that I really like. It’s a pretty broad spectrum of policies.

The second one is called “public power,” which people might understand as democratic socialism, or just socialism, which is where the state is actually doing the green transition itself. It’s loosening the connections between value and life, and between fossil fuels and value, by building a clean energy economy and providing a basic quality of life for all people, independent of their relation to the value system, such that fossil fuels can’t make the same demand on us that they make now to ruin our lives and ruin the collective life. That’s organized through organized labor developing itself in the interests of the entire society and taking control in that collective interest.

And the third one is what I call “communism,” which is breaking that connection between value and life and organizing life itself around different principles – specifically, to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities, rather than according to their ability to produce value.

We saw some of those marketcraft and public power strategies during the Biden years.

Yeah, you could point to examples, for sure. More marketcraft than public power, I think.

There is an interesting theme throughout [the book] of class conflict. You make the point that whatever you think taking on climate change is about, at its core any sort of realistic “solution” involves class conflict. Can you explain why that is? A lot of us on the left – maybe more of the progressive left, rather than the capital-L Left – are still hesitant to say “class.”

I think you have to go to the mode of production because capitalism is a mode of production. You have to look at the conditions and relations of that mode of production. We see a relation between a capitalist class and a working class. There’s a class that produces value and a class that receives that value. It’s a funny inversion because the capitalist class creates the work and the working class creates the capital. That is the basis for this production system, production for production’s sake, that organizes our entire global society and that we find ourselves unable to control.

I don’t necessarily claim that you have to abolish it in order to have a path through. That’s what I think – I’m an anti-capitalist; I think we need to abolish capitalism – but from a marketcraft perspective, you can change the way that capitalism works. I think it’s worth acknowledging that and trying to understand that perspective. Whether you have to absolutely destroy capitalist production or not [to solve the climate crisis] is a question that this book leaves open because it’s a question that’s open on the left.

But if the premise is that the oil-value-life chain is wrapped around the gate to positive futures, and we need to find some way to break it or bend it to slip through that gate, then we’re going to have to change the production mode that we have. And that is a class conflict.

One of the challenging parts of the book was the reminder that this is not as simple as, if we can provide some sort of organizing force for workers to unite around, then everyone will be naturally drawn to that and workers of the world will unite and rise up. A lot of people, and a lot of institutions of organized labor, have a lot invested in the economic and political status quo.

I don’t think it becomes easier by pretending it is easier. You run into that problem with some of the public power advocates, where we pretend if we focus on the easy solution, then it will actually become that easy. But the truth is that there are striations and conflicts within the working class.

You see that domestically and you see it internationally. We have to be really serious about that. If we pretend, “Oh, all workers in the world have the same sets of interests, and American workers are not advantaged by the exploitation of workers in Brazil in any way, shape, or form because we’re all members of the working class,” that’s true from one perspective. But it’s not the whole truth. It’s not realistic enough. So we need to map the conflicts within the working class in order to build the working class as a real force.

Construction workers lobbying in favor of gas-powered crypto mines is one of the examples I use. That’s in your own narrow – very narrow – interest. That isn’t in the interest of the global working class at all. We need to be serious about what the composition of the working class is and not just treat it as some self-evident abstraction.

I felt like there were a few concrete messages for “mainstream” progressives who are left of the Democratic Party but might not think of themselves as Capital-L Left.

I sure hope so.

One of them is, essentially, break up with the Democrats. I have to imagine, after the last couple of years, there’s a lot more openness among folks on the left that the Democratic Party is not the vehicle for change people might have anticipated it to be, to put it mildly.

I think I cited Kim Moody’s [book, Breaking the Impasse]. His argument is that we need a United States Labor Party in order to pursue the interests of workers. I think that’s an important perspective. I’m not 100% convinced that’s true. As far as I’m concerned, the Democratic Party, and even parallel institutions like the New York Times or something, are much like the United States itself. The perspective that “this is a force for historical evil in the world and we need to distance ourselves from it and there can be no progress through [it]” – I think there’s a strong argument for that perspective. It’s an argument worth hearing out and worth thinking through and sometimes conceding to.

At the same time, I think that these are internally contradictory structures. I don’t think everyone who works for the U.S. government is a butcher of Gaza, even though the U.S. government is itself. Do those contradictions within these institutions allow us to move in a positive direction? I think it’s possible. Has that perspective taken a blow in the past six months? Yeah, probably. But I think these are conversations we need to have and topics we need to think about. But what are the other ones?

