Abundance for the 99 Percent

Critics have argued that the abundance movement in general, and Klein and Thompson in particular, simply advance a rebranded “neoliberal” political project based on deregulation and the derisking of private capital. As Sandeep Vaheesan puts it, Klein and Thompson’s view is that “private actors will deliver abundance — at least when goaded by sufficiently high levels of public subsidy” — so long as zoning and environmental restrictions are lifted.  Similarly, Brian Callaci argued in Jacobin that their approach echoes what Daniela Gabor calls “the Wall Street Consensus” or the “derisking state”: Abundance “places its faith in the idea that private capital, finally freed from onerous regulation, will spring into action and undertake the massive investments required for broad prosperity.”

It is true that Klein and Thompson do not oppose the use of government to enable the private sector. They are clearly quite optimistic about Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and other forms of industrial policy that use public planning to spur private investment. But one assumes that Vaheesan and Callaci also don’t oppose such policies outright. Do they seek to repeal the IRA along with some in the GOP? In any case, it is a serious oversimplification to reduce Klein and Thompson’s entire argument to a derisking playbook.

Klein and Thompson explicitly position themselves as “liberals” interested in effective government action and state capacity. Specifically, they think the government must be central to the kind of technical innovation needed for their vision of abundance. When markets fail to account for the costs of climate pollution, “government can,” they insist; when markets find certain investments too risky for shareholders, “government must” step in and fund such technologies.

Examples of this state-centered logic run throughout the book. They lament, for instance, that it’s often cheaper to build affordable housing with private money than with public. “Shouldn’t things happen faster when they are backed by the might and money of the government?” they ask. They applaud Governor Josh Shapiro’s streamlined process to rebuild the section of I-95 that collapsed near Philadelphia — and the popularity of that state-led success. “Turns out people like it when their government gets things done.” Contra Josh Barro, they also celebrate that this project was completed so quickly with union labor.

On the question of “innovation,” their focus is squarely on the role of government. They cite the positive cases of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, The National Science Foundation and National Institute of Health, while also criticizing the state’s failure to fund Katalin Karikó’s breakthrough mRNA research.

One might argue that their discussion of Operation Warp Speed lends support to the charge of neoliberalism. The authors state unequivocally: “OWS solved problems by enabling the private sector rather than commanding it.” It was produced by private pharmaceutical companies, distributed by the likes of UPS and FedEx and made available at private pharmacies such as Walgreens. But, surely, OWS was also a triumph of public planning and public finance — none of these private capitalists would have signed off on making the vaccine free to all without the government picking up the bill.

Perhaps the most common charge that Abundance is neoliberal rests upon its alleged promotion of “deregulation.” But this is either a willful misrepresentation or, more generously, a result of not reading the book. Much of the text concerns how various bottlenecks — regulatory, process, and otherwise — inhibit the public sector itself from acting. Why, they ask, has California failed to complete a five-hundred-mile high-speed rail system since 2008, while China has built more than twenty-three thousand miles in that same period? Why does it cost an average of $609 million to build a kilometer of rail in the United States, compared to $384 million in Germany, $295 million in Canada, and just $96 million in Portugal?

“We looked into it,” they write, “and it turns out that all those countries also have governments, so the problem cannot be government.” The point, contra the fantasias of libertarians, is followed by another: “Nor is the problem unions — another favored bugaboo of the Right. Union density is higher in all those countries than it is in the United States.”

The deregulation agendas of Carter and Reagan, Thatcher and Mitterand — in finance, transport, energy, telecoms, and labor — were not just destructive in their time. They also laid the groundwork for deep pathologies in political economy decades later: from housing bubbles, offshoring, and deindustrialization to the Global Financial Crisis and Eurozone meltdown. The Left’s opposition to those deregulatory agendas in the 1970s and ’80s has, in hindsight, been vindicated.

So the real question when it comes to the removal of production bottlenecks, regulatory or otherwise, is whether such removal is progressive or regressive. And, crucially: whose interests did these regulations originally serve, and why were they introduced?

