~ Night Moths ~

my readership is likely aware of cataclysmic Central Texas flooding that took place over the 4th of July and in the days after the holiday. at drafting, there were at least 109 fatalities associated with this event. at publication, there are 119. i suspect there will be many more even after publication—the numbers have continued to climb for days now with no obvious plateau, and now they're reporting over 160 missing. it is the worst flooding disaster in the United States in 49 years. it is also an example of how there is no such thing as a natural disaster.

do not let people lie to you. do not let local officials gaslight; and do not let the climate-accelerationist federal government tell you sweet little nothings about how sometimes people just die in tragedies and nothing can be done about it. everyone knew something like this could and would happen here. this situation was completely predictable in every sense and at every level. there is no ambiguity here.

the Guadalupe River is one of the most flood-prone rivers in the United States and has a long history of murderous floods; it killed 10 people in 1987 and another 31 in 1998. the region it sits in is, likewise, literally nicknamed "Flash Flood Alley" and is geographically optimized for serious flash flooding events. flood events in this part of Texas are like hurricanes on the Gulf Coast: this is what the weather is like here—and local officials are extremely aware of this fact. one-time Kerr County Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer¹ agitated for an outdoor siren system during his time in office, and Kerr County commissioners first debated creating one in 2016 and have continued every year since. inadequacies in the existing flood alert system were also publicly and privately acknowledged after floods in 2015, and then again, and again, and again. it's very clear that everyone knew—eventually—a major flood was going to strike Kerr County and cause havoc. it's also clear that they all knew the imperfect—or in some cases outright nonexistent—warning system would be a particularly serious problem for the region's many youth camps. almost all of these were built in high-risk flood zones (defined by FEMA as having a 1-in-100 annual chance of flooding) and have flooded at one time or another during their existence. (in fact, the fatalities from the 1987 flood were all associated with one such camp.)

the things they wish you were stupid enough to not understand

of course, being aware that a catastrophe could happen—and doing the bare minimum to stop it—still doesn't actually make you look very good when the catastrophe happens and it has a body count like this one. the past few days have been rife with ass-pulls like "Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming" that are obvious bullshit to deflect blame away from where it rests.

the fact of the matter is that local officials, for all their knowing that a catastrophe could happen, seem to have simply not cared enough to actually prepare themselves for such an emergency. now that catastrophe is here, and they look very bad. so they deflect. they blame the National Weather Service for not giving them an adequate forecast in advance or providing ample warning time of the flooding, even though the NWS did on both counts (and was actually remarkably on the ball all things considered). they treat the deaths as acts of God as it simultaneously comes out they refused to coordinate with the NWS in the moment, and retrospectively admit to things like "[not knowing] what kind of safety and evacuation plans the camps may have had". or they insist that warnings almost exclusively communicated through Facebook (relying internet access) and their CodeRed system (relying on cellphone signal) wash the blood from their hands, even though—if they had done their diligence—it was known that in places like Camp Mystic

the young campers [...] likely wouldn’t have seen [such warnings] since cell phones, smart watches, iPads and anything with Wi-Fi capability were considered “unacceptable electronic devices” to bring and “not allowed,” according to a recent list of instructions sent to parents.

it's nothing short of delusional to pretend the buck stops anywhere besides with Kerr County for what a clusterfuck this has been.

ecological murder-suicide

maybe we wouldn't be here if Kerr County actually spent some money. but the thing about proactive disaster mitigation is that it sometimes isn't cheap and Kerr County is extremely stingy. in 2016, even a $50,000 contract to "conduct an engineering study for a proposed high water detection system" drew pushback from one county commissioner who thought it was rather extravigant; when the county lost out on a grant of $1 million to implement a more refined warning system in 2018, the county could have picked up the tab (it has a budget of almost $70 million) but opted not to and has mostly dawdled ever since (even after receiving other potential sources of money to finance such a thing such as ARPA funds). spending millions of dollars, according to both former and current county officials, would have been deeply unpopular and/or required raising taxes—actions that county commissioners are afraid of doing and which, in any case, county residents would raise hell over. as judge Rob Kelly expressed to the New York Times:

[...]the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive, and local residents are resistant to new spending. “Taxpayers won’t pay for it,” Mr. Kelly said. Asked if people might reconsider in light of the catastrophe, he said, “I don’t know.”

you may bristle at taking the word of county officials here given their ass-covering everywhere else, but i don't actually find this particular claim hard to believe. there are a lot of people who genuinely hate taxation and think being compelled to pay for something that will ensure they won't die is government overreach—and rural and exurban areas are particularly filled to the brim with people like that. in the case of Kerrvile you need only drive an hour south to the outskirts of San Antonio to find a suburban "liberty city" whose brilliant model of municipal funding is sales taxes and no property taxes.² there's also the fact that the Texas Legislature, earlier this year, quietly killed a bill that would have "established a grant program for counties to build new emergency communication infrastructure."³ the antipathy is deep for spending, or at least certain kinds of it that don't advance a hard-right political agenda.

so if we grant their honesty on this one count, which i am inclined to, what is happening should probably be understood not quite as a form of social murder and more as a combined murder-suicide, if you will. Kerr County and its elected officials are unambiguously cowards who should have done more, and are lying when they say they couldn't have done more, but they inevitably reflect the people who elected them. and the people who elected them were pretty clearly fine with—and may still be fine with, even after this event—an indeterminate number of people dying in service of keeping their tax bill down.

this is going to keep happening

at the end of the day what conservatives want you to believe is that your anger about this is placed at federal employees whose agencies are being defunded and destroyed with a thousand job cuts rather than county officials who thought spending money on evacuation sirens might dampen the county's beauty somehow. they want you to think that what happened here is natural, inevitable, and something we just have to plan around—but it fucking isn't. every part of this was preventable, if not necessarily every death.

Kerr County—or Texas—could have spent money on a comprehensive warning system; they did not for a variety of reasons. Kerr County could have made actual emergency plans and reviewed the procedures for getting people in the camps out of harm's way; it did not because its leadership doesn't seem to have cared enough. its leadership could have coordinated with the NWS, passed along warnings, and ordered evacuations when the severity of the situation became obvious early in the night; but none of this happened until it was far too late. the list is endless, and the commonality is that all of these are human—within our control to influence. Kerr County made a series of choices, fully human ones, that guaranteed many more people would die here than needed to.

similar human-controlled variables are making this possible at the macro-level too. while the consensus seems to be—if anything—that the NWS had more staff on call than it usually does at that time of night, that is in spite of what is being done to the agency as a whole. mass-death like this is an inevitable product of the systemic defunding and de-staffing it is currently being subject to under the Trump administration. Chris Gloninger summarizes what is happening here admirably, saying that:

The FY 2026 federal budget, championed by the Trump administration, proposes slashing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) by nearly 30% and gutting its weather and climate research division by 74%. These cuts are already reshaping the agency: more than a thousand veteran NOAA employees have taken buyouts or been laid off this year, and thousands more cuts are looming. At a single farewell event in May, roughly 1,000 staff walked out the door – taking with them 27,000 years of combined experience. At the NWS alone, hundreds of meteorologists and technical specialists have been dismissed or pushed into early retirement. In total, NOAA has lost an estimated 27,000 years of forecasting expertise in under a year – a brain drain of knowledge that can’t be replaced by algorithms or fresh graduates overnight.

