A Radical Plan Out of the Climate Crisis?

A Review of "What’s Left" by Malcolm Harris

Matthew Hunter

"We don’t plan to lose money." –Anonymous Shell Analyst

Malcolm Harris—author of the Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials, Shit Is Fucked Up And Bullshit: History Since the End of History, and Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World—has written perhaps his most audacious book yet. What’s Left? Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis [1] attempts to map a way out of the capitalist ecological disaster we are experiencing at an exponential and existential rate. It purports to be a potential What is to Be Done? for this generation. But does the book achieve the daunting task it sets out for itself?

Harris’s work centers on the existential ecological crisis as the primary factor forcing his emergency analysis.

A 2021 estimate published in Nature figures that most—58 percent—of oil reserves are "unextractable" if we want even a fifty-fifty shot at keeping the global temperature increase this century to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as was the Paris Agreement plan in 2015.

A chilling recent report reveals that finance capitalists at Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and other global institutions are already preparing for scenarios in which the above projected figures are not only met, but vastly exceeded.

Energy companies, likewise, continue to defy even the most basic climate mitigation strategies. As The New York Times’ Hiroko Tabuchi reported, following the 2021 transfer of a jointly operated Shell oil field in Nigeria to a private operator, gas flaring surged from near zero to over ten million cubic feet per week. The capitalist order, true to its nature, is compounding the crisis in real time.

If oil is valuable, and if value is the principle by which we organize life on earth, then oil is life, even as its continued extraction and combustion also assuredly means death. This bind helps explain why authorities at all levels, everywhere in the world, have struggled to respond appropriately to climate change and its causes […].

Harris draws on Elmar Altvater's concept of "fossil capitalism" as a central pillar of his analysis. Employing the Marxist framework of value extraction from both labor and nature, Harris distills the formula as "money plus labor equals more money," elaborating that: "fossil fuel plus money plus labor are transformed, via the making and selling of some stuff, into more money plus emissions." Arguing for a materialist, non-metaphysical understanding of the capitalist mode of production, Harris contends that fossil fuel consumption—and the emissions it generates—is as essential to capital accumulation as the exploitation of labor.

The author sets out to chart a path for organizers and activists through this contradiction and looming existential crisis. Harris proposes three distinct, and at times overlapping, strategies aimed at resolving the ecological and capitalist impasse of our era. While the analysis bears traces of ideological eclecticism and the familiar blind spots of Western Marxism, its pragmatic orientation raises valuable questions and insights for a broad spectrum of leftist tendencies—questions that demand urgent engagement.

Marketcraft

Harris outlines his three proposed paths—Marketcraft, Public Power, and Communism—as indicated in the book’s title. The first, Marketcraft, reflects the perspective of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party—figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—and what Harris calls "the liberal establishment," which "has shown itself newly enthusiastic about wielding state power over the economy, especially when it comes to the green transition."

He contrasts these Marketcraft proponents with the neoliberal political wing and so-called "market fundamentalists." Whereas the latter treat the market as something ethereal and quasi-divine, Marketcraft advocates argue that markets are "functions of public policies." When the market becomes "detached from our values […] it’s up to democratic society to reassert itself." This reassertion, Harris argues, must occur "via market regulation and incentives, shoving firms into competing to build us such an abundance of efficiency and value—including immaterial and hard-to-measure values such as carbon neutrality—that market competition largely ceases to be worthwhile."

Harris cites several U.S.-based examples of this approach, including the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the American Clean Power Association, the Green New Deal, the CHIPS Act, the CARES Act, the Science Act, and the Whole-Homes Repairs Bill. Yet he also acknowledges the most glaring critique of this strategy—particularly when pursued within a capitalist framework:

The marketcraft thesis is that the state has the power to shape the systematic compulsions they face without us all having to undergo a protracted guerrilla struggle. Capitalists may be the players for now, but democracy can write the rules […]. All this money flowing to corporations, some of which had something to do with getting us into this mess in the first place, does feel a lot like a sellout. Marketcraft leaves the Value-Life link intact, and capitalists will only pursue green opportunities if they are sufficiently profitable by their own standards. They don’t plan to lose money any more than Shell does, and that means some rich people will get richer. After decades of austerity politics for the public and pork-barrel politics for bomb makers, it’s hard to think about public money as anything other than a prize for rigged tugs-of-war between good guys and bad guys.

