JAWS at 50: Birth of the Neoliberal Blockbuster

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. In all, 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.

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Assignment Prompt: A Classroom Currency Experiment

Adapted from a prompt by Professor Benjamin Wilson (SUNY Cortland, Spring 2025), this assignment encourages students to perceive money and the labor it mobilizes as social forms that we can collectively remake. We share it here for educators and organizers invested in expanding the democratic imagination.

Introduction

Traditional economics defines and models money as a commodity like all other commodities—a modeling choice that renders money neutral or irrelevant to economic functions. This theoretical invisibility of money stands in stark contrast to lived experience, where virtually nothing occurs without monetary circuits connecting issuance to redemption, from securing food to maintaining shelter.

While orthodox economics treats money as merely facilitating trade, other schools of thought often characterize money as extractive or harmful, encouraging selfish behavior and decisions that may harm others. Even Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which centers money in its analysis, incorporates undertones of state violence and coercion in explaining money’s value.

Margaret Atwood offers a provocative alternative perspective in her 2008 work Payback, where she examines debt’s literary history and the stories used to justify extractive social relations. She argues:

“Like all our financial arrangements, and like all our rules of moral conduct—in fact, like language itself—notions about debt form part of the elaborate imaginative construct that is human society. What is true of each part of mental construct is also true of debt, in all its many variations: because it is a mental construct, how we think about it changes how it works.”

This observation raises compelling questions: How can we change how we think about credit/debt relations? Is it possible to change how money actually works?

The Experiment

Hypothesis: If money is a designed human construct, then we can design experiments that test various design elements to yield alternative outcomes.

Theoretical Framework

Our classroom monetary model incorporates two fundamental design elements that establish money as a public project:

  1. The Tax Circuit: Following the model used by currency-issuing governments, taxation creates demand for the currency. The tax doesn’t fund government activity but establishes need for the currency, making it receivable throughout the economic system. This creates a circuit from issuance to redemption that gives money its social power.
  2. Real Resource Constraints: While the currency issuer faces no financial constraints (except socially constructed ones), real resource constraints remain. If no people are available to do work, you cannot mobilize them through monetary payment. That said, real resources are also socially constructed, which means that such constraints are mutable over the long term. 

Implementation

Currency Creation as Governance: Students will earn classroom currency ([insert your currency name]) through productive activities. As the monetary authority, the instructor can issue unlimited currency but cannot create additional real resources (time, labor, expertise). This demonstrates money as a creature of law and governance, not alleged “market forces.”

Tax Obligation as Demand Creation: Each student enterprise faces a tax of [X amount] in classroom currency. This tax obligation creates demand for the currency and establishes its circulation within the classroom economy, completing the circuit from issuance to redemption.

Monetary Philosophy: Rather than treating money as a commodity or medium of dyadic trade, we define it as a collective relation and accounting tool. Money represents both credit and debit, asset and liability—an IOU or promise to pay. When students earn currency, they hold an asset while the instructor holds a corresponding liability, creating the collective relationship that gives money meaning.

Enterprise Structure and Goals

Organization

Students form social enterprises of [3-5] members. Each enterprise must collectively earn sufficient currency to meet all members’ tax obligations ([X × number of members]).

Objectives

The primary goal extends beyond mere tax settlement to achieving the highest level of public good production, including enhanced student learning outcomes. Enterprises may organize efforts in various ways:

  • Collective action with shared responsibilities
  • Individual optimization with separate efforts
  • Hybrid approaches combining cooperation and specialization

Earning Opportunities Through Public Purpose

Students can earn classroom currency through activities designed to serve public purposes while providing personal development:

  1. Community Service: Volunteer work with non-profit organizations, mobilizing underutilized labor for social benefit
  2. Academic Engagement: Attendance and participation in approved campus cultural and intellectual events
  3. Research Participation: Data collection exercises supporting academic research
  4. Enhanced Class Participation: Above-and-beyond contributions to class discussions and peer learning support

[Instructors should customize these categories based on institutional resources and learning objectives]

Strategic Considerations

Enterprises should consider these questions when organizing their efforts:

Impact Assessment:

  • Can your enterprise create impact across all earning categories?
  • Will you specialize in particular areas?
  • How will you measure and assess your impact?
  • What quantitative measures will you track (people reached, events attended, meaningful contributions?

Organizational Design:

  • What institutional parameters will you establish to generate collective success?
  • How will these parameters evolve during the semester?
  • Will leaders emerge naturally or be formally designated?
  • How will you resolve conflicts and make decisions?

Learning Outcomes

This experiment illuminates several key concepts about money as a public project:

  • How monetary circuits from issuance to redemption create social relationships
  • Money as a creature of governance and law rather than so-called “market forces”
  • Alternative values and motives beyond profit maximization
  • Non-zero-sum approaches to production through public purpose
  • The interplay between competition and cooperation in productive activity
  • Benefits of effort and work outside traditional wage relationships
  • How different monetary designs generate different forms of production and returns
  • Money’s role in mobilizing underutilized resources for public benefit

Assessment and Data Collection

Qualitative Assessment

Students submit reflection essays addressing:

  • Enterprise impact and innovation strategies
  • Leadership emergence and conflict resolution
  • Changes in understanding of money’s function as a public project
  • Implications for real-world monetary systems
  • Comparative experiences (e.g., non-profit vs. retail work)
  • Collaborative work satisfaction and challenges

Quantitative Metrics

  • Hours of community service and resource mobilization
  • Data collection contributions
  • Campus event attendance
  • Course assignment performance
  • Comparative class performance (if applicable)

Timeline and Payment Schedule

Tax Day: [Insert date – typically end of semester] Payment Opportunities: Regular class sessions and approved events Documentation: Students must complete effort verification forms and obtain appropriate signatures for currency payment

[Instructors should establish specific procedures for currency distribution and verification]

Research Questions

This experiment helps verify or reject our central hypothesis while exploring broader questions:

  • Can monetary systems be designed as public projects to improve human happiness and well-being?
  • How do circuits of issuance and redemption create different social relationships?
  • Are such improvements subject to diminishing returns?
  • Does this demonstrate money’s potential as a tool for mobilizing underutilized resources?

Adaptation Guidelines for Instructors

Customization Considerations:

  • Adjust currency amounts based on class size and semester length
  • Modify earning categories to reflect available institutional resources
  • Adapt enterprise size to accommodate class enrollment
  • Establish verification procedures appropriate to your context
  • Consider incentive structures that align with your learning objectives

Implementation Tips:

  • Clearly communicate the experimental nature and learning goals
  • Establish partnerships with campus organizations for earning opportunities
  • Create simple tracking systems for currency distribution
  • Plan regular check-ins to monitor enterprise progress
  • Prepare discussion prompts to connect experiences to theoretical concepts
  • Emphasize money’s role as governance tool rather than market mechanism

This experiment transforms abstract monetary theory into lived experience, helping students understand money as a social technology and public project that can be redesigned to serve different purposes and values through circuits of issuance and redemption.

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Care After Structure

by Scott Ferguson

This essay accompanies After Structure, an exhibition curated by Mark Fredricks for University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum, June 13 – August 2, 2025.

After Structure brings together works by Richard Tuttle and Mike Cloud to reconsider a notion that is central to modern visual art: structure.

The question of structure has long divided critics and art historians. Art is autonomous, says one tradition; its structure must be bounded, self-sufficient, and free from external contamination.1 Think Mondrian, Pollack, and Hirschhorn. Art should be integrated into everyday life, retorts the opposition. They point to Duchamp, Warhol, and Bruguera for whom structures are open, participatory, and receptive.2

After Structure transcends the terms of the dispute by foregrounding far-flung riddles of care.3 In doing so, it challenges what both sides unwittingly share: an attachment to the artwork’s physical location in the here-and-now. Commencing from the here-and-now compels art to choose: autonomy or integration, containment or exposure?4 Care, however, is omnipresent. Unlike structure, it concerns everything and anything, admitting no necessary trade-offs between inside and outside, near and far.

What, then, comes after structure? The exhibition answers this query by way of seemingly opposed strategies. At first glance, Tuttle’s series of encaustic monotype paintings on muslin appear woefully under-structured. Colorful splotches, smudges, streaks, and drips on white are delicately pinned to the wall, forgoing the solidity and support afforded by customary framing. On closer inspection, the apparent fragility of this arrangement reveals a highly structured configuration sculpted by precise drapings, curls, creases, and folds. Conversely, Cloud’s pieces give an initial impression of over-structuring. Painted mottles, figures, signs, and symbols spread across multiple strata of paper, photographs, cloth, and wood. In several works, Cloud deploys a superabundance of irregularly cut or broken stretcher bars to create criss-crossing patterns, borders, and frames-within-frames. With time, however, structural profusion gives way to systemic precarity, as compounding instances of overlap, mismatch, and imbalance imperil the art’s material and semantic integrity.

Richard Tuttle, Renaissance Unframed #21, 1994.
Mike Cloud, Body Builder Paper Quilt, 2010.

Through these inversions, Tuttle’s and Cloud’s works enfold structural insufficiency and excess into a single dynamic that construes aesthetic form as a problem of boundless care. Breaking with dominant models of structure, care circumvents eternal oscillations between openness and closure, unity and dissolution. It denies hard ontological boundaries, on one hand, and radical lawlessness, on the other hand. In After Structure, aesthetic saliencies, fissures, and edges admit no primordial exclusion. Smudges, crumples, and shards show little tendency toward disintegration. When Tuttle forsakes traditional framing, we discover quickly that any attempt to flee care’s responsibilities routes us back to fresh aesthetic quandaries and needs. In this deliberate destabilization, Tuttle compels us to consider: How else might we buttress social forms when customary supports become inadequate? When Cloud’s contributions multiply structure to the point of bewilderment, dozens of fresh vulnerabilities and hazards emerge that even the utmost care cannot master. In this labyrinthine complexity, Cloud poses a vital question: How to heed exigencies and complications that develop from fervid organization?

In this, care after structure demands a commitment to what might be called remote co-presence. Care is irreducible to proximity. Its forms do not merely circulate from one place to another. Its causal horizon requires no immediate displacements. To the contrary, care convenes meaning in disparate locales at once. Its forms engage non-adjacent events and concerns. Its causality encompasses the whole of collectivity. The mysteries of belonging–of joy as well as suffering–remain inescapably ubiquitous. Why should art proceed any differently?

In After Structure, care’s remote co-presence turns the conventional image of structure on its head. Take Tuttle’s series of twenty-five monotype paintings, tellingly titled Renaissance Unframed, which was completed at Graphicstudio in 1995. Visibly indebted to both Minimalism and Conceptualism, Tuttle’s frameless canvases lend painting’s surfaces palpable, even sculptural, qualities. Yet the works’ conceptual gesture is hardly unidirectional; it does not advance from flatness to volume à la Minimalism. From start to finish, surface markings diversely shape the muslin’s perceived texture, pliability, and weight. Reciprocally, each sculpted pleat, bend, and crinkle communicates from afar no less than Tuttle’s painterly inscriptions. It is not simply that the hand of the artist is forever absent. By relying on museum or gallery officials to carry out the artists’ detailed instructions for pinning, hanging, and folding, Tuttle’s canvases indicate that art depends on constant mediation at a remove.

