‘Palo Alto’ writer turns to climate-change crisis in his new book (2025)

Even today — or, rather, especially today — pointed critiques of capitalism carry a conspicuous taboo in the most proudly capitalist nation in the world. Which is why the new prominence of journalist and critic Malcolm Harris feels a bit transgressive. In 2023, his book “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World” emerged as the book for those looking for a vigorous and progressive vision of Silicon Valley and its outsized influence on American economic life.

Two years later, Harris is out with his follow-up, “What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis” (Little, Brown). He visits Bookshop Santa Cruz on Thursday to introduce the new book, which presents three possible paths forward out of the planet’s climate-change reckoning. Those paths, as he calls them, are “Marketcraft,” “Public Power” and, sure to trigger the enforcers of capitalism, “Communism.”

(Side note: In his previous book, Harris chose to present his analysis of Silicon Valley’s evils through a history of his hometown, Palo Alto. He was actually born in Santa Cruz, but moved away with his parents when he was still an infant.)

Harris said that his new book is designed to be a long view of a possible political or economic reaction to the climate-change crisis, important to point out after the recent coming to power of almost certainly the most hostile-to-climate-change-action administration in American history.

Of the three paths he presents, “Marketcraft” is the use of market forces with the goal of creating a new economy that doesn’t derive from fossil fuels; “Public Power” refers to the public ownership of utility companies. Of that loaded term “communism,” he writes, “[it’s] the best term I could find to describe a strategy in which the planet’s exploited people abolish capital’s 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.”

In a phone interview, Harris said that the three options he writes about do not constitute a zero-sum choice: “To me, it’s more like a Venn diagram, shaped with the three circles. There’s definitely overlapping projects between all of them.”

In the broad sweep of change, he said, it might not appear that such approaches could lead to an effective response to climate change. “If we look back at moments of great change and political crisis in the past, and you look at what progressive movements were doing, they’re never fully coherent,” he said. “They have different strategies and they don’t even necessarily see themselves as on the same team. But there is a coherent movement that they’re all part of, even if they are not always collaborating or even fighting with each other.”

In the midst of the second Trump administration, it might seem a distant star to imagine a coordinated and global movement to address climate change, but Harris offers ideas on how such a thing can be seeded on the local level. One such idea he calls “Disaster Councils,” community-based initiatives that establish new protocols and priorities to respond to specific natural disasters, to apply methods to assist people in crisis to create mini models of how society might work that are built on progressive values.

It’s all an effort, he said, to provide sight lines and inspire imagination to look outside a doctrinaire capitalist system for a better future.

“My hope is to give people the lens to see how it’s already happening all around them,” he said. “This book is about bringing forward something that readers already understand on some level, but they don’t necessarily have the lens to see it clearly.”

Malcolm Harris comes to Bookshop Santa Cruz on Thursday, April 24. The free event begins at 7 p.m.

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