Without a fundamental shift in class power over the means—and thus the social relations—of production, Harris’ Marketcraft strategy invites warranted skepticism. Even from a strictly economic perspective, the limitations of bourgeois-democratic pressure on green capitalism become readily apparent.

Harris points to a telling example: the fact that U.S. electric vehicles and roadways currently rely on three incompatible plug systems.

Imagine if gas-powered cars had three different nozzle couplings and you had to remember to always go to the right station. And because motor vehicles have proprietary apps now, any given charging point might not let you pay to use it, even if you have an adapter for the plug.

Unsurprisingly, China is offered as a comparative example to the U.S. approach to Marketcraft. In contrast to the fragmented system in the U.S., China, for example, employs a universal EV plug standard—even Tesla must conform and modify its vehicles accordingly; "and drivers pay by QR code via the ubiquitous WeChat and Alipay apps."

One of Harris’ key warnings is the nationalist and reactionary character this strategy has taken on in the U.S. While the United States escalates its economic aggression toward China, in the PRC:

[A]fter the 2008 global financial crisis, with a left-wing faction within the Chinese Communist Party pushing for greater state involvement in the economy, the CCP adopted an aggressive marketcraft strategy, pumping huge amounts of money into selected sectors, including aluminum, solar panels, and EV batteries.

As a result, China has emerged as the global leader in green transition industries, forging international connections through initiatives like the Belt and Road. Harris notes that China’s annual direct investment in the U.S. economy has plummeted from $46.5 billion to "only" $5.4 billion, a decline driven by escalating tariffs and sanctions first initiated under Trump and sustained by Biden—and, at the time of writing, intensified under Trump’s second administration. This rise of "nationalist marketcraft" in the U.S., Harris argues, signals the onset of another Cold War.

A further critique of the Marketcraft approach centers on what Harris calls "environmental unequal exchange." He draws on Max Ajl’s A People’s Green New Deal [2], noting that:

Much of left-liberal climate talk is based on administering rather than eliminating capitalism, [...] and as a result is built on a seldom acknowledged foundation of assumptions regarding the global distribution of wealth and consumption, and the institutions with which it is tied, in terms of why emissions are produced and their consequences, which are intimately related to which lives matter and which lives do not.

Even if the liberal wing’s Marketcraft strategy were to succeed in "fully mitigat[ing]" current carbon emissions, the existential consequences of “accumulated historical CO2” would still reverberate globally. Crucially, those effects "fall hardest" on the Global South as a result of colonial and "postcolonial exploitation." According to the Climate Policy Initiative, 75% of "climate finance" from 2011 to 2020 was "concentrated in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia & Pacific (primarily led by China)." That report notes a total of $4.8 trillion in "climate finance committed" during the period—an average of $480 billion annually. By contrast, the CPI states that "we need at least USD 4.3 trillion in annual finance flows by 2030."

Public Power

The second path through the planetary crisis, according to Harris, is Public Power. He defines this path as:

Public power is a full alternative strategy, designed to resolve the contradictions at the heart of our crisis moment. Rather than break the connections in the Oil-Value-Life chain, public power proposes to loosen both sides, to deform the links so they can no longer hold the gate to the future closed. By reducing the value of fossil fuels and providing a basic standard of living for everyone, we can escape from capital’s impersonal, inhuman dictates. Instead of production for production’s sake, production for our use. Instead of capitalists scurrying within a maze of democratic design, the direct social appropriation of the means of production in the common interest.

Harris draws on a range of examples to illustrate the Public Power path, citing institutions like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), unions such as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), and organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as key domestic actors—or theoretical voices—for this strategy. Internationally, he points to examples such as Chile’s nationalization efforts and Indonesia’s ban on unrefined nickel exports as instances where public power has been wielded to "loosen both sides" of the Oil-Value-Life chain.

