It’s somewhat ironic that when the socialist Left was most powerful, everyone was at each other’s throats. As Lars Lih recounts, Lenin’s strategic gauntlet, What is to be Done, came out of a context in which he was at constant polemical war with another social democratic tendency represented by the journal Rabocheye Delo (“The Workers’ Cause”). When the Social Democratic Party of Germany was amassing a huge, popular base among the working class, there was open warfare on strategy between the likes of Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxembourg, among many others. And, even after the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Lenin did not refrain from attacks on certain factions like his 1920 polemic, “‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder.”

In many ways, these Marxists were continuing a tradition started by the founder, who with Engels declared, “Our task is that of ruthless criticism, and much more against ostensible friends than against open enemies; and in maintaining this our position we gladly forego cheap democratic popularity.” Marx was also known for his withering attacks on the likes of other socialist anarchists like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. In 1860, during perhaps the most productive era of his life, Marx took a year off to refute the attacks of one Karl Vogt, confessing that “clever men… [would be] completely unable to grasp how I could squander my time on refuting such infantile nonsense.”

This is all to say that the early years of the socialist Left were defined by open and hostile debate—particularly on questions of strategy—rooted in the conviction that some viewpoints were right and others hopelessly wrong. History and class struggle were the proving grounds of such ideological battles.

But as working-class power was crushed by neoliberalism beginning in the 1970s, there has been a shift on the Left. Instead of “ruthless criticism” and inter-factional debate, a new common sense has emerged that, actually, the Left is on the whole good and noble, and that the only real problem is that it’s too scattered and fragmented. In the 1960s, in contrast to the “old” social movements centered on labor and working-class politics, “new” social movements rose to confront a multiplicity of social ills, from war and imperialism to racism, sexism, and environmental degradation. Each of these contained a virtuous cause, but by themselves, they were too weak to attack something as large as capitalism itself. The solution was to build a coalitional politics—often called a “movement of movements”—that could combine to build sufficient strength to address the root causes of each movement’s pet problem.

Perhaps the apogee of this form of left politics was the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, including a smorgasbord of unions, environmentalists, feminists, farmer organizations, and more—leaving many commentators to wonder what unified their disparate causes. The attempt to fold all of them together into something called an “anti-globalization movement” did not seem to help matters, particularly among those still committed to a socialist internationalism.

The last great iteration of this trend was Occupy Wall Street, where each and every anti-establishment ideological camp was welcome: from anarchists to hard money Ron Paulites. In stark contrast to the party-based and organizationally grounded debates of the Second International, Occupy was famously defined by a vague commitment to “consensus” formation, which ultimately led to Jo Freeman’s “Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Consensus, of course, tended to reward the most radical-sounding posturing in the square.

One of the radicals who made his name in the Occupy movement is Malcolm Harris, whose new book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through Planetary Crisis, is a product of this ecumenical, hyperradical, but deeply weak and marginal Left of the last half-century. The book is a spin on the aforementioned coalitional politics, wherein the base conviction is that the Left is good, and that it would win if only it could get together. Instead of a “movement of movements,” Harris calls for a “strategy of strategies,” with a focus on three: what he calls marketcraft, public power, and communism (more on these below).

While Harris evinces some open-mindedness and flexibility in his coverage of his three chosen strategies, the book overall is evidence of the stubborn narrowness of current left discourse, as described in these pages as a “self-defeating ideological extremism, which paradoxically suit[s] the professional ‘radicals’ in the media, the academy, the arts, and the activist NGOs.” The book’s title is instructive in that, apart from the clear double meaning, the lack of question mark (what’s left?) demonstrates that the task of the modern leftist is not to debate and question what is left, but to dictate and curate the “range of opinions” that are allowed in its shrinking milieus. In contrast to the old Left characterized by organizational strength and polemical debate, in the Left today ideas are “put forth and debated not as commitments in a platform but as fodder for internet debate,” making it appear “both unserious and irresponsible.”

While this book was clearly written as an attempt to build some form of “Left Unity” in the waning days of the Biden Administration, its appearance in the second Trump term only further shows that if this Left isn’t more open to self-reflection and internal self-criticism, the new Right is very happy to remake the world in the wake of neoliberalism’s ashes (and our collective weakness).

Which Way for the Left?