this is problematic if you want people to not die. our success in minimizing mass-casualty floods is in large part because we seriously fund and staff our federal weather service (although there's always been room for improvement on the second count). better infrastructure across the board—nationwide radar, ease of proliferating weather information, the development of highly detailed flood maps and flood datasets, etc—make it possible to identify where harm is likely and get people out before they can be harmed. all of that needs manpower and money, though, and that money is being deprived now in service of a fascist political agenda that denies climate change and devalues work like this as a whole.

our reliance on fossil fuels is another input that cannot be ignored. individual events are difficult to link causally to climate change—so i will not do that here—but catastrophic flooding events, and intense rain events more generally, are made demonstrably more likely by climate change. the mechanics of this are simple and rather intuitive, as Andrew Dessler describes:

Warmer air can hold more water vapor — about 7% more for every degree Celsius increase in temperature. Consequently, the air converging into a storm system in a warmer climate carries more water vapor. Since most of the water vapor entering the storm’s updraft will fall out as rain, everything else the same, more water in the air flowing into the storm will lead to more intense rainfall. That’s it. Not terribly complicated.

so even if we cannot say definitively that the Kerr County flood is a result of climate change, it is inevitable that more floods like this will happen if we continue warming the planet. the recourse here is the same as all things related to climate change: stop using fossil fuels. there is no other option.

if there's any summary i have for all of this it's the title. it's why i made it the title. there are no natural disasters—and this in particular was not a "natural disaster," but rather an entirely predictable outcome. this will happen again if we don't learn from it, and address the underlying things which made it such a disaster in the first place.

notes

¹ someone who, it should be noted, responded as a deputy to the 1987 flood on the Guadalupe River that killed 10 people.

² as an aside: that this city—Von Orny—has been a trainwreck that can't pay for basic services (and has still been facing a fiscal cliff pretty much since its creation) tends to be conveniently glossed over by libertarians.

³ one of the votes against in the House was, in a morbidly ironic case, Representative Wes Virdell (R, HD-52), whose district includes Kerr County. he now says he'd vote differently—i'm sure his constituents are thankful it has taken killing 109 and counting people to change his mind here.

the pre-cult-of-personality history of what is now the Revolutionary Communist Party—the party led by noted crank Bob Avakian—is a surprisingly fascinating one, with many twists and turns as it attempted to find its place in the broader left and solidify its position as the primary representative of Mao Zedong Thought in America. although a never particularly large group (best guesses are that it peaked between 900 and 1,100 members in November of 1977) it was likely the most significant Maoist group in American history and certainly among the most influential of the New Left groups in the 1970s. the FBI, at the very least, thought of it as a significant threat to domestic security; thanks to the tireless work of Aaron J. Leonard and Conor Gallagher in Heavy Radicals, we know that FBI informants had infiltrated the group almost from its origin in the Bay Area in 1968.

but the part of this group's history i want to talk about today is from their early period—approximately 1970, before the FBI had near-singularly honed in on them—because it is an interesting reflection how weird and dramatic the New Left could sometimes be, and the severe optimism (or perhaps, millenarian fatalism) certain leftists had at the time for how a revolution could be won.

first, some background: going into 1970, the Revolutionary Communist Party (still under the name Revolutionary Union at the time, which will be used henceforth) had anywhere from 400 to 600 members and was by all accounts growing rapidly. it had been extremely visible at the Richmond strike of 1969 (done by the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union against Standard Oil of California, now Chevron), and had been particularly successful in recruiting membership from the Peace and Freedom movement. within the Peace and Freedom Party of California—the California appendage of the national party—Revolutionary Union came into control of at least two Bay Area locals. beyond its usual East Bay stomping grounds, it also had particular strength on the campus of Stanford University, where it was an integral member of the anti-war coalition and eventually took in most of the campus SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) chapter. indicative of its broader growth was the fact that it also successfully absorbed another Stanford radical group, the Peninsula Red Guard, who had a substantially more militant outlook than SDS.

this growth served to conceal significant differences of ideological opinion which, in short order, would become the organization's first serious split and briefly but dramatically reverse its explosion of membership. this split was the "Franklin schism," a schism that—to modern leftists—will undoubtedly sound very fucking stupid as recounted here.

the basic ideological divide of the Franklin schism

there were two sides to the "Franklin schism," the first of which was advanced by the eponymous Franklin group (so named because it was stewarded by and centered on Bruce Franklin, who had also been an ideological figurehead for the Peninsula Red Guard), and the second of which was advanced by most of the leadership of Revolutionary Union at the time.

what the Franklin group argued

The revolutionary struggle in the U.S. will certainly be waged primarily in the cities. Unlike other peoples’ wars, which inspire and teach us, ours will be fought in the urban areas. [...]
An important counter-insurgency theorist for the enemy, Colonel Rex Applegate, argues that urban jungles are far more difficult terrain for their forces than any tropical rainforest or mountainous region. Jungles or even mountains are essentially two dimensional, and are subject to saturation bombing with napalm, phosphorous, and explosives. But cities like New York or Chicago, with their high-rise apartments and multi-layered underground systems, are three-dimensional jungles. Furthermore, rural guerillas can never be completely integrated with large masses of people, because the rural population itself is spread out in small villages and farms. The urban guerilla, on the other hand, swims in a real ocean of the people.

and furthermore, argued that

Decaying imperialism is vulnerable to material attack not only as an economic system but also as a physical entity. Its utility systems are delicate, overstretched, indefensible, and absolutely vital. [...] Although it would be adventurism to think that the empire could be quickly destroyed through an attack on its complex system of power, transportation, and communication, we should recognize that large areas can be instantly paralyzed by such simple acts as the blocking of freeways and bridges, the destruction of power stations, and the disruption of communications.¹

what were the occurrences that, in their view, hastened the need for taking up "protracted urban war"? this is unfortunately difficult to say because the argument is rather underdeveloped here, even within the fast-and-loose context of the Franklin document as a whole. the Franklin group was mostly content to say that "the ruling class faces utter chaos at home[...] Lashing out in its final throes, imperialism turns to genocide abroad and fascism at home." perhaps the most concrete thing proposed, analysis-wise, was that

Armed revolutionary acts, including the ambushing of dozens of pigs, all across the country seem to indicate that the Black nation is in a transition from the mass spontaneous uprisings of 1964-1968 to the first stages of organized guerilla warfare.

now, in one sense, it is true that the domestic situation between 1964 and 1970 was exceptionally chaotic and violent that was more amenable to open guerilla warfare than anything before or since. Elizabeth Hinton in America on Fire states that "between May 1968 and December 1972, some 960 segregated Black communities across the United States witnessed 1,949 separate uprisings—the vast majority in mid-sized and smaller cities that journalists at the time and scholars since have tended to overlook." anti-war activism had likewise risen from merely a handful of disorganized dissenters to, around the same time the document was written, a mass movement carrying out a then-unprecedented student strike against the Kent State murders. politically-motivated bombings and terrorism, finally, had became dramatically more common: in the span of a year and a half between the start of 1969 and mid-1970, an estimated 4,300 bombings were carried out in the United States, including almost 400 in New York City alone.² the sheer anger of the period—with segregation, with discrimination, with poverty, with the endless, bloody wars in Indochina, with the United States as an entity—was undoubtedly boiling over every day in a way that for some living through it presented a Russian Revolution-like opportunity.

