Transitioning Out of Capitalism Towards a Green Future

Sarah Jaffe: Why and how did ​“abundance” become the name and focus you chose for your book and organization?

Kai Heron: ​“Abundance” is a communist category. Abundance happens when you get rid of liberal capitalism so that we are free from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom, where we can do what we want to. Abundance is also the material world that we live in; even with ecological crisis, there’s still an abundance of opportunity in the world that we could orient ourselves towards in a better way, in a more restorative way, for people and planet.

Karl Marx uses this terminology. István Mészáros uses it. Kohei Saito uses it. For the term ​“radical abundance,” we have to give a nod to Jason Hickel.

Keir Milburn: We named the organization and started writing Radical Abundance way before we heard of the abundance agenda. And then we thought, is this a curse or a benefit? We do want to oppose a radical abundance to Klein’s deregulatory neoliberal abundance.

On the front cover of our book, there’s a picture of a strawberry plant. The stalks are green and the fruits are red, so it’s an ecosocialist thing, but also strawberries proliferate through—

Heron: They self-propagate.

Milburn: Each plant propagates a new plant. That mirrors our model of localized transition and how we might be able to spread common ownership projects, one seeding the other.

SJ: You sort of sidestep the growth-degrowth debate. Was that deliberate?

Heron: It was a quite tired debate. Whenever I wrote into this space, I thought of myself as writing as a Marxist ecosocialist and I was always pigeonholed into one of these two things, usually the ​“degrowth” side. When we started writing this book, it was a concerted thing that we discussed: How do we circumvent this whole discussion and start from somewhere else? The notion of growth versus degrowth is too abstract, and even degrowthers would admit this.

Milburn: Growth of what, and abundance of what?

There’s a very famous line in the UK that a disgraced former comrade of ours, Paul Mason, had. He said to someone in the north of England, ​“But GDP is growing.” And they go, ​“That’s your GDP, not mine.”

SJ: You start the book talking about ​“bullshit abundance” and ​“bullshit scarcity” and the illusion of choice that we get in the late-capitalist hellscape.

Bertie Russell: Part of what we’re trying to do with that opening chapter is turn people’s heads to looking for bullshit abundance and artificial scarcity. It’s easy to find examples in your everyday life. The way that musical trends have changed — we might sense that we’re getting access to loads more music through platforms, but what we’re actually getting is standardization of the types of music that we end up hearing. Or the microflora in your gut and the connection to industrial food. We’re having loads of negative health effects as a result of an artificial scarcity of actual bacteria in your gut.

These aren’t just random phenomena to do with food or transport. The abundance of bullshit that we experience in our lives and the scarcity — these are structurally produced and they’re two sides of the same coin.

Heron: We wrote the book so that the beginning would be common sense. We didn’t want to start with Marxist concepts; we wanted people to read it and go, ​“That describes my lived experience with the world.” Once you’re with us that far, hopefully you’re with us far enough to go and read some Mészáros.

SJ: In addressing why you disagree with Klein and Thompson, I wanted to bring up ​“derisking” in particular. What is derisking? Why that is such a key concept right now?

Milburn: Green transition is the problem structuring politics, even when it’s being denied. It’s the thing that politics are circling around, the crisis that comes from ecological collapse and long-term economic stagnation.

In the Donald Trump version, it’s clientelist state bailouts and using tariffs to restructure the global imperial order. But the liberal version of that is derisking.

You could do industrial policy in lots of ways. You can use the resources directly to produce things. China does that to a large extent. But derisking is using state resources to tempt capital to invest in certain areas, or to change the risk profiles, so it’s more attractive to invest in the priorities you want.

If you think about that in terms of ecological transition, Joe Biden’s thing was: ​“We want ecological transition, decarbonization, but only if we can subordinate it to keeping everything the same in the economic sphere.” Our sense is that there’s an opening there. The old neoliberal order would insulate key economic decisions, particularly investment decisions, from political influence. That’s what central bank independence is, that’s why you have the World Trade Organization and international agreements that cannot be reached by national state bodies. Those are the key encasements, as Quinn Slobodian calls them, of markets and decision-making.

