Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westerveldt. We have a new season coming for you starting June third, but in the meantime, I wanted to bring you this interview that reporter Adam Lowenstein did with journalist and author Malcolm Harris. You may have come across Harris's work in New York Magazine or his book Palo Alto. I particularly enjoyed his take on the Abundance Bros. Recently in The Baffler.
Harris has a new book out now called What's Left that tackles how we can save both democracy and the planet. It's a great read, and this conversation is a great listen enjoy.
Thanks for being here, Malcolm, Yeah, thanks for having me. So I wanted to ask you to start. I have my own of this, but I'm curious what you see as the purpose of your book.
Oh, I'll hear your theory, and I should hear it before I hear you hear my theories, and then you're going to copy me. When I set out to write this book, at first, I thought I'm going to worry about why I'm right and everyone else is wrong. Everyone who even sort of agrees with me is wrong, and
they all need to completely agree to me. With me, and I have the only explanation for how we get through the climate crisis, and when people read my brilliant explanation, they'll have no choice but to agree with me in my understanding. And then I like thought about that for a second and thought like, well, that's that's not true,
Like that won't happen. Even if I make a spectacular argument, I could convince you know, some people, but most people are probably doing what they're doing, even people on the left, as I'm broadly considering it, who don't agree with me on specifics or doing what they're doing for a number of reasons, not just because they're particular convinced, but because they have a like temperamental affinity with what they're doing.
They have like interpersonal commitments, you know. People. We live in a society, you know, and I wasn't going to remake that society by making an argument, And so I decided the most useful thing I could do was operating from some base of shared understanding, give a sort of showcase of what I think are the relevant ideological paths
that the left has opened to it right now. And this is mostly you know, like I wrote this during the Biden administration, and so we had some left wing people within some proximity to power for some period of time who were working on economic policy, and so from that the left wing of the Biden economic team all the way to insurgent communists. I think there was a certain level of agreement about some important terms, such that we could have a conversation about what everyone believes and
then how we fit together. And so this book was my attempt to sort of give the strongest presentation I could of these different paths, even if even if I don't agree with everything in there, both strengths and weaknesses, and then think about the whole field in a way that's holistic and realistic. But you, as a reader, what was your take? That's more interesting to me?
I will say on the you know, having written it during the Biden era, but of course readers are consuming it in the second Trump era. The mentions of Lena Khan made me somewhat wistful and nostalgic for a time that feels very far away, even though it was not that long ago. So what it felt like to me was that it was essentially a bracing bucket of cold water, which itself will be kind of a valuable commodity in
the not too distant future. Like, there's no benefit to pretending that the problem is not as bad as it is and that the crisis is not as acute and real and world spanning as it is. We'll get into this a little bit later, I'm sure, but there is a sense of inertia the way that capitalism works that all of us, including those of us on the left, can get very comfortable with that. What it felt like to me was you repeatedly reminding people that it's as
bad as you think, probably worse, and there is. We don't do ourselves any favors by avoiding the discomfort of that reality.
Yeah, that's just true. Right. So if we're talking about like foundation, I'm against deluding ourselves. I'm interested to see how much people will focus on different like think about it as an optimistic or pessimistic book or whatever, or hopeful or hopeless, And I try not to work within those boundaries. Usually I feel like they're not they don't guide us in the right directions because try to be
a very dialectical thinker. Right, So there's hope even in the most hopeless moments, and then there's despair even in our best strategies. But yeah, I don't think there is any point. I think that's a premise for the project, is that there's no point scouting ourselves and that I'm not going to lie to my readers about what I understand the situation to be. And the situation is it's pretty dire, but we can also you know, people have
been in dire situations for a long time. It's not We're not the first people to see the end of the world, and we can learn from other experiences with that. So for me, it's a it's a forward looking book, not a not a backward looking book or a you know, skyward despairing looking book. It's a forward looking book. I'm thinking about where we are, where you go, and to go anywhere, you have to start from where you are. You can't imagine you're somewhere else. It's not a path for movement.
Yeah, you say early on that the message to me at least was it's worse than you think. But you also write pretty early in the book that I'll assume from the beginning that success is possible, which is right. It's both very pessimistic and very optimistic at the same time, which I guess maybe is just a way of describing being realism in some ways.
Well, I think that the I cite the great late and great Mike Davis who says, well, we have to be realistic even about our realism, that you can look at the situation ecologically and turn to stone is what he says is like it is, it's very bad, and you can look look at the situation and see how bad it is and freeze. There's there's a real temptation to do that, and there's a temptation to ignore it right,
to just not look. But I think realistic about our realism is to find a middle in between those and say, like, the situation's bad and we can still move. We are not Stone, right. We have the ability to think and we have the ability to act, and we can do both collectively.