but simultaneously, this anger was neither a base from which you could wage armed revolution nor was it even particularly popular. sympathy for anti-war politics, much less student unrest or explicitly revolutionary politics, was severely lacking among the general public. as recounted extensively in David Paul Kuhn's The Hardhat Riot:

After 1968, most Americans deemed Vietnam a mistake. By 1971, six in ten lamented the war. That same year, roughly two-thirds of the public condemned antiwar protests. [...] Ultimately, most doves didn’t even like the antiwar activists. Back in September 1968, after the [1968 Democratic Party] Chicago convention, two-thirds of those who wanted to deescalate the Vietnam War backed Mayor Daley’s use of police “to put down the demonstrators.” Seven in ten whites, and the plurality of blacks, saw “radical troublemakers” as the cause of student unrest, rather than “deeply felt” beliefs in the “injustices in society.” Even among whites who thought the Vietnam War was a “mistake,” two-thirds thought “most student unrest” was caused by “radical troublemakers” rather than a belief in societal “injustices.”

that armed revolution would have not worked in such an ideological environment goes without saying. of course, the situation was actually worse still: by 1970, law and order politics were on their way toward almost total cultural hegemony, spearheaded largely by the white working-class but gaining credibility with even portions of the burgeoning Black political class that segregation had once disenfranchised. the "Black silent majority" of working- and middle-class Blacks, as Michael Javen Fortner describes it, felt increasingly little sympathy or solidarity with residents of the urban ghettos from which urban rebellions sprung. "After tilting the discursive terrain in the direction of racial equality during the struggles of the civil rights movement," Fortner writes, "working- and middle-class African Americans tilted it in favor of punitive crime policies and against economic justice for the urban black poor." if there were ever a base from which revolution could be waged, it was fleeting at best within the Black population and probably gone by 1970.

two other things bear final mention here. firstly: Revolutionary Union—like most leftist organizations of the time—was overwhelmingly white but, even more than just being overwhelmingly white, explicitly discouraged Black membership (instead usually referring them to the Black Panthers in this period). thus, even beyond the ill-developed premises of the "protracted urban war" thesis—and without downplaying the extent they were persecuted themselves—the membership of Revolutionary Union was not generally of a character that would be immediately harmed if such an analysis actually bore fruit. secondly: the case is strong that the Franklin group was doing little more than tailing the Eldridge Cleaver wing of the Black Panthers and their agitation for armed revolution. according to Steve Hamilton, a longtime Revolutionary Union member who Leonard and Gallagher interviewed, the Franklin group was convinced that the Panthers would be the "vanguard of the American revolution" and were exceedingly hesitant to be critical of them or their analysis.

what the rest of Revolutionary Union argued

needless to say, the non-Franklin group membership of Revolutionary Union was unimpressed with the thesis of "protracted urban war," a thesis they felt was wrong in principle and harmful in practice. although it could not bring forth the contemporary evidence i can that armed insurrection would make a very stupid tactical decision, it was still very obvious at the time that armed insurrection would be a very stupid tactical decision.

no doubt underscoring how deep the antipathy for the Franklin document ran (not least because it was a federal agent's dream, and indeed the FBI attempted to use it to justify extensive surveillance of Revolutionary Union), the official response felt a need to place in all-caps the following (which i will reproduce):

ANY ATTEMPT TO IMPLEMENT [the Franklin group document] WOULD NOT ONLY LEAD US AWAY FROM OUR MOST PRESSING TASK AT THIS TIME – BUILDING A REAL BASE IN THE WORKING CLASS, PROMOTING AND DEVELOPING ITS REVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP OF THE UNITED FRONT AGAINST IMPERIALISM – BUT WOULD ACTUALLY LEAD TO THE EARLY DESTRUCTION OF OUR ORGANIZATION. [sic]

criticism only became more withering from this initial statement. the response to the Franklin document essentially dismisses it in its entirely, from its assessment of class consciousness ("Yes, the U.S. workers today don’t like the rich bastards who run the country," the response observes at one point, "But they have very little consciousness of themselves as a class, the class that will remake the world in its image.) to whether the US is fascist ("It is clear from the fact that we can still use elections and Congress (or State legislatures) as a platform, that we can still legally organize trade unions, rank-and-file caucuses, anti-war demonstrations, etc, that we are not yet in a period of fascism."), and of course to its thesis that a "protracted urban war" is possible. special derision seems to be given here, worth quoting in full:

Once large numbers of police, national guard, or army divisions are called in, practice has shown that they do the annihilating-or at least the routing. Even if urban uprisings occurred simultaneously in several key urban centers, historical experience (for example, the Russian revolution) indicates that they can only succeed if at least a major section of the enemy army comes over to the side of the people. In any case, this would be an insurrection, not a guerilla war of annihilation, or attrition. If, under U.S. conditions, an urban war of attrition is not going to be fought by the method of annihilation, how is it going to be fought? [...] even if [the Franklin paper's revolutionary strategy] came to pass, how would it lead to the seizure of state power? Don’t excite us with the details of this glorious war and then neglect to tell us how we won! If this question sounds sarcastic – it is only because the scheme elaborated above is just that – a scheme, a concoction. It is not based on a scientific summing up of mass struggle in the U.S., but only the romantic dreams of the writers of this paper.

(the notion that "organized guerilla warfare" was being undertaken by Black people is also put through the woodchipper here, with the response paper effectively calling the description of spontaneous uprisings fetishistic and concluding that while "more and more pigs are getting killed by people in the Black community who just won’t put up with any more brutality and murder", such acts were "overwhelmingly the spontaneous acts of unorganized individuals.")

the Franklin document, the response concludes, "shows no understanding of the qualitative changes that will take place in the revolutionary movement as the crisis of U.S. Imperialism deepens and becomes more acute; as more and more workers are organized into struggle against U.S. Imperialism; as a new, genuine Communist party of the proletariat assumes its rightful place as the leader of the revolution." but, not content to merely call the document a bunch of bullshit, the response further derides the position of the Franklin group as adhering to the Weatherman line—that is, a tendency of politics whose theory of change was entirely centered on the "unemployed and petty-bourgeois youth" (specifically white youth) and on the methods of "terrorism and adventurism."

the Franklin schism happens

the back-and-forth between the Franklin document and the response was indicative of a broader period in which all hell seems to have broken loose within Revolutionary Union. unfortunately, reconstructing the chronology of this matter is quite difficult and not within my immediate capabilities. what are unambiguous though are the sides (Franklin on the one; and Avakian and most of Revolutionary Union leadership on the other) and the growing tensions within the organization even before the exchange.

conflict over the Franklin document seems to have begun by October 1970, when it was presented at a Central Committee meeting, as recounted in an FBI memo that Leonard and Gallagher quote in Heavy Radicals:

At the Revolutionary Union (RU) Central Committee meeting 10/10-11/70 H. Bruce Franklin presented to the approximately 75 participating delegates a paper entitled “Protracted Urban War.” This document urges immediate strategic application of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist concept of protracted guerrilla warfare in the cities. Franklin urged the building of a well-trained RU guerrilla organization which would start actual attacks on the establishment with the objective of awakening the masses and overcoming any hesitancy of the membership to engage in armed revolutionary struggle. According to informants present at the meeting, Franklin’s vanguard revolutionary thesis highlights a split within the RU with the majority supporting immediate guerrilla warfare.

following this meeting, polemics continued to be exchanged despite attempts at mediation, probably influenced by the fact that—unusually for such a sectarian dispute—both groups were quite large within the organization. Franklin's side was accused of supposed "Weathermanism" and of having conflicts of personality with Avakian that were being laundered as ideological. Avakian's side was accused of denying the necessity of armed struggle and of rejecting the national liberatory potential of Black and Chicano people, which it supposedly downplayed in favor of the industrial proletariat. inevitably, though, one side had to win out—and owing to the fact that it was mostly comprised of people in power, the winner was Avakian's side. at an indeterminate point (but likely at the end of 1970) Revolutionary Union took the "unusual" step of publicly expelling Bruce Franklin, his wife, Jane Franklin, and two additional members of the Franklin group Janet Weiss and Jeff Freed.

this action precipitated the actual split, which ultimately proved very large for a split with an obviously correct side (Avakian's) within an organization that also likely had no more than 600 members at the time. even the Revolutionary Union conservatively estimates that it lost approximately one-third of its membership (perhaps 150 people) to the Franklin group; the informants within it suspected closer to 200, which could have been up to half of the organization's strength. the exit was also not a clean one, with the Franklin group offering a withering, final volley in public that

RU leadership in some areas has consolidated a revisionist line in the organization. They do not support the Black Panther Party. They base themselves not on the needs of the most oppressed, but on the fully employed factory workers. They believe the U.S. is a “bourgeois democracy,” not a developing fascist state. They deny the national liberation struggles of Black and Chicano people, and back off from supporting them concretely. They believe white revolutionaries can wait for armed struggle. They put down the women’s movement, and don’t develop women’s leadership. They don’t see Marxism-Leninism as a living tool to serve the people, but as an abstract dogma.

the Venceremos side-show

ultimately most of these splitters ended up following Franklin into a smaller Chicano-led group called Venceremos, which had existed for several years previously and suddenly became quite a different (albeit still Chicano-oriented) organization. through Venceremos, Franklin and his allies finally had a channel through which to enact their theory of change—something they set about doing rather quickly with a variety of tactics. according to Leonard and Gallagher the newly-revitalized Venceremos

continued to publish the Free You newspaper, making it bi-lingual. They also published the San Jose newspaper, the Maverick. It operated Venceremos College and the People’s Medical Center, which were free alternatives to standing institutions. Along with this they “assumed recognized leadership” of a number of workers’ caucuses, community organizations, and the local Young Partisans, which they described as having “chapters on all the local community college campuses and in many high schools and junior highs.”

Venceremos was also heavily armed, presumably owing to Franklin's continued belief in the necessity of armed revolution. it apparently maintained "secret stashes of rifles, grenades, pipe bombs, and other explosives and they urged members to stay armed at all times --- advice that was apparently followed." this contrasted somewhat interestingly with the group's participation in local electoral politics: it ran Jean Hobson (in 1971) and Jeffrey Youdelman (in 1973) for Palo Alto City Council; Joan Dolly for Menlo Park City Council (in 1972); and Doug Garrett for Palo Alto School Board (in 1973). none were successful, although debatably it was an achievement to receive even the few hundred votes these candidates could while being openly associated with a group whose theory of change included violent revolution. when the group was not running in local elections, it also made a point of raising hell and brought "verbal aggressiveness never before seen in the city’s politics."

one consistent limiter to the efficacy of its tactics was that Venceremos, bluntly stated, tended to be an internal trainwreck of an organization. within months of the Franklin influx late in 1970, the group saw its own serious split in which it lost most of its Stanford-based membership to the “Intercommunal Survival Committee to Combat Fascism” (which Leonard and Gallagher call a Black Panther Party auxiliary). a more serious incident which ultimately blew up the organization was when several of its members ambushed and killed an unarmed prison guard to free prisoner (and fellow Venceremos member) Ronald Beaty in 1972. Beaty was later arrested with Jean Hobson, one of the ambushers and—in an effort to save his own skin—gave up the names of Hobson and three other accomplices. (Beaty and all four of the people he named were later sentenced to prison.) seeing a chance to destroy what it considered one of the most dangerous radical groups operating at the time, authorities then parlayed that into arrests of Franklin and most of Venceremos' leadership. only two of the eight charged apparently went on to be convicted, but the scrutiny was sufficient to force the group to disband in September 1973.

the Revolutionary Union glides on

on the Revolutionary Union side of things, the split was seriously damaging but ultimately not fatal; the group certainly was not led to the dead-end you might consider Venceremos to be. still, it seems likely that the organization did not recover in terms of membership for several years (the peak of 900 to 1,100 members having been attained in 1977, and Leonard and Gallagher estimating perhaps 2,000 or so people having churned through the organization over its life).

primarily, the split entrenched models of organization and attitudes that would initially benefit Revolutionary Union's growth, but later unravel it almost fatally in 1977/78—after which its relevance to the revolutionary movement also drastically waned and it primarily became Bob Avakian's political vehicle. as Leonard and Gallagher summarize at the end of Heavy Radicals chapter 4:

What was arrived at [after the Franklin schism] was a further closing the door on the 1960s mindset of questioning everything and challenging authority. In its place was the entrenchment of a quasi-religious apprehending of Marxism—though the RU was hardly the worst in this in the new communist movement—coupled with a hierarchal / authoritarian organizational model, albeit one that self-consciously rejected such a characterization. This did not happen immediately or at a single moment, but it was the path they went down.

The Franklin rift was also a touchstone of sorts on how to sum-up schismatic internal struggles. Here, they argued that it allowed “[r]apid progress theoretically, politically and organizationally.” While this was not without truth, it was also the case that quite a bit was lost it would seem, from their perspective—not the least of which were a good number of young revolutionaries taken down a path that would in one way or another lead to them no longer being part of a revolutionary movement, to say nothing of some garnering significant prison time. [...] There was also a problem with the RU’s misplaced minimizing of the damage done, and the ‘good riddance’ attitude they assumed as regards those in sharp disagreement. This would continue as a problem going forward.

what can be taken away from all of this? i'm not really sure—but i think it is indicative, if nothing else, of how the late 1960s and early 1970s were an optimistic but rudderless time for American socialism. which way would the movement go? nobody was certain, and in that uncertainty an abundance of views proliferated. many of those views were unchallenging and orthodox; many of them, including even the main Revolutionary Union line here, were not. and there was a lot of adventurism, some of which we still arguably live in the shadow of today.

notes

¹ it is interesting, as an aside, to interpret and compare this theory of change with modern far-right terrorism, which is almost universally accelerationist and so proposes and acts on similar impulses. perhaps the biggest difference is that that the Maoists of 1970s were not accelerationists, at least in the way the term is used with respect to far-right terrorists. we might term this a division of constructive versus destructive; that is, the Maoists of the Franklin group believed "accelerationist" tactics were only integral to the initial stage(s) of people's war—a seizure of state power by a dictatorship of the proletariat was still the ultimate goal, obliging its preservation. far-right terrorists, by contrast, usually believe existing state power must be destroyed (because it is hopelessly corrupted by any number of scapegoats) and a fascist system can only be rebuilt from the void of state power that results.