What the state derisks, or what the state facilitates to happen, is now an area of contestability. We think that partly explains the big authoritarian surge of the center and the Right: if you can’t encase economic decision-making from politics, you need to encase politics, insulate it from democratic pressure from below. So ban protest, stop free speech.

SJ: In this book, you’re offering the beginning of a plan not just for moving away from neoliberalism, but transitioning out of capitalism — something we don’t hear very often.

Heron: All the focus on decarbonizing from fossil fuels is distracting us from the transition that we need to think about. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has a really good book showing that we’re not transitioning away, we’re adding renewable energy sources. Even China might reach peak coal by 2030, but it’s still going to be heavily dependent on fossil fuels. You can’t get the shutting down of fossil fuel infrastructure under capitalism.

People are thinking about this plan. People like Pat Devine, who we were very inspired by, was an early example of thinking about socialist economic planning. Aaron Benanav has been working on this very closely. Phenomenal World and their work emphasizing the need for planning. Our book, hopefully, is part of the discussion.

Russell: The question of transition is not exactly the question of, ​“What’s the plan?” The question is, ​“How do we start to plan?” The transition that you need has to be so systemic and so all-expansive that you can’t think about some revolutionary break or a moment where everything changes from A to B and suddenly planning is possible, because who’s going to do that planning and where are the skills going to come from? What history have we got of doing any of this? Who controls those assets? All of these questions mount up.

Transition literally starts from the moment that you start doing it. It doesn’t happen in one go; it doesn’t happen in a straight line. We will lose things and we will win things. This is a conflict over how we should govern our territories, how we should govern the way we produce, how we relate to one another. That happens through a plurality of fights.

We’ve got to work out how you start doing it now, not offsetting it until after the revolution.

SJ: You note that transition is more complex than, ​“Now the state owns the company but the working conditions are exactly the same.”

Heron: This was Mészáros’s point, studying the Soviet Union. The state might own things instead of capital, but we’re still having a surplus extracted from us. Nowadays that has a direct relevance because we have parties talking about the need for nationalization, but nationalization doesn’t mean we’re in democratic control of what we produce.

One of our big contributions is to say social property or communal ownership is preferable in most cases to nationalization, or at least should be an alternative that we discuss. Even in our model, we are still extracting a surplus and the division of labor is still capitalist as a transitionary organization. Once workers are in control of how they work and what they produce, they’ll make their relations to production preferable. You won’t make yourself work extra weekends if you don’t want to because, democratically, you can decide not to. Whereas the state might demand that you do that extra.

Milburn: If you want to control the future, you have to control what gets invested and what gets built. That’s how you control what goes on and that’s what capitalism is — capitalists control the investment function. They invest and they decide what gets built. For a long time the state was like, ​“How can we facilitate you? Can we give you this asset?” With the return of industrial policy, isn’t it a bit like the reintroduction of planning to some degree — you are trying to induce capital to change what it invests in.

SJ: You hang a lot of your argument on two concepts: contested reproduction and popular protagonism.

Heron: We try and build on actual working revolutionary struggles with the concepts that we use. ​“Contested reproduction” comes from Evgenii Preobrazhensky. He was a Soviet economist and he was writing about after 1917. He says we are in power but we have a capitalist economy and we need to transition towards a socialist economy. There will be socialist logics at play, but there will also be capitalist logics at play and they won’t just contest, they’ll interpenetrate, to the point where it might be hard to tell what’s tending in a socialist direction and tending in the capitalist direction.

For him, the whole problem of transition was how to further the tendencies towards socialism. In that moment, you have what he calls contested reproduction. We’re reproducing ourselves both within capital and in new socialist directions. Michael Lebowitz takes the concept and says basically everything about transition is contested reproduction. How do we reproduce ourselves differently?

Russell: These ideas have resonated when we looked across lots of other movements and political initiatives, which might otherwise seem like very different initiatives. How could you put Venezuela into the same bag as the housing struggles in Berlin? That’s part of why this terminology, although it is slightly jargonistic, is useful, because it’s helping us to see and tell a story and articulate the way that people are organizing in what appear to be really different contexts.

We are in London, but our context is going to be totally different if you’re in Dallas. And that’s going to be totally different if you’re in Caracas. It’s not about there being a single model of struggle. Transition is the problem of our times. You need to understand what transition is and you need to find a way to make sense of it and evaluate it, and then design a politics that actually puts these things into practice.

In the UK at the moment, water — potable water, wastewater, all of your water services — they’re all privately owned by different investors. One provider, Thames Water — it serves most of London — it’s been privately run for around 35 years now. And the main stressor at the moment is the amount of sewage — so, literal shit that’s getting dumped into the river. The infrastructure has been chronically underinvested. You’re having whole towns where you can’t turn the tap and get any water, in one of the world’s richest nations, where it rains constantly. There’s no investment in new reservoirs, there’s no investment in new pipes and people are seeing their bills go up year on year.

At the same time, you’re seeing the investors and the management class with huge bonuses off the back of government money that’s continued to support them. It’s not surprising that there’s really strong support for the idea of nationalizing it, taking it into public ownership. Something in the realm of 75% of people think it shouldn’t be privately owned.

Our organization, Abundance, recently released a report that looked at different examples where people have attempted to bring these water resources under a form of social property. What that means in practice can be designed in different ways in different contexts, but it means people having some sort of direct control over the way that these companies would run. In Thessaloniki, Greece, they had a model that they wanted to implement with cooperatives. But it’s different if you’re looking in the model in Naples, and so on.

The massive problem that we are facing in the UK — and this is the same in the United States — is huge investment in data centers. Supposedly this is going to deliver these wonderful productivity gains and the economy’s going to boom and then there can be public spending. Trump’s in the UK to broker all these deals of investment into the UK, but it’s contingent on access to water and it’s contingent on us setting up new gas power plants to provide the electricity for them.

When we talk about popular protagonism, the question is how do we — as the people who currently live here and turn on these taps and use this water — how do we exercise some sort of control over our own lives? Who are the main actors in this story? If you start thinking about a water company being a form of social property, why are we not in a position to say, ​“We’re not going to turn the tap on for these data centers”? We need to make sure that we continue to grow our vegetables or to have clean drinking water. What are the different institutional forms through which people can exercise some sort of collective control over the future of what the society looks like?

Milburn: We’re trying to stand that left conception of transition on its head, the idea that you have a moment of disruption, a left government or a revolution, then you have a transition. We take it from Rodrigo Nunes that the transition is the bigger period and there may be elements of disruption within that.

We have to get out of capitalism. What is capitalism’s main source of power? It owns and controls most of the things we need to live. Our model of transition is to constrain and limit the amount of economic activity under the logic of capital and extend the amount of economic activity that’s run under a communal or social logic. We want to subordinate the capitalist logic, but you have to have these two economic logics going at the same time, because otherwise people would starve. That’s capital’s power and that’s what it will do.

That’s why we talk about public-common partnerships as a transitional institution. It’s something that can exist within this logic that has a different logic, and iteratively trying to break with capital further and further.

SJ: You analyze these two currents on the Left of the last couple of decades — the horizontalist movement of the squares and this electoral current of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. But what you’re writing about is a different idea of what popular protagonism looks like.

Heron: We could just talk about organizing workers at the site of production, but never has a strike just relied on the people at the site of production. When miners went on strike, the classic example that we give in England, their wives helped, the whole community came out in different ways, different workplaces coordinated and collaborated to give them food and resources. It leaked over and spilled over the narrow remit of what you might call a workers’ struggle.

With popular protagonism, yes, it’s working-class-led, but it’s much more than just the site of production. We use the language of composition. You are organizing people as they are, as you find them, but the whole point of organizing is that it creates a new kind of collective subject in and through that active struggle.

Russell: With popular protagonism, who are the popular protagonists? Marta Harnecker developed this idea from her work, from India and in Venezuela. She was absolutely adamant that protagonists are not only the workers and they’re also not only the people who already think exactly like you. Disagreement is part of this process. You don’t start from consensus and move forward. It has an effect on you, the fact that you will be in disagreement about how we should make the future together. The process itself changes you.