For public power to function effectively, breaking the capitalist value chain is essential. As Harris puts it, "public power means class conflict," quoting Matthew Huber: "It takes actual working-class institutions embedded in everyday life, like unions, political parties, and the concrete processes of struggle in the workplace, to build power [...] It is this kind of power—the disruptive power of workers whose own labor guarantees the profits flowing to capital—which has the capacity to 'create a crisis' for capital and force capitalists into the kind of concessions a Green New Deal represents." Given that capital has "chased low-paid labor and lax environmental regulations around the world," public power must advance "a different kind of plan."

Yet Harris also points to contradictions and limitations within this path. He highlights the case of the Kaua’i Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC), a community-owned co-op utility, and its tensions with Indigenous groups such as Nā Kia’i Kai (sea protectors) and the Pō’ai Wai Ola (West Kaua’i Watershed Alliance). As he notes, "there are dangers to building a public power system in the footprint of colonialism."

The KIUC developed a plan to repurpose "plantation-era water ditches […] divert water from the Waimea River," irrigating 250 new farms and pastures, each receiving energy and road infrastructure subsidized by the co-op. With freshwater increasingly scarce on the Hawaiian islands, the project claimed an ecological orientation, aiming to ensure all diverted water would be responsibly managed.

However, concerns from local communities underscored the colonial echoes of this proposal. Kawai Warren—a fisherman and leader of Nā Kia’i Kai—told the Honolulu Civil Beat, "I thought it was time to let the river heal, but now they want to continue doing what the plantation did for 100 years." Critics feared the plan would "entrench" patterns of “poor environmental planning” and displace "traditional farming practices." Most alarming was the risk of reintroducing “legacy agricultural chemicals” from the colonial plantation era into the watershed—further contaminating and polluting Indigenous lands.

Harris also cites the TVA’s historical record as a cautionary tale. Among other actions, the TVA desecrated “thousands of Native burial sites" and "distributed bones and artifacts to regional settler institutions such as museums and universities." It took nearly 14 years for the TVA to tally the remains of 4,871 Indigenous individuals whom they "claimed to own as property." Only in 2023—90 years after its founding—did the TVA finally "[invite] affected tribes to apply to recover" the remains of their ancestors and relatives.

Harris also highlights the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, the Pāti Māori Party in New Zealand, the Ogoni people's resistance against Shell in 1990s Nigeria, and the Sámi people's ongoing struggles in Norway. Each instance illustrates the ways in which Indigenous movements for self-determination often stand in direct opposition to dominant interpretations of public power initiatives.

In grappling with the role of Indigeneity, Harris draws on José Carlos Mariátegui’s foundational essay “The Problem of the Indian,” where Mariátegui writes: "The tendency to consider the Indigenous problem as a moral problem embodies a liberal, humanitarian, nineteenth-century Enlightenment conception." [3] For Harris, the central issue in Indigenous decolonial struggle is land itself. The "material land-based conflicts" in settler or postcolonial societies attempting a "plurinational" transformation have largely failed, he argues.

In Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State, Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq [4] argue that the evolving concept of Indigeneity:

always refer[s] to a colonial experience in one form or another; there is a "we" and a "they" to the formulation, and one party in this tight relationship arrived uninvited […] what really matters is understanding how it is a fluid, relational, and inevitably political identity. Throughout this book we see indigeneity as first and foremost a relational identity, a power dynamic that is highly contingent, informed by a certain historical consciousness and entangled—always—with gendered and racial identities brought through colonization.

And Harris argues that public power—divorced from incorporating "many, many Indigenous value systems" as a "foundation"—would "at worst […] end up destroying the world […] in the name of saving the world in general."