So in understanding the status quo, the stakes of the present moment or the state of the present moment, I guess you talk about the oil value life chain. Can you explain what that is as kind of a fundamental premise for where we are right now?
Yeah, Actually, the concept for this book is really this oil is life syllogism which I awoke from a dream with I was like in to pitch a whole different book, And the night before the conversation with my agent, I woke up for a dream with this phrase, the oil is life.
Fossil fuels are they're in your brain?
Well they are in so many ways microplastics alone.
Yeah, that's a good point literally in another.
Way, literally like oil is life. So we know the phrase the water is life from the code access struggle, and that's true. Right, everyone knows that you can't literally can't live without water. We know that, and that should be decisive, right, that should, like everything should flow from that fundamental truth if we are operating rationally, one would think.
And yet the assertion, the phrase, the truism of truth that water is life has not shifted our politics, It has not shifted our state behavior, It hasn't affected the path we're on that much, except in this insurgent way. And so the question is why there has to be something truer than at least in our society. Water is life. And the more you think about it, or the more I thought about it, once I had this phrase, whatever wouldn't leave me alone? It's true that oil is people's lives.
People's lives are tied up very very very literally in the fossil fuel system, and not just the gas that they put in their car, although certainly the gas that they put in the car, or the polyester clothes that they used to put on their children, but also you know, the dividends from the Exxon check that is going into their pension fund. You know that people's lives are really really tied up in these systems, and not just in their need for consumable energy that can be replaced with
a solar panel. And until we're realistic about that, unless we acknowledge that, we can't change it. And that's to me explains why every group, every agency, every state, every commune, unity that has tried to address this imminent crisis is currently a lapsing crisis of climate change has found itself really totally unable to do it, not at the scale
is necessary. Even when we talk about and I'd write in the book, and when we think about China, which is as a state maybe done the most to address the exigencies of climate change at scale, it's not there. It's not a reasonable reaction to what's happening in the world. Were not able to do that. And it's because oil makes our life for everyone in the world almost that
we face this block. And you need value as that center term to explain why it's not just oil itself that shapes our lives, but the fact that oil is valuable and valuable is the structure that explains and organizes the entire social metabolism. Means neither of these things are easy to cut off from each other. Right, It's not that we just use so much oil in our household production. We don't necessarily even for like it's heating and driving is mostly what people use fossil fuels directly for. I
mean some cooking too. But it's not like you can get an ev and get an induction stove and the whole problem is solved. It is a problem at the level of value. And as long as fossil fuels have value, which they do because you can use them to accomplish a whole number of things, And as long as value is the term that structures our whole world, we're going to find ourselves unable to control our social situation, to
control our ecological situation. I'm able to control what I call our social metabolism.
I think one of the main points that I took from this, or I found clarifying about this, was the idea that our entire society is structured around the idea of value for value sake or value production for value production sake is an Inherit aren't good on its own. That's the kind of the basis for this whole system we live in. And as long as that's the case and oil is valuable, then that chain will be unbroken. Is that a reasonable interpretation.
Yeah, And we can see the implications very simply. And I start with the story of going to the Shell conference where they wanted me to speak and talking to this engineer slash finance guy for a Shell who's explaining that, well, when we stop using a well because of climate pressure or whatever, we sell it to somebody else and they're going to use it, and so the oil in that whale is still going to get used, even though we're
complying with our climate commitments or whatever. We'll just sell it to some gangster, like literally, just like some gangster who can operate it at a lower cost because they're evading the safety responsibilities that have been foisted upon shell. They're avoiding the labor responsibilities they have been foisted upon shell because that oil is valuable, Like you could still use that, and it's like, well, if you get replaced. You know, two hundred million gas powered internal combustion engine
personal vehicles in the United States. With electric vehicles, those cars don't just disappear. They're going to be sold somewhere where they don't have as many cars because suddenly you can get a car for way cheaper. And then those cars are still they need to be powered with gasoline. That's still going to power the car that someone will find money in being able to supply. That person who's able to sell the gasoline for that car is going to be able to live, right, They're going to be
able to reproduce their lives. Maybe they're going to be able to improve their lives and the lives of people around them and their loved ones. And I'm not going to be able to convince them not to do that. You're not going to be able to convince them not to do that. State regulations aren't going to be able to convince them not to do that. You know, I
compared it to the War on drugs. There's theoretically a war between every government in the world, and like drug dealers and drug dealers are winning that war and have been winning that war for decades. And it's not because they have bigger armies or whatever. It's because there's drugs are valuable, and value is the way that we find our way to life.
