The Democratic Party’s faction of corporate-backed politicians has begun pushing a new buzzword: “abundance.” Their argument is allegedly simple—America’s economic problems stem from too much “red tape.” If we slash regulations on housing, energy, and infrastructure, they claim, we can unleash economic growth and lower costs for working people.
Essentially, as long as we grow the pie, we’ll all get a bigger slice. Don’t worry about how big your piece is compared to your boss’s. As long as he is expanding, surely he’ll pass on some of that growth to you.
Trickle-down economics much? Neoliberalism, but with a “progressive” veneer? What does this all mean for workers, however?
The Abundance agenda is just smoke and mirrors. Under capitalism, deregulation does not create abundance—it only increases the exploitation of workers and the planet. The real barriers to prosperity are not “bureaucratic bottlenecks” but the capitalist system itself, which hoards wealth, suppresses wages, and resists any policy that threatens its drive for profit maximization.
Yet another third way
The Abundance scheme is being peddled by some younger faces in the Democratic Party think-tank universe, but it’s got a pedigree stretching back decades. Remember Bill Clinton, the “New Democrats,” and their “Third Way”? That got us welfare “reform” and government downsizing.
Every time this corporate faction pops up pushing the same old ideas, they inevitably try to convince us that it’s “fresh thinking.” This time, it’s New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and former Atlantic magazine staff writer Derek Thompson. And like their intellectual predecessors, they’re showcasing their ideas as going beyond the categories of left and right.
In their best-selling book, whose title gives this trend its name, the two argue that core economic principles like supply and demand have become ideologically loaded. Republicans focus too much on the “supply side” and see cutting taxes on the rich and crippling government as the only means of generating economic growth.
“Supply-side economics was about getting the government out of the private sector’s way. Cutting taxes so people would work more. Cutting regulations so companies could produce more,” they write in the intro to Abundance. But what happens when the market can’t or won’t supply the things society needs at a price everyone can pay, like housing, for instance?
Well, that’s when Democrats, they argue, have stepped in to help but ended up making things worse. By focusing on demand, the Dems caused new distortions in the supply-and-demand balance.
“Progressivism’s promises and policies,” they say, “were built around giving people money, or money-like vouchers, to go out and buy something that the market was producing but that the poor could not afford.” Key examples cited include the Affordable Care Act, food stamps, Section 8 housing vouchers, Pell Grants, child care tax credits, Social Security, minimum wage, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the list goes on.
Undoubtedly aware of the popularity of such gains won by popular struggle over the decades, Klein and Thompson are quick to acknowledge the importance of such policies—“We support them.”
But—and it’s a big but—Democrats became so “focused on giving consumers money to buy what they needed” that they “paid less attention to the supply of the goods and services they wanted everyone to have.”
The progressive wing of the Democratic Party, according to our authors, just “learned to look for opportunities to subsidize” and “gave little thought to the difficulties of production”—the kind of difficulties faced by real estate developers, manufacturers, insurance companies, and the like.
The solution, according to the prophets of Abundance?
A world “beyond redistribution.” Stop worrying about income inequality and class division; unleash the power of business to solve society’s problems. Something new, new, new. A new theory of supply. A new way of thinking about politics. New means of promoting growth
In reality, though, what they advocate is old, old, old. Old right-wing economics. Old corporate-aligned politics. And old ideas about how to generate expansion by catering to the desires of capital. Essentially, they’re just telling society to take pages from the right-wing playbook but put a human face on the cover.
The myth of capitalist abundance
This kind of effort to drag the political left toward not just the center but all the way to the right is perpetually popular among the well-funded and well-connected in Democratic Party circles. Occasionally, they manage to sell it to the public, too, as they did with Clinton in the 1990s.
Often, however, their efforts fail to gain steam among regular working people, even if they prove a hit among certain wealthy liberals or Democratic neophytes who have no ideas of their own and are looking to hitch themselves to a platform and source of campaign cash.
Recent polling conducted by Demand Progress reveals just how unpopular the “abundance” messaging really is. Only 12.6% of voters were strongly convinced by it, saying they were much more likely to support a candidate who pushes Abundance themes. Overall, less than half of those polled said they’d consider it.
Many working-class people don’t see cutting regulations and pulling public benefits as the type of program they’re interested in. By contrast, a majority of Democratic voters—which is who the Abundance crowd needs to convince—59%, expressed a preference for what the pollsters framed as a “populist” message—one that targets corporate monopolies and aims to trim their power over our everyday lives.