Moving beyond questions of Indigeneity, Harris turns to the "unequal global division of labor," drawing on World Systems Theory to identify material obstacles to international working-class solidarity—specifically, the position of workers in the Global North. He employs the World Bank’s metric of "labor’s terms of trade" to illustrate how workers in the North, relative to those in the Global South, work less for more, as:

analysts compare how much labor is embodied in $1 million worth of a country’s imports with how much labor is embodied in $1 million worth of that country’s exports. A ratio of 1 means a country is exchanging its labor equally with other countries; a ratio greater than 1 means a country is higher in the international pecking order and vice versa. Scholars often talk about this regional composition in terms of capitalism’s "core" or "center," where wages and consumption are relatively high, and the "periphery," where wages and consumption are relatively low. As a global winner, the United States maintains an average LToT considerably larger than 1, achieving its peak in the early 2000s at above 5.54 while economic growth isn’t necessarily a zero-sum contest between countries, labor terms of trade is.

Harris accurately critiques the economism of Western labor movements as movements centered, “on building power to bargain within capitalism than on building the power to abolish capitalism.” On a more individual and psychological level, “Workers share a structural interest in the abolition of a system of production based on their exploitation, but they also share a seemingly more immediate interest in maintaining access to their jobs and increasing their wages. Unions in the capitalist West tend to spend much.” The workers of the Global North are locked in an “affirmation trap” from the contradicting material pulls of unequal global exchange, which they benefit from, and the overall system, which also exploits them.

Drawing on economist Minqi Li’s China and the 21st Century Crisis [5], Harris briefly addresses China’s global ascent, noting that its labor terms of trade have shifted significantly relative to other Global South countries. In doing so, he suggests that China has, in effect, become a beneficiary of unequal exchange—akin to U.S. imperialism. “Will Chinese workers fill the streets to demand that their government stop trying to increase the national share of global production in the name of protecting a foreign rainforest? Will Americans? The public-power strategy requires it.”

Harris also touches on the Uyghur issue, arguing that China’s economic boom was built on coal mining and production, and that the shift of this industrial activity to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was an "underdiscussed cause of Indigenous Uyghur uprisings." While he acknowledges this dynamic, the framing is notably one-sided and underdeveloped—contributing, whether intentionally or not, to well-funded Western narratives aimed at undermining China’s socialist development. [6] Still, Harris concedes that "it’s worth acknowledging that the PRC is likely to be the dominant model for this kind of cooperation [marketcraft and public power fused] in the near future."

Harris offers no analysis of why China prioritized rapid industrial development as a means of catching up to the West—an extraordinary feat, considering that China has managed to overcome two centuries of imperial subjugation in just three decades. That development has, of course, come at an ecological cost—a material reality that is not foreign to Chinese leadership.

As Carlos Martinez outlines in The East is Still Red [7], coal’s share of China’s energy consumption has dropped by nearly 30% over the past 15 years, with the country closing its last coal-fired plant in 2017. China now leads the world in wind and solar energy production, and its leadership has promoted both domestic and global carbon neutrality for more than a decade. Nearly a third of all global renewable energy investment is concentrated in China, which also accounts for 42% of the world’s renewable energy jobs. The country’s reforestation and afforestation programs have resulted in forests "the size of Ireland" being planted, doubling national forest coverage to 23% in just four decades. Even liberal sources have begun to acknowledge that China may have already reached "peak emissions," five years ahead of its own ambitious target. [8] These achievements cannot be attributed solely to marketcraft and public power strategies—they are being led by the largest Communist Party in the world.

Placing the socialist country of China in the same camp as the U.S. is a political dead-end that Harris ultimately falls into. Positioning China merely as a participant in unequal global exchange—without grappling with the internal and international class dynamics that shape its development—risks leading the reader toward an ultra-left position. While Harris does eventually pull back from this theoretical misstep in his concluding analysis, the path there is marked by these unresolved contradictions.

Communism

"Communism" is the book’s weakest section, largely due to the author's ideological eclecticism. For many on the Left, any serious discussion of communism would necessarily engage with historical and contemporary examples such as China, Cuba, Vietnam, the DPRK, and the USSR. Yet these are rarely—if ever—mentioned. Harris appears reluctant to be, as he puts it, “weighed down by a lot of history” and contemporary reality.

