Radical abundance: how to win a green democratic future. By Kai Heron, Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell. Pluto Press, 2025. ISBN 9780745351353
This is an interesting attempt to consider the transition to a society of common ownership in a concrete and practical fashion. The authors identify what they call the two invariant aspects of transition: ‘popular protagonism’ and ‘contested reproduction’, and these are necessary to overcoming the ‘metabolic control of capital’. That is, changes to formal ownership and state control are insufficient means for dealing with what they call the dialectic of ‘bullshit abundance’ (ie the abundance of pollution, authoritarianism, inequality, etc.) and artificial scarcity (the failure to meet real human needs) of commodity society.
As suggested by the title, this book is partly a rebuttal to the ‘Abundance’ deregulation theme that has emerged in the United States (as exemplified by the book of that name by Klein and Thompson, which we reviewed in our November 2025 issue). What they propose though, is something they call ‘Public Common Partnerships’. This is a riff on public private partnerships, or what they identify as the process of the state de-risking capital investment as a means of promoting economic growth. In their version, assets and enterprises that are otherwise unprofitable for capitalists can be taken over by tripartite bodies, made up of representatives of the workforce, representatives of the public authorities and a community trust. The last of these has a responsibility for distributing any surplus generated by the enterprise: either as a return to workers, further investment, or support for other such partnerships. As such, these bodies bring in those more broadly concerned with the reproduction of society, eg those engaged in child rearing or caring, rather than those directly employed. The surplus is in the hands of the community.
They argue that these bodies would enable ‘contested reproduction’ and ‘popular protagonism’ fulfilling community needs while also being an educational tool for increased popular participation in the economy. The authors are clear they do not consider this a magic bullet, but rather a practical tool for spreading de-commodified practice and an educational experience. They pose it, rather, as a political wager, that might move things in the right direction. As they note, they are not calling for the abandonment of other forms of struggle, but adding this into the mix.
They do, in one chapter, though, speculatively examine how a network of these PCPs could plan food production across an entire country. They look to leveraging ‘Council Farms’ which, despite decline, cover thousands of hectares in the UK. They look to movements in Brazil, Venezuela and Kerala as examples to follow.
The authors themselves work on such structures as practitioners, and they point to a number of examples of where such models have been implemented: including a take-over of an in-door market in Tottenham and a pharmaceuticals plant in France.
This does come close, though, to the islands of socialism suggestion that is frequently put to us: the idea that socialism can be created in bits, rather than as a hard change-over from capitalism, which can simply ‘outcompete’ capitalist methods.
The issue is that their examples come from taking on peripheral parts of the capitalist system, bits that it no longer finds productive, which means that these PCPs mostly survive precisely because they are not a threat to the metabolic control of capital. Should they ever become so, the state would be called in to intervene. As the authors note, by the 1970s, in the UK, around a third of housing was council housing: Margaret Thatcher disposed of that with the stroke of a pen, and there is no reason to suppose that a ‘self-expanding commons’ of PCPs could not meet the same fate.
While the authors might well in fact relish such a contest as an opportunity to expand the contestation of reproduction, it seems likely that the result would be the same as the outcome of the Thatcher era: state power would prevail.
Particularly, as the authors claim it doesn’t require political organisation to set up PCPs, but rather public agitation (although how political/governmental bodies come to be involved other than through sympathetic politicians getting involved seems to be a question). If political organisation becomes required, then why go the roundabout way of challenging capital through these bodies, rather than striking at the legal and political structures that sustain it?
This then brings us back to the problem of using PCPs as some sort of educational tool. The working class already manage capitalism from top to bottom, we just do not do so in our own interest. There is no reason to suppose that those, like the Tottenham traders, who engage in a PCP to save their local market or bottle plant, or whatever, will have a desire or interest in challenging the ‘metabolic control of capitalism’. As with any reform-minded movement, the majority of those attracted will be for the immediate goal itself, and they would balk at going further, or even be actively opposed.
This leads us to suggest that there may be a third invariant aspect of transition: consciousness. Unless there is a conscious desire to do away with capitalism, and at least some idea of what is supposed to replace it, there cannot be meaningful popular protagonism, much less contested reproduction.
This book raises important issues around the way in which transition to a non-commodity society can be achieved. The proposed PCPs are at worst harmless, and at best could form a part of the way that the working class can defend its own interests within capitalism (or, maybe, even organise society post-capitalism).
The authors are correct that a wider network of activity is required beyond the state, but for us that is the conscious mass movement for socialism that must include taking political control of the state as a minimum to stop it being used to prevent the spread of a self-managed and co-operative way of organising society from emerging.
Pik Smeet
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