“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 attempts to map a way out of the capitalist ecological disaster we are living through at an exponential and existential rate. It’s a potential What is to Be Done? for this generation. But does the upcoming book achieve the daunting task it sets out for itself?

Harris’s work centers on the existential ecological crisis as the primary factor forcing this type of 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.” In terrifying news recently, finance capitalists with Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and other international financial institutes are already planning to far exceed that figure.

The energy companies are also ignoring any common-sense climate change measures, “the New York Times, Hiroko Tabuchi reported that in 2021, after Shell and its partners transferred a jointly operated field in Nigeria to a private operator, weekly flaring increased from years of near zero to more than ten million cubic feet of gas.” The ongoing capitalist order, if anything, is increasing the dangers at the present moment.

“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…”

Marketcraft

Harris breaks down the three paths in the aforementioned title of the book to Marketcraft, Public Power, and Communism. The first, Marketcraft, attempts to posit the position from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party–Bernie, AOC, etc., “the liberal establishment” which “has shown itself newly enthusiastic about wielding state power over the economy, especially when it comes to the green transition.”

Harris contrasts the Marketcraft advocates with the neoliberal political wing and so-called “market fundamentalists.” Marketcraft supporters view the market not as ethereal and god-like, as the fundamentalists do, but as “functions of public policies.” If the market becomes “detached from our values…it’s up to democratic society to reassert itself…” How is this achieved? “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.”

The cited examples within the US of this type of path are 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. However, Harris points out the obvious criticism of this strategy–especially 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 shift in which class controls the means of production–and thus the social relations of production–there is genuine side-eyeing to be had of the Marketcraft strategy. Even from a purely economic standpoint, we see a failure in this type of bourgeois democratic pressure on green capitalism.

Harris cites the example of how currently, US EV cars and roadways have three different 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.”

Not surprisingly, China is used as a comparative example of marketcraft strategy to the US. In China, there’s a universal EV plug system–even Tesla has to conform to that standard in China and modify their EVs “and drivers pay by QR code via the ubiquitous WeChat and Alipay apps.”

A key warning of this strategy is the nationalist, reactionary character it has seemed to develop in the US. While the US has increased its economic aggression against China, in the PRC “after 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 is now the global leader in green transition industries and has connected to the world’s development on this front through the Belt and Road Initiative. Harris notes that China’s annual direct investment in the US economy has declined from $46.5 billion to “only” $5.4 billion due to increased economic tariffs and sanctions from the US started by Trump and continued under Biden. The threat of this “nationalist marketcraft” from the US is another Cold War.

Another key criticism of the purely marketcraft strategy is the environmental “unequal exchange” as Harris describes. He cites Max Ajl’s A People’s Green New Deal:

“Much of left-liberal climate talk is based on administering rather than eliminating capitalism,” he writes, accurately, “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.”

If the goal of a marketcraft strategy proposed from the liberal political faction is that carbon emissions are “fully mitigated” today, the existential results of “accumulated historical CO2” would still be felt worldwide. However, those consequences “fall hardest” on the Global South due to colonial and “postcolonial exploitation.” The vast majority, 75%, of “climate finance” per the Climate Policy Initiative from 2011 to 2020 was “concentrated in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia & Pacific (primarily led by China).”

Public Power

The second path through the planetary crisis, per 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.”

He goes on to cite institutions like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), and organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as examples of or a key theoretical voice for this path domestically. Examples such as Chile’s nationalization efforts and Indonesia’s ban on unrefined nickel also point to tactics of public power and how it can be used to “loosen both sides” of the Oil-Value-Life chain.

That capitalist value chain is key to breaking for public power to work effectively; as he says, “public power means class conflict,” and quotes 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.” Since Capital has “chased low-paid labor and lax environmental regulations around the world,” public power has to be “a different kind of plan.”

Harris points out some issues with this pathway through the planetary crisis. Using the example of the contradiction between the community-owned co-op utility company Kaua’i Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC) and Indigenous groups like Nā Kia’i Kai (sea protectors) and the Pō’ai Wai Ola (West Kaua’i Watershed Alliance), he shows how “there are dangers to building a public power system in the footprint of colonialism.”

The KIUC had developed a plan to have recycled “plantation-era water ditches…divert water from the Waimea River.” This would irrigate 250 new farms and pastures—all entitled to energy and road upgrades paid for by the KIUC. Since fresh water on the Hawaiian islands is in low supply, this was planned to guarantee all diverted water was used with an ecological mindset.