² these were usually minor bombings intended only to do property damage; some, however, were much more serious and far more potentially lethal. the bombing spree of the Melville collective (organized around future Attica prisoner and martyr Sam Melville) became particularly notorious and damaging in this timeframe. the Weathermen townhouse fiasco—in which three members of the Weather Underground blew themselves up and leveled their entire building in the process—also occurred in this period, and it had clearly been the intent of the would-be bombers to kill people.

i think almost everyone who follows me is aware of the illegal, horrific blockade on Cuba that has been imposed by the United States since approximately 1960; what you are probably less aware of though is how the blockade manifested in practice, the pressures it put Cuba under even before the fall of the Soviet Union, and what it was like at its worst during the 1990s. today's post will go into these details.

the situation before the embargo

Cuba has historically been extremely dependent on imports, some of which is a product of its geography and some of which is a product of ideology and capitalism. as summarized by Sinan Koont in Sustainable Urban Agriculture in Cuba:

The tropical climate makes it difficult to cultivate temperate-zone crops, such as wheat and soybeans, which are common staples of human and animal diets. Grains for feeding cattle or baking white bread, which is now central to the Cuban diet, must all be imported. In addition, the historical legacy of colonial agriculture—which was based on the cultivation of one or two highly labor-intensive export crops, mainly sugar, using slaves imported from Africa (and later indentured workers from China)—led to the relative neglect of food crops. Not only was land used disproportionately for export crops, but this relative overemphasis extended to areas such as research and development, credit and services provision, and governmental fiscal support. All these factors made food security import-dependent and likely to evaporate, especially for slave or slave-descendant populations, during hard times for export industries.

as a consequence, on the eve of the Cuban Revolution "imports constituted a third of all food consumed in Cuba, and 70 percent of imported foodstuffs came from the United States," according to Adriana Premat. few attempts were made by the pre-Revolution government to mitigate this import dependence. it could nevertheless be said that Cuban food security was superficially decent as long as imports continued: Koont does note that Cubans in this period received approximately 2,500 calories per capita per day. belying these numbers, however, were the inequal distribution of wealth and land; the large-scale usage of seasonal employment (meaning rates of unemployment in the 30% range at any given time); widespread illiteracy and poverty; and a general lack of amenities, especially in non-urban areas. many of these inequalities were factors in the growth, and eventual success, of revolutionary sentiment.

the Cuban Revolution of course sought to rectify this squalid state of affairs, and in most areas its program was quite successful from the beginning. agrarian and urban land reforms had been largely carried out by 1963 (with compensation, although this did little to placate capitalist interests or quell American anti-Cuban sentiment), and health care and education became far more accessible to Cubans.¹ one area in which it was not successful however was diversifying Cuba's agricultural produce and minimizing its import dependence. efforts to move away from the island's sugarcane monoculture—which had characterized the pre-Revolution economy and was a major source of income—were hampered by poor planning, labor shortages, and reduction in export earnings that obliged the government to keep the monoculture in place.

the embargo during the Cold War

it is likely a renewed move away from sugarcane would have occurred if not for worsening relations with the United States; nevertheless, the failure to accomplish this ended up having significant downstream implications. prompted by Cuba's program of expropriation, and to a lesser extent by its declaration of socialist ideology in 1960, the United States gradually implemented sanctions—and then the full-on embargo that continues to this day—on Cuba. such punitive actions by the United States had severe effects, and foregrounded a number of uncomfortable points of weakness in the Cuban system that the revolutionary government could not trivially resolve.

the first of these was suddenly pushing the island's food supply into extreme precarity. with a substantial portion of the island's calories contingent upon importation, shortages became the norm by 1962. food rationing and the ration booklet (libreta)—for which Cuba is so infamous—was implemented as a consequence; this was, and to this day remains, the only way to ensure a baseline level of food security for all Cubans.

the second of these was how the embargo definitively pushed Cuba into the Soviet sphere of influence—and as a byproduct, locked Cuba into another relationship in which they became extremely import-dependent. while trade deals with the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries allowed Cuba to attain high levels of food security (reaching 2,900 calories per capita per day by 1989), they also incentivized the continuation of the sugarcane monoculture and the adoption of a rigid, inflexible, export-oriented agricultural system. Cuba, writes Koont, "essentially became the provider of sugar and citrus fruits to COMECON [the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance]." in exchange, observe Rosset and Benjamin (1994), Cuba received

petroleum, industrial equipment and supplies, agricultural inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides, and foodstuffs — possibly as much as 57 percent of the total calories consumed by the population. [But t]he favorable terms of trade which Cuba obtained for sugar and its other exports made it cheaper for Cuba to export sugar and import foodstuffs than to produce sufficient food domestically.

thus it is only somewhat exaggeratory to say that the Cuban agricultural system during the Cold War came to imitate much of what had been overthrown in the first place—with the embargo in place, agricutural exports became one of the primary ways Cuba could pay for its much-needed imports. the consequences of such an agricultural system and its importance to ensuring Cuba could import goods were, of course, significant. arguably this relationship led to the disastrous 1970 sugar campaign, where much of the non-agricultural economy withered as the country's laborers attempted—and failed—to meet a sugar harvest quota of 10 million tons. another consequence was severe ecological harm, not dissimilar to what is seen on import-dependent capitalist island nations. "Nearly 80% of agricultural lands in Cuba, says Koont, "had been incorporated into the state sector and organized into gigantic farms under centralized government control" by 1975. the export-focus of these farms obliged them to care exclusively about yield, meaning Cuba

was using more fertilizers per hectare than the United States or any Latin American country: 202 kg/ha compared with 93 kg/ha in the United States and 56 kg/ha in Latin America. Its use of 22 tractors per 1,000 ha exceeded the averages for the Caribbean region (17), Latin America (11), and the entire world (19).

productivity decreases, nutrient deficiencies, and issues of erosion were eventually noted in up to 75% of cultivated areas—clearly a result of this extreme reliance on fertilizers and petroleum products, but which only additional fertilizer inputs were in a position to make up for.

the third point of weakness was Cuba's now-unique vulnerability to even minor shocks or disruptions of its imports and exports (which it should be noted did not ever fully cover the economic damage imposed by the embargo). this vulnerability did not go unnoticed or unexploited by the United States, which spent most of the Cold War attempting to reinstate capitalism in Cuba by any means necessary. the constant assassination attempts on Fidel Castro are only the most obvious manifestation of attempts to disrupt Cuba, of which there were many others such as Operation Mongoose and the proposed Operation Northwoods. not to be outdone by the government, though, there were also grassroots pressures against Cuba: from the 1960s to the 1980s Cuban exiles were among the most prolific terrorists in the United States, committing dozens of bombings against Cuba and agitating for regime change by the United States.