It is tempting to read the heavy bronze floor sculptures that accompany Renaissance Unframed as stabilizing perceptual anchors for viewers faced with the uncanny origami of Tuttle’s painted fabric. It turns out, however, that these ponderous elements participate in mediations that are no less remote and playful. The sculptures are cast from a Styrofoam carving then coated with a jet black patina. Their contours recall the roughness of basalt, the igneous rock that Robert Smithson arranged en masse in his monumental land art sculpture, Spiral Jetty (1970). Yet the impenetrable density and smooth inner faces of Tuttle’s sculptures maintain the trappings of highly manufactured artifacts. The sculptures come in pairs, each half giving the appearance of having been sliced neatly in two. Although circumstances vary, installation guidelines instruct exhibitors to fit the two parts together and place them on the floor precisely one foot in front of each wall hanging. Positioned this way, Tuttle’s bronze sculptures at once activate and whimsically undermine minimalist phenomenology. With Minimalism, what Robert Morris once characterized as “the autonomous and literal nature of sculpture” puts into question the corporeal orientation and movement of artist and viewer in a manner that trades painterly illusionism for direct reckonings with a universal gravity.5 Minimalism, at least on this account, achieves art’s elusive dream of autonomy by contracting gravity’s all-consuming pull into a circumscribed arena—one where freedom emerges by leveraging inner balance against outward resistance.

Richard Tuttle, Renaissance Unframed #10, 1994.
Richard Tuttle, Renaissance Unframed #26, 1994.

When it comes to Tuttle’s floor sculptures, however, Morris’s “obdurate, literal mass[es]” become optical and signifying riddles, which mediate physical things and forces from the jump.6 The sculptures present a tripping hazard to viewers engrossed by the wall hangings—a subtle challenge to museum officials striving to balance aesthetics with safety. One wonders: Is litigation merely another medium in the artist’s toolbox? Tuttle’s instructions recommend the use of a compass to align the two pieces along the north-south axis of the exhibition space and, of course, the planet. In this sense, the pieces function as geometric points that, together, form a line that wraps around the globe. As a consequence, Tuttle’s sculptures simultaneously satirize and profoundly amplify routine museum safeguards—floor demarcations, signage, and vigilant personnel—employed to preserve artistic works. Where exactly does the essence of the artwork reside? When, if ever, does concern end?

With Cloud’s ultra-structured fabrications, After Structure turns care’s ambit toward persons, domains, and events that one will likely never know or experience in any direct sense. In contemporary parlance, the established term for such phenomena is “parasocial,” defined as one-sided and ostensibly imaginary relations with celebrities, influencers, or fictional characters with whom one has no immediate or mutual interactions. Social scientists and cultural commentators regularly evaluate the costs and benefits of parasocial relations. Parasocial investments can be beneficial in moderate doses, they claim. Yet because this discourse fundamentally pathologizes physical separation and unreciprocated feelings, purveyors of such reasoning fret that inordinate parasocial devotion is damaging to psychological well-being.7

Cloud’s work weighs questions of remote association from a more salutary vantage. Cloud does not assume an atomized subject, whose flirtations with real and make-believe strangers teeters dangerously between health and illness. Instead, his art affirms sociality’s wide breadth at the outset. From here, Cloud deploys what he describes as “a wide range of marks, symbols, motifs, palettes and forms” to query traumas and ecstasies, fascinations and repulsions. The resulting lexicon is singular, heterogeneously shared, and thoroughly social. Cloud reports that he is frequently inspired by contemporary news stories. Sometimes, he includes URL addresses for news sources within the compositions of works themselves. When Cloud variously problematizes and hyperbolizes structure, it is this captivating realm of parasociality that commands our attention.

Take Rabbit Quilt (2008), which treats mismatched pajamas as canvas and make-shift frame. The pajama bottoms display the queer children’s television character SpongeBob SquarePants in pirate paraphernalia. The tank top comes from U. S. illustrator Jim Benton’s cynical novelty brand, It’s Happy Bunny. It features a pink, smiling bunny flanked below by a less-than-clever slogan: “You are perfect–except for 9 or 10 things.” (More acerbic quips from the same line of merchandise include, “Hi Loser” and “You suck, and that’s sad.”) Here, Cloud joins top and bottom in a roughly hewn fashion to construct something like a quilt of 1990’s pop juvenilia, a cross-section of high-neoliberal commodity culture.

Mike Cloud, Rabbit Quilt, 2008.

Significantly, Rabbit Quilt’s central seam draws attention to micro-generational rifts between the inclusive zaniness of SpongeBob and the misanthropic irony of Benton’s black-pilled cutesiness. As a result, “tops” and “bottoms” (in multiple senses) bristle uneasily side by side. Across the textiles, Cloud paints an impressionistic calico rabbit in mid-sprint, which enmeshes the aforementioned rift in ‘90’s youth culture in wider historical thickets. Is this a primordial cave painting of a totemic animal that is spellbound by movement? Is it roadkill flattened pajamas-and-all by a careless semi-truck? Is it Br’er Rabbit, the anti-authoritarian trickster from the Afro-American oral tradition, later white-washed by Walt Disney’s offensive mixed-animation feature, Song of the South (1948)? The answer, of course, is an all-encompassing yes. Rabbit Quilt thickens parasociality’s historical dimensions. It ensconces us in intimate and ongoing entanglements from which no person is exempt. The artwork tenders no stock judgments. It intensifies ethical evaluation and political accountability as it stages a wide-ranging aesthetic inquiry into seemingly unrelated pasts.

Cloud’s most disquieting entries are his so-called “hanging paintings.” The hanging paintings comprise a series of triangular constructions from which dangle several off-the-rack belts that serve as nooses. These works include S of B (2016), Ames 2017 (2019), Uehara 2011 (2019), and Khan 2013 (2019). Cloud deems them portraits because they represent persons who died by means of hanging–though the works show only hand-written names rather than visual likenesses. Some of the paintings are group portraits, including multiple names dispersed across several wooden stretcher bars. As a consequence, the hanging paintings foster unlikely and sometimes unnerving associations among strangers, including museum attendees. Exemplary is S of B, which names Sandra Bland, the 28-year-old Black woman whose alleged 2015 suicide in a Texas jail was fiercely contested by protestors opposed to racialized police brutality. Yet it also identifies actor David Carradine, rumored to suffocate from auto-erotic asphyxiation, and model Cheyenne Brando, daughter of Marlon Brando, who took her own life after suffering years of neglect, abuse, and mental illness.

Mike Cloud, S of B, 2016.

The point, it seems, is not to flatten differences between heterogeneous social conditions. Surely Cloud, a contemporary Black artist, has little interest in forcing equivalences between Bland, Carridine, and Brando. The idea, rather, is to play up resonances across differences, such that what counts as death’s proper context is socially defamiliarized and reconfigured. With this, the social loss of Bland accrues a cryptic communal importance beyond the confines of an isolated Black history. It would require many more pages to do justice to S of B’s polysemic title, painted cubes and swirls, tottering rocket-like architecture, and uncanny correspondences, not to mention the manifold aesthetic and social connotations at stake in Cloud’s references to “hanging.” Even so, my sense is that none of this dilutes the singularity of death; rather, it deepens and transmogrifies hanging’s collective implications.

I would be remiss if, by way of conclusion, I did not draw out After Structure’s relevance for the present moment. Since January 20, 2025, punishing fiscal austerity and lawless state violence have lacerated communities, destroyed vital infrastructures, and undermined public trust both across the United States and around the world. The current administration operates under a fiercely zero-sum conception of structure. Because they presume that there is never enough to go around, the powers that be fortify structure to protect a chosen minority. Everyone else is forsaken as internal parasites or expelled as external threats. Alternatively, After Structure teaches that there is no outside; collectivity is replete with untold riches; and nobody can exhaust the unending enigmas of care.

Notes

  1. A contemporary defense of autonomy can be found in Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). ↩︎
  2. For a recent affirmation of the integrative approach, see Grant Kester, Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024).
    ↩︎
  3. Scott Ferguson, Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics & the Politics of Care (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018). ↩︎
  4. To be sure, aesthetic theory has articulated the central binary between autonomy and integration (or “heteronomy”) in complex ways. For Theodor Adorno, autonomy involves a contradictory gambit wherein art’s utopian impulse toward freedom is only realized when its aesthetic structure fails to perfectly cohere. Jacques Derrida taught us to deconstruct the “truth in painting” by unleashing unsettling interdependencies between inside and outside that frames of all kinds are called upon to contain. Philosophers of process and difference such as Gilles Deleuze prioritize flows of becoming that at once undercut and overwhelm structural boundaries. Still, even when avowing the porous, intertwined, and unstable, such discourses constrain structure within a restricted and zero-sum model of art that is grounded in the here-and-now. See, Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Thomas F.H. Meck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). ↩︎
  5. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (Feb. 1966): 42 – 44. ↩︎
  6. Robert Morris, “Notes of Sculpture.” ↩︎
  7. Thanks to Will Beaman for educating me about the anti-social assumptions inherent in the discourse of parasociality. ↩︎

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Blue Bonds Can Stop Trump’s Fiscal Authoritarianism

By the Money on the Left Editorial Collective

Less than a year into his second term, Donald Trump has launched an illegal and (as now) unfeasible mass deportation campaign—one that is tearing apart families, destabilize communities, and provoke mass resistance across the country.

He’s already begun deploying military force to enforce it.

The California National Guard has been deputized. Several Democrat-controlled cities are under threat of military occupation. And Trump’s administration is moving quickly to consolidate control over federal spending—using public money to reward allies, punish opposition, and fund his growing network of coercive agencies.

We think he’s overplayed his hand.

Authoritarian rule depends on fear, but fear alone can’t stabilize a society. To function, authoritarianism needs infrastructure. It needs jobs, logistics, paperwork, coordination. It needs people to show up and participate—to carry out orders, to staff the programs, to help make the unthinkable look routine.

Trump is relying on a kind of fiscal austerity—a politics of negative space—to suppress the alternatives and starve local capacity. But this strategy is weak and vulnerable. His agenda only works if there’s nothing else on offer.

Blue Bonds are the counter-offer.

Blue Bonds are routine municipal bonds, paired with a bold, public campaign to provision care, public employment, and reconstruction directly without waiting for permission from Washington. Jobs that communities want. Projects that rebuild trust. Wages that sustain families. A future in which people want to participate.

Instead of asking if these bonds are “creditworthy,” we flip the script. We demand that the Federal Reserve receive them—just like it already receives Treasury bonds and backs coercive public infrastructure without blinking.

This is not a financial trick. It’s a political strategy.

Blue Bonds make visible what austerity tries to hide: we already have the people, the projects, and the know-how to build a better world. What we lack is federal recognition and support. By demanding that recognition—not as a favor, but as a public right—we expose just how hollow Trump’s grip on power really is.

Authoritarians rule through fear, but they can’t govern that way forever. You don’t build loyalty or legitimacy by threatening people. You build it by showing up with care, with resources, and with good public work.

Blue Bonds do that—and they do it in a way that no speech or protest alone can.

Leaders in California such as Governor Gavin Newsom and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas have recently floated the idea of withholding tens of billions in annual federal tax dollars as a means of resisting Trump’s executive tyranny and austerity. We affirm the impulse to vociferously politicize state money. Democrat-controlled states should be thinking big.

A California-led tax revolt, however, is a misguided half-measure. The Federal government hardly needs California’s tax dollars in order to spend and legal and operational realities would very likely obstruct such an action. Ultimately, California ought to utilize Blue Bonds to create a legal and genuinely productive circuit of credit in order take care of its communities and environs.

In the face of mass deportation, military overreach, and illegal fiscal retaliation against cities and states, Blue Bonds offer a peaceful, legal way to shift the balance of power. They don’t fight authoritarianism on its terms. They show that the emperor has no clothes—that authoritarians cannot actually sustain the work of public life without consent, participation, and public provision.

We are in a test of coordination. Trump is betting that he can consolidate power by cutting off air to everyone else.

Let’s prove him wrong. Let’s fund jobs, not jails. Let’s rebuild communities, not tear them apart. Let’s issue Blue Bonds to save the union once more.

Let’s make democratic public life irresistible.

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The Black University and Community Currencies, Pt. 2

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. This part has been transcribed below. 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.

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

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

William Saas
Welcome to Money on the Left. It’s really nice to have you. As a way to kind of kick things off, what is the Credo? 

Elijah Qualls

The Credo is a currency that we established in our political theory course over the span of the semester. We did various tasks and jobs where we could accumulate the Credo. Primarily, this was done through community service. However, there were other events on campus that were approved through Dr. Douglas that we could also accumulate the Credo through. 

This was all with the purpose of accumulating 50 Credos to pay our taxes at the end of the semester. The entire idea and purpose of the Credo was to mobilize labor that would not have otherwise been done by students. 

William Saas 

Can you just sort of walk me through all the different ways you can earn them? 

Isaac Dia 

I feel like that was the freest way you could ever earn a currency. It was like, whatever you did, you could pretty much get a Credo. You can either do the community service, you would fill out a paper and for every hour or every certain amount of hours for community service, you would get a certain amount of Credos. 

You could buy Credos. Some people would pay $20 for 20 Credos. Some people pay $5 for 20 Credos. It’s just whatever they decided. Or you could either raise your hand, answer a question, and then they might give you between 5 to 50 Credos for whatever you answer. 

William Saas 

Andrew, was that built in or is that more of an informal thing that Isaac, you and other students developed yourselves? 

Andrew Douglas

Oh, no, that was an informal thing. I consulted mostly with Ben Wilson – and I’m going to blame Ben Wilson – ahead of time, because he’s been doing this up at SUNY Cortland.  I basically followed his model. The only officially sanctioned mechanism through which one could earn Credos was by doing community service, but they could do whatever community service they wanted to, they simply had to have their site supervisor fill out a form, indicating what work they did and how many hours.  I would pay them on 5 or 6 pay days over the course semester. Then the private sector just emerged organically, and it turned out that we had a couple of students who did a lot of work well beyond what was required to earn enough to pay the tax. 

They began to do business with their fellow classmates. It seemed like the private sector was flourishing in our classroom. 

John Greene 

If I could jump in, the special thing for me about it was kind of seeing the birth of a currency and seeing the way that a currency comes about, the way we read about in Moral Economies of Money. You have the government that establishes the demand and then they spend money on incentivizing certain labor, and then all of the money in the economy is coming directly from doing labor that is, ideally, democratically decided. Although, we never got around to actually voting on what we wanted to incentivize like we had planned. 

The idea being that, in a fundamental sense, when you have the government printing the money that is circulating in the economy, ideally, is coming directly from this labor that was incentivized by the government on a democratic basis. I thought that was very interesting and, to that point about the educational aspect, really showed exactly what we were learning about in some of our readings. 

William Saas 

Another theme of the panel that was recurrent, and I think, Isaac, you brought it up explicitly early on in the discussion, around the capacity of the Credo and the Uni and the public money perspective to educate. In your case, I think you say the best thing the Credo did was help to educate you about how money works. 

It could educate others how money works. With the US dollar, people have been educated for a very long time, through their whole lives, more or less, that money is kind of an alienating and alienable object. We come to be suspicious of it. It is the root of all evil. It is this thing that we want and revolted by at the same time. 

Can you talk to us about your experience of using the Credo? Did it feel like that to you? Was it a reinforcement of the education every time? Or was there, experientially, a moment where you felt like you might be falling into that kind of common experience of using money and having attitudes toward it that might resemble your attitudes towards the US dollar? 

Isaac Dia 

This was the one thing I was talking about during the panel. I feel like there shouldn’t be a tax for the Credo, because then that gets back to how we felt about it originally, where it is kind of transactional, where you feel that burden. When there was like a week left in class, that’s really when that private sector started to flourish because everyone was like, “oh my God, I’m like ten Credo short.” That’s when people were paying $20 for Credo. I think if we were to implement it into the real world, we could come up with a better idea for how we could get the Credo back and make sure so many people don’t have it as much instead of creating a tax. 

I know a lot of kids wanted to do a tax for the end of the year, like that’s how you would graduate. I feel like that just creates more of a burden, where you start to see the Credo like a regular dollar and you’re like, “I’m only doing this so I can graduate. I’m not doing this because I really enjoy it. This is just another burden we have.” So that would be my only thing – to get rid of taxes. 

Bruce Malveaux 

I have a counter. I think the tax is necessary because if no one had to go get it, I’m not sure many people would. It’s also deeper than just a tax. For me, it’s more like serving a community, because that’s at least what Morehouse was built off of and Morehouse got so far away from serving its community. 

So, I’m a fan of the tax. If it does get bigger, I wouldn’t mind the Credo being a community service graduation requirement. It would be how many Credos one needed to how much community service was required. Some majors are pretty deep and don’t have as much time as business majors, for example. 

John Greene 

Yeah, I would argue that the tax was kind of the entire point. The Credo is supposed to be a way of incentivizing labor that wouldn’t otherwise be incentivized and the traditional way of doing that is always coercion. In this case, failing the class is the power we have. 

In the case of governments, it is violence and throwing you in jail, or whatever that may be. As much as the coercive aspect of the system is an ideal, in our classroom or in government and in capitalism, I think the entire point of the exercise is to attempt to emulate that, to incentivize labor that we wouldn’t otherwise be doing. 

Elijah Qualls 

I think I agree with what you guys are saying about the need to incentivize people. For me personally, I didn’t have a base incentive to do the labor this semester. The reason why I did accumulate the Credo was because there was that tax at the end of the year. 

However, the reason why that tax was established was because there was not some larger market that we could operate in. We didn’t have any other way, yet, to use the Credo. We couldn’t buy things on campus with the Credo, and we didn’t even get to the point where we could use the Credo for extra credit. 

If we start adding those other kinds of ways, I don’t think it would be a coercive method. I think it would be a more cooperative means of incentives. It wouldn’t be “do this or else,” it would be “if you do this, then it opens up the opportunity for you to purchase other things.” 

Especially if we do extra credit that could cross over to other classes. I think that’s an easy way to get rid of the necessary taxation and more so drift towards a market, and then people will have an incentive to accumulate the Credo, because then they can use that in the market. 

John Greene 

I feel like that’s a question that we had throughout the class that we never fully answered. That being, every currency that we’ve ever had has been backed by the monopoly on violence that the government has by some sort of coercion. But we also brought up the idea that, in the current era, is that even why currencies continue to exist? If taxes disappear today in the United States, would people stop using the dollar? 

Will we no longer have a need for the dollar? You could kind of make arguments either way, I guess. It’s interesting, because it doesn’t feel like the tax is really the most important thing once you have a currency off the ground, but it’s also never really been tried before, as far as I know. 

That’s more of a question for you guys. What do you think? 

Andrew Douglas

I’m happy to jump in here. From my perspective, the great failure of the experiment was that we never really got around to democratizing monetary design. I, as the sovereign initially, created the exercise and we never really imposed the tax, imposed the terms for acquisition of the Credo and ideally, we would bring everybody into some conversations and some decision making over what that would entail and what that would look like. 

I suppose it was almost impossible to do that in the first run of this experiment. If we get it up and running, if we get a couple of professors buying in on a semester-by-semester basis, we could really begin to democratize some of the decision making around that. But coming back to the tax piece, we did have some very rich conversation over the course of this semester about how the tax obligation might begin to feel different or be experienced differently than it is in our day-to-day existence as US citizens who pay taxes where we feel and experience it as a burden and transactional. It might be experienced differently if we’re actively involved in making decisions about how we’re going to use the currency, what kind of work we’re going to promote, how we want to incentivize labor and engagement in various sorts of projects on and around campus. If we really buy into that, the idea of paying back a certain portion of that at the end of the semester feels less like an obligation and more like an exercise of our agency. 

We did have some really interesting conversations around that in the abstract, even if we never really got to the point where we could begin to democratize that tax obligation, that element that drives the currency in a certain respect. 

William Saas

I run a similar kind of class, but we sort of live in that design part. We do the public money sort of orientation, and then we get into actual monetary design on campus, if we had to – in fact, students have to – design a currency to fill a gap to, to serve a need, and to serve a purpose that isn’t currently being served or is underserved by the current monetary regime. 

What would that look like? Students put together their proposals over the semester. This last time I taught it, one of the more illuminating things for me was to realize how much competition our designs would have, or do have, already on campus. I was kind of delighted when I was going back and listening to the tape because this didn’t show up so much – I don’t think we heard it in the panel – but I think someone, probably someone on this call – I couldn’t quite pinpoint the voice – said, “I want to talk about getting rid of the BEDC or something like that.” 

Elijah Qualls 

Yeah, the DCB. 

William Saas 

DCB okay. Somebody said under their breath, and we never ended up talking about it, but I suspect that it’s something like competition for the Credo or would be, prospectively. What is the DCB, what does DCB stand for and what is DCB in practice? 

Bruce Malveaux

I don’t know what DCB stands for, but it’s basically like a campus dollar. You buy in and they give you X amount of dollars. It’s tied to your meal plan. I don’t think you can buy DCB outside of a meal plan. So, you buy the meal plan, and they give you X amount of DCB to go to the campus store or eat at the food spots on campus. 

Elijah Qualls 

We talked about this a couple different times in our class as well. I’m not sure if I was the one who said that or not, but I do support that notion. I think the Credo should replace the DCB because the thing is, it comes as a part of whatever meal plan you will purchase at the beginning of the semester. 

There’s no way to accumulate more after that. Right? Say you come in as a freshman, you have to get the unlimited plan. I believe that comes with 230 DCB’s. That’s a 1 to 1 transference with the US dollar.  I think things are a little cheaper if you purchase with a DCB rather than using your debit card. 

Where I think the Credo would be more beneficial is, according to the plan that we have set up here, you can accumulate the Credo by doing certain things. For example, you know, again, the most surface level thing would be doing community service, right? However, towards the end of the school year, we began exploring some other ways that you could accumulate the Credo, but those could all be explored and expanded upon. 

The benefit to that is now you could use the Credo to buy things on campus just as you would with the DCB. And again, that goes back to what I was saying earlier about the market for the Credo. This would then create an incentive for people to accumulate the Credo and then, of course, conversely, that would mobilize labor and have more projects done that originally were not getting done. 

William Saas 

Thank you. Anybody google, in the meantime, what DCB means? What does it stand for? 

Elijah Qualls 

I’m trying to Google it, but I cannot find the definition for it. 

William Saas 

This is perfect because I’ll say – while you’re doing that – at Tulane, we have at least three. There’s Splash Cash, which basically anyone can buy in and you just get dollars on your ID card. Faculty, staff, students, everybody can do that. Then there’s Wave Bucks, which I think is a lot more like the DCB meal plan oriented buying stuff at the student convenience store, stuff like that. 

Then there’s Nola Bucks, which to me seems novel to Tulane, in some way, which is cash that the university forces you to buy and are only redeemable at certain businesses in the community. It’s meant to be spent at the local Domino’s, which was one place we discovered. 

But then, of course, it’s used so infrequently that the local Domino’s is like, “what are you trying to pay me with here? What is this? Nola Bucks? I don’t know what this is,” because they have a lot of turnover or whatnot. Anyway, in any case, for your class, Professor Douglass is the sovereign, but then we sort of exist in a hierarchy where there is already a complimentary currency or a community currency at Morehouse, which is more or less just a straight 1 to 1 with the US dollar, with a little bit of a discount and probably compulsory for those who live on campus. 

I wonder, it seems like there’s some productive problem space here to investigate, as my colleague Scott Ferguson would call it. We have these competing currencies on campus; how would we reckon with them in implementation of our own? 

Bruce Malveaux 

Oh, I was going to tell you, at Emory, if you don’t spend it, they give it back to you. Morehouse is a one of one. A true one of one. 

William Saas 

So, no getting it back. 

Bruce Malveaux 

No getting that back. I actually had a problem, I had too many DCB’s and started giving them away. My friend and I actually had too many DCB’s, so we went to Slim and Huskies and we just bought almost all the pieces and we gave them to the homeless. 

William Saas 

That’s great. Come to think of it, I just went to our student store and the shelves were pretty bare because, I think students loaded up on stuff with their surplus Wave Bucks at the end of the semester. Just to say, “I’m spending this money. You’re not having it Tulane.” 

Andrew Douglas 

Yeah. I was just going to add, I often wonder how helpful these sorts of competing currencies are in terms of getting folks to think about money and complementary currency in the way that we want to, because it’s simply a way for the institution to guarantee funding. Basically, it acts as a way to force students to pay upfront so that the college can budget and finance over the course of the semester and the academic year. 

The college is operating exclusively in a kind of orthodox monetary regime sort of way, a capitalist de-risking sort of way. The students experience it in a negative kind of way as something that’s imposed on them without any agency on their part. It’s the antithesis of the kind of democratizing work that we’re trying to do around complementary currency creation. 

I think it’s important to get students to realize that these complementary currencies are already functioning all around them. But at the same time, I worry that because people’s experience is already so negative with them that it may actually be counterproductive to the work of trying to imagine otherwise. 

William Saas 

I think you’re right. What I find interesting and where our discussions went in our class around these things was around the concept of seeing an infrastructure that’s already in place on campus that, if one were to be sort of revolution minded, one could be driven to try to operationalize that to serve your project or our project. 

I think you’re right that it’s a mechanism to capture money from students in advance and probably stash that in a savings account. They start earning interest on it immediately before you even get to campus. But something like Nola Bucks here, and maybe this is unique, it’s already an attempt. It has a kind of ethos of community participation built into it. 

There is an infrastructure, and there’s at least a rationale or an argument that we could take to the administration to say, “hey, look, we want to build this out in these ways.” I’m not so sure that the other ones aren’t there and so, Andrew brings up a great point. There’s a lot of negative feeling around these campus currencies that are already in place. 

What do we got? What can we do with that? 

Elijah Qualls 

I was going to say, with a lot of these conversations, the notion that I had for a majority of the semester was that those at the top should really be pushing for programs such as this. Our board of trustees are the ones who should really begin this movement. 

Then I started to realize they don’t really have, in my opinion, a reason to want to support this. I think the best way for this to really begin or to gain traction at Morehouse is for it to be a bottom-up sort of approach. 

We create an alternative to the DCB, show that it’s working, show that it has external benefits and validity and applicability. Then, maybe at that point, those higher up who have a say so in the infrastructure at Morehouse College would then see the benefits, because I do think Morehouse is very interested in its external image. 

A lot of its revenue, particularly from admissions, comes from image and legacy. One of the great things one could do for your image, especially as an HBCU, is to create some sort of currency that is feeding off of that Afrocentric mindset of helping each other with the sense of community and building each other up. 

Morehouse College being at the center of that would be pretty – revolutionary seems a bit hyperbolic – but pretty impactful and pretty powerful to see. I think that would bring a lot of attention back to Morehouse. I think that’s where the higher-ups vested interest would come from. It would come from an increase in popularity through a program such as this that started with the students. 

I think the students need to show that there is an incentive on a large scale for something like this. 

Isaac Dia 

What Elijah was talking about with the image is true. I think a really easy way to get them to care about the image where you can kill two birds with one stone, where we can help the community and we can better Morehouse’s image is with the restaurants we already have on campus. 

They kind of do this at Georgia Tech. That’s the only reason I know this. They have Buzz Cards, and with those Buzz Cards students can go to local restaurants, like Moe’s. I think it’s like Moe’s, Waffle House, and maybe Buffalo Wild Wings or something like that, where students can use their Buzz Card. It’s their version of the DCB. they can go there, and they can scan their card there. 

Now they’re eating really good food instead of the school cafeteria. I think if Morehouse wanted to improve their image and help the community, we could have more local businesses, like Slim and Huskies. There’s a Slim and Huskies on campus and there’s a Slim and Huskies five minutes away from campus. 

I think Morehouse should partner up with them where, if you’re just out and about and you stop with Slim and Huskies, you should be able to swipe your DCB card and you should be able to eat Slim and Huskies with your DCB card, because what’s the difference between that one and then the one that is out in real life? 

I think if they were to work with more local restaurants to provide better meals for kids, that’d be a great way to help the community and improve Morehouse’s image and the students win. It’s a triple win for everybody. 

John Greene 

I agree with ‘Jah. I think that’s kind of the crucial thing. It would have to start with the students. With the Nola Bucks, it seems like the school has a vested interest in attempting to get the students more involved in the community outside of campus. I feel like Morehouse has kind of the opposite attitude. 

I feel like we all have stories of people telling us and the school telling us that they don’t want us to go off campus. That it’s dangerous out there, and if you do leave, you should make sure you bring somebody with you. Don’t be out there by yourself. I volunteer with Midnight Riot on campus where we walk around, and we’ll pick up trash in the community. 

As we go, the students who run it are always pointing out, “Oh, yeah, Morehouse owns this plot of land. Look at it. Look at all the trash that’s all over it. They don’t take care of it. They own this land over here, but it’s covered in trash.” I think it would have to start with the students. It has to be because we wanted it, or because the faculty wanted it. It would have to be bottom up to the point where, for the board of trustees, it becomes in their best interest to put their money into it; otherwise, I don’t think they ever will. 

William Saas 

It seems like something like Midnight Riot and organizations like that could also be interesting, existing social infrastructure to tap into where there’s already activity off campus when you’re being told precisely not to go. I would imagine they’ve had to make a pretty persuasive argument to do the work that they’re doing. Credo, and when the way we’ve been talking about it, is not about destroying Morehouse as it exists and building something else whole cloth. It’s not it’s not revolutionary in its current iteration. That’s good because, you know, you go to Morehouse, but there is maybe something more transitional at play.  I love the bottom-up emphasis that was present in the panel and it’s present throughout our conversation here. Are there other infrastructures on campus that you could point to and tap to help break down those barriers? 

Elijah Qualls 

We already have some infrastructure in place that does focus on outreach and betterment of the community. I know we have prison education pipeline programs in place. I wouldn’t be the first to tell you about these because I’m not involved with them, but I know they exist, and I know they’re good programs that do quality work. 

I believe Judge Murray and the political science department at Morehouse College is pretty involved with that program, where they go into the prison system and they work on educating some of the inmates there and things like that. That’s one thing. I also know our Bonner Scholarship at Morehouse College is one of, if not, the most prestigious institutional scholarship that you can receive. 

It’s a full ride scholarship. In exchange, the students who receive that scholarship have to fulfill a certain amount of community service hours to maintain that full ride scholarship. Outside of that, there’s an expectation for every single registered student organization that they fulfill a certain amount of community service hours. My organization just filed to re-register as an RSO. 

One of the things that you have to submit is your community impact, like how many community service hours and things like that. You’ll see in certain areas here and there an interest in giving back to the community and improving the community. However, those are select cases. While those are multiple examples; we have a lot of RSO’s and the Bonner scholarship is pretty large, it is still not enough. It’s not like this is a campus wide thing and I think that’s where the Credo would really come in. That kind of separation and destruction of the wall that divides us is also very important, because right now our community service comes from a subconscious place of, “I’m in a better position than you right now, so I owe it to you to give back to you.” 

I don’t think we’re even scratching the surface of the potential of what a mutual exchange could look like. Right now, I think a lot of students at Morehouse think, “I’m at college. You’re not. I’m going to give back and help you.” However, they don’t come at it at all from a place of, “how can you also help me?” 

I think there is potential for a mutual exchange. The last point I wanted to make was how you mentioned the Black University, and whether or not Morehouse needs to be completely torn down and built up anew or can it just be restructured? If we’re looking at the most earnest idea of the Black University, I don’t think Morehouse can be that. 

I think that Credo is also an opportunity to improve Morehouse to get closer to that Black University concept. I don’t think Morehouse should ever be destroyed by any means. I think Morehouse does need to take some time and reflect on what it’s doing right now, because I think it’s rapidly losing sight of its original mission. 

I think that Credo will help the students to really understand what we’re about. Morehouse should not be about wealth accumulation, in my opinion, as a humanities major. I don’t think that all the students should just be focused on accumulating a gross amount of wealth. 

I think it’s got to be something completely different as Black people looking at how our predominantly Black communities, such as the West End, are doing right now. I don’t think wealth accumulation is the only way and then you just expect to give back your money. I think it should be something more focused and skewed towards the betterment of the community and the public benefit rather than the fiscal or the monetary benefit. 

John Greene 

Kind of on that same note of RSO’s and things like that in the Black University. Big shout out to the Writing and Thinking Society. I’m the president. I’m joking. We’ve been having lots of conversations about the decline of intellectualism. 

What was that one article that was in the Maroon Tiger that we read a while back about that? We’ve had lots of conversations about how our education here at Morehouse College isn’t as radical as we would like it to be and growing opposed to the idea of the Black University. We’ve been abandoning it. The idea that maybe the Credos job could be to create communities like the Writing and Thinking Society, where we can have these conversations and educate ourselves about these things that Morehouse may not want to be a part of its core curriculum because it’s too radical, because it’s not good for business or whatever the case may be. Moving Morehouse more towards the Black University could just look like creating incentives for organizations like that. 

Isaac Dia 

I’ll say for me, the one that I know about is with the Poetry Club at Morehouse. They also do prison education, but they do it through writing and poetry. What I think is more of an issue is events like the one I had in a Chinese literature class, where the speaker came in from Asia and she was telling us her life story alongside her writing and everything. There’s like so many events like that, like the poetry one, where we had inmates come, the ones they had been teaching, they came and performed a show where they showed us all the poetry they’ve been working on. 

When we have those important community events, Morehouse will never tell you because, I guess, they just don’t care. When you get an email from the school or you get an email from Handshake or an advisor, all the emails that they spam you with are always filled with Goldman Sachs. I get ten Goldman Sachs emails a day, or Blackrock, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. I get a million emails all the time from those four people. Morehouse, as a school they have their obligations they have to meet, but I feel like they need to have more of a balance where it’s like, “yes, you’re here at school to get an education, to get a job.” To be a complete person, a complete human, you also need community, so here’s some more community type stuff. I think that’s where more of the issue with Morehouse comes. A lot of the stuff they’re talking about, like the Midnight Riot, I have never even heard about it before. 

That’s why when you talk to a lot of students on campus and you tell them, “oh, yeah, I’m a part of this group, this organization,” or something, a lot of people are like, “oh, I had never heard about that before.” I think it’s more about getting more people to know about these programs because people want to do stuff. 

I think the biggest issue is they just don’t know where to go to get things done. 

John Greene 

This is stuff we can do now, really. Even at the level that it is currently with the Credo, with Dr. Douglas controlling everything. If Dr. Douglas just wanted to say next semester, “come up with a list of things and have people vote on whether or not they want the Credo to be given out based on attendance at Midnight Riot clean up events or going to certain events we have at the Writing and Thinking Society.” These are things that are actionable even before we expand too much further. 

William Saas 

The morning panel was largely about public money. “The Black University and Community Currencies” was the name of the event. The afternoon consisted of two panels: one featuring yourself, Professor Douglas, and Camille Franklin from Community Movement Builders and Jared Ball from Morgan State University. In that first panel you talked about – I don’t know if we can call it a tension, it’s more than that – the incompatibility of the vision of the Black University with existing structures of higher education generally and more specifically, the HBCU (Historically Black Colleges & Universities). Immediately after that we had a conversation with students about the Credo. I’m asking you to go back a couple weeks now, but is there anything that you have thought since that day, since that meeting about the relative compatibility of something like the Credo with the Black University? 

Isaac Dia 

I think that the Credo can work with the Black University. I think that the only way the Black University can work is if you have a project like the Credo, because when you’re creating a Black University, if we’re going to use the Duboisian way – which I know, like Doctor Douglass loves to bring up – it’s all about being in community with the people around you. In order to have that community, you need to have a currency that can support that community. I think the Credo is the perfect way to do that. When the Black University is the one who’s issuing currency, when they’re the ones who hold the monetary power, we know that they can issue projects that will benefit the currency. They’re more likely to issue money that will benefit the community rather than a private bank who is profit-focused. This one is more community oriented and community driven. I think that when you have a real Duboisian Black University, they’ll just fundamentally come up with their own currency to help support their people because they realize they can’t rely on the US dollar or the federal system to support them in the ways that they need to be supported. 

John Greene 

I would say that the Black University is not something that could ever make money, in a capitalist sense. It’s even fundamentally opposed to the idea that its goal should be to fit into that structure. Its goal should be to envision something newer, to be a venue for new ideas separate from the current white capitalist, individualistic world that we currently live in. 

I guess you could also say that it is fundamentally incompatible with something like the Credo because of what the Credo does to replicate the current capitalist system. You could also argue that the Credo is the perfect thing to allow for people to, whilst rebelling and envisioning something new, still survive and maintain their own lives whilst participating in this work that otherwise would not be able to make them money traditionally. 

Isaac Dia 

When you say the Credo replicates the capitalist system, I’m not sure I really understand. Do you think you could explain it? 

John Greene

Just in that you’re taking the money and you’re working for it and you’re paying for it. There is the idea that there would be a private sector and the eventual goal, especially for the Credo to work in something like a Black University, you would probably need to get to the level we talked about, having it backed by the Fed or by the US dollar in some way. This wraps it around into being a form of capitalism and a different branch of the capitalist system, even if it would be more of a public money centered thing. It still would be fundamentally connected to the system that the Black University would be trying to disconnect itself from. 

Andrew Douglas 

I’ll just add, we didn’t get into Marx in the class, but Dubois, in his later years, turned Marxist. It depends on how far we take that critique of capital and the value form and the wage relation. I think your intuition, John, is moving in that direction. Even a kind of community controlled or designed and managed currency is still mobilizing commodified labor power and is still operating within the wage relation. 

There are certainly critiques of the capitalist value form that would take issue with that. I think your intuition is kind of moving in a kind of conventional Marxist direction there. 

John Greene 

Yeah, I do agree with that, I think. 

William Saas 

Isaac, are you satisfied by John’s answer there? 

Isaac Dia 

Yeah, I understand the answer. I don’t think I agree with his outcome, but I definitely get where he’s coming from. 

William Saas 

On what grounds do you disagree? 

Isaac Dia 

I can see how, if the Credo were to continue in a traditional sense, we could end up with the same wage exploitation and capital relations that exist now, but  since we’re using it in the Black University and the Black University is here for radical change, this gives us the opportunity to implement real change. 

I think, if the Credo is actually to be used, we don’t have to tie it to the US dollar. That’s a way people get stuck; we don’t have to do the conventional thing anymore. We can branch out. If we really want to dismantle the system that’s going on, why would we then take our dollars to reintroduce them back to the US dollar, when we can use the Credo as its own form of currency? 

We can get people to actually use that rather than US dollars. That’s just the way I was thinking about it. So that’s the only reason I disagree. 

John Greene 

That’s an issue that rears its head over and over again. To what degree should you be participating in the system to work against the system? Working within the system can often make it easier for you to sustain yourself and cast a broader net in whatever movement you’re building. 

However, often you can end up being corrupted by the system and replicating the system versus attempting to do your own thing, which requires much more sacrifice. It will likely mean a lot less people will be involved in your movement – initially, at least – but can maintain some sort of purity, but what does that even mean if you don’t get anything done right? 

Isaac Dia 

Yeah. It sounds like we’re on the same page. 

Bruce Malveaux 

My question would be, how would you get people to use the Credo as a US dollar? What would the Credo be used for that the US dollar couldn’t be used for? 

Isaac Dia 

That’s always the toughest question. Getting people to use the Credo is something I talked about during the panel. If I gave you a dollar and if I gave you a Credo and I said, “hey, for the Credo, you have much more power in how you can spend it and how it’s invested,” I think more people would take that option over me just giving them a regular US dollar. If you were to really educate people on the power that they can have with the new money that we want to introduce into the world, I think they would be a little more accepting of the new dollar, the new Credo, rather than a traditional US dollar where they really don’t have much of a say in how it’s spent, how it’s used, or the value of it. If you tell somebody, “You can determine the value of the Credo,” like, let’s say one day you want to make one Credo worth five Credos instead of one Credo. Then, I think people will be down for an idea like that, when you can tell them, “You can get money for research with the Credos,” I think more people will be more willing to use it once they can understand the power that they can now hold from a more democratized currency. I think that’s how you get more people to use it. 

Bruce Malveaux 

Who will take the loss? 

Isaac Dia 

The currency issuer.  Morehouse would take the loss if we were using the Black University as an example. 

Andrew Douglas 

I think what you’re speaking about, Isaac, is the power of monetary agency. Currently, as we’re sort of taught to think about how we use the US dollar, we don’t have a sense that we have any agency in its design, in its management, in its issuance. What we’re thinking about here is bringing a smaller local community together in a much more democratic way to exercise some agency over how that currency is issued, against what it’s issued, what kind of labor we want to try to mobilize, what sorts of things we want to invest in. Bruce, to your point, I think part of the idea behind this, anyway, is to get beyond some of the strictures of zero sum thinking, so that our instinct isn’t always to think about who’s going to take the loss, but to think about what we can do for one another through relationships of reciprocity, through relationships of give and take, democratizing those relationships in ways that are more mutually self-satisfying to participants in the process. I get where you go with that question of loss. We had some serious conversations in the classroom about how an institution, like a Morehouse, could afford to experiment with this complimentary currency given the fact that the institution and its business model and its legal status is still, by and large, beholden to the orthodoxy of the US dollar. 

William Saas 

This is great. Isaac in the panel, you very optimistically said the biggest benefit of the Credo project is the education that we can get from it. “We” being the students in the class. I think more broadly we’ve been talking about anyone who participates in such a project. You also kind of get a little bit more pointed and specific and suggest that the Credo assignment would be “fantastic,” your words, for the economics department. I want to suggest that, as an audience member, I found that to be intriguing for a couple of reasons. I think that would be pretty uncommon for an economics department. As you know, no doubt, from the kind of survey of neoclassical orthodoxy and mainstream economics that you would have gotten in your class, that many of them have no place for money in their syllabus. 

In fact, money is kind of thought to be this thing that’s not that interesting. Why would they do it? I’m holding out that maybe the Morehouse economics department would be interested, but if you could expand on that comment, why would it be particularly good for economics departments to do it? Why might they be particularly receptive to an assignment related to developing and using a classroom currency? 

Isaac Dia 

My thinking behind why an economics department would really love a Credo was – this gets back to my main point – the education that the Credo can provide is almost unlimited. I’ve had to take macro and microeconomics as a course requirement for Morehouse. 

When you’re learning about those concepts, kind of like how we do in political science, money is treated as a given. They just assume that this is how money works, this is what it is used for. We’re just going to show you the math behind it. 

When I think about introducing the Credo, the student’s brain would explode and they’d be like, “oh, my goodness.” I, as an economist, now that I know there’s this thing called the finance franchise. The Fed uses interest rates and unemployment to regulate how much money is in the economy and the way that it’s used. The banks are issued money by them and the banks can create money on their own. This will show them that me, as an individual, will have a say in how money is used. Now I can take my knowledge, and I can go to a company like Goldman Sachs. I can even go to the government. We can have people who understand what money can do for them, and they can go into the system, like in government and the federal system, maybe they can even go to – if they really want to help take down the “evil capitalist,” quote unquote, they can go to like a Blackrock or Goldman Sachs and start applying the knowledge to help improve their communities. 

William Saas 

And you got the email addresses of Blackrock and Wells Fargo because the email you every day. 

Isaac Dia 

Oh yeah. Yeah. 

John Greene 

That kind of plays into the whole question of, “what is the goal of current education in economics?” Are they just educated to reproduce the current system? Would they be receptive to new ideas, like the Credo, that MMT are attempting to put onto the table? 

The idea of monetary silencing, the idea that economics and politics have been brought to us as separate entities for so long and that one of the primary goals of MMT is to bring them back together again. To end this monetary silencing, to show that politics and economics are one in the same in many ways. 

I think that would certainly be very interesting. I just don’t know if that is ever going to be the purpose of current economics as we know it.  

Andrew Douglas

If I could just jump in here, my econ colleagues are wonderful, I love them to death. There’s only a handful of them. We’re a tiny college, right? I don’t think any of them really teach money regularly or certainly don’t specialize in monetary policy. I think that means, interestingly, there’s a lot of potential there. I don’t know that there’s going to be any kind of principled or committed pushback, necessarily. Part of what I’m interested in as a political scientist is thinking about money as a creature of law and politics and wrestling money away from economics as a discipline to some extent and anchoring it in political science as a discipline. 

Realizing that all of these things are interdisciplinary. Money is an enormously and naturally interdependent and interdisciplinary sort of thing. The founder of our department here at Morehouse, Robert Brisbane, initiated political science instruction back in 1948. We have a thing called the Brisbane Institute that’s been moribund for a number of years. 

I want to try to revitalize it and put the Credo project at the center. The purpose of that institute was to provide a kind of home for public facing, publicly engaged political science teaching and learning. It seems to me that the Credo project is an ideal project to relaunch that institute, tapping into some of the more aspirational dimensions of our mission: past, present and future. 

William Saas 

That’s incredibly exciting to hear. I didn’t know that. Did you talk about that in class, or is that that fresh? 

John Greene 

We talked about it a bit. 

William Saas 

Awesome. We have the Credo at Morehouse. Morehouse and its relation to the West End. What about Atlanta? Where does the Credo come in in the municipal city context of where you all live? 

Andrew Douglas 

This is something we talked about a bit in class, thinking about creating the demand for the currency as we scale it from a campus currency to potentially a community currency, and potentially to be something that could be used to pay staff, faculty, and students in wages. We’ve talked about appealing to the city of Atlanta to allow Credos to be used for city tax purposes, and appealing to the city to demonstrate its commitment to Morehouse, Spelman, Clark, and all the schools of the Atlanta University Center. They have long treasured these universities as these core Atlanta institutions. This would be a great way for the city to demonstrate its commitment to these institutions by agreeing to accept institutionally issued currency for city tax purposes. 

Of course, that would go a long way toward creating a demand such that if people could use the Credo to pay their city taxes or at least a portion of it, they would be more willing to accept Credos as a portion of their wages. This is something we’ve talked about. I know, again, Benjamin Wilson, has been on Money on the Left talking about trying to experiment with this in Ithaca, and other places up in New York, but coming back to the point we mentioned earlier about a student driven bottom-up approach to this, nobody is more persuasive than the students themselves. If they approach the city council, the mayor’s office, the city reps with a proposal like this, I think it would be very hard for elected officials in the city of Atlanta to just shoot that down.  

William Saas 

We got some ambassadors for it on this call. That’s tremendously exciting to hear about as a prospect combined with the Brisbane Institute. It sounds like an amazing one-two-punch. We’ll have to have you back when that starts to roll out. 

In the meantime, by way of closing, I know that Andrew has been at this for a couple of years, at least a few years, talking about public money in your classes. I’m interested in hearing about whether and how John, Isaac and Elijah have had occasion since taking the course to teach someone else about public money, to walk them through public money, MMT, and constitutional theory. What’s that been like? 

Elijah Qualls 

I have two different instances. When I was leaving Morehouse, I was on my way back to Ohio and my dad was driving me. It’s about an eight-hour drive. We were just kind of sitting and talking and I think my dad may end up listening to this podcast later on. 

He’ll be the first one to tell you he’s very conservatively minded. A lot of his ideals go towards the right. When being presented with something like this, his immediate responses were to provide push back and ask questions transparently like, “How realistic do you think this is? 

Do you really think this would actually work? Why would people want to buy into it?” Quite frankly, he was asking the same questions that our class was asking at the beginning of this semester. This is hard, especially coming from the public money lens, right? It’s not necessarily taking your concept of economics and turning it on its head, but it is significantly contradicting a lot of the concepts that we had already understood. 

It was interesting to speak with him about it. In the end, he still didn’t buy into it, but I did not expect him to, of course. That was one instance. Also, talking to the student body at the workshop that we had. I don’t know if you had seen it, but during lunch there were a couple students who had come to my table, and I was explaining it to them. 

It is a tough thing, in my first few interactions with it coming from Dr. Douglass, I still was struggling to buy into this whole notion, especially with MMT. I’m like, “what are you talking about, our taxes don’t actually go towards anything?” It’s a difficult thing because you’re socialized your entire life to understand that the roads you drive on, the freeways you take, and all the public entities that you enjoy are funded effectively by you. 

If I understand MMT correctly, it takes that notion and retorts, “what your taxes serve to do is legitimize the US dollar and the public good that you enjoy could have been funded whether you paid taxes or not, in theory.” Right. I will say, even to those who are listening to this podcast now and they’re like, “this seems a little far fetched,” that’s a normal response. That’s how I responded. But it’s important to explore and leave no question unanswered. Ask all the questions you may have. When you do that, you begin to see the legitimacy behind the modern monetary theory and behind the public money concept. I think talking to the students and some family members about this has helped me gain a better understanding of the theory and see where it can apply and then what we can do with it, particularly, of course, looking at the “uni” project and the Credo. 

John Greene 

I have also explained it to my parents. I also have one friend who’s a super ultra mega liberal, and I’d be going back and forth with him and trying to turn him into a comrade. It never really goes well. I’ll have him on the ropes and then he’ll come back the next day, having refortified himself. One of the times we were talking, I was just like, “yeah, you know, the government prints money and taxpayer money is a myth” and all this MMT stuff. 

I tried to take him through the whole thing and then eventually loop that back around to get him to agree and it didn’t work, but I think he was buying some of the MMT stuff at least. 

Isaac Dia 

Yeah. I’m a little luckier than Elijah and John. My parents, like my whole family are pretty tired of capitalism already. When I had told them, “There might be an alternative,” they’re just like, “hey, sign me up for it. You don’t even have to tell me. Just sign me up.” 

I’ve been pretty lucky. I think the biggest challenge has been trying to incorporate a complementary currency in real life. I do stuff on the side. I have my own little organization in things I do. As a way to practice and see if this can work, I’ve tried to implement my own currency or where I’m not too focused on the dollar, exactly. If I need something, is there a way I can get it without having to exactly pay for it? I know it sounds like I’m stealing, but I promise I’m not. I just try and find an alternative to using the US dollar as much, and that’s been like a huge challenge for me. When you approach somebody and need camera equipment, I’m like, “hey, I know I need all this equipment from you. I don’t have money, but I can provide something else.” Trying to explain that to people and show them how it can be beneficial to them has been a challenge, but it’s something I’ve been working on in practice. 

William Saas 

What’s funny is that there are multiple ways to get things. Paying for them, straight-out, in US dollars is the easiest way. There’s a hierarchy here. You can also use a credit card. I’m not saying do that either. I’m saying that – and it came up in the panel and across the panels – there are alternative currencies that people use all the time to pay for things like airline miles, like credit card company points. 

Well, I’ve certainly learned a lot, both through our conversation today and from your panel discussion. I want to thank each of you so much for your time today and for all of your deep and meaningful thinking about this very important and central question of monetary agency and of monetary design in our current moment of democratic turmoil. 

Even if we weren’t where we are today, it would still be critically important for reasons that I think you spell out in your work. Thank you so much for joining us at Money on the Left. 

John Greene

Thanks for your questions. It was a fun conversation. 

Isaac Dia 

Yeah. Thank you for having this. I enjoyed it.

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

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Women in the Federal Arts Project with Lauren Arrington

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.

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

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Scott Ferguson

Lauren Arrington, welcome to Money on the Left.

Lauren Arrington

Thanks. I’m so glad to be here with you.

Scott Ferguson

I am so happy to have you here with me. We’ve invited you on the show this month to talk to us about a book that you’ve just finished writing and is in production and is not out yet. It doesn’t even have a title yet, although you’ve told me you’re floating some ideas. It is about women artists, diverse women artists, who worked and contested, and variously participated in the shaping of the New Deal arts programs.

Before we get into our discussion about your new book, I want to invite you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself; your professional background, what discipline you’re in, the kind of research you’ve done up until this moment, before we turn to this particular book project.

Lauren Arrington

Sure.  I’m a Professor of English at the University of South Florida. I grew up in Florida and came back about two years ago after spending most of my career in the UK, and most recently in Ireland. I did my doctorate at Oxford University and then just ended up staying in the UK by various good fortunes.

My doctoral research — I only belatedly realized — kind of set me on the course of the common thread that runs through all of my books. I was working on the question of government funding of the Irish National Theater and the impact that that funding had on the theater’s productions. I started out my career as a literary scholar, focusing mostly on Irish literature and then British literature.

The big kind of monolith in Irish literary history was that there was no censorship of the theater in Ireland, that it was a free theater, unlike the theaters in Britain, which had censorship coming from the Lord Chamberlain’s office. But that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, because if you’re taking state money, particularly from a government like the early Irish one that has a really strong ideological program, surely, they’re going to want some measure of compliance in the kind of art you’re producing. Can there really be free art when you’re taking government money?

I investigated that question and was able to turn up some new archival sources and show that actually there were private compromises and even instances of self-censorship from some really big players like W. B. Yates, who was a director of the theater. He is best known as a poet and was also a playwright. That rewrote the question of how state funding and the arts worked in the early Irish state. After that, my second book was about an Irish socialist republican called Constance Markievicz. Her last name was a Polish name because she married a Polish artist that she met in Paris where they were both in art school. Her movements in art circles in Paris and London and Dublin are what mobilized her to the politics which she arrived at socialist republicanism.

I was really interested in, after writing that biography, staying in the field of life writing. My most recent book was a group biography of poets including Yates and Ezra Pound, who were living in Rapallo, Italy, during the early years of Mussolini’s regime. I was thinking about the question of fascist aesthetics, how fascism in Italy took a very aesthetic impetus.

It was very different to German National Socialism and the way that certain ideas, particularly ideas about the past, were recovered and represented in art and in Mussolini’s Italy. I was thinking about the way that those poets were influenced by those aesthetics that were coming through the regime and being, in many ways, interpreted by Ezra Pound.

Most people think Ezra Pound is fascist. He’s arrested by the Americans and has a famous trial in the US. He goes back to Italy as soon as he can, gives a fascist salute, famously, from the boat. But most people don’t think about the poets who are visiting him and in his circle as having any kind of fascist orientation.

I was thinking particularly about the ways that those aesthetics were encoded in poetry that we might not really see. That was my book, The Poets of Rapallo, which came out in 2021 during the pandemic. The pandemic is actually where I started thinking about this book that I’ve just finished, which is going to come out with St. Martin’s Press, which is a division of Macmillan, in late 2026.

Scott Ferguson

The through line seems fairly clear. You’ve been thinking about how state finance variously inflects aesthetic production and social life. It would seem very natural that you would turn to similar questions during the New Deal in the United States. But maybe you can talk to us a little bit more about what motivated you to make this particular turn.

I kept wondering, were you thinking about this during the end of Trump 1.0 or did that come after?

Lauren Arrington

It was actually after the project began — which is kind of strange now to think about, given what’s happening on or in our federal landscape — but the project actually began in a moment of optimism.

Scott Ferguson

That’s what I was wondering.

Lauren Arrington

Yeah. We were living in Ireland, where I had taken a job at a university. It was lockdown, which meant something very different in most of Europe to what it meant in the US, particularly in Florida, where there were very few pandemic restrictions. In Ireland, it was about two years of restriction on social life.

During the depths of the pandemic, we couldn’t leave our apartment except to go grocery shopping once a week, and everyone was permitted to take one walk a day, but you couldn’t go further than a mile from your house. It was a very dark psychic landscape that most of us were living in.

There was, of course, also a very real economic impact and the Irish state saw this.  Politicians started thinking about the concept of universal basic income, which of course has been circulating for a while. In particular, they were thinking about how a version of that could be applied to visual artists, performing artists and writers in Ireland because there had been an immediate and detrimental effect on performing arts and visual arts, particularly with exhibitions closed.

There were no gigs, no concerts, no pubs even to play in. Book buying went up slightly, but then new books often went under the radar because there couldn’t be the kinds of launches that bring the media attention that, particularly, emerging authors need. The Irish state began a pilot scheme for artists and writers to sort of fund a base level of income in a way to compensate for those losses of the pandemic.

I was seeing all this unfold, and I was thinking about the New Deal. Why is nobody talking about FDR?  This is the precedent here. I started reading and doing research on the New Deal from my laptop because there were no libraries open.

Everything that I kept reading was turning up the very same story, dry history, post office art, rural programs, which were important, but seemed to be the only story. We’re all hearing about the Farm Services Administration. We all know Dorothea Lange’s photographs, the Dust Bowl migration murals that are kind of glorifying this American colonialist expansion.

I started going deeper and deeper. I was like, this can’t be all there was. Then I started reading about the community arts projects and community art centers. I started finding names that I didn’t recognize and digging as far as I could into various archives wondering, “who are these people?”

There were a lot of women, particularly women of color, communist women, Native American women, who had been written out of the historical record.  I thought I really wanted to tell their stories and not just the story of the arts projects again. I didn’t want to write another doorstop book about the New Deal.

I wanted to write a book that was focused on the lives of these women and how, in the midst of the depression, they found ways to live as artists and to keep themselves creatively alive, and the role that the state played in making that kind of creativity possible.

Scott Ferguson

Maybe we can pull back to the beginning of the New Deal and the very idea about financing the arts. How did that come about? How was it shaped at first? How was it variously discriminatory toward women and people of color? And how did some of those broader contestations play out?

Lauren Arrington

Right. We all talk about FDR as the architect of the New Deal, but actually the architect was probably Harry Hopkins. He was who did the real idea generation, we might say, and as for this aspect of Roosevelt’s presidency, he was his right hand and top adviser. Hopkins had this vision for this kind of national structure.

He invited Holger Cahill, who was involved in the early Museum of Modern Art, to think through this process. Holger Cahill tapped a woman called Audrey McMahon, who had started a pilot project to help fund artists in New York, where there was, of course, a high concentration of artists for various reasons.

For one, the nature of New York as an arts and cultural hub, also, the Great Migration, which brought new energy into the city and new networks and new kinds of artistic production. Audrey McMahon had piloted this program for artists in New York. Holger Cahill knew about it, so he invited Audrey McMahon to come to DC and talk about the idea.

Out of those conversations emerged the Federal Arts Project. McMahon remained a key player because she was appointed as director of the Federal Arts Project for New York which means that she has probably the most powerful position in all of the federal arts project because of the volume of artists that she’s dealing with.

She’s also a woman torn between bureaucracy and passion. She has a real passion for art. She is involved in the art education at NYU, which is where she starts this pilot project. But she also is an administrator and is constrained by the bureaucracy with which she is presented. She always has to make her budget.

In doing that, she’s forced to make some pretty harsh cuts at key points to the federal arts projects that are handed down to her. The artists don’t see that. They don’t understand how she’s squeezed between an idea that actually originated with her, although she doesn’t really get the credit for it and the pressures that she’s under that are coming from DC.

The Artists Union actually pickets her offices, which comes together in order to defend the right of artists to have employment and fair working conditions, and they advocate for those rights under the New Deal. They come to picket McMahon’s office. She doesn’t know what to do. She gets angry, I think, because she doesn’t feel seen or understood.

Because she’s an administrator, she’s automatically vilified as, like, a department chair.

As soon as you become an administrator, you’re like a baddie, right? No matter your intentions. She doesn’t feel seen. She gets really angry at the artists, at their inability to understand the economic constraints.  That the budget isn’t bottomless, right? There are only so many funds. But she does make some pretty big missteps.

One of those is understanding the way that racism is inherent to the structures of the New Deal. Despite what they’re saying in DC, it has a racist structure of privilege encoded in it, and she cuts black jobs first. She participates in that. Black artists then form their own union, which is open to anybody, but it’s primarily black artists, in order to lobby for that reinstatement.

And they actually have some measure of success and get jobs reinstated early on in the project. Soon those are eventually cut as the project is pruned and ultimately decimated as we head into the Second World War.

Scott Ferguson

I think for a lot of people, we imagine that when we think about the New Deal arts projects, we think there were some photographs documenting poverty in the Dust Bowl. There was a lot of easel painting of the so-called “American scene,” which were potentially, not only ideologically conservative, but also aesthetically conservative; not pushing beyond perspectival conventions that had been around since the Renaissance.

 I think we also have a sense of a certain kind of paternalism, which of course was there and so were the American scene paintings. In this kind of paternalism, or “Well, we’re just funding some art, and everybody does what they’re supposed to do and then it’s over.”

Whereas what your project shows us is that it was improvised and contested and messy and involved all kinds of creative triumphs, as well as horrible, horrible decisions and problematic organizations. I think one of the many impulses in this book that I really picked up on, and I actually regret framing this book at the outset as being just about artists,

is thinking about people in leadership roles, whether they are literally artists who are taking up leadership roles or are just variously taking up these organizing roles, because without that work there would be no artwork. I’m so fascinated by potentially even thinking about the aesthetic dimensions of what it is to organize, to socially reproduce.

What does it mean to have a school that teaches children how to sculpt, how to do printmaking, how to write poetry or whatever it’s going to be? And I love that you’ve introduced this right away. You can’t separate it. This isn’t just a story of some solo artists. It’s a story of a whole improvised apparatus of administrators and artists, and sometimes people cross roles.

Lauren Arrington

Absolutely. That was one of the things that made this book so hard to write because, like I said, I didn’t want to write a doorstop history of the New Deal arts projects. The challenge was how to convey that sense of collectivity among a handful of artists whose careers I wanted to highlight, and I began thinking about it as a group biography.

Folks were asking me early on, “How is this a group biography?” “Did they know each other?” You know what I mean? Because it wasn’t like the Bloomsbury Group where there were geographical constraints and a common artistic purpose, the sense of starting something new together and a lot of direct collaboration between these artists.

When you’re an artist, most artists are kind of working on their own. I allowed that to get in my head a little bit. Then I realized that actually it is a group biography because the structures create the group.

Scott Ferguson

And the groups create the structures. One of the moments that I love is when you’re talking about as the Harlem Renaissance is dying down and the depression is kicking up, Harlem starts to kind of create these new spaces that were actually, in certain ways, more based on group solidarity and were less beholden to white rich patrons who very much put their stamp on what would count as representations of black life.

Lauren Arrington

Absolutely. There was a real desire in Harlem, particularly, to get away from that legacy of the Harlem Renaissance as being the product of white patronage and a desire to advocate for black artists to be in administrative roles. Charles Alston is an important collaborator with Augusta Savage in that regard. He has a group that is more like a group called the 306 group, and they meet in what was an old horse stable in Harlem and have political conversations and conversations about art and conversations about the economy and conversations about what power means now.

That’s where we see this push against McMahon, and against the Federal Arts Project to instate more black administrators who have better salaries and better opportunities and to eliminate that kind of glass ceiling. But we know that there are tensions there, too, between folks who rose to prominence under the old order and folks coming up with a new way of doing things.

Even in Harlem, we’re seeing those kinds of tensions between the old guard of the Harlem Renaissance and new visionaries like Augusta Savage. Several of these artists, like Pablita Velarde is another one of those artists who we could talk about, who has to face challenges from within her own local network as well as challenges from the government apparatus in order to do the work that she feels compelled to do.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah, let’s switch to her because that pushes us across the country, right? They’re in a very different scene with a different set of political legacies, constraints, entanglements, and horrors.

Lauren Arrington

Yeah, absolutely. Pablita Velarde was a pueblo woman who grew up just north of Santa Fe. She, like Augusta Savage, shows talent as an artist from a really young age, but is constrained by social convention in terms of the role that she should play. Women in Pueblo culture were not artists, they worked with textiles. They should not be visual artists. Pablita Velarde is sent to a boarding school in Santa Fe where she, because of an early iteration of the federal arts project, is introduced to mural painting. Through that she is mentored as an artist and through those connections that she makes at her school, she is tapped by the National Park Service to make art for Bandelier National Monument, which is a big national monument under the National Park Service. It is northwest of Santa Fe and just south of Los Alamos, where the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, had started, making this national park, and they’re now building a visitor’s center, and they realized they need some art for the exhibits. So, she is sideways funded through the Federal Arts Project to make that art there. But again, she’s faced with constraints about what the Park Service believes Pueblo culture should look like and her own direct experience of growing up under Tewa culture in particular.

Scott Ferguson

You suggest in the book that a lot of the dictates from the white administrators is based on relatively old and problematic, ethnographic research. There’s also the interesting twist that there are certain rituals or aspects of Native American life that perhaps shouldn’t be depicted in public, if I’m remembering correctly. There’s all kinds of constraints and challenges that she’s negotiating.

Lauren Arrington

That’s right, that’s right. Even within Pueblo culture, which is very much a Spanish invention, from one way of colonization of what is now the American Southwest, there are different cultures. Pablita Velarde grew up on Santa Clara Pueblo, which is a settlement of a group of people descended from the Tewa people who were absorbed into a more hegemonic kind of Pueblo culture.

There were particular dances that were not supposed to be witnessed by women. There are other dances that should only be witnessed by members of that culture and not subject to tourists. Pablita Velarde is torn between portraying what she sees as these beautiful, celebratory parts of her culture and the cultural diktat that those are private moments.

The question over whether she should portray that actually comes when she’s further along in the Bandelier National Monument project, because early on she’s basically prescribed paintings that have been or gleaned by employees of the National Park Service from reading ethnographic research that doesn’t even relate to her culture. They’re just being absorbed and purported to be like Tewa Pueblo dances, Tewa Pueblo traditions.

They actually belong to completely different cultures altogether. There is just this hegemonic idea of what, quote, “Pueblo culture” is like. She starts to push against that, to add her own levels of detail, and then as she’s given more agency in the project, she starts to develop her own ideas for scenes that she would like to paint for the visitor’s center.

Scott Ferguson

This might be a nice opportunity to plunge into some aesthetic strategies and details. Your book is filled with beautiful readings of various artworks of various styles. Do you want to talk about Velarde’s particular kind of aesthetic strategies with reference to one or more works that you unpack in the book?

Lauren Arrington

Sure. I want to talk a little bit about my visit to the archive where the paintings are held. The paintings are in Tucson at the Western Archeological Conservation Center, which is a division of the National Park Service. It took months and months and months for me to get a visit arranged to the conservation center. 

Scott Ferguson

Why was that? Was that pandemic related or…?

Lauren Arrington

That was staffing related. So again, if we talk about federal resources, when I got there I realized the issue, and some really helpful archivists explained to me that there had been various furloughs. 

Scott Ferguson

Austere staffing.

Lauren Arrington

Exactly, austerity staffing. Meanwhile, their inboxes kept filling up, and so it was only when I picked up the phone right before I was getting ready to head off on my archive trips that I was able to get through.

They were so helpful once I was there. So helpful. But one of the restrictions of the archive is that there were a number of paintings that I could not take pictures of because there had been conversations with the Tribal Council that they should not be reproduced. 

Scott Ferguson

For what reason?

Lauren Arrington

The images depicted should not be witnessed by Anglo people, folks from outside of Pueblo culture. So those ideas that Velarde was working with when she was making the paintings persist with regard to certain paintings. Her paintings are very a flat style of painting, which – in art history – was contested because it was very much imposed in a way as a Santa Fe style of painting drawn from an ethnographic primitivist view of what art from the region historically looked like and a desire, in a way, to perpetuate a linear history of a particular art style. There was an art teacher called Dorothy Dunn, who taught at Santa Fe Indian School, where Velarde was, that schooled the children in this particular style of painting.

When we are thinking about Augusta Savage and the freedom that students had in her studio to experiment with clay, there’s a kind of an inverse situation in Santa Fe Indian School where we have a white art historian teaching “Native American art” to students from the pueblos in the surrounding region who been steeped in that culture for their entire lives.

It’s very prescriptive, this kind of Santa Fe style, but it takes off. It’s very popular. It has a market, and that’s one of the reasons that these artists were encouraged to perpetuate the style as well, because it’s sold to tourists and we see Velarde making an income for herself once she finishes school, by being able to sell this art.

Scott Ferguson

I want to make sure that we talk a little bit about the challenges of this archive, which I can let you explain, but it’s rather slim for political and historical reasons. Maybe talk a little bit about why the archive is so slim and what kinds of challenges that you’ve faced in researching and writing, and how you’ve tried to get around these absences.

Lauren Arrington

Yeah. If I had known this book was going to be so challenging to write, I like to think I would still have written it, but I am not so sure. And let me tell you, my next book is going to be about someone who has left thousands of pages of archives.

Scott Ferguson

Yes.

Lauren Arrington

I am tired from sleuthing. Writing about underrepresented artists, you have those challenges of there not being the funding structures in place, perceptions of value that mean that their archives have been preserved. Sometimes we know that’s because of economic status, and sometimes that is because of structural racism. Sometimes that is because of the politics of the artists themselves, or what parts of their lives that they were not comfortable having preserved.

I’m thinking particularly here about an artist called Lenore Thomas Straus. Lenore Thomas, as she was when she was working on the project, was commissioned to create a series of friezes for the first planned town in the United States called Green Belt, in Maryland, just outside of D.C. 

Scott Ferguson

A proto suburb.

Lauren Arrington

Exactly. You can read about this in the book, but basically the whole project of these green belt towns were segregationist and Lenore Thomas fought against that. The kinds of scenes that she wanted to depict in those friezes were anti-lynching and anti-lynching sculpture that is censored.

But in relation to her archive, what I’m thinking about is that Lenore Thomas was queer. She had a lover, Sally Ringe, who she lived with in Virginia and then in Maryland. She was also a communist. She had two huge black marks against her in terms of the McCarthy era. Lenore Thomas’s archive, which exists in the Greenbelt Museum, curated by a wonderful archivist, Megan Sharon Young, consists of mostly photographs. Not letters and not personal papers. Just photographs of her and photographs that she took of her work in Greenbelt.

When I was writing about Lenore, I wrote mostly from photographs in order to understand things like her perception of the world around her. I could contrast the photographs that she took with official photographs from the New Deal agencies in order to understand how she was contesting those racist hierarchies of power as they played out on the Greenbelt site.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about that? One of my many favorite parts of this book is when you’re contrasting. What’s the name of the photographer who uses angles in a very racialized way? You read her photography and argue how she is pushing against that. Can you spell out these details that are still a little fuzzy for me to remember.

Lauren Arrington

Yeah, sure. Carl Mydans is one of the main photographers on the Greenbelt site. He’s probably who you’re thinking about, but in the whole photographic section of the resettlement administration, as it was called, and the farm security administration where Dorothea Lange works, they were taught a particular photographic aesthetic that played to what you were talking about earlier in terms of this white, paternalistic, colonialist American dream.

Firstly, Greenbelt was not a segregated work site. There were white workers and black workers on the site, but they were captured doing very different kinds of labor and photographed in prejudicial ways. Mydans photographed these white workers often from a low angle. You see them against these like clear blue skies; you can intuit it’s blue even though they’re black and white. There are clear skies, and these almost three-quarter profile portraits presenting this heroic portrait of upstanding American laborers. Right? The black workers are photographed from a high angle. They’re photographed by Mydans, and he’s obviously standing on something, a ladder or a truck or something.

He’s pointing the camera down and so you see the tops of their heads. You literally see them against the dirt. It is the opposite image for these black workers. That is deliberate, as we know from Dorothea Lange’s recollections of how she was taught to take photographs, how she was told to take photographs, which she pushed against. We also see, when you contrast with Lenore Thomas’s photographs, which are very much on the level in every way, you see how those politics are conveyed in those kinds of images.

I spent time thinking about the photographs and thinking about how Lenore Thomas shows us what she thinks and what she believes when she can’t tell us in her archive.

Scott Ferguson

Speaking of form, I am curious, I’ve never written a trade press book. For our listeners.  ,we’re academics, we usually write academic monographs in a scholarly rhetoric or frame. Different fields and subfields have their own customs and standards, but we all write fairly similarly in this mode. A trade press book, however, is for a popular readership.

That mode of address is supposed to not be scholarly, and it’s supposed to be a little looser and warmer and not everything is footnoted. I’m wondering, what was it like composing in that more popular mode? What kind of challenges did you face?

Did you learn lessons about your own voice and its range?

Lauren Arrington

Well, I guess the first thing I’d want to respond to is what I think is a misconception that trade writing is not supposed to be scholarly, but I think that that informs some conceptions about scholarly writing and what it is supposed to be like. I respect writers, it is a hard thing to sit down and write.

No matter what genre you’re writing, props for doing it. The kind of writing that I’m interested in is writing that is enjoyable to read and writing that strives to convey quite complex ideas like we’ve been talking about in terms of the photographic aesthetics, in a way that appeals to readers, in a way that also teaches. It teaches in such a way that we’re communicating as peers to readers, who are picking up books and opening them and wanting to learn. Not feeling like there needs to be a distance in the diction or the structure between the writer and the reader. Rather, we’re meeting on the page in a way that I can bring my expertise and what I’ve learned and communicate it to a reader who maybe never even heard about the subject but is interested, using language that’s easy to understand, that takes its time in order to explain big concepts if we need to talk about big concepts, we’ll usually dwell on that rather than just throwing out a term and expecting immediate recognition and then moving on or digging right down into the deep stuff, but instead, actually slowing down and thinking about what things mean. That’s one of the most enjoyable things to me about the process of writing this book has been learning to slow down and sit with an image,, a painting, a photograph, a person, a place, and write about it in a way that brings it to life to someone who’s never seen it or been there or shows something new about it to someone to whom it’s quite familiar. I was lucky to have benefited from The Robert and Ina Caro Award from Biographers International Organization to support research for this project. Bob Caro is the hero, really, of this kind of writing. He’s the genius behind this kind of biographical writing.

He talks about when he was writing his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, of going to live in the Hill Country of Texas so that he could understand the landscape and the people and the frames of meaning that Johnson grew up under. I could not go and live in Santa Clara Pueblo for a few years with my family in order to write this book, but I could travel there. I stood in the landscape, right?

I thought about what it means and my whole frames of meaning changed as a result. Writing this book changed me because I thought, when I was sitting in Dublin digging up names of artists I thought were interesting, that nobody had heard of them. Pablita Velarde was one of them and then I got to New Mexico and she was everywhere.

People refer to her by her first name, like, “oh, Pablita,” and her paintings are in the state house and she’s on license plates, she’s everywhere. It’s like, well, how ignorant were we to presume that Pablita Velarde was an unknown? I think that writing a trade book also requires you to think about other experiences and lives removed from your own and what amazing knowledge readers will also be bringing to the subject.

Scott Ferguson

That’s lovely. I want to ask questions about lessons. Lessons for today. Lessons for tomorrow. I will say that we at Money on the Left have been long advocates for a federal job guarantee that would be financed by the federal government and provide living quality work for everyone and anyone who wants it and can contribute to their community and not be threatened by unemployment.

It would include all kinds of benefits along the way. We are certainly advocates for the Green New Deal, which is not on everyone’s lips right now in the middle of an authoritarian takeover of our federal government, but we remain advocates for it. We hold out the dream and the possibility for a publicly led employment society that is financing interesting, wonderful, creative and inspiring labor that would include aesthetic labor. Usually, at least in the context of the history of the United States, the New Deal is, for better and for worse, the model. It’s the template that you have to reckon with.

It’s the precedent that you have to look to and decide what’s worth saving and what’s worth recuperating. I find your book to be really inspiring for that problem, for that project, because it shakes up our frames of reference, to use the term that you’ve been using. It makes the challenge of going back to the New Deal feel fresh again, rather than kind of stale or, just dismissing it as if it was all just white supremacy and paternalism. Or the opposite: that it was socialism in America and we had finally done it. I don’t know who actually believes that. I’m wondering, what are some of the lessons that you’ve taken away or that were maybe tacit or implicit for what this means for a future of politics, of state financing, of the arts?

I will say that, one of the threads that I picked up on, that we talk a lot about when we talk about the politics of the job guarantee, is the way that publicly financed employment, especially guaranteed employment, which we know these projects were not guaranteed at all, but especially guaranteed employment can potentially free up laborers, including artists, to not only experiment, but to extract themselves from abusive situations, whether that’s an abusive partner or it’s a controlling, white patronage class.

That’s one thing, for example, that comes to mind that feels like an important lesson from the stories that you’re telling. What else do we take forward from this past?

Lauren Arrington

I think one of the things that we have to understand, which is very difficult for folks who are steeped in the American psyche, is that these things take time. It takes time to build sustainable infrastructures. That was one of the problems with the New Deal arts projects, that there was this massive expansion and then a contraction and the resentment that came with that, and then a little bit of expansion and then the whole thing was scrubbed, basically, because of a need to invest in the war economy and to pivot the arts to the war economy.

I think one of the issues that we have in the US is the four-year — hopefully, what is still a four-year presidential term — and this false binary of the political landscape being either Republican or Democrat.

The four-year turnover means that when do you have time to actually build a program.  FDR had too many terms, one would argue, and exercised too much presidential power. This is really the problem and not a solution. It’s not really a lesson, Scott. It’s a question of, how do you build a sustainable infrastructure if you need to have a turnover in leadership?

The answer is that you require agencies that are not politicized in order to make these programs happen. That was also one of the issues with the New Deal is that all these agencies were tied so closely to FDR’s presidency that they couldn’t exist without him and Hopkins at the helm.

That leads me to think about the NEH, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and lessons that we can take there about the need to protect these independent agencies from the executive office and the need to preserve them, constitutionally or otherwise, in order to have a solid platform for the long term projects.

I was reading back and as I was finishing the book, the cuts started coming. I was trying to finish it at the end of 2024, and it was a slog. Then the election happened, and the executive orders started coming down, and it just really mobilized me to finish this book quickly because it felt like it had a new object.

There was a new context that I was responding to, and it just so happened to line up, unfortunately. But anyway, what I wanted to say is that the NEH was encouraged by scientists who were depressed and frightened by the possibility of nuclear apocalypse and the belief that in a nuclear age, with the rapidity of scientific evolution and the threat that that brought to our existence. The humanities were crucial to preserving our morality, our ethics, our sense of why it matters, what our value is. I am skeptical about whether 50 years later from the congressional testimony of nuclear scientists advocating for the National Endowment of the Humanities, if scientists and humanists can still find commonality because we have become so siloed and so intent on our own individual projects and our disciplines, but also, as individuals we’ve become so individualistic. Can we see value outside of ourselves that was there at the New Deal?

That was there in the 50s. I have a measure of hope that we can get there again, but it requires us to maybe allow ourselves to experience these apocalyptic moments like we had with the pandemic. A time when suddenly things are stripped back and you realize what matters in your day to day, right?

The people around you, your health, your well-being, your mind, you know? With the constant treadmill of the consumer cycle, the workday, the targets, when do we have time to think about these things? I think there are a few lessons there. One is to take back from 2020 or 2021 and how, a few years ago, our existence was threatened then and the imagination that was required to bring us out of it and how we can recover that and allow that to stay with us. That as soon as we’re comfortable, we don’t go back to business as usual. Maybe we require these outside threats to our humanity in order to prioritize our cultures.

Scott Ferguson

That’s a beautiful way to end our conversation. Thank you so much for coming on Money on the Left and exploring your recent work with us.

Lauren Arrington

I really appreciate it, Scott. Thanks for having me on today.

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Thomas Chaplin (transcription) & Robert Rusch (graphic art)

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