"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.”"
https://jacobin.com/2025/08/klein-thompson-abundance-liberalism-socialism/
#Abundance#Socialism#Bureaucracy#Capitalism#Inequality