As previously noted, Harris tends to conflate socialism with Chinese characteristics with U.S. capitalism and settler colonialism. In the prior chapter, he defines public power as "organized workers taking control of the means of production," yet he defines communism as "the best term I could find to describe 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 book argues that communism—and the world—need "a value to replace Value." And Marx’s, ​​"from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" is pinpointed as the communist value to replace capitalist Value. However, Harris makes the confusing statement that, "communism cannot tolerate the persistence of top-down politics." Harris is perhaps here alluding to the higher stage of communism that Lenin describes in State and Revolution—the famous "withering away of the state." However, in the age of climate crisis, our present and immediate future, a centralized state (that is, the primary stage of socialism) is a necessity to collectively deal with this crisis on a national and then international level.

If the working and oppressed people of the world hope to abolish capitalism, then top-down politics is a requirement. How will capitalists be pushed out of economic and political power without the workers and oppressed people organizing themselves and taking that power for themselves? How will they deal with the natural and inevitable counter-revolution without a military that is mainly top-down in structure? How can we organize the massive green energy production needed to hit carbon neutrality without top-down politics where the working and oppressed classes can control economic and social development?

Later in the chapter, Harris does address some of these questions: “The biggest threat to communist organizing is that some group of guys associated with capitalists and/or the state will disappear the organizers.” And, tracking from the historical examples of Gracchus Babeuf, Rosa Luxemburg, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, and Thomas Sankara, Harris illustrates the counter-revolutionary threat: “Around the world, regimes responded to decolonial uprisings with brutal, disproportionate force, both targeted and blanket.”

Unfortunately, in this section—where Harris references figures like Mao, Fidel Castro, and the Bolshevik revolution—he fails to engage meaningfully with the subject of communism, despite it being the section's stated focus. These references serve primarily to illustrate that Marxist-Leninists were either violently repressed or implicated in repression themselves. There is no substantive discussion of their economic, political, or ecological reforms. The USSR is briefly mentioned as having “sacrific[ed] the project’s communist character” through the adoption of war communism in response to imperialist invasion. For a more in-depth exploration of the ecological dimensions of socialist states, one might turn instead to Guillaume Suing’s Communism, the Highest Stage of Ecology [9].

The reality is that this section, even though titled “Communism,” is an examination of, at best, anarcho-communist perspectives. The examples of "actually existing communism," used by Harris, are the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatistas/EZLN) and Kurdistan. Harris highlights anarchist theorists like David Graeber and anarcho-communists like Abdullah Öcalan, centering Öcalan’s “rose theory” and his vision of democratic confederalism. While movements such as the EZLN, the Kurdish Workers Party, and others he discusses are certainly worthy of analysis, presenting them as the primary examples in a chapter titled Communism feels, at best, like a significant missed opportunity.

This section could have been used to examine how Cuba has withstood over 70 years of U.S. imperial aggression, or to explore China’s policies on rural cooperatives, state-owned enterprises, and its role in the mass reforestation of rural regions. The reality of these countries going through the very class struggle process that Harris is calling for is seemingly lost on the writer—or at least was not seen as a worthwhile focus. Instead, the focus is put towards examples like Seattle's CHAZ.

There’s even a nihilist perspective approached in the text when Harris says, “Not only do communists ask almost all people to accept the destruction of their way of life, they also want us to actively participate in every part of that destruction.” But also, he cites Enrique Dussel’s Twenty Theses on Politics, which denounces “anarchist action” as illegal and illegitimate compared to “liberation praxis,” which is illegal but legitimate.

Harris even goes so far to say that, "[t]he whole road of socialism—so far as revolutionary struggles are concerned— is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats." Again, socialist countries like China, Cuba, DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, Venezuela (which he does cite as an example positively with its Pueblo a Pueblo policy), Nicaragua, and Nepal exist. One could even argue that a country like Bolivia or the Communist Party of India (Marxist) controlled state of Kerala are also examples of the transition from capitalism to socialism. All of these nations are on varying points of this road, but to say socialism—and in effect communism—is "paved with nothing but thunderous defeats," how can the reader not come away with a negative opinion of actually existing socialism?

