Real Abundance Requires Class Struggle
Today liberals lead the call for abundance. But if they really want to deliver plenty for all, they’ll need to confront the entrenched power of the capitalist class.
Democrats have learned to embrace economic abundance thanks to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s best-selling book. (Elizabeth Flores / Star Tribune via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Vivek Chibber
Over the past year, Democrats have learned to embrace economic abundance thanks to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s best-selling book of the same name. But is this the same kind of abundance the Left has traditionally argued for?
In this episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber is joined by Matt Huber, coauthor alongside Fred Stafford and Leigh Phillips of a new Catalyst essay titled “The Left Has Always Fought for Abundance.” Together, they discuss the need for an energy infrastructure build-out, the historic origins of stagnant state capacity, and what socialist abundance entails.
Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and published by Jacobin. You can listen to the full episode here. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Matt, we wanted to talk with you about a review essay you cowrote with Fred Stafford and Leigh Phillips that’s published in the latest Catalyst, which is called, interestingly, “The Left Has Always Been for Abundance.” And that title comes from the fact that it’s a critical engagement with this now-literary phenomenon, the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which is not only making enormous waves but is arguably reshaping some of the debate and the orientation inside the Democratic Party. So it’s really something that the Left has to come to terms with.
Also, because it’s, as you suggest in your article, taking a position that is kind of strange for somebody on the Left to be arguing for, because you would think it should be the commonsense, default position of anybody on the socialist left, at least, which is that you stand for increasing people’s material well-being, their standards of living, providing them with a livelihood.
And instead, it seems like a controversial subject. So the first thing I wanted to start with, Matt, was that you note in the review that a lot of the criticism of the Abundance book has come from the Left, from what’s called the Left. How would you understand that?
Well, obviously, there are long-standing rifts, particularly with Ezra Klein. I think if you go back far enough in the Bernie era, and even before 2016, to the network of what were referred to as neoliberal centrist shills in theVox media landscape, Klein was at the center of a kind of pro-Obama, centrist wing of the Democratic Party. He’d be the type of guy who’d be like, “Yeah, Medicare for All sounds great, but we can never get it passed because of all these nuances about the American system.” And he became a kind of skeptic of Bernieism. So I think there’s a lot of long-standing animus toward him, in particular, because of that history.
Coming into this new rebrand of his agenda to reframe the Democratic Party, I think people have gone into it with very hostile thoughts just to begin with. And the fact that the book does talk about sweeping away some of the restrictions on things like housing construction, it’s just very easy for people to say, “Oh, here’s Klein again, doing neoliberalism,” and to paint the book as just warmed-over neoliberalism, deregulation, a sweep of any kind of concern with the common good, and we are just going to build, build, build. But as you suggest, it ultimately is about trying to harness state capacity to deliver material goods, things like housing, energy, medicine — these kinds of core public goods that obviously any Left should want there to be a more effective building of and distribution of.
And I think one of the book’s most powerful elements is that it’s actually trying to point out that where the Democratic Party is in power in cities or blue states, these are places where the government is seen as totally unable to deliver on basic things. They talk about [Barack] Obama promising high-speed rail, but not bringing it forward. Joe Biden promised a lot of broadband in rural areas, but just couldn’t do it. In Democratic cities, you can’t afford housing. There’s sort of a general social breakdown. So if the Democratic Party is going to be the party of government that believes in the public goods, they’re failing at delivering them.
Ultimately, a lot of these nuanced arguments they make in the book get completely overtaken by this kind of branding as just warmed-over neoliberalism. And it doesn’t help that there have been a lot of dark-money networks around this abundance brand that are coming from pretty nefarious corporate sectors, and they’re doing a lot of conferences where people say horrific antiunion stuff. And that, again, can overwhelm the sort of nuances of the book, which does make some valuable arguments.
Let’s step back from the nuances and just look at the big picture for a second. One of the points that strikes me is what a different moment that book exemplifies than, say, the preceding twelve years or so, where, out of the networks around the Democratic Party, the single most important vision of social justice that was coming out was to not so much to focus on increasing the quantity of goods and the availability of resources, but papering over the disparities and fixing the disparities in their distribution.
