Modern Money & the Black University Concept

Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice
Vol. 1, No. 1 (2024)
ISSN 2833-051X

Modern Money & the Black University Concept
By Andrew J. Douglas

Abstract

Recent efforts to rethink the university as a site of monetary experimentation share several affinities with the “Black University” movement of the mid-twentieth century. Today’s “Uni” currency project, one of the more edifying policy visions to emerge from recent work in modern money theory, reimagines the university as a currency-issuing institution, a kind of public or community bank that can create money as a means of provisioning itself and mobilizing campus resources in more democratically accountable ways. The Black University movement—which, during its heyday in the late 1960s, sought to pioneer a new model of the university, one dedicated entirely to Pan-African research and community development—likewise sought to move beyond conceits of capitalist finance in order to leverage the campus community in service of cooperative and sustainable investment initiatives. In exposing their understanding of money and finance, I show how theorists of the Black University provided a rich critique of an orthodox or private money paradigm but did not have the language or conceptual tools to think beyond it, even if implicitly they imagined something like a public or modern money framework— what I call a Black counterpublic money—as fundamental to a broader Black worldmaking agenda. An appreciation of modern money theory and the potential of endogenous credit creation may help to renew the Black University movement in our time. Still, Black radical concerns about empire and racist state violence, key impetuses of the Black University, pose challenging questions for any philosophy of money rooted in the history and conceptual apparatus of European modernity.

Andrew J. Douglas is a professor of political science at Morehouse College. As a political theorist, Douglas focuses on theories and histories of Black radicalism, capitalism, money, labor, and debt. Douglas is the author of several articles and three books, including W.E.B. Du Bois and the Critique of the Competitive Society (2019) and, with Jared Loggins, Prophet of Discontent: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism (2021).