Fourth Reich Archaeology - What's Next? w/ Malcolm Harris

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

Author and critic Malcolm Harris joins Don for a forward-looking, optimistic discussion on communism, the possibilities for leftist organizing in our fascist hellscape (including concrete steps YOU can take to contribute to the struggle), the buildup to war in Iran, and much more. If you’re not already familiar with Malcolm’s work, you should be. He is the author of four books including 2023’s Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, and this year’s What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis. He has also emerged as a leading critic of the “Abundance” rebranding of neoliberal technocracy, publishing a thoughtful review at the Baffler (https://thebaffler.com/latest/whats-the-matter-with-abundance-harris). In What’s Left, Malcolm proposes that the left must pursue a variety of strategic approaches to confronting the climate crisis and the root causes of extractive capitalism and militarism that have fueled the fires burning our world. We discuss how we might make these strategies “fit together like puzzle pieces” in harmony, with the goal of ecological survival and planetary justice, as well as some of the biggest obstacles in the way. We hope you enjoy, and that we’ll have a chance to catch up with Malcolm down the line to check in on how things go from here.As a treat, a never-heard original song from Don (aka Angleton’s Orchids) for the outro.Meanwhile, you can get Malcolm’s books at your local bookstore or library, follow him on Twitter @BigMeanInternet, on Tik Tok @MalcolmHarrisClips, or on the scene in Philadelphia - check philacal.com for events!Follow us on Twitter & Insta @fourthreichpod, email [e-mail], and sign up for our Patreon if you’re willing and able at patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology. NO WAR WITH IRAN! END THE GENOCIDE NOW!!

Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of the science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America.

America. Ever, I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. He has a mom. He knows so long as a guy, afraid of we'd never be secure.

It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? Not what the CIA. Now, he has a problem.

This is coming. Bigbed in Fort Reich is coming. Archaeology. Archaeology. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Welcome back to our longtime listeners and welcome to our first time listeners. We're so glad to have you here with us today. We are so grateful for all of the positive feedback we've been getting about this project and just want to say thank you very much to every single one of you who has been tuning in, who has been liking the pod, who has been subscribing to the pod, who has been subscribing to the pod. A special shout out to the folks who have been talking about the pod in real life.

We really do appreciate it when we hear that our listeners are taking the word to the streets because we do think now more than ever the world needs to know just how it is we ended up in this late capitalist hellscape that we find ourselves. So at your next beer, wine, or cocktail party, or ice cream social, if it were, or don't be afraid to tell your loved ones and those in your close circle about this brand new anti-fascist, anti-capitalist program that you are just finding so interesting. Now, I also just want to take a moment of your time and ask once again, if you are able to do so, please do, donate.

to our cause on patreon.com slash fourth rake archaeology. It will keep our engines running. You know, we strive to be completely ad-free, completely free of special interests and corporate messaging. We'd like to be completely listener supported and we appreciate any amount that you could give to keep us going. But please, only contribute. you, if you can, what you can. Otherwise, we absolutely are just so grateful to have you here with us listening and enjoying the program that we put together. This week, we are yet again stepping away from our ongoing series within a series about that great coup in Dallas. Of course, I'm talking about the assassination of John F. Kennedy and subsequent cover-up. That series,

we are calling the Warren Commission decided, and we're stepping away from it for good reason. We are so excited because this week we have with us author Malcolm Harris. Malcolm is a writer and critic who, shall I say, propheses with his pen. I think it's fair to say that his eyes are indeed wide as they are deep into the goings-on of today with a more historical point of view. And I think it's more than fair to say that he, as a result, more than most, understands that the chance won't come again and that the wheels still in spin. Malcolm is the author of four books, kids these days, the making of millennials.

Shit's fucked up and bullshit. Palo Alto, and the latest one which is called What's Left, Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis. He has published articles in many different outlets, including a very incisive review of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's pulp nonfiction, abundance. Malcolm's critique was published in the best. Baffler, and you can find it online, and I'm sure we'll put a link in today's episode description.

Without further ado, I am going to turn it over to Don, who had the opportunity to sit down with Malcolm, well, just earlier today. Malcolm, thanks very much for joining us here on Fourth Reich Archaeology. Thanks for having me, guys. All right. So situating Malcolm's work in the Fourth Reich archaeology landscape, we often talk about digging down to examine how we got into this current fascist hellscape that we inhabit, with the ultimate goal of digging our way out.

And I think this paradigm really aptly describes the interplay between Malcolm's latest two books. So Palo Alto is a work of historical excavation, picks a dig site, the eponymous Bay Area City of Malcolm's upbringing, and through that excavation, it tells us a great deal about the contemporary world. And his latest book, What's Left, is Forward Looking, Considering Three Different Approaches to Digging Our Way Out. And I've read both of these books and look forward to reading the others as well. and I strongly recommend them to all of our listeners.

