Money on the Left

Pricing the Neighborhood with Ely Fair

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:00:00 -0400

We speak with Ely Fair, who studies structural inequality and poverty in urban geographies from a heterodox perspective. Fair holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Missouri, Kansas City and is presently a visiting instructor in Economics at Knox College.

Examining the institutions responsible for social valuation, maintenance, and transformation at the neighborhood level, Fair focuses especially on the role of housing policy in the racialization of U.S. cities. During our conversation, Fair not only spells out important discoveries in this critical research, but also outlines several positive policy solutions designed to remediate the unjust development of urban geographies.

In doing so, Fair explicates his work on the legal history of complementary currencies in the United States, emphasizing the generative role they can play today in advancing housing justice, empowering municipal governments to mobilize labor to create and maintain safe and affordable housing.

Lastly, Fair relays his findings about The Freedman’s Savings Bank. Specifically, he contends that the bank's collapse was a result of the federal government’s “negligent paternalism,” creating a moral and equitable obligation for the U.S. government to finally restore the outstanding deposits. From here, Fair proposes a targeted program of restitution that leverages digitized archival records to identify and compensate approximately half a million Black American descendants.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Contesting the End of India's Job Guarantee with Khush Vachhrajani

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 15:00:00 -0500

For over twenty years, India’s national rural jobs program provided a legal right to work for over 265 million people--the majority of them women--serving as a vital lifeline against poverty and a global model for social security. Tragically, however, that lifeline is now being cut.

In this episode, we speak with Khush Vachhrajani, writer and national coordinator at the Social Accountability Forum for Action and Research in India, about his recent article in The Wire, "How to Kill a Golden Goose: MGNREGA Repeal Reveals More than it Hides." Vachhrajani contextualizes the sudden 2026 demise of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) and its replacement by the new Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (VB-G RAM G). As he explains, this shift effectively "kills the golden goose" for millions of rural workers by replacing a demand-driven legal guarantee with arbitrary budget caps and centralized control. We discuss the neoliberal money politics behind this move: a calculated transition from a rights-based framework that empowered workers to a supply-led scheme that prioritizes fiscal austerity over human dignity.

Still, our dialog is not merely a post-mortem of a fallen policy. From the "Save MGNREGA" nationwide agitations to defiant resolutions passed in thousands of Gram Sabhas, the people of India are actively fighting to reclaim their right to work. This episode explores both the devastating effects of the repeal and the growing movement of workers, unions, and activists who refuse to let this Golden Goose go quietly, proving that the struggle for democratic accountability is far from over.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Defending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with Tyler Creighton

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 13:00:00 -0500

In this episode, we speak with Tyler Creighton about the ongoing struggle to save the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from defunding and closure at the hands of Russell Vought in the second Trump Administration. Creighton is a lawyer at the CFPB and a member of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), Chapter 335. Before joining the CFPB, Creighton clerked for the Massachusetts Appeals Court and, prior to that, he was an organizer for pro-democracy reforms at Common Cause and ReThink Media. We talk with Creighton about life at the CFPB under the leadership of Vought, central architect of the notorious Project 2025 document and avowed opponent of the agency he now directs.

During our conversation, Creighton details how, in spite of Vought’s attempts to defund and close the agency, the CFPB continues to survive. In Creighton’s telling, the agency’s endurance owes in no small part to the continuous labor actions undertaken by the NTEU and its members. In February 2025, for example, the union sued the Trump Administration, securing an injunction against Vought’s efforts to close the agency. (Read the judge’s extraordinary Memorandum Opinion here.) Then, in late December, a federal district court judge ruled that the Trump administration must continue to fund the CFPB through the Federal Reserve, contradicting Vought’s absurd claim that the CFPB can no longer seek financing from the Fed because the nation’s Central Bank is operating at a loss.

Despite the NTEU’s string of successes, the fate of the CFPB still remains to be determined. The good news, however, is that there are ways that you can support the bureau as it rounds into its second year of the second Trump Administration. Learn more about the fight to save the CFPB from the CFPB Union website. Follow and share news from the NTEU account on Bluesky. Join the union’s public demonstrations, if you live near or find yourself visiting Washington D.C. You can also help fund the NTEU’s activities by purchasing any number of cheeky items in their online merchandise shop.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Graeber's Utopia of Refusal

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 16:00:00 -0500

Will Beaman joins Billy Saas & Scott Ferguson to discuss the enduring influence of David Graeber’s debt-centered work in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s election to Mayor of New York City. Will and Scott unpack their jointly authored essay, “The Utopia of Refusal: David Graeber, Debt & the Left Monetary Imagination,” which is the latest in a series of pieces by the Money on the Left Editorial Collective to agitate for credit-centered experimentation through and beyond the Mamdani mayoralty.

Most crucially, Will and Scott find that the Graeberian framework on debt funnels political attention and action toward periodic acts of cancellation or refusal to the exclusion of radical democratic alternatives such as those outlined in “Blue Bonds: A Fiscal Strategy for Overcoming Trump 2.0” and “How the Zetro Card can Save New York City (Really).” While Graeber’s work has been indispensable to left organization and advocacy since before Occupy, what’s needed now, the hosts argue, is a framework for mobilizing--rather than refusing to engage--the considerable fiscal agency already at hand across all levels of governance.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Radical Finance for America's Schools with David I. Backer

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 13:00:00 -0500

We are joined by David I. Backer, associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University, to discuss his new book: As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Schools (The New Press, 2025). The right-wing attack on education has cut deep. In response, millions of Americans have rallied to defend their cherished public schools. Backer’s incisive book asks whether choosing between our embattled status quo and the stingy privatized vision of the right is the only path forward. In As Public as Possible, Backer argues for going on the offensive by radically expanding the very notion of the “public” in our public schools.

Helping us to imagine a more just and equitable future, As Public as Possible proposes a specific set of financial policies aimed at providing a high-quality and truly public education for all Americans, regardless of wealth and race. He shows how we can decouple school funding from property tax revenue, evening out inequalities across districts by distributing resources according to need. He argues for direct federal grants instead of the predations of municipal debt markets. And he offers eye-opening examples spanning the past and present, from the former Yugoslavia to contemporary Philadelphia, which hastens us to envision a radically different way of financing the education of all of children.

Backer's book is thus a must-read for anyone interested in building a robust and democratic public education system today and in the future.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Democratic Public Finance

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 14:00:00 -0400

Billy Saas and Scott Ferguson are joined by Will Beaman to discuss Money on the Left’s framework for what we call “Democratic Public Finance” (DPF). According to this paradigm, money is public credit, a capacious tool for mobilizing everyone’s capacities to meet our needs and build a desirable future. DPF redefines politics as the process of coordinating our abundant human and material resources within ecological limits, rather than as an austere and exploitative competition for scarce funds. With this, Money on the Left not only opens fresh horizons for left politics, but also directly challenges the fiscal sabotage routinely carried out by liberals, conservatives and the authoritarian right.

In conceptualizing DPF, Money on the Left builds on insights from Modern Monetary Theory (MMT); but we also push beyond MMT’s delimitation of public money creation to the alleged sovereignty of the nation-state. Contrary to conventional accounts of MMT, we insist that money is a public, contested, and inexhaustible institution that must be politicized and redesigned across all levels of governance.

During our discussion, our cohosts outline the approach to DPF presented in our recent long-form publication, “Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City.” Along the way, we tease out key insights from myriad other contemporary works, which variously leverage DPF to challenge the second Trump administration’s authoritarian radicalization of neoliberal economics. Such texts include co-authored pieces such as “Blue Bonds: A Fiscal Strategy for Overcoming Trump 2.0,” “How the Zetro Card can Save New York City (Really),” and “It’s Time for Complimentary Currencies,” as well as writings by Will Beaman like “How to New York Times Proof Mamdani’s Playbook,” “Blue Bonds: Duck or Rabbit?,” and “The Case for Fiscal Insurgency.”

The conversation highlights the originality and urgency of Money on the Left’s core ideas for Democratic Public Finance. Since the discussion only scratches the surface of our writings, however, we encourage listeners to consult the linked publications above for a comprehensive engagement with DPF.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

One Battle After Another

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 17:00:00 -0400

In this episode of the Superstructure podcast, Scott Ferguson is joined by independent film scholar Jonathan Haynes to discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed new film, One Battle After Another. The conversation centers on the film’s contribution to popular political cinema under the authoritarian violence of the second Trump administration. Scott and Jonathan affirm One Battle’s unapologetically leftist perspective as a breath of fresh air within a current political climate of despair–a feeling emblematized by films such as Ari Aster’s Eddington. Specifically, the episode examines how One Battle, which draws loose inspiration from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, deliberately removes specific historical markers to place the story in an ambiguous present of ongoing revolution and counter-revolution. The hosts evaluate One Battle’s controversial representation of leftist violence, highlighting the film’s focus on countervailing infrastructures in addition to punctuated actions. They also speculate about the meaning of the film’s rich aesthetic choices, including the mobile telephoto lenses that transform a conventional car chase into a dizzying allegory of an American culture unclear about its driving motivations and aims. Finally, Scott and Jonathan consider the complex, racialized eroticism between the revolutionary mother and the white-supremacist commander (played by Teyana Taylor and Sean Penn), which gives rise to the central character, Willa (Chase Infinity). Willa, they argue, embodies the entangled, embattled, and yet still hopeful left politics that the film ultimately celebrates.

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me” EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

The Activist Humanist with Caroline Levine

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 15:00:00 -0400

We speak with Caroline Levine, Ryan Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, about her important book The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis(Princeton University Press, 2023). Building on the theory developed in her award-winning book, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Levine’s The Activist Humanist redirects the critical capacities of formalist literary study to discover and mobilize the democratic potential of political forms thought by many on the left to be irredeemably exclusive, violent, and anti-democratic. Countering scholars in the environmental humanities who embrace only “modest gestures of care”—and who seem to have moved directly to “mourning” our inevitable environmental losses—Levine argues that large-scale, practical environmental activism should be integral to humanists’ work. For Levine, humanists have the tools–and the responsibility–to mobilize political power to tackle climate change. We speak with Levine at length about this project in an effort to move beyond critical gestures of dissolution and toward an activist formalism that moves constructively between politics and aesthetics.

See the Doughnut Economics Action Lab website for more information about the upcoming screening of Finding the Money mentioned in the audio introduction.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

* Thank you to Robert Rusch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript.

The New Postcolonial Economics with Fadhel Kaboub (New Art & Transcript!)

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 19:00:00 -0400

Money on the Left is proud to publish a remastered version of our third episode (ever!) with Fadhel Kaboub, now with a new transcript and art. Kaboub is associate professor of economics at Denison and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. In our conversation, Kaboub outlines a new critical approach to postcolonial political economy, arguing that re-gaining fiscal agency is a crucial next step for postcolonial nations hoping to achieve social, economic, and environmental justice. We talk specifically and at length about the CFA franc currency union, a system with violent colonial roots that continues to constrain the economic and political agency of its member states in West and Central Africa.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

The Radical Potential of Consumer Financial Protection with Vijay Raghavan

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 15:00:00 -0400

We speak with Vijay Raghavan, Professor of Law at the Brooklyn Law School, about his recent article, “The Radical Potential of Consumer Financial Protection,” published in Boston College Law Review in April 2025. Raghavan builds on the work of constitutional money theorists, as well as his legal experience in the public sector. In particular, he argues that consumer financial protection is an essential and potentially radical response to the "finance franchise,” a predominantly anti-democratic process by which modern governments delegate the money creation process to private actors like banks. The consensus in contemporary left sociological and legal scholarship dismisses consumer financial protection as a rearguard effort to sustain neoliberal capitalism. Raghavan, by contrast, reconceptualizes consumer financial protection as a vital counterweight to legally structured domination in financial markets. By tracing the history of this struggle from the early 20th century to the present, Raghavan provides a powerful legal framework for today's debtor movements, including the national campaigns to cancel student and medical debt. In doing so, Raghavan offers a forward-looking vision for how to build a durable consumer financial protection regime capable of reclaiming democratic authority in the post-Trump era.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

(Un)conditional Openness: Towards a Neochartalist Theory of Money and Trust

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 16:00:00 -0400

In this special episode, Rob Hawkes joins Scott Ferguson and Will Beaman to discuss his new article “(Un)conditional Openness: Towards a Neochartalist Theory of Money and Trust,” which was recently published in Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice. The conversation traces the development of Rob’s long-standing interest in theories of trust from his doctoral research in literary studies towards an increasing fascination with the topic of money which eventually led him to MMT, neochartalism and the Money on the Left project. Rob recalls a jarring moment when, having become excited by the possibility of bringing MMT into his research on literature and trust, he realised that some neochartalists reject the idea that money is trust-based. Determined to think this relationship through in greater depth, Rob’s article reaches the conclusion that neochartalism demands a re-theorisation of the concept of trust itself. In this wide-ranging conversation, Rob, Scott, and Will work through some of the key moves the article makes, including the problematisation of barter-like theories of “calculative trust,” its consideration of the connection between trust and vulnerability, and the way trusting blurs the distinction between conditionality and unconditionality (as alluded to in the article’s title). Finally, the discussion addresses links between trust, the university (as an institution), and the uni currency proposal, and situates Rob’s work within the heterodox and heterogeneous interdisciplinary academic, para-academic, and extra-academic field that is contemporary neochartalism.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Legal & Political Foundations of Capitalism with Jamee K. Moudud

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 14:00:00 -0400

Heterodox economist Jamee K. Moudud returns to Money on the Left to discuss his new book, Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez-Faire? (Routledge, 2025).

The phrase “institutions matter” is a common refrain among economists, including many who have proposed progressive alternatives to free market fundamentalism. For Moudud, however, this proposition doesn't go far enough, leaving a host of problematic assumptions unquestioned. To remedy this, Moudud draws on the Original Institutional Economics and American Legal Realist traditions to propose a robust theory of legal institutionalism or institutional political economy.

At its core, Moudud argues, society is a political community founded on property rights, money, credit, constitutional law, and legally-endowed corporations. From this premise, he concludes that laissez-faire has never truly existed and that seemingly natural dichotomies between “state intervention” and “deregulation” or “free markets” and “market failures” are as baseless as they are false. Moudud’s book, by contrast, urges us to engage with legal-economic theory and history to understand what institutions are and what economic regulation truly means. He asks: How does law order the economy? How does money shape power relations?

Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism should be of interest to readers of economics, law, and public policy, as well as those in international and development studies or anyone seeking to explore progressive alternatives in this period of multiple crises.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

JAWS at 50: Birth of the Neoliberal Blockbuster

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

In honor of the 50th anniversary of JAWS (1975), we are proud to publish a 2020 lecture about Steven Spielberg's film by Scott Ferguson. Far from a simple celebration, the lecture critically situates JAWS as the first genuine New Hollywood blockbuster and the originator of a distinctly neoliberal aesthetic that would come to dominate Hollywood for the next five decades. Ferguson explores the film's influence on Hollywood, its innovative use of television advertising, and its role in establishing the high-concept blockbuster. The majority of the lecture, however, teases out the film's profound aesthetic reorganization of Hollywood cinema.

JAWS, Ferguson shows, employs a wide range of techniques, such as the "Spielberg face," "God lights," and what he calls the "quasi-diegetic" camera, which work together to create a sublime, immersive experience grounded in immediate physical relations. In this new aesthetic regime, abstraction is repressed, physics reigns supreme, and cinematic movement is reduced to zero-sum displacements of material forces and entities. Ferguson connects this immersive aesthetic to JAWS's narrative treatment of money as an essentially private, scarce, and politically unanswerable thing. Through this analysis, the lecture demonstrates how JAWS both expresses and contributes to a broader turn toward neoliberalism in 1970s America, revealing cinema's role in shaping the economic and political imagination of an era.

The Black University and Community Currencies, Pt. 2

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400

In this episode, we share Part 2 of our coverage of The Black University & Community Currencies workshop (Click here for Part 1). Held April 25, 2025 on the campus of Morehouse College, the workshop fostered dialogue between students, faculty, and activists about the radical possibilities of public money for higher education, broadly, and for communities at and around Morehouse, specifically. The occasion for the workshop was the conclusion of a semester in which students enrolled in Professor Andrew Douglas’s advanced political theory course at Morehouse implemented a classroom currency called the CREDO for use by Morehouse students.

In practice the CREDO bears close resemblance to complementary currencies like the Benjamins at SUNY Cortland, the DVDs at Denison University, and the Buckaroos at University of Missouri, Kansas City. One significant aspect that sets the CREDO apart is that it is the first we know of to have been implemented at an Historically Black College or University. Another unique attribute of the experiment is that students were invited--and very capably answered the call--by their professor to reflect publicly on their experience as users, advocates, and critics of the currency at an HBCU.

In the first half of this two-part episode, we hear directly from Isaac Dia, Elijah Qualls, John Greene, and Bruce Malveaux--students at Morehouse College and participants in Professor Douglas’s advanced political theory course--about their experiences with the CREDO and its implications for the Black University concept. In the second half, we hear audio of the panel itself as it took place on April 25, 2025. Both halves of the episode reward close attention. Together they document a moment of substantial conceptual and political advance for public money theory and for the hermeneutics of provision.

A very special thank you to Isaac, Elijah, John, Bruce, and all others who participated in the panel discussion and interview.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Women in the Federal Arts Project with Lauren Arrington

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 16:00:00 -0400

We speak with Lauren Arrington about her forthcoming book on women artists in the Federal Arts Project. The Great Depression rendered 140,000 women and girls across the United States homeless. In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt founded the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that employed 8.5 million people over the course of eight years. Soon, the WPA instituted a landmark ruling forbidding sexual discrimination. As a result, between thirty and forty percent of newly hired artists on federal projects were women. This equity of opportunity enabled women to rise to positions of leadership and have access to resources that had a lasting effect on national institutions and on the history of art. In her book, Arrington challenges the popular memory of WPA art as a story of straight white men. Instead, she argues that the works of art that many women created under the Federal Arts Project made visible Black, immigrant, and women’s lives in a way that challenged segregationist, xenophobic, and sexist structures intrinsic in the nation’s institutions.

During our conversation, Arrington explores the extraordinary achievements and tribulations of New Deal women artists and administrators. Among them include Alice Neel, Gwendolyn Bennett, Augusta Savage, Georgette Seabrooke, Lenore Thomas, and Pablita Velarde. Along the way, we track how these women and the Federal Art Project more broadly came under fire from local and national government officials who attempted to censor or suppress their radical work, to fire them from their jobs or force their resignations from projects, and to investigate them for “un-American” activity. We contemplate the challenges of writing histories of lost and often deliberately destroyed archives. And we consider the lessons of women’s participation in the Federal Arts Project for the future politics of public arts provisioning.

Lauren Arrington is Chair and Professor of English at University of South Florida.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

The Black University and Community Currencies, Pt. 1

Thu, 01 May 2025 14:00:00 -0400

In this episode, Money on the Left shares audio from "The Black University & Community Currencies,” a public workshop convened by Professor Andrew J. Douglas at Morehouse College on April 25, 2025. This episode presents Part 1 of the workshop. It features an introduction by Professor Douglas and two panels. The first panel is titled “What is Public Money?” (Delman Coates, Scott Ferguson & Benjamin Wilson. The second asks: “What is the Uni Currency Proposal?” (Scott Ferguson & Benjamin Wilson). Money on the Left will release audio from Part 2 of the workshop within a few weeks’ time.

Description:

In the late 1960s, in the context of the Black Power movement and amid calls to develop Black Studies programs at many US colleges and universities, Black student activists and radical intellectuals sought to imagine a more revolutionary "Black University," an institution or network of institutions dedicated entirely to Pan-African study and research. This workshop revisits the theory and vision of the Black University. It foregrounds questions of political economy—ranging from the theoretical critiques of capitalism and empire that inspired the Black University concept to more practical questions about financial viability and the "business model" of a revolutionary Black institution. And it considers how an emerging school of heterodox economic thinking—what has come to be known as Modern Money Theory—might inform a renewal of the Black University and its commitment to Black community building.

This comes at a time of great crisis in US higher education, especially at HBCUs. Students are unsustainably indebted, encouraged to think of their education as little more than a private economic transaction or "return on investment." Schools, increasingly desperate for funding, are made to compete for private capital, often in ways that compromise their ability to serve even the nominally progressive aspects of their missions. Surrounding neighborhoods have become little more than sites of extraction, sources of low-wage labor and opportunities for land speculation, otherwise walled off from the very institutions they are made to sustain. More broadly, democratic questions about what kind of society the university is meant to serve or what kind of society we want an education for are rarely if ever addressed. Meanwhile, fascism's dramatic resurgence is renewing questions about whether Black institutions can rely on even minimal support from white society. In many ways, we appear to face some of the very same conditions that inspired the vision of the Black University more than a half century ago.

What would it mean to renew the theory of the Black University? What are the challenges involved in building the Black University from within today's HBCUs? How might we reimagine the financial architecture of the university and its commitment to surrounding communities? How might new thinking about public money and banking-heterodox ideas about credit creation, public investment, jobs programs and the mobilization of community resources inform such a reimagining? How might HBCUs experiment with the creation of complementary currencies? And does this new thinking go far enough, or does it reflect simply a recommitment to the structures of domination and exploitation imperial state projects, the logic of capital, the instruments of antiblack violence that the Black University concept was always meant to expose and challenge?

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Digitizing the Fisc with Rohan Grey

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:00:00 -0400

Rohan Grey, Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University, joins Money on the Left to discuss his urgent new paper, "Digitizing the Fisc." During our conversation, we recount the events surrounding Elon Musk & the DOGE boys’ unconstitutional takeover of the Treasury's Bureau of Fiscal Service, while explicating the right-wing theory of the "unitary executive" that underwrites such actions. Next, we analyze the structural deficiencies and choke points in the current Congressional appropriation process that have made DOGE's illegal interventions possible. Turns out, the US fiscal process involves several readily exploitable weaknesses, making it somewhat akin to the almighty Death Star's unprotected thermal exhaust port in Star Wars (1997). Finally, we consider Grey's proposal for a more streamlined, distributed, and democratic digital architecture for coordinating federal expenditures. Building legal concepts and procedures into the very materiality of digital design, this alternative system not only secures Congress's constitutional spending power against authoritarian interference and impoundment. It also unbundles fiscal policy from public debt management, making clear to the world that legislative action does not redistribute extant funds, but rather creates money afresh every time Congress votes to spend.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Gaming Money with Raúl Carrillo

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 08:00:00 -0500

Money on the Left speaks with Raúl Carrillo, assistant professor of Law at Boston College, about gaming money.