If Klein and Thompson are only offering a new version of “warmed over neoliberalism,” they go to great lengths in the book’s conclusion to argue the opposite. They situate their “abundance” framework as a contender to replace the crumbling “neoliberal world order,” deploying the analysis of historian Gary Gerstle. They also point to the state-led expansion of solar technology in the 1970s — an effort crushed by Reagan’s form of slash and burn neoliberal austerity — as a lost opportunity for a more abundant future.

Another common critique from the Left is that Klein and Thompson’s approach is explicitly opposed to the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor and working class. But more accurately, they are simply pointing out that redistribution alone is not enough unless the public sector can actually reliably deliver and build real public goods cheaply and efficiently. As Klein recently put it in an essay for the New York Times, “If Democrats are taxing people to build high-speed rail, that high-speed rail should exist; if they are taxing people to build electric vehicle chargers, those chargers should get built; if they are promising lower drug prices in Medicare, those lower prices should show up quickly.”

This concern isn’t just theoretical. Since the book’s release, an analysis found it costs $1.2 million per unit for the government to build housing in the Washington, DC area. Left-wing Mayor Brandon Johnson boasted of delivering ten thousand units at a cost of $11 billion but, as Klein points out, this “nets out to $1.1 million per unit.” In Chicago, as of June 2025, the median sale price of homes sold is less than half of that: $400,000. In Washington, DC, it’s quite a bit higher ($702,500), but still far lower than Johnson’s public provision.  These figures don’t undermine the case for taxing the rich to fund public goods — but they do suggest that without serious reforms to how public goods are planned and delivered, redistribution alone won’t be enough to meet vital social needs.

From all this, it should be clear that Abundance is not an argument for a neoliberal model of deregulation and private sector supremacy. As Klein himself puts it, the book is “about making the state more, not less, powerful and capable of doing big things.”

The most vocal critics of the abundance agenda have come from the antitrust or anti-monopoly left — and it turns out this kind of rift has deep historical roots. Marc Dunkelman’s book Why Nothing Works — a text often compared to and reviewed alongside Abundance — opens with conflicts among progressives and liberals in the early twentieth century. On one side were the anti-monopolists who believed society’s problems were a result of “corruption atop society — among robber barons, political bosses, corporate boards, and snooty lawyers.” Their solution was to break up concentrated power and restore competition among smaller-scale enterprises like the farmers and artisans who made up the class base for this “Jeffersonian” vision — one that prized decentralized economic life, local self-sufficiency, and an aversion to centralized authority.

Others, however, saw the emergence of large-scale capitalist enterprises as not only inevitable, but progressive — offering undeniable efficiencies and productivity gains. Even as early as the mid-nineteenth century, Marx and Engels had predicted that the small-scale production of the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie was destined for the dustbin of history.

Yet these reformers shared the anti-monopolists’ concern about concentrated corporate power. As Dunkelman states, their answer was less about “taking them down and more inclined to building government up.” For these “Hamiltonian” reformers, the vision of small-scale competition was actually highly anarchic and inefficient. The goal should instead be to establish “a new vanguard of competent centralized authority” and “public power” to keep the power of business in check.

If the Jeffersonians struggled with nostalgia for an era long gone, the Hamiltonians faced another problem: the widespread suspicion that centralized government bureaucracy was bound to descend into abuse and ineptitude.As Dunkelman explains, public sentiment saw bureaucracy as the domain of “champions of incompetence.”

Here is exactly the dilemma Klein and Thompson identify as a core problem for the liberal-left’s political impasse: profound popular distrust in the capacity of the government to solve society’s big problems — from climate change and the housing crisis to pandemics and antibiotic resistance. Or to put it in a way socialists will understand: if our answer to every problem of capitalism is “public ownership” or “nationalize it,” how convincing can those proposals be without material demonstration of effective state capacity?

Of course, it is the anti-monopolist critics who insist that Abundance fails to seriously address corporate power and corruption as the cause of all society’s problems. But, in doing so, they overlook — or even oppose — the Hamiltonian impulse at the core of the book.

More fundamentally, the anti-monopolist critique nearly always points in the direction of decentralization — of devolving power downward toward small business, local control, and community governance. Yet as Klein and Thompson show, this “small-is-beautiful” vision is hostile to building up the state’s ability to deliver universal goods. More troublingly, it opens the door to a proliferation of local veto points, with neighborhood or community groups empowered to block or slow public action.