They resonate very deeply with what we're trying to do through this project, and I'm confident that anyone listening will enjoy Malcolm's work. Now, before we dig into the substance of our discussion, I wanted to ask you, Malcolm, about your personal journey politically and professionally. Like Dick and myself, you grew up in post-Cold War America, at a time and place where it was conventional wisdom that communism is the root of all evil, the expression of all evil, murdered hundreds of millions of people, and all that bullshit. And moreover, that communism lost the Cold War.

So how did you come around to proudly identifying as a communist? How did I become a communist? It's a great question. I mean, it wasn't an active, youthful rebellion. And I'll tell you that, because as a kid, I was very much a left liberal, social democrat. You know, we didn't, democratic socialists didn't have a big presence at the time. But I was like, you know, listening to Cornell West lectures and was really into politicians like Russ Feingold, Paul Wellstone, before he was assassinated, stuff like that. And, but part of the expression of that politics was anti-war.

I mean, that's how I, like, acted out a lot of my politics was through the anti-war movement. And the anti-war movement was led by people who were much further to the left, mostly anarchists and Marxists and other, like, anti-capitalist folks. And so I ended up organizing a lot, spending a lot of time with those kind of leftists. And that's how I spent my, like, political life growing up around these people. But I wasn't, I was really invested in having. some links to the system, having some links to the Democratic Party, to liberalism, to democracy, small D, and all this stuff. And it wasn't until the 2008 financial crisis that I would say I really, like, radicalized and said, you know, this isn't a system that I want to save or

protect or improve. This is a system I want to overthrow and get through to the other side. and I understand my politics that way now. And it still took me then some more years to embrace the label communist, which I think had to do with the changing of the left wing and the post-occupy situation where people were looking for other forms of organization and thinking past anarchism or post-leftism into a sort of re-interrogation of the communist tradition.

and that's where I found myself. And I think it's a good place to be. I'm happy to be a communist, proud to be a communist, as you said. Yeah, it's remarkably similar to my own journey as well. The Obama, you know, placing hopes in the Obama campaign in 08 and then waking up to the deception of it all thereafter was that kind of wake-up call to, It's funny.

I was, I, I volunteered on the 08 campaign, but I volunteered for John Edwards. So I was like, very, such a, like, committed social Democrat or whatever that I was, like, not swept up in the Obama enthusiasm. I was like, John Edwards is the labor candidate. You know, that's how, so I went to, like, Iowa to go knock doors and talk to people about John Edwards for the 2008 campaign. So. Amazing. Didn't get swept up by Obama, but. Social democracy got me.

Very interesting. All right. Well, moving on to the meat here. I wanted to talk a little bit about the role of deep history as analytical foundation for this politics that you describe in what's left. So Palo Alto, it may be properly, I think, described as a work of deep history because it goes beneath the surface to draw out the dynamic between structural economic forces, geopolitics, individual personalities, and technological advancements. And it traces these connections over time, cross industries,

and through seemingly disparate political movements that may not otherwise seem connected like eugenics and early environmentalism. And in this way, the book is, as much a political, education as a history book. And so I wanted to ask, you know, having focused your latest book more on political activism and movement building and recognizing that most Americans have pretty short memories, even of events that happen during their own lifetimes, how important do you think the, this historical foundation is to political effectiveness?

and how can, on the opposite side, a lack of historical understanding, diminish or undermine political action? That's a great question. One of the real benefits I found from the exercise of writing Palo Alto, which is, yeah, it's deep, but it's really only 150 years of history. If you think about, like, other history books, there are history books that cover much longer periods of time. And so for me, it was, it got deep fast.

I didn't intend to write such a long book, and I felt like I could deal with all that history in a much shorter format, and that turned out not to be the case. But one of the real benefits of writing that and setting out to write a history of that time period is I feel like I got a real good sense of the long 20th century, of really what went on in the world between, you know, 1870 and 2010. And that's sort of an invaluable, I think, experience in trying to understand what's going on now. And so absolutely what's left was written with my understanding of that project and put to work

to understand the present moment. And I think it's really difficult to understand the present moment if you don't have that background, if you don't have a sense of like what actually happened in the 20th century and where the blocks are. When I see people talking about like single family home ownership

as some like pathology of the 70s or something, I feel like they really don't understand what work that form did in the 20th century, for example. Oh, and when they talk about like industrial policy in the United States in the 21st century and oh, we're going to have build all these like microship plants. It feels like they don't know the history of that industry of attempts to do that in the past and of the dynamics that led to the current moment.