You start where people are, but it’s through these processes that you create some sort of collective subject of transformation. There’s not already somebody out there you’re going to go and find who’s the privileged subject.

SJ: ​“The workers.”

Russell: That’s not to say people don’t exercise very specific types of power. If you’re in a particular type of work, of course you exercise a certain type of power in that workplace. But, ultimately, everybody ought to be the collective author.

Milburn: One project [we worked on] is Wards Corner market. It’s a market of primarily Latin American and Afro Caribbean traders. They’re classic very small businessmen, petit bourgeois even, a classically politically ambiguous category that can become a source of fascism. Part of the reason for that is they’re led into thinking about their problems as individuals, they’re sole traders who have to pay their bills. Drawing them into a project of collective management and deliberation is a way to add a moment of collectivity to that.

People do have preexisting material interests to some degree, a range of interests which can be actualized. But class is something that is not just given. It’s something that is formed and you can intervene by building institutions in which you enroll people.

SJ: Kelly Hayes, on the Movement Memos podcast, talked about people being socially de-skilled under capitalism. We don’t get to, most of the time, have meaningful debate about what our lives should actually look like. Let’s get deeper into what a public-common partnership is, and how ​“public” and ​“common” are two different things in the framework.

Russell: In the book, we give a general outline of what these things are. There’s three examples, one of which is the production of out-of-patent pharmaceuticals, one of which is productive agricultural land and food sovereignty strategies, and one of which is about urban assets and markets in particular. This is a way to think about different ways that you can own and control and make decisions over all kinds of different types of assets.

Take the pharmaceutical company. You’ve got something that’s a productive asset, which in this instance is a factory churning out paracetamol, and that is governed with a tripartite governance board. Who is on the board? We split it into at least three simple types. One, we imagine some sort of local or regional government — it depends on the context and the asset, but you’ve got some sort of public agency that’s in there. Then, you’ve got the people who work there, lots of different types of workers — you’ve got them directly on the board. And then you’ve got something called a ​“common association,” which is its own organization that also has seats on this board.

That organization plays a specific, important role. In pretty much all the cases we look at, this is territorially based. If you’re talking about a pharmaceutical factory in Lyon, then the people in that common association are just people from Lyon.

One of the key mechanisms here is how the work gets done within that organization. Should you be working faster? Should you be working slower? How do we change the nature of this work? The people who need to be making that decision are the workers, obviously — that’s not complicated. But the question about what you do with surplus is a different question.

There’s no reason why only the people who walk through a factory gate should have a say in what happens with surplus. The people who built the roads that people drive down to get to that factory gate, the people who are doing the cooking at home [contributed]. The wealth that gets produced out of initiatives like this should be social wealth. How do you spend that social wealth? How do you use this to expand this sector? One of the key functions of the common associations is making the decisions about what happens with that money.

Heron: Stuart Hall wrote that, in the transition, you can have a partnership between the state and what he calls society at large as long as power and initiative is always being transferred to society. The idea is leveraging state power, which we recognize has benefits, to transfer power and capacity to workers and communities. At the very top level, that is the function of PCPs, public-common partnerships.

SJ: Your examples come from all over the world. ​“With this law that exists in Italy, you can do this thing. And here’s this law that exists in Ohio.” It’s locally specific, and that means knowing what the law and what the power structures are where you are, but it’s also being able to imagine them differently.

Heron: This is one of the reasons we don’t have a theory of the state in the book, because there’s not just one. [The Landless Workers’ Movement] MST use a particular bit of the Brazilian constitution to be able to seize land. We can’t replicate that in Britain, but we could use publicly owned council farms and repurpose them in a creative way. In London, we used this community benefit society, a thing that’s set up for a completely different purpose by the state.

SJ: I also find the Basque example interesting, because we’re talking about territory that is literally in different countries.

Milburn: That’s similar to Cooperation Jackson. They’re trying to build sovereignty from the ground up, because they can’t access sovereignty at the higher level. The state level is majority white, so they can’t access that.

There isn’t a continuous Basque state because it’s split over different countries. They have to build power bottom-up, establishing sovereignty through economic sovereignty rather than starting with political sovereignty.