Kawai Warren—fisherman and leader of the Nā Kia’i Kai—said to 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.” The fear was that this plan from the KIUC would “entrench” the “poor environmental planning” at the expense of the “traditional farming practices” of Indigenous communities. Most alarmingly, there was a significant risk of dragging “legacy agricultural chemicals” from the colonial “plantation days” into the ecosystem—further polluting Indigenous land.

Harris also gives the example—among many—of the TVA desecrating “thousands of Native burial sites” and then “distributed bones and artifacts to regional settler institutions such as museums and universities.” It took the TVA almost 14 years to count the 4,871 Indigenous people whose remains they “claimed to own as property.” In 2023—90 years after the TVA was established and started this genocidal act in the name of public power—the TVA finally “invited affected tribes to apply to recover” their ancestors and relatives.

He also highlights the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, the Pāti Māori Party in New Zealand, the struggle between the Ogoni people of Nigeria against Shell in the 90s, the Sámi people of Norway, and more as examples of Indigenous struggle for self-determination running counter to perceived public power initiatives.

In terms of understanding Indigeneity and the role of the Indigenous struggle, he cites Peruvian writer José Carlos Mariátegui in his work The Problem of the Indian: “The tendency to consider the Indigenous problem as a moral problem embodies a liberal, humanitarian, nineteenth-century Enlightenment conception.” The central “problem” for the Indigenous struggle for decolonization is the land. The “material land-based conflicts” in settler or postcolonial societies attempting a “plurantional” shift haven’t succeeded, argues Harris.

In the book, Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State by Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq, they write that the 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.”

Taking it beyond Indigeneity, Harris dives into the “unequal global division of labor.” He develops an analysis using World Systems Theory to show a material obstacle of international working class solidarity coming from workers in the Global North. Utilizing the World Bank metric of “labor’s terms of trade,” which shows how workers in the Global North work less for more relative to the Global South:

“…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 does accurately critique 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.

Then, using economist Minqi Li’s book China and the 21st Century Crisis, Harris briefly touches on the rise of China. Illustrating that their LToT has significantly shifted in regards to other Global South countries. However, in that process, he sets up the narrative that China is, in effect, a beneficiary of the unequal exchange similar to US 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.”

He also taps into the Uyghur narrative slightly by saying the economic boom of China was built on coal mining and production. Harris argues that when this production shifted to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, it was an “underdiscussed cause of Indigenous Uyghur uprisings.” It’s odd framing when much later in the book during the conclusion—which I will break down later in the article in more detail—he says positively about China, “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.”

There’s no analysis of why China focused on industrial development to catch up to the West—an accomplishment itself when looking at how China has caught up after 200 years of imperial aggression in just three decades. Of course, that came with an ecological cost. This is a material reality that is not foreign to China.

According to Carlos Martinez in The East is Still Red, coal’s share of energy consumption in China has dropped by nearly 30% in 15 years, with China closing its last coal-fired plant in 2017. China is the world leader in wind and solar energy production. Its leadership has been pushing for global and domestic carbon neutrality for well over a decade now. Nearly a third of all global renewable energy investment is in China, and 42% of jobs in the renewables industry are in China. The country’s reforestation and afforestation policies are leading to planting forests “the size of Ireland” and doubling forest coverage in China in 40 years to 23%. We can not attribute all of these achievements purely to marketcraft and public power strategies when it’s being led by the biggest Communist Party in the world.

Placing the socialist country of China in the same camp as the US is a political dead-end that Harris falls into. Placing China purely in the equation of unequal global exchange without understanding the internal and international class dynamics at play in China could lead the reader to an ultra-left position. Now, as will be spelled out during the analysis of his conclusion, Harris does step back from this theoretical fallacy, but the road to get there is filled with these types of contradictions of analysis.

Communism

This section is the weakest of the book due to ideological collection. For most on the Left, when the topic of communism comes up, the examples would be China, Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK, the USSR, etc. These are rarely, if ever, mentioned in this section. Harris seemingly doesn’t want to be “weighed down by a lot of history” and contemporary reality.

As previously seen, he would also juxtapose Socialism with Chinese Characteristics with US capitalism and settler colonialism. Harris says the previous chapter’s public power is “organized workers taking control of the means of production.” But 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—needs “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, he makes the confusing statement that, “communism cannot tolerate the persistence of top-down politics.”

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?

Later in the chapter, he does address some of these issues. “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 Gracchus Babeuf, Rosa Luxemburg, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, and Thomas Sankara, he shows examples of this counter-revolutionary threat. “Around the world, regimes responded to decolonial uprisings with brutal, disproportionate force, both targeted and blanket.”