So, for a long time, social justice wasn’t so much about more housing, more broadband, more health care, but making sure that it was appropriately distributed across the human genome, right? As long as you go in there and count the heads, people will be fine. And it was the Democrats’ desire to fend off demands for actual increases in people’s livelihoods, wages, and health care, and to instead say, “Shut up, let’s just make sure that it’s the appropriate distribution across genders and races.”
Whatever criticisms one has of this book, the fact that it’s focusing on delivering on the supply side, on increasing availability, is a phenomenal change among the Democrats. And it’s another tacit or explicit realization on their part that we’re entering a new era where the old tactics of simply replacing availability with disparities aren’t going to be the effective strategy, don’t you think?
Yeah. And that’s another thing leftists have complained about: that the authors say redistribution is not enough. And that has angered those of us who really think a viable welfare state is a crucial bedrock of any just society. But they are keen to say, “We can’t just redistribute the existing wealth around and hope that’s going to actually solve a lot of our problems.” The book has a lot of faith in the power of technological innovation and harnessing production to, as you said, increase supply.
One that’s close to me is increasing the supply of clean energy, and that is not about moving stuff around, but about a total change in our bedrock infrastructure system. And that is going to require a lot of very wonky technological innovation and a lot of infrastructure building.
So, that’s a new approach. And I think one that is pretty welcome, given not only the degrading condition of our current infrastructure, but the fact that having a political platform that’s about really increasing the supply of these basic goods that people depend on. And the devil is in the details. If they’re actually able to deliver that, that could be a real transformative type of political project. But getting there is a whole other story.
Supply-Side (Neo) Liberalism?
It’s useful to step back and consider this for a moment. Because there’s, of course, an obvious way in which a return to focusing on the availability and provision of goods is a massive step forward. But — and this is where the left-wing skepticism does have some resonance — neoliberals have always said, “All we’re trying to do is increase the supply of goods. And what the Left does, and what the state does, is get in the way.”
And so, one can see how this particular message could not only be taken through a neoliberal lens, but could be co-opted and rebranded against all these so-called obstacles that the neoliberals rail against. Chief among which are trade unions, community organizations, environmental regulations, and things like that.
So, it’s worth going into, not just the boilerplate insistence on Thompson and Klein’s part that we need to increase the availability of goods and supply of goods, but also into A) what they think the roots of the problem are as to why they’re not being provided, and B) what the kind of solutions might be, so as to see if their message necessarily veers toward a neoliberal direction, or whether there’s a more progressive element in it that can be resuscitated and that can be brought to the fore toward the kind of ends that a socialist left might support.
I think the critics are right to say they completely ignore that there are classes in society with vested interests in maintaining the scarcity of key goods, not least housing. The other day, Donald Trump even said, “If we build more housing, then people don’t make money on the wealth of the housing.”
Which is the point!
Yeah. And so we have to look at the interests of real estate developers and landlords. As someone who studied energy, I can tell you that the whole history of energy involves attempts to form cartels to withhold the supply of oil to maintain prices and high profits. All these forces are going to fight you on actually building abundance for the working class in particular.
And so, the book doesn’t have any theory of class struggle, any theory of how to actually confront the power of the capitalists to control these sectors. And they’re very ambivalent about how to get to abundance. They’re saying, “We want increased supply, private sector, public sector — we don’t really care. We just want to increase supply, and then magically, the price will go down.”
How’d We Get So Stuck?
Interestingly, the book says two things that are potentially different avenues of explanation, but may be made consistent. The one they explicitly endorse halfway through in explaining why you have this kind of overly sclerotic regulatory state, which is crushing the delivery and the supply of goods, is by an economist named Mancur Olson.
Olson published a book in 1982 called The Rise and Decline of Nations, in which he predicted that as democratic countries get richer, democracy itself gives rise to more and more organized interest groups. Those organized interest groups become demand groups who make more and more demands on the state, and in so doing, increase the obligations of the state, and through the state, obligations of the economy, which takes investable resources. And rather than putting investable resources back into productivity, enhancing investments, and expanding employment, they instead put them into the pockets of these interest groups. And the state becomes a place where these interest groups pass legislation and regulations, each one carving out a niche for itself. And so it becomes an overly balkanized, layered apparatus, captured by these special interests.