Cuba was also misfortunate or, in some cases, hubristic in a way that backfired. the country experienced a wide variety of setbacks throughout the Cold War and particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. these included two major outbreaks of African swine fever virus in 1971 and 1980 that necessitated the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of pigs; the introduction of blue mold disease which affected a quarter of Cuba's tobacco crop in 1979 and almost all of it in 1980, apparently necessitating the halting of the tobacco industry for almost two years; the introduction of sugarcane rust disease in 1979, to which Cuba's most common variety of sugarcane was especially vulnerable and which necessitated large-scale replanting; dengue fever epidemics in 1977 and 1981 that infected 4 million and 350,000 people respectively; and a major outbreak of acute hemorrhagic conjunctivitis in 1981.

for rather understandable reasons, i should note that Cuba has called many of these events biological warfare or terrorism from United States. owing to the clandestine nature almost all such acts would involve—and the general context of United States desperation to restore capitalist rule—it is hard to rule this out completely. but the prevailing evidence is too weak on all counts for me to endorse any claim like this. Raymond A. Zilinskas is rather thorough in assessing, and dismissing, such claims in his paper "Cuban Allegations of Biological Warfare by the United States: Assessing the Evidence." medical researchers such as Trotta et al. also categorically dismiss any link between the CIA, Cuban rebels, and the introduction of African swine fever virus.

an allegation in this space that is not worth dismissing out of hand, though, comes from Warren Hinckle and William Turner's The Fish is Red, in which a whistleblower the pair interviewed alleges that in 1969 and 1970,

Planes from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in the California desert [...] overflew the island, seeding rain clouds with crystals that precipitated torrential rains over nonagricultural areas and left the cane fields arid (the downpours caused killer flash floods in some areas).

this may sound like the most outlandish of the claims—and there is no reason to believe cloud seeding itself was responsible for either the aridity or the downpours—but it is actually the most plausible claim based on available evidence. this allegation coincides with Operation Popeye, a military cloud-seeding project (based on research carried out at China Lake Naval Weapons Center) that the Air Force carried out over Vietnam in an attempt to extend the monsoon season. for approximately five years, the United States actually was, on most days, dumping two sorties of lead iodide and silver iodide into the atmosphere over Vietnam. it does not seem super implausible a more limited campaign of experimentation was being done to Cuba in this period.

the embargo after the Cold War

all of these points of weakness became far more severe as the Eastern Bloc began to liberalize and disintegrate. Gorbachev's ascension in 1985—and his subsequent termination of special deals with Cuba—arguably mark the start of an inevitable trend toward catastrophe that accelerated as the 1980s progressed. between 1986 and 1990 Cuba experienced significant financial contraction, something it attempted to fight and protest to COMECON without much success. although often dated to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in many respects the Special Period had already begun by 1989—by then it was clear that COMECON was totally dysfunctional, and most of the Eastern Bloc had de facto begun to cut Cuba loose. when the Soviet Union began to be delinquent on contracted imports in 1990, conservation efforts were already in place. the formal dissolution of the COMECON in August 1991 and the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991 were largely formalities for Cuban purposes.

the formalistic nature of these events was small comfort to Cubans, however. the socialist bloc of countries had previously received more than 80% of Cuba's trade—with these gone, and the embargo still in place, what can only be described as apocalyptic reductions in the availability of everything followed. Cuba lost half of its food imports; 60% of its pesticide imports; 77% of its fertilizer imports; and half of its needed petroleum. exports and imports declined generally by around 80%. Cuban gross domestic product (GDP) dropped by anywhere from 35% to 50% between 1989 and 1993, and the Cuban economy of 1993 had shrunk to 65% of its 1989 size. Cuban money became largely worthless, both because real wages fell by more than 50% and because the state became unable to offer consumer goods on which to actually spend said money. factories became inoperable between energy cuts and loss of raw material inputs, while agriculture collapsed so severely that it necessitated a break-up of state farms. car travel became prohibitive between shortages of gasoline and lack of car replacement parts and dropped by one-third from its already low level; public transportation, likewise, ground largely to a halt, rendering bicycles the only realistic way to travel for many. the state-subsidized ration stores, which Premat says "previously adequately covered basic food needs," were rendered unable to do so and soon provided only around half of established nutritional requirements—a dramatic loss of calories per capita followed. according to Koont, by 1994:

the daily per capita nutritional intake of the Cuban population had reached its nadir at levels well below the FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] recommendations for a healthy diet (given in parentheses): 1,853 calories per day (2,400 calories recommended), 46 grams of protein (72 grams recommended), and 26 grams of fat (75 grams recommended).

the situation, in short, amounted to one of the most substantial reversals of peacetime quality of life ever observed.

that this situation did not quickly topple the government outright is a testimony to the deep support for socialism in Cuba; nevertheless, the United States saw blood in the water and attempted to deliver a crippling final blow through tightening the already punitive embargo. in 1992 the Torricelli Act banned exports of food and medicine to Cuba (excepting only humanitarian aid), and in 1996 the Helms-Burton Act made foreign corporations doing business in Cuba subjects of U.S. sanctions. under the latter bill in particular, according to Premat, U.S. companies were endowed with the power to "sue foreign companies that conduct business with Cuba involving property previously “confiscated” by the Cuban government from U.S. citizens." (unsurprisingly, this law violates international trade law.) both of these laws undoubtedly served to make the crisis worse and longer lasting.

things bottomed out roughly in 1994, by which point the Cuban government was obliged (after much citizen participation and debate through the workers’ parliaments) to enact a degree of liberalization. so summarizes Helen Yaffe in We Are Cuba!, the state legalized the US dollar, committed to a fiscal adjustment, committed to joint ventures with foreign capital, opened up further to tourism, began large-scale conversion of state farms into cooperatives, opened private farmers’ markets, and increased avenues for self-employment. these reforms (which were generally intended to be temporary and last only as long as the crisis did) were instrumental in halting—and reversing—the crisis. growth ultimately returned in the second half of the 1990s and, slowly but surely, things began stabilize back toward normality. although a number of them have continued in some form or another, many of these reforms were reversed or repealed by the mid-2000s as their necessity receded.

the effects of the economic crisis still echo through Cuba, unfortunately. in many respects it marks a permanent delineation of before and after—Cuba before the crisis was simply in a much better position than it is today, and even 35 years later this shows no signs of changing. as Yaffe says solemnly:

living standards had not recovered their 1990 level by the end of the decade, productive capacity, infrastructure and public services had been crippled, and the dual economy and price distortions had skewed incentives and entrenched inequalities. The economic contraction generated a social crisis. Cuts in food consumption, utility supplies, basic goods and transport led to malnutrition, emigration, inequality and illegality.

