We need usable futures

Abundance not as an agenda but a goal

Last Thursday, Combinations (a publication of the RadicalxChange foundation), published a review essay that I wrote on Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. I’m not going to repeat here what I say there; it’s available for free, so if you want to read it, just click on the link! Instead, I want to make the implicit argument explicit.*

One of the big problems of American politics - and of politics in plenty of places elsewhere - is that we lack usable and attractive futures. The result is the current battle between the defenders of the present, and an incoherent counter-alliance that brings the cultists of an imaginary past and the evangelists of an impossible future into common cause.

Because I am weird, I think that the most immediately useful aspect of Klein and Thompson’s book is not its specific argument about how to get to the future.** It is that the book has the promise to reorient the presentists around the prospect of an attractive future, and the different paths you might take to get there. On the one hand, as Dan Davies says (riffing on post-punk philosophizing), if you don’t have a dream then how’re ya gonna have a dream come true? On the other, no single dream is capable of foretelling the One True Path To Abundance (or, for that matter, any other desirable goal) so you want to have useful arguments between people with different dreams, and different plausible paths.

Out of abundance, Abundance came. Something that likely isn’t obvious if you haven’t written a book for a broader audience, is how much writing is about winnowing down. You are writing about a vast, complex topic for an audience that is almost certainly impatient with complexities. You summarize difficult and heated debates among people deeply concerned with the topic you are writing on, but you can’t present more than than the thinnest abstraction of what they said, and perhaps not even that. Your duty is not to the participants in those debates (much though they may be annoyed if they aren’t mentioned), but to a general public whose interest, very reasonably, is not in the particulars of who argued what, when, and who said what in response, but in what is immediately relevant to the outside world.

Another non-obvious thing is that the Torment Nexus is a nearly inevitable side effect of intellectual success. When an author sells an idea to the the world, people don’t just download the idea into their heads, just as the author conceived it. They pick it up because it can be adapted for their own purposes, or react against it because it seems to threaten something that they care about.

It’s useful to be aware of both these facts when you read a book like Abundance. It both radically summarizes a very messy debate, and takes a particular position in it. Klein and Thompson are perfectly frank in explaining that this is what they are doing. They acknowledge that there is some parallel debate happening on the right. They say plainly that they aren’t going to talk about it. They take a lot of things for granted in order to talk about the things they do talk about. Most everyone in their imagined audience is in favor of the green transition. So they take that as a given, and focus instead on how the green transition can and should be imagined as part of a possible future of abundance, rather than one of material privation.***

Equally, people have quickly started putting the book to work for their own purposes. The liberals whom the book is aimed at are divided over what happened last November, and what ought happen next. Crudely summarized, some think that Kamala Harris lost last year because she was hampered by the left and the legacy of the Biden administration. Others contend that she lost because she was too centrist and too cautious. In electoral/policy terms, this roughly maps onto the disagreement between ‘deliverism’ and ‘popularism.’ I don’t believe the book was written to intervene in these fights, and it doesn’t fit cleanly into them.**** But if it is nonetheless shoehorned into the agenda of one or the other faction, it will lose much of its usefulness and force. Equally, to really succeed on a bigger scale, “abundance” needs to become bigger than Abundance, not just leading liberals to converge on a common goal but leftists and conservatives too.

That is why I wrote the essay that I wrote. Like everyone else who has written about the book, my own narrow interests color my interpretation. And I have two that I’m aware of (likely plenty of other prejudices have crept in without my knowing). The first, which I don’t talk about directly in the piece, is that I would like to see common cause happen between centrists and left Democrats around some attractive goal such as abundance. The second is that I don’t think that agreement needs to happen yet (there is a long way to go before it’s possible to do any of this at the national scale), and I’d like to see a much bigger debate happening before we get there, including not just those particular factions, but people to their left and right as well.

Klein and Thompson necessarily cut down on the variety of arguments around “abundance” to tell the story that they do. That is a necessary part of telling a story. But to have that story do good work in the world, it can be useful to reintroduce some of that variety again. That is why I talk about the pre-history of the book as I understood it: to draw out a couple of threads of the debate that it drew on. There is a right-abundance that was focused on markets before it took off for deep space, and a left abundance that draws on the old ideas of Red Plenty. That is why the review tries to weave those skeins back in again, to increase the variety of proposed paths through which we might find our way to a richer and better future.