Now, Klein and Thompson kind of say, ‘Well, that’s what’s happening here.’ But the problem is that, in a democratic state, there’s an inevitability to the state being overburdened by all these demand groups. Okay, well, that’s one explanation for where this is coming from.
The problem, of course, is that there’s, in their own book, this counterfactual — sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit — that other rich countries are doing this better, European countries in particular. Well, none of those countries are dictatorships. They’re all democracies.
So, the Olsonian framework starts falling apart when you see other democratic countries with states that don’t fall prey to this kind of overregulation and paralysis, which means the real problem isn’t democracy. The real problem is the second part that they talk about, which is state capacity. You have a government, a state, that for some reason is committed to providing more, wants to provide more, but even where it tries to, it can’t.
Now, the question is, who’s getting in the way? If it’s democracy, you should expect citizens groups getting in the way. But if it’s a class state, as you’re saying, well, you should expect that the real resistance, the real blockages are coming from the more empowered groups, the wealthier groups.
And here, there’s a really interesting post that Adam Bonica put up on his Substack. He’s a Stanford University political scientist, and he actually has data on this. What he shows is that, if you look at the people filing the court cases against new housing, highways, and railways, 75 percent of those court cases have been filed by the wealthy — half by housing associations and real estate developers and another 20 to 25 percent by businesses. So there’s a sense in which, yes, of course, there’s a vulnerability to all these projects through the court system, and that the court system is used to block and to put obstacles in the way of any new project.
But it’s not democracy that’s doing it. It’s wealth, which you can have without democracy as well. It’s the class character of the state and the economy underneath it.
Which means, then, that the real obstacle is not too much democracy, but not enough democracy. There needs to be greater empowerment of citizens groups and ordinary voters. And it’s an interesting fact that in the book, they bring up both of these possibilities, state capacity versus too many demands by citizens groups. But they don’t settle on one or the other.
And so, that easily leaves you with the possibility that it’s the Olsonian explanation in operation. And that Olsonian version is a really great weapon to use against things like trade unions, saying there are just too many demands coming from them.
Yeah. And Josh Barro basically said that the biggest barrier to abundance is trade unions.
Yeah, exactly.
So there are already people saying this. They might differentiate the United States from Europe by being a particularly legalistic society. And they trace this move toward legalistic blockages, which, by the way, to your point, if you have wealth, means you can afford lawyers. Dan Wang has this new book on China, Breakneck, which contrasts China as an engineering state that builds stuff with the United States as a lawyerly state that is good at procedures and legal processes, but not necessarily at building.
And in the context of that legalistic focus, they do point out that on the Left, people like Ralph Nader in the 1960s and ’70s formed a kind of activism, which was basically, I think, the term was “sue the bastards.” We are going to get a team, an army of lawyers attached to NGOs that sue the government, right?
A lot of it, in very noble ways, tried to force the government to actually enforce rules and laws on the books, whether that be the Environmental Protection Agency or OSHA, and really hold the government’s feet to the fire. But after decades of this, this has, you could argue, paralyzed the government’s ability to actually just function because they’re always getting sued, sometimes by left-wing citizens groups.
All the conversations about “is abundance neoliberal?” hinge on the concept of deregulation. And I think one of the most important things Thompson and Klein are arguing for is that deregulation in the general sense of just freeing the market for the private sector to do stuff is one thing. But I think they’re much more interested in the ways in which government and the public sector have become shackled and regulated and hindered from acting in the public interest because of this overly legalistic culture where anything you try to do can be blocked here and there by a variety of lawyerly types of forces, which again, as to your point, really skew toward the wealthy.
You know, for the last twenty-five years, until the Trump election, the Republican Party’s main strategy was just to block everything, to not let anything happen. And it was a way of delegitimizing the government and making sure that, if they can’t get their agenda passed to actively dismantle the state, what they’ll do instead is discredit the state.
Absolutely.
Now, it’s an important point to keep in mind because the Republican Party was, at least until the last eight years or so, not just in terms of its funders, but also its voters, a party of the middle and upper middle class. So, when we say that they’re throwing a log jam into the works, they’re representing moneyed interests. They’re representing the wealthy here.