[Another] one that emerged while reading the book was this idea that, as you put it, “breaking the situation into ostensibly manageable chunks” is essentially a form of [climate] denial. A lot of us realize that to some extent. If you ask us concretely [to] map out how we get from here to saving the planet in little manageable chunks, we admit pretty quickly that it can’t be done. And yet it’s such a comforting way to see the crisis as something you can just break up into small chunks and tackle sequentially.

And as something that is broadly and impersonally distributed by a collective logic that we don’t have to operate. That would be really nice because then everyone could just do their part, and it would get done, and we wouldn’t have to figure out what we’re actually doing. That’s how capitalism works. That’s not how solving our problems works. That’s causing our problems: Everyone just goes out there, doing their little part, one day to the next, and we don’t have to try and get together and actually decide what we’re doing. Everyone can just worry about their household-size share.

That’s not going to work. It’s not working. We really do have to organize to make collective decisions. I don’t see any other way through. We need common understandings. We don’t have to necessarily come together and work in one organization; I don’t think that’s going to happen. But we need some kind of coherence to these efforts.

At one point [you say] that’s the only way to actually tackle it: at the scale of what the problem is.

Yeah. And what’s the point of tackling it at another scale?

Besides making us feel better in the moment, I guess.

But it doesn’t make us feel better because we’re not stupid.

Do you think that the return to the White House and the government of MAGA types changes any of the arguments you make in the book, or shifts the priorities for some of the different strategies?

Absolutely. I think there are paths that seem more or less open, depending on what the political system looks like and who’s in control. The rise of Donald Trump is not an isolated event. This is part of a global rightward shift in reaction that is not just one of the possibilities that I lay out in the book, but one of the inevitable challenges – that there’d be a reactionary, pro-fossil fuel movement that you’re going to have to confront as part of any of these strategies. One of the reasons we need coherence between them is that we’re all vulnerable.

But also, I don’t think that any one strategy is particularly worse off under Trump. You could look at marketcraft and say, “Trump destroyed the Inflation Reduction Act. All Biden’s climate work has been destroyed with the wave of a hand, which then salts the earth for this kind of policy in the future because capital won’t commit to these kinds of investments if they know that there’s a coin flip that the next president’s going to just dismantle it all in one second.” Yeah, that’s pretty devastating for marketcraft.

But [for] public power, if he shuts down the Department of Education, then he’s able to shut down whatever public power agency that Biden should have set up. All of that would have been destroyed as well, not to mention his attack on organized labor. Communists as well. One of the major dangers of the communist strategy, as I describe it, is susceptibility to government repression. We’ve already seen a real, qualitative jump in repression from the Trump administration focused on the left in a way that people should be seriously alarmed about – in a “first they came for the communists” kind of way.

So all three [strategies] are reeling. The entire left is obviously reeling. And anyone who looks at the situation and says, “Ha, this is good for me and bad for you,” I think is wrong.

There is a series of questions from the Zetkin Collective that you cite at the end: “Will fossil capital defend itself to the bitter end?” and “will it draw on the unique resources of the far right for the purpose?” Those questions are being answered quite clearly in the moment that we’re living in.

It’s pretty obvious when they put it that way. Of course they’re going to fight for their own existence, and they’re going to fight in the political sphere. Even putting aside the history of their relationship with the far right – well, they’re not going to pick the far left. They’re probably not going to pick the center at this point. The far right is their best bet [for preserving the fossil fuel economy] by a long shot. That has come to pass, and it seems obvious when we think about it.

A clear problem with the sort of climate policy by compromise that even the left liberals have been pursuing with the hope that “we’ll give capitalists enough so that this transition will be smooth enough for them that they can agree to it,” that’s not happening. That can’t be the only solution. That can’t be the only tool we have.

The book didn’t seem like a “this is what we need to do” solutions type of book. But there was a very clear, concrete proposal that you offer at the end: “The left should lead the formation of community disaster councils.” Can you talk about what that means? I feel like it’s the kind of concrete thing that many people are yearning for right now.

The institutions and individuals with which we compose our communities need to collectively study and prepare for the social and climate disasters that we know are upon us. Wherever you live, you can figure out what extreme weather events are likely to happen, and you can figure out what responses are most likely to keep people safe. We can organize those. We need to do that not [only] at the level of government disaster response, which we’re seeing undermined by conservatives. But even if that weren’t the case, we need to organize ourselves, not just rely on the state to organize our response to what are social-wide problems, partly because the state is unable to and unwilling to.

I think the left is in a particular position to lead this kind of structure that society as a whole is in desperate need of. That’s something that we all can do, and something we all can do collaboratively, whether you are a staffer for a state senator who believes in marketcraft or a shop steward who believes that labor should be directing the entire thing or someone who knows the forests around where you live very well. We need the resources of all of those kinds of people, as well as the institutions and social networks that they represent. And we need to find ways for them to cohere, to work together, to respond to these things that we already know are happening. Disasters are organizing us already. Whether we organize in advance of them or in a disorganized way after they have occurred to us, disasters are organizing us regardless.