So there's a lot of like some of it intentional and some of it unintentional forgetting of the dynamics that led us here. But I think for me, having spent so much time and energy trying to understand those dynamics in the previous project put me in a good place to think about them moving forward. Yeah, or even just this backwards reasoning where people assume that all of the tech billionaires are some kind of geniuses because they have accumulated so much wealth and just understanding that it's such a combination of luck and government subsidies and an adherence to these hard right-wing politics has played much larger role than any

individual genius is something that people really need to grasp, it seems. Yeah, and long-term impersonal historical dynamics that are, you know, inconvenient for policymaking, for progressive policymaking, but that doesn't make them something we can afford to misunderstand. Yeah. And that's a good lead up to the next question that, you know, Palo Alto, the book, talks a lot about conspiracies that have operated alongside and, you know, subordinate to or in conjunction with those impersonal dynamics from, you know, Leland Stanford and the old railroad robber barons to Herbert Hoover and the mining cartels all the way up to the PayPal Mafia. So I'm curious, for one, have you ever been called

that slur conspiracy theorist? I don't think so. It's funny. People, I've heard more the opposite. I've heard people complaining that I don't get into the conspiracies enough and that I'm like obscuring the, like, parapolitical aspects of what I'm talking about or downplaying them. For example, in the way that I talk about MK Ultra, which I spend a fair amount talking about, but I sort of downplay the conspiratorial element and say, like, look, these were a suite of CIA research projects that were a lot like other CIA research projects that were happening under different auspices, and we can understand them that way, rather than thinking about the, like, the one secret program where the really secret bad stuff was going on.

and think of it as a more general phenomenon. And I think methodologically, that's how I look at a lot of these things. And when I say, like, oh, when people want to talk to me about conspiracies, I say, like, yeah, you should look at the Hoover Click and the Japanese war gold and its role in early Silicon Valley. That's the best conspiracy. Like, in terms of my research, that's the most interesting, like, actual conspiracy conspiracy out of the whole thing and it's one that people have spent like way less research time on

compared to some of the more glamorous stuff about like serial killers in California in the 70s or whatever um so I think some people see any sort of like Marxist analysis as intrinsically conspiratorial because we recognize the existence of the capitalist class and there are people who think like the cap there is no such thing as the capitalist class, there are like all the, of a bunch of different capitalists doing different things with different associations, whatever, but to think of a class of capitalists is inherently conspiratorial. Obviously, I don't think that's true. And so from those people's perspective, I could be a conspiracist. But that's not, that's not mostly what I hear. Again,

from the people that read my books, I think a lot of them are more conspiracy-minded than I am and sort of wish there was more of that content. Yeah, I mean, at the same time, you mention how that dynamic of kind of casting aside conspiracies, like you refer to this Peter Thiel quote about living in a world where people don't believe conspiracies are possible and how that kind of seeds the terrain to guys like him to carry out these conspiratorial misdeeds behind the curtain while kind of fabricating their own cover story in real time and getting away with it. Yeah, I think that conspiracies definitely exist. I think anyone who studies history at all is going to encounter the phenomenon.

of people who get together and make secret plans and execute them. I think that's a phenomenon of modernity. It's a phenomenon of capital society. It's definitely a phenomenon of like pre-modern societies. I mean, it's like a feature of human existence. I think the problem is when you start attributing it an undue role in driving history. Because what I wanted to get across is that they're conspiracies that exist for sure, and they exist like mostly orthogonally to the actual flow of history and the historical forces.

And sometimes they line up with part of them. And I think that's an example with Teal, right, that he's trying to like turn capitalist class interests into a conspiracy that he is a part of. And I think he's been pretty successful doing that to a certain degree. We also see the limits of that, right? We see, like, fractures within the class that his sort of conspiracyism can't overcome. And same thing with Herbert Hoover, right? Like, he can't prevent World War I any more than anyone else could, even if that's a tendency within the class to sort of keep everyone together.

There are also tendencies to split. So I don't want to get away from class analysis, which I think is the driving. motor of history is the conflict between oppressor and oppressed classes. And conspiracies sometimes relate to that, in fact, often come to relate to that. But I don't want to, I don't want to confuse people. And sometimes I think people are liable to get confused over that question. Oh, yeah. Especially with the proliferation of conspiracy theories with the express intent to confuse people, to funnel people into fringe beliefs and ideologies, everything from Alex Jones to these other sort of Carnival Barker style guys who have also proven successful in their own right in

inspiring actions, who knows the Minnesota shooter from this past week taken out lawmakers for unclear purposes. Yeah, it's hard in this moment when you see that sort of, what do they call it, like stochastic terror, when people are responding to sort of like flows within the discourse and letting it dominate their thinking. But again, I think it's hard not to get caught up. up in some of these things for some people, because it seems very explanatory. But I'm a sort of Occam's Razor guy, Occam's Razor Marxist when it comes to these things

and a lot of things. I thought it was really funny that the investigation into like the military UFO stuff, that a lot of it turned out to be like a prank, that they would like joke to new guys about like, oh yeah, and also there's like a UFO, we all know about the UFOs. And they like didn't tell people that it was a joke. And so some people then repeated it to other people. They're like, oh, no, seriously, everyone knows about the UFOs. And it becomes a, like, you know, secret conspiracy or whatever.

