Interview | Building a world of radical abundance

At The World Transformed (TWT), rs21 members interviewed a range of writers and activists. In this article we speak to Keir Milburn, writer, researcher and activist about Radical Abundance. He is co-director of the research action organisation Abundance, author of Generation Left and co-author of Radical Abundance: How to Win a Green Democratic Future. He also co-hosts the #ACFM podcast on Novara Media.

rs21: Could you start by telling us a bit about what Radical Abundance is? Why did you write this book?

Keir: There’s a history to Radical Abundance: me and the other two co-authors (Kai Heron and Bertie Russell) were involved in various kinds of political activity together. Bertie and I started kicking around the idea of public common partnerships, which we saw as a way to push back against public-private partnerships. It’s the idea of taking social ownership of assets. We’ve been doing this work for a while, and the second half of the book looks at some of the projects we’ve been involved with. One of those is an attempt to bring a pharmaceutical company in Lyon into social ownership. So, workers would be in control, and local authorities would also be involved in a facilitation role, but in addition there would be a common association – in this case a common health association – which would decide how the surplus produced by the company would be invested. From out of our involvement in these projects, we decided to write a book so we could work through the theory of transition we’d been developing. So that’s how I’d sum it up: a theory of anti-capitalist transition and strategy for it. 

The first half of the book is about the problems we face and it’s there we make a distinction between ‘bullshit abundance’ and ‘radical abundance’. We can understand this distinction through reference to our work on pharmaceutical production in France. We were invited to join a network of pharmaceutical workers, researchers, health activists and commons activists seeking to develop pharmaceutical production and research through common ownership. The network formed in response to two problems. Firstly, was the experience of the Covid-19 vaccines, which were developed with public money and then copyrighted – a decision which easily killed several million people in the global South, by my estimate. Another part of their motivation was fighting back against the shortage of common medicines, such as paracetamols. There’s an artificial scarcity of what we need. When a company owns the patent on a medicine and it comes to the end of a patent, they spend an incredible amount researching chemical compounds that can mimic the effect of the existing medicines, so they can have the new intellectual property rights and maintain their monopoly and profit. This is called ‘evergreening’. What we want to do is create spaces for democratic deliberation on economic decisions, insulated from the pressures of capitalism. That’s a reversal of what we have seen with neoliberalism and its institutional reform, where key economic decisions have been insulated from democratic pressure or political pressure. Part of what we want to do is give people control over investment, based on what they prioritise and what they value. We want to ensure that the surplus of one partnership could help start another one, and then another. What we want to do is start the creation of a self-expansive dynamic in the commons.

The book seeks to cut through the stale eco-modernist/degrowth debate that has been happening for some time now. Ezra Klein published a book recently that focused on abundance, and it’s kind of like the Labour Party, in that there’s a big focus on growth. But we’re currently experiencing ecological deterioration, so it’s a case of: a growth of what? An abundance of what? Who decides that? If it’s capital, we know where that goes. The first chapter sets the stakes and differences between bullshit and radical abundance, and the second goes into the history of anti-capitalist transition, where we analyse how transitions come about. Normally with traditional theories of transition, there’s an initial rupture, and then transition away from capitalism begins. We turn this on its head: we think transition is the bigger category. We need to start transition now. 

So we argue that there are two key elements of any anti-capitalist transition: we have this conception of ‘contested reproduction’, taken from Soviet theorists, who sought to address the problem that we rely on the existing infrastructure to survive. This means that any process of transition involves building up a new system, following a new economic logic, alongside the old system. What we aim to do is make sure that as little decision making and transition as possible happens under the logic of capital. So there are two economic logics at play, and we want to make sure that we are not reliant on the logic of capital, and that the logic of capital is subordinated to its alternative. For us, this means democratic planning. Our strategy of transition is aimed at setting up the conditions by which we win that contested reproduction with capital. After all, I’m not going to go into a revolution if I don’t know that my friend’s insulin is going to be produced. One way we can make sure of that is through having our own pharmaceutical company and producing it ourselves.

The other key element is popular protagonism. By this, we mean expanding the number of people taking control of their own lives; they are the protagonists here. There’s a good quote by Stuart Hall we use in the book: 

Once the logic of capital, property and the market are broken, it is the diversity of social forms, the taking of popular initiatives, the recovery of popular control, the passage of power from the state into society, which marks out the advance towards socialism. We can envisage a ‘partnership’ between state and society, so long as the initiative is always passing to society, so long as the monopoly over the management of social life does not come to a dead halt with the state elite, so long as the state itself is rooted in, constantly draws energy from, and is pushed actively by popular forces.

You don’t ignore the state, but you have to move the resources from the state to the commons, where the initiative is moving from the state to the commons, or society.

rs21: What is something you’d like to see come out of TWT?

Keir: Well, a thing I’m excited about in TWT is there’s been a change this year from previous festivals, which I think has to do with the Palestine movement. There’s been a lot of focus in the assemblies on building class power, setting up social centres and social infrastructure. Our book is a contribution to thinking about how these things can play a role in anti-capitalist transition. In the book we make the argument that this is what a transition must look like, and then we look at movements around the world which have elements of this, and then make a conjunctural analysis; what are the opportunities in Britain and Europe that we can make a strategic wager on? We weren’t sure about the environment the book would be launched in, but actually it seems that it’s talking to a lot of the concerns people have.

rs21: What traditions or historical struggles do you draw from, or feel a connection with?

Keir: We talk about various struggles. We had a panel at TWT on Friday, and we got a comrade over from the Basque country, where they do a huge amount of economic planning in the city of Hernani. They plan a really big amount of the economic activity, and there are a lot of commonly owned assets. We also talk about the Berlin campaign for socialised ownership of housing, where the assets of landlords were capped and the rest were passed into this common kind of ownership. They passed this referendum, and it’s currently in process, with some resistance from landlords, but it’s very interesting. We talk about economic planning in Kerala and Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi, as well.

rs21: In the most direct terms, what do the politics of your book mean for people?

Keir: The project is to democratically plan what we need. But that’s not radical abundance, that’s a pre-condition for it. Radical abundance is what is created when you remove the fear and insecurity that accompanies life in capitalism, when, for example, you don’t know if you’ll be able to pay the rent, or you don’t know if you’ll still have your job in a year, and replace it with free time and agency. Radical abundance is the excess, the hugely increased possibilities that open up when you have addressed necessity.

Radical Abundance is published by Pluto Press.