And it was a slash-and-burn strategy against a welfare state that they felt they did not have the power to dismantle frontally. I mean, they’d done a lot of it, but Social Security was still around, Medicare was still around, Medicaid was still around. And so the idea was, let’s just not let them get anything done.
Now, the reason I bring that up is that’s what you do when you can’t opt for your first option, which is to transform the state in the way you’d like to transform it. Well, this is what citizens groups and so-called Nader’s Raiders ended up doing.
It’s one thing to have a court-based strategy as an adjunct to a more mass strategy, a mobilizational strategy, because that’s the positive wing. It’s very hard to enact positive change through the courts. What you can do is use the court to block things.
So you have two wings to your strategy when you’re a real movement. The movement tries to push things through legislation. And then, through the courts, you try to block attempts at furthering a right-wing agenda.
But by the 1990s, when the movements had actually died down, all the liberals had left were the courts. And that overtook the liberal vision of how to fight for social justice. It’s a kind of legalistic vision of social justice, right?
And so that’s the rational kernel in Klein and Thompson’s critique of liberalism. That liberalism, weirdly, from being this transformative ideology associated with the New Deal in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, ended up becoming an ideology that, on the one side, defends the state because the state’s where all the payments are coming from to the poor. That’s where health care is coming from. So you want to defend the state.
But at the same time, it’s so wedded to the courts that using the state to actually make transformations becomes next to impossible by virtue of the liberal strategy itself. And it has become this strange kind of dualism inside the liberal mindset.
Let me say, we also review in the essay, this other book called Why Nothing Works by Mark Dunkelman, where he points out that, all throughout American history, there’s been a battle between, on the one hand, a Jeffersonian vision of, “We’re going to take down corporate power and break it up and redistribute it into smaller scale kind of enterprises that can compete. And then, we’ll have a kind of just small-scale capitalism.” And then, on the other hand, a Hamiltonian vision, which is sort of like, “That previous history of small-scale production is being destroyed by capitalism, and that’s okay. And what we need is a strong public sector, a strong form of public power that can really counter the centralized corporate power of our era.”
But, Dunkelman points out that with the Hamiltonian approach, there is always a danger of overrelying on centralized, unaccountable bureaucracies, right? And I think that’s why the1970s neoliberal revolution resonated across all these different registers, because there was this frustration with, to be clear, whether it was trade union bureaucracies or welfare state bureaucracies or whatever else in the Pentagon.
I mean, all these very rigid, centralized hierarchical bureaucracies were becoming more and more unaccountable to the larger population. So there is a danger of, I think we’re pretty clear in the review, we’re much more on the Hamiltonian side. We want centralized public power to deliver things for millions of people, but there are dangers, and we need to take seriously how to integrate democracy into these large-scale public institutions.
Big Public Power
Yeah. I mean, this goes back to the point that the real issue here is not that there’s too much democracy, but it’s wielding democracy in the right direction. Because, without some kind of actual support from below, from citizens groups, from trade unions, from voters, governments that are trying to have a transformative agenda are just going to find themselves twisting in the wind against the power of capital. And some of it will come through the courts, some of it will come through electoral funding, and some of it will just come through business confidence, the ordinary thing.
And so, the real issue is whether democratic forces can be mobilized to the point where they can back a genuine transformative agenda of some kind. And this is where I think the book really falls short, because if you admit, as they do, that state capacity is the issue, well, what does state capacity do?
You can measure state capacity and the ability to actually act on the laws that have been passed. Do you have enough civil servants? Do you have enough clerks? Do you have enough engineers? And that’s an element of state capacity. But the other issue is, well, when you don’t have a lot of power, when you don’t have a lot of support from below, and say you’re trying to put into place a new agency, like the CHIPS Act, or you’re trying to put in a new agency that’ll deal with nuclear power or something like that, if you feel you have a genuine mandate, what you’re going to do is take the existing part of the government that has dealt with electricity or with health care, and you’ll say, “Look, you’re out. Because you haven’t gotten the job done. We’re putting into place a new agency, and we’re going to give it real power.” And it’s going to enact the legislation that’s been passed. It’s going to actually implement the laws that have been passed.