Consistently, the Demand Progress numbers revealed the appeal of a pro-working-class, left-wing agenda. An astounding 81.6% of those polled endorsed “getting money out of politics, breaking up corporate monopolies, and fighting corruption.”
Abundance-style “grow the pie” arguments grouped around themes like “reducing regulations that hold back the government and private sector from taking action” fared far more poorly. Turns out most people don’t trust big business or bosses to have their best interests in mind.
A deeper dive into Abundance prescriptions reveals the kind of “red tape” that they’re really interested in cutting. They completely ignore the demands of labor unions for protections like prevailing wages, health and safety rules, and Project Labor Agreements. Their program dismisses regulations as mere obstacles rather than hard-won defenses scored by the working class against corporate greed.
The president of the California AFL-CIO, Lorena Gonzales, called out this betrayal earlier this month, recognizing that deregulation means worse conditions for workers. “Abundance,” she wrote on X, “is just eliminating worker and environmental standards we took decades to earn.”
To illustrate matters further, in a recent public discussion with corporate-backed Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y. (who has declared his loyalty to the Abundance creed), podcaster Josh Barro, another “abundance” sycophant, said this: “When I look at policies in New York that stand in the way of Abundance, very often if you look under the hood, you eventually find a labor union at the end that’s the driver.”
Those pushing the Abundance message want to dumb down the terms of debate. They’re for more of all the good things in life, while the left, by upholding stifling rules and bureaucracies, favors policies that leave us all with less. It’s a strawman argument, but they make it while arguing their creed is “a return to an older tradition of leftist thought.”
They even conclude the book by recruiting Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to posthumously endorse their cause, saying the two authors of The Communist Manifesto celebrated capitalism’s superiority to feudalism because it ended the “fettering of production.”
“Marx’s aim was not to turn the production machine off, but to direct its ends toward a shared abundance,” Klein and Thompson say. “There is much he got wrong, but one need not be a communist to see the wisdom in this analysis.”
It’s true, real Marxists—not the liberals who quote him when it’s convenient or convincing—do believe in abundance. Marx and Engels did indeed say the task was to, quoting Klein and Thompson once more, “unburden the forces of production and make possible that which had been impossible to imagine.” The problem, as they analyzed it, however, was that capitalism can’t pull it off. The capitalist system is not designed to meet human needs; maximizing profit above all else is in its DNA.
Consider airline deregulation in the 1980s: Yes, it initially made flights cheaper, but at what cost? What about the monopolization of the major airlines? Deregulation crushed unions through anti-worker laws, slashed wages for workers in the name of “competitiveness,” and created precarious jobs.
The Abundance cheerleaders would call this “progress.” Workers know better, and the consumers who now face price-gouging for air tickets do, too.
Capitalism’s productivity crisis
Corporate profits in the U.S. have soared to $3.6 trillion, an 80% increase since 2020. Yet instead of reinvesting in production or higher wages, corporations funnel this wealth into stock buybacks and financial speculation.
Just look at what’s happening with corporations like Stellantis. Last month, the United Auto Workers released a report that argued the U.S. auto industry could create tens of thousands of good-paying union jobs by simply better utilizing existing plants instead of offshoring production and funneling profits to Wall Street.
As covered previously in People’s World, in 2024, the U.S. had the capacity to produce over 14.7 million vehicles but built only 10.2 million, leaving 4.5 million units of unused capacity. This gap, the UAW argued, is the direct result of corporations prioritizing “high-exploitation race-to-the-bottom practices”—shifting production to low-wage countries while slashing domestic jobs. Big capitalists do this to increase worker exploitation dramatically in order to rake in enormous profits.
Our capitalists no longer serve to expand productive capacity; they simply extract more from workers while investing less in our country and our people. Do those preaching “abundance” really think further deregulating these same corporations even further will be the answer to worker precarity and social malaise? Do they not understand the power of monopoly capitalism?
This is simply the reality of our economy: It’s a system in decay. The capitalist class no longer drives innovation or strives for prosperity. It leeches off the labor of workers while dismantling the very regulations that once restrained its worst excesses. It super-exploits workers the world over and pays no mind to sustainable development for people or the planet.
While the Demand Progress poll numbers showed that voters respond far more strongly to populist critiques of corporate power, these arguments also have limits. Breaking up monopolies or taxing the rich, while necessary reforms, do not challenge the root problem: the capitalist system itself.
True abundance requires socialist planning—an economy where production serves human need, not profit. It requires public ownership of key industries under democratic control. Until then, the “abundance” peddled by corporate Democrats will remain a cruel joke—one that benefits only the wealthy while leaving workers with less.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of the authors.
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