By itself, the communist tactic of picking a fight to the death with a stronger, more vicious enemy is what the basketball analysts on ESPN call a low-percentage shot. But communists are not by themselves: They exist in the context of everything else I’ve examined, the whole left field. And sometimes a fight is what everyone needs.

Harris points to how the Eurocentrism within the communist movement can "find some answers" by "engaging with contemporary Indigenous theory." This critique or call to action to communists is completely valid—though the reader might find a better analysis on this topic in Robert Biel’s Eurocentrism in the Communist Movement [10].By conflating anarchist and communist movements—and drawing on perspectives that at times veer into anti-communism—the chapter becomes a theoretical muddle. Its omission of serious analysis of socialist states, coupled with a portrayal of the communist project as one of unbroken defeat, reflects not only a defeatist outlook but also a familiar tendency among Western Marxists and leftists to dismiss actually existing socialism for failing to meet idealized standards of purity. These ideological blinders can not persist if we want to seriously tackle the existential ecological crisis.

The Planetary Crisis

The next chapter—"The Planetary Crisis"—details, in terrifying fashion, the ecological and capitalist crisis. As Harris says, the past neoliberal individualistic fix to climate change has been meaningless:

Global warming was the inconvenient truth that dispelled the idea of environmentalism as a matter of individual responsibility. "Reduce, reuse, recycle" isn’t going to halt emissions, never mind pull sublime amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and it is impossible to pretend otherwise.

Citing the 2021 report A More Contested World, Harris notes that, as of 2020, there are ~270 million global refugees. He quotes Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First; Life and Death on a Scorched Planet,[11] which notes that “outdoor life” in “some regions of the tropics […] will become virtually impossible.” Harris shows, with examples of the US-Mexico border and Greece-Turkey, that climate refugees under capitalism are facing some of the “deadliest” routes of travel for migrants "worldwide."

Food sovereignty has always been an issue for the Global South, but Harris points out that even the imperial core of the US is now at risk, with the "Corn Belt" and California’s "Salad Bowl" both running out of arable soil and water. And, most disturbingly, that the entire "paired land-food system is both vulnerable to and a significant cause of global warming."

While it's not a focus, it's odd that, again, Harris decides in this section to push anti-communist and anti-China talking points: "Meanwhile, ocean extraction is a great way for powerful countries to take advantage of smaller, poorer nations with good coastlines, whether Chinese ships off North Korea and Madagascar […]." To frame the relationship between China and the DPRK as somehow imperialist or exploitative is, at the very least, to ignore the theory and practices of the Korean people themselves.

Chinese firms, private or SOEs, can be involved in exploitative or ecologically harmful extractive practices. China would be the first to say that the class struggle hasn't stopped within their country. However, in a time of exponentially increased US imperial aggression against China, this is just a missed opportunity—and, coming from a journalist in the West, Harris simply repeats errors that Western Marxists have committed against actually existing socialisms for over a hundred years. The recent publication of Domenico Losurdo's Western Marxism [12] covers these historical and contemporary errors from the Western Left or Marxist movements.

Harris, however, does an excellent job of detailing how and why the West has "de-developed" the parts of the Global South,where it acts as though it's "better to steal and destroy than to grow and build." Places like Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Mexico, and others are highlighted for where capital itself has sought to "de-develop" them to "steal" resources and labor power for cheap. Another key aspect of the ecological crisis is Capital’s tendency to create its own ‘gravediggers’ even from the environment. As Harris lays out:

The cost of nature's counterattack is deeper than fire and flood damage; it goes all the way to capital’s very ability to reinvest and accumulate. Because all aspects of production are anchored in the physical biosphere and its cycles, the bigger capital gets, the greater its dependence on the same systems it undermines for profit. A recent quantitative analysis published in Nature estimates that, because of climate change, "the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19 percent within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices," amounting to tens of trillions of dollars a year in annual damages. Creative destruction isn’t necessarily a problem as far as Value is concerned, but destruction that precludes reinvestment is a genuine loss.