Now, what Thompson and Klein show — they don’t make a big deal of it, but this is what, if you study the state as I have for most of my career, you’ll notice — is that, whenever a new agency or a new law is put into place, it’s actually layered on top of all the older ones. What that ends up doing is just adding one more node of regulatory checks on a very long list of regulatory checks, which have been sedimented over time by previous governments and administrations. What that ends up doing is actually weakening the capacity of the state to get anything done.
And that’s been the story of the US since the 1960s and ’70s, which is, no liberal government has actually come into power with a really ambitious agenda. When they have, they don’t feel like they’ve got the mandate or mobilizational power beneath them to do it. So they, at best, pass these weak laws with weak agencies that have no real power, and all they can do is become one more choke point.
And so you end up worsening the problem. That’s stagnant state capacity. But the solution to that state capacity isn’t deregulation per se, but different kinds of regulations, better regulations, which have real citizen support behind them.
The book has elements in it that point in this direction, but I don’t think the authors are fully aware. They’re journalists, so they don’t study this stuff. They don’t have the vision, or I believe the background, to separate out the different elements that go into this.
A good example of what you’re talking about is the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which I would consider original New Deal–style abundance. The TVA was established in 1933 by Franklin Roosevelt as a huge public power entity that built massive hydroelectric facilities. They also created huge forestry programs, which meant conservation, so they were really about solving all sorts of ecological issues facing the South at the time. And the TVA built this huge public power system in that part of the country, which lasted several decades, but its power has been increasingly constrained by our governmental system.
It has a debt limit that really constrains its ability to do more ambitious projects. But more than anything else, after this revolution in the regulatory state that, in many ways, was for the good in the 1970s around environmental regulations — which the book talks a lot about — this started to really constrict what the TVA could do. As our article points out, the TVA is the only utility in the country that, because they’re at the federal level, they have to go through what’s called NEPA permitting constraints, which is the National Environmental Policy Act of the early 1970s, and which requires a whole lot of bureaucracy to get any project off the ground through a NEPA review process, which is also something that has become a polarizing discussion about whether or not this is deregulation.
But again, when the crown jewel of public power, public sector capacity, is being constrained by regulations, that’s a different type of deregulation. It’s a type of deregulation that’s constraining what the public can do, what the state can do. And so that can be an issue.
Yeah. So the TVA is an example of creating a new agency that actually has real power and doesn’t have to kowtow to the existing eighteen agencies. And that’s a vision of how an actual, duly empowered state can implement what we might call an abundance agenda, which, over time, has now been hampered by the same kind of bureaucratic sclerosis that Thompson and Klein are talking about.
But that’s not an inevitable result of democracy. That’s a result of actually democratic mandates being undermined.
I think, ultimately, Klein and Thompson’s argument is based on a wager that if some mythical, hypothetical Democratic Party actually did deliver cheap housing and clean energy, then it would stitch together a material constituency. And I think they’re not too up-front about it, but I think in the background of their argument is the idea that, “We need to find a way to win over working-class voters who have gone to the right. And this is one way to do it.”
But for us on the Left, I would say we are on the precipice of actually having an experiment to see if this kind of theory of power works, because, despite all the hate the book got from the online left, it was quite striking to have Zohran Mamdani basically endorse a lot of the ideas in interviews, and also give a big speech where he called for “Abundance for the 99%.” And I would argue, if he were to accomplish his agenda of fast, free buses and universal childcare, and really deliver those material benefits to millions of New Yorkers, I think that’s the kind of theory of politics that Klein and Thompson would say would stitch together a coalition for this kind of politics, behind Mamdani.
Now, of course, as you were suggesting before, governing New York City is not easy and not uncomplicated. He’s going to have to navigate this thicket of preexisting laws and regulations, as well as the fiscal architecture, the municipal bond market, and the way in which Albany controls the taxes — there’s so much.
But I think at a fundamental level, if he actually does deliver these material benefits, you would hope he could start to build a political movement on that basis. And I think it’s sad we have to be this basic, but having a Democratic Party that actually delivers material benefits to the working class would be a major breakthrough in politics.
If you look at the last twenty-five years of what’s called the Left and what’s dominated their discourse, it’s been two things.