So you organize this book around three collective strategies, as you call them, and I actually don't want to spend a ton of time on each one of them, because that's what the book is for, and there's so much nuance in each of these that people should just go read the book for that. But just as a little bit of scene setting, can you just give a bit of an overview of what the three different strategies are that you outline in the book.
Yeah, I describe them as and I use the strategies as the names and the organizing principle rather than like identity ideology thing. So not socialism in the middle term, it's public power. I describe it as public power because I want to keep focused on the strategies themselves rather
than these kind of political identifications or identities. So the strategies, as I describe them our market craft, which is using the states to intervene to break the connection between fossil fuels, oil and value by building a clean energy economy and by regulating fossil fuels out of existence. And so I call that market craft. It's a term designed by the political scientist Stephen Vogel that I really like. But it's a pretty broad spectrum of policies even within this chapter.
The second one is called public power, which people might understand as like democratic socialism or just socialism, which is where the state is actually doing the green transition itself.
It's loosening both the connections between value and life and between fossil fuels and value by building a clean energy economy and providing a basic quality of life for all people independent of their relation to the value system, such that fossil fuel can't make the same demand on us that they make now for us to ruin our lives
and ruin the collective life life. And that'sized through organized labor developing itself in the interests of the entire society and taking control in that collective interest.
And we saw some of those first and second, the market craft and public power strategies during the Biden years.
Yeah, yeah, you could point to examples for sure, more market craft than public power. I think you can definitely definitely point to examples. And then the third one is what I call communism, which is breaking that connection between value and life and organizing life itself around different principles, specifically to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities, rather than according to their ability to produce value.
And you talk in the book about choosing the word or settling on the word communism rather than something more complicated that might have this not have the same political baggage.
I guess, yeah, I'm not scared of the word communism, and maybe I should be, and I would be now more if I read it again now. But for me, I think having an honest relationship with my readers is really important that I'm never going to try and dumb things down. I'm never going to try and like handle my reader strategically in that way with regard to the truth or what I think. I'm not going to give
the reader or anything less than what I think. And that's a pretty pretty firm commitment from me as a writer, which becomes difficult in these kind of situations where I'm taking something that's pretty I don't want to say theoretically dense, but definitely fraud that's very important for my thought, and then I have to find a way to share it with a broad audience. And the best way I've found to do that is pretty straight up, and sometimes I need a note to explain to the reader, like, look,
this is what I'm doing. I trust you to trust me to get us where we're going, and not need just call it like communism or like communalism or whatever something else. If I'm talking about to each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities, I'm talking about communism Like I'm a Marxist. I'm not afraid of that. I think society should be less afraid of that, and it's my duty to make society less afraid of that.
In some ways, so I trust, I trust my readers, maybe to my own detriment or downfall, but I can't help myself.
I feel like it's just a good operating principle for a writer and just for a human being in the world of just to trust people, give them the benefit of the doubt.
I think so, but I find a lot of writers don't feel the same way necessarily. A phenomenon I see a lot is writers trying to write down to their
reader from a place that's not very high to start with. Yeah, and so people who are assuming they're like, you know, too clever, too informed for their broad readership, and they're taking something that's already not first rate and diluting it down further to the point where like the readership can't really get anything out of it, and there's there's just not much there. And so I'd rather like look straight across the table at my reader, because that's where I
that's where I will always think they are right. I'm always writing for curious, thoughtful readers the best I can.
Unless we get diverted into the conversation just about the writing process, which I would love to have but is probably not what people signed up for. I do have a note written on a sticky note tape to my monitor here that says, respect your reader, trust them to get it, don't hit them over the head with it. And I don't always succeed in that. I probably usually don't, but I at least try to remind myself that people are smart.
I've had a lot of luck, I've had a lot of luck respecting my reader and respecting readers in general. And I think there are there are a lot of smart readers out there, way more than people think there are, way more than a lot of writers think there are.
So coming back to the book, there is an interesting theme throughout, which is this idea of class conflict. And there's a lot of points in each of the three strategies, and then the book more broadly where you make the point that whatever you think or have convinced yourself that this fight taking on climate change is about at its core, any sort of realistic, long term solution involves class conflict. Can you explain a little bit about why that is?