While capitalism increasingly relies on "disaster investors" to implement shock therapy in the aftermath of natural catastrophes, this model of capital centralization and privatization is ultimately unsustainable. At a certain point, the land from which capital extracts its "Value" will no longer be able to yield any—an existential crisis for a system predicated on perpetual profit expansion.

Additionally, the ILO estimates that 10 million people were forced into modern slavery from 2016 to 2021—and, since 2021, UNICEF and ILO have published a joint statement that child labor has increased for the first time in decades. Capitalism is tearing itself apart at the seams through its mass exploitation of both land and humanity. These systemic contradictions cannot persist.

Another key aspect of the current planetary crisis is what Harris calls the "capital bloc," represented by the "fossil fuel companies and the military-industrial complex." Harris stresses the importance of an internationalist approach, as a reactionary "nationalist marketcraft" would be devastating, as:

[a]ttempts to frame the situation as a fight between nations or groups of nations, between people or races, between humanity and nature, and even between everyone and the mistakes of the past all misread the current coordinates. Circumstances will force either the exploiting or exploited class to pay a decisive price in the coming decades. To capital, genuine answers (such as globally planned migration, nationalized utilities, a decline in the profit rate, and fossil fuel asset stranding) appear as problems, and disasters (such as lowering our expectations for how much warming we can avoid and intentionally spewing sulfur into the air) suggest themselves as solutions. Capitalists are incapable of implementing the limits to extraction that the workers of the world must then impose on behalf of the species in general. No matter which class declares victory, this conflict resolves in a revolutionary reconstitution of global society at large. Either that or the common ruin of the contending classes and the earth itself […].

Conclusion

Aside from the chapter on public power, the conclusion is Harris’s strongest section of the book. After surveying the three distinct "partisan" strategies, he calls for the emergence of a reimagined United or Popular Front. In the face of rising global fascism—embodied by Trump's ascent and his deployment of the reactionary "nationalist marketcraft" strategy Harris critiques—the urgency of tactical and strategic unity has never been greater.

Harris makes clear that the wide range of views of the Left—as expressed through working class and oppressed peoples' movements—are the only "viable strategic" plans of action for "progressives in the near term." He is also right that, at a mass scale, "Partisans of one strategy will not persuade the others to give up and join them, not on a relevant time scale." Put simply, but concretely: "Public power needs the radical threat; communists need bail money; marketcraft needs an organized working-class constituency."

The idea that we can treat the existential ecological and class crisis as a "friendly contest" between differing strategical schools of thought is out of the question for the author—and he's right. This is where a diversity of tactics is both necessary and a natural outcome of these forces coalescing towards liberation. Harris cites the famous playwright Lorraine Hansberry's memoir, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black [13], which was inspired by a question on Martin Luther King Jr.’s strategy of nonviolence and reform:

At the same time [...] I have no illusion that it is enough. We believe that the world is political and that political power, in one form or another, will be the ultimate key to the liberation of American Negroes and, indeed, black folk throughout the world. [...] I think, then, that Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent. That they must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities.

Fascinatingly, Harris brings up the scientific concept of "quantum walk" where a "particle or impulse of some kind advances down several paths toward its destination at once, only collapsing into a single reality when it finds the fastest route—or if someone tries to take a peek at the process." This metaphor of how the new United Front should function suggests that we should simultaneously and collectively work down our respective strategies together until something works. "The Left must walk down three strategic paths at the same time, and we have to do it all together. And we're already late."

Next Harris gives a brief and general overview of the "characteristic fears" and "points of coherence" among the left, giving examples such as inefficiency, fear, complicity, oppressive policing, women’s collective self-liberation, international solidarity, building power, voting, and fidelity to principle—respectively. Following this, we see a Venn diagram of how Harris's three strategies interlink.