Community can also be global. If you’re a climatologist, let’s say, working for the IPCC, that’s a community of people working together on this project. I think local communities need to find ways to work with those global communities of experts to inform our efforts as well. That’s not crazy, the idea that we should have civil structures that are responding to these big things that we know are coming and that will upend all of our lives. Let’s get ahead of that.

As you note in the book, it also can provide a use case for this different world that we’re hoping to build. You can’t just tell people, “Give up the way you’ve experienced society and trust us that this other one will be better, [even though] it involves huge sacrifices from you and your family.” [It’s] much easier if you have demonstrable evidence that you can point to that this is another way to organize a society, and it works.

How are we going to make sure that the people in our community, if there’s a flood or a fire, have access to the life saving medication that they need next week? Well, where is the medication held? There are seven pharmacies in our city. There are pharmacists who work at those seven pharmacies. We can talk to them. We can organize the pharmacists such that we will have a disaster plan and be ready to enact it. We’re not going to go check with CVS corporate and follow their plan. We’re not going to wait for the National Guard to give us a plan. Because somebody needs their heart pills next week. In fact, we know how many people need their heart pills next week. We have a list of them, and we know where they live, and we have pharmacists who are ready to fulfill those needs in the event of a disaster.

That’s not an illusory sense of control. That’s actual control. You’re organizing actual community control over your circumstances. Not right now, but in the event of these disasters that we know are going to elapse, that are elapsing. That’s really a place for left-wing leadership, a place that we can build cohesion among this diverse swath of people, but people who all share, I think, a common interest and belief and desire for a better world.

I wanted to come back to this idea that acknowledging, accepting, even embracing the scale of the problem can feel liberating because you can drop all the artifice of, “We’re just gonna hack our way out of this crisis” or something. Once I let that go and accept that, yeah, things are potentially going to get really bad, I realize how much work it was taking to create these false, soothing futures in my mind. It frees up all this energy and brain space to think about actually tackling it, rather than existing in a comforting world of my own making. I’m wondering how you think about that.

That’s one of the real benefits of the radical imagination. That’s a lens that I’ve used to think about the world since I was a kid. There are some downsides to that in terms of communicating with people who are thinking about the world differently. It can be hard. As I write in the book, you can get really obsessed with the complicity of everyone who doesn’t see it the same way as you. You can get really isolated and angry. I spent a long time, particularly when I was young, being angry all the time at the whole rest of the world.

So there are perils to thinking that way, but I think there are also real benefits. That’s something that I try to share with my readers, the benefits of that radical imagination. When you think about the world historically and in its actual shape, it is freeing. The truth is freeing. Trying to tell yourself that what is happening isn’t happening and constantly recalibrating – it’s like the frog in the pot being like, “This isn’t that hot.” But it’s getting hotter, so you have to constantly tell yourself, “This is fine. This is fine.” That can take up your whole mental space. There are people who spend all of their mental effort constantly reassuring themselves that things are still fine.

The fact that things aren’t [fine] – the fact that things are very bad – doesn’t mean that you give up. It doesn’t mean that you are relieved from having to do stuff or that you then can just spend your time wallowing in despair. At least not for me. Like I said, I think there’s a whole spectrum of middle activity where you look at the world and [see] things are bad and then you say, “Alright, what are we going to do about it?” Some people talk about that as “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

You reference a lot of books and films and art in this book. Are any pieces of content bringing you clarity or comfort in this current moment?

It’s a series that the streamer Mubi has been doing called “Self Portrait as a Coffee Pot,” by the South African artist William Kentridge. It’s a nine-part video series filmed during the most intense lockdown periods of Covid. It’s an amazing view of his mind, his techniques, but also his perspective on history. He does this great thing where he doubles himself, and so he’s constantly talking back and forth with himself. There are two of him, and they create this amazing dialectic between a lot of different positions because there are a lot of contradictory truths that we have to hold in this historical moment. And one of the ways he does that is by splitting himself and arguing with himself.

Fantastic series. Ultimately, I think, hopeful in the useful ways and despairing in the useful ways. You can be hopeful and despairing at the same time. I beseech readers to go check that out.

I feel like in this moment in particular, being hopeful and despairing in useful ways is a pretty worthy aspiration.

I think so. I think people are trying to figure that stuff out. It’s hard. It’s a hard environment in which to think. I don’t fault anyone who feels completely overwhelmed by even just the task of thinking critically in this moment. But we’ve got to do it. There’s no other choice.