In sum, while much of the post-1970s Left has been shaped by a Jeffersonianism suspicion of centralized power — as wary of big government as it is of corporate power — Abundance seeks to recover a Hamiltonian tradition. That tradition, as Dunkelman shows, was foundational to the New Deal era of massive public works, infrastructure projects, and the construction of government agencies that served the public good. That it falls to liberals like Klein and Thompson to make the case for state capacity ought to give the socialist left pause.

As early as 2022, Klein dubbed this vision a “liberalism that builds” — that is, builds housing, energy, and other key infrastructure. But if the Left confines itself to critiques of corporate power or blanket suspicion of large-scale industrial projects, it risks ceding the terrain of state-building to liberals. What’s needed is not just a liberalism that builds, but a socialist left that builds — and builds differently: with democratic planning, redistribution, and working-class power at its center. There is much to learn from Abundance, not because it is socialist but because it indirectly points toward the conditions that socialism would require in order to succeed.

If Klein and Thompson make a convincing case that we are living through a crisis of productive stagnation — particularly in state capacity — they are less persuasive when it comes to explaining how this stagnation came about. Some of their analysis comes close to the mark, but the democratic socialist left offers a different story of what happened in this crucial period.

The authors lean heavily on the ideas of economist Mancur Olson, who argued in the 1980s that stagnation is an inevitable feature of complex, stable, affluent societies. As these societies mature, they give rise to increasingly powerful interest groups that fight over the distribution of resources. The result is a proliferation of lobbying, bargaining, paperwork and regulation — “making it difficult to get anything done.” On top of this, Klein and Thompson note the peculiarly American predilection to pursue policy goals through adversarial legalism rather than legislating them. Quoting UC Berkeley law professor Robert Kagan, they argue that “in the United States, lawyers, legal rights, judges, and lawsuits become functional equivalents for the large central bureaucracies that dominate governance in the activist states of Western Europe.” Kagan reckons that this is because Americans have always been uniquely mistrustful of government compared to citizens of the Old World.(Although one might note that government by politicians is at least in principle democratically accountable, unlike what Ben Burgis has called the “antidemocratic monstrosity” of de facto government by Supreme Court judges.)

Finally, Klein and Thompson argue that a transformation of political culture occurred within the liberal left in the wake of 1960s and ’70s, triggered by a torrent of revelations about state and para-state misconduct. While they don’t list these revelations in the book, they are well known: the atrocities of the Vietnam War, the deceptions and lies of Watergate, and the intelligence abuses of three-letter agencies investigated by Senator Frank Church’s 1975 select committee. These scandals marked the end of the deep trust in government born of the New Deal and the “muscular wartime exercise of state power.” By the 1970s, the authors argue, liberalism was “slow[ing] the system down so that instances of abuse could be seen and stopped.”

And so, the simple story of small-government conservatism and big-government liberalism isn’t quite correct: the liberal left has, in many ways, proven to be every bit as obstructive to the public sector as the Right. In other words, progressives shifted from their New-Deal, Hamiltonian core to a decidedly more Jeffersonian direction favoring local control.

One of the most illustrative examples in the book — echoing what online debates have termed “the Groups,” a catch-all for NGOs, academics, lawyers, and property-owning NIMBYs seen as choking abundance — is the story of lawyer Ralph Nader and his movement of public-interest law firms. Often referred to as “Nader’s Raiders,” these activists routinely sued government agencies in court, and in doing so helped reshape the regulatory landscape.

The authors are torn on this legacy. They acknowledge that the early efforts of Nader’s Raiders and other NGOs, especially with respect to the environment, were good. It’s true, they write, that government permitting was allowing refineries to dump toxic chemicals in low-income neighborhoods and oil spills to pollute waterways. And the rise in permitting processes and litigation worked: “Apart from greenhouse gases, which effectively have been unregulated, every major air pollutant has decreased significantly over the past five decades, from carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide to airborne lead and others. Surface water quality has similarly improved substantially since the 1970s.”