And I think that accounts for, like, half of conspiracies, right? Like, that sort of stuff explains a fair amount of them. And so my instinct is, yeah, to look for material explanations and social conflicts as the source of, historical events. Yeah. And I think that's a good pivot to start talking about what's left and how we broadly conceived left wing may plan our way out of this reality. So I don't think we didn't want to do like a full book talk where we go through all the components. and chapters and everything, but maybe just for purposes of our listeners who haven't yet read the book, and I'd encourage them to check out your other interviews that are kind of more

summary nature or, you know, getting into the substance. I really enjoyed your talk with Gabe Wynette on the Haymarket podcast. But if you could just outline the main sort of thesis of the book about this Venn diagram, of strategies between these three strategic approaches that you outline, then we can take it from there. Yeah, I'll try to do it quick. So the three main body chapters of the book are focused on what I see is the three main progressive strategies for addressing climate change. And I described them as market craft, which is the idea of a society using market-based tools to create the social outcomes they desire, specifically decarbonization in this example.

The second strategy is public power in which the society through the state actually creates the things that it needs rather than trying to set up a market architecture that leads to the outcome. So, and the title is kind of a pun because it's public power like the power of the public, but also public powers and publicly owned and operated power stations. which is an example of the exercise of public power. And then the third strategy is communism, which means not, am I telling not public power, but a different thing,

which is the overthrow of a social metabolism based on value and the institution of a social metabolism based on from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs, with the foregrounded knowledge that something we all need is the decarbonization of the atmosphere and a production system that doesn't overheat the planet. That's my real quick spiel through the three strategies. And the format suggests that it's not one of these strategies

that's going to be the right answer that everyone should get behind, but rather we're going to have to find ways to sort of fit them together like puzzle pieces to get the movement we need to win to come out the other side. Yeah, that was something that stands out, I think, in the conclusion, especially you emphasize that point that none will convince all the others that it is the sole path forward in a relevant timeline. And so I wonder, has that been controversial to readers who may be hardcore partisans on any of these?

Not so much that I've heard. I think people, just because people are pursuing a particular strategy doesn't mean they misunderstand the fact that people are operating with other strategies and doing useful things under those strategic auspices. I think some people get confused about that, but most people, especially people who are doing serious work, tend to understand that they just don't talk about it because it's not their job to talk about it. It's not really anyone's job to talk about it, especially when we're talking about the whole left field when we're talking about, you know, left liberal economists all the way to

anarchist street bunks or whatever. That it's not anyone's particular job to stitch that all together, even though they all, everyone knows that there is a common fabric there. And so I thought I'd take up that gig, at least for this book. Yeah, I wonder especially about, you know, in the market craft, which I think is the most open to the kind of liberal, maybe academic or bureaucratic type of white-collar discourse workers and the like, that those folks might be less amenable to changing the basic structure of the ownership of the means of production, Because, you know, so much of that, at least in the American tradition, comes from the New Deal and from this very concerted and deliberate effort to save capitalism from its own excesses and stave off communism. So that was one of the concerns that I was wondering if for those of us on the communist end of the spectrum, you know, how do we kind of work with?

these liberals to either bring them into the fold or, you know, potentially be on the lookout for any potential efforts at sabotage. Yeah, I think we should be attentive to being co-opted, for sure, but that shouldn't limit us or close us off from understanding what other people are doing. And that's one of the key. My goal isn't to get everyone to join the same organization or to work on the same campaign, it's to develop what I call coherence. And a big part of coherence is just knowing and understanding what other people are up to and why they're doing that. And I think the radical left that you and I are on has done some important work over the

past five years, let's say, understanding where some of those market craft people are coming from in a, and just some of the post-Canesian, you know, people who we, we don't agree with, but we can understand where they're at theoretically and we can recognize that they could do good work from that position and they're worth relating to. And I draw, I think it's important to draw a line between that work, people who are looking at like the socialization of investment, for example, someone like Salomo or Ova or someone like Lena Khan who's looking at, you know, monopoly as a way to unlock productive forces within society. And sort of like market fundamentalist, maybe like capital A, abundance people who just want to remove blockages on private power, I think there's a distinction to be made there, and it behooves us on the radical left to clarify that distinction, to draw that line and say, like, look, these are people, we see what everyone's doing, we've listened, we've understood, and these are the people who think are doing useful things

and these are the people who think are doing non-useful things, and here's the difference, and here's the line. And we would like more people on this side of the line and fewer people on that side of line, and here's how we can work with other people over here. And I think that's a valuable exercise, and I've heard from a fair amount of market craft folks who've actually taken the time to read this book,

and they've been very positive because I do my best to present their strongest argument, strongest argument for this left market reposition. And I think I do a pretty good job. And I've heard from them that I do a pretty good job clarifying what they're really about progressively. And they're not looking for something very different from us on the radical left in terms of the outcome. And their idea of how to get there is different from ours, but it's not totally incompatible, I think. And how do you propose bridging conflicts over things like political participation, support for the Democratic Party, and things like that that might come up