Because I feel like, especially a lot of us on the left, or maybe more of the like liberal progressive left rather than the capital l left we've been taught and we're still very hesitant to say the class word.
Yeah, I think you have to go to the mode of production because capitalism is a mode of production, and you have to look at what are the conditions and relations of that mode of production. And that's what we do as Marxists, is we look at the capitalist mode of production, which is the mode of production we live under it's the most motive production nee mode of production. Right, it's the archetype for all other understandings of motive production.
And we look at are what are its relations? Right? Well, we see a relation between a capitalist class and a working class. There's a class that produces value and there's a class that receives that value. It's a funny inversion, right, because the capitalist class creates the work and the working
class creates the capital. That's at a little Mario Trante for our p our warning, and so that that is the basis for this production system, production for production's sake, that organizes our entire global society, and that which we find ourselves unable to control. So it's ultimately a relationship that we're unable to control. It's not the machines themselves, right, we can't fetishize the objects that are produced by the
system of production. It's this relationship that we're unable to control. And that's true for emissions, right, That's true just at the very like basic level. It's that it's not like the machines are dragging us into this situation or whatever. It's our social relation and on our individual social relations.
But the social relations at the class level, which is what enables production in the first place, and so without disturbing that, and I don't necessarily claim that you have to abolish it in order to have a path through, right, that's what I think. I'm an anti capitalist. I think we need to abolish capitalism, but from a market craft perspective, you can change the way that capitalism works, and I think it's worth acknowledging that and trying to understand that
perspective as well. But to do that, do you still have to understand the class relation as an obstacle to any sort of control over the social metabolism. And so whether you have to like absolutely destroy capitalist production or not is a question that this book leaves open because
I think it's a question that's on the left. But if the premise is that the oil value life chain is wrapped around the gate to positive future and we need to find some way to break it or to bend it to slip through that gate, then we're going to have to change the production mode that we have, at least such that it's unrecognizable. And that is a class conflict. That's a relation between two classes of people, not a relation of objects.
One of the challenging parts of the book I found was the reminder that this is not as simple as if we can provide some sort of organizing force for workers to unite around, then everyone will be naturally drawn to that, and workers of the world will unite and
rise up. It's there are a lot of people and a lot of institutions of organized labor more broadly, that have a lot invested in quite literally jobs, but also the broader economic and political status quo, which I feel like it's already hard enough just to organize all the workers if all we had to do is create a platform for people to gather and rise up. But actually it's not as simple as that.
Yeah. Well, honestly, I don't think it becomes easier by pretending it is easier, and I think some people run into you run into that problem with some of the more vulgar public power advocates, where if we focus on the easy solution, then it will actually become that easy. But the truth is that there are striations and huge conflicts within the working class. You see that domestically, and you see it absolutely, you see it internationally, and we
have to be really serious about that. You know, we're really serious about our situation, and if we pretend that all workers in the world have the same sets of interest and American workers are not advantaged by the exploitation of workers in Brazil in any way, shape or form, because we're all members of the working class. Like, that's that's true from one perspective. There's an important perspective from
where that's true, but it's not the whole truth. It's not realistic enough, and so we need to map the conflicts within the working class in order to build the working class as a real force. We can't just pretend that like, oh no, there's no issues with gender within the working class, which doesn't mean that like working class people or sexist or whatever. It's about the structure of
these abstractions in really impersonal ways. Obviously there are personal, you know, interpersonal personal ways as well, but what I'm talking about is the impersonal structures of these things. And so you have situations where you have like construction workers lobbying in favor of gas powered crypto minds is one of the examples that I use, and like, well, that's terrible,
that's bad planning. That's in your own like very very narrow interests that isn't in the interest of the like global working class at all, and so we need to we need to be serious about what the composition of the working class is and not just treated as some self evident abstraction.
How do you think about the fact that for a lot of people, and I include myself in this, I think none of us are immune to it, but many of our beliefs, including for a lot of people all things climate and environment, they seem to be downstream from our political identity. These days, if you are a Republican, you know, self identified, and that's part of your identity, you are probably not going to be, to put it,
mildly enthusiastic about democratic efforts to tackle climate change. And that seems like a you know, overcoming kind of entrenched political identities, or maybe loosening them a little bit. And so people can vote Republican while also believing in climate change. And obviously this is a little bit of a kind of a micro example, but of a broader phenomenon of what people believe being downstream from how they see their identity. I just wonder how you think about that that dilemma.
