One day, I woke up with this concept of oil being tied up in our lives in ways that we don't talk about. It’s sort of a value-theoretical approach to climate change and the climate crisis. Something that's impersonal and goes to the root of our entire social metabolic structure.

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu welcomes Malcolm Harris back to the show. Previously, he talked with us about his mammoth study, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. This time, we are looking not at a history of Capitalism and the World, but our possible futures under the threat of catastrophic climate change. We talk about not only failed policies, but failed perspectives on society, politics, and culture, and focus on a deadly form of Value that has led us to the abyss precisely because it has emanated from a basic rift between humans and the world. It is a rift that Capital has always both fed and exploited, but will end up exhausting a finite resource—the Planet. We talk about what is needed to heal this, what we are up against, and his latest book, What's Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis.

Malcolm Harris is the author of the national bestseller Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials; and Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History. He was born in Santa Cruz, CA and graduated from the University of Maryland.

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

Malcolm, when you were last on, we talked about your book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. So what led you to move from being a historian of capitalism in the world to most likely examining its mutual demise and ways to avoid it? What brought you into this subject?  

MALCOLM HARRIS

Well, for as long as I've been writing, my family, friends, and loved ones have prodded me to write something about what we are supposed to do now, and that has been a response to everything I have ever published.  Oh, that's really interesting. Why don't you write something about what we are supposed to do now politically, like in the context of global warming or the planetary crisis situation? And I always say no because it's a tough thing to write about and figure out a good angle on it. It's hard to address a book to the present in general.

You try to find a specific angle, and then one day, I woke up with this concept of oil being tied up in our lives in ways that we don't talk about. It’s sort of a value-theoretical approach to climate change and the climate crisis. Something that's impersonal and goes to the root of our entire social metabolic structure.

Then I decided I had to write that. That was probably the most useful thing I could do with my time if I could convince people to think about those issues from that perspective. I think it follows from the last book in many ways, although not as you say professionally, which is one of the lucky things about my job as a writer in the generic sense is I get to pick and choose what professional domains my work falls under.

PALUMBO-LIU

It's a hard topic. When you go through these various tactical strategies, rubrics if you will, they each seem alluring, and you think that might work. Then you very usefully and devastatingly undercut it. You first address them and then show why they're not working. Would you mind going through them quickly, or as quickly as you're comfortable doing? In the marketplace, people's power, communism—what are their key characteristics in addressing climate change, and what do you find deficient in them?  

HARRIS

Yeah, so those are the three strategies from the title: market craft, public power, and communism. Each of those three strategies gets a chapter, and each chapter has eight sections.

The first five sections are about its advantages, its strengths as a strategy. The final three are about drawbacks, contradictions, or oversights in the strategy—any number of practical drawbacks. That was a useful intellectual exercise for me.

It made me really inhabit each of these strategies and try to think like a partisan of each. Market craft is about using the tools of the market to design a sort of playing field for private actors that results in the outcomes we want, specifically in this case, decarbonization.

So it's not about fitting our policies to the market; it's about fitting the market itself to the outcomes we want as a society. Public power is about seeking those outcomes directly under the auspices of the state, socialization of production, and the power of the public through organized labor.

But then I also talk about the public control of the electrical grid and power systems. So that's public power. Communism involves shattering the value principle and reorganizing society along the lines of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs," with the acknowledgment that we have a strong, overriding collective need for the decarbonization of the atmosphere and the redesigning of our production system and our general social metabolism to avoid climate crisis.  

So that's the fast and dirty explanation of those three strategies. Again, I think there's, as you say, a lot of value in each of them. That's part of the intellectual exercise of this book for me. I come away with the conclusion that it's not about searching for the right key for a lock. One of these strategies doesn't have all the answers; it's about how we fit them together.  

PALUMBO-LIU

You used that great anecdote from Lorraine Hansberry about what was going to bring about black liberation, and she comes up with a similar kind of answer. It was interesting and appropriate for this particular topic that I had folks on from Scientist Rebellion.

We were talking about tactics, and at that time, Michael Mann had come out saying we can't throw soup at priceless oil paintings. That's going to turn off so many people. The people at Scientists Rebellion said, no, the public is not a monolith, and different people react differently to different things. We can't afford to simplify the idea that there's a magic bullet.  