It’s been about disparities, which, at its root, is essentially neoliberal justice. It’s basically saying, we don’t care how much is being produced. We don’t care whether or not the cost is correct. We just want to make sure that the gender and racial composition of the recipients exactly matches that of the population. And that is manna from heaven to neoliberals, when you say that that’s your vision of justice.
And the second thing has been degrowth, which is just a suicide note. It’s a political suicide note. There are elements of degrowth that are actually quite rational, quite sensible, such as shortening the workweek and imposing very high taxes on the richest to put a ceiling on wealth inequality. Those are all fine. But to package it the way they have, in this idea that there’s too much consumption and, even worse, that it’s coming on the backs of the toiling poor in the Third World and that the West only got rich through this, it’s suicidal.
And I think Mamdani’s overture to the book and his kind of adoption of some of the languagethe book uses, again, as we said earlier, it’s a sea change. And you’re right that it is a step toward stitching together an electoral constituency that’ll be long-lasting, that’ll be enduring, because they’ll see that the government actually does something for them.
And it’s a massive step forward because this is an electoral constituency that goes back to the original constituency of the social democratic and the socialist left. It’ll be working people who are not being carved apart on racial, gender, and sexual lines the way the Left has been doing, but instead are brought together around a common agenda. And oddly enough, I think the abundance book is a step toward that.
Yeah, we’ve seen the cost-of-living crisis, the affordability crisis, whatever you want to call it, whoever’s in power, people are upset about it. People were upset with Biden about it, now they’re upset with Trump. And it just shows that our political system has shown a lack of care and inability to do anything for people at the basic material level — what the yellow vest movement called “the end of the month struggles.” They’re not worried about the end of the world; they’re worried about the end of the month, paying rent and utilities, things like that.
And basically, both parties have not been able to address those very material concerns. And that’s why our politics is completely cynical and culture-war, because no one’s actually addressing the core material needs of workers. And if someone could, that could be, yes, a sea change politically, I’d say.
Energy Democracy
Let’s think in terms of specifics. You brought up utilities, and this is a subject you know a great deal about. We keep hearing now that, with the crushing demand coming from the power centers and AI, an already creaky grid is now being asked to provide electricity at a level it may not be able to keep up with for quite a while.
So, if there’s any one sector where there’s a really big need for increasing supply and creating new supply chains, it’s utilities and power. So what would a more radical and left-wing agenda look like on that score? And would it have to confront some of the same dilemmas that Klein and Thompson are talking about?
Yeah, I mean, it’s clear that, just when it seemed like the Left was starting to be about, “We need to build stuff again to address climate change, we need to build all this clean energy and stuff,” since this AI and data center thing, it’s reverted back to its old ways where, particularly for climate activists, all they want to focus on is blocking stuff. “We’ve got to stop these data centers.” I think there are a lot of valiant efforts to shut down particular projects, but ultimately, they are at their core, what the authors call NIMBYism, right? They’re just trying to stop some bad project from happening in their backyard.
So our approach to electricity would say that building out new electricity generation is vital for the climate crisis, and we should be trying to build as much as possible.
In the piece, when we talk about abundance for electricity, we focus on nuclear power. It can produce so much electricity, it’s very reliable, and it’s ultra-low carbon, so it’s a climate solution. Unions love it, which a lot of people on the Left sort of don’t like to confront. But this, again, fits into a kind of abundance agenda because it would argue that the more electricity you build out, the more technological innovation and economic growth can come behind it and lead to even more breakthroughs when it comes to electricity and the grid, and ultimately catalyze a lot of the other infrastructure build-out.
We don’t just need to build power plants; we need to build many more transmission lines, many more EV charging stations, and much more. And that can only really come with more supply and more production.
And there’s really no way of confronting the climate crisis without a lot of building because it’s about changing our existing infrastructure system, wherein, to this day, basically 80 percent of our infrastructure runs on fossil fuels. So it’s like a civilizational building project to rejigger and revamp that entire infrastructure system, and that’s going to require a lot of building.
So that’s very different from just thinking that solving climate change means scaling back our existing systems and blocking this and that, and blocking fossil fuels. You can block fossil fuels all you want, but people still need energy. We have to completely replace our current fossil fuel system, and that’s going to be a lot.
