It’s Time for Complementary Currencies

By the Money on the Left Editorial Collective

Introduction

Zohran Mamdani’s landslide win was not just a local upset—it was a turning point. It proved that member-led, volunteer-powered campaigns can defeat political dynasties even under conditions of national authoritarian drift. And now, others are lining up behind him. MN state Sen. Omar Fateh—another Democratic Socialist—won the local Democratic Party’s endorsement for Mayor of Minneapolis against three-term Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey. Kat Abughazaleh, a progressive digital commentator formerly affiliated with Media Matters, is winning major party endorsements for her congressional campaign in Illinois’s 9th District. More campaigns are getting ready. 

But the window is narrow, and the threat is clear. Donald Trump is terrified of an insurgent movement rising out of the cities he cannot control. His plan is to withhold federal funds, punish sanctuary cities, and weaponize austerity against local governments that refuse to comply. He wants mayors and city councils too scared to fund anything beyond police. And the Democratic establishment will go along with nearly all of it. The economic establishment will cheer it on in the name of fiscal moderation and pragmatism.

To meet this moment, we need new tactical registers–new tools for organizing local capacities and coordinating them at scale.

What follows is not a singular proposal. It is a framework for coordinating, scaling and financing the work that so many organizers do for free. A shared practice of issuing and receiving credit in solidarity—between campaigns, between cities, between institutions willing to govern together. We do not need to wait for reactionary statehouses or federal financing to tell us what’s possible. We can build systems of solidarity and accountability that scale without sovereignty.

Mamdani’s campaign did not simply win—it ran a logistical operation, coordinated policy development, and cared for people. Fifty thousand volunteers who didn’t beg for permission got organized.

To understand how we can scale up that infrastructure, we need to first understand the tool: complementary currencies.

What Are Complementary Currencies?

Complementary currencies are locally issued forms of credit that supplement and expand the currencies we think of as “official”. When imagined alongside the dollar rather than in opposition to it, complementary currencies do not merely reveal new possibilities. They help us see the dollar differently, too.

Imagine this: a canvasser in Brooklyn earns credits for a weekend of turnout work. Those credits are then accepted by another chapter to help fund a print run. A local labor union recognizes those credits as dues. A food co-op accepts them for groceries. A pilot municipal grocery store, created by a city council aligned with the movement, honors the credits for fresh produce. A sanctuary city program uses them for transit access. Under pressure from organizers, the local government agrees to accept those credits for partial tax payments, fines, or fees. This isn’t “exchange”; it’s organizing. 

Instead of treating money as a scarce resource to be unlocked from the top down, complementary currencies reveal money to be a flexible and inscribable record of solidarity and coordination. They allow communities and coalitions to express their own priorities, provision their own infrastructures, and deliberate what kinds of labor and care should be receivable across shared space. 

There are many historical precedents for complementary currencies in U.S. history—from colonial-era land bank notes and settler-issued paper money to Depression-era scrip, mutual aid societies, time banks, and local exchange trading systems—each reflecting periods when ordinary people experimented with monetary design in the absence of sufficient national currency or in response to systemic exclusion from formal credit systems. Even Lincoln’s greenbacks and FDR’s war bonds grounded new money issuance in real economic capacities rather than abstract pools of tax dollars. Money on the Left proposals like Blue Bonds and the Uni draw on these traditions to reimagine democratic finance as a practice of coordination, not austerity.

From Command to Coordination

We do not need a movement that controls everything. We need movements that can coordinate across what is already happening, provisioning at scale without turning participation into tactical bottlenecks and zero-sum debates over which “theory of change” is correct. That is already the lesson of the campaigns and organizations that are winning: field ops that trust volunteers to become leaders; member-led organizations that practice deliberative democracy; housing and mutual aid coalitions that prototype new forms of care without waiting for policy permission.

These campaigns are not spontaneous. They are deeply organized. But they are also strategically diverse. What links them is not control or discipline—it is solidarity. We need forms of coordination that let us hold many strategic priorities as valid without collapsing them into a single strategic hierarchy. That is what complementary credit experiments can offer: not a command center or vanguard, but flexible infrastructures of coordination and provision. Built from below, from diverse middles, and even daring city halls that refuse to wait for Albany’s approval.

Money as Credit, Not Scarcity

We are used to thinking of money as something we need to get—from donors, from state budgets, from foundations that never quite agree with our politics. At the heart of a complementary currency strategy is a different understanding of what money is. Money is not a scarce thing to be hoarded or unlocked. Nor is it a capitalist medium of exchange. Money is a flexible infrastructure of recognition, designed through politics. 

Because the truth is, we already can do the things that we supposedly need billionaires and middle class taxpayers to fund. Indeed, we already do extend care, time, labor, risk, translation, food, design, coordination, and protection across every campaign, community org, and institution that we build.

Complementary currencies do not introduce a new kind of value. They enlarge the democratic value systems that already exist—and allow wider scales of recognition and inclusion in the infrastructures we need to live.

In an insurgent democratic politics, no single node of issuance or receivability calls all the shots—but each one takes responsibility to extend trust and good faith as part of a shared infrastructure of democratic provisioning.

Swap Lines as Democratic Pedagogy

The left does not need central discipline from a vanguard of strategists or an idealized mass organization imagined as external to the broader public. We need infrastructures that enact the same solidarity and flexibility we already extend to each other, honoring diverse valuations of what work is important, and agreeing to receive what others provision—even when it comes in unfamiliar forms.

That is the logic of a swap line.

In high finance, a swap line is a mutual agreement to recognize credit across systems without collapsing them into one. Central banks use them to stabilize currencies, but the principle of connecting different currencies to facilitate economic coordination shows up everywhere. It is how bank deposits, paper money, coins, reserve—all forms of money with different institutional histories—come together to make the US dollar feel singular and continuous. What appears as the dollar or imagined as a gold standard has always been an invisible choreography between institutions.

But that invisibility is part of the problem. As Jakob Feinig argues, monetary systems are kept deliberately opaque, a process he calls monetary silencing. The more our systems rely on coordination, the more that coordination is hidden, treated as technical or natural rather than political and participatory.

Complementary currencies make the logic of the swap line public. They give us ways to politicize the agreements we already depend on, to deliberate openly about what kinds of work and care we’re willing to receive—and from whom. They turn financial interoperability into a practice of democratic solidarity.

Monetary Silencing and the Battle for Legibility

This political moment isn’t emerging in a vacuum. For decades, our fiscal and monetary institutions have rehearsed a worldview in which credit is something earned—a borrowing right extended only to the deserving. But “deserving” has never been neutral. Creditworthiness has long stood in for segregation, racism, and exclusion—baked into zoning laws, lending practices, public education funding, and municipal bond markets. Home loans, student debt, and city budgets were more than neutral financial instruments. They rehearsed the ideologies of American racism: who belongs, who can be trusted, who is safe to invest in, and who must be controlled or abandoned?

That regime fractured in 2008. Some responses moved in a hopeful direction: mutual aid networks, debt resistance campaigns, diverse anti-carceral movements from Black Lives Matter to the mainstreaming of abolition and defund, and resurgent interest in public banking and economic democracy. But the collapse also made room for something else. If the 20th century home loan once staged middle-class exceptionalism, Trumpism offered a permission structure for outlaw cruelty. A way to break rules without consequence, to treat others’ suffering as proof of one’s own sovereignty.

But that is not the only story. Mutual aid networks, abolitionist coalitions, and movements like Mamdani’s have rehearsed alternative credit infrastructures—ones grounded not in discipline, but in coordination, care, and lived solidarity. These movements did not necessarily name their practices as monetary, but they began to build the legibilities we need to overcome monetary silence. They have not been able to fully elaborate these unconscious participatory impulses. Still, they have created the conditions to make such impulses visible–and to politicize them.

Complementary credit systems offer a trajectory for elaboration. They do not moralize worthiness. They do not reward obedience. They do not ask who deserves a loan. They rewrite the script, treating credit not as exception, but as infrastructure: a shared capacity to issue and receive trust without hierarchy or purity tests. 

The issue is not whether labor is paid or unpaid—credited or uncredited. Nominally “volunteer” labor builds good faith and trust within a community, but that kind of credit is not usable at a grocery store. What is relevant is where credit is receivable. Today, as campaigns like Mamdani’s promote pilots of municipal grocery stores and other public institutions, we have the opportunity to publicly deliberate receivability itself. We no longer need to maintain the fiction that political labor and public provisioning belong to separate spheres. We can develop new forms of credit—and new institutions that receive them—to bridge the false binary between activism and public works, and to reveal that distinction as something far more messy, lived-in, and democratic than we’ve been taught.

Insurgent campaigns like Mamdani’s are not pausing for Albany’s blessing. They are already rehearsing a creative, coalitional politics—one that provisions capacity across communities, builds trust across organizations, and coordinates across difference. Complementary credit systems do not replace that work. They extend it.

Conclusion: Coordinating What We Already Know How to Do

There is no shortage of capacity on the left. We have organizers, campaigns, coalitions, and institutions already doing the work of governance: feeding people, housing people, translating policy into action, building coalitions across lines of difference. What we lack is the infrastructure to recognize that work as connected.

Complementary credit systems can help us coordinate what we already know how to do. Not by replacing the dollar or disavowing the state, but by recognizing that public trust is not something we must win permission to issue. It is something we are already extending to each other, every time we organize a shift, open our homes, cook a meal, or build a spreadsheet.

This is not a project of exit. It’s a project of refusing to defer. We need not delay unlocking capacity for a future administration. We can name what we are already provisioning—and build systems that make that provisioning visible, receivable, and durable across space and time.

What we’re describing is not a singular plan. It’s a tactical register—one that can help insurgent movements reimagine good government not as control, but as coordination. This is not bureaucracy; it is collective trust. In the face of austerity threats and coercive attacks, we need cities and campaigns willing to issue and receive public credit in solidarity. Not someday, but now.

An insurgent movement of good government connected by local currencies can spread courage and coordination faster than Trump’s tenuous coalition of the fearful and battered ever could.