Simon van Zuylen-Wood's long account of the war between the Democratic Party's populist left and its Abundance center is sharp, fair-minded reporting. He follows Sanders to Tulsa, sits through Welcome Fest's slideshows, watches Mamdani electrify Brooklyn. He notices — almost despite himself — that the two camps keep bumping into each other. Sanders and the YIMBYs cite the same housing statistics. The Jacobin reviewers point out that Abundance should have been the left's book. Mamdani closes by calling for "an agenda of abundance that puts the interests of the 99 percent over the one percent," mashing the two vocabularies into a single sentence.
But van Zuylen-Wood frames this convergence as a curiosity — a "what's remarkable" aside — rather than as the story's center of gravity. And neither camp he profiles pushes through to the question that would actually resolve their quarrel.
That question is ownership.
Sanders wants to tax billionaires and fund five million units of public housing. Klein and Thompson want to strip away the red tape so government can build again. Both are describing real problems. But both accept, without examining it, the same underlying architecture: a small class of owners controls the productive economy, and the argument is over how to redistribute what that class produces or how to remove the obstacles to producing more of it. The oligarchs keep the deed. The fight is over the rent check.
This is not a new pattern. It is the pattern of the twentieth century: capital owns, labor negotiates for a share of the proceeds, and the state referees. That arrangement delivered enormous gains when the economy required mass labor and when unions were strong enough to bargain. It is now failing, and not only because unions have weakened or because billionaires have captured the political process — though both are true. It is failing because the productive economy is beginning to run on inputs that don't require mass labor at all. AI systems, solar arrays, automated logistics, iron-air batteries storing energy at a tenth the cost of lithium — these are not tools that need a factory floor of workers to operate. They are, increasingly, tools that operate themselves.
When the engine of abundance no longer needs your labor to run, your leverage as a worker evaporates. Taxing the owners more aggressively, as Sanders proposes, treats the symptom. Removing the bottlenecks to building, as Klein proposes, accelerates the engine. Neither changes who holds the key.
The People's Share argues that the coming age of technological abundance poses a question that neither camp in van Zuylen-Wood's article is asking: not how do we redistribute the proceeds of abundance? but who owns the abundance itself?
This is the difference between a politics of distribution and a politics of ownership. A universal basic income funded by taxing AI profits is distribution — the owners write a check. A sovereign wealth fund that holds equity in automated industries on behalf of the public is ownership. Worker cooperatives that hold productive assets in common are ownership. Community land trusts, platform cooperatives, democratic utilities — these are not utopian proposals. They exist, they function, and they represent a tradition as old as the Rochdale Pioneers and as current as the Mondragón Corporation, whose 80,000 worker-owners generate more revenue than many of the tech firms whose founders populate Reid Hoffman's Rolodex.
What strikes us most in the article is not the fight between the two camps but the shared absence at the heart of both. Sanders, for all his moral clarity about oligarchy, proposes to discipline the owning class, not to abolish the distinction between owners and everyone else. Klein, for all his intelligence about state capacity, imagines a government that builds for people, not a public that builds for itself. And even Mamdani's stirring synthesis — abundance for the 99 percent — still places the 99 percent on the receiving end.
A vision of shared abundance demands something else: not abundance delivered to the many, but abundance held by the many. Not a better landlord, but a table where everyone sits. Not top-down and not bottom-up — because both of those are descriptions of hierarchy — but lateral, distributed, democratic. A million gardens and a dam.
Van Zuylen-Wood ends his piece by noting that neither faction has offered "a form of mass politics that meets people at each aspect of their lives."
Such a politics can't be offered at all — it has to be lived.