notes

¹ the change was quite remarkable. Agustin Lage Davila says that on the education front, the mass literacy campaigns of 1961 involved "more than 270,000 voluntary teachers" and led to 700,000 people being taught to read and write. on the healthcare front according to Don Fitz, by 1963 the revolutionary government had built "122 rural centers and forty-two rural hospitals, with 1,155 beds, 322 doctors, and 49 dentists." Koont says there had previously been just three general hospitals for all of rural Cuba.

welcome back to Birzeblog, after a lengthy hiatus.

if you've followed my Bluesky over the past three months or so you've probably seen at least one of my posts about the discourse du jour in liberal spaces, which is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's new book Abundance. perhaps because Klein is framing it as a handbook for the Democratic Party and liberalism (or perhaps because people just like drama and argumentation) this book and its prescriptions are among the latest in a post-2024 series of online liberal-leftist litmus tests. there's a truly fascinating amount of sectarianism over it between mainstream liberals and self-described "abundance" types (who usually seem to come from the ranks of online YIMBYism). from the left, meanwhile, the book has been subjected to a withering barrage of criticism against basically every premise it advances—this has become especially acute after the truly bizarre WelcomeFest, in which a large number of pro-abundance thinkers got very mad about Bluesky and people criticizing them there. from all the controversy you might therefore assume this book is actually interesting in some way.

unfortunately it really is not. it is clunky and pretty uncompelling, and it's bizarre to me that it has the reputation it already does. to the extent that the book arrives at correct conclusions, that's usually because the conclusions are self-evident to its audience. but in every other way the book is boring or a mess, and sometimes both. its broader argumentation is effectively libertarian despite coming from two ostensible social liberals. in a number of places—even to someone like myself, who does not specialize in much of what the book is about—the book is demonstrably falsifiable or outright bizarre in its argumentation (and, again, sometimes both). finally and on the whole, the framework of "abundance" is muddled and not coherent, largely coming off as a wishlist of loose demands with no central ideological core. i think you'll see what i mean as we go forward here.

the stuff Abundance gets correct

let's start with a few areas in which i think Abundance is, for the most part, correct in its analysis. you'll forgive me for only briefly explaining my thinking:

• onerous housing regulations: the existence of legitimately onerous regulations in the housing market is inarguable, and Abundance is correct to center this as a problem. from the issue of zoning (as M. Nolan Grey observes in Arbitrary Lines, "In a typical US city, at least three-quarters of the land zoned for residential uses will be zoned exclusively for single-family houses."), to parking minimums (parking spaces, according to Henry Grabar in Paved Paradise, often cost $30,000 or more per space and add hundreds of thousands to housing costs), to the design constraints created by multi-stair buildings (as lengthily recounted in Michael Eliason's Building for People), there are many things you could categorize as regulations which can be removed to ease the housing crisis and make new housing better for everyone.
• bizarre planning and design requirements: likewise, the process of planning and designing housing in the United States is usually a bad one across the board. the process takes far too long generally and is too easy to concern troll; when planning meetings are required, these are almost invariably a terrible and unrepresentative feedback mechanism. who we let build housing is often ridiculous. San Francisco's ordinance favoring construction by “Micro-Local Business Enterprises” is perhaps the primordial example in how it defines small business ("less than $12 million in average annual gross revenue"), and in so doing it discourages the use of proven contractors while consolidating business into a select few contracting companies. there are also no shortage of nonsensical bodies with power over the process they should not have. the book names the Art Commission and the Mayor’s Office on Disability as two examples in San Francisco; undoubtedly, most cities have formal or informal analogues, or just allow aforementioned planning meetings to disrupt the process. all of these are things we could streamline, and housing construction would assuredly not be worse off if we did so.
• weaponizing environmental protection laws: the weaponization of environmental protection laws (such as the infamous California Environmental Quality Act) is a constant issue that does need to be addressed in some form. (mercifully, in the time since i began drafting this, some of CEQA's worst excesses have finally been curbed!)
• homeownership cannot be a speculative asset and attainable to everyone in our current capitalist economy: this should be apparent to literally anybody who can understand supply and demand. for housing to be a useful speculative asset it must be scarce; and indeed, housing currently appreciates in value largely because of scarcity. but this is incongruent with affordable housing (or really housing people at all). it's also bad that for many people, their net worth is partially or wholly tied to the valuation of their home.

all of this is well and good. something you might be picking up on, though, is a pattern of things that are obvious. remember: this is marketed as a handbook for the Democratic Party and liberals more generally. everything i have just described has a correct side and an incorrect side, and there is effectively no controversy over which side is correct within the audience Klein and Thompson are targeting with this book. you will find very few people in the liberal-left hemisphere of politics who, for instance, actually believe the California Environmental Quality Act ought to apply to literally any development requiring government approval. every governor of California since Jerry Brown has railed against its undue expansion by a court for a reason. and leftism and liberalism aren't even really in tension on the fourth point, even if they disagree on almost everything else that follows from the statement.

somehow, though, Thompson and Klein cherrypick these problems into a full blown crisis to which the only supposed solution amounts to libertarian deregulation. the book jumps from "CEQA is bad and should be reformed" to "virtually all environmental regulations are onerous, and stand in the way of building housing" without seriously considering the psychotic downstream implications of the second statement.

what the hell are we doing here?

lest you think my characterization is exaggeratory, i offer the following vignette based on my initial experience reading the book. Abundance immediately gets to making the second argument in its introduction, saying

well-meaning laws to protect nature in the twentieth century now block the clean energy projects needed in the twenty-first. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially.

later on—in a section recounting the environmental history of the United States—it elaborates on the argument, positing that

Between 1966 and 1973, the US passed almost a dozen laws that required the government to be more responsive to local citizens and the environment. They were the National Historic Preservation Act (1966), the Department of Transportation Act, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act, the Noise Control Act of 1972, the Clean Water Act, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973, and the Endangered Species Act. In seven years, America compiled an arsenal of regulation to slow or outright stop the era of big government building. [emphasis mine]

rather definitive of the book's alignment, i think. but just to quiet any ambiguity, the book picks up again later still by taking the side of a report by J. B. Ruhl and James Salzman, which concludes

the problem is really the profusion of different, overlapping policies and authorities. Beyond NEPA, Ruhl and Salman note the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Clean Water Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the National Forest Management Act.

to say this is goofy is putting it mildly. we don't have time to go through all of these, but it's not even clear to me how most of these regulations actually serve as the primary obstacles to housing construction—and the book does not really elaborate besides gesturing at regulatory and environmental groups and their litigious tradition that ostensibly began with Ralph Nader. i do not find this particularly convincing, nor do many reviewers. it also skips over the fact that many of these regulations are demonstrably some of the most valuable ever passed. the Clean Air Act is almost singularly responsible for the reduction of air pollution in the United States, preventing as many as 370,000 premature deaths and saving an estimated $2 trillion per year. laws such as the Endangered Species Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act both seem pretty important, and successful at preventing large-scale extinctions, in what is otherwise the ongoing Holocene extinction event, wherein extinction rates are far higher than the estimated background rate. and even the most ambiguously beneficial regulations such as the Clean Water Act still seem advisable to keep around. despite the general improvement of water quality in the United States, many bodies of water continue to exhibit concerning—and dangerous—levels of pollution.

