How Can The Left Tackle the Climate Crisis?

Writing an effective political roadmap before a seismic election that is then released into a world transformed by that result is a tall order. 

Luckily for Malcolm Harris, the challenges — and the proposals floated to address them — in “What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis” are bigger than any one administration.

The threat is clear: Not only is burning fossil fuels destroying our planet and threatening irreversible warming, but consumption of them is deeply embedded into nearly every aspect of our lives. “Fossil fuels,” Harris writes, “are society’s lifeblood.”

As we’ve seen countless times, just presenting the facts of the climate crisis will not be enough to avoid its worst impacts. Deep structural change will be needed as long capitalism incentivizes squeezing every last iota of value out of the environment and workers.

While the picture painted of the climate crisis and its inevitability within our current economic system is bleak, this book is ultimately optimistic about our capacity to intervene in the crisis and transform our society while doing so.

The size and proximity of the threat is so large, Harris argues, that finding one common approach among the broad constellation of the Left is nigh impossible. Instead, he offers consideration of three different strategies that — like “liberals in antifascist march led by anarchist revolutionaries, socialists in an electoral coalition led by liberals, anarchists in an organizing campaign for increased social services” — can coexist and strengthen each other.

Marketcraft

The easiest way to understand marketcraft is as a souped-up version of the Biden administration’s domestic policy agenda, especially the green energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act.

This strategy starts with an understanding that markets are not naturally occurring systems with intrinsic preferences. Rather, markets are “functions of public policies” that can be molded into supporting our collective interests. 

By throwing a steak for private capital in the direction of decarbonization and lowering the value of fossil fuels to the point that they’re “not worth the trouble of pumping from the ground,” democratic institutions can make markets work for them, the case for marketcraft goes.

These “green carrots” and “green sticks” can take any number of forms — Harris points to former currency comptroller nominee Saule Omarova’s proposal of a National Investment Authority as an avenue to fund climate-friendly projects and attract institutional investors to infrastructure projects. When it comes to ways to punish bad climate behavior, Harris cites two of the Institute for Policy Studies’ favorite policies: Restricting private air travel and taxing stock buybacks.

After steelmanning each proposed avenue for addressing the climate crisis, Harris also presents their drawbacks. 

One of the main issues raised with marketcraft is how it would interact with the rest of the world — namely that financing can do little to correct global inequalities and how crafting attractive domestic green technology markets almost requires blocking cheaper Chinese products from coming in. Another is that capitalists won’t let themselves be coaxed into supporting the greater good without a fight, one that marketcrafters alone can’t win.

Public Power

That’s where the second arrow in the Left’s quiver comes into play: public power. Instead of encouraging capitalists to play fair, public-power advocates want the government to wrench away the power needed to lead the green transition itself.

This avenue is bigger than just getting the government to nationalize important industries like energy production. It also requires a transformation of government to be truly representative: dictated by the wills of the masses rather than oligarchs. The existing production system would be transformed into one that is wielded in the public interest.

The most obvious vehicle for this transformation, according to Harris, is labor. Giving workers — from factory floors to hospitals — control over production would remove the insatiable need for profits and let decisions be made to improve their own communities. “The working class builds public power,” Harris argues, and in turn “public power builds the working class.”

A glaring issue here is what the majority of the public values will inevitably conflict with minority groups, groups — in particular Indigenous communities — that may know better about their own environments. This “reflexive antilocalist strain to public power” risks ending up “destroying the world in all its particularities in the name of saving the world in general.”

There is also the issue of inequities among the working class that form the base of public power. There are privileges that say male workers, white workers, or American workers may not want to willingly give up, even if eliminating them is essential to true public power.

Communism

The book’s final proposition is to overturn the capitalist system instead of trying to outcompete it. Harris’s version of communism is defined by its orienting principle: From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. 

This framework would decide what needs are and how well they’re being met through communes, groups of people who make calls together and “only ever exist in relation to one another.” In the context of the climate crisis, communists could for example respond by developing indigenous-style agriculture systems that produce enough food for their communities while respecting their environments.

This avenue faces the problem of an armed and powerful capitalist class not interested in giving up its dominance over society. Figuring out how to balance values of nonviolence with the reality of inevitable confrontation poses a serious challenge. That threat of violent repression only exacerbates the existing challenges of recruiting the masses into a strategy that demands much more of its adherents than the previous two.

Working Together

As mentioned earlier, Harris is clear-eyed about the difficulties of uniting progressives behind just one of these strategies for addressing the climate crisis. An at least loosely-coordinated effort “at the level of the problem” will be needed. 

In the service of getting the Left together, Harris proposes several axioms that could help cohere partisans of one strategy or another, including that truly international solidarity is a prerequisite to substantive changes, that voting together is not the end-point of politics but still should be done if possible, and that fidelity to principles is key. 

The final portion of Harris’ book focuses on areas of potential collaboration between the strategies. He likens the climate crisis to an emergency siren, one that demands people work together because there’s no other choice. 

“Marketcrafters can understand “looting” cases of water from Walmart,” Harris writes, “communists can understand the arbitrary authority involved in rations scarce supplies; public-power advocates can understand taking action without waiting for official permission.”

What does melding of the three strategies look like in practice? Harris offers up the suggestion of community disaster councils, where all kinds of progressives could get together to identify the threats of the climate crisis to their neighborhoods and find consensus on how to respond to them.

“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,” Harris proposes.

“What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis” is available now from Little, Brown and Company.