Unfortunately, in this part—where he also mentions figures like Mao, Fidel Castro, and the Bolshevik revolution—he doesn’t delve into this “communism” in any detailed way. It’s purely to point out that, largely, Marxist-Leninists were violently oppressed or oppressed others. Their economic, political, and ecological reforms and policies are never touched on. The USSR is briefly brought up as “sacrificing the project’s communist character” by developing war communism against imperial invasion.

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. He highlights anarchists like David Graeber or anarcho-communists like Abdullah Öcalan. Harris centers the “rose theory” developed by the latter and his version of democratic confederation. While the EZLN, Kurdish Workers Party, and other examples used are perfectly fine to analyze, centering them as the primary examples to use in the chapter called communism seems like a major missed opportunity at the very least.

This space in the book could have been used to detail how Cuba has survived US imperial aggression for 70 years. China’s policies towards rural co-ops, state-owned enterprises, and relationship to the mass reforestation of rural areas. The reality of these countries going through the very class struggle process 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 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.

He even goes as far to say that “The 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. But by combining anarchist and communist movements—and backed by some anti-communist perspectives—this chapter is a mess theoretically.

The Planetary Crisis

The next chapter—The Planetary Crisis—details in terrifying fashion the ecological and capitalist crisis we are under at the moment. 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, we already have 270 million global refugees. He quotes Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First; Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, 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 at risk, with the Corn Belt and California’s ‘Salad Bowl’ are both running out of “good soil” and “water.” And most disturbingly, 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 peddle in 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 imperialist or exploitative, at the very least, is to ignore the theory and practices of the Korean masses 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, this just repeats errors that Western Marxists have committed against actually existing socialism for over a hundred years. The recent publication of Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism covers these historical and contemporary errors from the Western Left or Marxist movements.

Harris does an excellent job of detailing how and why the West has “de-developed” the parts of the Global South where Capital thinks 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 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.”

Even though capitalism, through’ disaster investors,’ performs shock therapy in the wake of natural disasters, this is an unsustainable model of capital centralization and privatization. Eventually, the land from which Capital derives its ‘Value’ won’t be able to produce in an ever-increasing-profit motive system.

Additionally, the ILO estimates that 10 million people were forced into modern slavery from 2016 to 2021, and since 2021, the 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 the land and people. These are contradictions that can not persist.

Another key aspect of this current “planetary crisis” is 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.

“Attempts 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

Other than the public power chapter, this is Harris’s strongest section of the book. After reviewing these three different “partisan” strategies, he argues for a reimaged United or Popular Front to emerge. In the face of rising global fascism, as seen in Trump’s rise and his implementation of the reactionary “nationalist marketcraft” strategy that Harris warned about, the need for tactical and strategic unity of action is at an all-time high.

It’s clear that the ride 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’s 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 these different 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 “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” 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, he 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 is 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 is a brief and general overview of the “characteristic fears” and “points of coherence” among the Left, such as Inefficiency, fear, complicity, and then police are our enemies, women’s collective self-liberation, international solidarity, building power, voting, fidelity to principle—respectively. Then, it’s a Venn diagram of how the three strategies interlink.

At this point in the conclusion, Harris’s analysis wrapping up is pragmatic and thoughtful. It’s a purposeful reimagining of how a Popular Front would function in the era of worldwide existential threats. But here emerges some of those ideological confusions that appeared earlier in the book. China, the preeminent socialist nation run by workers and the masses through a Communist Party, is only mentioned regarding how marketcraft and public power can intercede.

Now, perhaps the reasoning for excluding China from the section covering communism is due to the working class already gaining political power there and thus only can be in the denominator of “public power.” Unfortunately, the 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 communist elements to these respective histories and these are examples of working class struggles, to reduce these movements of how public power and communism can overlap is odd when China, Cuba, Vietnam, and more exist. Why are they so frequently left out of the conversation of communism’s experiences, but examples that are far closer to the public power/marketcraft strategies are pushed into the communist status by Harris—let alone the conflation of anarchism and communism?

The only in-depth part of the conclusion’s focus on communism that relates to communist countries are a slight repeating of the information regarding the Venezualan 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. There are plenty of issues with this book that any organizer, regardless of their respective political ideology, will find some fault with—I imagine anarchists generally aren’t happy being lumped under the communist umbrella or ultra-left folks being told to build coalitions with progressive “marketcraft” proponents.

But, this reimaged United or Popular Front has a pragmatic and grounded foundation that holds its own theoretical mistakes or confusions from tearing apart. The existential ecological crisis—compounded and largely generated by capital accumulation —is an ‘all hands on deck’ situation for working class and oppressed peoples. Add to the balance of forces the exponentially aggressive neo-fascist order coming into effect under the second Donald Trump administration.

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