of course, the text also seems unintentionally revealing as to why Klein and Thompson are so willing to potentially throw out entire swathes of valuable environmental regulation: they seem to dismiss, or be ignorant of, how bad things still are because those things are not as visible as they used to be. according to them:

Human beings choked on smog in London in the nineteenth century and in New York and Los Angeles in the twentieth century. A few years ago, Beijing’s air quality was an international scandal, and now the same is true for Delhi. But notice: the problem passes. Los Angeles got richer and its residents now breathe clean air. The same is true in London, where air pollution in the eighteenth century was worse than Delhi is today. [emphasis mine]

almost none of this is correct. earlier this year—and for the 25th year in a row—Los Angeles was recognized by the American Lung Association as one of America's worst polluted cities. pollution has come down drastically, yes, but even current levels are known to cause excess mortality in the thousands every year in Southern California. and even when pollution doesn't kill, it has serious health effects: we know that Southern California pollution levels cause "reduced lung function growth, increased school absences, asthma exacerbation, and new-onset asthma" in children, for example. to call the problem "passed" is flatly ridiculous. similarly, Beijing's pollution problem—although massively improved—remains far above WHO guidelines and has an even higher annual body count than Los Angeles. nor have reductions been accomplished because Beijing nebulously "got richer;" they have been accomplished through a massive and multifaceted Chinese government program to address the causes of, sources of, and contributors to pollution.

another illuminating passage of the book in this vein decries "special air filtration systems for developments near freeways" which it poses as admirable, but symptomatic of too-strict green building requirements that increase homelessness through increasing the cost of construction. while i'm sure this does make it harder to build inexpensive housing, it seems rather straightforwardly bad to argue that—simply because the alternative is potential homelessness—people in affordable housing should not receive protections from car fumes and pollutants. arguably, air filtration has become necessary independent of freeways (and away from them too): the growing wildfire smoke problem in California is likely responsible for tens of thousands of premature deaths in the past decade. it is not going to get better as the climate continues to warm. should we simply not build with this in mind because it will be more expensive? this is a conclusion the book all but asks you to make in its one-dimensional advocacy for more housing.

what others are saying about the book

other deficiencies are, unsurprisingly, evident throughout other portions of the text—and in even defining the bounds of who supports abundance or what it means as a policy orientation. how, for example, can an agenda with little through-line besides deregulation keep itself from being weaponized by right-wingers who use deregulation to exact harm? already, such a "co-optation" (if you can even call it that) is evident. Hannah Story Brown, for instance, observes that "Donald Trump, at a surface level, is following an abundance agenda by removing the implementing regulations of the National Environmental Policy Act," yet is also doing so in a manner which advantages fossil-fuel interests. she adds that "Trump appointees like Doug Burgum and Chris Wright have cloaked their pro-polluter agenda in the rhetoric of “energy abundance.”"¹ the through-line of deregulation, too, is fraught. even writers more amenable to the abundance agenda such as Mike Konczal are rather hesitant to concur with the book's attempt to provide a one-size-fits-all solution to a disparate set of problems. Matt Bruenig, another of the writers more sympathetic to abundance, summarizes best that "bringing all these disparate things together causes unhelpful muddling." and it seems debatable at best, at least if you ask Liberal Currents, that abundance is capable of helping the Democratic Party electorally in the way Klein and Thompson want to believe. "Very few voters," write Isaiah Glick, "are actually going to notice the changes that Klein and Thompson suggest in their book."

in the ideological department, to call the book generally confused—outside of deregulatory libertarianism—is probably still generous. Malcolm Harris, in a lengthy piece, lingers on a number of questions that seem prudent such as "[...]why can’t decent liberals like Klein and Thompson bring themselves to interrogate America’s trillion-dollar defense budget?" surely, in a book where the pair find time to pooh-pooh measures such as degrowth, advertisement reduction, or a shift away from meat and dairy consumption, there is space to linger on the defense budget—often maligned as the representation of government waste and inefficiency among the liberal-left hemisphere of politics? but they are conspicuously pretty silent here, and in many places where scrutiny of government waste and inefficiency is actually warranted. there's also the book's bizarre forays into non-liberal economics. when the book starts "cit[ing] Karl Marx in [its] argument for unleashing the capitalist forces of production from government standards," Harris understandably poses this as self-evidently stupid—not least because it is an absurdist usage of Marx in a book that, for the record, seldom even mentions class (much less class conflict).

returning to Bruenig (who to reiterate is otherwise reasonably sympathetic to abundance) he calls the book's narrativizing and historiography rather weak and scattershot, saying "Sometimes the blame [for obstruction] is put on environmentalists. Other times it is put on the individualistic cultural revolutions of the 1960s, including the New Left, and the consumer protection movement spearheaded by Ralph Nader." hardly an ideal review of one of Abundance's central themes. Bruenig's specialty is economic policy, though, and it is apparent that he is even more critical of the book's willingness to confidently assert things like "American liberalism has measured its successes in how near it could come to the social welfare system of Denmark." America is almost uniquely unwilling to implement Nordic-style measures, Bruenig notes, opting (largely at the behest of liberals like Klein and Thompson!) for means-testing over universality.

and more generally, to close out, the book seems to be irritatingly fast and loose with its facts and focus despite the wonkishness of both its writers. there are people who credibly contest Klein and Thompson's understanding of telecommunications or his characterization of the process for deploying rural broadband funding, the nuances of which he seems to have either missed or intentionally ignored because they undercut his thesis; and there are people who observe the oddity of the pair's hyperfocus on a handful of major U.S. cities as engines of creation and productivity in what is ostensibly intended to be a sweeping agenda for America. there are people who dispute the Abundance narrative of housing, its tendency to avoid having to address the impact of the Great Recession, and its dancing around inconvenient facts, such as

the Golden State [having] built plenty of housing in the mid-aughts. In fact, at times in 2004 and 2005, California even permitted more new housing units than Texas did. Since zoning restrictions didn’t suddenly get tighter in the second half of the 2000s, this building boom scrambles the thesis that public land-use controls are the root cause of today’s housing crisis.

to say nothing of those who raise their eyebrows at abundance and its willingness to sideline the very workers needed to carry out such a sweeping program of construction; or those who rightly point that infrastructural bottlenecks—from housing, to power, to transportation, and beyond—are often more a product of capital, corporate consolidation, and monopoly than regulation that needs cutting. for all the problems Klein and Thompson assign to regulation, there is above all very little engagement with what comes after (which is often less clear-cut than they would perhaps like), or even a fleshing out the intermediary between what we have now and what abundance looks like tomorrow. this is a bad way to do things.

in sum, it's not a particularly good or interesting book. it would be nice to talk less of it.

notes

¹ one is inclined to think, as an aside, that abundance would be less easy to "co-opt" if Derek Thompson could avoid paling around with conservatives like noted freak and probable white supremacist Richard Hanania. the organizational ties of abundance groups—rife with Silicon Valley capitalists, effective altruists, techno-libertarians, and all sorts of bizarre and reactionary monied interests—also leave quite a lot to be desired.