Welcome to Confronting Capitalism.

On this week's episode, Vivek Chibber will speak with Matt Huber about his new Catalyst essay.

The Left has always fought for abundance, which was co-authored with Fred Stafford and Lee Phillips.

For details on how listeners can get a discount on their first subscription to Catalysts, stay tuned to the show.

Matt is a professor of geography and the

environment at Syracuse University and a leading scholar of environmental policy of politics.

He is the author of climate change as class war. You can find more of his work in Jacobin and

Damage Magazine. Enjoy the show. Matt, it's great having you on the show. Great to be here.

Well, what we wanted to do today was talk about this essay that you co-wrote with Fred

Stafford and Lee Phillips, with whom you've written quite a bit in the past, right? Both of us.

So we wanted to talk about a review essay that's published in the latest catalyst, which is called, interestingly,

the left has always been for abundance. And that title comes from the fact that it's a critical

engagement with this literary phenomenon now, which is this book called Abundance by Ezra Klein and

Derek Thompson, which is really making enormous, it's not only making waves, it's arguably

reshaping some of the debate and the orientation inside the Democratic Party.

So it's really something that the left has to come to terms with.

Also, because it's, as you suggest in your article, taking a position that is kind of strange

for somebody on the left to be arguing for,

because you would think it should be the common sense, the default position of anybody on the

socialist left at least, which is that you stand for increasing people's material well-being,

their standards of living, they're providing them with livelihood. And instead,

it seems like a controversial subject. So the first thing I wanted to start with, Matt, was you

...