But over time, the legacy of the Groups — the legal rulings, legislation, and procedural norms that they established — have resulted in a choking off of development, not least with respect to the very clean technology and low-carbon infrastructure that environmental NGOs are supposed to favor. Klein and Thompson give the example of the Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project, a Wyoming clean energy project that would be the largest wind farm in the United States. Navigating all the permitting and siting authorities and environmental legal challenges — the very product of Nader’s revolution — has meant the project will be completed a full eighteen years after being proposed.

Klein and Thompson, however, neglect a key problem with the proliferation of procedural barriers: they slow down development even when the public sector is doing the work itself — not just permitting it. That problem is also neglected by leftist critics of Abundance who, like us, would rather see the state engaged in muscular New Deal–style public development.

Vaheesan’s review raises the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and other New Deal institutions providing “electricity for all” as the kind of public abundance that the authors purportedly cede to private forces. Indeed, TVA remains America’s largest public power system today, and it’s the only federal public utility actively building new power generation. But TVA as public developer faces hurdles that private utilities don’t.

As a federal entity, TVA must clear all projects through the gauntlet of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a requirement that no other electric utility in the country faces. These procedural demands compound an already lengthy and complex grid interconnection procedure that TVA, like all grid operators, must follow. In fact, almost every single major planning decision at TVA — not just developing a new land-altering hydroelectric facility or a pollution-spewing fossil plant, but also releasing a new integrated resource plan or updating their price methodology — must undergo the NEPA process. Even solar farms built by third parties that connect to TVA’s transmission system must undergo a full environmental study, usually taking one to two years.

TVA’s most recent financial report revealed four different lawsuits from the Groups over new power projects. Two of the four are predicated on NEPA, and one of those, a NEPA challenge to a gas-fueled power plant at the site of a retired coal plant, dragged TVA in lawfare for almost two years before a judge threw it out. Meanwhile, a rising MAGA hostility to TVA is partly rooted in a perception that TVA is no longer building reliable power to meet its needs.

Another New Deal example of public abundance is the Public Works Administration, which helped build public infrastructure like housing, schools, hospitals, airports, and power plants all across the country. Today, each of these projects would constitute federal actions that trigger NEPA and other such laws. Even if we assume progressives would get behind such an agenda, could they also defend it against vetoes of individual projects by the Groups — or from obstruction by private firms empowered by the very procedural mechanisms they support?

Efforts to combat these procedural barriers are further complicated by the political capture of progressive politics by the Groups. Growth of TVA’s carbon-free energy, for example, is held back, in part, by a constellation of environmental nonprofit groups that oppose nuclear power and prefer the status quo of privately financed renewables. Though labor unions vociferously back such growth at TVA, the Groups are the ones that wield influence with the liberal members of Congress who oversee TVA’s financial capabilities. Senator Ed Markey for example — who sits on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, a critical body for TVA, and who once dismissed the authority as “disgusting” for preferring nuclear power to renewables — has proven a reliable voice not for New Deal public power but for the Groups’ vision of it.

A new New Deal program of public abundance would face procedural barriers that the original never encountered, like NEPA and the Administrative Procedures Act. The Hamiltonian progressivism that delivered the New Deal simply isn’t the one that has congealed institutionally in the Groups. “That’s the thing that progressives don’t understand,” Dunkelman, the Why Nothing Works author, tells us. “[Even] the progressivism of 1967 and the progressivism 1977 were totally different animals.” The earlier Hamiltonian progressivism “had wanted to build up centralized power so that it could accomplish big things,” while the Jeffersonian one was, “for good reason, deathly scared of public authority, and wanted to box it in.”

So where do Klein and Thompson stand on this new thicket of rules and institutional blockages? Their answer is the familiar story centrists tell about pretty much everything: the pendulum and its dastardly propensity for swinging too far one way then another. What is needed to correct the problem, they say, is to strike the right balance. Just dial it back a bit.

Socialists have good reason to be wary of the narrative of pendulums and striking balances. Not only does the logic of balance invariably cast left politics as the pendulum swinging “too far,” it also fails to explain anything. It’s the analytical equivalent of a shrug. It says humans will always tend to go too far with things and that’s just the way things go. It doesn’t tell us anything at all about why something has happened, who drove it, or whose interests it served.