To his credit, Harris diagnoses the “planetary crisis” reasonably well. He begins with an anecdote from a financial analyst for Shell, who had the gall to confidently say “we don’t plan to lose money” in the face of a crisis caused by their primary product, oil. The example allows Harris to explain the particular psychosis of a capitalist class that is hell-bent on profiting off sunk assets, even if it means disastrous warming for the planet. He calls this sociopathic force “Value” with a capital V. When Value shapes the global “social metabolism” (a bit of jargon he takes from Marx by way of the Hungarian Marxist István Mészáros), our planetary fate appears sealed for collective destruction. So, the overarching question of the book is: what force on the Left could stop the power of Value?

What follows is a nice three-part structure in which Harris lays out the three left strategies to tackle the planetary crisis. Oddly, he claims himself an impartial and objective presenter of these strategies, writing, “My goal with this book is not to convince readers that one is better than the others or that they should convert. I am admittedly a partisan of one strategy, but if I did my job well, it won’t be too obvious which one.” Well, for this reader, it is painfully obvious which one he favors (folks, it’s communism). But in the interest of objectivity, each strategy’s chapter contains two parts—the first makes the case for the strategy, and the second lays out its problems and challenges.

The first strategy is what he calls “marketcraft” (he takes the term from Steven Vogel, but just after What’s Left came out, a new manifesto for the approach was published by Chris Hughes). For Harris, this is the approach of “the liberal establishment” that claims we can come together as a “rule-making polity that allows markets to function in the collective interest and produce a universal rise in the tide of human well-being.” In short, this is the strategy of “Bidenomics”—the idea that through smart industrial policy design (tax credits with rules meant to promote just outcomes like prevailing wages or investment in “disadvantaged communities”), the state can marshal the private sector to invest in the right “green” technologies. Cleverly, Harris makes fun of this strategy by comparing it to what Barbara and Karen Fields call “racecraft,” where race becomes constructed as a force so powerful that it obtains almost supernatural causal powers over society. In much the same way, this strategy tends to treat markets as a quasi-mystical force beyond our social control. 

Bidenomics never dictated investment or consumer decisions but only hoped its nudges would be enough for markets to deliver. The problems for the marketcraft strategy, according to Harris, include its often nationalist approach to what are global problems (using tariffs to promote domestic “green” industry) and a focus on what he calls the “goddamn cars”—the promotion of electric vehicles as a particularly materially-intensive answer to maintain America’s spatially extensive form of decentralized suburban development. So much for strategy #1.

The second strategy is somewhat confusingly called “public power.” To be sure, Harris does discuss the public ownership of electricity systems as a model for this strategy. He is particularly enamored with the potential for entities like the Tennessee Valley Authority to develop pumped storage hydro facilities (as an aside, Harris needlessly denigrates actually-existing public power by claiming TVA “went corporate” in the 1980s). But, as the chapter unfolds, it is clear that Harris means public power in the broader sense of public control over the economy at large. He discusses the importance of planning and “instead of production for production’s sake, production for our use.” He also suggests that this strategy entails the “dispossession of capitalists” or, as Marx would say, the expropriation of the expropriators. Clearly, the agent of public power is the working class. As Harris puts it, “organized labor is both the subject and object of the public-power strategy. The working class builds public power, and public power builds the working-class.”

At this point in the book, I wondered: isn’t this the fight for socialism—and particularly a Marxist vision of socialism in which the proletariat seizes the means of production from capital and subjects production to democratic planning? If so, then, what in the hell is communism?

Communism of a New Type

Harris begins his discussion of the third strategy, communism, by acknowledging that it is “weighed down by a lot of history,” but curiously he says almost nothing about the actually-existing political movement “communism” under which one-third of humanity lived for a good chunk of the twentieth century. Indeed, the real communist movement only comes up when Harris gets to the “drawbacks” section—namely, that communists routinely get murdered by capitalist states with support from US imperialist forces.

Harris’s communism is altogether different from that of the USSR or China. He defines it as “a strategy in which the planet’s exploited people abolish the capital 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 key word in this definition, and to the modern Left, is abolition. Only a few pages later, Harris equates communism with the abolition of the family. Later in the chapter, he cites favorably what he calls “movement luminary Mariame Kaba” for her op-ed in the New York Times, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” Most of what falls under the umbrella of contemporary abolitionism is included, and that of course includes the abolition of capitalism. In fact, when Harris covers the drawbacks to the “public power” strategy rooted in the organized working class, he disparages unions for spending too much time “building power to bargain within capitalism [rather] than on building the power to abolish capitalism.”

