I found much to agree with in Marco Rosaire Rossi’s account of the liberal ‘Abundance’ movement, meaning that my present response will more resemble an improvisational “Yes, And…” than a proper critique. However, this does not mean that there are no potential pitfalls in Rossi’s approach.

If I may restate his conclusion, it would be that supposed virtues like “progress” or “abundance” have no pre-political meaning that could be appreciated in their neutrality, but are instead beholden to the class society that determines what sort of backwardness or scarcity ought to be eclipsed in the course of human progress. This, I totally agree with. However, it also leads me to ask why Milwaukee’s socialists would have felt the need to appeal to such faux-neutral values at the time.

To struggle over the relative ‘efficiency’ of this program or that one is to center one’s politics on an ‘empty signifier,’ a concept that is sufficiently malleable as to be broadly agreeable and motivating. While the use of such signifiers is often associated with populist movements, as terms like “The People” or “The Elite” may as well be the ultimate empty signifier, Rossi’s critique allows us to recognize that technocrats and progressives are no strangers to this tactic either, simply hiding their effective programs behind paeans to scientific management. Of course, this only makes it more troublesome that a socialist would make use of such terms.

While it makes sense that any emergent political movement would want to speak in the language of the day, and the progressive movement of the early twentieth century contained many elements that could be and were radicalized towards a socialist conception of their predicament, we should not ignore that this influence is a two-way street. Even as one attempts to pull a mainstream political debate in a socialist direction, so does that debate constrain what kind of politics can be elaborated. In this instance, the notion that we should evaluate our government on the basis of its ‘efficiency’ suggests that government is a service to be performed for us if not by us, and that the standards of this evaluation can be objectively determined. That socialist government might be inherently participatory, or that this participation may produce a genuine disagreement on what ought to be done, are fundamental issues which a technocratic view of socialism elides. For this reason, I find it little surprising that the Milwaukee faction of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) also turned out to be among the Party’s more revisionist elements, as destructive revolution could only have spoiled their efforts at good government.

Returning to the present, there is another aspect to the ‘Abundance’ narrative that I would have liked to see Rossi focus on. Namely, what is it about the current moment that would produce such a bizarre type of liberalism? The answer, as with the rise of neoliberalism before it, is a shift in the global political economy. As per usual, liberalism’s overriding political objective is to maintain class peace in the face of capitalism’s perennial crises. With the previous Global North paradigm of deindustrialization and austerity no longer paying dividends, the intellectual wing of Capital has now invented a parodic version of the communist final merger thesis, that a last gasp of accumulation, innovation, and consolidation could produce the kind of technological cornucopia that will buy the loyalty of the lower classes forevermore.

To be sure, it could benefit the longevity of capitalism as such to do away with the most obvious rent-seekers of the present arrangement, just as the progressive movement of the early twentieth made the capitalist case for trust-busting. On the other hand, any new regime of accumulation would need to be sufficiently profitable to overcome the political cost of marginalizing those sections of Capital that stand to lose out, like landlords and cattle farmers. Given the speculative nature of any technological leap, along with the danger of overaccumulation inherent to such transformations, this last gasp may well be one too many. This is to say nothing of the social dangers which come with the demand-side changes an ‘Abundance’ regime requires, with both lower working hours and a basic income offering a measure of autonomy to the lower classes that has historically terrified their masters.

Overall, the propositions of Klein and Thompson are strikingly similar to the Keynesian teleology of the post-war era, which fell apart when the stagnation crisis of the 1970s compelled a choice between worker democracy or neoliberalism. Given the risks involved, I would estimate that Capital would rather run out the clock on their moribund estates than grant greater leisure to the peasantry. Their ideal is a world without workers at all.

Finally, a note on the intersection of the ecopolitics of Abundance, as there is much more to critique here than their obsession with efficiency. Rossi is right to point to the severe misreading of recent political history by the authors, reframing it instead as an inter-capitalist spat between rent-seeking NIMBYism and developmentalist YIMBYism. It is also correct to link parts of the former to a reactionary strain of environmentalism.

However, I would have liked to see Rossi go one step further and point to the fundamental false consciousnesses produced by ‘Scarcity’ and ‘Abundance’ alike. The key insight here is that both of these concepts always already refer to a social and political environment, not a material reality that can be technically assessed and addressed. The capitalist view, whether ecomodernist or Malthusian, requires us to pretend that the needs and resources of a given population are an objective question of supply and demand. Thus, when scarcity is in evidence, we either increase the supply (YIMBY) or cull the demand (NIMBY). The socialist solution is to first and foremost reintroduce the political into this question, unify the governed with the governing, and understand that we can build a society adequate to our needs within nearly all material constraints. If I had to put a name to this sublation of both ‘Scarcity’ and ‘Abundance’—though any such name would suffer its own inadequacies—I would opt for the notion of ‘Sufficiency.’ Only a democratic understanding of the limits we can accept or transcend will prove durable. Anything else is either a false promise or an excuse for our immiseration.

-The Inner Moon