SJ: Maybe, to close, we could talk about how you envision scaling from something happening in one place to something growing and replicating?

Milburn: We started by thinking of how to reverse the effects of public-private partnerships, which are part of this neoliberal attempt to remake society through institutional reform. That’s what we’re trying to do as well, but in a different way. The common association — we think of that as insulation, of deliberative democratic processes, from the pressure of capital.

We’re trying to build a self-expansive dynamic into the common association, to combat the self-expansive dynamic of capital. The surplus from one public-common partnership can be deliberated and they can do what they like, but one of the things you’d want to promote is to capitalize a new project — give the impetus, give the knowledge and the staff resources to start a new public-common partnership. And then the surpluses and knowledge developed there, and so on.

We talk about a circuit of commons, where you’re trying to build networks which partially delink from capital. To go back to this pharmaceutical example in Lyon, the structure of it is oligopoly — public-private partnerships, public knowledge captured and turned into huge profits. 

The people who were thinking about how to turn pharmaceutical production into a commons were a network — of pharmaceutical engineers and pharmaceutical workers (quite a few of them retired) and common property and health activists — talking about, what are the active ingredients of this medicine? For most medicines, there are perhaps one or two sources of the active ingredients. Big Pharma wants to shut you down, they’ll just go and buy those two sources of it. 

So if you’ve got one pharmaceutical factory running commonly owned and governed, then you immediately need to commonize this or bring them into a network to protect ourselves from predatory activity. In fact, we’d need a European-wide network. That’s one way you move up the levels of scale in that way.

But we also think that there has to be a wider process of political change going on. It’s not going to be some smooth rollout. You will come into conflict with organized capital at a certain level. If you want to have a left government, you better get ready for a fight, because you are going to get it straight away. There’s different ways in which capital fights — they can go to arms and have violence, you have capital strikes, you have capital flight. The purpose of that to is to provoke a crisis of social reproduction of the general population, make cost of living higher and make the government unpopular.

We are trying to build shock absorbers for the moments of rupture. If we have social control over as many elements of the key essential things we need to reproduce ourselves, you can resist the capital strike, capital flight, much more. If you built up popular protagonism, you can defend yourself against violence more as well.

SJ: The pharma example made me think of two things. One was the ACT UP movement educating themselves about medicines and about the drug trials so that they were the experts. It’s also making me think of things that people are doing in the U.S. right now around birth control and hormones for trans folks. Where can we get it? How can we distribute it?

Heron: That goes to the other part of how this expands: Capital is abandoning providing certain things. You could imagine something like a public-common partnership moving in to provide them. Especially with increased climate inflation, the moment something’s too expensive, capital’s not going to provide that anymore. So into that gap, communities and workers step in and start trying to take over those things that we need.

Milburn: Provision is becoming more bullshit or being withdrawn, and there’s artificial scarcity, extracting incredible rents. With the pharmaceutical factory, one of the prompts for these engineers getting together to address this really big problem is that there’s a massive shortage of everyday generic drugs, like paracetamol, particularly in France. Capital is just not providing the basics of what you need.

SJ: It’s much more profitable to make Viagra and heart drugs.

Milburn: Six percent profit on paracetamol, perhaps. Sixteen percent, 20%, 30% on other things.

SJ: This also brings me back to Martin Shkreli, the pharma bro, who jacked up the price of drugs. It was a very telling moment of popular antagonism, but that’s how the whole industry runs.

Russell: Whichever way you go, there’s going to be conflict. The point is to change the conditions of that conflict — to change what the stakes are, to change what your defensive positions are, to change the positions you can attack from — to make sure you can feed yourself. If you’re going to need long extensive strikes, how are you going to make sure you can look after each other in them? It sure as hell helps if you’ve actually got some control of assets, some experience in governing them, having built up chains of solidarity across different groups.

There isn’t a single revolutionary roadmap you can drop into every single context. But every context is going to have struggle, and in every context you have to change the conditions and the starting positions of those struggles and what power you can build in these different contexts.

SJ: You’re building both the material security and the social skills to deal with social conflict.