As Suresh Naidu pointed out to me in conversation, there is a solid case to be made that Peter Frase’s “Four Futures” essay is the ur-text of the modern Abundance debate. I haven’t seen Bhaskar Sunkara, Ben Burgis and Mike Beggs’ forthcoming book, which I guess will look to revive some version of the Red Plenty argument. And there are interesting arguments on the right too - e.g. Tanner Greer’s ideas about where Tocqueville-meets-state-capacity. In short, there are many futures where abundance might be possible, and many different proposed paths to get us there.

The worry - as Frase’s original essay makes clear - is that extremism - combining scarcity with vicious hierarchy - is a possible future too. Moreover, there is a real risk that a future of angry scarcity might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is the future that Britain created for itself in the Brexit referendum. Liam Kofi Bright wrote about this last week, just before the UK local elections.

So when I say "people want more stuff" I do not mean that, say, there is some budding proletariat consciousness in the UK wherein the people cry out for control over the means of production. Alas, no. Rather, I mean they simply want access to more goods. People want to be able to afford a decent place to live, and they don't like the idea that their country is going to become poorer. … second fact about voter preference: people also want to share the stuff with fewer people. … many voters took the lesson of the 2008 crisis and its aftermath to be that you need to have Your Guy in power to ensure that when it comes time to decide who has to take a hit, they'll ensure The Others are cut out rather than you.

… the dynamic that I think is driving present politics arises from the fact that you cannot have both of those things. The ways of having less people are also ways of having less stuff. And, contrary to Hinder's tacit degrowth ideology, nor is there any practical way of shrinking the population faster than you shrink the pie, so as to be left with more stuff to share among the rest of us. We don't have the infinity gauntlet. Nor does the mass cleansing violence fascists dream of actually deliver the outcomes they claim, even setting aside its moral horror. … So instead the political mainstream has adopted a two tiered response of trying to appease the desire for fewer people just enough to scrape by politically while at the same time performing some miracle or another to will growth into being despite that.

… The UK government's recent "pivot to AI" seems to me a move of desperation, the hope that there is some miracle cure that will supercharge the productivity of labour so as to help us escape this cycle. Well, colour me sceptical - I think Labour high ups do not believe this on grounds of evidence, but out of sheer wishful thinking. If only this were true, if only there was some way of making some change on an electorally relevant timescale wherein we could actually generate more stuff without needing more people, and without even needing to find some way to cut out the Undesirables!

One terrifying prospect for the U.S. is that the Trump faction wins again in 2028. Another is that the Democrats regain power - but that like Keir Starmer’s government, they trap themselves in a vicious cycle where universal expectations of less generate factionalism and political stasis, which further deepen those universal expectations.

That is why I think that abundance is important as a goal. We need to aim towards some version of abundance to escape the trap we’re in. That too, is why I think that disagreement about how to reach that goal over the next couple of years is valuable im two ways.

First, no faction on the left or right has any monopoly on the wisdom about how to get there. It is only through argument - and experimentation in those bits of the federal system and local politics where experimentation is possible - that we can figure out what to do when we can do it. Second, if we can get to a place where the major argument is about how to get towards abundance, not just between center left and centrists, but across the political spectrum, we - for a very broad value of we - will be halfway towards winning the fight we need to win. Far more is politically possible when we are disagreeing over how to get to an attractive future, than when we are struggling to ensure that we are as close to the top of the pile as possible in a horrible one.

We need usable futures that can orient current politics in fruitful ways. Abundance - in the broadest sense of that term - is the closest thing to a common denominator across such futures that I know of.

* When I read Abundance, I discovered to my mild surprise that I was thanked in the acknowledgments. I suspect that this is down to a very early workshop around the project that Margaret Levi, Steve Teles, Angus Burgin and I helped organize. The first version of the book I saw was the copy I got after publication: everything I say in the review and this essay is plausible surmise on the basis of publicly available information.

** Much of which I am generally sympathetic with - but I have little that is interesting to add.

*** If I had written a proper review of the book, rather than the typical ‘here is how this book illustrates the things I am thinking about’ con-job review-essay, I’d have said a lot more about the vignette describing what a future of abundance might look like at the book’s beginning. While I found it a bit static, I thought that there were an awful lot of implied political struggles behind the statics, which would be worth unraveling. The faith in a successful green transition is one. Another is the central role of public interest AI, which could only plausibly have happened through some very messy political-economic fights.

**** Abundance has next to nothing to say about electoral strategy, but if you were to try to retcon one in, I think the most plausible version would be a kind of deliverism that suggests that actually-existing deliverists are going about creating new constituencies from big policies all wrong. If that interpretation is right, it’s awkward for both the major policy factions in the Democratic coalition right now.