Three Paths Left Through the Planetary Crisis

With Malcolm Harris

For this week’s interview, I spoke with author Malcolm Harris about his new book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis. We explored three strategies that have a chance of staving off climate change before it’s too late. Malcolm demonstrates—compellingly, I think—how and why the left needs to unite ASAP.

Malcolm is a journalist, writer, and critic. He’s the author of four books, including Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, which we discussed two years ago. A condensed transcript of our latest conversation, edited for clarity, is below. I’ll share the full conversation on the Skipped History podcast in a separate post soon.

Ben: Can you give us an overview of the first strategy you discuss, marketcraft?

MH: Sure. Marketcraft is a term coined by a political scientist named Steven Vogel. It suggests a state should structure their markets to break the chain between fossil fuels and value. It’s about creating such an abundance of renewable energy that there’s no longer any value to fossil fuels.

On one hand, this means creating systems that incentivize building, say, solar panels. On the other hand, it means banning things like Bitcoin mining and private flights.

Ben: You note that the number of global private flights was at an all-time high in 2022—5.4 million. Of those, 85 percent were private flights within the United States.

MH: Which is nuts, right? One of the benefits I describe of ending private flights is that celebrities and rich people would then have to travel with the rest of us. Maybe we'd have faster trains if celebrities had to ride them, right? Maybe high-speed rail would be a little quicker if Taylor Swift needed to get from L.A. to San Francisco in half an hour.

Forcing the one percent to participate with the rest of us in some of these solutions is important—not just in terms of emissions reductions, but also in terms of the spirit of these policies. If it's something you can individually buy your way out of, people are going to start individually buying their way out of it.

Ben: As you’re hinting, marketcraft often has some loopholes. It can create new problems or perpetuate old ones.

MH: Electric vehicles are a good example. Replacing gas-powered vehicles with electric ones is one of the real promises of marketcraft. There's a landmark Princeton study that called for 200 million personal electric vehicles in the U.S. alone. That's the marketcraft compromise with capital: we'll replace everything you currently sell with something else you can sell.

But that begs the question. There are a lot of smart people who spend all their time thinking about transportation, and none of them advise building 200 million electric vehicles to replace every gas-powered car.

I just read this book, Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. They give the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, a lot of credit for fixing I-95 in Philly (where I live) way faster than people thought he was going to. And they're like, "Wow, this is real abundance thinking. You skip all the red tape and just fix something that needs to be fixed."

But then you talk to any transportation engineer, or anyone who studies the history of urban design about I-95 going through Philly, and they're like, "This is one of the worst ideas you could possibly have." It was intentionally created by Kevin Bacon's dad, of all people, who laid out a lot of Philly streets to promote automobile sprawl and cut the city off from its waterfront. So, yeah, Shapiro did a really good job repairing an absolutely insane piece of design.

So the question is not just "Can we do things fast?" but "What are we doing?"

Ben: Well, that segues us into your second strategy: public power, an important supplement to marketcraft.

MH: Exactly. The basic idea of public power is that the state can step in and actually build and run the things that we need directly, without recourse to the market and market actors. The logic behind public power says, if we can do something, we can do it. We don't have to compromise.

Take grid-scale electricity storage as an example. Almost all of it happens through this technology called pumped-storage hydropower, which basically means pumping water from one reservoir to another and then letting it fall over a generator that spins and creates power when you need to use it. Over 90% of grid-scale energy, both in the U.S. and worldwide, happens this way.

Ben: These mountainside batteries are literal examples of public power.

MH: Yes. It’s really a 20th-century technology, but it lasts for a long time. There's a reason why countries like China continue to build a bunch of pumped-storage hydropower. But the U.S. isn’t doing the same. Why? Because our system has been marketcrafted to rely on all these private agents. Though giant pools of water store energy really well, they’re not particularly good investments for capitalists.

So I use the term public power in a double sense. First, in terms of publicly owned utilities. And second, in terms of our need to build public power. The "we" here is labor. Labor makes public power happen by organizing and voting.

Ben: And yet public power has its own drawbacks, too. The national perspective it draws on isn’t always enough, you say.

MH: Right. I quote a Sámi leader named Skuvlaalbmá Áslat Niillas Áslat who talks about an Arctic area where Scandinavian countries want to put a bunch of windmills. They see this land and say, "We need to fit tons of windmills in this empty space." And Áslat responds that it only looks empty if you don’t understand the social metabolism of this place.

So that brings us to the third overlapping strategy: communism, or organizing around the equality of all people and all peoples.  Communally organized people live in very specific ways tied to the earth, and there are way more implications from their kind of thinking than you might imagine, both socially and ecologically.

Ben: You write, “Though there are approximately half a billion Indigenous people in the world—somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the global population—scientists commonly credit their managed territories with maintaining 80 percent of world biodiversity.”

Which is amazing—and yet, communism has drawbacks, too. First and foremost, communists get a lot of blowback. There’s so much anticommunist violence throughout history.

MH: Yes. Communists get a lot of heat for not conceding how broke, landless, and unpopular we are as a movement. I think we need to be straight up about that, and at the same time, acknowledge that none of us is living in a stable system. It’s coming for your life, whether you like it or not, and we need to make collective choices.

Ben: One of your central points is that we need elements of all three strategies—marketcraft, public power, and communism—to address the planetary crisis. None “can succeed on its own.” Can you explain more?

MH: The timescale we’re talking about is pretty immediate. I don’t think any one of the groups we’ve talked about—progressive, socialist, or revolutionary—is going to be able to convince everybody that they’re right and we should all align behind them.

At the same time, I think we need all of the people who are working earnestly within all three strategies—not necessarily to work on the same project, not even necessarily to work together, but to work in a coherent manner, so that we might have a chance to look back and say, we didn’t know it, but we were all working on the same thing from different angles.

That’s often how we look at history, right? When we look back at progress in the 20th century in the U.S., we look at radical and liberal groups that were often at loggerheads. But we also often see that their successes wouldn’t have been possible without each other.