At this point in the conclusion, Harris's wrap-up is pragmatic and thoughtful—a purposeful reimagining of how a Popular Front could function in an era of worldwide existential threats. But here, again, emerge some of those ideological confusions that appeared earlier in the book. China, the preeminent socialist nation run by the working class through the Communist Party, is only mentioned with regard to how marketcraft and public power could intercede.

Perhaps the reasoning for excluding China from the section covering communism is due to the working class there already having gained political power, thus it could only be in the denominator of "public power." Unfortunately, Harris's examples used for communism are Brazil, as expressed through the coalition that returned Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the presidency again, and the radical militant history of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).

While there are indeed communist elements within these histories—and they are unquestionably examples of working-class struggle—framing them as the primary overlap between public power and communism is peculiar, especially when countries like China, Cuba, and Vietnam continue to exist and develop. Why are these socialist states so often excluded from discussions of communism's historical and contemporary experiences, while examples more aligned with public power or marketcraft strategies are elevated to the status of communism in Harris's framework? The conflation of anarchism and communism only deepens this confusion.

The only in-depth part of the conclusion that focuses on communist countries is a slight repeating of the information regarding the Venezuelan commune system and Cuba's development of advanced urban agroecology through the "deployment of organopónicos, an urban farming technique featuring long raised cultivation beds filled with soil and natural fertilizers, and legalized land occupations by producers."

Harris ends the book with a proposal:

The left should lead the formation of community disaster councils. If there’s one thing we know about the near future, it’s that it will be if not disastrous then at least disasterful. Every place will see the world’s conflicts erupt in particular ways, local crystallizations of the planetary crisis. Heat waves, fires, storms, floods, disease outbreaks, civil conflict, algal blooms, drought, energy shortages: The smooth skeletal sphere of capitalist metabolism is cracking. So far, capital's plan is to spackle those cracks with rubble made from the destroyed lives of the least fortunate—a plentiful and renewable resource—but the authorities accomplish this in large part by refusing to lead society to adequately plan for these disasters, preferring to leave everyone to themselves and the hindmost to the devil. The Value system's solution is clear; the left is obligated to construct and impose an alternative.

Malcolm Harris has attempted to produce a rallying call for the working class and its allies. And there are plenty of issues with this book that any organizer, regardless of their political positionality, could find fault with. For example, I imagine that anarchists generally aren’t happy being lumped under the communist umbrella; or ultra-left folks being told to build coalitions with progressive "marketcraft" proponents.

Yet despite its theoretical inconsistencies, the call for a reimagined United or Popular Front rests on a pragmatic and grounded foundation—one sturdy enough to withstand its own internal contradictions. The existential ecological crisis, largely driven by capital accumulation, demands an "all hands on deck" response from the global working class and oppressed peoples. This imperative becomes even more urgent in light of the exponentially escalating neo-fascist order taking shape under a second Trump administration.

The concerns that Harris has throughout the book—a reactionary nationalist marketcraft, lack of coordinated global action, and a capitalist bloc becoming increasingly violent—are all coming to fruition.

Harris calls for "disaster councils" to form now to combat these crises: “On such a council, marketcrafting politicians could meet unionized workers could meet communist miscreants as equals, all of us patching together a new world the best ways we can figure out how and preparing to fight for it, together.”

The need for a united class struggle to wage a collective international class war for the future is—with every second ticking away—becoming the only thing left to survive the planetary crisis.

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Endnotes

[1] Little, Brown, Boston, 2025

[2] Pluto Press, London, 2021

[3] Iskra Books, Washington, 2021.

[4] UAPress, Arizona, 2024.

[5] Pluto Press, London, 2015

[6] For an in-depth resource on these multifaceted disinformation campaigns, see https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/xinjiang

[7] Manifesto Press, London, 2023

[8] See, for example,  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/27/chinas-co2-emissions-have-peaked-or-will-in-2025-say-44-of-experts-in-survey

[9] Iskra Books, Washington, 2025.

[10] Kersplebedeb. Montreal, 2015

[11] Little, Brown, Boston, 2023

[12] Monthly Review Press, New York, 2024.

[13] Doubleday, New York, 1995.