(iPoster) Walter Reuther and the Politics of Abundance

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Foundations of Political Theory II & Autocratic Politics and Democracy
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory II

Abstract

The publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s "Abundance" early in 2025 kicked off a major debate in progressive circles about both the goals government pursues and how it pursues them. Klein and Thompson argue that American progressives have fetishized processes and institutions as the source of political legitimacy to the point that they have neglected the state’s ability to produce outcomes that are in the public interest. In response, they call for both increasing state capacity and reducing self-imposed regulatory barriers in pursuit of what they variously call “a liberalism that builds” or “supply side progressivism.”

Though Abundance is an avowedly progressive book, many of its most vocal critics have come from the left. Environmentalists have been wary of its calls to reduce regulation and litigation, while advocates of local participation have worried about its embrace of political centralization. More surprisingly, it has also been criticized by proponents of a progressive economic agenda, like Zephyr Teachout, who group themselves around calls for an anti-monopoly agenda and economic populism. At stake in this debate, both sides seem to agree, is whether inability of progressivism to live up to promises and implement its own policies is feeding the rise of illiberal politics in the developed world.

This paper approaches the debate around abundance by looking at the thought and career of Walter Reuther, the longtime president of United Automobile Works who was widely seen as the most dynamic and influential labor leader of the mid-20th century. Reuther’s interests ranged widely, encompassing automation, education, energy, Medicare, and the Cold War. Under his leadership, UAW embraced causes like civil rights and environmentalism that many other unions shied away from. In all this, and throughout his three and a half decades in the public eye, Ruether placed the concept of “abundance” near the center of his thought.

In the paper, I identify and explore two levels at which the idea of abundance structures Reuther’s thought. As a policy framework, it combines a Keynesian commitment to maintaining effective demand, a populist-inspired resistance to the distortions of monopoly power, and futurist interest in promoting innovation and increasing productivity throughout the economy. As he put it in a 1955 speech to the UAW, abundance means using “full production and full employment” to “find a way to make the biggest economic pie that science and technology and our resources make possible.” Through this framework, Reuther can hold together some of the issues that divide contemporary proponents and critics of abundance.

At a deeper level, however, Reuther saw abundance as a fundamental transformation of the problem of politics, which had historically been a struggle “to divide up economic scarcity.” This struggle has been transformed by scientific progress into a more existential situation in which the destructive uses of technology are racing ahead, while the development of its productive capabilities lags behind. Thus, politics now requires developing the “vision and common sense to use the new tools of abundance to usher in an era of human progress and human fulfillment.” Drawing on both the 19th century socialist tradition and 20th century anxieties about nuclear annihilation, this account of the problem of abundance calls for a remaking of the global economic and political order in ways that go beyond the nation-state focus of abundance as a policy framework.

By uncovering Reuther’s understanding of abundance, the paper makes two contributions to ongoing political and scholarly debates. First, it enriches our understanding of the history of abundance as a political idea. Much of the current debate is informed by the work historian Paul Sabin, who argues that, starting in the 1960s and 70s, liberalism came to distrust itself so thoroughly as to become its own worst enemy. Reuther shows us how abundance fit into a left-liberal framework prior to that. Moreover, Reuther was not opponent of the left movements that challenged the New Deal coalition in this period; he was often their mentor and supporter. As a result, his ideas may give us a sense of how the transformation of liberalism in this period might have gone differently, particularly after his tragic death in 1970.

Second, the paper’s contribution goes beyond the abundance of debate by recovering Ruether’s political vision for a modern audience. Despite his massive historical importance, Reuther has not received much attention from political theorists, with the partial exception of William Connolly. By presenting Reuther’s ideas in light of contemporary debates, the paper joins with the work of Alex Gourevitch and others who have drawn attention to the ideas of labor movements and leaders to American political thought.

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