Yeah, so I'm not a liberal, so I don't like get my marching orders from polling and stuff, and there's a lot of contradictory pulling or like, you know, election results, which sounds kind of silly because election results obviously play a really important role in like structuring the field in which we operate. But I don't think that like those
votes are the truth or something about anxiety. And if you look at polling for like, oh, do you think we should focus more on like economic growth or the environment. The way we talk about people, you'd think people would say everyone says growth or whatever. It's not true, totally not true. Americans are when they're polled and asked to like how important the environment is, say, the environment's very important.
I think people believe in climate change. I think people walk outside and believe in climate change in mind the like apocalyptic floods and fires and stuff that are unavoidable. Like, yeah, we have a very like polarized partisan political environment electorally in the United States. I don't think that has any or very much bearing on the actual truth of our historical situation, and I try not to let it in.
One's how I think about these questions, because I think then you end up looking like you know, two inches in front of your face, often at some like reflection in some mirror or something. I find it very hard for people who orient themselves that way to get a historical understanding, and I think that's the kind of understanding we need.
I felt like there were a few different concrete messages for progressives, mainstream progressives who are left of the Democratic Party but might not be again capital L or might not think of themselves as capital L left yet.
I sure hope, So tell me what they are.
I mean, one of them, you say, very explicitly at one point, is you know, essentially break up with the Democrats capital D Democrats, which I have to imagine after the last few weeks there's a lot more openness to maybe after the last couple of years, there's a lot more openness too among folks on the left that the you know, the Democratic Party as an institution is not is not the vehicle for change people might have anticipated it to be. Again, to put it very mildly.
Yeah, I think I cite Kim Moody is maybe the book I'm talking about, because that's really his argument is that people we need a United States Labor Party in order to pursue the interests of workers. I think that's an important perspective. I'm not one hundred percent convinced that's true.
I think the like, as far as I'm concerned, the Democratic Party, and like even parallel institutions like the New York Times or something are much like the United States State itself, where I think the perspective that like, oh, we need to this is a force for historical evil in the world, and we need to like distance ourselves from it, and there can be no progress through these things.
I think there's a strong argument for that perspective. I think it's an argument worth hearing out, and we're thinking through and sometimes conceding to. At the same time, I think that these are internally contradictory structures. I don't think everyone who works for the US US government is a butcher of Gaza, right, even though the US government is itself a butcher of Gaza. And so do those contradictions within these institutions allow us to move in a positive direction.
I think it's possible. I'm not saying everyone who thinks that is wrong certainly has that perspective like taken a blow in the past months. Yeah, I think probably but I think these are conversations we need to have and like topics we need to think about. But what are the other ones?
I'd say, the the other one, which is a little bit less direct, but not much so, that emerged to me while reading the book was this idea that you know, as you put it, breaking the situation into ostensibly manageable
chunks is essentially a form of denial. And that's a pretty bracing argument, I think, because I feel like a lot of us realize that to some extent, Like if you ask us very concretely map out how we get from here to saving the planet and its creatures in those little manageable chunks, we admit pretty quickly that it can't be done. And yet it's such a comforting way to see the crisis as something you can just break up into small chunks and tackle sequentially.
Yeah. Well, and it's something that is like broadly and impersonally distributed, that's distributed by a collective logic that we don't have to operate. That would be really nice because then we could just like do our part. Everyone could just do their part and it would get done and we wouldn't have to like figure out what we're actually doing. And that's how capitalism works, right, So that's actually not how solving our problems works. That's how causing our problems works.
Is everyone just goes out, they're doing their little part one day to the next, and we don't have to try and get together and actually think of what we're doing and decide what we're doing. Everyone can just worry about their household size share. That's not going to work. It doesn't work, it's not working. Really, do have to make collective decisions organized to make collective decisions. I don't
see any other way through. So, yeah, I'm glad that came through because I think that's that's the ground for this project. Right. If that weren't true, then we wouldn't need this book. But I think it is true, and so I do think this book. We need ways, auspices, you know, common understandings under which we don't have to necessarily come all together and work in one organization. I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think it's
very realistic. But we need some kind of what I call coherence to these efforts.
Yeah, to I think you put it at one point too, that's the only way to actually tackle it at the scale of what the problem is.
Yeah, and what's the point of tackling it at another scale, right.
Besides making us feel better in the moment.
It doesn't make us feel better because we're not stupid, like we.
Know that that's not going to do it.
Yeah.
You, I don't think you even say trump in or use that the letters in that order in the book, But I have to assume that you wrote it with the possibility of a second Trump term in mind.
Trump gets a couple of mentions, it's four. I'm looking at the index. But yeah, I mean, I try to write all of my books that way. I try not to not be dependent on what's happening that week, month, year. And so even with like my pal Alto book, when it came out, people are like, well, why didn't you write about crypto? There's all this crypto stuff happening right now, Why didn't you write a whole chapter about crypto? And it's like, well, that's not what I'm trying to do here.
This is a like trying to take a historical view on the situation. And so my hope was that this book works no matter who got elected president, and no matter who gets elected president the next time around. Right, that the truths that I try and unfold in this book are larger than control over the White House.
Do you think that the return of at least return to the White House and the government of MAGA types changes any of the arguments you make in the book or shifts the priorities for some of the different strategies.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think there are paths that seem more or less open depending on what the political system looks like and who's in control and the Again, it's like the MAGA rise or the rise of Donald Trump is not an isolated event globally, right, this is part of a global right word shift in reaction. That is absolutely one of the not just possibilities that I lay
out in the book. But one of the challenges, one of the sort of inevitable challenges, is that there be there's a reactionary movement you're actually pro fossil fuel movement that you're going to have to confront as part of any of these strategies. And one of the reasons we
need coherence between them is that we're all vulnerable. But also I don't think that necessarily any one strategy is particularly worse off under Trump because you could look at, you know, market craft and say, well, Donald Trump like destroyed the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, He's like destroyed
Biden's all. Biden's climate work has been destroyed like with the wave of a hand, which then salts the earth for this kind of policy in the future, because capital won't commit to doing these kinds of investments if they know that there's a coin flip that the next president's going to just dismantle it all in one second. Yeah,
that's that's pretty devastating for market craft. But like public power, if he shuts down the Department of Education, then then he's able to shut down whatever like Public Power Agency that Biden should have set up instead, or whatever, like, all of that would have been destroyed as well. Not to mention his attack on organized labor, It's not like he couldn't attack those things from the same position. And
communists as well. One of the major dangers of the communist strategy, as I describe it, is susceptibility to governments. And we've already seen that, right, We've already seen a real qualitative jump in the kind of repression we're getting from the Trump administration focused on the left and like in a way that people should be seriously alarmed about, you know, like first they came for the communists kind of way. And so all three we're all reeling, Like
everyone the entire left is obviously reeling. And anyone who looks at the situation and says like, haha, you know this is good for me and bad for you, I think is wrong.
There is a series of two questions from the z Kin collective. Is that right? Am I saying that right that you cite at the end, And they're obviously somewhat rhetorical, but they are will fossil capital defend itself to the bitter end? And will it draw on the unique resources of the far right to do so? And I feel like those questions are being answered quite clearly in the moment that we're living in.
Yeah, And it's pretty obvious when they put it that way, right, Like, I think that's a good phrasing of the question. Their questions, right, because it's like, well, of course they're going to fight for their own existence, and like, well, okay, they're going to fight in the political sphere. They're going to have to pick an avatar or whatever. Even putting aside to our history of their relationship with the far right, it's like, well,
they're not going to pick the far left. I probably pick the center at this point, Like the far right is their best bet, like by a long shot, for a number of reasons that are described in that book,
which people should definitely check out. So, yeah, that has come to pass, right, And it seems obvious when we think about it, and a clear problem with the sort of climate policy by compromise that even I think the left levels have been pursuing for a little while with the hope that like will give capital and capitalists enough so that this transition will be smooth enough for them that they can agree to it while they also think about all the things that they can lose in a
storm or whatever. And that's that's obviously not happening. That can't be the only solution, right, that can be the only tool we have. And one of the hopefully one of the virtues of the structure of this book is that then we've got a whole at least a small set of different tools strategically, rather than just one perspective that is blocked.
I was actually surprised to find just because of the way the book is structured, it didn't seem like it was leading toward an ABCD this is what we need to do, kind of a solutions type of book, and then the world will be solved and everyone will feel better. But there was a very kind of a very clear,
very concrete proposal that you offer at the end. You write that the left should lead the formation of community disaster councils, and I feel like the value lowercase V value of that suggestion, that proposal feels even clearer given what we've seen over just the last couple of months.
Can you just talk a bit about what those what that means, because I feel like it's the kind of concrete saying that many people are yearning for right now, and it's again lowercase V. Value feels very real right now as something people can do.
Yeah. Absolutely, And I think it's funny. I've had some conversations about this where people I'm talking to have tried to figure out if there's something that they're not understanding about what I'm saying because it seems so simple, and I'm saying, like, no, no, it really is as simple as I'm saying. It's that the institutions and individuals with which we compose our communities needs to collectively study and prepare for the social and climate disasters that we know
are upon us. Right So within wherever you live, you can figure out what extreme weather events are likely to happen, and you can figure out what responses to those are most likely to keep people safe, and we can organize those. And we need to do that not at the level of like necessarily just government disaster response, which now we're
seeing undermined obviously by conservatives. But even if that weren't the case, we need to organize ourselves, not just rely on the state to organize our response to what are social wide problems. This partly because the state is unable to and unwilling to solve that at the level that we need. And I think the left, as I outline, it is in a particular position to lead this kind of structure that society as a whole is in desperate need of. That's something that we all can do, and
something we all can do collaboratively. Whether you are a staffer for a state senator who believes in market craft, or whether you're a shop steward who believes that labor should be directing the entire thing, or you're someone who knows the forests around where you live very well, right, Like, we need the resources of all of those kinds of people as well as the institutions and social networks that they represent, and we need ways for them to cohere,
to work together to respond to these things that we already know are happening. Right, So, disasters are organizing us already, whether they organize us, whether we organize in advance of them, in response to them, or we organize in a disorganized way after they have occurred to us. Disasters are organizing us regardless. And so I think a community, disaster councils and community, as I write and think, can also be like global. Right, if you're climatologists, let's say working the IPCC,
that's a community. It's a community of people working together on this project. And I think local communities need to find ways to work with those international communities, global communities
of experts to inform our efforts as well. But that's not crazy, right, Like the idea that we should have like civil structures that are responding to these like big things that we know are coming and that will upend all of our lives collectively in a similar way, or in a at least a shared way, like let's get
ahead of that. You know, we can't. I don't think we can just rely on There's this line that we can rely on the generosity of other people in terms of crisis, and we should let that sort of like guide us into a new future or whatever. And I've been sympathetic to that line, and I think it's true to a certain degree, but I don't think it's sufficiently
responsive to our current situation. I think we need to like think in advance and plan in advance and organize in advance for these problems that are absolutely knowable.
I think there's something remarkably empowering about that type of work too, at a time when a lot of people feel like things are out of control and that we don't have any agency and we're all just doomscrolling and
watching democracies collapse in the world. Burn gives you a sense of agency empowerment, and then, as you note in the book, it also can provide kind of a use case for this different world that we're hoping to build that if if the Left can lead these you know, this this broader response to these disasters, which is you you note are happening already and are inevitable that they're
going to continue happening. We are, you know, potentially proving that another way of organizing a society works, because you can't, just as we were talking about earlier, you can't just tell people give up the way you've experienced society the only world that any of us have ever known, and
trust us that this other one will be better. That involves huge sacrifice from you and your family, potentially much easier if you have a demonstrable evidence that you can point to that like, this is another way to organize a society, and we showed that it works.
Yeah, well, I think people even if it's risky. I think people are willing to take the risk of the unknown if it's when it's offered to them. At this moment, I feel like that we don't have enough, We don't do enough recruiting on the left in some ways into these conversations and into these efforts, and that can't just be like, oh, we have the right idea or whatever. Necessarily ask to be like, how are we going to solve these collective problems? And how are we going to
solve these collective problems. How are we going to make sure that the people in our community, if there's a flood or a fire, have access to the life saving medication that they need next week. Well, where's the medication held? Well, there are seven pharmacies in our city. There are pharmacists who work at those seven pharmacies, So we can talk
to them. We can talk to those pharmacies. We can organize the pharmacists of our city such that we will have a disaster plan and we'll be ready to enact it. And we're not going to go check with CBS Corporate and follow their plan or whatever. And we're not going to wait for the National Guard to give us a plan because somebody needs their heart pills next week. In fact, we know how many people need their heart pills next week.
We have a list of and we know where they live, and we have pharmacists who are ready to fulfill those needs in the event of a disaster. Like that's not an illusory sense of control, right, that's actual control over your circumstances. Right, You're organizing actual community control over your
circumit stance. It's not right now, but in the event of these disasters that we know are going to ellapse, that are ellapsing, and so I think that's really a place for left wing leadership, our place that we can build the cohesion and use it at the same time. Among this really a pretty diverse swath of people, but people who all share, I think, are a common interest and belief and desire for a better world.
I wanted to come back to this idea because I feel like it has been pervading this conversation and certainly the book as well. That recognizing, acknowledging, accepting, even I guess, embracing in some ways the scale of the problem, the scale of the crisis, can feel to me at least, it feels kind of liberating because you can kind of drop all the artifice of like we're just going to hack our way out of this crisis or something. And once you let that go and you realize, I should say,
once I in my mind let that go. I don't want to speak for anybody else, but except that, yeah, things are potentially going to get really bad. I realized how much work it was taking to create these false, soothing, comforting futures in my mind, and all of a sudden it kind of freeze up all this energy in brain space to think about actually tackling it rather than existing in sort of a comforting world of my own making.
So I'm just wondering how you think about that, you know, the idea that it is painful to see it for what it is, but it's also kind of liberating in a way that all of a sudden it frees you up to get after it, I guess, instead of convincing yourself it's not so bad.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the real benefits of the radical imagination. And so that's a lens that I've used to think about the world since I was a kid. That's how I've always thought. Not always, but you know, since I took hold intentionally of the way I thought about the world. That's about the world. There's some downsides that in terms of communicating with people
who are thinking about the world differently. You know, it can be the part you can get, as I read in the book, you can get really obsessed with the complicity of everyone who doesn't see it the same way
as you get really like isolated and angry. And I spent a lot long time, particularly when I was young, being angry all the time at the whole rest of the world, and so there are perils to thinking that way, but I think there are also real benefits, and that something that I try to share with my readers is the benefits of that sort of radical imagination that when you think about the world historically and in its actual shape,
it is freeing. Absolutely should be freeing. The truth is freeing, right, trying to tell yourself that what is happening isn't happening and constantly recalibrating, right, It's like the frog in the pot being like, well, this isn't this isn't that hot, but it's getting hotter, And so you have to constantly, constantly, constantly tell yourself this is fine, this is fine. Well it's much worse than it was two weeks ago. Well they did overturn row, Like, but this is fine now,
Like this is how it will be fine. That can take up your whole mental space. Right. There are people who spend all of their mental effort constantly reassuring themselves that things are still fine. And the fact that things aren't, the fact that things are very bad, it doesn't mean that you give up. It doesn't mean that then you are relieved from having to do stuff, or that you then can just spend your time wallowing in despair, at
least not for me. Like I said, I think there's a whole spectrum of middle activity where we say, all right, you look at the world and say things are bad, and then you say, all right, what are we going to do about it? Some people talk about that as pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, and that's one of the things that the Marxist tradition has to offer. Having lost a number of times, right, where the people who are like losing adds up to something is the idea,
and I think that's true. I believe that I'm a radical, and I want to share what I think of the benefits of that perspective with as many people as possible in a way that I hope it's not alienating, right, that doesn't make them feel like this person has thinly veiled disgust for me, or is not willing to see things from my perspective, or like thinks I'm an idiot or whatever, because I don't think those things, and I think there is this space for coherence among people with different beliefs.
Last question for you. You cite reference a lot of different books and films and pieces of art in this book, and I'm wondering if there are any pieces of art or content that are giving you or bringing you clarity or comfort in this current moment.
Ooh, that's a really good question. Let me pull up the answer. It's a series that the Streamer movie has been doing called Self Portrait as a Coffee Pot by the South African artist William Kentridge. And it's a nine part video series. Yeah, a nine part visual series in the studio of this artist, William Kentridge. It's done was filmed during the most intense lockdown periods of COVID. Amazing. I mean, he's an amazing artist in general, but it's an amazing view of his mind, of his techniques, but
also his perspective on history. And he does this great thing where he doubles himself and so he's constantly talking back and forth with himself. There are two of him, and they create this amazing dialectic between a lot of like, you know, different positions. Right now, because there are a lot of contradictory truths antonomies, I guess that we have to hold in this historical moment, and one of the ways he does that is by splitting himself and arguing
with himself. Fantastic, fantastic series. Ultimately, I think hopeful in the useful ways and despairing in the useful ways that you can be hopeful sparing at the same time, if you're dialectical enough, you can be hopeful and de sparing at the same time. And that's definitely a piece that really lately captured it for me. It's fantastic. Strongly, I beseech readers to go check that out.
Amazing. I feel like in this moment in particular, being hopeful and despairing in useful ways is a pretty worthy aspiration for all of us.
I think so. I think people are trying to trying to figure that stuff out. It's hard, it's a hard environment in which to think. And I don't fault anyone who feels completely overwhelmed by even just the task of thinking critically in this moment. Oh, we got to do it. I don't think that there's no other choice.
Well, congratulations on the book, Malcolm, and thanks so much for this conversation.
Yeah, thanks so much for reading it. And this has been really great.
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