Liberals have never quite known what to make of those who are far to their left. Conservatives tend to conflate liberals and leftists so often that many who fit under the broad Democratic umbrella have fallen into the habit of doing likewise. This is why Democratic operative Peter Daou can write that “Clinton and Sanders supporters … largely have the same goals,” and an NPR reporter can claim that the 2020 Democratic candidates “all basically want to do a lot of the same things.” The difference between liberals and leftists isn’t really a matter of policy, this view goes; the two just differ on tactics and purity and willingness to compromise.

SHIT IS FUCKED UP AND BULLSHIT: HISTORY SINCE THE END OF HISTORY by Malcolm Harris Melville House, 288 pp., $18.99

But such a conflation elides actual, significant policy differences and does a disservice to both factions. Liberals—from Nancy Pelosi to Elizabeth Warren—see capitalism as flawed but fundamentally salvageable if managed correctly, with just the right balance of government regulation and free enterprise; leftists—including Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn—see capitalism as definitionally unfair, responsible for much of the world’s misery, and thus “irredeemable,” in the words of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As the avowed leftist Nathan Robinson put it in an excellent piece from 2017, “Liberals believe that the economic and political system is a machine that has broken down and needs fixing. Leftists believe that the machine is not ‘broken.’ Rather, it is working perfectly well; the problem is that it is a death machine designed to chew up human lives. You don’t fix the death machine, you smash it to bits.”

Perhaps the pièce de résistance of this conflation took place two years ago, when the conservative television personality Piers Morgan invited the activist and writer Ash Sarkar on Good Morning Britain to discuss upcoming protests against Donald Trump in the United Kingdom, protests that she supported and he disdained. Morgan attempted to depict Sarkar as a hypocrite by asking her whether she had also protested Barack Obama—who “deported three million people”—when he visited the U.K. Sarkar answered with an emphatic, “Yes!” but Morgan ignored her, pressing on, at one point exclaiming, “It’s double standards!” When Sarkar calmly encouraged Morgan to “actually check out some of the other work that I’ve done,” he replied that he’d “checked out some basic facts about your hero, Obama.” Shocked, Sarkar shot back, “He’s not my hero—I’m a Communist, you idiot!”

This distinction is important to Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History, a new book of essays by as outspoken a leftist as Malcolm Harris. While the ideas and the rhetoric Harris espouses are not uncommon in certain corners of the arts, the academy, and the Twitterverse, they are nonetheless rarely articulated so forthrightly and with so few qualms about their consequences. Harris, himself a millennial and the author of Kids These Days—a well-regarded monograph about the conditions under which millennials labor—apparently feels no need to qualify his radicalism with liberal hedging or apologetic backpedaling. His directness and frankness are refreshing—even, occasionally, startling. Taken together, his essays are an indictment, a road map, and a call to action.

Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit is a collection of Harris’s writing from the past decade, covering an eclectic range of topics, from Marxism to television to sex with robots. The book begins with Occupy Wall Street and ends with Donald Trump, traveling from a moment of frustration with an unequal status quo to a moment of so much greater frustration with a so much worse status quo. It was at Occupy in 2011 that a man named Micky Smith held up a sign reading, “SHIT IS FUCKED UP AND BULLSHIT,” which became the unlikeliest of rallying cries. What was remarkable about the sign, Harris writes, was that “the whole world knew what he meant.” The whole world still knows what he meant.