In place of this, socialists can offer a materialist explanation: the explosion of NGOs, legalism, and NIMBY blockages to development — and the extra-democratic politics that this ecosystem embraces — are themselves the product of the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s and ’80s. They represent the shift toward a technocratic, highly undemocratic form of governance that cedes power to unaccountable bureaucracies.

This materialist, socialist explanation of post-1970s stagnation must begin with a brief recounting of the Left’s own critique of bureaucracy.

The socialist defense of the public sector is not a defense of government per se, but rather a defense of self-governance — that is, of democracy. If Enlightenment liberalism was right to critique the unaccountable power of kings, lords, and bishops, then it follows that unaccountability and domination exercised by capitalists — or, more accurately, by markets — must be subject to the same critique. When a capitalist decides that a certain good or service will or will not be produced, they are commanded to do so by the imperative of profitability, a commandment no less unaccountable than that of a king or a queen — even if the entity that issues the order is unconscious and amoral.

If not by unaccountable commandment, then the only viable alternative for deciding what is to be done — what is to be produced and how — is collective deliberation and voting. This requires allocating tasks to individuals (elected representatives and, thence, civil servants) to carry out the mandate of the majority.

But if capitalist power — that is, private enterprise — is inherently unaccountable, it does not follow that state power is inherently accountable. The most obvious case of unaccountable state power is a state-owned enterprise under an authoritarian regime. Unaccountable market coordination has merely been replaced by unaccountable coordination by the ruling party, little different from domination by feudal lords.

This latter phenomenon is precisely why socialists dating back to the 1920s and ’30s, figures such as Leon Trotsky, Yvan Craipeau, Lucien Laurat, and Hugo Urbahns, were among the first to develop theories of bureaucracy to explain the horrors of Stalin’s USSR. While their analyses differed, they broadly shared a materialist argument: that a bureaucratic elite can arise when cut off from mechanisms of accountability, and that it will, over time, develop interests of its own.

This theoretical analysis of Soviet bureaucracy would go on to inform broader socialist critiques of bureaucracy wherever it emerged. By the 1970s, the Left had developed internal critiques of both welfare-state and trade-union bureaucracies — critiques that owe a great deal to these earlier attempts to theorize Stalinism. In both cases, even though western welfare states and trade unions were democratic, institutional arrangements had emerged that increasingly sheltered actors within them from accountability. These actors, in turn, began to act in their own interests, distinct from any mandate they had been given.

Today, the Left tradition of anti-bureaucratic critique can be extended further. It applies just as well to the contemporary ecosystem of NGOs, academics, lawyers, and property-owning NIMBYs that can apply the brakes to production and abundance. This ecosystem functions as a social group, operating largely outside of democratic control, in its own self-interest, and often at odds with the general good.

The neoliberal revolution did not just break the strength of trade unions. It also empowered new bureaucratic organizations, sending many left-liberal intellectuals scurrying away from organized labor, where they had been based for decades, and off into sinecures in the newly emerging phenomenon of the NGO, as well as in academia and law. These other social locations lack the explicit mechanisms of democratic accountability and the daily proximity to production that unions or labor parties maintain. They are cut off from not only from workers themselves but also from the tacit and formal knowledge workers possess about how production actually functions.

This is how, for example, a green climate NGO can believe that an electricity grid entirely dependent on variable renewable energy is viable (“100% renewables”), while any union member in the energy sector could quickly explain how such a system would fall apart. (As it happens, Klein and Thompson are themselves much too optimistic about renewable energy — a trait common to many journalists and other knowledge workers like them.) It’s also how a once-reasonable critique — articulated by left-wing academics and development NGOs — of how postwar foreign aid was tied up in neocolonial and Cold War imperatives transmogrified into an anti-modernist critique of development tout court. Ironically, this turn can be just as neocolonial and condescending in its indifference to the actual desires and aspirations of people in the Global South.

In the case of public developer TVA, the Group that’s spent decades as its leading antagonist, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, has been headed by the same executive director for over thirty years. When one of us asked whether his organization has any democratic means by which members could change its opposition to nuclear development at TVA, the answer was simple: no. Maybe the regional billionaire whose foundation funds a good chunk of their work doesn’t approve.

New York presents another example. As one of us recently reported for Jacobin, Governor Kathy Hochul announced a groundbreaking initiative of public abundance: the state’s public power authority would lead the development of a new nuclear plant, to boldly go where capitalists are not. Unfortunately, the state’s environmental NGOs are nearly unanimously opposed to the prospect of new nuclear. Even the Public Power NY coalition that unites NGOs and the Democratic Socialists of America won’t get behind the project, despite its vociferous backing from the state’s industrial labor unions. The NGOs’ hostility to nuclear is too strong.

Like any unaccountable bureaucracy, NGOs can begin to operate in their own self-interest. That does not always happen, but often enough, the survival and growth of the organization becomes its primary purpose. What is to be done when the original aims of an NGO are all met? Tie up the organization and lay off all those thousands of staff and executives? Of course not. New missions are invented.

The pivot toward adversarial legalism in the 1970s can also be said to be a product of the neoliberal revolution’s successful breaking of the power of mass organization — not just trade unions but all forms of mass politics. In a world where mass mobilization had become far less feasible, it made sense for liberalism to shift from trying to win popular electoral mandates to winning legal victories. But over the long term, this extra-democratic strategy undermines public faith in government itself. Voters are not wrong to ask: “But wait, who voted for this?”

This left critique of bureaucracy, wherever it emerges, does not replace the left critique of private power; it complements it. The origin of critique is the same for both: democratic opposition to unaccountability that inevitably results in domination.

At the same time, we cannot place all of the blame on the unaccountable, freelance bureaucracy of the Groups. Nuclear power is often held up, as in the aforementioned case of TVA, as a representational example of how NGOs successfully block abundance. It’s true that anti-nuclear campaigns have contributed to stalled deployment of this ultra-low-carbon, highly energy-dense source of electricity. But that’s only part of the story. The primary obstacle, as Vaheesan’s critical review identified, is market failure: the enormous up-front costs of nuclear infrastructure make firms nervous about the long-term risks. It is thus fairer to say that it is neoliberal privatization and deregulation of the electricity sector — not just NGOs — that explain the slowdown of nuclear deployment in the 1980s.

Those of us who have long worked in climate, clean energy, and extraction — who come from the Left and remain connected to industrial labor — can tell you plainly: it’s both unaccountable markets and an unaccountable NGO-academia-legal bureaucratic class that are stalling public progress. In some cases, one pathology dominates, in others, the reverse. Usually, it’s some combination of the two. Either way, the result is dysfunction and stagnation.

Any serious left program has to tackle both problems. A muscular, social democratic program of build-it-now abundance — one that tackles market and bureaucratic obstruction alike — is the only real inoculation we have against global Trumpism.

Apart from their endorsement of Karl Marx’s fettering thesis near the end of the book, Abundance is clearly not a socialist text. It is a manifesto for a broad tent of liberals and centrists, aimed in part at what the authors call “the pathologies of the modern left.” We share concern about these pathologies, but argue the solution is not a retreat from the Left — it is, if anything, a more full-throated socialist politics. Here we can reassert some of those fundamental socialist arguments.

First, socialists understand that the main barrier to abundance is not bottlenecks or the Groups, but capitalism. “Supply-side liberalism” can sometimes rely on a naive neoclassical assumption: supply goes up, price goes down, and voilà — abundance! But this theory ignores the fact that there are very powerful class forces with a vested interest in maintaining artificial scarcity of key goods to maintain their profits. Landlords and real estate developers, for example, do not have an interest in an “abundance” of housing because it would collapse the price of the commodity they wish to sell for a profit. The history of energy is likewise a history of cartels — from the Seven Sisters to OPEC — whose prime goal is withholding supply to maintain prices, rents, and profits for owners. And this only mentions class interests in the sectors covered by Klein and Thompson, to say nothing of the larger political economy that, as Joe Weisenthal notes, “has too much riding on a perpetual rise in the value of financial assets.”

Second, given this reality, achieving abundance requires confronting the power of these vested class interests. In other words, abundance requires class struggle. Many have argued the abundance agenda lacks a “theory of power” — so much so that Ezra Klein attempted to clarify the theory elsewhere. A serious theory of power demands class struggle: to tax the wealthy, break elite resistance, and reclaim resources to fund an abundance agenda for the public good. (It is painful to write this at a time when US tax policy is going in precisely the opposite direction). And this same class struggle also must confront unaccountable power wherever it emerges, which can sometimes mean taking on the unelected freelance bureaucracy of billionaire foundation–funded liberal-left NGOs, and not solely tackling the democratic illegitimacy of corporations.

Third, a theory of power must include a plausible social force capable of and with an interest in shifting the balance of power. For socialists, of course, that force is the working class — about whom Klein and Thompson have very little to say, even as this class is drifting toward Trump and the populist right the world over. The closest thing to an “abundance” society is arguably the Nordic model: abundant, socialized housing, cheap public electricity, and effective and inventive public bureaucracies. These gains are not accidental — they rest on the power of trade unions and the historical legacy of labor and social democratic political parties.

Fourth, and finally, we would insist that it is not only that the abundance agenda needs socialism; socialism also needs abundance. There is a current on the Left, often associated with the “degrowth” movement — that is convinced that there is already more than enough wealth in the world — indeed, there is too much! — and so all we need is redistribution of that profuse wealth. Redistribution is of course necessary — for all the reasons socialists have always insisted. It is a moral abomination that Jeff Bezos can “rent” Venice for a wedding. But we also must confront material reality: humanity simply hasn’t produced enough core goods yet for everyone to have a good life, even if we expropriated every billionaire. The fact is that roughly eight hundred million people still lack access to electricity and even more lack basic access to potable water and sanitation services. If socialism means anything, it means the abolition of poverty for all of humanity — and that cannot happen simply by moving numbers around. It requires building basic infrastructure: electricity grids, sewage treatment plants, high-speed rail, hospitals, and schools.

The barrier to this kind of “liberalism that builds” in the Global South, or indeed anywhere, remains capital’s inability to produce something if it isn’t sufficiently profitable. And we must also reckon with global finance, whose stranglehold on poor nations’ budgets limits even the most modest investment plans.

One might say that socialists — provided we are serious about industrial policy, public sector innovation, and democratic planning — ironically make better builders of capitalism’s promised abundance than capitalists themselves.

For over a century, socialists of every stripe — from Bolsheviks and Spanish anarchists in the 1930s to the right wing of postwar social democracy — understood how capitalism irrationally limited production. The anarchists planned to take over the mines, not shut them down. Sylvia Pankhurst, the Suffragette and left communist, wrote in 1923, in the first edition of the Workers’ Dreadnought newspaper, that production and consumption are “artificially checked” by private ownership. She complained that land usable for agriculture was instead kept as deer forests for the pleasure of wealthy hunters; that capitalists diverted funds to more profitable but less socially useful ends. In a line that could be ripped from any contemporary flame war on X between YIMBYs and NIMBYs over single-family-dwelling homeowners leaning on arguments about the need to protect green space in order to protest the construction of apartments nearby that might shade their view and thereby lower property values, Pankhurst writes: “Country landowners refuse to build cottages on their estates in order to preserve their own privacy.”

We applaud Klein and Thompson’s advocacy of a “liberalism that builds” through effective capacity. But they underplay the extent to which capitalism and class power will prevent their agenda from yielding the political fruit they envision. Ironically, as we were writing this, an explicitly socialist abundance agenda won a major victory: in the Democratic primary for mayor in America’s largest city, New York.

Zohran Mamdani called for an abundance for the 99 percent, pledging to deliver free buses, childcare, and more abundant public housing. Powerful forces are already stacked against him — not just in anticipation of his mayoralty, but even in the lead-up to this November’s general election. But for now, it seems a real test of democratic socialist abundance might come sooner than expected. The lesson of Abundance is that the constraints on delivering such public goods may not come solely from the Right. They are just as likely to be coming from inside the left-liberal coalition itself.