and raise some hackles? I think we do it in practice, which doesn't always mean we do it successfully. I think the uncommitted campaign was a really good compromise. It was a really, like, painful thing that people were doing in the Democratic Party. primary where they were reaching out to the Harris campaign and saying like we recognize the realities of the political situation and we just need some sign from you that you'll be different and you'll do something to end this genocide so that we can endorse you and we can rally people to support you and we just need we just need something we just need some movement from you

to show us that and we'll that because we recognize the situation we recognize how bad Trump is and we want to help but we we need you to give us something. And they didn't do it. The Democrats didn't do it. And that's, you know, the liberals, their liberals couldn't manage to do it. And that's to their discredit that's ended in their defeat. And I hope people take the right lessons from that. I think we're going to struggle right now about what lessons to take from that. But that's an example of how to try and do it, right? How to try and reach across what is a fundamental difference in strategy and perspective and say we're trying to find a way to work with you right now and we want you to try to find a way

to work with us. And the fact that it didn't work, I think it doesn't mean that it's not the kind of thing that we need to do. Yeah. I mean, I guess maybe the jury is still out on whether, you know, what the legacy will be of that, especially now as we're recording this on June 19th, the country seems to be gearing up once again for a war, a new war in the Middle East, potentially in Iran with a lot of, you mentioned the anti-war movement from the Bush era and a lot of the same discourse, the same talking points and dynamics that were deployed then in an even more low effort packaging, it seems to me, to gin up this warfure and most of the Democrats are allied with the neocons on this with pretty far-right voices like Tucker Carlson

being the standouts against the ramping up to war. but for maybe all the wrong reasons, right? I mean, I don't know if you've listened to the Tucker interviews with Bannon and Ted Cruz, but his anti-war cases, we need that money to mass deport 20 million people and maybe militarily occupy Washington, D.C., to do something about homelessness or something like that. So, you know, in your book, you talk about kind of setting aside the right-wingers or market fundamentalists from this coalition. But have you, I mean, do these other cleavages

on big issues like foreign policy give you second thoughts about that, or how do you think we should respond? Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, when you see someone like Thomas Massey opposing the war, I don't think that's that different from, you know, Ron Paul opposing the war, which is a fringe position within the Republican Party. And so actually within the political system, you see a real sort of repeat of G-WAT, you know, invasion fever, patriotic bullshit, which is insane for the Democrats to be in that position to be supporting an unpopular president's unpopular war.

Because that's, and that's the biggest difference that I see between this one and the last one is that everyone opposes this war, that the population does not want to. involved and that the administration has not put in the work to confuse people, to bamboozle people enough to supporting this invasion. They support the idea of Iran not having nuclear weapons. But when you start polling a U.S. war with Iran, it's like even the most Republicans oppose it. I think it's like 53% of Republicans oppose it against, you know, 20-something percent for it. And that's the Republicans. The Democrats, it's, like 70% against or whatever. And that was not the situation for Afghanistan.

That was not the situation in Iraq. So the public seems to have learned its lesson in terms of this kind of military adventurism. And in some ways, you could point to Trump's election as an attempt to get away from that, as attempt that he portrayed himself, at least, as the anti-war candidate. And I don't think there's any reason to believe

a Biden or Harris administration would be behaving any better right now than the Trump administration is with regard to Gaza or with regard to Iran. But it is interesting that the population feels so differently. So I don't know, is like Theo Vaughn going to motivate a bunch of conservative or conservative leaning folks into the street to oppose the war? I don't, maybe, I don't know. But I don't think they're going to lead a movement. And so I think it definitely still falls to the level. left to lead an anti-war movement, and that's what I think a bunch of us are going to be doing on Saturday afternoon. I've been thinking, Uncle Sam, it's time we went to war.

Been so long since Vietnam. Tell me what you're waiting for. If you don't hurry, sure enough, all these kids be grown up. up be too old to die for you so get them if you're going to ain't been much excitement on evening dewsing way too long let's break out our submarines blow some place to smithereens yeah and it's leading an anti-war movement with no political i mean kind of like with the Iraq war where also the Democratic Party was by and large on side with the Bush administration. So it's a movement without a political home. And your observation about the lack of public support

for this, do you think that that owes it all to the evolution of the media landscape where once upon a time, whatever you saw on TV, on mainstream news media, and read in the New York Times, had the veneer of truth about it, whereas now there's less perceived legitimacy to the mainstream media? Maybe, I don't know. I think the, I mean, the media has done a really great job concocting rationale for Israel's genocide in Gaza and did, did a real, at least as well as that for any, as they did for the invasion of Iraq and has not faced accountability in the same way. You know, the New York Times in particular ginned up support for the genocide pretty directly

with really, really atrocious work, you know, sub-journalism. Propaganda, right? Yeah, I mean, I think that I struggle to find the words to describe my contempt for the publication of some of that work. And I'm sure the people who work at the times are embarrassed by it. But there hasn't been accountability for it really at all. And I'm not sure what that will look like going forward. So I hesitate to give the media landscape any credit right now.