The $250 billion video game industry (the largest entertainment industry in the world) has rapidly developed an unregulated banking system. As online gaming becomes increasingly social and immersive, players build economies within games. Gamers can purchase goods and services within these environments using debit and credit cards. Companies also issue gift cards and co-branded credit cards. They store balances on digital platforms outside of the regulated banking system. Most critically, gaming companies offer players the chance to earn points inside games and convert them to other financial instruments, including bank deposits. However, these “gaming money” systems also feature exchange rate manipulation, money laundering, and financial risk for unwitting gamers and other stakeholders.

In this episode, we explore how companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Roblox are not only harming gamers but issuing “shadow money,” evading banking regulations meant to prevent structural problems. Much like 19th-century canal, railroad, and mining companies, as well as 21st - century financial technology and cryptocurrency companies, gaming giants are engaging in private monetary governance. Although agencies hesitate to regulate “virtual” worlds of entertainment, media, and the arts, banking law does not ask if money is “real” but whether its creation infringes on the privileges of banks and the U.S. government. Carrillo proposes regulators supervise large corporations that support the conversion of gaming money to bank deposits at scale. Gaming money suggests banking law is incomplete without concern for corporate monies—even those conjured across imaginary boundaries between worlds. Moreover, the long-run stakes are high. Gaming introduces most U.S. children to money. Regulation must confront a future that is already here.

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Odious Debt with Edward Jones Corredera

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 13:00:00 -0500

Money on the Left speaks with Edward Jones Corredera, author of Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2024).

What are fallen tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Odious Debt shows how Latin American nations have wrestled with the morality of indebtedness and insolvency since their foundation, and outlines how Latin America’s forgotten history of contestation can shed new light on seemingly intractable contemporary dilemmas.

With a focus on the early modern Spanish Empire and modern Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, Odious Debt explores how discussions about the morality of debt and default played a structuring role in the construction and codification of national constitutions, identities, and international legal norms in Latin America. Ultimately, Corredera reveals how Latin American jurists developed a powerful global critique of economics and international law which, in rejecting the political violence promulgated in the name of unjust debt, continues to generate pressing questions about debt, bankruptcy, reparations, and the pursuit of a moral world economy.

Corredera is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and Lecturer in History at Spain’s National Distance Education University.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Community Currencies with Jens Martignoni

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 14:00:00 -0500

Money on the Left speaks with Dr. Jens Martignoni, lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and chief editor of the International Journal of Community Currency Research (IJCCR). Community or complementary currencies are phenomena of great interest to monetary scholars and activists. We’ve spoken often about them on this show–whether about the Benjamins classroom currency at SUNY Cortland, the DVDs currency at Denison, or our recurring work on the Uni Currency Project. During our conversation with Martignoni, the appeal of such projects becomes clear. Community currencies not only lay bare the false claims of prevailing monetary orthodoxy–and in so doing make powerful teaching tools, as Jakob Feinig has argued. They also permit and even compel us to imagine a world that is otherwise–a world figured first in terms of abundance rather than primarily or exclusively in terms of scarcity. In our dialog, we focus on Martignoni’s provocative essay for the IJCCR, titled “Money is Not a Medium of Exchange.” In doing so, we reflect upon the limits of “exchange” as a framework for understanding money, while simultaneously experimenting with more generative linguistic and conceptual tools to help us re-imagine monetary provisioning.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Law & Political Economy with Martha McCluskey

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 17:00:00 -0500

Billy Saas and guest-host Ben Wilson speak with Martha McCluskey about the ins and outs of the Law & Political Economy movement. McCluskey is Professor Emerita at the University at Buffalo School of Law and a progressive institution-builder. She has made foundational contributions to feminist research and activism in and beyond the academy, focusing on interrelations between economic and legal institutions. A long-time organizer of the Class Crits project and president of the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL), McCluskey has recently spearheaded the new Law & Political Economy Collective, which insists that “a better understanding of law’s role in upholding the present distribution of wealth and state power is crucial to a more just, sustainable future.” McCluskey’s expertise with construction and maintenance of durable institutions for the development and circulation of socially- and politically-attuned critical legal scholarship gives good reasons for hope in this time of great political unease.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Money, Modernism & Inflation in The Great Gatsby (Part 2)

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0500

Rob and Scott return to their dialog about modernism, inflation, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s celebrated 1925 novel The Great Gatsby (click here for Part 1). During their conversation, our co-hosts forge connections between the novel’s many complications of time and space and the attitudes to money and identity explored in the first part of this mini-series. For instance, they consider The Great Gatsby’s unusual manner of imagining the spatial dis/connectedness of West Egg, the ‘Valley of Ashes’ and New York City; the strange ways in which characters seem to be passively ‘borne’ between these locations; the ambiguous role that bonds of various kinds play in the text; and Nick Carraway’s blurry impressionist method of narrating (or accounting for) the events of the story. Along the way, Rob and Scott revisit one of the text’s most enduring symbols, the elusive figure of the green light, which burns bright from the end of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s dock on Long Island Sound. Associated both with U.S. money and the marvel of electricity, the novel’s green light points to the powers of public provisioning that conduct modern life and serves as a mysterious beacon of hope in which, we’re told, Gatsby continues to believe until the end. For Rob and Scott, this green light reveals the novel’s “political unconscious,” here understood as the process by which a repressed history of public provisioning nevertheless comes to contour the modern novel’s many formal and affective constructions. Finally, our co-hosts point to the U.S. government’s mass printing of copies of The Great Gatsby for its G.I.s during WW2, an act of public provisioning that proved foundational for the subsequent widespread popularity of Fitzgerald’s book and its canonization of as a classic of American literary modernism. Novel printer go brrr…!

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me” EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

Artists in Academia with Tim Ridlen

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 13:00:00 -0400

We speak with Tim Ridlen about his new book, Intelligent Action: A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia (Rutgers University Press, 2024). Ridlen holds a PhD in Art History from the University of California, San Diego and is currently Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Film, Animation, and New Media at the University of Tampa. In Intelligent Action, Ridlen challenges dominant readings of mid-20th Century art preoccupied with critiques of the commodity form by shifting critical focus from the familiar spaces of the gallery & museum to the contested scenes of US higher education.

Through archival research and analysis of artworks by Gyorgy Kepes, Allan Kaprow, Mel Bochner, and Suzanne Lacy, among others, Intelligent Action examines how these artists brought alternatives to dominant conceptions of research and knowledge production. The book is organized around specific institutional formations—artistic research centers, proposals, exhibitions on college campuses, and the establishment of new schools or pedagogic programs. Formal and social analysis demonstrate how artists responded to ideas of research, knowledge production, information, and pedagogy. Works discussed were produced between 1958 and 1975, a moment when boundaries between media were breaking down in response to technological, cultural, and generational change. In the context of academia, these artistic practices have taken up the look, feel, or language of various research and teaching practices. In some cases, artists bent to the demands of the cold war research university, while in others, artists developed new modes of practice and pedagogy. Reading these works through their institutional histories, Ridlen shows how artistic research practices and artistic subjectivity developed in the long 1960s within and alongside academia, transforming the role of artists in the process.

During our discussion, we consider the significance of Ridlen’s theorization of "intelligent action" for a democratic politics centered around public money, educational provisioning, and aesthetic experimentation.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Direct Job Creation in America with Steven Attewell (New Transcript!)

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 16:00:00 -0400

This month we are re-publishing our conversation with Steven Attewell along with a new written transcript and episode graphic. Attewell is author of the incredible book, People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America from FDR to Reagan, published in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania Press. The book examines the history of job creation programs in the United States from the Great Depression to the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978.

Unfortunately, Attwell passed away last spring. Yet his work endures as historically robust and eminently humane approach to public policy. We dedicate this re-publication to his legacy.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Tribal Nations & Eco-Feminist Provisioning with Josefina Li

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 13:00:00 -0400

We speak with Josefina Li, Assistant Director of the International Program Center at Bemidji State University and doctoral candidate at University of Missouri, Kansas City. Josefina’s dissertation research brings feminist and ecological economic traditions into conversation with Modern Monetary Theory. We first encountered Li's work at the inaugural “Money on the Left” conference, which was held at University of South Florida in Spring 2018. At that conference, Li delivered a paper that explored the prospects of developing community currencies and implementing job guarantee programs in tribal nations. We were thrilled to finally speak with Josefina on the podcast and to learn more about her ongoing project of envisioning a jobs guarantee program for an ecofeminist future.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Make America Laugh Again with Maggie Hennefeld

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 10:00:00 -0400

Hosts Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) welcome Maggie Hennefeld (@magshenny) to the Superstructure podcast to discuss her essay, “Make America Laugh Again,” published in Minneapolis’s Star Tribune. Previously ridiculed, Kamala Harris’s signature laughter has emerged as an electrifying rallying cry for her last-minute candidacy for President of the United States. “Harris’ laughter has become a national symbol of collective healing,” Hennefeld argues, “affirming the powers of contagious joy to unite community across the bitter divisions of culture and identity. … [L]aughter is a lifeline for resistance against the global onslaught of authoritarian hate and fearmongering.” Analyzing the carnivalesque slogans and memes surrounding the Harris campaign, our conversation draws surprising parallels between feminist laughter in fin-de-siècle cinema and in contemporary online cultures.

Maggie Hennefeld is a feminist scholar of silent cinema and professor in the Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2024) and Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia University Press, 2018). She is also co-curator of the four-disc DVD/Blu-ray set Cinema’s First Nasty Women.

Music: "Yum" from "This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me" EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

Money, Modernism & Inflation in The Great Gatsby

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 10:00:00 -0400

Rob Hawkes (@robbhawkes) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) kick off a new Superstructure series about money, modernism, and inflation by revisiting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s widely-read novel, The Great Gatsby (1925).

In this first episode of the series, Rob and Scott complicate orthodox notions of inflation that treat economic crises past and present as mechanical results of excess money printing. They do so by reconsidering modernist art and literature’s fraught relations with notions of austerity and excess. While inflation has been associated, by modernist writers and scholars alike, with a crisis of faith in representation, Rob and Scott problematize reductive narratives that link economic, literary, and aesthetic exuberance to the relativization and loss of all value, offering limitation and privation as the only routes to sustainable creativity. Such narratives, they argue, not only mischaracterize the generativity of modernist experimentation, but also dangerously undermine modernism’s transformative challenges to unjust social orders, including hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality.

Working out a heterodox alternative, Rob and Scott turn to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, well-known for holding the exuberance of the jazz age and the relativising effects of its cubist narrative in tension with the deflationary impacts of the various crashes the novel thematizes and attempts to contain. In the past, scholars and critics have interpreted Gatsby as a cautionary tale, one that apparently warns against the extravagances of the Roaring Twenties and even foretells the coming Wall Street crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression. In Rob and Scott’s account, by contrast, Fritzgerald’s text unleashes rich experimental energies that point beyond the rigid austerity/excess binary through which it is frequently framed. They acknowledge how the book’s preoccupation with private persons and desires can abet “monetary silencing,” Jakob Feinig’s term for the repression of monetary knowledge and participation. At the same time, however, Rob and Scott contend that the way Gatsby implicitly connects credit issuance to social critique and creativity harbors urgent lessons for contemporary debates about money, inflation and culture.

Stay tuned for the second installment in this series.

Music: "Yum" from "This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me" EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

Democracy in Power with Sandeep Vaheesan

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 17:00:00 -0400

We speak with Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute, about his forthcoming book, Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Democracy in Power is a highly detailed work of political and institutional history that recounts the struggle over electric power generation in the United States. It is also an agile experiment in heterodox economic and legal theory, which treats both political and electric power as contestable and malleable public goods.

For Vaheesan, historical battles over electrification in the U.S. remind us that today’s green transition presents new opportunities for democratic participation and institution building. “Elected and other public officials in the United States who express a commitment to combating climate change … face a choice,” he writes, “decarbonize and maintain oligarchy or decarbonize and build democracy. Even as the net-zero pledge has become a rallying cry in the fight against climate change, it should raise concerns for those committed to democracy.”

During our conversation, Vaheesan lays bare the tragedy of “dirty power,” the concentration of inordinate powers to shape the global climate into increasingly fewer and usually unaccountable private hands. At the same time, he charts a clear and hopeful path for a just and democratic transition powered by clean and green energy.

What is vital for this project, Vaheesan insists, is to expressly politicize and reshape the present monetary order in a manner that serves democratic rather than oligarchic control and interests.

Please preorder Democracy in Power today through the University of Chicago Press website.

For more on this topic, see our previous interview with Vaheesan on the Superstructure podcast.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Housing for All with Chris Martin

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 13:00:00 -0400

Money on the Left is joined by Dr. Chris Martin to discuss Modern Monetary Theory’s vital importance for the struggle to provide adequate housing for all. A Senior Research Fellow at the City Futures Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Martin is a long-time tenant’s rights advocate in Australia with scholarly training in law and heterodox political economy. He is closely familiar with the rhetorical machinations–or “contrivances,” as he calls them–that attenuate the effectiveness of national housing policy in Australia and beyond. In 2023, Martin and his team of co-authors (including Julie Lawsome, Vivienne Milligan, Chris Hartley, Hal Paswon, and Jago Dodson) published a report that argued the government can and should provide adequate housing for everyone in Australia. Titled “Towards an Australian Housing and Homelessness Strategy: Understanding National Approaches in Contemporary Policy,” the report makes several noteworthy contributions to housing-for-all discourse, including figuring social housing as an integral part of a nation’s infrastructure. We speak with Martin about this report and its reception in Australian housing policy debates. We also ruminate about what housing-for-all movements in Australia, the US, and across the world stand to learn from each other.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

The Black University Concept with Andrew J. Douglas

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 15:00:00 -0400

Andrew J. Douglas, political theorist and professor of political science at Morehouse College, joins Money on the Left to discuss his latest article, “Modern Money and the Black University Concept,” published April 19, 2024, in Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice.

In the article as in the interview, Andrew stages critical encounters between the little-studied but tremendously potent concept of the Black University–an alternative vision for higher education oriented to Pan-African research and community development–and recent public money-driven proposals, like the Uni Currency Project, that aim to activate colleges and universities as sites for radical public provisioning and meaningful political participation. Proponents of both projects, Andrew argues, stand to gain much through collaboration and close study of each other’s work, with the prospective outcome of a revitalized 21st-century public money-driven Black University movement lingering just within reach.

Toward the end of the conversation we discuss Andrew’s planned participation in a symposium on the cooperative university that was to be held later in the month at Columbia University. In solidarity with campus protestors at Columbia and across the world, Andrew withdrew in advance from that event.

Andrew J. Douglas is author of three books, including (with Jared Loggins) Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism (2021); W.E.B. Du Bois and the Critique of the Competitive Society (2019); and In the Spirit of Critique: Thinking Politically in the Dialectical Tradition (2013).

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Aesthetics after Autonomy with Grant Kester

Fri, 03 May 2024 15:00:00 -0400

Money on the Left is joined by Grant Kester, professor of Art History at University of California, San Diego. We speak with Kester about his multi-decade career, researching and teaching the history of socially engaged art.

Kester’s scholarship underscores the limits and contradictions of the dominant modern Western tradition of aesthetics. Such aesthetics value “autonomy,” insisting that the artist, the artistic medium, or art as an institution ought to stand alone and outside of society and its corrupting influences. Paradoxically, autonomy in this tradition is supposed to secure art’s political dimension by blunting and often deferring any claims to immediate social efficacy. Kester, by contrast, affirms what is variously called dialogical aesthetics or socially engaged art, a collaborative sensuous practice in public space, which aims to transform thought and action by forging complex relationships among artists and publics.

Here, we focus on Kester’s two recent books published by Duke University Press. In The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (August 2023), Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Beyond the Sovereign Self Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art (December 2023), Kester then shows how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice. Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester demonstrates how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation.

Throughout our conversation, we tease out affinities between Kester’s scholarship and heterodox theories of public money and provisioning. Problematizing unquestioned desires to cordon off aesthetics from political economy, we call on artists and activists to contest, reconstruct, and build anew the forms of mediation that heterogeneously shape a shared sensuous life.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Economic Democracy with Pavlina Tcherneva

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:00:00 -0400

Money on the Left speaks with Pavlina Tcherneva, Professor of Economics at Bard College and leading scholar of–-and advocate for—Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Many of our listeners will be familiar with Dr. Tcherneva's contributions to MMT, especially her book, The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity Press, 2020). She is also Director of Open Society University Network’s Economic Democracy Initiative, instrumental to the publication of a United Nations report on the job guarantee, titled “The Employment Guarantee as a Tool in the Fight Against Poverty.” We speak with Pavlina about her work, and also get her perspective on the causes and conditions of MMT’s movement from the margins of economic discourse toward the mainstream of political economic thought.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

The Alternative with Nick Romeo

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 12:00:00 -0500

Scott Ferguson and Billy Saas speak with New Yorker writer Nick Romeo about his exciting new book, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy, released in January 2024 with Public Affairs. Romeo’s The Alternative rebukes Margaret Thatcher’s infamous axiom that “there is no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism. In doing so, the book inventories the most promising experiments in radical economic democracy underway across the world today. Such experiments include, but are not limited to: a publicly-owned and -run gig work platform in Long Beach, California; a True Price system in Amsterdam; a public budgeting project in Cascais, Portugal; and a public Job Guarantee in Gramatneusiedl, Austria. (See our previous episode on the Austrian Job Guarantee for a deeper dive into that topic) Taken together, these and other initiatives profiled in the book “share a vision of the economy as a place of moral action and accountability,” as Romeo puts it, while modeling the kind of radical political economic imagination that is so utterly and urgently needed to meet our dire ecological moment. For Romeo, then, it remains insufficient to simply deny Thatcher’s quip that there is no alternative. The crucial task is to actively imagine and create the alternative.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

How can novels help us think about money ... and maybe even save the planet? (Guest Lecture)

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 17:00:00 -0500

Can novels and, by extension, other works of art help us to think about money and trust in new ways? Could embracing alternative perspectives on trust and money help us to avoid climate catastrophe? Rob Hawkes shares a new version of a talk previously presented at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art as part of the One Fifteen at MIMA series of public talks. Highlighting the financial barriers often assumed to stand in the way of local, national, and global efforts to advance ecological and social justice, Rob situates the trust inherent in the act of money creation as much closer than we usually think to the trust fostered and demanded by experimental fiction. If “storytelling” is another word for “accounting,” then maybe we can learn to tell the story of money in new ways, and perhaps this can help us to save the planet.

Music: "Yum" from "This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me" EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

Resisting Predatory Finance w/ Raúl Carrillo (Recovered Audio!)

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 19:00:00 -0500

Money on the Left is proud to present recovered and remastered audio from our interview with Raúl Carrillo, published previously solely as a written transcript. The recording also includes a new audio introduction in which Billy Saas reflects on the significance of our dialog with Carrillo for contemporary politics.

In our discussion, we explore the promise of the public money framework for advancing antiracist, anti-imperialist, and democratic politics across the world. We discuss how the public money or MMT perspective shapes his work as an attorney fighting against predatory finance and for an international, rights-based approach to full employment. A significant portion of the conversation is also devoted to Raúl’s ongoing critique of the “taxpayer money” trope in U.S. political culture. In both his recent article for the UCLA Criminal Law Review and a 2017 piece (coauthored with Jesse Myerson) for Splinter, Raúl persuasively shows that the myth of “taxpayer money” is not only incorrect in operational terms, but also a significant threat to marginalized communities and a major rhetorical obstacle for progressive politics.

Raúl Carrillo is an attorney, chair of the board of the Modern Money Network, Research Fellow with the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and member of the advisory board at Our Money.

You can read his article for the UCLA Criminal Law Review here: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7rp8g89c.

See his article on “The Dangerous Myth of Taxpayer Money” here: https://splinternews.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-taxpayer-money-1819658902.

Theme music by Hillbilly Motobike.

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Modern Movie Theory: What We Do in the Shadows

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 11:00:00 -0500

Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) is joined by Robyn Ollett (@robynollett) and Rob Hawkes (@robbhawkes) to discuss What We Do in the Shadows. Citing Robyn’s interpretations of vampirism in The New Queer Gothic: Reading Queer Girls and Women in Contemporary Fiction and Film, the cohosts situate What We Do in the Shadows within the vampire's long history as a figure for queerness and alterity. In the second half of their conversation, Will, Robyn and Rob develop figural connections between the show’s queer citational form and Money on the Left’s articulation of endogenous credit.

Order Robyn Ollett's book, The New Queer Gothic: Reading Queer Girls and Women in Contemporary Fiction and Film.

Music: "Yum" from "This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me" EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

Criticism LTD w/ Matt Seybold

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 13:00:00 -0500

Matt Seybold joins Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson to discuss the political economy of literary criticism from past to present, amateur to professional. Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature at Elmira College and Resident Scholar at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. In addition to writing and teaching in the field of literature & economics, Seybold produces and hosts The American Vandal podcast, an ever-growing collection of conversations and presentations about literature, humor, and history in America that is inspired by Mark Twain's life and legacy.

Our conservation focuses, in particular, on The American Vandal’s magisterial eighth series titled, “Criticism LTD.” With 16 episodes totaling 24-hours of listening, “Criticism LTD” marshals a diverse cast of over 50 voices to provide fresh perspectives on the origins & trajectories of literary criticism and the so-called “crisis of humanities.” Episodes take on a wide range of topics, including: the marked contrast between today’s “golden age of criticism” (Ryan Ruby) in amateur and para-academic venues and the “Ponzi Austerity” (Yanis Varoufakis) and “Ed-Tech Griftopia” (Seybold) undermining contemporary academic research and instruction; the mid-20th-century trouncing of the neo-Aristotelian Chicago School Critics by the neoliberal Chicago School Economists; how the ugly politics of race, class, gender, and colonialism have both informed and met resist in practices of close reading; and the importance of the 19th-century feud over literary criticism between Matthew Arnold and Mark Twain for imaginatively contesting imperialism, then and now. “Criticism LTD” has much to offer teachers, researchers, organizers, and creators interested in building a more humane, collaborative, and democratic education system in the shell of the old.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Teaching Economics w/ Benjamin Wilson

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 17:00:00 -0500

We are joined again by Benjamin Wilson to discuss what it is like to teach Economics from a heterodox Modern Monetary Theory perspective in 2023. Wilson is associate professor and recently-minted chair of the department of Economics at SUNY, Cortland. In previous episodes, we have chatted with Wilson about his research, the Uni Currency project, and his innovative work experimenting with classroom currencies. Developing these topics further, our conversation this time explores the potentials and dangers of using neoclassical textbooks in the heterodox classroom; the utility of classroom currencies for Econ classes of all levels; the place of narrative in neoclassical and heterodox theory; and so much more. Our dialog with Wilson is shaped in several respects by our conversation with Larry Johnson in last month’s episode of Money on the Left. If you are passionate about pedagogy, then this episode is for you.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Monetary Foundations of Education w/ Larry Johnson

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 17:00:00 -0400

This month, we speak with Larry Johnson, associate professor in the Social Foundations of Education Program at the University of South Florida, Saint Petersburg. In his pedagogy, Johnson focuses on the complex relationship between education, culture, and society with the goal of exploring policies and practices from historical and contemporary perspectives that address structural inequality, and transforming educational institutions into sites for social justice. Johnson is notably a long-time proponent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and variously mobilizes MMT’s insights when training our teachers-to-be. In our conversation with Johnson, we discover just how constrained the US system of public education is by wrong economic thinking and what it would mean to think otherwise. Together, we ask: How do federal interest rates shape US education policy? What do standardized tests have to tell us about neoclassical economics and the nature of money? Why is the rhetoric of education in the United States so narrowly focused on preparing students for careers? How do classist and racist myths of taxpayer financing create unequal schooling? And how could we ever reasonably hope for the political economy of education in the United States to ever be otherwise? Pondering such questions, Johnson opens a window onto his longstanding advocacy for radically rethinking US public education through the lens of endogenous public money theory.

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Power to the People w/ Sandeep Vaheesan

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 12:00:00 -0400

Sandeep Vaheesan (@sandeepvaheesan) joins Scott Ferguson on the Superstructure podcast to discuss the still-undecided political significance of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Their conversation focuses on Vaheesan’s article, “The IRA is Still Being Formed: An Episode in America’s Past Contains Important Lessons for How We Move Forward in Greening the Economy,” published recently in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

While present left debate about the IRA tends to split over whether the legislation ultimately breaks with or confirms the tenets of neoliberal governance, Vaheesan turns our attention to the ongoing contestation over the bill’s implementation across heterogeneous domains. Vaheesan puts the current struggle into perspective by reflecting on the historical fight surrounding the construction and operation of the Boulder (a.k.a. “Hoover”) Dam.

In the case of the federal provisioning of the Boulder Dam in the 1920’s, a strong public utility—the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power —was well positioned to control water and power as public goods, despite efforts by the conservative Hoover administration to wholly privatize the process. What is more, the success of this project laid the groundwork for later rural electrification programs under FDR’s New Deal.

Today, Vaheesan sees similar potential for public control over the IRA’s implementation because the legislation crucially extends investment and production tax credits, which were formerly available only to for-profit entities, to community-controlled public and cooperative electric utilities. For this reason, the meaning and fate of the IRA remains up-for-grabs. Should community-controlled public and cooperative electric utilities seize hold of the IRA’s democratic potentials, Vaheesan suggests, the process stands to build significant capacities for a more expansive Green New Deal.

Ferguson and Vaheesan close their conversation by considering the social construction of and disputes about public money in both contemporary and historical contexts.

Vaheesan is legal director of the Open Markets Institute and author of a forthcoming book titled, Democracy in Power (University of Chicago Press) on the history and future of cooperative and public power in the United States.

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Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Reparations for Black Americans w/ William A. Darity

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 15:00:00 -0400

We’re joined this month by William A.( “Sandy”) Darity to discuss reparations for Black Americans. Sandy Darity is Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. A founding theorist of stratification economics and foremost scholar of the racial wealth gap in the United Stats, Darity is perhaps best known for his committed public advocacy for acknowledging, redressing, and resolving histories of racist violence against enslaved black people and their descendents through a federal program of reparations for black Americans.

In April 2020–just weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic and two months before the global uprisings that followed the murder of George Floyd–Darity and co-author Kirsten Mullen published the book From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century. We speak with Professor Darity about this book–including its conception, reception, and circulation over the last few years. We also ask Darity about related projects like his proposals for “Baby Bonds” and a Federal Job Guarantee. We conclude, finally, by suggesting that the U.S. Treasury mint a $12 trillion-dollar platinum coin featuring prominent figures from the black freedom struggle for the purpose of financing reparations and educating the public about how money works.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Money's Place (Journal Announcement!)

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 17:00:00 -0400

In this brief podcast message, Scott Ferguson announces the publication of Maxximilian Seijo's peer-reviewed journal essay, "Money’s Place: Science Fiction, Realism & Modern Monetary Theory in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future," in Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice.

Abstract

Kim Stanley Robinson’s speculative near-future novel Ministry for the Future (2020) centers the heterodox political economy of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) to forge a new path for ecosocialist politics. This money-positive path diverges radically from critical traditions in political and literary thought that reject money as the ultimate source of environmental exploitation and climate catastrophe. In this essay, I argue that Ministry’s centering of money challenges and displaces the generic conventions of science fiction and realism, each of which has historically related to money in opposing ways. Whereas science fiction prioritizes escape to an enclave “outside” of money’s mediation of social relations, and realism laments the immanent dynamics of money’s mediating force, Ministry estranges both genres from their relationship to money by redefining money as an inextricable expression of social relation and interdependence. As opposed to dominant Marxian modes, Robinson’s redefinition draws attention to money’s radical place within the speculative imagination, disclosing new political economic and ecological capacity to remake global reproduction.

The People’s Ledger w/ Saule Omarova

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 15:00:00 -0400

This month, we discuss democratic possibilities for public finance with Saule Omarova, the Beth and Marc Goldberg Professor of Law at Cornell University and President Biden’s original nominee for Comptroller of the Currency. Omarova’s work on financial regulation and banking law has long informed how we at Money on the Left understand the modern monetary system. Her and Robert Hockett’s “finance franchise” metaphor for modern banking-–according to which the federal government is the franchisor and chartered banks are all franchisees–renders an often-times opaque system intuitive and readily politicizable. Throughout our conversation, we learn from Omarova about how she arrived at this work, what other metaphors she and Hockett considered as alternatives, and exciting democratic possibilities for social policy development, including proposals for a National Investment Authority and a public banking system called “the people’s ledger.”

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Adventures in Quantumland w/ Ruth E. Kastner

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 16:00:00 -0400

Scott Ferguson is joined on the Superstructure podcast by Ruth E. Kastner, philosopher of physics and research associate at the University of Maryland. In their conversation, Ferguson and Kastner explore metaphysical resonances between Modern Monetary Theory’s approach to money and Kastner’s “Transactional Interpretation” of quantum physics.

Setting the stage for their dialog, Ferguson and Kastner critique orthodox commitments in both economics and physics to a pre-relational individuality: what medieval theologian John Duns Scotus famously called thisness or, “haecceity.” When being is contracted to mere haecceity, they argue, causality is reduced to local and unidirectional events in a manner that overlooks global conditions of possibility. In contrast, Ferguson and Kastner affirm an irreducibly relational ontology for monetary and quantum theory alike. This relational ontology comprises broader patterns of potential, which orthodox methods have rendered imperceptible. It also takes seriously non-local notions of causality, especially that unfamiliar all-at-onceness that Albert Einstein once derided as “spooky action at a distance.”

Along the way, Ferguson and Kastner consider a host of interdisciplinary analogies–for example, between monetary receivability in heterodox economics and so-called “absorber waves” in the Interaction Interpretation of quantum mechanics. At the same time, however, they remain careful not to collapse distinctions between political economy and quantum theory. Far from impractical navel gazing, such speculations harbor very real worldly consequences for interdisciplinary theory and practice.

For more information, check out Kastner’s website as well as her recent paper on “Quantum Haecceity” mentioned during the podcast.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Job Guarantee as Historical Struggle w/ David Stein (NEW TRANSCRIPT!)

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 12:00:00 -0400

We are excited to rerelease our inaugural episode of Money on the Left alongside a brand new transcript.

Conversation originally published on May 27, 2018

Money on the Left is the official podcast of Modern Money Network: Humanities Division (@moneyontheleft).

In our inaugural episode, we consider the recent resurgence of full employment politics in the United States from both a political and historical perspective with historian David Stein (@davidpstein). Stein is currently a fellow at UCLA’s Luskin Center for History and Policy and a lecturer in the departments of History and African American Studies. Check out his recent article in Jacobin: David Stein, “Full Employment and Freedom.”

Intro music by Hillbilly Motobike.

The Ends of Freedom w/ Mark Paul

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 10:00:00 -0400

Mark Paul joins Money on the Left to discuss his new book, The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Paul is assistant professor in the Bloustein school of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. In his book, Paul scours U.S. political and economic history to recover, reclaim, and adapt the rhetoric of economic rights for our current political moment. For too long, Paul demonstrates, progressives and leftists have let conservative and sometimes charismatic economists define the boundaries of our economic thinking. This even as the left has underappreciated its own rich reserves of heterodox political thinking and radical rhetorical action. Hence Paul’s outspoken advocacy–within and beyond the book–for durable and democratic policy interventions like Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, and a Green New Deal.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

New Deal for Higher Ed w/ Jennifer Mittelstadt

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 14:00:00 -0400

We’re joined by Jennifer Mittelstadt (@MittelstadtJen), professor of history at Rutgers University, to discuss her involvement with Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education. We speak with Mittelstadt about how Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education is organizing to address the most pressing threats to US public higher education today, as well as about how her own scholarship on publicly-provisioned welfare systems in the United States shapes her political organizing and advocacy. We also consider the role of Modern Monetary Theory in the struggle to democratize university finance, including Money on the Left’s controversial proposal for a federally backed university currency called the “uni.”

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Postmodern Money Theory! (Part 3)

Wed, 17 May 2023 19:00:00 -0400

In the third installment of Superstructure’s “Postmodern Money Theory!” series, Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson wrap up their discussion of B.S. Johnson’s novella, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, which self-consciously weaves money and accounting into the very fabric of literary form. Rob and Scott tease out the text’s lingering potentials and blindspots in order to problematize dominant forms of political economic and aesthetic critique. (Click the following links for Part 1 and Part 2.)

To start, our co-hosts zero in on the book’s estrangement of taxation. Characterizing taxation as a zero-sum game that breeds extreme pettiness, resentment, and violence, the book critically distances itself from orthodox visions of money, while providing only faint hints of possible alternatives. Next, Rob and Scott read Christie Malry’s generative tensions alongside two misleading tendencies in critical theory, both of which are predicated on the false barter story of money’s origins.

The first tendency links the end of gold standards to the rise of modernism and postmodernism, respectively. Advanced by the likes of Jean-Joseph Goux, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson, this expressly lapsarian tendency frets an absolute volatilization of forms and values across political economy and aesthetics, rather than affirming a contestable and imaginative politics of public inscription unencumbered by legally sanctioned austerities and inequalities.

The second tendency, meanwhile, casts the orthodox problem of dyadic exchange in terms of debt and credit. From Friedrich Nietzsche to David Graeber, this discourse reduces debt to narrow oppositions between domination and freedom, while foreclosing credit’s collective and always disputable caretaking capacities. Although both impulses inform Christy Malry’s construction, Rob and Scott underscore the ways that Johnson’s constant formal experimentation subtly reframes and exceeds these tendencies’ erroneous totalizing judgments.

Finally, Rob and Scott uncover money’s repressed public foundations and alternatives in Christy Malry’s allegorical conclusion. Working to redeem Johnson’s unrealized longings for socialism, the co-hosts consider the text’s enigmatic appeals to credit overdrafts and debt write-offs in relation to its tragicomic play on Christ’s sacrificial death.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Bank of the People with Dan Rohde

Sat, 06 May 2023 10:00:00 -0400

Dan Rohde (@DanEricRohde) joins Scott Ferguson to discuss his Superstructure Vertical piece, “Bank of the People: History for Money’s Future.” The piece is based on a longer scholarly article titled, “The Bank of the People, 1835-1840: Law and Money in Upper Canada,” which is forthcoming from Osgoode Journal of Law.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

On Paradox with Elizabeth S. Anker

Mon, 01 May 2023 14:00:00 -0400

Elizabeth S. Anker joins Money on the Left to discuss her provocative new book, On Paradox: The Claims of Theory (Duke University Press, 2022). Anker is Associate Professor of English at Cornell University and Professor of Law in the Cornell Law School. In On Paradox, Anker contends that faith in the logic of paradox has been the cornerstone of left intellectualism since the second half of the twentieth century. She attributes the ubiquity of paradox in the humanities to its appeal as an incisive tool for exposing and dismantling hierarchies. Anker, however, suggests that paradox not only generates the very exclusions it critiques but also creates a disempowering haze of indecision.

Tracing the ascent of paradox in theories of modernity, in rights discourse, in the history of literary criticism and the linguistic turn, and in the transformation of the liberal arts in higher education, Anker shows that reasoning through paradox has become deeply problematic: it engrains a startling homogeneity of thought while undercutting the commitment to social justice that remains a guiding imperative of theory. Rather than calling for a wholesale abandonment of such reasoning, Anker argues for an expanded, diversified theory toolkit that can help theorists escape the seductions and traps of paradox. In our conversation, we explore strong parallels between Anker’s call for a reparative “integrative criticism” and our own constructive hermeneutics of provision.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Stayed on Freedom w/ Dan Berger

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 08:00:00 -0400

Money on the Left presents a public conversation with Dan Berger about his important new book, Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power through One Family’s Journey (Basic Books, 2023).

Berger’s Stayed on Freedom tells a new history of Black Liberation through the intertwined narratives of two grassroots organizers. The Black Power movement, often associated with its iconic spokesmen, derived much of its energy from the work of people whose stories have never been told. Stayed On Freedom brings into focus two unheralded Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom. Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons fell in love while organizing tenants and workers in the South. Their commitment to each other and to social change took them on a decades-long journey that traversed first the country and then the world. In centering their lives, Berger shows how Black Power united the local and the global across organizations and generations. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews, Stayed On Freedom is a moving and intimate portrait of two people trying to make a life while working to make a better world. 

This public dialog took place on February 24, 2023 at the University of South Florida. It was graciously moderated by Tangela Serls (Professor of Instruction in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and Special Advisor to the USF College of Arts and Sciences Dean on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and K. Stephen Prince (Professor in the USF History department).

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Postmodern Money Theory! (Part 2)

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 07:00:00 -0400

In Part 2 of Superstructure’s “Postmodern Money Theory!” series, Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson explore B.S. Johnson’s postmodern novella, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), which self-consciously weaves money and accounting into the very fabric of literary form. Regarded as brokering a broader transition between modernism and postmodernism, Johnson paradoxically conceded that “to tell stories is to tell lies,” while remaining committed to the revelatory “truthfulness” of literary form. In Christy Malry’s Own Double-Entry, Johnson tells the metafictional story of a disaffected young man, Christie Malry. Throughout the book, Malry applies the principles of double-entry bookkeeping in response to injustices in his life, "crediting" himself against society in an increasingly violent manner for perceived "debits.”

Our co-hosts trace Christy Malry’s multifaceted approach to accounting, which cuts across questions of money, narrativity, enumeration, and reckoning in economic, ethical, historical, and even biblical senses. Affirming the text’s defamiliarizing insights, Rob and Scott unpack how Johnson’s satirical and estranging use of language unsettles dominant visions of money as a merely finite and located particular. At the same time, however, they also weigh the book’s problems and limits, flagging Johnson’s unquestioned white masculine framing of accounting, for example, despite his socialistic aspirations and attentiveness to form’s social restrictions. Stay tuned for the third installment of “Postmodern Monetary Theory!,” in which Rob and Scott further plumb Christy Malry’s Own Double-Entry for its postmodern lessons about the aesthetics and politics of credit and debt.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Mikhail Bakhtin Pt. 1 - Carnival Laughter & Grotesque Realism

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 16:00:00 -0400

Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) inaugurates the first of a lecture series on the work and ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin. Drawing parallels with right wing attacks on contemporary drag performance and ballroom traditions, Will discusses Bakhtin’s analysis of the Medieval carnival humor, its manifestation in Renaissance literature, and its unique aesthetics of what he terms “grotesque realism.” Quotations are drawn from the Introduction and first chapter of Bakhtin’s text, Rabelais and His World (1965), with additional references made to Siegfried Kracauer’s 1927 essay “The Mass Ornament” and Marx’s Capital.

Music: Music: “Lilac” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste w/Rohan Grey (Bonus Episode)

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 18:00:00 -0400

In this bonus episode of Money on the Left, Rohan Grey joins co-hosts Scott Ferguson and Billy Saas to assess the epistemological and political implications of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failure. While orthodox economics and law tell us that economic crises are essentially matters of private risk and market discipline, Rohan, Scott and Billy argue that blatant federal mediation throughout the ongoing SVB crisis exposes money’s public and contestable nature. Rather than another story of capitalist contradiction or bankers behaving badly, then, the SVB crisis opens contemporary money politics to a host of invaluable tools for a stable, just, and green transition: democratic state and municipal credit issuance; public digital banking; focused credit regulation and demand management; and full deposit insurance without arbitrary and destabilizing caps.

For more on the significance of the unfolding crisis, see Nathan Tankus, “Every Complex Banking Issue All At Once: The Failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Five Quick Implications.”

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Postmodern Money Theory! (Part 1)

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 13:00:00 -0400

Launching a new Superstructure series, Rob Hawkes joins Scott Ferguson to explore the ins and outs of “postmodernism.” Postmodernism is a heterogenous and disputed regime of aesthetics and theory that arose in the second half of the 20th century. Dated to midcentury, but promulgated as a discourse from the 1970’s to 1990’s, postmodernism is known primarily for its preoccupations with multiplicity, difference, surface, language, image, constructedness, reflexivity, and the integration of art and everyday life. Decades past its heyday, postmodernism today frequently serves as a pejorative for reactionary critics of social and ecological justice and aesthetic diversity. In their conversation, Rob and Scott critique noxious voices both outside and inside of today’s Modern Monetary Theory movement, who similarly wield postmodernism as epithet to discredit and police money’s contestable public capacities to provide for all. Our co-hosts dismantle such false zero-sum invectives by weighing the historical nuances and semantic surfeits of terms including modernity, modernism, postmodernity and postmodernism. As a result, this episode prepares the groundwork for a forthcoming engagement with B.S. Johnson’s postmodern novella, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), which self-consciously weaves money and accounting into the very fabric of literary form.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Gramatneusiedl's Job Guarantee w/ Thomas Schwab

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 12:00:00 -0500

This month, Money on the Left is joined by Thomas Schwab who, as mayor of Gramatneusiedl in Lower Austria, oversees a promising Job Guarantee pilot program. Seeking to eliminate long-term unemployment, the program guarantees public jobs to anyone in the community who seeks them. In our conversation, we explore the philosophy and structure of Gramatneusiedl’s municipal employment service. We also discuss a key inspiration for the program: a Depression-era study of the effects of unemployment conducted in the same region as Gramatneusiedl. Titled “Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal” (or, “The Unemployed of Marienthal”), the report detailed the deleterious effects of systemic unemployment in wake of a severe economic downturn and soon became an early classic of European sociology. Decades later, Schwab wrote a master’s thesis about the report, aiming to revive its findings in defense of public employment today. The Gramatneusiedl program is presently being studied by Jörg Flecker, a sociologist at the University of Vienna, as well as Lukas Lehner and Maximilian Kasy, economists at Oxford. The pilot is set to expire in 2024. Thereafter, however, Schwab and his allies anticipate leveraging current academic studies to renew and potentially scale up Gramatneusiedl’s public employment program.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Money & Solidarity in Latin America w/ Andrés Arauz

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 11:00:00 -0500

Money on the Left is joined by Andrés Arauz, recent candidate for the Ecuadorian presidency, heterodox economist, and outspoken advocate for the creation of the “Sur.” The Sur is a complementary currency for use in intra-Latin American trade and cooperation. Dismissed by New York Times blogger, Paul Krugman, as a “terrible idea,” Brazilian President Lula De Silva’s proposal for development of the Sur as a tool for encouraging economic and political integration between Latin American countries has stoked the imaginations of progressive leftists within and beyond the region. As he makes clear in our conversation, Arauz is among those who see in the Sur urgent opportunities to build plurinational solidarities among countries like Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, and Peru, as well as to diminish the hegemony of the U.S. dollar and financial institutions over Latin American economies and politics. Arauz offers an astute and defamiliarizing perspective on the Sur for anyone who may be committed to or uncertain about the political economic potentials of a SUR-driven future for the Latin American Left.

In our dialog, we speak with Arauz about his time serving as director of the Ecuadorian Central Bank. Remaking an orthodox organization with heterodox tools, he not only oversaw the Central Bank’s transition from a neoliberal handmaiden for corporate interests to a robust public institution in Ecuador’s complex “dollarized” economy, but also empowered and secured the country’s network of local credit unions by integrating them into the Central Bank’s federal payment system. Money on the Left is proud to present transcripts of this important conversation in both English and Spanish.

Andrés Arauz on Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR): https://www.cepr.net/staff-member/andres-arauz/

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Superstructure 34 - Italy and International Fascism

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 15:00:00 -0500

Co-hosts Naty T Smith (@orangeasm), Will Beaman (@agoingaccount), and Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) discuss the rise to power of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni near the 100th anniversary of Mussolini's March on Rome to frame the international moment and the ascendance of red-brown tendencies, the urgencies of anti- fascism, and the shape of contemporary reaction. Through the example of Meloni’s election, they explore how monetary austerity, anti migrant tactics, fascist nostalgia, and other ideologies of replacement, are at stake in this global conjuncture.

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Can The Little Mermaid Speak?

Sat, 14 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0500

Will Beaman and Scott Ferguson tease out the multiplicity of voices that shape The Little Mermaid (1989) in order to problematize racist outcries against Disney’s forthcoming 2023 live-action version of the film starring singer Halle Bailey. The co-hosts answer and invert an imperative promulgated by a reactionary meme circulated on social media: “Don’t take away my history." The meme falsely imagines Disney’s 2023 reboot displacing and replacing a past white heterosexual monoculture.

This episode, by contrast, explores the genuinely heterogeneous and contestable legibilities that inform The Little Mermaid’s historical production and reception. Developing Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “dialogism,” Will and Scott trace the film’s significance across several registers: (1) gender representation in relation to Disney animation history and 1980’s Hollywood; (2) Disney’s imperialist expansions as a multinational conglomerate in the context of a zero-sum neoliberalism and expiring Cold War; (3) abstract animation aesthetics in light of an increasingly physics-oriented blockbuster cinema; and (4) queer culture’s fraught popular expressiveness in the midst of an HIV/AIDS crisis dismissed and repressed by U.S. authorities.

Note to Animation and Broadway Aficionados: In this episode, the co-hosts refer to “Someday My Prince Will Come” in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) as an original example of what has come to be called an “I want” or “I wish” number in musical films and plays. Here we add a small proviso: Snow White’s “I’m Wishing” song precedes “Someday My Prince Will Come” and thus represents the original “I want” or “I wish” number in the film in a very literal sense.

Making Digital Public Spaces w/ MUSICat

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 14:00:00 -0500

This month Money on the Left is joined by the folks behind the MUSICat project, an online music streaming service for public libraries designed to share heterogenous local music with local community members. We speak with Preston Austin and Kelly Hiser from Rabble, the company behind MUSICat, as well as with Racquel (“Rocky”) Mann, who coordinates the MUSICat service with Edmontonians as Digital Initiatives Librarian for Edmonton Public Library.

Launched by the Madison Public Library in 2014, MUSICat has since been adopted by public libraries, including in Pittsburgh, Nashville, Fort Worth, New Orleans, Edmonton and elsewhere. Artists who share music via MUSICat are paid for their work with library funding and are granted other substantial forms of support through the library system.

MUSICat serves as an inspirational model for mobilizing public institutions and forms that can provision communities in diverse and locally sensitive ways. Exploring what we at Money on the Left have called a hermeneutics of provision, we affirm public libraries’ critical function as creative stewards and producers of regional public cultures.

Special thanks to Edmonton artist Jill van Stanton for the album art used in our episode graphic. Thanks also to the Edmonton musicians, whose work is spread liberally throughout this episode. Featured tunes include: Shout Out Out Out Out, “Never the Same Way Twice”; Souljah Fyah, “8 Days of Summer”; Farhad Khosravi, “Escape”; Denim Daddies, “Roadrunner”; and The Tsunami Brothers, “Stink Bug.”

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Mercedes Ohlen (transcription), & Emily Reynolds of The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (graphic art)

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

The Descent of Money

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 10:00:00 -0500

‘The Descent of Money: Literature, Inheritance, and Trust in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property (1906)’

Rob Hawkes' paper argues that Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property (1906) foreground, interrogate and enact questions of trust, both in their engagements with and departures from literary realism/naturalism and in their preoccupations with the value and power of money. Wharton’s novel is saturated with the language of costs, payments, investments, and debts, while the first of Galsworthy’s Forsyte novels presents ‘Forsyteism’ as an inescapable set of hereditary traits. Both texts, furthermore, implicitly associate money with nature and imagine a ‘sense of property’ as inherited in more ways than one, whilst simultaneously offering glimpses of a different understanding of money altogether: one that reveals surprising connections between literature, money, and trust.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 08:00:00 -0500

Money on the Left is joined in conversation with curator Emily Ebba Reynolds & artist Nando Alvarez-Perez, co-founders of the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, or BICA, in Buffalo, New York.

BICA is a new and distinctly heterodox arts organization, offering physical space for artist shows and educational seminars, as well as fiscal space for provisioning micro-grants to local artists. In 2018 Emily & Nando founded BICA, in their words, in order to “reframe contemporary art around issues of regional community, create a plurality of art worlds, and reconceive art as a practical tool which can be used to reshape the world around it.” Along this journey of re-conception, reframing, and reshaping, they’ve confronted and engaged creatively with the “money” question in its numerous and challenging forms. We talk about these as well as get Nando’s and Emily’s take on why a “jobs guarantee” is something artists should fight for.

Learn more about BICA (and discover ways to support the project) at THEBICA.org.

Special Thanks to Nando for lending his artwork titled, Primary Document 08262022a, for our monthly episode art. Scroll below the transcript for a full view of Nando’s piece. See if you can spot the reference to the Money on the Left crew!

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Medium: Femme - 8 - Abortion (Part 2)

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 14:00:00 -0500

Charlotte and Naty continue their discussion of abortion and reproductive justice internationally in the wake of the repeal of Roe v Wade in this much delayed second segment of three.

Topics include : vegetables souls, the AMA, the progressive era, 70s Australia, the Bruenigs, dirtbag left media, Joe Biden, the democrats, Dorothy Roberts, New Zealand, disobedience, community and care, doulas, travel, Judge Dredd, decriminilization, insect graveyards, eugenics, American exceptionalism, Japan, Margaret Sanger, data surveillance, Guttmacher union, Catholicism, the green tide in Latin America, doctors, Roe v wade, state laws, Margaret Sanger, Clarence Thomas, the supreme court, as well as orgs to donate to.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirtin

Political Economy of 'The Rehearsal'

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 12:00:00 -0500

Cohosts Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) and Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) discuss the reflexive and imaginative political economy of Nathan Fielder's HBO series, The Rehearsal. The show points towards an apophatic ethics of social provisioning, presenting an ambiguous portrait of care, production, and human agency. This portrait remains irreducibly and collective, in excess of the powers and intentions that constitute social belonging.

Internet for the People with Ben Tarnoff

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 16:00:00 -0400

Money on the Left is joined by Ben Tarnoff—tech worker, writer, and cofounder of Logic Magazine—about his book Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future (Verso Books, 2022). In his book, Tarnoff provides a comprehensive history and a critical topology of this thing we have come to know, love, hate, swear off, get on, and grow bored of: the Internet. Throughout our conversation, Tarnoff displaces the haphazard history of the Internet that circulates often-unquestioned in our foggy collective memories, helping us to see more clearly how the Internet came to be “so broken.” Tarnoff refuses to accept privatization or the profit motive as given or inevitable. Instead, he evaluates the history of privatization and profiteering from the perspective of public provisioning. He does so, moreover, in order to advocate for heterogeneous public alternatives and cooperative futures. Ultimately, Tarnoff fashions a vision for the future of the Internet as a de-privatized, public space for collective flourishing, which is to say, an “Internet for the People.”

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Democratizing University Finance

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 14:00:00 -0400

Benjamin Wilson and Scott Ferguson join guest-host Jakob Feinig to discuss their forthcoming article about Money on the Left’s “uni” project to democratize university finance. Titled “Stop Trying to Find the Money–Create It!,” the article argues that the Public Banking Act can empower universities to issue new forms of public money that serve democratic communities and repudiate austerity. The text will appear mid-October 2022 in the American Association of University Professors’ publication Academe Magazine as part of a special issue edited by Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education. In this conversation, Ben and Scott recount the evolution of the uni project from its original politicization of emergency Federal Reserve facilities early in the Covid-19 pandemic to its most recent iteration joining bottom up learning-by-doing with top-down federal legislation. Along the way, the conversation turns toward the project’s commitments to democratic pedagogy through participation, the need to recognize universities as powerful economic provisioners and anchors, and the uni’s role in challenging the current dollar system from within.

*Special thanks to Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education for inviting Money on the Left to collaborate and for inviting us to contribute to their issue for Academe Magazine.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Debt Cancel Culture: Media Strategies for Democratic Coalitions (ft. Erica Robles-Anderson, @fstflofscholars)

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 14:00:00 -0400

Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) is joined by Erica Robles-Anderson (@fstflofscholars) for an examination of the Biden Administration’s public communications around student debt relief. If Trump-era communication was characterized by direct broadcasts from the Tweeter-in-Chief, this new style uses public policy to strategically hail online discussion. Erica and Will read "This You?" debtor discourse as an example of how political media forms can be suited to coalitional, democratic politics.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure…

Music: “Lilac” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Performing Hard Money with Frederic Heine

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 20:00:00 -0400

Frederic Heine joins Money on the Left to discuss his recent essay, “Performing Hard Money: Monetary Policy, Metaphor and Masculinity in the Making of EMU,” published this summer in the Journal of Cultural Economy. Heine is a university assistant at the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies at Johannes Kepler University, Linz. In his essay, Heine analyzes the cluster of masculine metaphors that ground and mobilize the European Monetary Union’s hard-line opposition to soft money politics. At the time of this episode’s publishing in early September 2022, what Heine classifies as the masculine performative agency of EMU leaders can be seen all over Europe, with Macron decrying the end of abundance and the ECB signaling a coming period of sacrifice across the Eurozone. We speak with Heine about this essay as well as his broader inquiry into the intersections of gender, global finance, and political economy.

See Frederic Heine’s essay here.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Austin Credits with Jonathan Wilson

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 14:00:00 -0400

For this special episode of Superstructure, cohosts Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) and Andrés Bernal (@andresintheory) are joined by Jonathan Wilson (@DeficitOwl24601) to discuss his new white paper, "Proposal for a Local Currency Issued by the City of Austin," which proposes a complementary currency for the city of Austin called Austin Credits.

Jonathan's proposal contributes to a developing conversation in the Austin City Council, which was tasked by recent legislation with exploring possibilities for new public banking and payments structures by a resolution. The conversation delves into the proposal's legal design and implementation strategy, while also contextualizing its political meaning and stakes for progressive politics.

Read the white paper here: https://moneyontheleft.org/2022/08/11/austin-credits-with-jonathan-wilson-white-paper-and-podcast-interview/

Superestructura: Latin America Edition

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 19:00:00 -0400

Money on the Left is thrilled to release English and Spanish transcripts from our Superstructure podcast with with Daniel Rojas Medellin (@DanielRMed), now Coordinator of newly inaugurated President Gustavo Petro's ’s transition team (@petrogustavo), and Mexican economist Jesús Reséndiz Silva (@Tlacuachito). In the episode, co-hosts Andrés Bernal (@andresintheory) & Naty Smith (@orangeasm) speak with Medellin and Silva about what it means to think beyond economic orthodoxies in Latin America.

Click here for the new English and Spanish transcripts. The episode was transcribed and translated by Natalie Smith.

This episode was published originally in May 2021.

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Cloud Money with Brett Scott

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 19:00:00 -0400

Brett Scott joins Money on the Left to discuss his recently published book Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for our Wallets (Harper-Collins 2022). A committed advocate for financial heterodoxy, Scott grounds his perspicuous critique of “cloudmoney”--the conjoined efforts and outcomes of Big Finance and Big Tech’s drive to go “cashless”-- in his anthropological training and work as financial derivatives trader in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis.

Through our conversation we explore the possibilities and limitations of different metaphoric frameworks for understanding money, paying special attention to the pitfalls of figuring money as blood-like fluidity. Scott’s own comparison of financial operations with the functioning of the central nervous system prompts further discussion of the temporal and physical realities of modern money. We also discuss how awareness of the principles of monetary design clarifies the need for physical cash and the perils of privatized and surveilled forms of digital money.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 14:00:00 -0400

In this special episode, Billy Saas, Maxximilian Seijo and Scott Ferguson announce the launch of the collective's new scholarly journal: Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice.

Click here for the journal's inaugural publication, “Food, Money, and Democracy: Cultivating Collective Provisioning for Resilient and Equitable Communities of Work,” co-authored by Benjamin C. Wilson, Taylor Reid, and Max Sussman.

As Billy, Maxx and Scott explain in their conversation, Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice is a peer-reviewed, open access journal of scholarship in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. The journal places money’s public origins and capacities at the center of left inquiry and action. It cultivates interdisciplinary approaches to past and present, aesthetics and politics. And it advances intersectional forms of research and practice in service of a just transition from social and ecological devastation. During their dialog, Billy, Maxx and Scott discuss the journal's key aims and publication schedule, while offering advice for prospective authors.

See our Instructions for Authors page on our website, if you are interested in submitting or pitching an essay to the journal.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Medium: Femme - 7 - Abortion (Part 1)

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 19:00:00 -0400

In the first of a three part series following the overturning of Roe v Wade, cohosts Naty (@orangeasm) and Charlotte (@moltopopulare) discuss the ongoing fight for abortion access and rights taking place in both the US and the rest of the world.

Using the framework of reproductive justice, they contextualize abortion rights within a broader struggle for reproductive autonomy, touching on histories of reproductive control ranging from abortion restrictions to forced sterilisation, colonialism and incarceration. In doing so, they also highlight interconnections with concurrent right wing assaults on trans people, gay parents, drug users, refugees, and others marginalized groups.

Touching on histories and movements from Australia to Chile, Ireland, Brazil, and the border of Ukraine and Poland, Naty and Charlotte defend the right to free safe and legal abortion without apology, drawing out various trends and intersections to make a positive case for reproductive justice and autonomy.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Monetary Modernism

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 08:00:00 -0400

In this special episode of Money on the Left, the MotL Collective shares an audio recording from a conference panel titled, “Monetary Modernism.” Featuring papers by Scott Ferguson (University of South Florida), Rob Hawkes (Teesside University), and Maxximilian Seijo (University of California, Santa Barbara), the panel was presented at the Hopeful Modernisms conference organized by the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) at University of Bristol, June 22 - 25, 2022.

The conference sought to revive hopeful and more generative impulses in modernist art and literature, challenging a persistent view of modernism as relentlessly bleak and angst-ridden. It did so, moreover, for a present moment similarly burdened by dead-end accelerationist and pessimist imaginaries.

The panel begins with Rob Hawkes. He introduces the BAMS audience to the wide-ranging contributions of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective. He also makes the case for reading Georg Friedrich Knapp’s early twentieth-century chartalist approach to money as a modernist project deeply entwined with myriad other aesthetic modernisms.

In the first presentation, Scott Ferguson explores how Len Lye’s Rainbow Dance (1936), a short experimental promotional film for British public postal banking,embraces the abstractness, publicness, and heterogeneous plentitude of both money mediation and avant-garde cinema.

In the second talk, Rob Hawkes uncovers how tensions between fixed and fluid understandings of identity formation and history inform John Maynard Keynes’ chartalist-inspired writings on money as much as Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing and Ford Madox Ford’s 1933 novel The Rash Act.

Lastly, Maximilian Seijo’s presentation carefully works through metaphors for money in Virginia Woolf’s book-length feminist essay, A Room of One’s Own (1929), complicating the text’s appeals to monetary substances and fluids by teasing out its experimental approach to imagining non-patriarchal infrastructures for provisioning aesthetic work.

If you are interested in the texts and images that accompany some of the presentations, see here for Rob Hawkes’ slides and here for Scott Ferguson’s PowerPoint deck.

Superstructure 33 - Mediation is the Fourth Estate

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 14:00:00 -0400

Analyzing recent events at The Washington Post, Will Beaman (@agoingaccount), Natalie Tabb (@orangeasm), and Maxximilian Seijo (@maxseijo) develop a theory of media accountability in which heterogeneous institutions and social infrastructures are variously implicated as political participants.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Superstructure: Bitcoin in El Salvador

Sat, 16 Jul 2022 11:00:00 -0400

Ricardo Valencia joins co-hosts Andrés Bernal and Scott Ferguson to discuss recent protests against Bitcoin in El Salvador. Adopted as legal tender by the authoritarian President Nayib Bukele in September 2021, Bitcoin has become an emblem in El Salvador for U.S. corporate imperialism, public mismanagement, and anti-democratic rule. Whereas mainstream accounts of cryptocurrency tend to flatten stories in Latin America to matters of success and failure, Ricardo draws upon rich critical approaches in Cultural Studies developed by the likes of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy to situate current events in El Salvador within histories of global governance, political conflict, and cultural identity. During the conversation, Ricardo weighs the fraught legacy of left politics in and beyond El Salvador. He analyses the conspicuous convergence of “tech-bro” boosterism coming from the U.S. with right-wing regimes in vulnerable countries across the Global South. He considers tensions between imperial domination and quotidian safety that attend El Salvador’s dollarization in 2001, including the large role that remittances play in the everyday lives of the Salvadoran people. Finally, Ricardo contemplates the future promise of left politics in El Salvador. This promise, he explains, hinges upon feminist, queer and environmental movements, which are now demanding democratic and just uses of public money.

Dr. Ricardo Valencia is an assistant professor of public relations in the Department of Communications at California State University, Fullerton. Between 2010 and 2014, Dr. Valencia was the head of the communication section at the Embassy of El Salvador to the United States. He has also worked as a reporter covering international and domestic politics for Salvadoran and global media outlets such as La Prensa Gráfica, German Press Agency (DPA), and El Faro. Follow Ricardo on Twitter @ricardovalp.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Superstructure: Plato’s Republic (Part 3)

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 10:00:00 -0400

Historian and philologist Brendan Cook joins Scott Ferguson for the final installment of their 3-part mini-series devoted to Plato’s Republic. (See Part 1 and Part 2, if you are new to the series.) In Part 3, Brendan and Scott take up the vexed and largely maligned role of money in Republic. Weighing the fact that there is no linguistic equivalent for the modern English term “money” in Attic Greek, Brendan and Scott nevertheless align the text’s negative treatment of money-related activities with Plato’s impoverished univocal thinking. Next, they consider the limits and potentials of Plato’s well-known taxonomy of political regimes in Book 8 of Republic, noting how unfavorable invocations of “money loving” throughout the text’s latter sections abet a fatalistic and anti-democratic politics. Brendan and Scott then ponder the ironies of Socrates’ second paradoxical argument against poetry. And lastly, they explore the celestial “myth of Er” that closes Plato’s Republic. On their reading, this concluding myth not only implicitly betrays Socrates' injunction against poetry, but also encapsulates the text's key contradiction between expansive provisioning and zero-sum trade-offs.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Varn Vlog with Scott Ferguson

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 12:00:00 -0400

Scott Ferguson joins Varn Vlog to discuss his approach to critical theory, aesthetics and politics. Special thanks to C. Derick Varn for permitting Money on the Left to re-publish the interview here.

You can find more Varn Vlog interviews here:
https://www.youtube.com/c/CDerickVarnVlog

You can support Varn Vlog by becoming a patron:
https://www.patreon.com/varnvlog

You can support the Money on the Left Editorial Collective by becoming a patron:
https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Money on the Left: The Journal featuring "Food, Money & Democracy"

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 19:00:00 -0400

Benjamin C. Wilson, Taylor Reid, and Max Sussman join the podcast to discuss their forthcoming co-written essay, “Food, Money, and Democracy: Cultivating Collective Provisioning for Resilient and Equitable Communities of Work.” Inaugurating our new journal, Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice, the article politicizes what Sanjukta Paul and Nathan Tankus term “coordination rights” across monetary and production sectors and focuses on the coordination of food systems, in particular. Coordination rights are fundamental to the process of building resilient communities, our guests argue, determining whether social provisioning systems are “collective” or “concentrated.”

In our conversation, Wilson, Reid, and Sussman consider several promising cases of collective provisioning, which prioritize democratic participation and ecosocial stewardship over the austerity and profit-maximization associated with concentrated industry. Such examples include La Via Campesina movement for Food Sovereignty, the Black Cooperative Movement in the U.S., and restaurant reactions to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lamenting the failures of such models when faced with systemic illiquidity, our co-authors also importantly extend collective coordination principles to monetary systems, exploring small and medium-scale monetary experiments that use food systems as a way to build community capacity.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Projections 5: In Social Medias Res

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 16:00:00 -0400

In episode 5 of Projections, Will reflects on how recent editorial decisions at The Washington Post and New York Magazine have opened both institutions to public pressure and contestation during a period of right wing media campaigns against feminism and so-called "wokeness."

Visit our Patreon page here: https://patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure…

Music: “Lilac” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Superstructure: Plato’s Republic (Part 2)

Sat, 11 Jun 2022 12:00:00 -0400

Historian and philologist Brendan Cook joins Scott Ferguson for the second installment of their 3-part mini-series devoted to Plato’s Republic. (See Part 1, if you are new to the series.) In Part 2, Brendan and Scott turn their attention to the education of the guardian class that occupies Republic’s middle books in an effort to examine how the text’s zero-sum or “univocal” metaphysics of mediation variously undermine its commitments to abundant provisioning. Along the way, our co-hosts investigate Republic's elitist critique of democracy, contradictory endorsement of the so-called “noble lie,” and much-discussed analogies of the sun, divided line and cave.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Municipal Money After Crypto: Austin Edition

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 16:00:00 -0400

Mike Siegel and Mike Lewis join Money on the Left to discuss municipal currency politics. The conversation focuses, in particular, on our guests’ recent success in Austin, Texas, where they helped critically rewrite anti-public and anti-environmental crypto legislation to open fresh possibilities for public banking and payments that support local communities and ecologies.

A former public school teacher, Mike Siegel is a civil rights attorney, a co-founder of the progressive non-profit Ground Game, and a former Democratic candidate to represent Texas’ 10th Congressional district in the US House of Representatives. Mike Lewis, meanwhile, served as communications director for Siegel’s 2020 campaign, works regularly to advance Ground Game’s commitment to progressive electoral politics, and remains a prolific advocate for public money.

In early 2022, Siegel, Lewis and Money on the Left Collective member Andrés Bernal mobilized an effort to block the development of an official cryptocurrency in the City of Austin. Initially, they appealed to the Austin Chronicle opinion page to reshape public opinion. Next, Siegel, Lewis, and Bernal persuaded and then worked alongside Austin City Council members to amend recently-passed crypto legislation. Impressively, these amendments introduced new language into municipal law, warning against the eco-social dangers of crypto, on one hand, and articulating a broad-based need for robust public banking and payment systems, on the other. Woefully underreported in comparison to news about all things blockchain, the story of municipal money politics in Austin represents a powerful model for local public money action worldwide, particularly in light of the recent catastrophic crash in crypto markets.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Projections: May '22 in Review

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 14:00:00 -0400

Catch up on the May 2022 episodes of Projections, a new series from the Money on the Left Editorial Collective hosted by Will Beaman (@agoingaccount). Projections offers short readings of current events that destabilize and contest mainstream conservative narratives on behalf of an inclusive progressive politics.

Tracklist:
1. Up for Grabs
2. The Calls Are From Inside the House
3. Grab-bags & Constellations
4. Cops Don’t Care

Visit our Patreon page here: https://patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure…

Music: “Lilac” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Projections 4: Cops Don't Care

Sun, 29 May 2022 19:00:00 -0400

Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) draws out the ideological stakes of recent comparisons between teachers and police in the wake of the recent school shooting in Uvalde, TX.

Superstructure: Plato’s Republic (Part 1)

Thu, 26 May 2022 15:00:00 -0400

Historian and philologist Brendan Cook joins Scott Ferguson for this special 3-part Superstructure in which they examine a keystone of the Western philosophical tradition: Plato’s Republic. In Part 1 of their discussion, Brendan and Scott set up a critical consideration of the influential text’s fraught metaphysical commitments and political implications by situating The Republic within Fourth-Century (BCE) Athenian Democracy and teasing out its complex dialogical approach to the question of justice.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Projections 3: Grab-Bags & Constellations

Sun, 22 May 2022 18:00:00 -0400

This week, Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) offers critical reflection on recent statements by Jacobin Magazine's Matt Karp, in which he dismissed recent Democratic Party primary victories against establishment candidates as moving backwards to a "pre-Bernie era" of "vague constellations of grab-bag progressives."

Projections 2: The Calls Are From Inside the House

Sun, 15 May 2022 11:00:00 -0400

Reflecting on recent protests outside of Brett Kavanaugh's home as well as a recent news story where police invaded the home of a 16 year old trans twitch streamer, Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) notes ways in which conservative narratives around household and parental identity are unstable and contested.

Focus on the Family Values (ft. Erica Robles-Anderson, @fstflofscholars)

Fri, 13 May 2022 17:00:00 -0400

In this special episode of Superstructure, Cohost Natalie Tabb Smith (@orangeasm) is joined by Erica Robles-Anderson (@fstflofscholars) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) to discuss common interests between the Money on the Left Editorial Collective and the Oikos working group on kinship/economy. Naty, Erica and Scott reflect on households, financial forms, and reproductive politics in our contemporary political economy through the prism of Melinda Cooper’s 2017 text, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism.

Medium Femme - 6 - Pleasure on the Left (Part 2)

Wed, 11 May 2022 18:00:00 -0400

Continuing their consideration of pleasure for a world of leftist struggle, co-hosts Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) and Natalie Tabb Smith (@orangeasm) turn to a recently published Superstructure article co-authored by Erica Robles-Anderson and Scott Ferguson. Titled "The Visual Cliff: Eleanor Gibson and the Origins of Affordance," the essay critically locates the hidden history of contemporary user-experience design in a well-known psychological experiment. Conducted by Dr. Eleanor Gibson, the experiment placed babies alone atop a visual precipice in order to test their depth perception. Following the essay, Charlotte and Naty question the notion that we must remain frozen forever between false binaries, like babies staring over an impossible visual cliff. Doing so, their discussion weaves through thinkers as diverse as Lynne Segal, Adrienne Maree Brown, Lisa Duggan, Gayle Rubin, and more.

Projections 1: Up for Grabs

Sun, 08 May 2022 13:00:00 -0400

In this first episode of Projections, Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) reflects on some recent comments from US Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va) suggesting Democrats should prioritize inflation over Roe v. Wade in their campaign messaging in the midterms.

Music: “Lilac” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Medium Femme - 5 - Pleasure on the Left (Part 1)

Sat, 07 May 2022 17:00:00 -0400

Co-hosts Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) and Natalie Tabb Smith (@orangeasm) discuss conceptualizations of pleasure on the left, looking at a recent article arguing against the radicalism of polyamory in Novara for part 1 of this installment of Medium Femme.

Place-Based Narrative Labor with Sonia Ivancic

Sun, 01 May 2022 14:00:00 -0400

Money on the Left speaks with Dr. Sonia Ivancic about the importance of regionally sensitive and affirmative storytelling in provisioning processes. Assistant Professor in organizational communication at University of South Florida, Dr. Ivancic is a community-engaged researcher, whose work on “place-based narrative labor” offers essential new tools for displacing prevailing scarcity logics and rhetorics of austerity with more capacious ways of thinking, arguing, and narrating.

Through embedded fieldwork with non-profit, rural Appalachian food distributors, Professor Ivancic has developed astute critiques of the narrative frames used by some grant-making non-profits as they paradoxically seek to address privation and hunger in Appalachia by perpetually framing privation and hunger in Appalachia as the region’s most salient and seemingly default characteristics. In place of this “deficit-driven” characterization–which, owing to the ways that such projects depend on the grant cycle, is nearly always the dominant kind of characterization–Dr. Ivancic identifies and promotes an “asset-driven” mode of place-based narrative labor. With this asset-based approach, the provisioning process affirmatively calls attention to and works to expand the capacities and potentials of a given community, honoring the dignity of particular communities, while opening political imaginaries to include new metrics for collective flourishing and renewal.

In our conversation, we extend Ivancic’s theorization of asset-driven place-based narrative labor to rethink the challenges and potentials of a Federal Job Guarantee under a future Green New Deal. We also draw rich parallels between her account of narrativity in local provisioning and conceptions of macro political economy in Modern Monetary Theory and other heterodox traditions in political economy.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Superstructure 32 - Know Your Allies

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 15:00:00 -0400

Cohosts Will Beaman (@agoingaccount), Natalie Tabb Smith (@orangeasm) and Maxximilian Seijo (@maxseijo) are back to reflect on some of the many things that have happened since their last episode. Mentioning Elon Musk’s tentative Twitter purchase, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s feud with Disney, and escalating political attacks against LGBT educators and children, the cohosts reflect on how the US Left should account for its capacity in this new moment. Critiquing a recent NYMag article by Sam Adler-Bell from the Know Your Enemy podcast for its uncritical embrace of right wing premises, the Superstructure cohosts suggests that the Left’s capacity is hiding in plain sight, on the front lines of the very infrastructures that the far right is contesting. To write off social media, the entertainment industry and critical pedagogy as non-political and nonstrategic is to abandon some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Modern Movie Theory: Old Enough!

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 19:00:00 -0400

In this installment of the Modern Movie Theory series, Scott Ferguson explores how a complex aesthetics of omniscience raises important questions about dependence, care, and responsibility in the Netflix show Old Enough!. Recently repackaged by Netflix for streaming audiences across 190 countries, Old Enough! is, in fact, a long-running Japanese reality show titled, “My First Errand,” which began airing on television in Japan during the 1990’s. Each 10 – 15 -minute episode of the series follows the triumphs and tribulations of a small child (and occasionally two), as they venture out for the first time to complete a series of routine tasks without parental chaperones. A flurry of commentary about the show in Western media has worried about televisual claims to realism; the ethics of sending toddlers out into the world; the politics of cultural differences lost in translation; and the dangers of inadequate urban and suburban infrastructure. Shifting our attention to the abstract moving image forms that shape Old Enough!, Scott by contrast teases out how the series routes the collective pleasures, anxieties and responsibilities involved in creating mobile personhood through a subtle aesthetics of omnipresence, which dominant blockbusters and video games repress, and film and media theorists tend to jettison. Irreducible to all-controlling surveillance or to individual embodied action, this omniscient televisuality harbors important lessons about money, mediation, and coordination that we cannot afford to overlook.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Economics as Discourse

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 18:00:00 -0400

In this episode, Andrés Bernal and Natalie T. Smith critique the recent mainstream econ Twitter shaming of MMT, while vibing on left heterodox anti-racist & feminist economics. The conversation then turns toward Latin American politics and Andrés' latest paper on inflation for the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.

Andrés' paper: http://www.global-isp.org/working-paper-no-132/

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Weimar Futurities with Engelbert Stockhammer

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 12:00:00 -0400

Engelbert Stockhammer joins Money on the Left to discuss the political and economic debates that shaped and ultimately devastated Weimar-era Germany. Professor Stockhammer is professor of political economy in the department of European and International Studies at King’s College London and has published widely on financial instability and Post-Keynesian economics. In this episode, we focus specifically on Stockhammer’s recent working paper, “Hilferding, Woytinsky, and the Fiscal Orthodoxy of Interwar Social Democracy,” published by the Post-Keynesian Economics Society in Fall 2021.

In the essay, Stockhammer reconsiders the so-called “WTB Plan,” a union-backed public works program, which was tragically rejected by the Social Democratic Party (or “SPD”) on seemingly Marxist grounds. During our conversation, we explore the biographies and arguments of two key players in this historical drama: Vladmir Woytinksy, the Russian-born socialist economist responsible for drafting the WTB plan and Rudolf Hilferding, the Austrian-Marxist theorist and politician who turned the SPD against it. Along the way, we consider the stakes and fate of Weimar-era fiscal politics in light of a hegemonic gold standard that ruled across Europe and the United States, growing unemployment and suffering, and the German fascist movement that rose to answer such problems in violent and genocidal ways. Finally, we ponder how unrealized Weimar futurities in the past can help inform the struggle for public full employment today.

Read Stockhammer’s paper here: http://www.postkeynesian.net/downloads/working-papers/PKWP2118.pdf

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

The ECASH Act with Rohan Grey

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 01:00:00 -0400

In this special episode, Rohan Grey (@rohangrey) joins Billy Saas (@billysaas) and Maxximilian Seijo (@MaxSeijo) to discuss the "ECASH" or "Electronic Currency and Secure Hardware" Act. Introduced by Rep. Stephen Lynch (MA-08), Chair of the House Committee on Financial Services' Task Force on Financial Technology, and based on Grey's research on electronic currency, the ECASH Act directs the Secretary of the Treasury to develop and pilot digital dollar technologies that replicate the privacy-respecting features of physical cash. Recognizing the United States Treasury as an institution ideally suited to managing a digital U.S. dollar, the Act treats monetary inclusion and privacy as a political rights and public goods, while at the same time eschewing the exclusionary and ecologically destructive effects of crypto currencies that rely on blockchain technologies.

The ECASH Act is co-sponsored by Rep.'s Jesús G. “Chuy” García (IL-04), Rashida Tlaib (MI-13), Ayanna Pressley (MA-07), and Alma Adams (NC-12) of the Committee on Financial Services, and endorsed by Americans for Financial Reform, Demand Progress, the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE), and Public Money Action.

Rohan Grey is Assistant Professor of Law in the College of Law at Willamette University.

Full text of the E-CASH Bill

E-CASH website

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Medium Femme - 4 - Food Publics (with Max Sussman)

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 13:00:00 -0400

Hosts Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) and Naty T. Smith (@orangeasm) talk food with chef Max Sussman (@maxsussman) in episode 4 of Medium Femme, from the Money on the Left Editorial Collective (@moneyontheleft).

The discussion touches on the political openings and challenges in the pandemic food industry, ranging from labor to small business politics to federal aid to restaurants and the public, mutual aid, the GND and more. Hosts and guest explore food as narrative in cookbooks, literature and film and TV, touching on the politics of liberal food. Examination of internationalism in food culture, history of migrant food riots and food for refugees. And finally, pizza!

Follow Max on Instagram at @pizzareplicator and @thesussmans.

Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Superstructure 31 - Non Eugenic Media Practice (ft. Beatrice Adler-Bolton)

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 12:00:00 -0400

Beatrice Adler-Bolton (@realLandsEnd) of the Death Panel podcast joins cohosts Will Beaman (@agoingaccount), Natalie Smith (@orangeasm) & Maxximilian Seijo (@MaxSeijo) to discuss a recent article about pandemic politics published by Adler-Bolton and her cohost Artie Vierkant in The New Inquiry. Titled "The Beyblade Strategy" or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Focused Protection," the essay uncovers eugenic ideas and assumptions embedded in mainstream liberal responses to COVID-19. Fleshing out Adler-Bolton and Vierkant's claims, this episode advances a non eugenic media practice that stakes a claim for the social rights of the medically vulnerable in the name of fully inclusive public provisioning.

Read "The Beyblade Strategy" or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Focused Protection" here: https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/the-beyblade-strategy-or-how-we-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-focused-protection/

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Euphoria: A Textural Analysis

Sat, 05 Mar 2022 15:00:00 -0500

Modern Movie Theory (MMT) continues with cohosts Will Beaman and Maxximilian Seijo giving a sustained reading of the HBO series Euphoria, situating its congregational themes within wider histories of subversive queer media and scholarship.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music:
"Amore Mio Aiutami (Main Theme)" by Piero Piccioni from the EUPHORIA Season 2 Episode 7 Soundtrack

“Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Adorno, Lazarsfeld and the Birth of Public Broadcasting with Josh Shepperd

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 12:00:00 -0500

Josh Shepperd joins Money on the Left to discuss the research and activism that hastened the rise of public media in the United States. Assistant Professor of media studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Shepperd shows how public-interest broadcasting platforms like NPR and PBS exist in the U.S. today in large part as a consequence of hard-fought battles by committed scholars and advocates throughout the inter- and post-war periods. In particular, Shepperd traces the untold aftermath of the Communications Act of 1934 which, in addition to creating the Federal Communications Commission, gave overwhelming legal support to private for-profit networks, while stripping radio licenses from public and educational broadcasters committed to serving the common good.

Deepening this narrative, Shepperd draws special attention to the Princeton Radio Research Project, spearheaded by noted sociologist and communication studies scholar Paul Lazarsfeld. Through the Project, Lazarsfeld developed influential quantitative research methods that fundamentally shaped the discipline of communication studies. Fascinatingly, however, Lazarsfeld hired then-immigré critical theorist Theodor Adorno to assist in the research program. As Shepperd tells it, Lazardfeld welcomed and even incorporated the critical theorist’s incisive contributions into the Project. Yet, Adorno ultimately repudiated the Project’s efforts to build a robust U.S. public radio system, unfortunately divorcing the developing tradition of Critical Theory from the domain of public media research and advocacy.

Fast-forwarding to the present, we ask Shepperd about his argument that contemporary humanities research ought to be politically constructive. We then conclude by exploring his important archival work for the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress.

See here for Shepperd’s article, “Theodor Adorno, Paul Lazarsfeld, and the Public Interest Mandate of Early Communications Research, 1935–1941,” published by the journal Communication Theory in August 2021.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Capitalism Does Not Exist

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0500

Maxximilian Seijo and Scott Ferguson join Naty Smith to flesh out a controversial proposition: capitalism does not exist. First broached by Scott in a short piece for Arcade and in the conclusion to his 2018 book, the claim is meant to de-naturalize the underlying logics and casual structures that mediate modern money economies and to resist defeatist leftist analyses that concede the horizon of possibilities to an austere and contradictory profit motive.

Medium Femme - 3 - Economics is Always Surreal

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 14:00:00 -0500

Co-hosts Charlotte Tavan and Natalie Smith discuss:

Melinda Cooper, the Kardashians
Che Guevara at central banks
technical mastery and politics
Alan Partridge and his secretary
the labor politics of flower shops
budgets as spells
Robin DG Kelley and the surreal

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Historicizing Inflation & Price Controls with Andrew Elrod

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 13:00:00 -0500

Andrew Elrod joins Money on the Left to discuss the political economy of inflation and price controls, past and present. Elrod holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Santa Barbara and is presently Research Specialist at United Teachers Los Angeles, a 36,000-member labor union. In our conversation, Elrod overturns one of the most common understandings of a central plot point in our collective memory of the 1970s, and which continues to shape dramatic engagement with the problem of “inflation” today: the notion that stagflation was both a consequence of factors exogenous to politics and the catalyst for austerity in the United States and across the world. In doing so, Elrod locates human agency—not autonomous “price signals” or exogenous shocks—as the most formidable instrument for dealing with post-Covid inflation.

Link to Elrod's recent essay for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth titled 'Austerity policies in the United States caused 'stagflation' in the 1970s and would do so again today':
https://equitablegrowth.org/austerity-policies-in-the-united-states-caused-stagflation-in-the-1970s-and-would-do-so-again-today/

Superstructure 30 - Is Inflation Real? (ft. Mitch Green @drmitchpdx)

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 14:00:00 -0500

Cohosts Will Beaman, Natalie Smith and Maxximilian Seijo are joined by Mitch Green (@drmitchpdx) to discuss the problems with “inflation” as a catch-all term for price changes. A heterodox economist by training who studied with the late Fred Lee, Mitch takes a disaggregated view of prices that opens up price-setting as a publicly allocated administrative power with no necessary relationship to profits or sound finance.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Introduction to Theory: Karl Marx - Value, Price and Profit

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0500

In this third installment of our Introduction to Theory series, Maxximilian Seijo explores the economic theory of Karl Marx. Specifically, Maxx investigates Marx's 1865 speech and posthumously published book Value, Price and Profit.

This episode, drawn from Maxx's pedagogy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, interrogates the relationship between Marx's labour theory of value and the capitalist mode of production. Through close attention to Marx's theory of price, Maxx teases out (and ultimately contrasts) Marx's classical formulations from the Money on the Left Editorial Collective's heterodox economic foundations.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Medium: Femme - 2 - Radical Craft

Sun, 16 Jan 2022 12:00:00 -0500

Co-hosts Charlotte Tavan and Natalie Smith marinate in the complexity of the concept of femme:

inheritance politics, fascist food,
slaveholders, bell hooks, MMT & the household, oikos,
labor discipline, gender play, analogical fun
Real Housewives, dinner party politics
women in Stem, radical craft, reply guys

Introduction to Theory: Sigmund Freud

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 14:00:00 -0500

In this second installment of our Introduction to Theory series, Scott Ferguson presents an introduction to psychoanalytic theory by exploring key theoretical writings by Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams (1899); Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905);& Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Drawn from a semester-long university course titled “Theory for Film & Media Studies,” the recorded lecture takes up three distinct texts in order explore continuities and divergences in Freud’s complex contributions to modern thought and society. Framed as an advanced introduction that is hardly exhaustive, Ferguson’s lecture strives to orient students to Freud’s contested historical significance and to model forms of situated close reading that resist reductionism.

See the post on https://moneyontheleft.org/ for reference materials you might find useful.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Vulnerability Theory with Martha Fineman

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 11:00:00 -0500

Money on the Left discusses "vulnerability theory" with Martha Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University. Going beyond the politics of non-discrimination and formal equality that animate liberal politics and policies, Fineman underscores the human being’s embodied vulnerability throughout the life cycle in order to politicize, rather than pathologize prevailing structures of social dependence. Working primarily in the context of constitutional jurisprudence in The United States, Fineman argues for forms of government, economic institutions, and social organizations that variously take responsibility for the vulnerable subject’s ongoing resilience in a contingent world. In doing so, she controversially re-conceives universality through, rather than against difference, expanding the language of feminist and intersectional politics in capacious ways. In our conversation with Fineman, we plumb the depths of vulnerability theory and ponder its significance for left politics oriented toward public money and provisioning.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Superstructure 29 - Tucker Carlson

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 11:00:00 -0500

Cohosts Natalie Smith and Will Beaman venture into Tucker Carlson's reactionary mediascape, connecting the neo-fascist rhetoric of his nightly Fox News show with the past iterations of American conservatism that preceded it. Natalie and Will trace the various rhetorical logics of the far right and offer a critique of left wing attacks on Tucker's populist bona fides that deny the possibility of reactionary populism.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Modern Movie Theory: Bo Burnham's Inside

Sat, 18 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0500

Will Beaman and Thomas Chaplin join Scott Ferguson on the Modern Movie Theory podcast series to discuss Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021). A musical comedy special written, directed and performed by Burnham for Netflix, Inside reckons with contemporary sociopolitical traumas and transformations through hysterical and frequently painful engagements with digital media culture. In the episode, Will, Thomas, and Scott contextualize Inside’s complex mode of address, wherein Burnham dramatizes past struggles with mental health to express present suffering felt variously by audiences during the first year and a half of the Covid-19 pandemic. Along the way, the co-hosts work through the show’s scathing indictment of today’s flattening, irresponsible, and dangerously anti-public corporate Internet. Yet at the same time, they tease out Inside’s paradoxical affirmations of mediation—and the abstract potentialities of light, in particular—in ways that resist misleading accelerationist fantasies of total destruction and disintegration.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Medium: Femme - 1 - The Constant Garden (Part 2)

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 13:00:00 -0500

Fleshing out the themes of Part 1 , Part 2 of the Medium: Femme pilot develops the metaphor of the constant garden. Pondering migration, care, maintenance, and coordination at a distance, Naty & Charlotte envision a politics of constant gardening that makes space for everyone. "Our hearts," says Mathew Forstater, "are never unemployed."

Introducing Medium: Femme

Sun, 12 Dec 2021 13:00:00 -0500

Co-hosted by Natalie Smith & Charlotte Tavan, Medium: Femme explores under-appreciated feminine and queer modes of knowing in left culture and political economy, carrying the broader project of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective into quotidian relations, meanings, and practices.

The Neoliberal Blockbuster: Jurassic Park (Preview)

Sun, 05 Dec 2021 14:00:00 -0500

This Money on the Left/Superstructure teaser previews both our tenth and eleventh premium releases from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.

For access to the full lecture, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure.

If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.

Course Description

This course examines the neoliberal Blockbuster from the 1970s to the present. It focuses, in particular, on the social significance of the blockbuster's constitutive technologies: both those made visible in narratives and the off-screen tools that drive production and reception. Linking aesthetic shifts in American moving images to broader transformations in political economy, the course traces the historical transformation of screen action from the ethereal “dream factory” of pre-1960s cinema to the impact-driven “thrill ride” of the post-1970s blockbuster. In doing so, we attend to the blockbuster’s technological forms and study how they have variously contributed to social, economic, and political transformations over the past 40 years. We critically engage blockbusters as "reflexive allegories" of their own technosocial processes and pleasures. Above all, we think through the blockbuster's shifting relationship to monetary abstraction and the myriad additional abstractions monetary mediation entails.

Blockbusters:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999)

Avengers: Infinity War (Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018)

The Metaphysics of Accounting with Paolo Quattrone

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 09:00:00 -0500

Paolo Quattrone (@PaoloQuattrone) joins Money on the Left to discuss the metaphysics of accounting and the significance of accounting’s repressed history for political economy today. Professor of Accounting, Governance & Society at The University of Manchester, Quattrone insists that, while often seen as a positivist and merely technical skill for recording extant data, accounting in truth represents a rhetorical and quite generative engagement with the “mystery of value.” This mystery, Quattrone reminds us, informs nearly all aspects of collective life. Genealogy is central to Quattrone’s work and, in our conversation, we explore how numbers, figures, and visual arrangements used in contemporary accounting trace complex and often surprising lineages that have a lot to teach us about accounting’s still untapped possibilities. Along the way, we touch upon two of Quattrone’s most important case studies. First, we delve into the Jesuit order’s rich contributions to early-modern accounting, including its development of double-entry bookkeeping. Then, we turn to the more recent history of “I.R.I.,” the Italian “Institute for Industrial Construction” which, even as it served as administrative arm of the Marshall Plan, underwrote the midcentury period of prosperity known as la dolce vita by precisely rejecting the ideology of “profit maximization” promulgated by The United States. We conclude, finally, by rethinking money’s futurity through Quattrone’s approach to accounting. If spending tomorrow is never flatly predicated upon yesterday’s inert data in the form of receipts or revenue, we suggest, then it instead derives from mobilizing accounting practices in the present to create new credit and debt relations “endogenously” in response to shifting circumstances.

You can find Quattrone's publications here: https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/researchers/paolo-quattrone(4b8a4f45-fecc-422c-8991-8bfc9f1e4efd)/publications.html

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Introduction to Theory: Karl Marx

Sun, 21 Nov 2021 13:00:00 -0500

In this podcast, Scott Ferguson presents an introduction to key theoretical writings by Karl Marx: Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844; Manifesto of the Communist Party; and Capital, Volume 1. Drawn from a semester-long university course titled “Theory for Film & Media Studies,” the recorded lecture takes up three distinct texts in order explore continuities and divergences in Marx’s complex contributions to modern thought and politics. Framed as an advanced introduction that is hardly exhaustive, Ferguson’s lecture strives to orient students to Marx’s contested historical significance and to model forms of situated close reading that resist reductionism.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Radical Heterodoxies & Parallel Institutions w/ Mat Forstater

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 10:00:00 -0400

Mat Forstater joins Money on the Left to discuss the origins of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the vicissitudes of heterodox economics, and the challenges of building alternative institutions in and beyond the academy. As one of the principal architects of MMT, as well as teacher and advisor to many of the more recognized MMT scholars and advocates today, Forstater is perhaps the best equipped heterodox economist to give us the details on the innovative assumptions and arguments that created the firmament for what we now know as Modern Monetary Theory. More importantly, how Forstater came to shape the project greatly defamiliarizes popular assumptions about MMT, which tend to reduce what is in truth a rich intellectual and political movement to a narrow and technocratic set of truisms and just-so stories. From experimental poetry and Black political economy to the problems of futurity and invention, Forstater’s circuitous path reveals MMT’s origins to be far more interdisciplinary and heterogeneous than it is often understood to be by opponents and advocates alike.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

The following was transcribed by Richard Farrell and has been lightly edited for clarity.

Becoming Cube (Guided Meditation)

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 17:00:00 -0400

A guided meditation you can do with your Tungsten Cube.

Superstructure 28: We Have Never Been Neoliberal, What Now?

Wed, 20 Oct 2021 10:00:00 -0400

In this episode, co-hosts Natalie Smith and Maxximilian Seijo argue that the pandemic not only killed neoliberalism as a tacit ideological formation; it also revealed how neoliberal truisms have never captured the actual causal mechanisms and potentials that defined the past 50 years. Fleshing out these claims, Naty and Maxx journey through the work of rockstar economic historian Adam Tooze, focusing in particular on his widely-hailed recent book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy (2021). Naty and Maxx affirm Tooze’s characteristically thorough demonstration of the myriad ways that the world-wide response to the pandemic, however inadequate, dismantled the pillars of neoliberal governance. Yet they also critique the elitist complicity of Tooze’s methodological commitment to historical immanence and inevitability, tracing such impulses to back to John Maynard Keynes’ fatal dismissal of Abba Lerner’s proposal to do away with balanced budgets and revenue-constraints. For the Superstructure crew, by contrast, proceeding “in medias res,” as Tooze puts it, requires an abolitionist attunement to genuine conditions of injustice and possibility, from #Defund and ongoing labor strikes to contests over #MintTheCoin and the Green New Deal. During the conversation, wisecracks and burns abound, per usual. This one, too, is packed with citations, including loving shoutouts to David Stein, Jakob Feinig, Mariame Kaba, Dan Berger, Emily Hobson, Alex Yablon, Nathan Tankus, and Rohan Grey.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Mint After Reading: Philip Diehl Talks with Rohan Grey

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 11:00:00 -0400

In this bonus episode, Rohan Grey speaks with Philip Diehl about #MintTheCoin in the wake of this season’s debt limit showdown. Director of the United States Mint under President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000, Diehl is best known today as the person most responsible for 31 U.S. Code 5112(k). The law permits the Treasury Secretary to “mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time.” This clause charts a completely constitutional path to avert recurrent debt crises and furnishes a ready framework for a new kind of radical financial literacy. No wonder why much ink has been spilled and many hands have been wrung trying to explain away or dismiss its radical implications. Grey’s conversation with Diehl explores the history of the platinum coin, offering a fascinating and unprecedented behind-the-scenes glimpse of life in the U.S. Mint.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Superstructure: 1 - Critique After Bernie (NEW TRANSCRIPT!)

Sat, 09 Oct 2021 20:00:00 -0400

We are thrilled to present the very first Superstructure episode rereleased with a brand new transcript, brought to you by the generous effort of friend-of-the-show, Mike Lewis.

Framed by a cold open from Chapo Trap House’s recent Bernie retrospective, hosts Will Beaman and Maxximilian Seijo inaugurate the Superstructure podcast with a discussion of the failures of a reified left wing imagination. To chart a path forward for an MMT-informed leftist praxis, they critique reductive castigations of spectacle, damaging affirmations of scarcity and zero-sum politics as well as a burgeoning ‘anti-woke’ left-right coalition.

Transcript: Mike Lewis

Link to the transcript: https://moneyontheleft.org/2021/10/09/critique-after-bernie-new-transcript/

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com

Twitter: @actualflirting

Abstractions also Liberate with Anna Kornbluh

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 12:00:00 -0400

Anna Kornbluh joins Money on the Left to discuss the politics of form and literary realism as theorized in her provocative book, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago Press, 2019). In The Order of Forms, Kornbluh lays bare the problematic “anarcho-vitalist” underpinnings of neoliberal discourse which, she argues, also inform much critical theory and left critique. In contrast, she upholds the necessity, malleability, and contestability of social form. Focusing, in particular, on English novels from Wuthering Heights to Alice in Wonderland, Kornbluh reads myriad nineteenth-century literary realisms as at once speculative and generative abstractions, capable of newly mapping and scaffolding social space. At the same time as forms might oppress, she concludes, abstractions also liberate. Wrapping up the conversation, Kornbluh considers how the politics of form reorient our approaches to contemporary academic labor, pedagogy, and learning.

Kornbluh is Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research and teaching center on the novel, film, and theory, especially formalism, marxism, and psychoanalysis. Kornbluh is the author of Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury 2019), and Realizing Capital (Fordham 2014), and has just completed a manuscript "Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism." She is a founding facilitator for The V21 Collective (Victorian studies for the 21st Century) and InterCcECT (The Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory).

Find Anna Kornbluh on Twitter

@V21collective

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Chekhov's Coin with Rohan Grey

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 14:00:00 -0400

In this special episode, Rohan Grey joins Billy Saas to discuss the latest episode in the #MinttheCoin saga. Rohan Grey is Assistant Professor of Law in the College of Law at Willamette University.

Read his article on the trillion-dollar coin in the Kentucky Law Journal titled “Administering Money: Coinage, Debt Crises, and the Future of Fiscal Policy” here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3536440

John Stewart on the trillion-dollar coin in 2013: https://www.cc.com/video/t24pv8/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-the-trillion-dollar-coin

James Buchanan and Paul Samuelson in John Maynard Keynes: Life, Ideas, Legacy documentary: https://youtu.be/JpIJvAt3dTc?t=3105

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

The Neoliberal Blockbuster: Toy Story Part 2 (Full Episode)

Sun, 19 Sep 2021 14:00:00 -0400

This Money on the Left/Superstructure episode is the eleventh premium release from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers. Typically reserved for Patreon subscribers, this special two-part episode about Toy Story is available to the general public in full.

For access to the rest of the course, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure.

If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.

Course Description

Blockbusters:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999)

Avengers: Infinity War (Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018)

The Last House on the Left

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 19:00:00 -0400

CW: trauma, abuse

Will Beaman draws on personal experiences to reflect on how the problematic reduction of “deradicalization” to dialogues between fascists and anti-fascists resembles other forms of emotional and relational abuse. When the imperatives of “coalition-building” require victims of right wing violence to double down on dialogues with hostile interlocutors, the supposedly public realm of ideas resembles an abusive household, in which leaving is not an option. After a cold open from Briahna Joy Gray’s recent interview with Talia Lavin on the “Bad Faith” podcast, Will suggests that distinctly non-carceral and non-“paid for” modes of institutional mediation are necessary for deradicalization to be something more than the emotional blackmail of victims via toxic social norms.

Superstructure: Comforted & Chastened : A Liz Bruenig Special

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 18:00:00 -0400

In this special episode, hosts Natalie Smith and @moltopopulare take on the austere sexual politics promulgated by cultural critic and commentator Elizabeth or “Liz” Bruenig. Mirroring the tacit zero-sum logics built into her spouse Matt Bruenig’s analyses of political economy, Liz regularly weaponizes social conservatism and conformity in cruel efforts to shore up a problematic vision of a proper social democratic populace. Natalie and Charlotte lay bare the sadistic violation of sexual freedom and identity that forms the core of Liz's project by examining a wide range of articles on topics such as queer celibacy, the politics of pornography, and 50 Shades of Gray.

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Superstructure: 27 - Sunrise or DSA?

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 12:00:00 -0400

Co-hosts Will Beaman, Natalie Smith, and Maxximilian Seijo discuss recent critiques of the Sunrise Movement by influential members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) on social media and in the pages of Jacobin Magazine. Problematizing the DSAers destructive zero-sum rhetoric regarding the allegedly correct “theory of change,” the gang suggests an alternative mode for organizational provisioning, rooted in neither the sovereignty of a dues-paying membership structure nor the sovereignty of “outside” donors. It is impossible to take part in an interdependent social organization that knows no externality because everyone is responsible to everyone else, whether inside or outside a particular organization. Misunderstanding inter-organizational dependence, the Superstructure co-hosts argue, has led these writers to accuse Sunrise of “social disembeddedness,” a reactionary charge with little basis in reality. In contrast, the Superstructure team proffers a self-consciously generative and analogical model of social coordination that opens organizational activity to diversity and difference.

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

The Philosophy of Money with Graham Hubbs

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 09:00:00 -0400

Graham Hubbs speaks with Scott Ferguson and Andrés Bernal about the relationship between Modern Monetary Theory and philosophy. Associate Professor & Chair of the Department of Politics & Philosophy at the University of Idaho, Hubbs convened a conference panel on Modern Monetary Theory at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association in January 2021. He invited Editorial Collective members Bernal and Ferguson to join him on the panel, where they shared and discussed his original paper, titled “The Promises & Challenges of Modern Monetary Theory.” In this episode, we present the full audio of Professor Hubbs’ presentation, as well as Scott Ferguson's response and reflections. A very engaged question and answer period follows, rounding out this special episode.

Thank you to the American Philosophical Association for sharing this audio with us, and to the Philosophy, Politics, & Economics Society for creating space for this important panel at the meeting.

Theme music by (forthcoming)

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Link to our GoFundMe: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/money-on-the-left-superstructure

Superstructure 26: Mutual Aid By Any Other Name

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 13:00:00 -0400

Cohosts Natalie Smith and Will Beaman discuss mutual aid, highlighting the potentials of its often neglected monetary and linguistic dimensions.

Reading against Dean Spade’s interpretation of mutual aid as fully internal or external to money and the state, Natalie and Will recast mutual aid practices as active and vital forms of contestation over the “monetary naming” of other fiscal authorities that naturalize austerity and unemployment. Viewing mutual aid this way, they argue, opens up possibilities for its expansion through monetary creation.

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

The Neoliberal Blockbuster: Toy Story Part 1 (Full Episode)

Sun, 22 Aug 2021 20:00:00 -0400

This Money on the Left/Superstructure episode is the tenth premium release from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.

For access to the rest of the course, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure.

If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.

Course Description

Blockbusters:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999)

Avengers: Infinity War (Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018)

The Neoliberal Blockbuster: Robocop (Preview)

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 13:00:00 -0400

This Money on the Left/Superstructure teaser previews both our eight and ninth premium releases from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.

For access to the full lecture, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure.

If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.

Course Description

Blockbusters:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999)

Avengers: Infinity War (Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018)

Left Conversion Therapy w/ Ian from Twitter

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Ian (@ian_as_portrait) joins Natalie Smith to discuss the hyper-normative left rhetoric of philosophy instructor and frequent Jacobin contributor Ben Burgis. Emblematic of a certain deadpan logical sobriety seen in certain left circles, Burgis’s debate style downplays heterogeneity, pleasure, and generativity in an effort to convert libertarians and right-wingers to an incrementalist tax-to-spend vision of democratic socialism. Calling out the austerian and deeply fatalist assumptions of Burgis’s reactionary approach, Ian and Naty instead affirm the potentials of an inclusive, heterogenous, and emotionally wide-ranging left discourse.

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Building Digital Commons with Cory Doctorow

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 08:00:00 -0400

Cory Doctorow joins Money on the Left to discuss what Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) means for building digital commons. Award-winning science fiction writer, prolific blogger, and long-time digital activist, Doctorow explains how MMT has shaped his ongoing work in the realms of digital rights management and anti-monopoly politics. He walks us through his important critical genealogy of Intellectual Property law as well as his contribution to the urgent anti-monopoly accord called the “Access to Knowledge Treaty.” Next, we get a quick preview of two new science fiction books he is completing, both of which engage MMT as a central component of their plots. Finally, Doctorow indulges our curiosity about his aesthetic practice of posting sundry pop and other ephemeral imagery to social media.

Theme music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Research help from Lina Reyne.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Link to our GoFundMe: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/money-on-the-left-superstructure

Modern Movie Theory (MMT): Loki

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 15:00:00 -0400

Maxximilian Seijo, Andrés Bernal and Scott Ferguson plunge into the latest Disney Plus streaming series, Loki (2021), as part of their ongoing examination of Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). For all its deliciously queer aesthetic & political potentials, they argue, Loki represents another MCU tragedy about the promise & perpetual failure of social contract theory, and fascism’s seductive exploitation of that failure. In doing so, they critique how the show’s neoliberal and tacitly Deleuzean conception of time as “univocal difference” problematically pits care against heterogeneity in a zero-sum trade-off between fascism and democracy. At the same time, they suggest that Loki’s polyvalent and often-campy aesthetics nevertheless express new longings for alternative modes of questioning and organizing the world.

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Processions: 15 - The Desire Called Utopia

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (page 16-17)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique.

The episode concludes Season 1 of Processions. Stay tuned for announcements about Season 2.

Subscribe to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 14 - Where do babies come from?

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Silvina Ocampo, "Forgotten Journey", in Thus Were Their Faces (page 1-3)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique.

Processions will be released Monday, Wednesday, & Friday to the public, and Tuesday & Thursday as Patreon exclusives.

Subscribe to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 13 - Finite Media

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technology (page 7)

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 12 - Monetary Modernism

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (page 9-10)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique.

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 11 - Framing Historiography

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Siegfried Kracauer, History, the Last Things Before the Last (page 42-43)

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

The Neoliberal Blockbuster: Star Wars: A New Hope Part 2 (Preview)

Sun, 04 Jul 2021 14:00:00 -0400

This Money on the Left/Superstructure teaser previews our seventh premium release from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.

For access to the full lecture, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure.

If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.

Course Description

Blockbusters:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999)

Avengers: Infinity War (Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018)

Superstructure: 25 - The Official MMT Personality Test

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 13:00:00 -0400

Hosts Natalie Smith and Maxximilian Seijo dive into the world of personality types as exemplified by the likes of astrology, MBTI and Enneagram. Complicating John Ganz’s recent dismissal of personal types as univocal, alienating and repressive, Naty and Maxx queer such typologies, drawing attention to their playful, generative and relational meanings. Sprinkled with references to Adorno, Deleuze, Leibniz, and Hegel, the episode treats astrology, MBTI and Enneagram as analogical practices and asks how such practices can inform a non-zero-sum left politics of money.

Link to Ganz's essay: https://johnganz.substack.com/p/thats-not-a-personality-sweetie

Processions: 10 - The Agamben Relation

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 04:00:00 -0400

Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, (Page 272-273)

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Digital Money Beyond Blockchain with Rohan Grey (Re-release)

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 13:00:00 -0400

The Money on the Left Editorial Collective presents a classic episode from our archives along with a previously unavailable transcript & graphic art. In this episode, we’re joined by Rohan Grey (@rohangrey), President of the Modern Money Network, Director of the National Jobs for All Coalition, Research Fellow at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and JSD student at Cornell Law school.

Our conversation is dedicated to Rohan’s current work on the political, economic, and cultural implications of money’s digital future.

Rohan’s report on digital fiat money: “The Case for Digital Legal Tender: The Macroeconomic Policy Implications of Digital Fiat Currency.”

Theme music by Hillbilly Motobike.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Link to our GoFundMe: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/money-on-the-left-superstructure

Processions: 9 - Colonialism-for-itself

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Ndongo Samba Sylla, Colonialism’s Neoliberal Origins (https://moneyontheleft.org/2021/06/14/neoliberalisms-colonial-origins/)

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 8 - Hegel Falls From Heaven

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 07:00:00 -0400

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Page 90)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique.

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 7 - Infinity Sign

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (Page 8-9)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique.

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 6 - Marx's Essence

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Page 127-128)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique.

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 5 - Hall of Mirrors

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Stuart Hall, Essential Essays (Vol. 2): Identity and Diaspora, "Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities" (Page 67)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique.

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon for more: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 4 - Performing Money

Thu, 17 Jun 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Rebecca L. Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Page 6)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique.

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon for more: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 3 - Our Journey

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Inferno, by Dante Alighieri (Canto 1, lines 1-15)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique.

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon for more: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 2 - Twinkle, Twinkle

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 07:00:00 -0400

The Stars Down to Earth, by Theodor W. Adorno (Pages 48-49)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique.

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon for more: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

Processions: 1 - Postmodern Angst

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 07:00:00 -0400

Simulation and Simulacra, by Jean Baudrillard (Page 1)

In Processions, host Maxximilian Seijo reads and reflects on one page of a given text, five days a week. Taking a tour through a vast array of thinkers, concepts and methods, one snapshot at a time, Maxx explores the redemptive capacity of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective’s method of analogical critique.

After the first five episodes, Processions will be released as a Patreon delayed exclusive. Episodes will be available for public listening seven days later.

Subscribe to our Patreon for more: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula (https://www.nahneenkula.com)

The Neoliberal Blockbuster: Star Wars: A New Hope Part 1 (Preview)

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 10:00:00 -0400

This Money on the Left/Superstructure teaser previews our sixth premium release from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.

For access to the full lecture, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure.

If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.

Course Description

Blockbusters:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999)

Avengers: Infinity War (Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018)

Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution with Sibel Kusimba

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 12:00:00 -0400

Money on the Left speaks with Sibel Kusimba, Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of South Florida, about her work on mobile money and digital finance in Kenya. In her recently published book with Stanford University Press titled Reimagining Money: Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution, Kusimba both theorizes and critiques Kenya’s thriving M-Pesa mobile phone-based payment system as a constitutive component of Kenyan social life. In doing so, Kusimba explicitly eschews the postcolonial drive to develop more effective approaches to microloans or means for so-called “financial inclusion.” Instead, she offers a sophisticated culturally embedded analysis of mobile money, informed by her twenty-plus years of ethnographic study and archaeological fieldwork in Kenya. Understanding money as “wealth-in-people,” she traces mobile money’s role in shaping complexly gendered social networks and agencies, while simultaneously underscoring the political injustices of public austerity and privatized payment systems.

Theme music by Hillbilly Motobike.

Link to our Patreon: www.atreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Link to our GoFundMe: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/money-on-the-left-superstructure

Superstructure: On the PMC Question

Sun, 30 May 2021 10:00:00 -0400

@moltopopulare joins co-hosts Natalie Smith, Will Beaman & Maxximilian Seijo to problematize unquestioned leftist critiques of the “Professional Managerial Class,” or “PMC,” past and present. As exemplified by a recent episode of The Dig podcast, leftists frequently invoke the epithet “PMC”--as well as its cousin, “ultra leftist,” or simply “ultra”--in order to shore up class solidarity against capitalist cooptation and ward off allegedly unfeasible political aims. Yet in reality, the Superstructure gang argues, the left PMC trope conceals deeply zero-sum and exclusionary logics that undercut universal emancipation and caretaking. Often stemming from a place of self-loathing or a desire for self-exculpation, such logics not only police leftist discourse according to a univocal workerist ethos, but also violently divide supposedly legitimate from illegitimate horizons of contestation in a manner that reduces universalism to exceptionalism. Tracing the PMC figure’s theoretical and historical roots, the episode culminates with a sustained reading from Karl Marx’s controversial essay, “On the Jewish Question.”

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Superestructura: Versión Sureña

Sat, 22 May 2021 18:00:00 -0400

¡Llegó el primer episodio de Superstructure en Español!

Andrés Bernal (@andresintheory) y Natalie Smith (@orangeasm) conversan sobre la relevancia de la Teoría Monetaria Moderna para Latinoamérica con dos expertos económicos de la región, Jesus Resendiz (@Tlacuachito) y Daniel Rojas (@DanielRMed).

Analizamos las protestas recientes en Colombia, con sus formaciones reaccionarias y las posibilidades para la izquierda, incluyendo la candidatura de Gustavo Petro, una carta abierta de economistas Colombianos heterodoxos criticando una tendencia común a la izquierda de entender los impuestos como la fuente del gasto público, y una propuesta para una ley de garantía de trabajo. Después, vamos a México para conversar sobre los supuestos ortodoxos de austeridad asumidos sin crítica por el gobierno de la izquierda de AMLO.

It's the first Superstructure episode in Spanish! Andres Bernal and Natalie Smith discuss the relevance of MMT for Latin America with two Latin American economic experts, Jesus Resendiz and Daniel Rojas. We discuss the recent protests in Colombia, reactionary formations there and prospects for the left, including the candidacy of Gustavo Petro, a recent open letter from Colombian heterodox economists criticizing left tilt towards understanding taxes as funding the government, and a job guarantee proposal. Then we move to Mexico and discuss the orthodox austerity assumptions uncritically taken on by the purportedly left government of AMLO.

Look out for the English and Spanish transcripts in the coming weeks!

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Superstructure: Modern Movie Theory (MMT): The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

Thu, 13 May 2021 16:00:00 -0400

Andrés Bernal joins Scott Ferguson and Maxximilian Seijo to discuss the historical and political implications of the latest Marvel streaming series, The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. Together, they tease out unstable contradictions between the show’s desires for racial and geopolitical reparation and justice, on one hand, and its punishingly zero-sum Malthusian drama, on the other. The result is a fascinating and, at moments, surprising Marvel offering, which struggles to keep up with the contemporary crises of American imperialism and white patriarchy.

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

The Neoliberal Blockbuster: Jaws (Preview)

Thu, 06 May 2021 19:00:00 -0400

This Money on the Left/Superstructure teaser previews our fifth premium release from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.

For access to the full lecture, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure. If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.

Course Description

Blockbusters:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999)

Avengers: Infinity War (Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018)

Finding the Money w/ Maren Poitras

Mon, 03 May 2021 08:00:00 -0400

Documentary filmmaker Maren Poitras joins the podcast to discuss and share a teaser from Finding the Money, the first feature-length documentary on the past, present, and future of Modern Monetary Theory. The film is currently under consideration for audience and jury awards in the DocLands film festival. Head to the festival website to watch a longer clip and to vote for Finding the Money by May 10th: https://www.doclands.com/docpitch-finding-the-money/.

Watch the video version of this episode of Money on the Left on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMdoWvOm2P0

More info at: www.findingmoneyfilm.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/findingmoneydoc
Facebook. www.facebook.com/findingmoneydoc

Theme music by Hillbilly Motobike.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Link to our GoFundMe: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/money-on-the-left-superstructure

Remaking Radicalism with Dan Berger & Emily K. Hobson

Sat, 01 May 2021 13:00:00 -0400

Money on the Left is joined by Emily K. Hobson and Dan Berger, coeditors and curators of the recently published collection Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973-2001.

https://ugapress.org/book/9780820357256/remaking-radicalism/

Hobson is associate professor of history and gender, race, & identity at the university of Nevada, reno, and author of Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left. Berger is associate professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington, Bothell, and author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era.

Together, Hobson and Berger have compiled and thematically arranged a tremendous selection of key documents authored by radical organizers during a period commonly associated with the fall or disappearance of the left. Against this inaccurate and self-defeating lapsarian story, Remaking Radicalism shows the period of 1973 to 2001 to be replete with radical thought, revolutionary action, and what Hobson and Berger call, after Stuart Hall, “usable pasts.” In most cases these pasts are inseparable from our present. In all cases there is much to learn from and build upon. We talk with Hobson and Berger about the history of this project and the ways that it alters common understandings of the political and cultural present. We chat, too, about money and its place in the radical rhetorics recovered in the book.

Cover Art: “A Boogie/Un Baile: Benefit for July 4th Coalition” (1976). Original silkscreen by Ronald Weil. Published by Gonna Rise Again Graphics. Courtesy of Lincoln Cushing/Docs Populi.

Theme music by Hillbilly Motobike.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Link to our GoFundMe: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/money-on-the-left-superstructure

Superstructure: Modern Movie Theory (MMT): WandaVision

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 18:00:00 -0400

In this episode; Scott Ferguson and Maxximilian Seijo discuss the politics and aesthetics of Marvel’s WandaVision (2021), which was released via the Disney Plus streaming service earlier this year. Picking up questions about blockbuster form and apophatic analysis they’ve pondered in previous episodes, Scott and Maxx affirm the show’s exceptional foray into past sitcom aesthetics and other similarly abstract forms in light of the present neoliberal paradigm crisis. They tease out WandaVision’s critical engagement with the white heteronormative patriarchy that sitcoms have complicatedly mediated. And they critique the program’s ultimate capitulation to conventional blockbuster aesthetics, which substitute a finite and fatalistic physics for what is in truth a capacious and transformable process of monetary mediation.

Superstructure Vertical: Natan Last

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 10:00:00 -0400

Maxximilian Seijo (@MaxSeijo) speaks with Natan Last (@natanlast) about his recent essay for the Superstructure vertical, "A Graceful Kind of Non-Absence."

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Announcement: Superstructure Vertical

Fri, 09 Apr 2021 16:00:00 -0400

In this brief recording, Will Beaman announces the launch of our new Superstructure Vertical, highlighting its first two publications: "Money Beyond Sovereignty" by Will Beaman and "A Graceful Kind of Non-Being" by Natan Last. Check out these pieces and pitch us with ideas!

The Neoliberal Blockbuster: 2001: A Space Odyssey (Preview)

Thu, 08 Apr 2021 08:00:00 -0400

This Money on the Left/Superstructure teaser previews our fourth premium release from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.

For access to the full video lecture, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure. If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.

Course Description

Blockbusters:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999)

Avengers: Infinity War (Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018)

Ministry for the Future with Kim Stanley Robinson

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 09:00:00 -0400

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson joins Money on the Left to discuss his Modern Monetary Theory-inspired “cli-fi” novel, The Ministry for the Future (2020).

Throughout his distinguished Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke award-decorated career, Robinson has repeatedly offered visions of the future that are grounded in, and speak directly to, urgent present problems. These stories, including and especially his widest-known work in the Mars Trilogy, simultaneously condemn dominant logics and chart paths for the possible redemption of humanity as a terraforming (and terra-destroying) species.

In Ministry for the Future, Robinson explores a more proximate future on Earth, one characterized by massive climate catastrophes, widespread political violence, and economic super depressions. Most critically, the novel tests out a messy, but nevertheless workable way toward collective climate restoration, fashioned by an improbable assemblage of intergovernmental agencies shadowed by clandestine black wings; ecological activists armed with untraceable drone technologies; heroic scientists; environmental preservation groups; and Central Bankers.

Money, too, plays a central role in advancing Ministry’s fraught utopian story of climate restoration and is crucially anchored in an MMT-driven framework for equitable and sustainable political economy. In our conversation, we hear from Robinson about the influence of MMT on his thinking in and beyond his work in Ministry, as well as about how this thinking aligns with and deviates from previous political and literary engagements with utopian literary form.

Theme music by Hillbilly Motobike.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Link to our GoFundMe: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/money-on-the-left-superstructure

Superstructure Cancels the Pope

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 17:00:00 -0400

Contra leftist praise for today’s seemingly anti-capitalist papacy, co-hosts Naty Smith, Maxx Seijo, & Will Beaman offer a critical close reading of “Fratelli Tutti,” Pope Francis' third and most recent encyclical. Unearthing the austere logics that inhere in Bergoglio's ideas of encounter, charity, and reconciliation, Naty, Maxx, and Will take on the pope’s not-so-lefty Jesuit career and Peronist history, as well as the Franciscan ideology and history that inspired his Covid-era message to the world. Framed by readings of Scott Ferguson’s work on the symptomatic search for solidity in the modern and neoliberal moments, the gang exposes the deeply toxic nationalistic impulses behind the Pope's metaphysical, theological, and political exhortations. Superstructure, in other words, cancels the pope.

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Money, Literature & Trust with Rob Hawkes (Guest Lecture)

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 18:00:00 -0400

The Money on the Left Editorial Collective is proud to present a recent talk by English literature scholar Rob Hawkes titled, “‘The Power of Money is so Hard to Realize’: Literature, Money and Trust in George Gissing's 1891 Novel New Grub Street.” In it, Hawkes draws out urgent, though regularly overlooked linkages between modern money and modern literature. In particular, he explores British novelist George Gissing’s reflexive and genre-bending book to pose the problem of social trust from a neochartalist or MMT-informed perspective.

Dr. Rob Hawkes is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University in the United Kingdom; a Fellow of the English Association; and a member of the Executive Steering Committee of the British Association for Modernist Studies. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns: Edwardian Fiction and the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor several related books on Ford Madox Ford. Recently, he contributed ‘Openness, Otherness, and Expertise: Uncertainty and Trust in Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle’ to the collection, Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak, edited by Helen Davies and Sarah Ilott (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). And he is now working on a monograph on literature, money, and trust from the 1890s to the 1980s.

To contact Dr. Hawkes, email him at r.hawkes@tees.ac.uk. Or, you can find him on Twitter @robbhawkes.

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Thank you to the English and Creative Writing Research Seminar at Teesside for hosting and giving us permission to sharing Dr. Hawkes’ lecture.

Money, Media & Modernity (Preview)

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 10:00:00 -0500

This Money on the Left/Superstructure teaser previews our third premium release from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.

For access to the full video lecture, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure. If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.

Course Description

Blockbusters:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999)

Avengers: Infinity War (Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018)

Heterodox Properties with Lua Kamal Yuille

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 16:00:00 -0500

Money on the Left is joined by Dr. Lua Kamal Yuille to discuss heterodox economics, property law & the politics of vulnerability. Dr. Yuille is professor of law and affiliated professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kansas. Her work, which spans property theory, heterodox economics, business law, critical pedagogy, and group identity--truly puts the “inter” in interdisciplinary. We chat with Yuille about her path from law to heterodox economics, and, more specifically, about how Modern Monetary Theory has variously shaped and affirmed her critical perspective toward property law. We also to talk about her provocative work on “gangs as para-corporate entities.” These collectives, on her reading, perform necessary provisioning labor in reaction to racist and classist government policies that exclude significant swathes of the population from basic rights and protections. Other topics discussed are Yuille’s engagements with Martha Fineman’s “vulnerability theory,” as well as Yuille’s role as faculty senate president at the University of Kansas at a time when tenure and academic freedom are under serious threat in that state.

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure/

Superstructure: Franciscan Fun Pack

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 12:00:00 -0500

Cohosts Will Beaman, Natalie Smith, & Maxximilian Seijo are joined by Ian from Twitter (@tweet_boxian) to visit America’s favorite socialist family, the Bruenigs. They begin with reflections on a New York Times piece by Elizabeth Bruenig on the need to forgive the recently canonized Franciscan friar Junipero Serra, who oversaw the torture, enslavement and murder of indigenous Americans in California during the 18th century. Next, they consider Matt Bruenig’s “Family Fun Pack” policy paper. They critique the paper's exclusionary economic premises and natalist aesthetics, and suggest an alternative political economy based on public creation rather than zero sum redistribution.

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Superstructure: JG Resolution (with Andrés Bernal)

Thu, 18 Feb 2021 16:00:00 -0500

In the wake of the release of Rep. Ayanna Pressley's (D-MA) job guarantee resolution, Maxximilian Seijo invites Andrés Bernal to reflect on this historical moment in intersectional left-wing activism.

Link to the resolution: https://pressley.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-pressley-economists-advocates-unveil-historic-federal-job-guarantee

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Superstructure: Marx Was Right

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 15:00:00 -0500

Scott Ferguson joins Maxximilian Seijo to discuss method and the dangers of overly positive or negative orientations to the historical world. First, they critique Liam Kofi Bright’s problematic revival of logical positivism, which submits left praxis to reductive and exclusionary market models. Next, they affirm the negative approaches to aesthetic criticism found in the works of Siegfried Kracauer, the Frankfurt School, and Fredric Jameson. Finally, they celebrate the often-overlooked “double movement” of positive & negative impulses that animate Karl Marx’s writings, only on analogical rather than dialectical terms.

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter:
@actualflirting

Modern Movie Theory: Sharing Parts in Kiarostami's Close-Up (Preview)

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 13:00:00 -0500

This Money on the Left/Superstructure teaser previews our third premium release, a one-off lecture from Scott Ferguson on Abbas Kiarostami's Close Up (1990) for Patreon subscribers.

The full video lecture can be found here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/modern-movie-in-46862120

For access to the full video lecture, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.

Course Description:

In this lecture, professor Scott Ferguson explores a reparative cinematic approach to social alienation and unemployment in the film Close Up (1990) by the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.

The Franciscan Invention of the New World with Julia McClure

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 10:00:00 -0500

Money on the Left is joined by Julia McClure, lecturer in Late Medieval & Early Modern Global History at the University of Glasgow. McClure’s 2017 book, The Franciscan Invention of the World, draws compelling and confounding conclusions about the role of the late Medieval Franciscans in shaping the modern capitalist and colonialist world. We talk with McClure about how these surprising but profound connections relate to the problematic construction of money in Western modernity as a kind of scarce and finite technology of alienation and privation.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Superstructure: Film Theory of the State

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 16:00:00 -0500

In this episode, cohosts Natalie Smith, Will Beaman & Maxximilian Seijo reflect on some ill-fated responses to the right-wing insurrection at the Capitol, utilize feminist psychoanalysis to articulate a film theory of the state, and meditate on the mental health side of an MMT-informed left-wing praxis.

Link to our Patreon: https://patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure…

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter:

@actualflirting

Superstructure: Overcoming Pessimism with Adorno (Maxx Uncut)

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 20:00:00 -0500

In this short episode, Maxximilian Seijo reads from Theodor W. Adorno's Negative Dialectics, complicating the philosopher's discussion of nihilism to critique contemporary left pessimism.

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Historicizing the Neoliberal Blockbuster (Preview)

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 14:00:00 -0500

This Money on the Left/Superstructure teaser previews our second premium release from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.

For access to the full video lecture, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure. If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.

Course Description

Blockbusters:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999)

Avengers: Infinity War (Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018)

Money as a Constitutional Project with Christine Desan (rerelease)

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 15:00:00 -0500

Kicking off a brand new multi-media publishing platform at moneyontheleft.org, the Money on the Left Editorial Collective presents a classic episode from our archives along with a previously unavailable transcript & graphic art. In this episode, we are joined by Christine Desan, Leo Goettlieb professor of law at Harvard Law School to discuss her excellent book, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism. Desan argues that money is a constitutional project, countering the dubious “commodity” theory common to contemporary economic and legal orthodoxies. Desan develops her constitutional theory of money through rigorous historical examinations of money’s evolution, from medieval Anglo-Saxon communities to early-modern England to the American Revolution and beyond.

Theme music by Hillbilly Motobike.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Link to our GoFundMe: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/money-on-the-left-superstructure

Superstructure: the Fascist Analogy (with Daniel Bessner)

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 11:00:00 -0500

In this episode, Natalie Smith & Maxximilian Seijo host Daniel Bessner (@dbessner) to debate the pertinence of contemporary leftist efforts to analogize Trumpian neoliberalism to 1930s fascism. The conversation also takes up matters of left strategy & media, including the role of theoretical provocation and the politics of online culture.

Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

Why Do We Fall?: Introduction to the Neoliberal Blockbuster (Preview)

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 12:00:00 -0500

This Money on the Left/Superstructure teaser previews our first premium release from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.

For access to the full video lecture, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure. If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.

Course Description

Blockbusters:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)

Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999)

Avengers: Infinity War (Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018)

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Superstructure: Close Encounters with the Dirtbag Left

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 14:00:00 -0500

Superstructure cohosts Will Beaman and Natalie Smith are joined by Scott Ferguson and Andrés Bernal to reflect on a recent "close encounter" with the Dirtbag Left. They diagnose the perverse comfort that the Dirtbag Left takes in contracting political economy around fixed points of "leverage" over political elites. Touching on the Jimmy Dore controversy and a recent Chapo episode on Avatar, the team compares the austere physics metaphors that structure the Left's hopelessness to neoliberal action cinema's preoccupation with what Ferguson has called its "Hyper-Newtonian aesthetics."

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure/posts

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting. flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

Superstructure: Modern Movie Theory (MMT): Avengers: Infinity War

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 10:00:00 -0500

Kicking off a Money on the Left / Superstructure Patreon fund drive, Scott Ferguson joins Maxximilian Seijo on the Superstructure podcast to discuss MMT, eco-fascism and Avengers: Infinity War. This premium Superstructure episode offers listeners a sneak peek at Ferguson’s Hollywood Blockbuster course, which will be rolled out for subscribers in the coming months.

While we appreciate support for our premium content on Patreon from those who can afford it, this is not a hard paywall! If you are unable to pay, reach out to the Money on the Left/Superstructure team for free access to our premium content.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure/posts

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

Superstructure: Superstructure Works (with Matt Christman)

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 16:00:00 -0500

In this episode, Maxximilian Seijo (@maxseijo), Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) & Natalie Smith (@orangeasm) are joined by Matt Christman (@cushbomb) from Chapo Trap House to discuss their critique of his zero-sum methodology.

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

New Laws of Robotics with Frank Pasquale

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 11:00:00 -0500

Frank Pasquale joins Money on the Left to discuss the legal and monetary politics that will determine the future of automation. Professor of Law at the Brooklyn Law School, Pasquale is author of The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (2015) as well as recently published New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI (2020), both with Harvard University Press. He is a leading thinker in the law of A.I., algorithms, and machine learning and, as he makes clear in his recent book, a committed advocate for a public-money driven just transition from the current paradigm of “equality before the algorithm” to a brighter future replete with ethical, complimentary robotics. Our conversation with Pasquale covers these and a number of other surprising components of his project, including his critique of post-structuralist, post-humanist, and accelerationist discourses. There is something for everyone in this conversation--whether you’re interested in the future of robotics, the present of machine learning, the history of money, or the promise of critical theory in our post-COVID world.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Superstructure: Reading Jacobin from the Left

Sun, 22 Nov 2020 07:00:00 -0500

Hosts Will Beaman & Maxximilian Seijo critique the Enlightenment myth that treats private property as the basis of political economy and they reflect, in particular, on the limits of a contemporary left media ecosystem that unquestioningly relies upon this spurious foundation for analysis & praxis.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Superstructure: Abolitionism: What is and What Could Be with Dan Berger

Thu, 12 Nov 2020 12:00:00 -0500

Cohosts Will Beaman, Natalie Smith, and Maxximilian Seijo are joined by historian Dan Berger to reflect on the political economy of abolitionism and its critical importance for the Left.

Dan Berger (Twitter: @dnbrgr) is an Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington at Bothell.

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Public Money, Public Media with Victor Pickard

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 13:00:00 -0500

Victor Pickard joins Money on the Left to discuss the public bases and potentials of money and media in The United States. Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Pickard is a prolific researcher and author of over one hundred articles and six books on the history of media institutions, media activism, and the avowedly political and public foundations of journalism and media policy. Our conversation with Pickard is far ranging. We survey his early work on the postwar settlement for American media, when the fundaments of the current media landscape such as its tendency toward private and consolidated ownership were first put in place. We explore the critical role and shortcomings of political liberalism in shaping that midcentury settlement and all that’s come after. And we identify means for creating resilient and diverse public media infrastructures that are better equipped to help leftists resolve the most pressing political, economic, and ecological crises of our moment. Along the way, we also uncover complementary impulses between Pickard’s vision for the future of public media and the Modern Money Movement’s project to democratize public money.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Superstructure: Why MMT?

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 16:00:00 -0400

Cohosts Will Beaman, Natalie Smith, and Maxximilian Seijo reflect on the importance of Modern Monetary Theory for the Left.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Superstructure: The Virus is the Virus

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:00:00 -0400

Pulling from the archive, Money on the Left presents the second episode of the Superstructure podcast, "The Virus is the Virus." In this episode, hosts Will Beaman and Maxximilian Seijo embark on a deep dive into intersections between the work of philosopher Giorgio Agamben and reductive Marxist discourses around capitalism and nature. In so doing, they uncover a highly problematic historical and political economic lineage for the widely used COVID19 meme: 'Capitalism is the virus'.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Superstructure: Tragedy of the Commons

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 20:00:00 -0400

Cohosts Will Beaman, Natalie Smith and Maxximilian Seijo discuss Maxx's recent article in the Journal of Environmental Media, titled “Governing media information through a Green New Deal: History, theory, practice."

Featuring a special report by Australian Twitter Correspondent @moltopopulare from inside the Superstructure, and a surprise call-in from friend of the show, Liz Bruenig.

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

Link to Maxx's paper: www.academia.edu/43950105/Governi…_theory_practice.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Money After Redlining with Rebecca Marchiel

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 11:00:00 -0400

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Superstructure: Critique after Bernie

Sat, 26 Sep 2020 12:00:00 -0400

Dipping into the archive, Money on the Left presents the very first episode of the Superstructure podcast. Framed by a cold open from Chapo Trap House's recent Bernie retrospective, hosts Will Beaman and Maxximilian Seijo inaugurate the Superstructure project with a discussion of the failures of a reified left wing imagination. To chart a path forward for an MMT-informed leftist praxis, they critique reductive castigations of spectacle, damaging affirmations of scarcity and zero-sum politics as well as a burgeoning 'anti-woke' left-right coalition.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Superstructure: Red Scared (with @moltopopulare)

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 07:00:00 -0400

Will, Naty and Maxx are joined by @moltopopulare to critique the hopeless aesthetic imagination of the Red Scare podcast and related films by Red Scare cohost Dasha Nekrasova.

Money on the Left Presents: Superstructure

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 14:00:00 -0400

Money on the Left is thrilled to introduce the latest project by our growing collective over at the Modern Money Network Humanities Division: Superstructure. Superstructure is a new podcast hosted by Will Beaman, Natalie Smith, and Money on the Left’s own Maxx Seijo.

Debuting in late Spring 2020 via Soundcloud and other platforms, Superstructure builds on the sensibility Money on the Left has made legible, but it does so through a daring new model of left podcasting which combines high-octane critical theory with biting wit.

The gambit of Superstructure speaks through its title. Vulgar Marxisms past and present have reduced political economy to supposedly direct material relations known as the “base.” Such approaches then cast off the remote or abstract relations of language, aesthetics, government and law as mere second order phenomena called “superstructure.”

In contrast to such reductive and polarized suppositions, the Superstructure podcast insists on the superstructure’s constitutive and fundamentally generative priority for any monetary economy. It places language, aesthetics, government and law at the very heart of critical efforts discern and transform the ways money mediates social production and participation.

Superstructure is an integral contribution to the evolving Money on the Left project--so much so that going forward we plan to release both archived and new Superstructure episodes through the Money on the Left podcast feed.

To kick things off, we present episode 6 of Superstructure, released formerly under the title, “Beyond The Bellows." Framed by a new introduction from Money on the Left host Scott Ferguson, "Beyond The Bellows" serves as an apt entree into Superstructure since it nicely encapsulates the program's overall argument, tone, and stakes.

Please help us spread the word about Superstructure by following @Superstruc on Twitter and sharing episodes in your networks.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Resisting Predatory Finance with Raúl Carrillo (Transcript)

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 13:00:00 -0400

Transcript: https://mronline.org/2020/09/02/resisting-predatory-finance-with-raul-carrillo/

Raúl Carrillo, organizer for economic justice and scholar of law, race, and money, joins Money on the Left to explore the promise of the public money framework for advancing antiracist, anti-imperialist, and democratic politics across the world. We discuss how the public money or MMT perspective shapes his work as an attorney fighting against predatory finance and for an international, rights-based approach to full employment. A significant portion of the conversation is devoted also to Raúl’s ongoing critique of the “taxpayer money” trope in U.S. political culture. In both his recent article for the UCLA Criminal Law Review and a 2017 piece (coauthored with Jesse Meyerson) for Splinter, Raúl persuasively shows that the myth of “taxpayer money” is not only incorrect in operational terms. It is also a significant threat to marginalized communities and a major rhetorical obstacle for progressive politics.

Raúl Carrillo is an attorney, chair of the board of the Modern Money Network, Research Fellow with the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and member of the advisory board at Our Money. You can read his article for the UCLA Criminal Law Review here: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7rp8g89c.
Read his article on “The Dangerous Myth of Taxpayer Money” here: https://splinternews.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-taxpayer-money-1819658902.

Transcript by Rich Farrell; Graphics by Meghan Saas; Production by Alex Williams; theme music by Hillbilly Motobike.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Money, Music & Method with Alex Williams

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 12:00:00 -0400

Economist, musician & Money on the Left audio engineer, Alex Williams, joins the podcast to discuss money, music and method in light of Modern Monetary Theory and heterodox economics. At the outset, we chat about methodology and the riddles of “administrative capacity” that drive so much of Williams’ work. Next, Williams guides us through his proposal for arts and culture provisioning under a federal Job Guarantee by way of a critique of the anti-money, laissez-faire DIY music scene in which he came up. Finally, we turn to Williams’ much-touted master’s thesis & recent popular work on stabilizing state and municipal balance sheets during crises like the coronavirus health emergency.

Check out some of Williams’ important work:

“The Job Guarantee and Cultural Equity: Gatekeeping and Popularization,” Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, Working Paper 127, 2020.

Intragovernmental Autonomous Stabilizers, Master’s Thesis, Bard College, 2020.

“Structuring Federal Aid To States As An Automatic (and Autonomous) Stabilizer,” Employ America, 2020.

Find Alex on Twitter: @tragicbios

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Place, Participation & #Unis4All with Benjamin Wilson

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 11:00:00 -0400

Economist Benjamin Wilson joins Money on the Left to discuss heterodox approaches to place, participation, and the politics of university finance. Associate professor of economics at SUNY Cortland, Wilson received his interdisciplinary Ph.D. from University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), where he took courses with some of the leading lights of heterodox economic theory, including Stephanie Kelton, Mathew Forstater, and Fred Lee. In both his research and his pedagogy, Ben combines his commitment to local democratic participation with a deep, MMT-driven understanding of social provisioning to create some of the most compelling community currency projects ongoing today. We chat at length with Ben about the intellectual, historical, and practical frameworks for these projects, which intervene in spaces ranging from the college classroom to the state and regional levels. We also talk with Ben about our collectively authored #Unis4All university currency project, which derives from many of the principles of Wilson's previous work to argue that college and university systems ought to leverage their considerable provisioning capacities in order to reject austerity and provide for the health and welfare of all in their communities. You can read more about this proposal on Monthly Review Online and at Public Seminar.

Check out some of Wilson's important papers:

"An Interdisciplinary Narrative: Oncology, Capital & Solidarity," American Review of Political Economy, 2018.

"A Dirigisme Approach to a Monetary Policy Jobs Guarantee and the Green New Deal," Available at SSRN, 2019.

"Housing, Health & History: Interdisciplinary Spatial Analysis in Pursuit of Equity for Future Generations," Intergenerational Responsibility in the 21st Century, 2018.

Theme music by Hillbilly Motobike.

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: Alex Williams (audio engineering), Richard Farrell (transcription) & Meghan Saas (graphic art).

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Coordination Beyond the Corporation with Sanjukta Paul

Mon, 18 May 2020 09:00:00 -0400

In this episode, Maxx and Scott speak with legal scholar Sanjukta Paul about imagining alternative and more just forms of economic association in ways that denaturalize the 20th-century monopolistic firm. The key, Paul argues, is to reveal and contest the public “coordination rights” that legally structure all economic activity.

Sanjukta Paul is Assistant Professor of Law at Wayne State University. Her current research and writing involves the intersection of antitrust law and labor policy. She is currently writing a book tentatively titled, Solidarity in the Shadow of Antitrust: Labor & the Legal Idea of Competition, which will be published by Cambridge University Press. Her scholarly work has appeared in the UCLA Law Review; Law & Contemporary Problems; The Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law; and The Cambridge Handbook of U.S. Labor Law.

See here for the important paper we discuss in this episode, "Antitrust as an Allocator of Coordination Rights" (UCLA Law Review, Vol. 67, No. 2, 2020).

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

#MintTheCoin & COVID Relief with the Modern Money Network

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 17:00:00 -0400

Rohan Grey and Nathan Tankus join Money on the Left to discuss the flurry of debate about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) arising out of the Coronavirus crisis. We focus, in particular, on the Modern Money Network’s multi-pronged efforts to illuminate and remedy the resulting economic devastation. At the center of our conversation is Rohan’s contribution to Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s “Automatic BOOST Act.” Known by the popular hashtag #MintTheCoin, Tlaib’s proposal calls on the U.S. Treasury to mint two trillion dollar platinum coins in order to deliver direly-need cash assistance via preloaded public debit cards for all—no exceptions. In response to dismissive critiques of the proposal as a gratuitous “gimmick,” we affirm #MintTheCoin’s political significance as a gimmick—whether as a critical parody of sound finance trickery or as a meaningful pedagogical ritual that makes public money creation visible. Along the way, we delve into Nathan’s now widely-hailed Substack newsletter: “Notes on the Crises: The Pandemic-Induced Depression from a Monetary Political Economy Perspective.” We reflect upon the inadequacy of Congressional action, paradigm-smashing moves by the Federal Reserve, and MMT’s strategic importance for the future of leftist struggle, both in the near- and long-term.

For more information about Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s “Automatic BOOST Act” and #MintTheCoin, see here, here, and here. Sign up for Nathan’s Substack here.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Building Capacity with Money on the Left

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 15:00:00 -0400

This month’s Money on the Left episode departs from the show’s regular interview format to reflect on the past, present and future of the Money on the Left project as a whole. We focus, in particular, on a recent special scholarly journal issue dedicated to Money on the Left, which was published by Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies and guest-edited by our friend Andrés Bernal. The issue joins archival text, audio and video with fresh essays about institution building, history, and media composed by co-hosts Billy Saas, Maxximilian Seijo and Scott Ferguson, respectively.

Recorded in what now seems like a very different context before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the episode additionally discusses the graduate student workers’ ongoing “cost of living adjustment” (COLA) strikes in the University of California system and U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley’s powerful appeal to our colleague David Stein’s scholarship on the Civil Rights struggle for full employment in a recent House Financial Services Committee meeting. Finally, we ponder Money on the Left's future efforts, including our upcoming second bi-annual conference titled, Money on the Left: The Green New Deal Across the Arts and Humanities. Originally scheduled for April 24 – 26 at Louisiana State University, the conference has recently been postponed to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

You can check out Money on the Left’s special issue of Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies here: http://liminalities.net/15-3/.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

From Liberation Theology to Public Money Creation with Delman Coates

Sun, 16 Feb 2020 12:00:00 -0500

Reverend Dr. Delman Coates joins Money on the Left to discuss why the politics of public money creation are essential for social and spiritual liberation. Dr. Coates holds a Master’s in Divinity from Harvard and a Ph.D. in New Testament & Early Christianity from Columbia University. He currently serves as Senior Pastor at Mount Ennon Baptist church in Clinton, Maryland, and is founder of OUR MONEY, an organization fighting to restore democratic control over public money. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Coates about how he teaches Modern Monetary Theory to the over 10,000 members of his congregation; about his call for a new “theology of economics”; and his efforts to unite the traditions of the black church and the Civil Rights movement with the fiscal & policy frameworks of MMT. For more on Dr. Coates’s efforts, check out his essay, “The Unfinished Work of the Civil Rights Movement,” published recently in Sojourners magazine. Also, see ourmoneyus.org to learn about his organization’s work and how to get involved.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Covering the Paradigm Crisis with Alexandra Scaggs

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 11:00:00 -0500

Alexandra Scaggs joins Money on the Left to discuss her experience covering the ongoing paradigm crisis in mainstream economics, central banking and finance--and why leftists should be paying close attention. Alexandra is presently a senior writer at Barron’s, where she covers markets and fixed income. Giving credit to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) for turning her toward left politics, Alexandra has proven an important contributor to the MMT project through her critical financial journalism and online commentary. During our conversation, we discuss Alexandra’s recent reporting on the complex topic of “repo markets.” We also talk about the inordinately powerful role played by so-called “primary dealers” in concealing money’s political constitution and possibilities. Ultimately, we stress the need for leftists to seize the moment in order to reverse the unjust neoclassical and monetarist consensus that has organized neoliberal political economy since the late 1970’s.

Find Alexandra’s reportage at Barron’s (https://www.barrons.com/authors/8576) and follow her on Twitter (@alexandrascaggs).

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Neoclassical Marxism (Christmas Special) with @NMarxism

Sun, 15 Dec 2019 08:00:00 -0500

This December, we bring you a special Christmas episode of our program, featuring the enigmatic operator behind the increasingly popular Twitter account known as “Neoclassical Marxism,” or @NMarxism. @NMarxism is a deeply satirical Twitter project, which deploys Modern Monetary Theory and some very dark humor to critique the neoclassical economics and neoliberal assumptions that unconsciously organize a lot of present leftist discourse. Our mystery guest agreed to speak with us out of character, so long as we promised to disguise their voice. The episode is a funny but also quite penetrating conversation between @NMarxism and Money on the Left’s Maxximilian Seijo (@MaxSeijo). Given @NMarxism’s problematic proclivity to reduce socialist politics to crass consumerism, we thought what better way to present our dialog than in the form of a Christmas Special.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

MMT & the Art of Social Practice with Vienne Chan (Live)

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 09:00:00 -0500

In this special live episode of Money on the Left, artist and researcher Vienne Chan joins us to talk art, politics, and money—and how Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) reconfigures the boundaries between all three. Recorded at the Third Annual International Conference on Modern Monetary Theory held at Stony Brook University, our conversation focuses specifically on Vienne’s recent efforts to combine MMT principles with diagrammatic visual design to fundamentally reimagine how to build and sustain democratic housing communities. Vienne holds an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from Bauhaus Universitat Weimar. Her work has been shown at NGBK in Berlin, Plataforma Revolver in Lisbon, CCA Tel Aviv, Kunsthaus Dresden, and the Armory Center in Los Angeles.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

No Depression in Heaven with Alison Collis Greene

Tue, 15 Oct 2019 12:00:00 -0400

In this episode of Money on the Left, we speak with historian Alison Collis Greene about her book No Depression in Heaven with an eye toward contemporary debates around the Green New Deal. Subtitled The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta, Greene's book critiques what she calls the “myth of the redemptive depression” which, particularly in the American south, eroded the legacy of the original New Deal by affirming regressive fantasies of self-help and individualism.

Many on the left today see the “New Deal” framing of contemporary social and ecological politics as a concession to liberal nostalgia. However, No Depression in Heaven reminds us that right-wing and religious dismissals of the New Deal played a key part in rolling back government provisioning under neoliberalism. From our perspective, then, the original New Deal remains a crucial rhetorical battleground for the future of American political economy.

Greene teaches United States religious history at Emory University, and researches American religions as they relate to politics, wealth and poverty, race and ethnicity, the environment, and the modern rural South. Check out her poetic mediation on scarcity, gender and history, “Pine Knot Woman,” which Greene reads for us at the beginning of the show.

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: Alex Williams (audio engineering), Richard Farrell (transcription) & Meghan Saas (graphic art).

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Money Politics before the New Deal with Jakob Feinig

Fri, 30 Aug 2019 11:00:00 -0400

Jakob Feinig, assistant professor of human development at Binghamton University, joins us to discuss the history of political organizing and activism around money in the United States, from the pre-Revolutionary period to the New Deal era. Characterized alternately by periods of widespread “silencing” and mass mobilization, the history of money politics that Feinig documents in his research has much to tell us about the present and future of the modern money movement. For more about the history of money politics, see Jakob’s research on money politics in Sociological Theory and The Journal of Historical Sociology.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

The Modern Money Movement with Andrés Bernal

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 07:00:00 -0400

We are joined by Andrés Bernal, policy advisor to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and doctoral student at the New School for Public Engagement, Division of Policy Management and Environment. We speak with Bernal about his history with political organizing and the critical role he has come to play in the modern money movement, including the struggle for a Green New Deal. He also sketches out his dissertation project, which focuses on the Green New Deal as a site of collective action, political communication, and policy analysis.

Additionally, Bernal is a research fellow with the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and lecturer Urban Studies at CUNY Queens College. For more from Bernal, check out the article “We Can Pay for a Green New Deal,” which he coauthored with Stephanie Kelton and Greg Carlock. [link the article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-green-new-deal-cost_n_5c0042b2e4b027f1097bda5b]

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Inflation & the Politics of Pricing w/ Nathan Tankus

Wed, 19 Jun 2019 13:00:00 -0400

In this episode, we talk with Nathan Tankus, Research Director of the Modern Money Network, and Research Fellow at the Clarke Business Law Institute at Cornell Law School. Nathan recently co-authored an opinion piece in the Financial Times with Scott Fullwiler and former MoL guest Rohan Gray about MMT’s position on the causes of inflation

Link to the piece: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/03/01/1551434402000/An-MMT-response-on-what-causes-inflation/

In the conversation, we ask Nathan to expand upon and deepen his engagement with the inflation question in all its historical, political, and rhetorical complexity. More specifically we discuss the different historical approaches to inflation; how the Post Keynesian MMT perspective diverges from those approaches; the vital contributions of economist Fred Lee to the foundations of Modern Monetary Theory; as well as how we ought to be thinking about issues of inflation and growth as they pertain to the Green New Deal. The conversation is as compelling as it is challenging.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Colored Property & State Debt w/ David Freund

Thu, 16 May 2019 09:00:00 -0400

On this episode, we talk with David Freund, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland. David is the author of Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America, an award-winning book that tracks how the language of racial exclusion was re-coded in terms of markets, property, and citizenship in the post-World War II era. Throughout the conversation, David speaks to his research on the history of public policy and economic ideology in the United States, and the role that heterodox economic thinking has played in shaping his research agenda. We talk at length about Colored Property, as well as his current book project, State Money, which offers a history of financial policy and free market ideology that unveils the repressed role of the state in the making of modern America.

David Freund recently published a chapter in the edited collection Shaped by the State, titled "State Building for a Free Market: The Great Depression and the Rise of Monetary Orthodoxy" More info here: https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo31043679.html?fbclid=IwAR1oUDodC6uWVbLo_f71OUBqmCcuVRZhlaOGZfdzF9npqaj-mRNz7Ouxlkk

Freund also recently publish a piece on the role of money in historical inquiry for The Metropole: https://themetropole.blog/2019/05/21/money-matters/

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Imagining the Green New Deal w/ AOC advisor Robert Hockett

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 09:00:00 -0400

In this episode, we speak with Robert Hockett, Edward Cornell Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. At Cornell, Hockett teaches and writes about organizational, financial, and monetary law and economics. He’s also worked as a fellow for the Century Foundation and as a consultant to a number of international financial institutions and state legislatures.

We talk with Bob about his role in crafting the Green New Deal Resolution, his conception of finance as a franchise, and his experience as an advisor to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as well to Senators Sanders and Warren.

Professor Hockett’s notable publications include his essays, “The Finance Franchise,” co-authored with Saule T. Omarova (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2820176) and “The Green New Deal: Mobilizing for a Just, Prosperous, and Sustainable Economy,” co-authored with Rhiana Gunn-Wright (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3342494).

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Confronting Monetary Imperialism in Francophone Africa w/ Ndongo Samba Sylla

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0400

Ndongo Samba Sylla is a Senegalese development economist and Research and Programme manager at the West Africa office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Sylla is also the author of many articles and three books, including the recently published L’Arme Invisible de la Francafrique, or “The Invisible Weapon of Franco-African Imperialism.” In that book, Sylla and coauthor Fanny Pigeaud lay out a comprehensive case against the CFA Franc, a neocolonial currency union that presently constrains the social, political, and economic prospects of each of its member states.

In this episode, Scott Ferguson and Maxximilian Seijo talk with Sylla about the history of political economy in pre-and post-colonial Africa; the theoretical bases and political stakes of the anti-CFA Franc movement; and how Modern Monetary Theory ought to inform current and future efforts to restore political and economic sovereignty to West African nations.

Sylla's book: https://www.amazon.fr/Larme-invisible-Françafrique-Fanny-PIGEAUD/dp/2348037394

Sylla's Twitter: @nssylla

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender with Julie Mell

Fri, 15 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0500

On this episode, we talk to Julie Mell, an associate professor of history at North Carolina State University and author of the two volume book, The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender.

In The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender, Mell marshals previously untapped primary sources to upend the common historical narrative regarding the role of Jewish moneylenders in the development of the modern economy. On Mell’s reading, the prevailing understanding of the medieval Jewish moneylender--common to both antisemitic and philosemetic discourses in the 19th and 20th centuries-- has no more basis in history than does the prevailing myth of barter.

At North Carolina State University, Mell teaches courses in medieval history, Jewish history, and economic thought; she also recently served as a fellow at the Center for the History of Political Economy and as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Hebrew and Judaic Studies at the University of Oxford.

In this episode, Scott and Max speak with Mell about these and other connections that may be drawn between her own and neochartalism’s critical projects.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Direct Job Creation in America w/ Steven Attewell

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0500

In this episode, we're joined by Steven Attewell, Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies.

His recent book, People Must Live By Work (University of Pennsylvania Press), examines the history of direct job creation programs from the depths of the Great Depression and debates over the Employment Act of 1946 to the War on Poverty and the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978.

Link to the book: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15862.html

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Money & Power w/ Jamee Moudud

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 16:00:00 -0500

In this episode, we’re joined by Jamee Moudud.

A professor of economics at Sarah Lawrence College, Jamee draws on the tradition of critical legal studies to extend the constitutional theory of money to new historical and international contexts.

He currently serves on the board of the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law. He is also associate editor for the Review of Keynesian Economics.

You can check out some of his recent work, including a timely essay on tariffs and free trade, on the website for the journal of Law and Political Economy: https://lpeblog.org/2018/03/26/free-trade-for-all-market-romanticism-versus-reality/

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Digital Money Beyond Blockchain w/ Rohan Grey

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 10:00:00 -0500

In this episode, we’re joined by Rohan Grey, President of the Modern Money Network, Director of the National Jobs for All Coalition, Research Fellow at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and JSD student at Cornell Law school.

Our conversation is dedicated to Rohan’s current work on the political, economic, and cultural implications of money’s digital future.

Rohan's report on digital fiat money: https://bit.ly/2K4els2
Twitter: @rohangrey

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Poor People's Campaign - June 23, 2018

Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0400

In this special episode, we offer a montage of interviews, songs, and speeches recorded during the Poor People’s Campaign’s June 23 rally on the National Mall and march on the US Capitol. To learn more about the 21st Century Poor People’s Campaign, visit www.poorpeoplescampaign.org.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Ballerinas on the Dole w/ Colleen Hooper

Mon, 08 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0400

We talk with Colleen Hooper, assistant professor of dance at Point Park University.

Colleen researches the history of public funding for arts programs in the United States from the New Deal through the post War era. Her 2017 article in the Dance Research Journal, titled “Ballerinas on the Dole: Dance and the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA), 1974-1982,” is the subject of most of our conversation.

Link to the article: https://goo.gl/9Sztyn

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Gender, Labor, & Law w/ Democratic Socialist Emma Caterine

Sat, 08 Sep 2018 00:00:00 -0400

In this episode, we speak with Emma Caterine, a law graduate and writer with more than a decade of experience working within economic justice, feminist, LGBTQ, and racial justice movements. We talk Democratic Socialists of America, MMT, the advantages of a federal jobs guarantee over a universal basic income, the place for sex work in a jobs guarantee program. Emma's Medium page: https://medium.com/@EmmaCaterine Heads up: The Second International Conference for Modern Monetary Theory is set to take place September 28 - 30, 2018 at The New School in New York City. Details here: http://www.mmtconference.org

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Money as a Constitutional Project w/ Christine Desan

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 00:00:00 -0400

We are joined by Christine Desan, Leo Goettlieb professor of law at Harvard Law School to discuss her excellent book, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism. Desan argues that money is a constitutional project, countering the dubious “commodity” theory common to contemporary economic and legal orthodoxies. Desan develops her constitutional theory of money through rigorous historical examinations of money’s evolution, from medieval Anglo-Saxon communities to early-modern England to the American Revolution and beyond. Link to Desan's book: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Money-Currency-Coming-Capitalism/dp/0198709579

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

The New Postcolonial Economics w/ Fadhel Kaboub

Sat, 07 Jul 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Scott and Max are joined by Fadhel Kaboub, associate professor of economics at Denison University and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity: http://www.global-isp.org Fadhel outlines a new critical approach to postcolonial political economy, arguing that re-gaining financial sovereignty is a crucial next step for postcolonial nations hoping to achieve social, economic, and environmental justice. We talk specifically and at length about the CFA franc currency union, a system with violent colonial roots that continues to constrain the economic and political agency of its member states in West and Central Africa.

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Confronting Cinema's Fascist Unconscious

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Bad tweets from AP and Howard Schultz inspire discussion of Left Twitter’s engagement with fiscal policy. Maxximilian Seijo (@maxseijo) expands upon the argument made in his video essay, “Inglorious Basterds: Nazi Desire Fully Employed,” which takes a neochartalist lens to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2008). View the video essay here: https://vimeo.com/264766464 Money on the Left Conference program: http://modern-money-humanities.webflow.io/ MMN HD YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtEq19YkCJeEvvyXsguo9QA

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Job Guarantee as Historical Struggle w/ David Stein

Sun, 27 May 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Money on the Left is the official podcast of Modern Money Network: Humanities Division (@moneyontheleft). In our first episode, we consider the recent resurgence of full employment politics in the United States from both a political and historical perspective with historian David Stein (@davidpstein). David is currently a fellow at UCLA’s Luskin Center for History and Policy and a lecturer in the departments of History and African American Studies. Check out his recent article in Jacobin: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/05/full-employment-humphrey-hawkins-inflation-jobs-guarantee. Intro music by Hillbilly Motobike: http://hillbillymotobike.bandcamp.com/album/flexiocentrism

Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure