Review of Kai Heron, Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell, Radical Abundance: How to Win a Green Democratic Future, Pluto Press, 2025
There is an emerging consensus among progressives about how to pursue a socially just and ecologically sustainable future: economies must serve the interests of people and planet; governments must give priority to ensuring that all citizens have access to everyday necessities and do this in ways that safeguard the natural environment; democratic institutions must be enriched at every level by enabling citizens to participate effectively in decisions that affect them; nation states have a key role to play in planning, investing and coordinating measures to support green technologies and fair distribution; priority must be given to ‘upstream’ policies that prevent social and environmental harms; global and poorer countries must no longer fall victim to the excesses of the rich world.
It's not a definitive list, but these points now usually appear, variously articulated and prioritised, in proposals for a just transition. (See, for example, the ‘Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth’ by UN Special Rapporteur Olivier de Schutter, and recent literature on building a ‘sufficiency economy’ and universal basic services.) Where the consensus breaks down is over how to achieve real and lasting change. Which means, in effect, what to do about capitalism. Can any of this be achieved within the current capitalist system?
For Kai Heron, Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell, the answer is a vigorous ‘no’. The agenda they set out in their book Radical Abundance: How to Win a Green, Democratic Future, chimes with the progressive consensus. However, along with Thomas Piketty, Nancy Fraser, Jason Hickel and others, they argue that the essential dynamics of capitalism – especially its urge to accumulate – are at the root of widening inequalities, deepening poverty and accelerating climate breakdown. It is ludicrous, therefore, to suggest these problems can be solved by applying more of the same.
Most social democratic governments and not a few progressives in policy circles take a different view. ‘Green growth’ is seen as a viable route to fairness and sustainability that doesn’t disturb the economic orthodoxy and its immensely powerful protagonists. Notably, in the similarly titled book, Abundance: How We Build a Better Future, US journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson make a case for economic growth fuelled by technological breakthroughs, less regulation and more effective government.
For Heron, Milburn and Russell, capitalism creates ‘bullshit abundance’, meaning ‘too much of what we don’t need and too little of what we do’. An abundance of choice but too little power. Everyday necessities – from clean air and water, energy and housing, to nutritious food, education, care, transport and medicines – are increasingly hard to come by for growing numbers because capitalism depends on creating artificial scarcity to boost profits and growth. There is, in fact, quite enough to meet everyone’s needs. The trouble is that a very small minority controls the necessary resources and refuses to share. The way to achieve ‘radical abundance’, meaning enough for all, is not to pursue more growth but to shift the balance of power.
Drawing extensively on Marx, Gramsci, Stuart Hall and a distinguished range of contemporary Marxist intellectuals, the authors aim to show why and how this can be done – in theoretical and in practical terms. They acknowledge and try to confront the overwhelming complexity of the challenge. It won’t do just to ‘imagine and describe a desirable post-capitalist future’, or to hope that millions will rise up and take over the state. There’s also no point relying on promising local initiatives to morph into a replacement for business-as-usual. These may be useful developments, but they cannot establish an alternative that is viable, radical and self-sustaining. What’s required, they argue, is to focus relentlessly on the process of transition – and particularly on two ‘invariant features’ of transition: ‘popular protagonism and contested reproduction’.
The phraseology can be daunting, but if you read on you will find that the first has nothing to do with populism, and the second is not about in vitro fertilisation or genetic selection. Popular protagonism calls for participatory forms and institutions that enable ordinary people (the waged and unwaged working class) to become ‘a new powerful collective agent of social transformation’ – personifying, shaping and championing the transition to a post-capitalist world. ‘Contested reproduction’ describes the multiple ways in which capitalism reasserts itself and retains power, and how these can be counteracted by generating new – and more effective – modes of operation under communal control.
The authors’ chief practical proposal is to develop what they call ‘public-common partnerships’ (PCPs). It’s an antidote to the public-private partnership model (PPP), deployed since the 1990s to inject market forces into social and industrial policy. A PCP brings together workers, community and state in a ‘joint enterprise’ committed to serving the public interest and ‘finding ways to meet people’s long-term needs’. It is designed to enhance workers’ control, to share power with a wide range of people in surrounding neighbourhoods, to leverage support from appropriate state institutions, and to generate further PCPs through a ‘self-replicating and expanding system’ that builds social ownership and control.
They examine the recent history of ‘derisking’, whereby the state effectively insures private companies against failure through PPPs, so that that private investment in infrastructure and services ‘is paid off by taxpayers, along with long-term guaranteed profits’. Why not turn this around? Instead of public money derisking private ownership and gains, the authors propose that it ‘go to derisking publicly or commonly owned assets and production’. Indeed, this would be crucial for developing PCPs at scale.
To show how PCPs might work in practice, they explore three very different projects – in considerable detail to which I cannot do justice here. In the first, they show how a group of market traders in North London stopped developers taking over their premises by creating a Community Benefit Society, through which assets or ‘a business, industry or trade’ must be ‘conducted for the benefit of the community’. This formed the core of a PCP designed to build capacity for broad democratic participation and ‘collective responses to shared problems’.
The second (more speculative) example challenges the logic of the French pharmaceutical industry. Drawing on their work with a ‘small group of health and commons activists’ including Médecins Sans Frontières, the authors examine the potential for applying the PCP approach so that decisions about research and production are guided not by profit maximisation but by ‘collectively defined human needs.’ In the third, they sketch out an institutional map for achieving ‘agroecological food sovereignty’ in England. This involves developing more ‘council farms’ (where the local authority owns the land), establishing a national Food Sovereignty Council, and building the power of public bodies such as hospitals and schools to lead the change by procuring healthy, sustainable food.
The kind of bottom-up, people-powered systemic change proposed by the authors can only be a long, drawn-out process. Yet we have already breached the 1.50 C threshold for global heating set out in the Paris Agreement. There is absolutely no time to lose. Capitalism is heavily entrenched in almost every aspect of our lives. It is hardly surprising that working within the current system is so often regarded as pragmatic or ‘realistic’.
For Heron, Milburn and Russell, however, that will just bring catastrophe closer. In their densely argued and trenchantly ideological book, they offer their own version of realism. Face the enormity of the challenge, focus on the process of transition, create new institutions that are fit for purpose, enrich democracy, and build the capacity of people to think and act together for the common good. For unless we are deluded enough to believe that AI will solve all our social and environmental problems, continued pro-growth pragmatism will clear the way for the ‘disaster nationalism’ of Trump, Farage et al. This will soon trample the progressive consensus into oblivion, replace liberal democracy with ‘might-is-right’ authoritarian plutocracy, and let the planet go up in flames.
Anna Coote is Principal Fellow at the New Economics Foundation
Image credit: Radical Abundance [Cover], Pluto Press (2025), Fair Use.