Your book does a really good job of showing how things might come together in different ways. Here’s where I think we may get to the idea of value because when I was reading the book and you talk about capitalism, I kept thinking there’s something above capitalism almost—just an inherent sense of what we need in life, right?  

The way in which the market and capitalism have come to naturalize certain expectations about what we deserve to have. When I had Kohei Saito on, he said it’s really about democratizing the idea of value and having value be something arrived at through a process that’s not permanent. The process, in fact, may be more important than the arrival at the value.  

Could you talk a little bit about your sense of value as it informs this book?  

HARRIS

Yeah. I think you see a sort of struggle between value (capital V) and values, which is the social prerogative to decide how to balance competing needs and wants and to use scarce resources, time, and energy in socially useful ways.  

One of the things capitalism does is ally the difference between those two; they say capital V value stands in for all values. It's the structure that allows us to reveal our preferences, seek them out, and exercise them. It’s only through this big V value system that we can all seek our individual ideas of value.  

However, climate change is a really good example of how that fails to work because although we all value, to a certain degree, a decarbonized climate, that’s not something we can seek as individuals. It’s not something we can purchase as individuals. Capital's attempt to sell it to us that way, or to solve the problem that way, is comical.  

Right? You can buy a decarbonized box of pasta or something. The implication is that if enough people decide to buy decarbonized products because they value decarbonization highly enough, then the market will reveal their preference for it. But that's completely false; we see that it's totally wrong.  

The impersonal pursuit of capital V value militates against our ability to consciously solve these problems, especially the problem of climate collapse.  

PALUMBO-LIU

Yeah, and it’s sold to us as the price of freedom. When I had Naomi on, she talked a lot about the idea of a free market and how capitalism tells us that we will all be free to arrive at the right answer together if the right answer looks like saving the planet. But if not, we'd rather have our freedom as we die than gamble on something as crazy as a collective decision like this.  

I'm thinking about the Mamdani victory and the way he's immediately labeled as a communist or socialist. Why is this such a potent weapon against acting in common values? This idea that we're giving up something precious that our fathers fought for or something like that.  

HARRIS

Yeah, well, we will see how potent it ends up being. If we're looking at New York, we saw the same rhetoric used against congestion pricing. When we look at climate, there's an attempt to address it, which is barely a climate policy; the goal is to get fewer people driving, even if it’s just a traffic management policy.  

The idea is to raise the cost of driving into Manhattan during certain periods to alleviate traffic congestion and reduce the number of cars on the road. People hated it. They barely scraped that law through after spending so long fighting for it. It constantly seemed like it was going to fail.  

The way that a lot of pro-public transport urbanist policies are really on a knife-edge regarding public support is staggering. So, it was just on the edge, and then they implemented it, and it turned out it works really well. It’s exactly how it was supposed to work.  

There are fewer cars on the road, and for the people who are driving, it’s worth it. They are happy to pay the congestion pricing because they get to their destination faster. Your time as a plumber stuck in traffic for an appointment in Manhattan is worth way more than the cost of the congestion charge.  

For everyone else, taking public transit is easier than it would’ve been otherwise. Have they surrendered some freedom in that? They have traded some convenience. People who would have driven did not. But this is more my next project than a part of this project, so I’m thinking more about it, which is about convenience.  

What was the more convenient, more free situation that took them longer? What were they really valuing? It may have been the time alone in the car listening to the radio or perhaps the experience of control, even if that control is just being stuck in a traffic jam.  

It’s not the actuality of control, which would involve getting to the destination faster, right? In theory. But the experience of control over oneself and one’s space that comes with driving a car, I think you are right. That's a major obstacle—not just in transportation, but also when it comes to food, entertainment, and community.  

This idea of convenience and control as you move through time and space is a much bigger obstacle than I realized when I started this project. That’s why I’m focusing on it in my next project.

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Speaking Out of Place, which carries on the spirit of Palumbo-Liu’s book of the same title, argues against the notion that we are voiceless and powerless, and that we need politicians and pundits and experts to speak for us.

Judith Butler on Speaking Out of Place:

“In this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times.  This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”

David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of literary criticism and theory, culture and society, race, ethnicity and indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. His books include The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, and Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Truthout, and other venues.
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
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