I think it's about as bad as it's been at least as bad, probably worse than it was in the Bush era when we had. least had, you know, alternative media. We don't have alternative media anymore to make the anti-war case even. So even if the public opposes it, we'll see what kind of, how we're able to harness that energy and try and oppose what looks like, what I fear is on the way that happening. Yeah. I don't know if it was covered in the book, but it does.

seem like an effective means of mass communication is important to building the type of power that you talk about in the book, do you have thoughts on how we can go about doing that? I mean, obviously, there is publications and articles like the ones you write and books and podcasts and everything, but I don't know how massive the reach of these outlets is versus what we're up against in the mainstream media. Yeah, you know, I'm trying a lot of things. So I'll talk to just about any podcast who wants to have me all go and talk for an hour. And I've been convinced by some friends to let them start a TikTok that's going to post the segments of my talks or whatever

because I feel like they're just not reaching the same audience that they would. if, you know, I do an hour talk at a bookstore and it goes on YouTube and I might have some really good conversation in there, but it's just not going to reach people the same way that a minute clip on TikTok will or could. But at the same time, I also started like filling an old suitcase with great books and taking it around town and I wrote a postcard that says books not bombs on it and passing out great books to people for free. And I've, desperately one and all weekly back in Philadelphia, and I started a, like, Radical Calendar Project with my friend Susan called philical.com. If you're in Philly,

go check out philical.com. So I think we, I wish we had like a radio station. I think we need a communication network using what are called Laura L-O-R-A devices, which are like off-grid texting machines. basically. I think we need those, a network of those within our city. We need any number of things that we don't have right now. And I'm willing to try a lot to try and figure it out.

But fundamentally, I'm an author. I'm going to keep writing books. That's how I make a living. And I think there's no matter how things change, there's going to be a place for books and reading books. Yeah. And speaking of books, you have

been one of the more vocal critics of one that has filled a lot of airport shelves recently, the abundance book of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. And, you know, I wonder if that project doesn't carry some dark implications for the future as well, like all of the sort of guerrilla media and or subversive counter narratives that were able to put out there, it seems like a drop in the ocean when you have these bestsellers coming and rebranding what seemed like very old and ineffective neoliberal ideas in new packaging, drawing on that great American pastime of being distracted by the latest set of jingling keys.

Yeah, I can't really explain it because it's not like it's not just that it's sold well and then people responded it's that people were interested before that. Like I got asked to review the book by a couple different publications that were interested in what my take was going to be

because, and I guess there was a sense that this was a project that was going to deserve attention. And partly they did a good job, you know, I mean, the press sent me, because I was on their lists or whatever, it sent me three copies of the book. And that means someone is doing a good job on the presses end, doing the marketing for the book and doing the publicity for the book. And it's harder and harder to get publishers to make that kind of investment and follow through.

So clearly someone decided that this was going to be a winner, right? But I don't know. I can't, I don't think it's the content of the book because it's like you said, like pretty unexceptional as a text. I think it's partly that like Ezra Klein is a big star. It's a big like podcasting star. And maybe this, but maybe it suggests that like podcasters are the new like actor celebrities when it comes to selling books and that that's, that's who should be like, you know,

who you should get to write books if you want to sell a million books or whatever. I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out. And maybe a little more conspiratorial than you'd be willing to point at, but it does seem like a lot of the supporters of this and really the whole milieu in which Ezra Klein is now kind of centered in San Francisco and among the tech oligarch. that there's some concerted interest in having as a hedge against the overt fascism of the Trump administration, which is moving a lot of fascist projects forward at an alarming rate of speed.

But in the future, assuming that as it tends to in the United States, the political pendulum comes and swings back the other way to have a way to sell the same. same agenda to maybe a democratic administration or a population that will, if it's not already, be fed up with a corrupt and a really ineffective administration, which I think is going to bring on an economic crisis in addition to perhaps a war before 2028 if things proceed apace. Yeah, no, I mean, that makes sense. And I get why the people who already agree with it support it. as a set of policies or as an object or whatever.

But I don't think that really explains. I mean, like, right. Like, so the conspiracy you're talking about totally exists. And there were some people sitting, I'm sure, around some table saying, how do we make this a bestseller? Because it supports our ideology. But, like, people do that for a lot of books. People do that for all sorts of books.

And it doesn't mean it works, right? Like, Sam Bankman Fried famously spent, like, was it, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars, like millions of dollars? supporting Will McCaskill's book, which got more publicity than it would have otherwiseed, but it didn't become a number one bestseller. Like, it doesn't work that way. It's a very arbitrary industry, and I know enough about the industry to know that it doesn't work that way.

So, like, that doesn't explain why the editors of the Baffler and the nation and Jacobin and current affairs and all these other publications. choose to review abundance and devote money and editorial attention to this book project. And not mine, for example, right? Like, why make that choice? And it's partly because, like, people are interested and people are going to read that. You know, why are they doing it? Well, it's something that people have, like, taken positions on, which is interesting, you know?

And so I think it speaks to the, like, reactive dynamics of our media culture right now, for sure, that it's like a book you don't have to read and people are interested in that. They're more interested in like the positioning and the position taking that's involved in a book like that. Partly I think it was an interesting object for a lot of us to think about critically on the left

because it like theoretically concentrates this perspective that you're talking about that we can then say like, okay, well, this is what you believe. How can we say, well, we believe in relation to this. And Marxists from Marx on have done that with liberal or bourgeois economic thought and said like, okay, this is what they're saying, here's why it's wrong, in a way that illustrates what we think. And I think a lot of people have taken the opportunity to do that on the left.

And I think a lot of that has been useful. But I think we also have a, it speaks to our lack of ability to connect. control our own collective attention that we spent some I've spent so much time thinking about this like mediocre air mainstream airport book by and for liberals you know like I think that that speaks to like our inability to focus our own attention on projects that matter yeah I mean I think as I view abundance it's less about the book as you said is more about what it's long wondering and the sort of horizon, the utopian horizon that abundance considers, I think gels up very troublingly with what the former Google CEO and co-founder Eric Schmidt said

when he said, we're not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we're not organized to do it. And yes, the energy needs in this area, he's talking about artificial intelligence, will be a problem. But I'd rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it. And this is where I think it butts right up against the three-part Venn diagram of strategies in what's left, where you can't have both, like that AI horizon of using the state's power, to set up these fossil fuel intensive data centers to power AI slop factories out in the desert, it accelerates the climate catastrophe and also augments the surveillance apparatus that bears down upon anybody organizing for a more human alternative.

Yeah, if your listeners haven't checked out the book by Andreas Wallam and Vim carton called overshoot. They should totally check out overshoot. And that has a, definitely, you could get conspiratorial about that one, too. But it basically says every, all the mainstream climate models assume that we are going to overshoot on emissions and then find some technological solution that allows us to fix it. So exactly what Eric Schmidt is saying. So when he says that, that's not actually like a crazy position. That is the, unspoken conventional wisdom of all technocratic climate solutions, is that things are going to get unmanageably worse, but part of making them unimaginably worse is that we're going

to figure out a solution in there somehow with that energy use. And we'll invent some machine that can fix this and then we'll just do that. Or we'll invent the artificial intelligence that will create the machine for us. And so we have to assume that a solution will emerge out of our continual problem causing. And that's the solution, right? That's the model that we're banking on. So that's a, it's a really mind-bending book. It hasn't gotten nearly enough coverage.

And again, reflects our inability as a left to sort of focus our attention on what matters. And climate as a subject suffers for that for sure. and that book is a good example of something that should be like common currency on the left and that we should be telling everybody else about. Yeah, I mean, it really seems like that's the veneer of it that they are saying that AI will solve the problem, but what they don't say is it will solve the problem for the X number of billionaires or other extremely privileged people that, will retreat to their bunkers in Hawaii or whatever and ride out the storm while everybody

else kind of has the left behind years of tribulation. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's a fantasy. It's a real fantasy. And a lot of that fantasy is definitely wrapped up in the abundance stuff, for sure. But yeah, Malman Carden do a great job explaining what the actual, the math behind that fantasy, what the fantasy is based on. And it really is based on this idea of overshoot that we're going to, you know, overshoot all of our targets by a lot and then work our way back using the tools we invent through that overshoot. And since the tools we're inventing through the overshoot right now are AI, AI must be the solution, right? This must be the thing that we planned on. And even though there's absolutely no reason to believe that and there's no

but plausible mechanism for how that's going to happen, unfortunately. Well, they've even built a religion around it. You talk about it in Palo Alto a little bit with the Racco's Basilisk and all of that real Terminator universe madness. Yeah, and a lot more like the simulation theory. They've got all sorts of, you know, thought experiments. I think thought experiments is maybe the right to, right, term for it. They're experimenting with thinking. Whether it's a religion or not, God, I hope

we don't get that far. But you're right that this kind of thought experiment, glorified thought experiments, is taking up more and more energy within our society. You definitely saw that with the rise and fall of effective altruism, my God. Yeah. Yeah, lately I've been seeing a lot of people comparing that with abundance and just mixing, you know, whether it's a rebrand or whatever, a lot of the same elements seem to be involved. Yeah, well, they switch to effective acceleration, right, which is like, well, actually the best thing to do is accelerate sociotechnical development because that's, then you build more stuff and then you have more stuff for the future.

And that's the most altruistic thing you can do is, like, build things for. the future as fast as you can because then more people will be happy or have the things they need or whatever which can excuse a lot right you could that could justify anything but it's fundamentally

market based it's a market fundamentalist idea which is that like if we spin this capitalist spin the years on this capitalist machine faster then things will get better faster and that is not what I think the capitalist machine produces. Well, speaking of thought experiments, there's one that I

did want to run by you that it's not my own, but a friend of mine who works in politics, who will remain anonymous, this idea that he's calling the Plan Wyoming to exploit the fact that the state of Wyoming has a population under 490,000, and yet, is entitled to two U.S. senators and has, you know, all this land out there. And so this idea posits a sort of bleeding Kansas style internal migration to Wyoming for the scaling up of experiments in communism, ultimately with the goal of, you know, increasing the population to have political power in a state of the United States. what do you think uh i don't think wyoming would be the best spot for that necessarily for a number

of reasons the predominant one being a lack of jobs for the people that you need for this uh colonization plan uh which you know to speak of conspiracies that there are people working towards such things in communities at scales that people don't know about, that I shouldn't talk about publicly or whatever. But there aren't just thought experiments about such things. There are action experiments about such things, and people should ask around if they're curious, because it doesn't take that many people. You don't need enough people to, like, win a Senate, statewide Senate elections to really start. changing a place and creating room for communists to start doing interesting work.

So if anyone's interested in what I just said, they can find my email address and reach out to me, but they've got to be really interested. Very good. Very good. Well, I know that you have a time limit, and I wanted to end on a positive note here. because I think kept a pretty positive tone, but amidst very, very dark times, you know, a genocide that we have popular opposition to but have been unable to stop, a war that seems to be on the same track. And, you know, I heard you on another interview say that you don't have

any natural tendency towards a depressive frame of mind. And first of all, congratulations. Thank you. It seems like a superpower, especially in the world that we live in. But I was wondering if you could expand upon that a little bit. How do you keep that outlook? And what advice could you give to our listeners who may be feeling doom and gloom. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's something that I think myself out of, and I don't have a like, you know, set of cognitive behavioral tricks or whatever that I use to not be depressed. It's just that my like emotional temperament is not a depressive one. And I think we, at the moment, maybe we have a socially dominant, depressed.

that I think is reasonable given situation. And the left in general, I think, tends to be relatively depressive because we spend a lot of time thinking critically about the world and what's wrong with it. And that means that people become depressed and also that depressive people find the left a good place to think about the welcome place to think about the world, which is not wrong.

I don't want to fix any of my own. I don't want to fix any of my depressive comrades, and I don't think that's how it works. But I think a different perspective can be useful, and I have a different perspective that, you know, when I get, like, upset, I tend to get very, very angry, and rather than, like, sad, and it doesn't tend to be, like, inner or self-directed for better and worse. And I think in this moment, there are things that that perspective. can offer to the left as a whole. So I hope people who have a more depressive frame of mind can still relate to the problem

as I describe it in the book because I'm not like, you know, it's not rose-covered glasses and I'm not being like, I don't think we're in an easy situation. I think the most likely things to happen are bad and I say so in the book. But that doesn't, for me, that's not a reason to give up or to reason to wallow. or a reason to do anything but continue to fight. And that's a perspective that I have to offer to folks, and I hope people find it useful. Well, I can speak for myself and for Dick when I say that we certainly have found it useful.

I'm sure our listeners will as well. We're extremely appreciative of your time. Where can people follow you and find your books? Do you have like a preferred way of purchase? just saying your books. Go to a local bookstore. And if you can't go to a local bookstore, bookshop.org, or you can even order from someone else's local bookstore.

Ask a comrade which local bookstore could use the order. But really, you can buy it wherever fine books are sold. You can get at the library. The important thing, I think for me, is if you check it out and really engage with it. I guess I've got a TikTok now. It's Malcolm Harris Clips. If you're on TikTok, I think I've got one.

one TikTok up currently. And I'm a big, mean internet on Twitter. I still call it that. I think it will be Twitter once again in the future. Yeah, that's, I still have the old app that's called Twitter. I haven't updated it to the X yet. It's glitchy as hell, but making... It's called principles.

People should learn about them, you know? Oh, yeah. that's one way to do it. Well, Malcolm, thanks again. Really appreciate it. Had really enjoyed the talk, and I hope you'll come back when we've got a thousand flowers blooming of experiments in communism that we can take a roll call. Absolutely. That or the next book comes out, whichever comes first. Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. And curious to hear what that one will be about and looking forward to seeing what it is. All right. Take care. Thanks so much for having me. Just one more very special thank you to Malcolm for joining us on this week's episode,

and thank you to our listeners for tuning in yet again. Join us next week where we will return to our ongoing series within a series the Warren Commission decided by picking back up with our good buddy, Jacob Rubinstein, a.k.a. Jack Ruby. Until next time, on behalf of Dawn, I'm Dick, saying farewell and keep digging. solution comes soon Because this here life is not worth living Carrying on from day to day

Could you ever be forgiven For giving your humanity away What more can I set me? Yeah Celebration In our lifetimes Revolution Come at last

No more waiting For the right time What's present now soon be passed. Liberation in our lifetimes. Say revolution come at last. No more waiting on the right time. What's present now we'll soon be passed.

Thank you.