What's Left
Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis
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- US$14.99
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A vital guide for collective political action against the climate apocalypse, from bestselling progressive intellectual Malcolm Harris—“a brilliant thinker and writer capable of making the intricacies of economic conditions supremely readable” (Vulture).
Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem can be paralyzing, especially when corporations are actively staving off changes that could save the planet but which might threaten their bottom lines. To quote Greta Thunberg, despite very clear science and very real devastation, the adults at the table are still saying “blah blah blah.” Something has to change—but what, and how?
In What's Left, Malcolm Harris cuts through the noise and gets real about our remaining options for saving the world. Just as humans have caused climate change, we hold the power to avert a climate apocalypse, but that will only happen through collective political action. Harris outlines the three strategies—progressive, socialist, and revolutionary—that have any chance of succeeding, while also revealing that none of them can succeed on their own. What's Left shows how we must combine them into a single pathway: a meta-strategy, one that will ensure we can move forward together rather than squabbling over potential solutions while the world burns.
Vital and transformative, What's Left confirms Malcolm Harris as next-generation David Graeber or Mike Davis—a historian-activist who shows us where we stand and how we got here, while also blazing a path toward a brighter future.
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In this provocative and galvanizing treatise, journalist Harris (Palo Alto) grapples with what is to be done about climate change. He considers a range of possible strategies, beginning with "left-liberal" attempts to control economic development "via market regulation and incentives." Examples include Joe Biden's 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included a $150 billion investment in green energy facilities. This strategy's fundamental shortcoming, Harris argues, is that it's a national solution to a worldwide problem; the crisis urgently demands a more potent "counterforce to capital": the "direct social appropriation" of entire industries. As an example, he points to the Build Public Renewables Act passed in New York, which was spearheaded by the Democratic Socialists of America. The legislation commits the state-run New York Power Authority to building renewables if the private sector fails to do so. However, Harris also finds weaknesses in this approach, which he sees as relying on a robust global coalition of working-class voters that is not realistic in the short term. For Harris that leaves only one option, "communism"—a word "weighed down by a lot of history," but the most straightforward way to describe a strategy that would "abolish" profit-making as the organizing principle of production. Written in a lively and elegant style, this will convince readers that a better world, or at least the continued existence of this one, really is possible.
