Socialism and Abundance

New Podcast and Essay on the Biggest Debate of 2025

“In particular, Trotsky located the origins of bureaucracy in scarcity—‘when there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order.’ He believed bureaucracy could be overcome by the achievement of abundance.” ~Ian Birchall, “Bureaucracy and Revolution.”

I’ve always felt the core of the socialist project is rooted in the concept of abundance. Many associate capitalism with a kind of abundance — and it is that — but it is a constrained abundance only for the few, while the many suffer through artificial scarcity and deprivation.

So, you can imagine my surprise when the liberals Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance took the world by storm in 2025 leading to much…discourse. The book, indeed, recognizes its debt to socialist thinking, and favorably cites Marx’s fettering thesis. But the debate that followed was extremely frustrating. Nearly everyone on the Left rejected Klein and Thompson’s framework as just more warmed over neoliberalism. Few grappled with the insights in the book, and the more nuanced calls for a fundamentally new political orientation in the Democratic Party focused on growth, technological innovation, and increased supply if key goods like housing, energy, and medicine.

So, I’m just putting up a post here to alert subscribes (welcome!) to some new content from me and my co-authors on this abundance debate. First, my essay with Fred Stafford and Leigh Phillips first published in Jacobin, has been updated (and profusely footnoted) for the scholarly journal Catalyst “The Left has Always Fought for Abundance.” You have to subscribe to access, but it is truly worth it!

Second, here on Substack or any podcast platform, you can read or listen to a really great conversation I had on abundance with Vivek Chibber. I think I made some OK points, but Chibber didn’t just ask questions, he really brough substantial insight to the conversation (owed to his decades of research into the nature of the state and industrial policy). I can’t recommend this conversation enough!

That’s it for me. My semester starts tomorrow, so pray for me that I can keep posting to this platform.