What’s Left

Climate change is the crisis that touches everything, and its scale can leave people feeling helpless, particularly when corporations work to block the changes that might save the planet because they threaten profits. Greta Thunberg has said that despite clear science and real devastation, the adults in charge are still offering little more than empty talk. Malcolm Harris asks what has to change, and how.

In What's Left, Harris argues that humans caused this crisis and can still prevent a climate catastrophe, but only through collective political action. He lays out the three strategies with any chance of working, which he calls progressive, socialist and revolutionary, and shows that none of them can succeed alone.

His answer is to combine them into one pathway, a meta-strategy that lets people move forward together instead of fighting over solutions while the planet burns. Harris writes as a historian and activist, tracing how we got here as well as where we might go next.