I think this is an important point to stress. You are not going to block fossil fuels unless you provide alternative sources of energy. If that is your agenda, it’s an open invitation to the far right.
It’s basically saying to the far right, “We give you power, please come take power away from us.” Because you’re telling people that we’re going to wind down fossil fuels, we’re going to send your bills skyrocketing, and yeah, at some point down the line, if we think it worthy and if it checks the right boxes, we’ll give you wind and solar to replace it.
Yeah. And I mean, this has actually happened in Europe in particular, where efforts to move toward net zero, very aggressive efforts, have, in many people’s minds, raised the price of energy. And of course, the whole attempt at what’s called carbon pricing basically tried to say, yes, we want to raise the price of energy, which, yeah, it was a total gift to the Right.
Building Socialist Abundance
So, suppose you’re trying to implement this agenda: who would be the key agents pushing for it? Because we need, as we said, a real mandate, a real push from below. And then at this moment right now, okay, the fossil fuel industry is in the way of this kind of transition until it feels that it’s ready to make the profits off of it. But are there other kinds of agencies and groups that are gunning for something like a more assertive push to build nuclear plants and similar projects?
Yeah. So, first of all, unlike Klein and Thompson, we are big public-sector people. We think this build-out should be done for the public good, and it should not be done on the basis of profitability or market competition. It should be done by public sector agencies.
So it just so happens that some of the most aggressive efforts to build out nuclear right now in the United States are public power agencies, the Tennessee Valley Authority. And just this summer, the New York Power Authority, led by Kathy Hochul, has made an effort to build nuclear plants.
And they’re doing this because private-sector investors have basically said it costs a lot and isn’t particularly attractive to them. And there’s a whole literature on how just basic investment in clean energy is not a particularly profitable gambit for capital in general. So really, we have a lot of excitement around these public power agencies.
And what’s striking is how, because they focus on nuclear for a lot of reasons, there’s been a cool response from the Left in terms of these types of public power wanting to build a bunch of nuclear.
And by “cool,” you mean tepid.
And sometimes, an outright hostile reaction from some, particularly these green NGOs! But again, there’s just a different coalition behind this kind of build-out. Kathy Hochul’s press conference had tons of unions there to sing the praises of this nuclear project in New York State.
And so, it should be obvious, but, if we want to build a bunch of stuff, a bunch of infrastructure, a bunch of power plants, it’s going to be building trades, it’s going to be blue-collar workers, it’s going to be skilled electricians and other types of trades workers who are going to be at the core of that kind of politics of building. And what is striking is how those workers who have very smart, rational ideas about decarbonization are, culturally, the polar opposite of the types of people who populate the climate movement, the climate activist movement, and the NGOs that are agitating around climate.
You have this kind of cultural or class divide within the advocacy networks. And we’ve been saying for a while that, rather than trying to win over unions to sometimes quite insane visions of wind-and-solar-only technology — a 100 percent renewable grid, which a lot of the green NGOs are pushing — we should try to figure out how to let these industrial unions lead the way and let them set the agendas for what these building politics should look like and what the campaign should look like and what the demand should look like and really let unions lead.
There is an organization in New York that’s now gone national called Climate Jobs, and that’s basically their philosophy: get these industrial unions at the table and let them lead the way in terms of the vision of what this politics would look like.
This is a large topic, but let me ask you for a summary: Is there any particular reason to promote nuclear over wind and solar?
Well, I did just write a Jacobin piece about this. There are a lot of reasons.
The main one we like to talk a lot about is the capacity factor, which is a technical term that basically describes how often you can expect your energy resource to be available to the grid. And for nuclear, it’s like 92 percent. This means it’s an energy that you can rely on pretty much 24/7. The capacity factors of solar and wind are roughly 23 percent and 34 percent, respectively. They’re very low, especially this time of year.
And this time of year, in the Northern latitudes, people will say, “Oh, you just get batteries.” But batteries aren’t going to help you. You need weeks of storage to deal with the reliability problems of solar and wind.
Now, there’s a lot of technical literature that says it’s possible you can build more transmission because it’s sunny somewhere and windy somewhere. But nowhere in the world has anyone been able to really get above maybe 50 to 60 percent solar and wind, whereas countries like France or Sweden have a combination of large-scale hydro and nuclear, and can get upwards of 80 to 90 percent of their grid to be completely low or zero carbon.
So, what you’re saying is that there’s a workable, implementable strategy that’s already been tried elsewhere. It’s not that one should be dogmatically against wind and solar; it’s that there’s no reason to be dogmatically against nuclear.
Yes. And wind and solar can be very useful. And I think unions are always very clear that we want a broad-based strategy that harnesses a multiplicity of technologies. It’s only the green NGOs who are like, ‘We want to block everything except wind and solar. We want this 100 percent renewable grid.’
Green groups will also often block large-scale hydro, which is a renewable resource. So I would say it’s the green groups who are the most narrow and dogmatic, whereas the unions are much more open and realistic, I would say, which is the key.
Class-Based Climate Strategies
It’s interesting. I mentioned Adam Bonica’s data. The fourth most active litigator on these issues after housing associations, businesses, and real estate are actually these what’s called nonprofits, NGOs.
And it’s an interesting issue because it makes perfect sense, because these are not mass-movement organizations. They have two levers. One is money — if they get lots of money from donors like the Sierra Club, they become a millionaire’s environmental group. And the other, of course, is the courts. And these NGOs will, of course, be staffed by people of a fairly elite class background with the attitudes that elites bring toward workers and the interests and demands of workers.
So, it’s kind of interesting to see that it cleaves into two different sorts of environmental strategies and policies: wind and solar attracting a certain group of middle-class and wealthy people, and nuclear attracting trade unions.
Yeah. And this plays out in the TVA region. In the piece, we cover an organization called the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, which has been suing them. They’re trying to block everything that TVA is doing. The TVA has immense popularity amongst poor and working people throughout the Tennessee Valley. They serve millions of people within their region. And of course, the TVA is something like 60 percent union density. Now think about that in our country.
That must be the last remaining part of the political economy that’s more than 15 or 20 percent.
Yeah. And interestingly, in the 1930s, when the TVA was set up, they got a legal carveout. They’re not in the NLRA, but they’re also not in state public-sector law, which is a whole other story, and which makes a lot of unions kind of squeamish about public power in various places.
But in the Tennessee Valley, they’re gung-ho, and the unions are among the biggest spokespeople for the value of public power and the value of the Tennessee Valley Authority. But again, you have a whole network of professional class–staffed NGOs that are resisting this, doing so under the rubric of defending communities and democracy, right? But as you said, there’s nothing more top-down.
And we get a lot from the Catalyst essay written by Melissa Naschek and Ben Fong on NGOism. It’s a great piece that I recommend weekly, it seems. They make the point that these NGOs are very top-down organizations. They’re not mass-membership democratic organizations like unions, and they are advocating for themselves.
And that’s where we say, we do want to draw upon this kind of left critique of bureaucracy, which the Abundance book is really about. But we draw on an earlier argument, going back to Trotsky’s critique of Stalinist bureaucratic states and things like this.
NGOs are bureaucracies, right? And they’re undemocratic, they’re unaccountable bureaucracies. But what’s really nefarious and problematic about NGOs is that they claim to be the agents of democracy, the sort of representatives of the most oppressed, of the downtrodden.
The keyword is “civil society.”
Yeah. And the way in which they use communities as the sort of agent of their representation is really a problem. And I would argue that there’s a much broader, I would even call it working-class, democratic mandate behind the Tennessee Valley Authority. Again, that’s the vision of a mass, public sector–led, union-led abundance that we’d like to advocate for.
Yeah. I think the “abundance” slogan is going to dominate the Democratic Party in the coming years. And the issue is going to be whether it’s going to be abundance that’s sought and chased through a neoliberal set of instruments, where you take the anti-regulatory rhetoric and you deploy it against unions and citizens’ organizations and tenants’ groups and such, or whether you deploy it towards a more centralized, social democratic mass agenda to transform the state and give the executive a real mandate to clean house and to put in agencies that actually have the power and the ability to pass and implement legislation.
Yeah.