After abolition, what do communists, according to Harris, imagine in its place? In contrast to the rapid industrialization plans of previous communists, he proposes, “[c]ommunists want to restore people’s ability to reproduce themselves via direct metabolic connection with their particular environment, the land.” To his credit, Harris does warn of the dangers of localism and affirms the movement must be rooted at the level of the species, claiming the “best thing about the long twentieth century” was the “emergence of a true world society.” He also is at pains to insist his version of communism is not a nostalgic call for a return to the past, but rather to use the “past as a foundation as people make a new world.” 

Nevertheless, this is very different from a Marxist communism, which is an unabashedly progressive vision of the future premised on the forced separation of the mass of producers from a “direct metabolic connection” with the land (this is what “proletarianization” is all about). Marx insisted that such a small-scale community-level form of production would be replaced by a socialized form of production able to provision humanity as a whole. That would necessarily entail that most humans rely on food, energy, and other materials not produced from “their particular environment” and rather rely upon hyper-efficient, large-scale industrial production necessary to provide free time for all. Unlike capitalism, where such necessities are provisioned via anarchic markets, Marx’s vision of socialized production meant a planetary-scale form of democratic planning for the entire species.

Like many among the professional-class Left (who don’t tend to do much manual labor, let alone back-breaking farm work), Harris’s vision of communism includes a positive appraisal of “agroecology,” a “low tech” sustainable mode of farming. Quite apart from its ecological benefits—which can be debated—advocates, including Harris, almost never bring up that it is more labor-intensive (among other concerns) and will entail millions more laborers being pulled into agricultural work. While advocates tend to spin this as a good thing (rural jobs!), the strategic question remains: how will you recruit these millions into a political program that Leigh Phillips jokingly refers to as “drudgery for all”?

Rather than the proletariat, the agent of Harris’s communism is much more indigenous and peasant communities. Drawing from the work of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, he speaks of the “Indigenization of Marxism.” Harris borders on an essentialist politics that assumes indigenous “communities” are (a) monolithic groups and (b) inherently noble, ecological, and kind toward the earth (practicing what Harris calls “earthcare”). This kind of romantic obsession with indigenous peoples is rife in the radical professional-class ideology Harris swims in. In my milieu, the University, jobs and academic programs in “indigenous studies” have exploded in recent years. 

While I would certainly not deny we can learn valuable ecological lessons from some specific indigenous practices of ecological stewardship, the political strategic question at the core of the book is left hanging: what is the political advantage in a strategy that centers groups which—in Harris’s admission—comprise 5-10 percent of the global population? How does this version of communism appeal to the roughly three quarters of humanity that are not still attached to land-based livelihoods, or, in Harris’s wistful terms, “the most oppressed, least alienated people in the capitalist world” (and by “alienated” he mostly means alienated from the land).

Harris’s communism is not only a professional-class exoticization of land-based peoples, but also celebrates people closer to his own milieu: namely, anarchists. Harris’s preferred vanguard is “small groups of radicals”: squatters who occupy abandoned hotels and housing, tree sitters who try to “Stop Cop City” outside Atlanta, activists who engage in property destruction, and the select Black Lives Matter activists who razed the Minneapolis police station. In his view, being a communist means engaging in direct action (and generally fucking shit up), though the historic role of Leninist party organization guiding action is notably absent. Harris concedes that many urban land occupations “haven’t been nearly as successful as their rural inspirations,” but temporarily relaxing the book’s focus on strategy, he says, “that hasn’t stopped communists from trying.”

The coalitional result of this strategy appears to be a decidedly minoritarian politics rooted in an alliance between urban anarchists and indigenous and peasant communities. What’s “left” is basically most of humanity, and, indeed, the traditional agent of communism, the working class.

The book ends with Harris’s main concrete policy proposal (which echoes what others have called “disaster communism”): community disaster councils where local communities do mutual aid, food and medical provision in the wake of increasing climate disaster. One might wonder if this is a convenient substitute for the abandonment of the state as the more traditional democratic structure to provide aid when society breaks down (just this summer, FEMA, apparently, simply did not answer calls from flood victims on the Guadalupe River in Texas). Low-resourced and uneven community-based “mutual aid” is, you could say, “what’s left” after decades of right-wing austerity and attacks on the public sector.

What’s the Opposite of Mass Politics?

On the surface, What’s Left is an ecumenical “big tent” strategy for the Left to regain power, but underneath this veneer are loads of ideas that ordinary people would likely find bizarre, if not repulsive. Harris promotes a proposal to turn a golf course into a “public sex forest” that its advocates claim would solve an urgent social problem: “thousands of perverts have no good place to fuck.” He champions a rural Senegalese community concerned about their dependence upon commodified bouillon cubes who made a local alternative “sum pak” made from locust beans, shrimp and, for a time, sand (the organization funding such initiatives is a Western NGO drawing significant funding from the Canadian Government). He implies at one point that he supported the “fully successful assassination of [former Prime Minister] Shinzo Abe” in Japan in 2022. I could go on. The point is that, in promoting such wild ideas, Harris seems disinterested in what it would take to build an actual left mass politics that appeals to those not already inside the left tent.

This allergy to mass politics is, as usual, rooted in a disdain for ordinary working-class Americans. Indeed, it is these workers who, according to Harris, are the primary obstacle to the “public power” strategy. The problem with them is they just want too much. On one page he speculates about the potentially problematic desires of what he later calls “coddled Americans”: “Maybe they do not like taking the bus and prefer driving their cars…. They can’t help but appreciate the low prices Americans pay for food, courtesy of an unequal global division of labor and extractive farming techniques.”

According to Harris and many on the Western Left today, Global North workers’ standard of living comes directly at the expense of poor workers abroad. Harris bluntly explains, “…if workers in the core act like they have something to protect in the current system, it’s probably because they do.” The image of privileged workers protecting their global position seems out of step with daily headlines of skyrocketing wealth flowing to the top and a cost-of-living crisis and economic insecurity for the majority of Americans. Rather than pitting workers against each other, it makes more sense to see all workers as losing a “global class war” with capital.

Unionized workers in particular, says Harris, might be too eager for their own exploitation. The problem is what he calls, following the late academic Joshua Clover, “the affirmation trap.” As Clover explains, this deadlock occurs when “labor is locked into a position of affirming its own exploitation under the guise of survival.” Fossil fuel workers who want to keep their jobs, unions that prioritize good contracts with capitalist employers, and workers who might rely on car transport are all positioned as the main barriers to public power. But, in the context of capitalist austerity, with the evisceration of the social safety net, it’s not like there are a lot of good options for workers who lose their livelihood. It was union leaders like Tony Mazzocchi who argued that only the labor movement has the strength to put into place actual protections for workers who bear the brunt of environmental progress (what became known as a “just transition”).

Any socialist labor organizer will tell you that union leadership and bureaucracy can indeed be a barrier to the kind of class struggle unionism we need to revive. But Harris’s problem with labor is different in that he impugns them for not adopting what is often the insane agenda of today’s environmentalists, including adopting labor-intensive agroecology, intermittent electricity grids fully powered by solar and wind, and locally-made bouillon cubes. Harris, for example, endorses communist Jasper Bernes’s vision of revolution that entails “a rapid decrease in energy use for those in the industrialized Global North, no more cement, very little steel, almost no air travel…” No cement? At all? Forget public power or communism: who precisely is going to get on board for any project where this is the aim? As I’ve argued here before, it is the actual workers in the building trades that often have more realistic and practical ideas about decarbonization than the radicals on the Left.

It is also telling what Harris considers not debatable. Early in the book he claims he will not even consider what he calls “naive techno-optimism” in addressing a planetary crisis very much caused by the social relationship between society and technology. Consequently, Harris has very little to say about how a socialist Left should approach key questions of technological innovation. Near the end, he tries to lay out the “points of coherence" that everyone in his broad left tent should accept, and starts with “the police are the enemies of the people.” While this might gain you traction in ACAB Twitter, this is certainly not the basis for a big tent. It is not coincidental that Zohran Mamdani disavowed his previous claims to “defund the police” on his path to victory in the mayoral election in America’s largest city. 

In sum, Harris’s book is the outcome of a long process in which the Left has celebrated its varied forms of “resistance,” but had no clear path to power. For all the polemical debate, the socialists of earlier days at least agreed that power came from working-class organization and politics. By the 1970s, that conviction was abandoned by the Left just at the moment capital got better organized to crush the labor and workers movement. Since then, the Left keeps hoping that its scattered parts can somehow unite to once again build a powerful Left. But the conviction underlying this is that the Left’s scattered parts are inherently good in themselves. 

What’s missing is any confrontation with the fact that the Left’s marginality might be of its own making, in that it consistently adopts positions at odds with the popular masses. The Left does not merely need to combine its disparate strategies, or unite its various movements; it requires a wholesale strategic reevaluation.

Matt Huber is a professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University. He is the author of Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet.