By Rob Hawkes
Alongside my Money on the Left colleagues Will Beaman and Tyler Suksawat, I recently joined Gus Dunn-Hindle of the Maine People’s Alliance to discuss public money and public banking on the Beacon Podcast. During the conversation, I cited our podcast’s regular opening announcement that Money on the Left is ‘a monthly interdisciplinary podcast that reclaims money’s public powers for imaginative intersectional politics.’ The imaginative part of this is especially important – when we free up our imaginations to think about monetary design in new ways, we can begin to move beyond the austerity mindset that condemns millions to poverty, even in the wealthy societies of the global north, while treating extreme inequality and social exclusion as natural and inevitable facts of life.
Many of today’s most intractable challenges, from crumbling public services to the accelerating ecological crisis, look very different when we cease to view them through the orthodox prism of monetary scarcity, privation, and limitation. For the former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas, ‘the failure to rise to the challenge of the nature and climate emergencies’ is reflective of an ‘imagination deficit’ and ‘a failure to imagine that a better world is possible’. Indeed, as Cory Doctorow points out, the ‘true meaning’ of Margaret Thatcher’s famous slogan ‘There is no alternative’ (TINA) ‘isn’t “No alternative is possible,” but rather, “Stop trying to think of an alternative.”’ Speaking as a sci-fi writer, Doctorow likes to quip that ‘thinking of alternatives is literally my job.’ In Doctorow’s fiction, most notably in 2023’s The Lost Cause, the envisioning of an alternative future engages directly with the emancipatory potential of democratic public finance, when a character recalls a moment in the past when ‘Towns and universities started minting their own currencies’ (a nod to Money on the Left’s Uni Currency Project). In the novel, this ‘wildcat money’ becomes an engine of democratic possibility and change.
This is one of the many reasons why cultural analysis – from the MCU to literary modernism – has always been central to the Money on the Left project. As I wrote last month, ‘what connects my approach to the interpretation of cultural, monetary, and political forms to our group’s proposals for public banking, municipal bond issuance, and university finance’ is the framework we at MotL call ‘the public money paradigm’. And ‘when we understand that inequality and exclusionary violence are built into the logic of private money we can begin to imagine new possibilities for monetary design founded on democratic inclusion, collectivity, and care.’
This is also why the intersectional part of ‘imaginative intersectional politics’ is vital. From the perspective of the private-money-based orthodoxy, the pursuit of justice appears as a series of either/or battles where the liberation of the marginalised can only ever come at another’s expense. It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that this summer’s hounding of Jason Arday, an autistic black professor, first out of British academia and then to his shocking and untimely death has taken place in the midst of an increasingly brutal financial crisis in the UK’s higher education sector (which, as The Sunday Times recently revealed, saw universities collectively spending over £400 million excluding people from its workforce through redundancy schemes in 2024-25 alone). This is not to suggest that the austerity wrecking ball that’s currently trashing courses, departments, disciplines, and institutions across UKHE was responsible for Professor Arday’s death in any direct or uncomplicated sense. As Kieran Rose argues, the ‘ONLY reason’ Jason Arday’s story became a ‘story’ after he was publicly accused of plagiarism by a known eugenicist was ‘because of racism’. Nevertheless, the fact that UKHE has been systematically starved of funds while simultaneously facing relentless attacks on its commitments to equality, diversity, and inclusion, has undoubtedly damaged the already precarious safety of marginalised groups and individuals such as Arday within our academic communities.
The vision of zero-sum exchange that defines the private money paradigm also corresponds closely with the rationale underpinning attempts to split the queer community by pitting LGB against TQIA2+ as well as the ‘overdiagnosis’ panics that, in the UK, have coalesced around Dame Uta Frith’s divisive and exclusionary views on autism and Channel 4’s irresponsible documentary ‘The Great ADHD Myth?’ Since March, when a piece appeared in the TES titled ‘why I no longer think autism is a spectrum’, Frith, an autism researcher since the 1960s, has repeatedly been given a platform across new media (including podcasts), legacy media, and academic publications from which to take issue with the present interpretation of the diagnostic criteria for autism and especially to question the validity of late diagnosis. Meanwhile, ‘The Great ADHD Myth?’ aired on 18 August and asked ‘whether ADHD is a genuine neurodevelopmental disorder, or a social construct’. As Rose explains: ‘These aren’t isolated stories, instead, they sit within a much wider journalistic ecology in which Autism and ADHD repeatedly appear alongside welfare expenditure, SEND budgets, NHS demand, school absence, social-care pressures and questions about who genuinely deserves support.’
In each of these cases, then, those whose full participation in society is impeded by racism, transphobia, and/or ableism are regarded as competing for scarce resources in a world where there is never enough to go around. In a private money universe of barter-like trade-offs, care for the vulnerable must always come at the cost of someone else’s suffering. By contrast, reclaiming money’s public powers for imaginative intersectional politics means recognising that monetary design choices shape and condition everything from our hierarchies of academic privilege to university funding crises, battles over trans rights, SEND provision in schools, and the wider recognition, accommodation, and support afforded to disabled people. Picturing another world is not the same thing as bringing one into being, of course, but freeing our imaginations from the austere limits of the private money paradigm is an important first step towards a better, more inclusive, and sustainable future.
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