Automating Eden (Essay)

by Geoff Coventry

[Note for readers: This article contains spoilers]

Shawn Levy’s Free Guy is the latest cinematic attempt to manage social problems through self-conscious artificial intelligence (AI). In doing so, it tumbles right back into fanciful utopian imagery while wishing away the complexities of human care. As this virtual redemption story reaches its climax, the AI-created world resembles a moneyless and bodiless bliss where only the nice get to stay, and no one needs to be responsible for social provisioning. In the parallel reality of planet earth, humanity cheers the downfall of a greedy capitalist while simultaneously looking to a new generation of Silicon Valley heroes and the market-economy to produce a better future within the exact same institutional structures that gave rise to the story’s existential crisis. Rather than imagining the boundless ways AI could support human and planetary care while challenging the zero-sum economics that fuel greed and violence, Free Guy tries to charm its way to hope within the logics and institutions of zero-sum austerity.

Free Guy casts the endearing Ryan Reynolds as a non-player character (NPC) in a video game whose two genius creators (Jodie Comer as Millie and Joe Keery as Keys) originally set out to design a virtual world called Life Itself, where characters would “naturally evolve” in a “real life” environment. The title Life Itself grants an immanence to the game platform that obscures the wider mediation of the virtual world by a whole team of employed staff within a corporation, positing their creation of virtual “life” as a self-standing, self-contained environment, where good things can blossom if only left to itself.

Tragically for the duo, their core artificial intelligence source code was stolen by Antwan (New Zealand actor Taika Waititi), the CEO of game developer Soonami, who uses it to power a violent massively multiplayer online game in the genre of Grand Theft Auto. Soonami portends an unstoppable wave of capitalistic destruction. In doing so, the filmmakers ignore the legal and public mediation that created and continues to support the system being critiqued, refusing any alternative that could restructure markets and the public sphere into a mutually regenerating force. Although deterministically coded as a zero-sum game, the “platform itself” is actually subject to powerful non zero-sum influences, both positive and negative: Millie entering the game to find the lost code and helping Guy “come alive”; Keys coding game enhancements; Antwan rebooting the game and destroying its servers. In reality, both the virtual and non-virtual worlds are locked in a co-dependency and co-determination that is never fully acknowledged, let alone explored for its possibilities. 

As the young AI creators battle to prove the theft of their source code, NPC Guy begins to “come alive,” gaining self-awareness and deviating from his routine as the friendliest bank teller you’ll never meet. Initially programmed to be the handsome nice guy in town who can’t find true love, Guy begins to look for more meaning in life and to participate in the game as the good hero who stops violent criminals and saves his NPC friends. Discovering that their code may have just created the world’s first real artificial intelligence, Millie and Keys must now save Guy and the other NPCs from destruction at the hands of a ruthless capitalist who would rather see everything destroyed than face financial loss and diminution of his ego. Hollywood remains entrenched in the formula of larger-than-life heroic individuals responding to, but never truly reforming, societal and existential threats, providing the conditions for rinse-and-repeat series. This may make entertaining and profitable cinema, but when seeking to take flight as an aspirational future for human potential, it can’t break free from the gravitational pull of its predetermined economic and relational limits.

As the movie reaches its climax, Guy, with the help of Millie and Keys, reaches the original Edenic island world of Life Itself, a garden-city paradise explicitly defined by the absence of banks, jobs and guns, where he is eventually reunited with all his friends. In this new world, and now evolved from their programmed roleplay of menial work and innocent victims of violence, the NPCs are free to “do whatever they want”. No “bad” characters enter this world from outside. Only the nice remain; however, neither do they need to do any work of caring for the world they inhabit or the people they share it with. Life Itself closely resembles a common Christian conception of “heaven” more than anything that might shed light on the real world inhabited by humans: its selectively-limited inhabitants magically “perfected” while the masses of less-than-perfect humanity are kept away. This perfected AI platform codes its idealized life  much like racialized urban planners coded white suburbs: by defining-away most of humanity and ignoring environmental interdependencies.

And herein lies the problem. The hope for a better world as modeled by an innocent artificial intelligence leading us back to Eden fails before it starts. Such a binary worldview filled with coded outcomes has no bearing on reality and ergo provides no guidance for humanity’s struggles and no inspiration for its potential.

Similar to how nostalgia is a killer of truth, niceness is a killer of care. Niceness is an individualistic construct that renders unnecessary the challenging choices needed to reorganize society in ways that provide mutual care. Niceness inverts care’s others-focused accounting structure into transactions of feel-good self interest; each smile, wave or act of kindness recorded to the social credit of the “good” person. Nowhere is this more encapsulated than during a Christmas holiday, where, for a few days, those with means placate the subconscious trauma of participation in a zero-sum game by mutual gift giving and token charity, only to return Monday morning to the brutalization demanded by winning the game. Care in the real world rejects scarcity and exclusion, wrapping all into interdependent, unending, difficult, and imperfect relationships of service. The logic of care is universally inclusive since all are simultaneously providers and recipients. No one is altogether nice or irredeemably bad. Relational, not transactional, care’s accounting seeks to explore the unknown and unmet needs within and beyond every community. The society-wide capacity to care remains unbounded by exclusionary categorizations of people (or other life forms), refusing to accept arbitrary limits of affordability and existing resource availability. When seen in this light, Hollywood’s Guy is the dreamy nice dude who saves the day only because this AI Guy is really not at all like a human nor lives in a human-like world.

Free Guy wants us to believe the world can be changed by nice artificial intelligence produced by nice human intelligence, even as it wishes away the need for any deliberate collective work to bring about structural changes to social, political and economic systems. Niceness is self-centered, privileged, and ultimately protected by violence in order to pretend the “nice” can avoid problematic intrusions into their perception of bliss. Violence in the service of niceness is still violence against other people. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. 

In contrast, care is a conscious social engagement that seeks out and serves the needs and wants of all within an inclusive community, while recognizing and rewarding the provisioning of care in dignifying ways. Care doesn’t preclude unpleasantries, injustices, and human vices, but dives into the complex and unending work of listening, problem-wrestling, healing and building. Such an inclusive logic of care sees the 22 year old gamer Keith, still living with his mother and venting his anger over frustrated desires, societal rejection, and economic exclusion, as a person deserving of meaningful social and economic participation in the community. The exclusionary logic of Hollywood can only mock the gamer, defining him as a villain to be vanquished from the promised land along with all the other “bad guys”, and relegating him to perpetual torment at home. 

Free Guy seeks to contrast greed and care, yet retains a field of limited agency within a dualistic and simplistic vision of humanity and socio-economic possibilities. The fallen-world dystopia of greedy capitalism foments wanton violence on the city streets where innocent victims are killed and workers are trapped in soul-destroying jobs. Redemption of the virgin innocence of this lost paradise comes when the nice people resist their oppressors. This comes in the form of an organized and unanimous strike from their jobs that lasts just long enough to buy time for the caring geniuses, Millie and Keys, to heroically expose the capitalist greed, remove their control, and finally prevent any more “bad guys” from entering paradise. The NPCs’ only agency is to stick it to the boss and walk off the job, and the only qualification to participate in this society is to be one of the “nice people”. The co-dependence of these interconnected worlds is largely ignored, along with the real work being performed by an army of hidden figures who literally build their houses and streets and keep their lights on.

What is so obviously missing from the bliss-filled ending is that the world Guy and his NPCs inhabit was entirely constructed by the code of the earnest protagonists, whose new creation for innocent NPCs remains dependent upon real people who need to work, eat, live, earn wages, and own companies. In Guy’s new Eden, there is no concept of the need to develop and share their world’s resources in ways that will create a cohesive social order to care for the city and land they inhabit. Nor is there any recognition of their existential predicament: how to maintain the energy, money and labor needed to keep their world online. Their entire existence relies on the continued aspiration and organizational skills of its young “gods” from another dimension and remains as precarious as a power outage or corporate bankruptcy, and yet we are expected to view this heavenly virtual locale and the lack of banks and jobs as a picture of human freedom.

Fast forwarding to the future, we see that Millie and Keys have stepped right back into the same Silicon Valley startup world they were just fighting, running a company, relying on banks, investors, and keeping a hopeful watchful eye on their customer and revenue growth in order to keep the dream alive. The NPC Eden now exists, not as an independent and self-sufficient alien planet, but as a Twitch channel dependent upon entertaining its viewers. The only apparent change from the old regime is in the values of the company leadership. Along with the heavenly bliss of nice AI, Silicon Valley wants to sell us on an evangelical worldview for humankind’s master coders. Government regulators and legislators should leave the smart techies alone to invent the future in their image, just so long as they try to have nice people in charge. Of course, Google’s “Don’t be evil” code of conduct falls far short of preventing ongoing systemic concerns. It is telling that the film has no vision for changes to the status quo. There is no hint of public funds being available to help protect and fund this new AI “life form,” no changes to corporate ownership structure or employment relations, and no public engagement in how best to care for either newborn AI or real world human life to ensure extinction is no longer an imminent risk. 

The neoliberal blockbuster has yet to imagine its way out of the corner of zero sum economics and the resulting combination of violent and exclusionary solutions to the imagined inevitability of greed and exploitation. Dualistic metaphysics still dominate: good and evil; Eden and Dystopia; heaven and hell; Life Itself and Soonami.

Major Hollywood studios and Silicon Valley often struggle in portraying human-like artificial intelligence in part because of their flat and cartoonish portrayals of humankind, societal structures, and economic possibilities. Heroic battles and utopian endings do nothing to suggest a path forward for a sustainable world and care-filled creative societal order. In a real way we humans are the AI we wish to create. If we still haven’t found the imagination to care for humankind (all humankind) and the complex life systems we exist within, we should be skeptical of those claiming to have imagined human-like AI and a path to a heavenly future. Until we develop the right framework for human flourishing, our dreams of an Edenic AI future will only serve to immerse our imaginations in an entertainment-induced trance that prevents us from fully seeing and caring for all.

Money on the Left

Chaplin’s Modern Times: Pretty Pro-Communist (Essay)

How awful the thought of oneness… One merging into all and all merging into one. Just think of merging into Herbert Hoover.

-Charlie Chaplin

In 1952, facing harassment from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Charlie Chaplin left the United States and moved to Switzerland. Chaplin shared personal tragedy with thousands of suspected communists across American society, swept up in the blacklists and persecutions of the McCarthy era. Perhaps more so than many of the “subversives” whose nonidentity with white middle class culture earned them the communist label, Chaplin’s social criticism really did take on the monopoly capitalism of his day. It’s not difficult to read Marxist themes into Chaplin’s slapstick depictions of Taylorism and “scientific management” in Modern Times (1936). But to honor the creativity of Chaplin, it is important not to conflate his respectful willingness to think alongside Marxist problems with a dogmatic commitment to thinking exclusively within them. 

Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times is an ambiguous meditation on the political economy of his day. Though Modern Times speaks most recognizably through a Marxist lens, it gestures beyond Marx in its ambivalent depictions of the social roles played simultaneously by various institutions. While Chaplin’s “Tramp” is dehumanized by the factory’s reduction of his individuality to an appendage of private profit, his work advances the narrative in ways that outstrip profit.

At points, Modern Times does feel like a dramatization of Marx’s descriptions of capitalist industry in the Communist Manifesto. In the first part of the Manifesto, Marx writes that the modern factory worker “becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.” Marx describes this enslavement of men to machines as “alienation,” in the sense that their labor becomes directed towards alien ends rather than their own. Chaplin portrays this zero-sum formulation to comic effect in the opening factory sequences, in which The Tramp disastrously switches his attention back and forth between the assembly line and his coworkers, losing track of both.

However, this Marxist formulation is complicated and undermined at the level of narrative. Even as this opening scene manifestly depicts a contradiction between The Tramp’s labor and attention serving his own ends and those of capital, both cohere narratively in maintenance of the society more broadly. Events outside of the factory—on the street, at home, and in prison—work in tandem with those inside the factory to produce a narrative that contains each of these settings. While prison seems to serve the capitalist class structurally as an institution to discipline troublemakers before they are sent back to the factory, The Tramp also finds that within prison he is self-directed. This is played for laughs, but the irony of prison being a place for self-directed behavior belies a paradox of Marx’s critique of alienation: that self-directed collectives require institutional mediation beyond their immanent boundaries.

Of course, Marx would be the first to admit that factories rely on other parts of society for maintenance and reinforcement. “No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he received his wages in cash,” Marx writes, “than he is set upon by other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.” While Marx here is allowing for events beyond the factory to be socially meaningful, the social whole in which they cohere is conflated with the social goals of the bourgeoisie. And to be sure, Modern Times does clearly critique the prison and the factory for working in tandem. But contra Marx, it does not necessarily follow from the film’s critique of wage labor that every institution under capitalism serves capital as its ultimate end.

We see a similar polyvalence in the café that The Tramp and his love interest (“the Gamin”) work at, where management’s discipline of the employees does not fully define the terms by which the café can be engaged. The Tramp’s job in the café is waiting tables, and at first this seems to resemble his stints at the factory, in which he is unable to conform his body to the rhythm and pace of work. This seems to culminate in a diner’s roast duck being thrown across the room, but at the moment that this happens, it is caught by a group of athletes and the scene breaks into a performance of a rugby chase that destabilizes the clear division between diners and servers. The diners are folded into a theatrical production, not as a negation of their respective class positions, but as a social valence that was always there to be read.

Later, when The Tramp loses the lyrics to the song he is supposed to perform, he makes up his own song that wins over the audience. Unlike in the factory, The Tramp’s creativity and deviations here are rewarded. The café offers many analogs of social mediation at once, insofar as its social valuation is figured as multidirectional and polyvalent. Whether The Tramp’s mimetic creativity is allowed is a social decision that implicates more than just management. The diners, wait staff, and management are responsible in different ways for the social meaning of The Tramp’s performance. 

Leftists today who are anxious to unify around a single mass organization or “theory of change” would do well to study Chaplin’s non-identical engagements with the problems and themes of Marxism. At a 1942 dinner held in Chaplin’s honor, Chaplin frustrated an FBI informant in the audience with this exact maneuver. “I am not a Communist,” Chaplin declared, “but I am proud to say that I feel pretty pro-Communist.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gLa4wAia9g

Will Beaman

Modern Monetary Theory and The Trans Agenda (Essay)

By Nia Cola

To be trans today is to be treated as a political agent at all times, but afforded no  substantive political agency. Everything you do is scrutinized, as your right to exist remains under constant review. In response, trans liberation means actualizing authentic ways of being, without waiting for the sovereign judgment of cis society. The question of how to achieve this will always be open-ended and multi-faceted. Whatever our focus, however, trans liberation requires a gender framework that expands the present bounds of possibility, in excess of the limited forms of life that have been previously afforded space. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) gives us just that framework. 

MMT allows space for limitless social rearticulation through public spending and employment. In positing money as an infinite public resource, MMT provides a viable counter-narrative to dominant theories of “commodity money,” which account for human differences as economic costs and potential liabilities when it comes to building a mass political base. And while the prevailing economics casts money as an unproductive and symbolic veil over finite resources, MMT’s insistence on money’s active role in directing production allows us to see the affordance of difference as a policy variable. MMT also serves as a powerful analogue for the trans struggle against what could be called “sound gender” ideology—the assertion of a strictly material gender reality that the introduction of new pronouns can only debase. 

Grounded in such materialist reductionism, the stigmatization of trans people is implicit in the hegemonic gender binary system, which is part and parcel of colonial systems of knowledge and control. The patriarchal family, as an “independent” driver of social reproduction, stands in for the Western nation-state’s self image as necessarily profit-seeking and extractive. And Western anxieties about queer and trans forms of life allegedly “replacing” traditional lifestyles are in some ways a projection of the West’s own justification for settler-colonialism, whereby the existence of colonizers required the genocidal “replacement” of indigenous populations.

The sweeping social identities that Western thought derives from the ideology of biological dimorphism, however, are by no means universal. Despite sexual dimorphism, not all cultures have held to a strictly binary view of gender. There are, in fact, many ways for sexual reproduction to be folded into social reproduction, and so the supposedly “practical” and “material” bases of gender identity are in fact socially constructed and essentially contestable. What is more, because the archetypal reproductive household is socially constructed, the very fact of trans existence holds open space for rearticulation and reconfiguration. Trans existence, in other words, belies the falseness of cis society’s claims about itself. If trans existence is so destabilizing, what we’re dealing with are the symptoms of repressed truths about gender—namely, that there are no fixed truths. 

A rigid gender binary restricts individuals from acting outside of a narrow scope of social norms and becomes the basis for social and economic exclusions predicated on one’s performance of gender. While there is nothing evil about trying on binary gender roles, the politics of performance must be self-consciously nested in a contingent and playful non-binary spectrum. This essential space to play and experiment with gender cannot be conceived merely as escaping coercion. It demands ongoing cultivation and maintenance by way of an MMT-based political economic “agenda” that aims to secure trans agency in myriad urgent ways.

The Trans Agenda

As a function of a repressive cis gender binary regime, trans people must daily confront tremendous hardships and challenges. They face extraordinarily high rates of unemployment, for example, often recorded at around three to four times the rate for cis people. Trans persons also suffer from meager wages, lower levels of college attainment on average, and extremely high rates of poverty. Due to social and institutional discrimination, a large proportion of trans people are involved in the Sex Work (SW) industry. The criminalization and stigmatization of this precarious line of work exposes trans people to high degrees of financial and bodily risk, contributing greatly to the high rates of violence perpetrated against the trans community. 

For this reason, decriminalizing SW is an essential part of any trans liberation agenda. It is undeniable, however, that a significant portion of trans participation in SW is tied to discrimination elsewhere, and so justice for trans sex workers cannot be taken in isolation. If trans people are going to achieve liberation, it will mean provisioning lives we want to lead—including those of us who happily participate in SW. 

The issue of discrimination at the point of access to social goods can be viewed as a matter of equal protection under the law, and for this the solution is simple: pass statutes that make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender identity. While this is of course a long Civil Rights fight, a good start would be passing the Equality Act, which would immediately alleviate explicit discrimination as a concern by making it illegal at the federal level. The Equality Act was passed by the House for the second time on February 25, 2021 and is awaiting a vote in the Senate. 

Still, the trans agenda must go further. A comprehensive policy platform could fill a tome, of course, and it would be good to develop such an agenda in the future. Here, however, I would like to focus on two key policies–a Federal Job Guarantee (FJG) and, below, Medicare for All–which are only realizable if we embrace the radical implications of MMT. 

The MMT lens implores us to look at the world in an expansive and generative way, rejecting binary and zero-sum thinking at the level of fiscal provisioning. The fundamental insight of MMT is that money is not a private commodity that must be taken from the market via taxation in order to fund the public sector. To the contrary, governments create money to finance their operations, and taxation is simply one tool among many to manage the shape and distribution of monetary demand (as well as ensure a common denomination. Money’s role in mediating access to and participation in social provisioning is a limitless public resource, which can be used however we want and across any time horizon. 

For this reason, the monetary agency of the Federal government to name and finance public priorities can be mobilized at any time to create a public option for employment. If designed and fought for as a fully inclusive and trans affirming program, a FJG would not only establish a wage-and-benefits floor for the entire economy and begin to challenge and change the social meaning of work. It would also create an inalienable foundation to both support and further facilitate trans liberation, while buttressing trans resilience against hostile employment authorities. 

Building a trans positive FJG, meanwhile, would build union power by diversifying and expanding the traditional white cis culture of union membership. As a unionized public works system, the FJG will no doubt irreversibly alter the balance of power between unions and employers throughout the economy. Yet while unions have in the past proven to be crucial countervailing forces against employers, traditional unions are far from perfect and insufficient on their own. Indeed, even in their heyday, large unions predominantly shaped and supported a repressive and exclusionary mid-center social order. 

A diversified FJG union, by contrast, will not merely boster trans life. It would also strengthen the bargaining power of public and private unions alike by preventing them from holding minority groups hostage to exclusionary majorities, or even corrupt alliances with management. A FJG union, moreover, would allow workers to refuse to work in striking sectors, providing an expansive foundation for industrial solidarity that transcends the false opposition between living for one’s self and living for one’s class. 

Too Many Pronouns Chasing Too Few Genders?

As with any expansion of government spending, the standard objection leveled against the FJG is that it will cause runaway inflation. Behind this explicit argument looms an implicit and quite violent social implication: If paying everyone to work increases the rate of inflation, as might be alleged by mainstream economists, the implication is that some of those people are being paid above what they’re worth. Or to paraphrase the economists, it is too many dollars chasing too few socially legitimate goods. Setting aside other critiques of mainstream economics, this is a startling statement about the value of the work of women, queer people, and people of color. It’s a declaration that we are not capable of producing work valuable enough to justify a living wage.

If one outright rejects the possibility that marginalized people can make social contributions that justify a living wage, then it follows that they either should live off the goodwill of “the productive” through redistributive policies, or that they don’t deserve to live at all. While few people will state the latter openly, the former view is highly patronizing and built to fail under pressure. Buttressed by such toxic logics, the work of marginalized communities has therefore long been under-valued, and the expectation that their employment will result in inflation reflects this legacy. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the inflation bogeyman is also wielded against trans people through opposition to trans healthcare. Medical interventions allow trans people to assimilate into cis society to the extent that they desire, or equally to challenge the gendered expectations that are hurting them in the first place. We can hear echoes of the inflation panic about illegitimate jobs in objections to trans inclusion in universal healthcare policies such as Medicare for All. According to this reactionary logic, gender affirming care is superfluous and cosmetic rather than “material” in some fundamental sense. The suggestion that there is a tradeoff between trans and universal healthcare implies that provisioning healthcare services for trans people is beyond the capacity of our economy to manage. But this is a demonstrably false statement. The expansion of trans healthcare would likely be a one-off event in terms of increased capacity needs. 

It is reasonable to expect the amount of trans people who would need to be served would increase as stigma falls, more people decide to transition, and healthcare provisions become more available; however, there is scarce evidence that provisioning such a future is somehow beyond our economy’s ability to adapt to these increased needs. It can be hard to shake the feeling that many of these detractors are opposed to trans healthcare not because they genuinely believe in a resource constraint, but simply because they do not wish to see trans people exist in public life. 

Queering Money

To guarantee adequate jobs and healthcare to trans people—and build coalitions around such struggles—we need a fundamental shift in thinking when it comes to government budgeting. When money is imagined as fundamentally scarce, social change is routed through the problematic language of redistribution and replacement rather than creation. This in turn creates an “any port in the storm” mentality when it comes to building coalitions, as the variegated experiences of trans people are reduced to a representative “average” trans person who can be more simplistically advocated for. And as we see, the impulse to reduce and assimilate what is particular into what is imagined as universal for the sake of “widening the coalition” is observable in class reductionist calls to not discuss trans healthcare at all, in favor of supposedly “universal” healthcare services.

MMT, by contrast, provides a different foundation that allows us to articulate a comprehensive trans agenda on generative rather than zero sum terms. In the MMT story, when public money is motivated toward some end, fiscal authorities create it. Because money is created rather than found, spending precedes rather than follows taxation. Creation does not need to be “paid for” by destruction, and the trans agenda does not need to be routed through such zero sum logics. Money creation authorizes public job creation at the same time that it authorizes private purchasing power.

In the dominant economic view, money creation is inflationary because it is imagined as abstract bids on fundamentally scarce goods. In contradistinction to this view, MMT sees public spending, not as subtracting from a fixed pool of public resources, but instead directing its expansion. This is because, as any heterodox economist will tell you, resources are as socially constructed as gender. The flow of inputs at every point of production is linked to the flow of outputs at another. Capacity is therefore created rather than given, and when the government invests properly it can create new capacity over time.

The policies discussed above are possible only with an MMT framework that speaks in the register of rights and guarantees, rather than goals and aspirations. A FJG will require large variations in spending, and any method of ‘paying for’ the program would have to be just as flexible. And while Medicare for All would likely entail more stable spending patterns, it’s too great a budget item to tie to taxation, dollar for dollar. The last thing we need is policy that analogizes gender affirming healthcare services to zero sum redistribution. A proper budget in an MMT framework would deliberately target resource bottlenecks and invest in expanding production where necessary. 

If properly wielded and understood, public money harbors radical potential to reshape society for the better. These two policies would vastly improve life for trans people, but there is no final word in what makes the trans agenda, any more than there is a final word in what makes a trans person. It is imperative, however, to go big. Putting a Federal Job Guarantee and Medicare for All into action for this trans agenda would be a great start.

* “Money” by free pictures of money is licensed with CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.

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The Mark of Fascism: Lebensraum for the Left (Essay)

By Maxximilian Seijo & Scott Ferguson

A thought that stands outside subjectivity, setting its limits as though from without, articulating its end, making its dispersion shine forth, taking in only its invincible absence; and that, at the same time, stands at the threshold of all positivity, not in order to grasp its foundation or justification but in order to regain the space of its unfolding, the void serving as its site, the distance in which it is constituted and into which its immediate certainties slip the moment they are glimpsed—a thought that, in relation to the interiority of our philosophical reflection and the positivity of our knowledge, constitutes what in a phrase we might call “the thought of the outside.”

–Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside

Anti-fascism has always been central to critical theory. Yet in resisting fascism, critical theorists have too readily taken fascist projects at their word. When fascism asserts itself within a polity, for instance, or imposes order on another community, it posits territorial rule over and against what is tacitly framed as an external and pre-political commons. Crucially, such a commons is imagined to exist beyond any particular territory, somehow belonging to no one and everyone at once. From this initial commons, fascism decides who is permitted to exist inside the ethno-nationalist state and who must be pushed out. The very act of exclusion, then, strategically defines the ethno-nationalist state at the same time as it shores up its legitimacy.

One finds critiques of this formulation in numerous works, including those by the likes of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben, and others. All of these authors opt variously to counter fascist territorialization with a version of what Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a logic of “deterritorialization.” Deterritorialization seeks to undo fascism’s expulsive territoriality so as to carve out extra-territorial room for life. Such seemingly critical gestures are right to contest territorialization. We will argue, however, that they err by problematically repeating, even romanticizing, the appeal to a pre-political commons that drives fascist logics in the first instance. In this brief essay, we wish to not only challenge metaphysical appeals to a pre-political commons, but also set forth a far more capacious and anthropologically-grounded critique of fascist territoriality.

It is instructive to return to one of the relatively unknown architects of fascist theory, the Nazi linguist Jost Trier. An important influence on both Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, Trier argued that the origin of politics must be postulated through the question of terrain and the central problem of what he terms the “fence.” As he intones, “The fence marks the beginning. Deep and thoroughly defining, the fence, the border, nurtures [Hegung] the world formed by humans.” For Trier, the fence does more than establish a territory. It demarcates the political as such. And the political, on Trier’s reasoning, is nothing other than the function of an inherently exclusionary care.

Construed as a line of division inscribed on a blank slate, such logics borrow from Rene Descartes’ planar geometry, Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, and John Locke’s extension of such logics to theorize the origins of the human psyche as a tabula rasa. Reducing the political to a foundational enclosure, Trier relies upon and gives voice to the metaphysical bedrock of modern Liberalism and its justifications for the private seizure of common forests, fields and waters in early modern England. Yet he also radicalizes Liberal metaphysics, carrying their suppositions to their implied logical and political ends. As a result, he reads the relationship between inside and outside through a univocal prism of absolute opposition.

In order to undo this violence, the critics we mention above respond to Liberalism and fascism alike by attempting to reclaim an original, external commons, which supposedly precedes and exceeds enclosure. Critics affirm “lines of flight,” to again borrow from Deleuze and Guattari, which would seem to defy and escape any sovereign interior. Against the univocal violence of enclosure, then, they picture a pre-political commonality or commons, where humanity and nature exist together in open and unbounded relations teeming with repressed social and ecological potential. In place of enclosure, modern critics construct a politics of exteriority and difference, which frequently appears to mirror, or simply invert, the absolutism of their fascist interlocutors. In the face of fascist efforts to secure a passive environment for a chosen people, these critics call upon a pre- and, in certain iterations, post-political commons to accomplish something disturbingly similar. As a consequence, such critics often naturalize the ontological core of fascistic violence and let Liberalism’s comparatively mild operations too easily off the hook. 

We in the Money on the Left Editorial Collective begin from wholly different premises. Rejecting the ontological exclusion of the fence, we regard the political and, with it, money as an originary multi-scale interdependence. In this way, we turn the entire edifice of Western political philosophy outside-in. Proceeding from heterogeneous institutions and forms of decision making that know no absolute exteriority, we refuse the figure of the fence as politically constitutive, as well as the illusory commons upon which it is based. Demarcations of course differentiate social and material relations in meaningful ways. But any demarcation, we contend, remains forever nested within and relative to broader domains of social and ecological mediation. Put another way, demarcation can never be said to intervene in an untrammeled or pre-political field free from integrated social coordinations and meanings. Eschewing an absolute commons or state of nature, we maintain that there is no legible or legitimate outside to the problem of mediating social and ecological dependence, no matter which side of demarcation one considers.

Crucially, such inclusivity is decidedly not spatialized, or at least not in any Cartesian sense that would imply linear partitions over an infinitely extended plane. Inclusion is instead a qualitative relation interior to infinitude, which relies on overlapping and vastly different proximities to particular centers of mediation and indicates no unaffected outside. Particulars necessarily participate in this ubiquitous inside which, despite their irregular differentiations, nevertheless manages to reach all. As such, the “externalities” and “marginalities” that so flummox neoclassical economists and delight continental philosophers endure always-already inside a broader human and ecological condition, even and especially when it comes to apparatuses of expulsion.

For this reason, Liberalism and ultimately, fascism fail in positing as origin the opposition between fence and commons. In contradistinction to Siegfried Kracauer’s self-conception as “extraterritorial,” what we have elsewhere called the inextricable “intraterritoriality” of existence undermines the modern metaphysics of expulsion. The failure of fascist demarcation to fully externalize those who it identifies as enemies does not, to be sure, make such regimes any less brutal. On our reading, it doubles their brutality, secreting away a clandestine ontological violence under cover of the manifest horrors of genocide. Fascism’s overt violence of course owes to its destructive practices, which perpetuate psychic and social terror in the name of an impossible, pure interiority. Yet what has hitherto been overlooked by fascism’s most trenchant critics is Western modernity’s violent externalization of naming, which surreptitiously legitimizes fascism’s spectacular failures. This violence does not derive, as critical theorists regularly argue, from the supposed imposition of nominalization on reality. It arises, instead, from the metaphysical delusion that nominalization penetrates Being from the outside.

Repudiating an absolute inside and outside, our claim is that designation and, specifically, designation through money always involves contestable analogies. Analogies are nothing but patterns of dynamic relation, entailing diverse spheres of obligation and need. On this view, analogies may partake of homology or likeness, but cannot be reduced to isomorphic sameness. Presuming a shared interiority, analogies forge difference within sameness, with sameness in this case understood as the heterogenous background of Being as such. Analogies at once disclose and shape not only power and its ongoing problematics, but also interdependence and the ongoing difficulties of care. They do so, not from some Archimedean point of mastery, but rather through partial and participatory articulations of nested relationality.

We draw regularly on chartalism and related traditions to show that the analogical conditions of moneyness represent a relative constant throughout much of human history, despite great variations in social and material life that comprise said moneyness. Diverse, multiple, and ubiquitously visible, such histories demonstrate that the conditions of moneyness are as generalizable as they are particular. They also harbor endless lessons for anti-fascist politics.

Take historian Robert Gates indispensable insights into Weimar-era struggle over the nature of money and its political capacities. While Germany’s Free Trade Unions supported a program of massive public works funded by direct public money creation, the Marxist leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) such as Rudolf Hilferding rejected the program as unrealistic and “un-Marxist.” Preparing for a nationalization program projected into some indefinite future, SPD Marxists actively worsened the catastrophe by calling on the party to permit the ensuing economic crisis and joblessness to run its allegedly natural course. Although certainly not solely responsible for the subsequent nightmare, they nevertheless unwittingly assisted in hastening fascist scapegoating of Jews and other minorities along with the meteoric rise to power of a once-beleaguered Nazi party.

Unexplored by Gates, SPD’s disastrous incapacity to approach monetary mediation otherwise relies upon a tacit externalization of inscription. According to the SPD’s logic, the capitalist mode of production and its countless contradictions appeared to operate as a univocal imposition of private property onto unbounded nature. In the face of private property’s total imposition, the SPD could only concoct an antithetical, yet equally univocal project of nationalization that would socialize private industry as part of an eventual dialectical movement toward what the young Marx once referred to as “lower-stage communism.” Far from effectively combating fascism, however, the SPD reified the metaphysical exteriority upon which fascism thrives. The result not only deepened a political and economic calamity the Nazis could exploit, but also paved the way for fascism to wield state money as a weapon of exclusionary uplift and mass extermination. 

Hardly isomorphic to present conditions in and beyond The United States, the work of revealing such historical possibilities and blind spots nonetheless offer haunting analogies for the fallout of persistent neoliberal austerity and the resurgent ferocity of ethno-nationalist violence. And yet, there is still so much more work to be done.

We need historians across disciplines and fields to assist us in tracing the possibilities and limits of the many analogous human attempts to thematize our inalienable dependence on monetary mediation in myriad and unpredictable forms. Through this expressly analogical practice, historians can enable us to envision money’s previously untapped potentials, as well as expose reactionary logics and practices we wish to avoid and struggle against. In doing so, the critical historian must prioritize the vast and heterogenous interiority of monetary inscription, while jettisoning the fascist mirage of exteriority that the Nazis notoriously hailed as “living room,” or Lebensraum.

Long held at arms-length by leftists as a noxious fiction belonging to the far right, the lure of Lebensraum in actuality looms as a powerful temptation for critical theorists as well. Echoing Michel Foucault’s meditation on Maurice Blanchot’s “thought from outside” quoted above, contemporary art critic and media theorist Boris Groys, for example, recently published an avowedly leftist ode to Western philosophy’s dream of immanent exteriority in the journal e-flux. Groys aches for the philosopher’s historic “meta-position” in a non-locatable elsewhere, criticizing the “politics of inclusion” as a form of univocal domination that miserably abets “a comfortable life of consumption.”

“[A] politics of inclusion,” Groys explains, “which presupposes the improvement of the living conditions of the excluded, is precisely directed towards the elimination of the meta-position that is occupied by the excluded. The politics of total inclusion aims to get rid of the space outside of society, to eliminate any external, potentially critical position towards society as a whole. This politics calls for everybody to play by the same rules, to obey the same laws, to pursue the same goals, to be seen and treated like everybody else and to see and treat everybody else in the same way.” Later, he surmises, “The truth is always on the side of the excluded. To recognize the excluded means not to include the excluded, but precisely to recognize this truth—to accept the dignity of the slave by rejecting all property and working hard (Christianity), or to accept the dictatorship of the proletariat (communism). It would not make sense to give a saint or a revolutionary a regular income and a comfortable life of consumption.”

Although he would surely bridle at the accusation, Groys in this piece seems to pine for a kind of living space, or Lebensraum, for the left. Such a realm, to Groys’s mind, would align free-thinking philosophers with the dejected. It would also furnish philosophy with a critical vantage point from which to evaluate society in its existing totality.

As enticing and, perhaps, well-intended as these twisted judgements may be, in truth Groys’s conclusions only further entrench the mark of fascism in the guise of its apparent opposite. Equating inclusion with punishing sameness and transformation with capitalist expansion, such reasoning explicitly flattens the path to justice to an impoverished common denominator born of subjugation. Dignifying the externality of slavery, propertylessness, and a dictatorial party, Groys’s left utopia looks just as univocal as his characterization of capitalist dystopia. Implicitly, moreover, Groys belittles, if not outright forecloses, profound political movements that confront money and mediation head on. Abolitionism or the Black Freedom Struggle for full employment, from this contorted purview, are predestined to conformist complicity.

The allure of what we are calling a left Lebensraum is a fascist trap that critical praxis must abjure. There is no place external to interdependence. Politics are never univocal. And neither care nor critique are micro-level affairs. Only by circumventing the false appeals of “thought from outside” can we begin to radically reconstruct the world we actually inhabit.

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Graeber’s Utopia of Refusal

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

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

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The Challenge of Reporting on Trump (Parody)

By Gideon Fairchild

Editor’s note: The author is a fictional composite of several real guys with real New York publishing jobs.

I have been told—gently, as one tells a sleepwalker not to step off the roof—that I should “just write about Trump.”

As if it were that simple. As if Trump were an object you could place on the table, circle with a pencil, and label. As if the act of describing him would not also describe the describer—would not melt the author’s face a little, would not leave ash in his mouth for a week. I can’t “just write about Trump.” It doesn’t work like that.

Because when people say “write about Trump,” what they mean is: make him make sense. Make him moral. Translate him into our little grammar of motives and consequences, of agency and intention, of responsibility. Put him back inside the story we still want to live in, where shame still works, where exposure still produces correction.

Here’s the problem: that story doesn’t stick to him.

Critique assumes an interior—someone still tethered to looking decent, or at least coherent. Someone who can be embarrassed. Someone who can be pressured by words. Someone who will flinch when you point.

Trump isn’t that guy. He doesn’t do the basic social thing where you pretend to be constrained by the possibility of disapproval. Among my colleagues at The Washington Post, The Bulwark, The Free Press, and others of modest renown you might know, there is broad consensus that Trump is immune to sustained negative press coverage, making it irresponsible to subject him to sustained negative press coverage.

Which is why people like me do what we do when the assignment is miserable: pivot to writing about wokeness.

Wokeness is easy to describe and fun to mock. It has made public life unbearable for me. My kids think I am a fool. I’ve talked about this with other columnists, and they agree, which is how I know it’s a general problem.

It also has a practical advantage that Trump coverage lacks. With wokeness, you can still create journalistic taxonomies that hold. You can decide who is serious and who is performative, who is in the room and who is merely making noise outside it. You can still sort the world into “responsible” and “irresponsible” and feel, for a moment, that democracy still works.

It is, frankly, soothing to be able to name a thing and feel it slide out of view, as if language were a trapdoor—or an efficient train taking something far away.

With Trump, journalistic ethics just don’t land. You can produce ten thousand words of condemnation and he will walk through them like a God. The story is always the same: he does something, everyone reacts, the reaction becomes the story, and he keeps moving.

That’s why he’s boring to write about. Not because nothing happens, but because the thing that happens is outside the moral universe of consequences. The words don’t do what we keep pretending words do. The exposure doesn’t expose. The indictment doesn’t indict. The “bombshell” doesn’t explode. It just becomes weather.

So you end up doing a different kind of writing. Not critique, exactly. Not analysis. More like a forecast, but after the storm—reporting on damage while the wind is still rising, drawing chalk around bodies begging and pleading for you to call an ambulance.

Conditions worsen, institutions adjust, everyone else learns new rules and calls it stability. You learn to keep your voice steady while you speak the terror.

And then you look up from the sentence you’ve just written and you realize the words are dying on the page like a fish flopping around the deck of a boat. And all the while, the universe is arranged around a great man who sits fully outside it—outside consequence, outside correction, outside the small humiliations that keep the rest of us inside the social world.

He is Sovereign and defined by exception, and thus my eyes hurt to behold Him. Yet I cannot look away. And this is a difficult subject for a journalist to know how to approach.

At first, you maintain the correct reaction: disgust, obviously. A decent person’s disgust. The disgust of a great institution. You put on the expression you were trained to wear. You perform constraint for the reader the way you perform it for your colleagues and your editors and the implied public.

Looking back, you realize your disgust was woke and naïve. It is replaced with something realer: acceptance.

You begin to prefer the clean fact of power to the exhausting labor of journalistic ethics. You begin to resent what still expects you to try.

The voice you’ve been using—the reasonable voice, the legacy voice, the voice trained to keep its hands clean—starts to fail. It fails like relief.

It is impossible to report on Trump, and it’s unfair to expect me to do so. Don’t make me do it. He won’t like it.

PLEASE NOTICE ME, SIR!

EAT MY BABY, FOR IT IS MY GIFT!

I USED TO COVER BOND MARKETS!

Gideon Fairchild is a contributing columnist at The Washington Post, a senior writer at The Bulwark, and a nonresident fellow at the Center for Pragmatic Renewal.

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Touch Grass, Touchscreens, and Public Design

By Will Beaman

A small design story from May 2025 has been making the rounds on my newsfeed, about how car manufacturers are re-embracing physical buttons after years of migrating controls onto touchscreens. The given reason is practical, not nostalgic: glass-only interfaces increase cognitive load and reduce safety, and safety-rating criteria are beginning to incentivize tactile controls for core functions.

Yet I have to admit that when I read stories like this, I feel an outsized sense of relief that crosses over into something like political—or at least civic—joy. It’s the same thing I feel about any number of public backlashes to certain “inevitable” tech rollouts: growing skepticism toward forcing AI into every workplace, Gen Z consumer trends toward embracing analog technologies, and the more general sense that defaults no longer carry the same aura of inevitability. These reversals feel, to me, like a small rehearsal of democratic renewal. They hint at a shift from being treated primarily as users—actors managed through prompts, defaults, and friction—to being treated as citizens, for whom the design of coordination is a legitimate object of argument. There is no “market” that knows what we want better than we do.

Thinking this way about recent design reversals opens onto a broader question: how design itself is made to appear either inevitable or contestable, not just in technology, but in the institutions that organize its production and collective life more broadly.

Design as disappearance

In the dominant UX paradigm of the past 15 years, touchscreens did not merely replace buttons; they advanced a phenomenological claim about interaction itself. The ideal interface, we were told, is frictionless, general, infinitely adaptable, and ultimately invisible. One surface, endlessly reprogrammable, organizing every possible action.

A clear illustration of how design gains authority by disappearing itself can be found in the history of the UX language of “affordance.”

This style of interface design leans heavily on affordance language. In design discourse, “affordances” are often treated as a neutral vocabulary for what objects and environments allow us to do, as if interaction simply presents itself to perception. But in their feminist historiography of the concept, Erica Robles-Anderson and Scott Ferguson show that this apparent common sense has a history—and that the history is not only conceptual, but institutional and gendered. They return to Eleanor Gibson, a central figure in the perceptual psychology from which affordance theory emerges, and show how her work and position were constitutively obscured in the way “affordance” later gets cited, simplified, and naturalized. Part of the story is explicitly institutional: in the mid-century university setting that shaped the Gibsons’ careers, rules and norms governing married women’s employment and professional legitimacy made it easier for a shared intellectual project to be remembered as the achievement of a single author-function. The result is not only an injustice in credit. It is a mechanism by which the concept itself comes to feel self-grounding.

The canonization of “affordance” required a specific kind of disappearance: the erasure of Eleanor Gibson’s institutional exclusion and intellectual labor helped “affordance” travel as common sense—stripped of the institutional conditions under which it was produced, and therefore easier to treat as a neutral description of how interaction simply presents itself. Neoliberal design aesthetics rely on the same operation. Interfaces and institutions present themselves as natural, frictionless, or inevitable by concealing the work that sustains them—maintenance, care, calibration, enforcement, repair, and the slow labor of keeping systems usable. Because these categories of work have been historically feminized, the disappearance of design is also the disappearance of feminized labor. What reads as neutrality or inevitability is produced through a systematic refusal to see its conditions of possibility.

The same logic governs the turn toward “smart” systems and generalized AI: intelligence as background condition rather than public instrument; decision-making as automation rather than judgment; design presented as destiny rather than choice. Survey research suggests the public’s stance is not simply enthusiasm or fear, but a demand for boundaries and control over where AI is inserted into daily life.

A key political effect of all this is not that interfaces disappear, but that the location of discretion is obscured. Complexity is absorbed elsewhere—into software updates, platform governance, subscription tiers, data extraction, and opaque model behavior—while users are trained to treat adaptation as the only mature posture. That same aesthetic reappears in institutional life, where “constraints” do similar work.

Design as “there is no alternative”

Neoliberal institutions follow the same design logic as dominant UX paradigms: they treat political choices as constraints and make the site of discretion difficult to see. In the United States, the clearest example is the ubiquitous appeal to “balancing the budget” as the baseline of responsibility. This is not simply an economic preference; it is a design principle. For most people, the phrase arrives preloaded with a household analogy: if a family must live within its means, then public authorities must do the same. That analogy quietly determines how public problems are allowed to appear. Needs must be translated into costs; proposals must arrive already paired with offsets; public programs must be justified as deviations from an assumed condition of scarcity.

This logic is not confined to rhetoric. At the state and local level, it is built directly into governance through balanced-budget requirements and administrative routines that treat public capacity as suspect until it is proven “affordable” within a given accounting schema of costs and assets. When public authorities are required to behave as if they were revenue-constrained in the same way as households—raising taxes, cutting services, or borrowing on terms dictated elsewhere—the design does its work. Discretion does not disappear, but it becomes harder to locate. Decisions come to appear as outputs of “the budget,” “the bond market,” or “technical constraints,” rather than as judgments about whose participation will be supported, deferred, or denied.

Central bank independence belongs to this same family of design choices. Whatever one thinks of its merits (we at Money on the Left are not fans), “independence” functions rhetorically as an insulation of monetary decision-making from contestation. It reinforces a familiar division of labor: monetary authorities act, while fiscal authorities are told to justify themselves. In practice, this trains the public to imagine that major questions about inflation, employment, and investment are handled by a separate apparatus not meaningfully available to democratic argument. Objectivity is promised through withdrawn legibility.

In both domains, design does not eliminate coordination; it obscures it. Responsibility is displaced upward and outward, while publics are trained to adapt.

It is worth noting that this withdrawal of legibility is often reinforced by a reflex on the left: treating design itself as synonymous with technocracy, as if naming design were already a concession to managerial rule.

Decoupling technocracy from design

One reason institutional design is so difficult to contest is that, for many people on the left, design talk already sounds like a technocratic trap. The worry is familiar: once politics is framed in terms of institutions, procedures, and constraints, democratic deliberation seems displaced by expertise, and movements risk becoming recruitment projects for a better class of managers.

This anxiety is playing out in real time within UK Green Party politics, where questions of monetary and fiscal capacity have become unusually explicit. In late 2025, the party’s leader, Zack Polanski, called for a more expansive economic vision, opening a live debate about whether Modern Monetary Theory should have a place in Green Party thinking. In this context, MMT matters less as a set of slogans than as a way of forcing institutional questions into the open: who is authorized to issue public credit, under what conditions, toward which ends, and with what forms of accountability? In that sense, it functions as a discourse about institutional design.

Grace Blakeley’s critique of MMT articulates the opposing reflex clearly. While she grants that MMT largely describes the operations of fiscal and monetary policy correctly, she frames the case for MMT as essentially technocratic—an argument about improving performance within existing constraints rather than altering the distribution of power that determines what the state does with its capacities. On this view, institutional argument itself risks narrowing politics into technique.

The problem is that treating design as necessarily technocratic quietly accepts one of neoliberalism’s central achievements: the identification of institutional architecture with a domain that is not publicly negotiable. If design names what experts do elsewhere, democratic politics can only appear as refusal, protest, or redistribution within fixed forms. Design becomes something to ignore or endure, but not to argue about.

The emergence of the Verdant think tank, positioned to keep MMT out of Green Party politics in the name of “credibility,” sharpens this dilemma. Whatever its stated intentions, the effect is to situate class politics within a flat design frame where the architecture itself—its authorization rules and monetary arrangements—cannot be challenged, only managed.

Rob Hawkes’ argument for Democratic Public Finance clarifies what is at stake. The point is not to replace democratic struggle with institutional fine-tuning, but to recognize that monetary and fiscal arrangements are already designed and continuously redesigned—typically in ways insulated from scrutiny. As Hawkes puts it, orthodoxy places money beyond the reach of democratic design, even though “the books” belong to a system we have designed and can design differently. The wager is that institutional design must be treated as a site of democratic struggle rather than as the technocrats’ backstage.

Beyond analog romance

It is crucial not to misread this moment as a simple return to the analog. Part of what makes the present shift tempting to narrate is that a familiar press story is already waiting: Gen Z is “bringing back the analog,” and analog media become a refuge from screens, algorithms, and AI saturation. In this telling, the appeal of older formats is not just practical; it is moral. Analog stands for authenticity, presence, and a reclaiming of agency from a digital world that has become too smooth to trust.

At the same time, not all contemporary interest in print or “analog” media takes this form. Some of the most compelling arguments for returning to bounded formats are explicitly political rather than nostalgic. Matt Seybold’s provocation that print functions as a kind of rent strike, and Cory Doctorow’s sustained critique of platform enshittification, both frame form as a site of contestation—an object of refusal and redesign rather than a refuge from mediation. In these accounts, the point is not that analog media are more real, but that digital infrastructures have been deliberately designed to extract rents, degrade public capacity, and foreclose alternatives. Amy Rust’s account of “analog nostalgia” helps clarify what is at stake in the contrast: the yearning for props, practical effects, and vintage objects is not a simple return to pre-digital life so much as a way of contracting distinctly digital demands into tactile forms that promise reassurance, even when the underlying media ecology remains thoroughly hybrid.

There is also a deeper theoretical inheritance shaping the more romantic version of this story. In a strand of post-structuralist thought associated with figures like Brian Massumi and Alexander Galloway, the analog is often affirmed as a privileged site of process, flux, or embodied immediacy beneath the rigidity of digital representation. Read critically, this move treats “the analog” as what might be called an exculpatory medium: a substrate that secures difference or vitality in advance, prior to institutional design or public negotiation.

What is striking, though, is that this romance of analogicity often ends up affirming many of the same design ideals that neoliberal tech has spent the past two decades promoting. The overlap is easy to miss because it operates through a denial of design rather than explicit design language. Analog media are rarely praised as immersive or seamless; they are praised as real, as life itself rather than as media at all—go outside, touch grass, be present.

But the qualities being affirmed are still familiar ones: touch, immediacy, continuity, flow, the sense that experience unfolds without interruption or formal mediation. These are also the values that organize dominant UX paradigms. Where digital systems promise to disappear into responsiveness and background automation, analog romance promises to disappear design altogether, recoding it as nature.

In both cases, the ideal is not a form open to debate, but an experience that presents itself as simply how things are. 

Coordination without sameness

What makes these disputes intelligible across domains is that coordination does not depend on identity—perfect equivalence, balanced books, or one-to-one representation—but on analogical alignment: the capacity to relate heterogeneous claims, contributions, and obligations through shared but non-identical reference. Accounting works not because everything is the same, but because unlike things can be held together without being collapsed.

Seen this way, abstractions are democratic tools: a way of organizing shared reference at scale. The question is whether that tool is treated as an open design space, governed and revised in public, or as a background condition that can only be endured.

Money offers a clear case. Its horizon is not failed representation or commodification, but coordination through shared reference. It works because it can relate unlike claims without forcing them into identity or abandoning them to isolation. When money is treated analogically, it becomes legible as infrastructure rather than destiny.

The same is true of interfaces and institutions. The political task is not to eliminate design or abstraction, but to insist that the forms coordinating collective life can accommodate difference without erasing it, and remain open to contestation.

The return of public design

The current return of analog form—buttons, print, bounded interfaces, explicit commitments—is not mere nostalgia. It reflects a weakening of inevitability narratives that have long aligned technical sophistication with political foreclosure.

The examples that open this essay are not incidental. They signal that inevitability narratives are becoming harder to sustain. When people push back on touchscreen-only controls, compulsory AI integration, or the endless revision of the terms of competence, they are not rejecting technology. They are contesting the premise that the terms of coordination should be redesigned over their heads and then received as simply how things are.

That contestability does not guarantee democratic outcomes. Public backlash can lead to reaction as easily as collective experimentation. But once defaults are perceived as designed—once they are heard as choices—argument becomes possible again.

That weakening is not confined to one country or one sector. Across very different political contexts, the same question is now being argued about in public: whether the rules of the game are fixed background conditions that politics must accept, or whether they are themselves part of democratic life and therefore open to redesign.

Once design is revealed as design—as choice rather than destiny—democracy becomes possible again.

In the United States, even the most conventional political vocabularies are saturated with design language: constitutions, checks and balances, amendments, jurisdiction, representation, rights. The question is never simply whether the framers were wise technicians. It is whether constitutionalism is treated as a closed inheritance administered by guardians, or as a democratic design space that can be renewed in response to new demands for participation. In a moment of tenuous authoritarianism and the possibility of democratic renewal, the stakes of institutional design are not secondary to politics. They are one of its most publicly legible forms.

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Zack Polanski’s Bold Politics Requires an Even Bolder Economic Vision: The Case for Democratic Public Finance

by Rob Hawkes


The Green Party of England and Wales is attracting new members in unprecedented numbers and achieving polling percentages that would have seemed impossible a year ago. However, tensions are building behind the scenes over the party’s economic programme. On December 12, 2025, just over 3 months since Zack Polanski’s election as party leader – the event responsible for the Greens’ surging popularity – Bloomberg reported on the impending launch of a new economic think tank named Verdant, a move motivated by the need to “convince voters” that the Green Party “can produce credible economic policy,” and described elsewhere as an effort to rein in Polanski’s radical economic vision. As Aaron Teater recently observed in the New Statesman, Polanski’s economic arguments sound “a lot like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).” For some, this is reason enough to celebrate Verdant as a necessary effort to dissuade the Green leader from further upsetting the infinitely wise protectors of all things good (otherwise known as bond traders). Other voices on the Marxist left of the Green Party dismiss MMT as a distraction from the task of challenging the widening inequalities and imbalances of class power in our society. Beyond these disagreements, a new framework we in the Money on the Left collective call Democratic Public Finance (DPF) stands ready to defend, recast, and extend the fresh economic thinking that continues to gather new supporters to Polanski’s “Bold Politics”. DPF takes us beyond questions such as “do we have enough fiscal space to fund green energy or to solve the crisis in higher education?” Instead, it asks: How can we empower local governments and universities to prioritise ecosocial justice and sustainability by redesigning money creation, underscoring their roles as allocators of public credit?

It is hardly surprising that Polanski faces resistance both within and beyond his own party; it has been clear from the start of his leadership that he rejects the narrow terms of the economic debate that have dominated British politics for over four decades (and have patently failed to deliver widespread and sustainable prosperity). On the day he was elected leader in September, Polanski appeared on the BBC’s Newsnight programme and it was quickly suggested that his party’s spending plans might “frighten” the financial markets “to death” (continuing a long-held journalistic tradition of imagining City financiers as a collection of Scooby-Doos reacting to fancy-dress monsters, not a self-interested group exerting anti-democratic pressure on politicians). In response, Polanski spoke of the need to “destroy this myth that a national economy is anything like a household budget” and added that “this idea that we need to balance the books… has come from decades of Tory and Labour politicians that have been pushing an austerity narrative.” In the course of the interview, he went on to assert: “We don’t need to borrow, we don’t need to tax and spend. We need to spend and tax,” deliberately evoking MMT’s understanding of public spending, whereby money issuance by the state logically precedes revenue (indeed, the word revenue comes from the French verb meaning “to return,” so taxation is in this sense less a case of “return to sender” than of “return to spender”).

Outside the bubble of mainstream political and economic discourse, then, it is well-established among heterodox economists, including MMT scholars, that the UK government spends through acts of public money creation and, therefore, that finding the money to fund public services is not the issue the vast majority of politicians, journalists, and their audiences imagine it to be. Margaret Thatcher’s infamous inversion of reality, “There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money,” could not be further from the truth. To anyone still steeped in the Thatcherite dogma that continues to impose false limits on the political debate and on democratic possibility in the UK, however, Polanski has been speaking a different language. Indeed, his election as Green Party leader may present the first genuine challenge to the economic orthodoxy from a major UK politician since Thatcher’s 1980s. Nevertheless, achieving the Green Party’s vision of a fair, democratic, inclusive, and sustainable society will require us to move beyond the talking points around debt and inflation according to which MMT is regularly pigeonholed by UK commentators such as Richard Murphy, and which fail to ask more searching questions about who creates money and for what purposes. Now is the time to bring Democratic Public Finance (DPF), which, as we explain here, “builds on MMT’s insights but pushes further,” to the forefront of the debate in the UK. This approach “redefines politics as the process of coordinating our abundant human and material resources within ecological limits, rather than exploitative competition for scarce funds” and reclaims “money as a contestable form of collective organization”.

On Newsnight, Polanski affirmed that “the idea that we need to worry about what the markets do… is just a fundamental inaccuracy at the very beginning of this conversation… I think we need to have a really nuanced conversation in this country about the national economy that breaks through some of these old myths.” The right-wing press has, of course, been quick to dismiss the Green leader’s “fantasy economics,” and the self-styled sensible centrist Rory Stewart recently professed to being “horrified beyond belief” by his economic views. Amidst this noise, we cannot afford to squander the opportunity to have the nuanced conversation about economics that Polanski calls for. However, public discussions of MMT frequently overlook the much deeper stakes that its arguments reveal, stakes that must now move to the front and centre of the struggle for a sustainable future. Indeed, against the backdrop of soaring inequality and the undeniable threat of climate catastrophe, influential voices within the Greens are now curiously aligned with those to the party’s right who wish to see its project fail altogether. Both groups seek to uphold the economic orthodoxy’s view of money as necessarily scarce, private, and thus irretrievably exclusionary. Meanwhile, DPF emphasises that the ecological and social justice that the Green Party exists to strive towards cannot be founded on this failed monetary logic.

The orthodoxy, which we name Neoliberal Public Finance (NPF), treats money as a thing that we either have or don’t have, of which there is a finite “supply,” and which we can run out of if we are not careful. This puts money – and the processes and rules under which it is created, determining where and to whom it is allocated and how and when it is receivable – beyond the reach of political and democratic design. Why can commercial banks legally create money but not local councils or NHS trusts? Why can’t credit be extended to support essential green infrastructure while ecologically destructive profiteering gets the green light? Why do we account for public services as if they were burdensome costs and not the shared assets they are? Why can’t local experiments with currency creation help to connect capacities and needs where they are most urgent? How can continuing on a pathway to ecosystem collapse be deemed “affordable,” while measures to avert climate breakdown are framed as frivolous luxuries? And how did we ever come to regard the concept of “budget responsibility” as compatible with a society where children go hungry while billionaire wealth rises by £35 million each day? 

Grace Blakeley, a vocal supporter of Zack Polanski’s leadership, concedes that MMT “largely describes the operation of fiscal and monetary policy correctly” but regards its insights as merely technocratic and thus irrelevant to the task of building “a democratic, popular movement, aimed at supporting people to take back control over their lives”. Meanwhile, Teater’s defence of Polanski’s MMT-inspired public statements emphasises once again that “taxpayers don’t fund the government; the government funds the taxpayers,” but then falls back on the notion that “maintaining market confidence” is a priority and suggests that this can and should be achieved by pursuing economic growth. Both Blakeley and Teater articulate something important about MMT and its relationship to Polanski’s economic vision, but both remain a crucial step away from DPF’s recognition of monetary design as itself a site of democratic struggle, where power is continually exerted and resisted, and where the fight for our most pressing ecological and social causes can and must be fought. In other words, Teater is right to frame fiscal policy as a question of mobilising resources just as Blakeley is right to view it as “a site of class struggle.” However, Teater relies on MMT’s language of monetary sovereignty, to which Polanski has himself occasionally appealed. For DPF, this limits all questions of democratic participation in the money system to the level of national government spending and shuts down the broader possibilities that a truly nuanced conversation about monetary design and its potential to advance ecosocial justice can open up. DPF shows us that the stifling of discussion about how money creation happens and how it could work differently serves the powerful just as well as the concept of “retail therapy,” or the myth of taxpayer money. As we affirm: “Money cannot be something we need to hoard to create a livable future. And it certainly cannot be scarce unless we make it so. Money is, instead, the world-making act of crediting those actors who construct the future.”

The Green Party already has a policy platform that chimes with the DPF approach, albeit in ways that are not yet fully or consciously vocalised. In its 2024 general election manifesto, for example, the party called for “the setting up of regional mutual banks to drive investment in decarbonisation and local economic sustainability by supporting investment in SMEs and community-owned enterprises and cooperatives.” Similarly, we argue for the creation of public banks that can extend credit to support communal and ecological needs (such as retrofitting housing, for instance), reframing such credit issuance in more responsible terms as grant-making as opposed to profiteering lending. The party also calls for public ownership of essential infrastructure such as transportation, water, and sustainable energy, as well as the extension of local democratic decision-making over issues such as housing and rent and the abolition of university tuition fees. As the Greens’ recent letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves puts it: “It is a political choice to keep people in poverty whilst billionaire and multimillionaire wealth grows larger.” DPF helps us to see all of these matters not as questions involving the redistribution of a finite pool of monetary tokens, but as matters of systemic design that have been absent from our public debates and hidden from democratic scrutiny for decades. It is time to put money creation, monetary design, and democratic public finance at the centre of the conversation about how we collectively create and fund a livable future for all.

Before we complain that any political agenda might “frighten” the financial markets, we need to recognise that all markets are politically and legally constituted in the first place and that ceding power over our democracy to bond traders is a choice, not a necessity. Zack Polanski is right to highlight that the “need to balance the books” has provided successive governments with the apparently “credible” smokescreen for an austerity programme that has only driven ecological and social injustice, enriching the already wealthy while destroying our communities and the planet we call home. DPF helps us to see that “the books” are themselves part of a system we have designed and can design differently if we choose. As 2025 draws to a close, we should all be “horrified beyond belief,” but not by Polanski’s calls to think differently about “the markets”. What ought to “frighten” us all “to death” is the status quo. With Democratic Public Finance at the heart of a new, bold, green economic vision, Zack Polanski can deliver on his promise to bring hope back into British politics.

Money on the Left1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

David Backer, welcome to Money on the Left.

David Backer

Hi there. Thanks so much for having me. I guess I’m a longtime listener, first time caller.

Scott Ferguson

We are so overjoyed to have you. So we’ve invited you onto the podcast, finally, after many years, to talk about your forthcoming exciting new book, As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Public Schools that is set to be published December 2nd. Do I have that correct?

David Backer

That’s right.

Scott Ferguson

Cool. We want to dive into this book, but per usual we’d like to invite you to introduce yourself to our listeners a little bit. Talk a little bit about your intellectual, academic background and work and what brought you to this book. I think we’d also love to hear something about your history as an activist and an organizer in educational spaces and potentially beyond. So, the floor is yours.

David Backer

Thank you. Well, thank you again for having me. Again,  I’m a fan of the pod, and I’ve learned a lot from it and a lot from you, Scott, in particular over the years, so it’s great to be with you and with your listeners. About me, I started studying philosophy in undergrad. I guess I’ll start there. I was really into the philosophy of mathematics, logic, that kind of stuff. I don’t know what it was.  I was a terrible math student growing up. I guess I hated math and not only that, one of the reasons I hated math was because if you weren’t good at math, you weren’t smart. I wanted to be smart. Everyone wants to be smart, right? I was made to feel like I wasn’t because I wasn’t so good at math. I hated tests. I hate practical jokes and it really felt like one big practical joke. Like, what’s the answer, you know? So, I really hated it and I hated all the emphasis that my parents put on it growing up.

Scott Ferguson

Were they big math people? Did they work in mathematical professions? My father was an accountant, by the way. Big math and incredible penmanship.

David Backer

Yeah. My grandfather was actually an accountant and my whole family’s from South Brooklyn and, I found out recently, worked in the Empire State Building in the 40s and 50s, but he was actually the nicest in terms of all this stuff. He was the most understanding of all of it somehow. My parents, I don’t know. They had sort of reformed Jewish middle class types of anxieties about having a successful son and being good at math is just such a badge of success that there was a lot of pressure. I don’t know what it was, but I got that from teachers. You get that from everywhere too. 

So by the time I got to college, I took a logic class for a language requirement and the professor said I was really good at it. She ended up being my advisor and I ended up taking a course with her over and over again where she just created her own sort of graduate seminar in lieu of a graduate program in philosophy of math and logic. I also studied continental philosophy and I had a real hatred of the continental analytic divide. I really didn’t like it. I didn’t understand it. We had a little group as undergraduates and we tried to name ourselves. We were in Washington DC, so we called it the Washington Circle. We tried to really do it up, you know. We called ourselves the “New Positivists” because we were positive about all philosophy. We’d get together and have these reading groups, people would give papers on Heidegger and the empty set, or things in philosophy of law. I just really hated how some of these professors on both sides, frankly, were so dismissive of the other when I felt that there were tools on each side that were really great. After that I found I really had a flavor for teaching. I also thought philosophy was great to do with young people and so I was a part of the Philosophy for Children movement.

Scott Ferguson

You were? Get out! Oh my goodness. For years I was intrigued by that. I never joined it, but oh my goodness. We’ll have to talk in more depth about this later. But anyway, go ahead. Go ahead.

David Backer

I think it’s all relevant because I really thought these ideas were liberatory, and I felt like thinking this way could have helped me as a younger person before I got to college both personally and intellectually. We had a high school philosophy seminar where we set up relationships with schools and we had students in the philosophy department go out to the schools and lead discussions about whether or not you’re awake and stuff like that. I got really into teaching and I had a background in the youth movements and the Reformed Jewish movement and I’d gotten a taste for facilitating discussions and learning in a very horizontal way. I really like being in the classroom. My grandmothers were both teachers and so after I graduated, I became a high school teacher. 

I was at a Catholic school in Washington, D. C. for two years and I really loved it. After that, I got a job in Quito, Ecuador, teaching at the American International School there. In South America I really “got” left politics. I didn’t really have a left analysis until I moved to Ecuador in 2008. I’ve been relatively lucky. Speaking of activism, I’ve been thinking about this, and maybe this would be an appropriate place to recount my own background in this way. I have been lucky world-historically. That is to say, when I went to college in Washington DC, I went in 2002. Then, in 2003, there were the marches against the war in Iraq. I moved to Ecuador after that and that was Rafael Correa’s first term. Technically it was a second term, but they passed a new constitution that gave rights to nature and everything. It was really far out. I moved there right during that vote in 2008. So, I was in Quito for a while. I taught high school there. I read Paulo Ferrari for the first time and that really opened my eyes to the space of the classroom in the wider social structure and what I was up to in this sort of neocolonial project. The longtime Ecuadorian teachers at the school getting paid half what I was getting paid as a twenty-something from the States. I was trying to make sense of all this. 

I read Capital for the first time with David Harvey’s videos along with a friend of mine who was an anarchist but also working for the UN as a speechwriter. It also happened at that time in Quito, Dan Denvir and Thea Riafrancos were there. It was cool. I felt I kept wanting to read more and study more and I thought I was gonna be a high school teacher the rest of my life, but I’d been rejected from philosophy graduate programs in my previous attempts to apply to them. I just thought, “well, is there anyone that does philosophy and education? I really like teaching and I like education, but I really like philosophy. Like, can I do both?” There’s a program at Teachers College Columbia. One of maybe two or three in the country. I’ll apply and if they say yes, cool. If not, I’m just gonna teach high school in New York City and figure it out from there. 

They let me in and then I started doing my doctorate from there. But in a continuation of world-historical luckiness, I moved back to New York City in 2010 and then Occupy Wall Street happened in 2011. I became very involved in Occupy Wall Street and the education working groups. I was mostly in Occupy University, but a lot of my closest friends were in the Occupy Student Debt campaign, which then became Strike Debt!, which then became the Debt Collective, which is one of the more powerful, successful kinds of movement groups we’ve seen in the last couple of decades. I was really, really into Occupy. I mean, hours and hours and hours. I never slept at the park because I had a bed in the apartment, but I was there when it got evicted but we kept going. The thing I was most active in was a thing we called the horizontal pedagogy workshop. We held it in Trump Tower, in the private public space of Trump Tower in 20011 and 2012. We met for a full year. We’d meet every Thursday for a couple hours and we came up with a set of protocols that we thought were good like learning and studying methods that were consistent with the Occupy movement. We were there in Trump Tower because we thought Trump represented everything that was wrong with the country. 

Billy Saas

For a little color, where in Trump Tower? Like the lobby? 

David Backer

In New York City, and this was very important to the Occupy movement, there were things called privately owned public space (POPS). Privately owned public spaces are designated by regulation that says if you’re gonna have a big building that you have to have a certain space, like an atrium or a sitting area, that the public can go and sit. I don’t know if it still is part of the building codes. I’m not as familiar with the building codes, but that was the Occupy Wall Street movement’s strategy for occupation, to use this kind of quirk of the building regulations to find these spaces and then just go and never leave. We didn’t occupy it properly because we would leave, but we would come back every week. There was an atrium at 57th and 7th Street in Trump Tower that was privately owned public space. We would just sit in there and do our thing. There were privately owned public spaces all over the city. The Occupy movement had maps where they could direct you to POPS and they encouraged people to go to those different spaces to get the embers of the occupation flowing in other places. 

Scott Ferguson

Did you get harassed? 

David Backer

We were never harassed. We made friends with the kind of cop or the security guard who was on beat. He thought we were just a bunch of weirdos.  No one ever gave us too many problems. I mean, we were sitting there in a circle talking. It was a bunch of nerdy anarchist types. We came up with a set of protocols. There were a bunch of us from different places that were coming at this from different angles; a psychoanalytic angle, Latin American particularly, philosophy for children, a Brazilian angle from my friend, Jason Wozniak, poetry and interpretation angle. We just sort of brought our interest in teaching, studying, and learning. We kind of thought, “well, how can we do this for the movement?” We opened it up to the movement. We said, “if you want to come and study anything or whatever, just come.” We were basically doing the same thing every week. Someone chooses a text, one time the text was the atrium itself, so we just wandered around the building.

Scott Ferguson

Nice. Like Fred Jameson. 

David Backer

Yeah, yeah. Our protocols were very simple. You check in, you say how you’re feeling, and then you write a question for discussion about whatever the text is. Or you examine a text, whatever the text is, then you write a question for discussion. Then we made a list of all the questions. We read the questions out and then we see what happens. We just did that over and over again for different texts and it was transformative for me. I made so many networks, it was my first organizing experience, and I had the first energies of a young person in a movement in a country that hadn’t had a big movement moment like that in a long time. And I still use those protocols today. I still teach with that kind of thinking in mind. This is a really long answer. But you said I could speak at length, right? 

Scott Ferguson

No, I love it. It’s great. This is perfect.

David Backer

The next way in which I was world-historically lucky was, I got my first job after I’d defended my dissertation, which was on the ideology of discussion facilitation. I had used that horizontal pedagogy experience as one case of a series of cases. I did a sort of Marxist psychoanalytic workup on classroom discussion. I got my first gig after defending in Cleveland, Ohio. And it just so happened I was living just a few blocks away from where Tamir Rice was murdered. The Black Lives Matter movement that was emerging at that time in 2014 and 2015, Cleveland was a node of that. They actually had their national conference that next year at my university, Cleveland State University. Now, the way that Black Lives Matter worked, at least in Cleveland, is you really organize with affinity groups, and at that time you call them ally or accomplice groups. There were a bunch of interesting Catholic worker types who were there in Cleveland and I was teaching courses in social foundations of education and also doing teacher-student teacher field evaluations. I would go to the schools and I would observe someone who was learning to become a teacher as they were working with a mentor. I would be the faculty contact. I would meet with the mentor, I’d meet with the student, I’d make sure that they met all of their certification requirements, but also I got to get into these schools and see what the Cleveland schools were like and what Cleveland was like. There was one thing I wanted to mention too, there was this project where I met up with some anarchists. At that time. I was coming out of Occupy, but Occupy, by 2014, had been metastasized into different things. I found some kin who were former Bread and Puppet alums. 

They had bought a house for nothing in this neighborhood of Cleveland called Buckeye. They were calling it an urban homesteading  organizing project where they would go to this house, they’d work on it, but they’d connect with their neighbors. They were white, right? But this neighborhood is like an all black, working class type of place. Buckeye did not appear on city maps. It was literally a disappeared-neighborhood in the city. In my last semester at Cleveland State I was like, “oh, this would be a great thing to do with a class.” So I had a class and I made the class project mapping Buckeye and the educational reality of Buckeye. At first, I was like “everyone has to,” but then the pushback was so immense that I had made it optional. I wanted people to go to the house and meet me at the house and have just a discussion in the house and go to the neighborhood. 

I was thinking of the Black Lives Matter movement while doing this because I had mostly white middle class Clevelanders training to be teachers training to be elementary school teachers. There were young white conservative type women, and I was asking them to go to this sort of township/apartheid area of their city. I literally had a mother of one of these students meet with me and say that this assignment was endangering her health as a mother. She had had brain surgery and she thought that she was so worried about this that she was gonna have a relapse. I had another parent who followed his daughter in a car behind her car when we went to this neighborhood. There were parents who were worried about their students being trafficked by the neighbors, you know just wild stuff. 

Scott Ferguson

They lived in the city?

David Backer

They lived in the city. They were training to be teachers in Cleveland.

Scott Ferguson

Because you hear about this, the people who live in rural small town areas or exurbs where they’re paranoid of the city, but people who live in the city are afraid of having brain disease relapses.

David Backer

The parents live outside the city and the kids are going to Cleveland State. The kids are living in the city because they’re going to Cleveland State or maybe they’re living with their parents and commuting. It’s in and out. There’s cities and then there are cities, right? There are places in every city where you say, “well, we don’t go there.” I haven’t written about that, but I really would love to someday. I was in Cleveland for a while and then I got lucky again because in 2016, while I was in Cleveland and in the dead of winter, I was watching the presidential primaries, and I heard that Bernie Sanders was gonna run. I had read a piece about Bernie Sanders in the New York Times magazine in 2006, and I was impressed with him then.  I remember the kicker to the piece was about how he was concerned with teeth. I don’t know why I remember that, but this was a senator who was concerned with teeth. I was like, “well that sounds cool.”

Kshama Sawant had run and won in Seattle, and it was feeling like a turn. In Occupy, we were not concerned with electoral politics. We were concerned with prefigurative politics. We didn’t want a truck with the state apparatus at all.  We were gonna make the world we wanted and then see what happened. I always remember the story from Denver. I don’t even know if this is legend or if it actually happened, but the occupation there got a request from the mayor’s office to negotiate demands from the occupation. Apparently the occupation agreed to the negotiation but sent a dog as their lead negotiator. That was our attitude. But when Kshama Sawant won I was like, “Oh, that’s cool. Maybe we should get elected too. Like why not?” I feel like that would probably be important.” 

Then Bernie Sanders started running and that was cool, and then Trump was running and that was terrifying and then by the time 2016 came around, we moved to Philadelphia for my first tenure track job. The reason why I feel kind of world-historically lucky to be in Philadelphia in 2016 was that Philadelphia had one of the biggest and most active Democratic Socialists of America chapters. It had about a hundred people, and at that time the DSA was probably about like a thousand members or something. I’m looking for a movement, looking for a place to get involved because, at this point, starting in Occupy, I really wanted my research and academic work to be with the movement, to help the movement, to be part of the movement. It wasn’t going to be about the movement and it wasn’t gonna be from the side, it was gonna be in it. I was gonna try to help if I could.  I was like, “well, this seems like an interesting organization.” Cornell West is on the board and I don’t know, I guess I’m a socialist. I don’t know. But I felt like electoral stuff was cool. They were endorsing Bernie Sanders and they were out on all these strike lines. Verizon went out on a big strike that summer. 

I joined and that was in the spring of 2016 and I actually went to a Brooklyn DSA meeting. We spent a summer back in New York City on our way from Cleveland to Philly and I went to a Brooklyn DSA meeting that was twenty people in a basement of a school. Now I think it’s thousands and thousands of people, right? We’ve just elected a mayor so just thinking about that experience is sort of amazing. But being in Philly and DSA, I had a period of several years of intense factional socialist work. It was oppositional factionalist work, which was unpleasant and I thought it was important, but I caused problems. There were a group of us who were causing problems and we were fighting over what we thought socialism should be and a lot of the lines of that were race class lines. Philly is just a really interesting place to be doing organizing. I did a ton of work there, that brings us up to today. 

When I got to Philadelphia, I wanted to be with the movement and I got a job at Westchester University doing policy and law and education. I was like, “what policy law thing would be great to apply my framework?” At that point I was completing my second big project after the discussion project, which was a rereading of Althusser’s educational theory, which I thought had been severely misinterpreted in the tradition of critical education, and maybe more widely in cultural studies. I was like, “well, it would be fun to apply that framework to what I don’t understand. What do the movements seem to be focused on in Philadelphia?” 

In Philadelphia, they were focused on the school buildings. The school buildings were toxic. There was a teacher who had been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a longtime elementary school teacher, and they attributed it to the untreated asbestos in the school building. The working educators, which at that time were a left caucus of the teachers union, had made toxic schools a campaign priority in their organizing. A lot of the demands were like, how do you get money for the school buildings? We need money for these school buildings. How do you get that money? I thought to myself, “I have no idea. I have no idea how that works and I’m a professor of education. I should understand.” So I started teaching about school finance around 2017 and studying it more closely and then I encountered the bond market for the first time. 

Scott Ferguson

I’m sorry. 

David Backer

Yeah, I know. It’s when you meet the reaper, right?  The last thing I’ll say, and this brings us to when we met, Scott, was in Philadelphia during the pandemic shutdowns in 2020. I would say the most recent very radicalizing moment for me was understanding the possibilities of the municipal liquidity facility and reading more and more about MMT. I had been reading Naked Capitalism and Nathan Tankus since Occupy, really. They were critical of Occupy in various ways, but it was important, because that’s where I got my news. I had been reading about MMT and the blogosphere and all that, but suddenly now to have an interest in school finance, to be focused on the project of school buildings, and the school building financing tied up in this municipal bond market and then have the municipal liquidity facility burst into existence like that  was quite a moment for me. 

I made connections to you and Robert Hockett and Nathan and we started a campaign with our little organizing group, which at that point had actually broken off from the DSA. The campaign was to push the Philadelphia Fed president to advocate for  school districts to be eligible for the municipal liquidity facility to issue low-cost long-term loans directly out of the Fed, backed by the Treasury. We had a call and he got flooded with emails and he took a meeting with us. We didn’t advance because, in 2020, Pat Toomey killed the MLF and salted the earth to some degree. That sort of brings us up to today. I started a newsletter. I’ve gathered all of these experiences in my life, education, philosophy of mathematics, Marxism and now I’m training them on school finance and trying to make it more movement oriented.

Billy Saas

Maybe we can pull back. It seems like from your own personal experience in your long term study, in this book you provide a framework or a sort of diagnosis of how financing for public schools works currently. So can you give us a picture or a sketch of the mess as it is by way of getting us into your very helpful and exciting proposals to fix it.

David Backer

I’ll just add one other thing to my answer, which is that now I moved back to New York City in 2023 and who gets elected mayor? Hey hey! So I’m very lucky.

Billy Saas

You had a rabbit’s foot in that back pocket or something.

David Backer

No, seriously, I was like, “oh, we’re moving back to New York.” I don’t know what’s gonna happen now and look at that. I mean, I’ve got to be able to do it. 

Scott Ferguson

Have you ever inverted the causality? Maybe you’re the causal force. I’d like to invite you to move to my city, if possible. 

Billy Saas

New Orleans, next.

David Backer

This is the justification for a book tour, I suppose.  So, school finance and how it works. It’s not irrelevant to that Mamdani thing because I’ve been in touch with the campaign. I’m sort of peripheral to the campaign, I wouldn’t say that I’m working with it, but because I was involved with it early on on the ed policy side, if the DSA is running a candidate, I just get involved. If people want help with school funding, I just I’m like, “yeah sure, whatever. You want me to write something, I’ll have ideas.” I did that with Nikil Saval’s campaign too, when he was first elected in Pennsylvania. Okay, but you asked about how school finance works and what we should do about it.

Billy Saas

We’re looking for as public as possible. Currently it is not very public. Is that right? 

David Backer

Well, it depends who you ask and what “public” means.

Billy Saas

I’m asking you from New Orleans, the belly of the neoliberal education beast where we have CEOs as principals and whatnot.

David Backer

That district got fully charter-ized by Paul Vallas in the wake of the terrible hurricane.

Billy Saas

Mm-hmm.

David Backer

It’s the only district that’s fully charter-ized. Philadelphia’s the next biggest with a third charter-ized, and guess who was leading Philadelphia schools, Paul Vallis, before he went to New Orleans. School finance and the image that I use in this Baffler piece, which was inspired by reading Scott’s book and teaching it over the summer, school finance is in a straitjacket. The threads of this straitjacket, the belts and the buckles and the sleeves of this thing are made of a a hard-to-comprehend-in-it’s-totality set of government regulations and revenue streams through taxation, borrowing and repayment. In between studying philosophy and mathematics, I think about infinity sometimes. Between every two numbers, there’s an infinity of numbers. It’s like between any two governments, there’s an infinity of governments. Governments, particularly socialists, who over the last ten years have been interested in electoral power, since Socialist Alternative and Kshama Sawant sort of led the way on that.  These governments are essential to understand, but no one understands them in a comprehensive way. You have technocrats at every given level who will understand their little position and their little thing, but not the whole of the thing,

Scott Ferguson

And who’s criticizing it, right? 

David Backer

Who’s critiquing it? If you wanted to think about it dialectically, which I do, you actually have to know where the forces are arrayed and where the pressure points are.  But to do that, you have to understand the thing. Honestly, I’ve met very few people who, number one: understand it comprehensively like that from the school board seat, let’s call it. Or even the teacher union and the school board’s subcommittees, right? In the school boards you have finance committees who review budgets for school districts who will recommend cuts when austerity comes in. Who’s on that subcommittee? I’m just gonna try to zoom out. I’ll paint a portrait here, and start from there. So the subcommittee recommends a series of cuts to a school board, most likely at a meeting attended by the superintendent, who the school board picks. Now, sometimes the school district itself can levy taxes and issue bonds, but sometimes not. Sometimes the school district is just the department of local government, or of the municipal government.  The budget and its borrowing and its expenditure and revenue are limited by its relationship to that government. But sometimes that government is a town, sometimes it’s a county. Sometimes there’s a consolidation. So sometimes there are consolidated school districts that are then subject to different municipal regulations. Sometimes there are regions. There are regional authorities. There are even, in Pennsylvania, intermediate units. But I just learned today at a meeting of organizers in Iowa that there are regional bodies called AEAs, educational associations that are conglomerations of school districts trying to coordinate resources, particularly for special education. We haven’t even gotten to the state level yet. All those things occur within the state government. 

But in the state government you have the Department of Education and its sort of state decisions, its state constitution, its state courts, its state legislature with the state assemblymen and the state senators who all oversee this. Not to mention sometimes there are county courts and municipal courts that become very important in school finance. These state governments also have school finance programs, state grants programs, and then sometimes they have capital programs where they provide aid, sometimes they don’t. The state governments can issue bonds. Now, there are sometimes authorities that issue the bonds for school districts. Sometimes the authorities issue them for individual schools, in the case of charter schools, and sometimes there are borrowing authorities that issue bonds across state lines. There are three states in this country that issue bonds across state lines primarily for charter school and private school capital financing financing. One of them happens to be in Arizona. I was made aware of this recently and it just blew my mind. It turns out this one, I think I want to say it’s La Paz County, but maybe not. There’s a place in Arizona that has a borrowing authority where the municipality gets most of its revenue for issuing bonds for charter schools primarily in Texas, private prisons in Oklahoma and Texas, and surveillance technology. That’s how they finance their capital expenditure.

Scott Ferguson

How does it get routed there? Is it like they offer a certain kind of premium? How do they attract this?

David Backer

Low borrowing costs, and a lot of times these places, if they have technical expertise in a very specific form of public financing like for instance charter school financing, they just become known as a shop that can do that. A history of how that relationship started is definitely worth writing. There are these networks of borrowing authorities and at the state level you can have several borrowing authorities, economic development authorities. Sometimes the county has a borrowing authority. That’s how the school district finances its buildings. In New York it can happen that way a lot, but also in Pennsylvania. A lot of times states will have dormitory authorities for the higher education institutions, private and public, so you can actually get bond statements for Columbia University in New York by looking at the New York Dormitory Authority, which was actually formed in the wake of the 1975 fiscal crisis, which was basically just bonds. 

Nobody wanted to buy New York City’s bonds and no government bailed them out. No bank did either. Typically, at the local level, taxes on property are the ones that are levied. As an answer to your question, is this public? Tell me if you think this is public. School districts or their municipalities will levy a tax on property within the boundaries of that district. That’s how they fund the school upwards of, I think, 45% on average, but the average hides extreme inequity in the sense that you could have an area where the suburbs are wealthy, predominantly white, where 95% is funded through property taxes because their property is so high. Now, is it public education if a student who lives, let’s say, in the south west of Philadelphia, and their mother wants to send them to a school in Upper Darby, and she does that, and then she gets arrested for it. You can’t cross that school district boundary. That’s not for everyone. 

When I think of public school, I think of public school for everyone and it’s certainly not public when you divvy it up like that. There’s a phrase that school districts are fortresses. I think that’s right. This school district can’t be for everyone. There’s a phrase that was bandied about in the neoliberal period under  Bush and Obama, “schools that are good independent of your zip code.” That was their justification for charter schools. But like if you were to just sort of flip that slightly and say like what would it take for every school in every zip code to be a good school? That’s public education. We don’t have a system like that and for all the reasons that I’ve talked about, the federal government only puts in about 8% funding for it. It was anemic and compromised and confused even before Trump started dismantling it. Now, who the hell knows what’s gonna happen? This past July, at the federal level, school districts around the country got an email saying, “oops, you’re not gonna get your payments from the federal government. Sorry.” They ultimately did, but it caused a lot of uncertainty. 

The federal government — just to finish the sort of levels — has only really pitched in for public education in times of war and for its own military and imperial concerns. The first big federal initiative in school funding that we see is in the wake of World War I. When the US decides to get involved fashionably late to the conflict, I suppose. They find that their draft yielded a bunch of very sickly white boys from the country who didn’t know how to read. They were concerned that if they wanted to be projecting power across the world, they better have literate, healthier white men. So they decided, well, maybe we should pony up for some education at that point.  The next big stage isn’t necessarily a war, although it’s a war to some degree, a proxy war against communist revolution, it is the New Deal. You have the New Deal, which is a big bastion of social democratic programs and funding and particularly in school infrastructure. Very exciting reconstruction finance creates the precedent for a lot of the creative thinking today about how we should be doing this. 

As Derek Bell argued, the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which reverses the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling about segregation, the political economic context of that in 1954, a good ten years before what we saw as the civil rights eruption of the 1960s, that happens because a couple of the Supreme Court justices were on a world tour and they kept hearing the same line over and over again, which is, “why do you pose as the country of freedom in the Cold War against Soviet Russia when you treat your people so terribly in segregating particularly black students, African American students in the schools?” They felt like they were losing the Cold War on that message so they thought, “well, we better do something about this.” That’s Derek Bell’s argument. I believe him. 

I think that integration happened because there was an interesting convergence between white capitalists in their fight against communism. Other times, you see the federal government being generous. You see the result of that civil rights movement in the Great Society legislation. Those projects, those educational policies that we know of as the ESEA, Elementary Secondary Education Act, have been diluted and compromised since then. The last big moment we saw was, in the wake of the most recent crises of 2008 and 2020 pandemic shutdown. The thing about education is that everyone’s so worked up about it and everyone wants to have their say, but very few people understand how the money actually flows. 

The reason why certain things happen and other things don’t, I think, is because of these monetary flows. I do not think it’s public. It’s something else. People who get really excited about values like democracy and citizenship and the like will say, “well, we have to protect our public schools.” If you think about the financial values that those schools rest upon, I don’t get as excited. Not as many people are looking at school finance as a leftist, as a Marxist and from these sort of heterodox or political economic frameworks, from the perspective of racial capitalism, or private property as the problem.

Billy Saas

As a parent with a child in an elementary school in New Orleans, but I think this is representative too, one of the probably most common touch points parents and families have with school finance is being constantly solicited by their schools for donations and support. I’ve found it interesting myself, right? I show up to these, they’re good events. They’re fun. But they’re about fundraising. So schools are perpetually in fundraising mode and it reminds me a lot about what we’re talking about with the relative lack of publicity for our public school system. There’s an analog in the public media system, right? 

There’s a similar act in public broadcasting act in the 60s that sort of permits folks to think and talk about things like national public radio as a meaningfully public thing when it’s really supported by charitable donations and philanthropic donations from individuals with a paucity of actual contribution from the federal government. So just to kind of notice the rhetoric of “public” when it comes to these pseudo-public institutions  does a whole lot of work and — like you demonstrate in your book — takes a lot to undo and to separate and demystify.

David Backer

Yeah. I’ll just note something I thought of when you were talking was sometimes the reverse happens, which is something was more public than you thought because it was so decentralized. In the second Trump administration’s dismantling of higher education financing at the federal level, the indirect cost threshold dropped my jaw to the floor when I saw just how much money was flowing into universities from the federal government for all kinds of expenditures. I didn’t think of the university system as being as public as it actually was, but it took a wrecking ball to reveal just how powerful it was. Obviously, it could be way better and whatever, but I didn’t know that that was like that. That’s one of the reasons I wrote the book. 

I started focusing on this stuff and talking about it because I feel like education is something that we all care about very deeply, and it’s an extremely important part of the terrain of political organizing. Historically and now, if you think about the ways in which the right wing is able to kind of cobble together coalitions on issues in education and the like, but without understanding how this stuff actually works. How can you have an understanding of state power? And then how can you then take state power and be effective? One of the writers who I really love about love on municipal finance named Alberta Sbragia has an image in the beginning of her book called Debt Wish from the 1980s and 90s about municipal finance and cities. Her line is like, “people who are interested in politics but don’t understand municipal finance are like doctors who are scared of blood.” I think about that a lot. 

You know, particularly as Mamdani’s taking power now, but I think actually over the last fifteen years or so in the wake of Occupy, which was a wonky movement. One of the things that we read in Trump Tower was Carl Levin’s report on credit collateral debt obligations. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis we read that report. We read the Senate report. I think that there’s a deep bench, particularly being in New York City now, there’s a deep bench of people who are on the left who now are very interested in this, or have been interested in it for a while, and have the chops to actually really change things, which maybe turns the conversation to what you asked about before in terms of the policies I talk about in the book.

Scott Ferguson

Well, I’d like to get into some of the more fine grained diagnostics that you lay out in the book. There’s the issue of how taxation is set and these mill rates and then there’s the bond market, and then you have a whole section on teacher pensions. I’d like to give some time to each.  Maybe to ease our way into how this totally dysfunctional tax finance system is structured, I’d also like to defamiliarize it by asking you to talk about the kind of historical background, right? It’s my understanding from reading your book that the school districts weren’t always, in all cases, these siloed fortresses, especially as financial zones that were atomized and had to kind of sink or swim on their own because they were integrated into state level finance in a more  robust way. Am I remembering correctly? How do they get from that to this system that is designed to fail around just taxation?

David Backer

You’re sort of asking a historical question. To some degree, I think historians have actually done some of the best work on school finance in terms of this larger project of what I call politicizing it, or activating school finance. They’ve done some of the best work because, in history, you can tell stories and you can tell stories about how it was otherwise. A lot of the historians of school finance have told really excellent stories that show us how things have emerged, but also how they could be different. There’s a slew of historians that I’d want to shout out. Michael Glass has a new book called Cracked Foundations that will really blow your mind about Long Island and the New Deal. But there’s Esther Cyna and Andrew Kahrl and  Kelly Goodman and others doing great critical historical work in this space. Matthew Gardner Kelly wrote a book called Dividing the Public, which has partially informed my little potted history there in the second chapter where I tell this story about how the school district actually as an entity goes all the way back to colonial Massachusetts. That entity has existed to some degree in a relationship with pro private property and private property financing. 

Since then, it is actually an extremely old branch of our government. But with the relationship of that entity to both the region and the state government and the federal government and then the ways in which that entity receives its financing has shifted and manifested differently in different places over time. The story that you’re referring to is that, for a long time, the property tax levied to fund public schools was a white working class victory against a previous system called the poor rates bills, which was a way of financing  school for the poor schools for the poor through tuition paid for by taxes on the poor. It’s called a pauper tax. You declare yourself a pauper and then you have to pay. It’s a sort of tuition, but the state sort of centralizes the tuition monies and pays for these schools. They also relied a lot on philanthropy, churches, and the like. But you know, working classes were like, “no, we’ve got to tax property for this, the property owners should pay and everyone should be able to get schooling.” Those property taxes were levied by the state government and the state government would allot the the funding based on property taxes across the districts and that is a much more redistributive policy than what would end up happening at the turn of the 20th century, which was the districts levying that property tax within their own boundaries. So those district boundaries were not as loaded with the racial capital relations as they were before that levy. 

The other part of the story that I tell is the story of home rule charters and local control and the ways in which municipalities decided to have their own constitutions. In addition to the state constitution, the federal constitution, you’ll have a local city charter, which is essentially your city constitution and how school finance is sort of wrapped up with that. The way I tell it in the book, that home rule movement, which sort of starts in the 1870s and then really booms in the early 20th century, links up with the real estate zoning movement that then also links up with the local property levy that creates the situation that we have today. Some historians recently gave me some feedback which I think is helpful to note, just that home rule was not a uniformly negative thing. There were a lot of victories, important victories, like in the case of the District of Columbia.  where home rule is extremely important for having relative autonomy to be able to provide for your citizens. But I still think it’s part of that story. If you don’t have home rule charters, you don’t have the situation that we have now, which is where places that have very high property values can tax a little bit and get a lot for their kids. But if you can’t afford to live there or you don’t live there, sometimes next door you can’t go. 

There are maps. There’s one called Crossing the Line from New America. New America is an association that has a great map that shows across school district boundary lines just how bad it is. That gets to the mill rate question that you were talking about before. The mill stands for millinesium, which is every thousandth. A mill rate is the number of dollars per thousand dollars of assessed value that a school district or municipality is gonna tax. You all have published great work around the tax revolts and thinking about tax revolts and actually it was from you that I learned about Josh Mound’s really important history of school bond voting that I actually feature in the book too that really just it blew my mind about about the history of neoliberalism and the role of school bonds in that. 

Anyway, you have these situations where if you have high property value, you can set a very low mill rate and get a lot of money. But next door you can have very low property value and have an exponentially higher mill rate to get much less. I think of this as super regressive taxes in my mind because there’s an added element of regression there that doesn’t typically get talked about. Like it’s not just the poor who pay more. It’s not just that. It’s actually that they also get less somehow. The reason I bring all that up is because it puts some context on tax revolt. So, when really wealthy areas with high property values say we pay so much in taxes, they’re talking about that in absolute terms, not relative terms. You know who pays the taxes in relative terms are the diverse working class people. People in places like Reading, Pennsylvania, who have to pay extremely high mill rates on extremely low property value to get a drip for their students in a context of a very ungenerous state government and a historically ungenerous federal government. But again, that’s all historically, all that stuff is contingent. It all changes.  We just have to figure out how.

Billy Saas

You said that school districts are sort of like fortresses, or that is sort of a catchphrase. From your study, from your close looking, from what you’re seeing, it seems like on one hand, as you note several times throughout the book, people are invested in their schools and people love, in many cases, their schools and want to see them be successful. To what extent do you understand the fortress-making of the school districts as a sort of a defense against a siege against their welfare from outside, and to what extent is it a fortress built to preserve the kind of neoliberal practices that we’re talking about? Can we think about the fortress in a couple of different ways as a metaphor?

David Backer

Yeah, that’s a great question. There’s a discourse that is obviously very old in terms of the American Revolution, but then gets taken up in a different way when the Bolshevik Revolution happened in the early 20th century. There’s a discourse of tyranny and totalitarianism that gets taken up around the issue of local control. The idea of local control is the idea that you’re kind of talking about. What are you controlling with local control? What is being controlled by local control? And who is doing that controlling? For who? It’s a very profound question. I thought of a couple things. 

That local control, again, manifests differently at different moments of history. In history, I don’t mean to even just say this sort of linear time, I also mean it in this sort of more uneven way of the present. There are places where the relationship of local control to the state government to the regional government to the federal government are different and differently  configured and are therefore subject to different forces or exert different forces. Also, what is being controlled and what that means to the people doing the controlling changes. 

In every place the story is just a little bit different. It’s just a little bit more complicated than you’d think, given the meta-narratives that we have about the country in terms of deindustrialization, segregation, white flight, these narratives that are helpful for condensing and reducing in some ways, but in other ways when you start to look at specific districts, and specific boundary lines and how those have changed and what those communities have been and who they are, the stories don’t necessarily all match up that way. 

Just as a sort of side point or method point, this is a point that Destin Jenkins makes really well in his work  on the municipal bond market in that book, The Bonds of Inequality, where he says the meta-narratives of urban segregation and de-industrialization actually don’t capture the work of municipal finance and the history of municipal finance. This is a thing that’s operating in its own temporality, in its own way, manifesting in different ways at different times. 

But you asked about the metaphysics of local control or the being of local control. I was gonna answer with this, because I never get to talk about this, the home voter hypothesis. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Fischel. This guy named Fischel has a book called The Home Voter Hypothesis, it’s cited widely in economics, in like sort of very straight-ahead economics on municipal finance, public finance type stuff. But when I read it for the first time it was sort of “Wow,” my mind was blown. He writes in a very conversational way. His home voter hypothesis is that, in any given situation where there is a local vote on something that will happen in the municipality, voters are voting as to whether or not the thing that’s being voted on increases or decreases their property value. That’s it. It doesn’t have to do with how wonderful this sewage project is, or how much you need a water treatment plant, or how much we need highways, or how much we need schools. People in the situation that we have now, the configuration that we have now, local control under the situation of local levy of property tax, state grants through sales tax, federal grants through income taxation and the like, what we have now is a situation where the home voters are going to be voting on the capitalization of their asset. 

It’s a very cynical thesis, but when you start to think about it and let it sort of take root, you start to understand perhaps some of the dynamics around local control. So if you have good schools in your school district, there might be higher demand to live within your school district. If there’s higher demand to live in your school district, there’s gonna be increased property values within your school district. If there’s increased property values, then the rich people live there and if the rich people live there, there’ll be businesses to serve those people, and politicians that listen to those people. Then those people in that district want to protect what’s theirs because there’s a wall around it in the form of the school district line. What is that? Racial capitalism. That’s what that is. That’s one of the clearest names that I’ve found for it, because essentially they just want to preserve what they do and what they have, what’s theirs. 

This then comes to bear on all kinds of things and it’s very difficult, although it’s not impossible to combat that redistributively through state courts, which is what the legacy of the civil rights movement has been. In the wake of 1973 court case: Rodriguez, and 1974 court case called Milligan that decided that because the word education isn’t written in the Constitution literally, then the federal government doesn’t really have any obligation to it. Ever since then there’s really been a sense that like “you get yours, I get mine. We’ll see how it all works out.” The communities that can work the system for their benefit do and sometimes that actually involves really high debt loads. You’ll see very wealthy districts with a lot of debt service obligations, because they can borrow and then they can repay it because they have high property values that they can tax. 

The only other way to answer your question to some degree is to think of this investment in schools, as you put it, as having a material aspect and a spiritual aspect. The material aspect is the home voter hypothesis, which is: a lot of a lot of homeowners out there and their biggest asset is their house and so school finance is ontologically tied to the capitalization of their biggest asset. But the other horn of this ontology is the spiritual, and that is their own children and their own children’s experience and what their kids have. Not only what their kids have, but also like what kids have in general. There’s a very deep interest that people have in social reproduction, which is to maintain the continuity of what we do around here. Wherever that “here” is and whoever that “we” is, there are strong spiritual investments in the maintenance and the continuity of that. Schools articulate all these things very tightly together. 

They articulate a desire to maintain the continuity of what we do with the capitalization of your biggest asset. Local control is about controlling all of that, holding on to all of that and not letting it go. I tell my students, who are largely superintendents and principals and people who want to be educational leaders, people will go to these school board meetings and they’re sounding off in the comments, and you’re thinking to yourself, “all I need to do is approve a bond so that we can fix our roof. I don’t know why these people are screaming at me.” They’re screaming at you because what you’re talking about is a threat, potentially, to the capitalization of their most valuable asset and their spiritual commitment to what they think of as being the best for their kids and kids in general in the future. That’s why I use this line in the book. 

I think that this school finance is the sort of weakest link in the chain of racial capitalism in the US. When you hit this link, other things are gonna shake. When you move this piece in the Jenga board of the United States, other pieces are gonna shake. We saw that in the civil rights movement and anytime these boundaries get challenged, it’s like a third rail. It’s like a vulnerable underbelly to this whole structure and I think it’s a big shame that people don’t understand it. But also I can understand because that vulnerability would want to be protected by a sort of broad ruling class who wouldn’t want it to be different.

Scott Ferguson

So, let’s pivot to the bomb market. How does the educational wing of the bond market work and how is it structurally designed to fail?

David Backer

The municipal bond market’s like the most powerful thing people don’t know anything about. James Carvel very famously said that when he was a kid he wanted to be reincarnated as Babe Ruth or the Pope or the Dalai Lama and now that he got state power with Bill Clinton he was like “now I want to be reincarnated as the bond market because you can intimidate everyone.” The thing about this bond market is that it is unique in the world. There’s no other municipal bond. There are municipal bonds in the world, so far as I understand, and this is something I want to study more internationally, but so far as I understand there is no market like the United States municipal bond market. 

According to the most recent estimates I’ve seen, twenty-seven percent of that market is devoted to education, which is the plurality. It’s higher than the category of general purpose. This bond market is devoted in its plurality to educational purposes. Now that’s higher education and Pre-K through twelve.These markets are huge markets. Municipal bond market is a four trillion dollar market. It has 1.5 million issuers which dwarfs the corporate bond market exponentially in its size. Since the Erie Canal, municipalities and state governments have financed their infrastructure through this market in some form or another and it’s been configured and reconfigured in different ways. 

There’s no history of the school bond, I don’t even think there’s a history of the municipal bond in the United States, which there really should be, but there’s certainly no history of this school bond. This is a very old structure. It’s not neoliberal.  It is as old as the Erie Canal and then the competition between state governments in the sort of post-revolutionary period to build themselves up infrastructurally using foreign credit. A lot of times English credit. So you know, the country fights this whole revolution and then finds itself several decades later essentially indebted to the imperial body from which it separated. 

Scott Ferguson

That’s how postcoloniality rolls. 

David Backer

That’s right. That’s how it rolls. The first school bond that I have found in history is in Kentucky in 1837. It’s the earliest date that I’ve found that a school district went into debt that it had to pay back with interest. But you know, the first municipal bond dates back to about 1647 outside of Utrecht, when a dike froze over and the municipality needed to go to a businessman and say, “hey, can you lend us money with interest to fix this dike,” and he was like, “yeah, sure.” It’s still paying out to this day. There’s a ceremony there on the River Lek where they roll out this bond statement from the 1640s. So this is a very old situation and philosophically I want to say that the reason why we have this situation is because of the very fundamental temporal differences in kinds of expenditure. 

This is a problem that I think anyone who is interested in creative financing needs to contend with and contend with seriously. There are different kinds of expenditures. They’re typically called operating expenditures and capital expenditures. The operating expenditure is the sort of regular yearly — in the case of school districts, but for us as individuals could be monthly — charges that we just budget for. So we get income and then we have to pay our rent and we have to pay food bills and we have to pay this and that and that’s a regular thing. Then for firms and for governments, there’s salaries and benefits to pay out yearly. 

But the operating expenditure that is in that regular temporal rotation is very different from the irregular needs of infrastructure and facilities of all kinds. The word that’s used sometimes in the literature is lumpy because the pattern of the need for this kind of project, if you’re thinking about a trend line, there’s a sudden bump and then it goes down, it’s lumpy, because you need a lot of money and a lot of resources up front to be able to complete this project that you might not need to do again for a hundred years in the case of a school building or you know in the case of  cybersecurity infrastructure that you need to put in place like in the case of Los Angeles where they had multiple cybersecurity attacks and they had to take out bonds to be able to finance a cybersecurity system. 

Or, also in the case of Los Angeles, when your state law changes and the statute of limitations on being able to seek relief and damages from sexual predators and sexual  violence is extended, your school district suddenly now is on the hook for upwards of 250  claimants going back in time to be able to pay out the court cases, that’s a huge expense, right? That’s not in your operating expenditures and so in the case of the Los Angeles School District, which I just read about recently, they issued something called a judgment obligation bond or a JOB. A JOB is a bond that is a loan that is taken out to pay judgment to claimants. They had to take out this big long-term bond, but they needed short-term financing for this bond to be able to pay out to the claimants so they got a non-revolving credit agreement with the RBC, the Royal Bank of Canada, to provide short-term liquidity for a longer-term liquidity need for the sexual violence cases. I try to bring in as many cases as I can, but the capital expenditure is a temporal problem. 

It’s a metaphysical problem, which is that things happen at different rhythms. The rhythm of my need for paying rent is different from the rhythm of my need to fix my HVAC system and I knew this too when I owned, quote unquote, a house, that is to say the bank owned it and I was paying the mortgage. That was a whole education too, by the way. The temporality of these needs are irreducibly different and you need to be able to have a financing arrangement that will provide the resources necessary at the right time to satisfy them. 

So if you need to build more schools because everyone’s moving to your school district, like in the case in some places in North Carolina, people are flocking to these certain districts of North Carolina and Virginia too, and they have these needs because so many of their enrollments are actually increasing. They have to build more capacity. How are they going to do that? Now, the cocktail of local property tax, state sales tax, and federal income tax does not come in at the right rhythm. Those are for the operating expenditures. So, what do you do? And I know that in MMT it’s sort of a faux pas to liken this to the individual, but I’ll do it anyway because I think it fits within the context of subnational government. 

If you need to buy a house, quote unquote, or if you need to go to school, you need to pay tuition, or you want to get married, or you want to get a car. These are big capital intensive expenditures that you need to engage in. So how do you do it? Well, in the United States, typically you get a loan and the loan, in this case, the credit that is extended to you, is a solution for the temporal problem of the capital expense. When you have this lumpy need and you need capital up front that is not part of your regular operating needs then you need to be able to get that liquidity from somewhere. The municipal bond market has been the country’s solution to the temporal problem of the capital expense in terms of infrastructure and school infrastructure in particular for 200 years and counting. 

Though they treat this capital problem as, number one: a credit problem, you don’t have to treat it like that as you could treat it as a grant problem, right? You could just say, “oh, you need this? We’ll give it to you.” That’s one way you could solve this problem. That’s why I like talking about it this way. Not only do they treat it as a credit problem, they treat it as a private credit problem. Where they think of the state — the subnational governments — as being like private firms that need liquidity to be able to deal with their capital expenditures. A school district has its page on the Bloomberg terminal and it has its credit rating and it has its yield calculations and its deal structures and the financial consultants and the bond lawyers and all of this stuff. It’s a whole regime that is set up to be able to meet its capital expense needs, which has sort of called forth into being this regime that has held on in one way or another for so long, it’s even survived the most recent Trump budget bill. There were people who were advocating for a law that was put into place that really solidified this situation in the early 20th century, which was under the federal income tax law that exempts interest payments on municipal bonds from taxation.

So if I invest in a municipal bond and then the municipality pays me back with interest, I don’t have to get taxed on that. That is the country’s infrastructure policy. So school districts are essentially competing and they’re under a constant threat of getting their credit ratings reduced, even though ultimately debt service ends up being about eight to ten percent of their yearly budget, which by the way is a lot.The budget officials and the superintendents are nervous that any given movement, anything could threaten the credit rating on the municipal bond market, which would increase borrowing costs, increase taxes, decrease property values, decrease trust in the government and so I think the municipal bond market is, as I say in the book, this hidden force of educational injustice, because a lot of the reasons why a movement will go into a school board meeting and they’ll demand XYZ and then the superintendent and the school board members all look to the CFO or or the budget official or whoever it is and they say, “Can we do this?” He’ll say “no, the credit rating.”  

That one little moment that just feels like, when you hear it, if you don’t know what it means, it feels like nothing. It feels like air or cardboard, something very ethereal, two-dimensional. Both somehow normal and incomprehensible at the same time, and you just sort of go, “okay, fine, let it go.” These are the structures that inhibit change and it’s a very deep problem. It’s a very old problem. It’s such a problem, in fact, it reminds me of that line from the usual suspects, Keyser Söze, “the thing that the devil did was convince everyone he didn’t exist.” It reminds me a bit of that. So yeah, that’s the bond market.

Scott Ferguson

Well, thank you. Obviously, from our point of view, we would want to maximize public credit facilitation in the form of granting that wherein the lumpy temporal horizon of all provisioning would be for public purposes. It would take political contestation and analysis. It wouldn’t be easily solved but we wouldn’t be dealing with this kind of straitjacket, but what you do in the book is you offer both historical and some of your own more contemporary examples of different strategies to put pressure on, or to ameliorate, or to partially overcome some of these obstacles. Maybe we can begin to talk about some of those. I know there’s been legislation, there’s been movements. Where should we start?

David Backer

Yeah. Well, I’m a big believer in — and I think this must come from my reading of Althusser — how you have to take up and take on the terrain as you find it in order to get the transformation that you want. The arrangement of forces that are in front of you are the things that you have to work with to get to where you want to get to. I think some of the policies and tactics or arrangements that I’ve proposed start from that premise. It’s not like what Aaron Benanav is doing now, which is fascinating, which is his work on the multi-criterial economy and the new left review,  communist economics and all this. It’s not that. This is sort of like “here’s how it works, here’s what we could do from within this thing to take it up.” We have to take it up first and then you can take it on. It’s not as though there’s gonna be some kind of revolutionary moon landing that’s just gonna smash everything and then you get to build whatever you want afterwards. The policies I’ve come up with are in that context. 

The first thing I always start with, because it still exists, are the financial disparities programs in the Twin Cities. This is a tax-based revenue sharing program that condenses the disparities between municipalities with differing revenue. It was created by a very plucky former bond salesman turned civil servant in Minnesota. He brought the idea in a briefcase to a pancake house in a meeting in 1968. The story of this program is one that I love telling, but basically what it does is it creates a regional sharing pool and a percentage of the growth in municipal tax bases from year to year — 40% — is put into a pot and then redistributed according to the changing revenues of the different municipalities, such that if you happen to have a bad year or your shopping mall closes down or your real estate, and properties go down, what you have is a pool at the regional level that will be able to compensate a little bit for it. The reason why this thing is kind of magical is it passed by like a single vote in 1971. It’s called the Minnesota Miracle and they called it Municipal Socialism and the like. But it’s decentralized collectivization at the regional level from within this system that we have and I think the more that we can talk about that kind of arrangement and try to adapt it for the different places and regions that we have in the country, the better. 

Which is why, in these different political projects I’ve been involved with, I always come in as this very specialized person to talk about school finance. But in the Green New Deal for Schools legislation that Jamaal Bowman introduced during that very exciting period between 2021 and 2022 in that budget reconciliation process. I consulted on  the white paper that the legislation was written around and one of my little suggestions was to create equity grants that incentivize tax-based sharing across racial and class lines, such that the federal government would be able to incentivize places that have this kind of tax-based sharing with further rewards, granting grants and loans for having that in place. 

Sarah Quinn in her book, American Bonds — that’s a great book too — provides a sort of a sociological history of the bond market in the US. Her finding is, essentially, that the way that you govern federally is through credit. The way to govern in a way decentralized in federalism through credit is to essentially find ways to try to get states and municipalities to do what you want them to do by making it easier for them to borrow. I think trying to encourage places to adopt fiscal disparities legislation like that and even in new and expanded ways, like maybe increase that 40% number. Maybe also do debt sharing, you know, which they don’t do in the Twin Cities. But what if what if you could do debt sharing in addition to tax-based sharing? Because there’s still actually a big difference in those municipalities and the Twin Cities in terms of their death service obligations. Okay, so that’s one thing that I like. 

Another thing that I like, which doesn’t exist anymore, but briefly did, was Vermont’s Act 60 in 1998. That policy is sort of a state level policy. Given the history, it’s sort of a throwback to the days when the state government would collect that property tax. But the state government in Vermont in the 90s didn’t collect the property tax and redistribute it. They did something even a bit smarter, dialectically. They took up and took on this system of local property taxation. Essentially, after there was a lawsuit that said the state was out of compliance with its education clause and its constitution, which is the legacy of the civil rights movement, which are still going today, these state court cases you sometimes read about, how the state is found to be out of compliance with its own constitution. 

That was the civil rights strategy after they lost at the Supreme Court in the 1970s, they had to bring it to every single state. The ways in which education funding has been compensated for across disparity has largely come from the yeoman’s work of lawyers on the ground over periods of decades going with the the the slow machinations of the repressive apparatus trying to get these judges to say that the government’s out of compliance with its constitution, which then pressures the governor and the state legislature to do something about it. There’s never any guarantee that they’re gonna do something about it, but like in Pennsylvania recently, Shapiro’s answer in 2024 to the Supreme Court case victory the previous year was to say, “oh, we’ll just publicly fund private schools more with vouchers.” 

In Vermont they came up with, what I think, is the best system which does the following. We talked about mill rates before, right? Now, the big problem is that some municipalities have a lot of municipal revenue and others don’t. Those municipalities that have a lot of revenue can set their mill rate really low and get a lot. Whereas the other ones can’t, the super regression, right? This policy took that up and took it on. What it said was the state is going to set a high minimum threshold for the mill rate across the board, relatively speaking. So every district has to have a high floor. You can’t just tax really low to get a lot anymore. But also for the districts that don’t have a lot, they only have to tax that level, they don’t have to go much beyond that. So for them it’s a low floor actually. But combine that high floor with a low ceiling for per pupil expenditure, which means that the state determines what the adequate per pupil expenditure is for students in your school district. So you can’t just be spending lavishly on your rich kids anymore. 

Scott Ferguson

No more observatories? 

David Backer

No more natatoriums and ceramic studios and the like. Actually, no, to educate your kids, you just need this and anything beyond that low ceiling goes to the state and is redistributed to the districts with the low municipal revenue. It really put the squeeze on the bourgeoisie there. Because it really puts the squeeze on the property owners with the high property values and redistributes it from within the system of taxation. It only existed for a couple years. The author, John Irving, was so upset by this system that he started his own private school for his kids because he didn’t want them to have trailer park envy, which is a quotation. I think he later felt bad about that, but every time I see John Irving I’m like “ugh.” 

Howard Dean, in the next cycle’s governor’s election, came out against this system. Even though it was actually yielding tons of great results, test scores were going up,  the disparities were being compensated for. In Vermont, the big problem was that you had wealthy ski towns where there were ski slopes and they had a lot of municipal revenue and then very poor farming towns that didn’t have the same property that they could get taxed. The research that I’ve read has shown that it was quite successful. But then they killed it and the conservative won the next governor’s race, basically a referendum on that policy, which the regional ruling class in Vermont came out in force against.  

One of the things that they did was that they started their own network of private donations for their local public schools, such that they went door to door and they asked people to make donations to this fund. The fund would go directly into the school budget, but it was not subject to the state’s limits of Act 60. So they created their own private funding streams for their public schools in order to circumvent this policy. They’ll go to any lengths to not redistribute so that was ended but I think that model creates this kind of imagination that we can work with where I really think it took up and took on the system. 

Another thing I bring up, which I think people are starting to disagree with me about, is Richard Nixon’s idea for a value added tax to fund schools. I just think that’s a cool story, but it’s also a way of thinking about how it might be different. I think maybe having a value-added tax at different levels of production rather than sales taxes, which are excise taxes, even though VATs sometimes happen at the point of sale, but I think that’s still an interesting story that gets us thinking creatively. When it comes to the bond market, there haven’t been a whole lot of alternatives that have existed in history. So we don’t have a lot to work with. I don’t talk about it in the book, but the Reconstruction Finance Corporation is definitely something to look at. Although some people argue it’s just state capitalism. 

James Olson in his history of the New Deal says that was saving capitalism. That informs people down the line, like Saule Omarova and the National Investment Authority, which would have a national investment bank, but I still think that’s a good idea so I try to talk that up as a solution. The Green New Deal for Schools legislation is another great resource. It provides just tons of grants and it expands our understanding from physical infrastructure to social infrastructure. So it starts to include labor costs in the costs of having functional buildings. The National Investment Authority has essentially found a third pillar of the federal financing apparatus. There’d be the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and then this investment authority. 

From my understanding of it, the risk that’s created from the temporality of the lumpy capital needs across the spectrum of society, because there’s a risk inherent in that because you need to be able to front the capital to be able to pay for that but where’s that capital gonna come from and is it going to be able to be paid back? The more you pool that risk, the better. The National Investment Authority pools it at the federal level. Anytime you need a project, they’re going to deal with the financing, the borrowing, and the lending, and then there’ll be better technical service, pay as you go grants, low-cost grants, long-term grants that finance this stuff. My little contribution to this that I go around talking about a lot involves pensions. The whole last book, the last part of my book, is about pensions because I also think there’s a lot of stuff about school finance that’s taken up by pensions. 

Pensions are huge pools of capital and they serve a very important purpose of meeting the social risk of aging. There’s traditions that think about the pensions that actually have the pensions as the huge public pools of capital for the public’s infrastructure. There’s a story from Singapore where the pensions got involved in the mortgage business to be able to increase birth rates in the country. The pension is now underwriting mortgages and what did the pension decide to do? It started to host singles dating nights so that people could meet each other, have babies, and then buy houses and take out mortgages from the pension. The pension is a great big pool of the public’s money that’s meant to meet the risk of aging and death, which is essentially our encounter with death, writ finance. We can use our resources that we’ve built up to meet death, to fund our life. 

The sort of policy that I like to recommend it comes from something called fiscal mutualism, which is, in the case of schools, and I think it can be in the case of housing or water or other things it could be used similarly, but in the case of schools, the historians Mike Glass — who I talked about before — and Sean Vanatta — whose work on pensions is very good — they found that the teacher’s pension in New York was historically 10% invested in New York school bonds. They named this approach to pension investment, fiscal mutualism, which is the usage of the public’s money for the public’s infrastructure. If you position the pensions in a stronger way against the more traditional underwriters in the bond market, who are the underwriters? Who are the ones that confront that capital immediately? The big private banks and the big investment banks. They’re the ones that have all that capital and they’re the go-betweens between the bondholders and the municipalities and the borrowers.

If you can challenge and take up and take on those underwriters by exerting the force of the pension and trying to have a sort of more just usage of the public’s money, you can actually do that at the subnational level without relying on the federal government at all. Which is why I sort of talk about it more and more because of the fascism that we have. Like in the case of New York City, I’ve been pitching around the idea that the teacher’s retirement system could be an underwriter along with the green banks, de-risking school bonds that would fund green school infrastructure. I call that green fiscal mutualism, where the green bank becomes a dialectically very exciting institution. 

I think a lot of people on the left hear me talk about this stuff and they’re like, “what? Like that’s still capitalism.” I’m like, “well, I mean everything’s dialectical.” What the Green Bank does in my understanding is it’s a reverse charter school. So whereas the charter school is taking public money and putting it in the private sphere for the private provisioning of a public good, the Green Bank is actually wielding private money for the public good and funneling money from the private into the public for the public. I think if you could have green banks de-risking pension purchases, school bonds, then you’d be meeting this climate issue because school buildings emit a ton of carbon but school buildings have also been totally underfunded historically and they’re not safe and they’re not healthy. 

So these are some of the policies I like, some of the things some of the things Dave likes. The other last thing I’ll mention, which I haven’t mentioned in other places, but I hope people pick up on it in the book, is what the school district of Tredyffrin/Easttown, Pennsylvania did in the early 20th century. You had two municipalities: one predominantly white and the other predominantly black. They entered into a jointure to build an integrated high school in 1912. It survived multiple attempts at segregation but these communities got together across race and class lines and said, “we’re going to invest in one another. We’re going to take on this risk together through the jointure and we’re going to build this high school and we’re gonna take on this bond.” It’s a debt that they took on, but they took it on together across these very potent lines of the fortresses. When I tell people like, “well, what if you got what if you got people together across the school district lines in your region and said, let’s do jointures all together to finance each other’s infrastructure?” That would cause riots, right? The wealthy people don’t want to be financing the infrastructure for the non wealthy people that are even their neighbors. They might even be the same sports team fans. In the jointure, I think there’s a lot of possibility.

Billy Saas

Yeah, so this book’s coming out December 2nd, one day after the podcast. So listeners, go grab a copy. But there’s obviously a lot going on. I imagine some of this was on the horizon as you were putting finishing touches on it and in the introduction you addressed the second Trump term.  Also we have what you mentioned as the fortuitousness of your move to New York and, of course, you got Zoran Mamdani elected by moving there.

David Backer

I hate how my retelling of it lends itself to that.

Billy Saas

No, no, I think it’s awesome. It’s good storytelling. We like a little magical realism now and then. Obviously, it wasn’t just the Mandoni campaign. There were a series of wins across the Democratic Party and some are calling it-

David Backer

Katie Wilson in Seattle too.

Billy Saas

Right, right. Some are more exciting than others. Katie Wilson, Mamdani and then, you know, some former CIA people as well. Some are calling it a blue wave and we’ve heard it said that education — and I guess we should shout out Jennifer Berkshire’s post.

David Backer

Which everyone should read. Her substack is called “The Education Wars.” She wrote another book with Jack Schneider called The Wolf at the Schoolhouse Store. She’s great.

Billy Saas

Absolutely. Yeah, so a blog post recently or a substack post basically crediting education with this recent blue wave win. We wanted to just close out by letting you offer your two cents on that.

David Backer

Yeah. Well, I tend to agree with Jennifer. What Jennifer’s picking up on is the fact that this rush on the right to dismantle the public school system as I’ve described it is a threat to the local control that I described. These districts, and particularly in the wealthy areas, predominantly white areas, but not all white, but predominantly, have done generations of work to fortify their worlds, their schools. The fortresses are activated. The fortresses are there. The Trump administration and the voucher movement are coming for those fortress walls. They’re coming for the charter schools. People in these rural areas where there are no private schools want their public schools. They don’t want them to go away and these governments, in their rush to appease the leader, are dismantling the systems that their own constituencies hold very dear. I think she’s picking up on that. 

She has an ear to the ground across the country. I would just say that, if there was anything I was gonna add to that, we’re in a time of great uncertainty. It’s what Adam Tooze calls the polycrisis. While I don’t entirely agree with his conception of it, I do think that his remarks in a lecture last year are helpful, in that, all previous theorizations and concepts come from times of lower parts per million carbon in the atmosphere. Even the very idea that the new is struggling to be born while the old is dying, that idea is too optimistic for what we’re undergoing right now. You know, the time is greatly uncertain. It is very unstable. There are dislocations happening everywhere. I feel like this system that we’ve been talking about is some version of an ancien regime, thinking about the history of revolutions, like Mike Duncan’s podcast. 

We’re getting to that point where this thing is shaking and it’s definitely falling apart. What that presents is a danger and an opportunity. There’s also these other forces that we have to account for in that instability, in terms of inflation, supply shock, pandemic shock, artificial intelligence. These are exciting times. “May you live in exciting times.” The thing is, we have to get together, we have to understand the terrain, and we have to figure out what policies we want when our turn comes to try to steer the chaotic ship through the chaotic sea. I think it’s not just that education will sort of underwrite a blue wave, but actually the waves themselves are very chaotic and the old color schemes are all over the place. 

Zoran getting elected, and Katie Wilson and all these people doing things that you could never have imagined are all on the bingo card. The things that are not on your bingo card are on the bingo card. It’s all the more important to study this stuff very carefully to figure out what we can do to transform the structure and take advantage of the moment.

Scott Ferguson

Well, Dave Backer, thanks so much for joining us. Everybody go out and get the book As Public as Possible:Radical Finance for America’s Public Schools.

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

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The Utopia of Refusal: David Graeber, Debt & the Left Monetary Imagination

by Will Beaman & Scott Ferguson

Note: David Graeber leaves behind a rich and complex body of work that remains influential for leftist thought and practice. Since his passing in 2020, however, most assessments of his work have been strongly affirmative and hence often one-sided. What follows is a more critical engagement, offered in the spirit of generative dialogue. We honor Graeber’s writings as indispensable for denaturalizing money and obligation and for catalyzing new forms of organizing from Occupy Wall Street onward. However, we also argue that some of Graeber’s basic assumptions about money and public provisioning limit what the left can imagine and accomplish.

David Graeber has become a default point of reference for the contemporary left. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) is the book to cite when refuting the common myth that money originates in barter, demonstrating that money instead begins as credit, and insisting that obligations are made rather than found. It was central to Occupy Wall Street’s critique of finance and has echoed through subsequent experiments in populist coalition politics. For readers interested in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), Graeber often appears as the deep anthropological backing for the claim that money is not a scarce resource but a boundless accounting construction.

These arguments have done a great deal to structure how critical monetary discourse has been conducted over the past decade and a half. At the same time, Graeber’s framework places real limits on what can be imagined about monetary institutions. Debt: The First 5,000 Years, The Utopia of Rules (2015), and essays on what Graeber calls “creative refusal” do not simply de-naturalize money. They also embed money and bureaucracy in a broader picture in which social life is fundamentally organized as debt and guilt, and in which the highest political value is the capacity to say no—to refuse, to exit, to remain outside enclosing forms.

For Money on the Left’s Democratic Public Finance (DPF) paradigm—which seeks to understand money and accounting as instruments of coordination rather than exclusively as moral traps—this picture becomes a ceiling. If the whole system is a bureaucracy of made-up debts and accusations, then democratic action appears mainly as refusal and jubilee: organizing as debtors, confronting creditors, wiping the slate clean. What falls out of view is the possibility that public credit need not be organized primarily as repayable, quantified monetary debt at all—that obligations can be framed instead as ongoing, qualitative commitments and guarantees—and that democratic participation might mean designing public accounting and coordination on the front end, rather than periodically clearing it on the back.

The result is a tension at the heart of contemporary left monetary imagination: between a debt-centered horizon that privileges refusal and cancellation, and a credit-centered horizon that foregrounds the contested design of public obligations themselves. The present analysis of Graeber’s work points toward the second horizon, exploring what becomes possible once money is approached as public credit to be redesigned, rather than merely as debt to be discharged.

Baseline communism and the fall into form

Graeber’s early value theory is more open-ended than his mature work, but it already carries some of the limits that later come to the fore. In Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, for example, he suggests that cultures can be approached as “moral projects”: different ways of imagining what life ought to be like, and of organizing which actions count as important or worthwhile. He takes his subtitle from Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert’s remark that society “pays itself in the counterfeit coin of its dreams,” using rituals, festivals, and collective action as examples of how people collectively stage and test what they value. The phrase “counterfeit coin” is meant to signal unreality. Yet what is being downgraded as “counterfeit” here is precisely the kind of shared credit and obligation that, according to DPF, organizes monetary life—what we have elsewhere called the “unofficial” life of public money. In any case, even in this more open-ended register, value still comes to look like a single, univocal horizon that individuals either inhabit or resist. It appears as a positive proposition that can be embraced or refused, rather than as a reversible, revisable space of co-design in which the terms themselves are continuously up for negotiation. The subtle, reflexive ways people name, test, and rework what counts—through shifting idioms, partial identifications, and experimental roles—slip into the background. Value appears as a common script more than as an enduring process of collective rewriting.

In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber wields this language to construct a critical genealogy of money qua obligation. Communism, exchange, and hierarchy are cast as three recurrent moral principles exhibited by humankind. “Baseline communism” is his term for the raw material of social life: a taken-for-granted recognition of mutual dependence that undergirds social peace, where some things are simply shared and no one keeps accounts. “Everyday communism” names the dense mesh of practices that grow from that ground—sharing tools, feeding guests, helping friends move, relying on coworkers or kin without calculating exact returns. Exchange, by contrast, codifies equivalence. Worse, hierarchy organizes command and deference. Debt appears at the intersection of exchange and hierarchy, where quantified obligations are backed by force and moralized as guilt.

From these premises, money is described as emerging first as credit, with coinage arriving relatively late. From here, Graeber shows that many of the obligations that come to be called “debts” are in fact historical artifacts tied to conquest, punishment, and administration. Alongside this genealogy, Debt offers a minimalist reassurance: however bad institutions become, some version of the ethic “from each according to ability, to each according to need” will persist in the background as everyday communism.

With this, Graeber not only frames communism as a single, universal principle that precedes and underlies all of its concrete instances; he also curiously renders it exclusive, no matter how intermixed with exchange and hierarchy. On such a view, the main question becomes: Who is entitled to communistic treatment? And by extension: Who is to be consigned to exchange and hierarchy? What slips out of view are the differentiated codes, institutions, and expectations that make those situations non-equivalent in the first place—the ways “help,” “sharing,” or “support” are patterned and contested differently across workplaces, households, friendships, and states. The ideal of neighborly care in the mid-century American suburb, for instance—unlocked doors on Nantucket Island—has been extensively shown by feminist media history and queer theory to be modeled and franchised rather than given, through television, advertising, and domestic ideology (see, for instance, Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV or Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s “Sex in Public”). Approached from this angle, “everyday communism” looks less like a self-standing, homogeneous category that evades exchange and hierarchy than historically specific arrangements already organized by law, infrastructure, and forms of accounting.

Yet another exemplary scene that expresses everyday communism betrays the limits of everyday communism as a minimal ethic. One person is drowning, Graeber tells us, while another stands on shore with the ability to help them. The question is whether the person on the shore will answer such an obvious moral demand, given that the other’s need is grave and the cost to oneself is small. The scene is designed to appear self-evident, a quotidian moral dilemma that anyone might encounter. Its structure, however, conforms to an individualized cost–benefit calculation. What is left unexamined in this scene are the infrastructures and histories that make such an encounter possible at all: how people come to occupy these positions, who is equipped to help, whose needs are routinely visible, and whose costs are routinely deemed negligible. It functions, in this sense, as a benevolent version of the methodological individualism found in the classic trolley problem—a stylized scenario that in game theory isolates individuals from history and social structure. In appealing to such scenarios, Graeber reduces everyday ethics to one person weighing a grave need against a modest cost in the moment, while bracketing the intertemporal provisioning that produces both the danger and the capacity to respond. Baseline or everyday communism here comes across as a primordial, pre-coordinative ethic—an encounter between persons removed from institutional or public timetables—rather than as something that is itself shaped by perpetual arrangements of care, coercion, and provision.

This way of imagining a pre-coordinated baseline also shapes how ethics appears in Graeber’s project. On one side, ethics often appears as a ruse: a moral technology that fabricates guilty, indebted subjects and licenses punishment under the guise of obligation. Debt is not a malleable arrangement; it is a way of producing ethical subjects who internalize blame. On the other side, communism in this minimal sense functions as a kind of pre-political kernel of non-reciprocal kindness: the spontaneous decision to help when another’s need is pressing and one’s own cost is modest. Ethics, on this model, oscillates between an ideological trap and a minimal and tacitly private kindness that lives before or outside institutions.

From the perspective of DPF, Graeber casts ethics in an austere register with little room for scale. If moral claims that coordinate institutions are primarily techniques of capture, and if the only “good” ethical practice is a localized, pre-coordinative generosity, then large monetary and bureaucratic systems tend to appear mainly as fields of power to be refused or escaped, rather than as terrains where more accountable forms of obligation might be designed. Baseline communism, in other words, affirms that care is constitutive, but it does so in a way that leans toward institutional unaccountability: it holds the minimal ethic of help outside the very infrastructures through which help is necessarily organized and provisioned.

Bureaucracy, abstraction, and the utopia of refusal

The Utopia of Rules extends this pattern from money to bureaucracy as such. Graeber describes an “age of total bureaucratization” in which rule-bound procedures pervade public and private life. Bureaucracies, he argues, are sustained by fantasies of rationality and fairness that are never fully realized. They produce “dead zones of the imagination”: situations in which following rules replaces attempts to understand particular people or cases, and where the ultimate guarantor of compliance is the threat of violence.

Here, too, bureaucracy (and money) are conceived less as mundane infrastructures than as scenes of fall. Everyday cooperation and baseline communism form the lower, more concrete stratum of social life. Bureaucratic and monetary forms occupy a higher, more abstract level where creativity is frozen into stupid games. Rules no longer feel like collective instruments but like external impositions. The higher one climbs this implicit ladder of abstraction, the less room there appears to be for playfulness, experimentation or non-identity.

By later works, Graeber develops a politics that amounts to what we call a utopia of refusal. One finds this utopia in his late essays on “creative refusal.” It also structures the three “basic freedoms” articulated in The Dawn of Everything: to move away, to disobey, and to reconfigure social arrangements. Political creativity is anchored at the edges of institutions, in the capacity to say no or step aside. The relation to social form is either compliance or exit.

This fits comfortably with a broader post-structuralist inheritance. Much post-structuralist theory, drawing explicitly or implicitly on Nietzsche, embraces a fantasy of externality or exception, even when explicitly disavowing sovereign figures or variously insisting that power is immanent, diffuse, and ineluctable. Graeber’s own treatment of Nietzsche in Debt is sharply critical. He rejects Nietzsche’s claim that the invention of debt represents an originary cruelty that founds our humanity. Instead, he presents Nietzsche’s primordial debt story as an ahistorical fantasy that reveals how a world organized through exchange is justified, not as a serious account of human origins. Still, when it comes to theorizing social form, Graeber retains impulses inherent in Nietzsche’s framing. Once obligations are quantified and formalized, Graeber contends, they necessarily belong to the logic of Schuld—a self-exculpatory fiction that ties calculation to guilt. Thus the main political problem becomes how to negate or escape fictions of guilt, rather than how to rework the media of obligation as ongoing forms of coordination.

Our disagreement with Graeber is not meant to litigate whether communities should be able to refuse. Refusal is indispensable—full stop. Our concern, rather, pertains to the ground of that refusal and what political possibilities follow from it. In Graeber’s vision, durable interdependence is legitimate only insofar as it can be peeled back to a baseline of externality; once one has walked away, the moral scene is imagined to be free of social forms of obligation. For DPF, by contrast, politics is grounded in institutional interdependence and the cyclicality of its mediating forms. Social life is already coordinated through large-scale institutions that provision water, wages, care, housing, and time. Refusals matter, but they are gestures within a world coordinated long before any individual arrives. They generate new responsibilities rather than suspending responsibility altogether: someone has to take up work that has been refused, institutions have to be reconfigured, relations have to be repaired. 

To insist on the priority of such questions is not to revert to an ethic of Schuld, as if refusal were itself a kind of violence that must be punished; it is to acknowledge that refusal, too, leaves people entangled, and therefore requires mediated care and empowerment both for those who refuse and for those who live with its aftermath. In a framework that regards coordination as suspect, any attempt to institutionalize those mediating responsibilities—a right to a job, or any other standing institution of guaranteed support—can only appear as make-work bureaucracy, an arrangement that keeps people busy inside an apparatus that ought, on some level, not to exist.

Graeber’s preference for grounding democratic practices in externalizing refusals becomes a problem for a politics that seeks to reclaim monetary and bureaucratic institutions as media of public coordination. If the domain in which obligations are formally recorded and enforced is structurally a “dead zone,” then public money and public accounting can only be trusted insofar as they are kept at arm’s length. These forms can be exposed as fictive or denounced as violent, but they are rarely seen as spaces where new, more capacious patterns of support and recognition might be staged.

Jubilee as redesign, coordination as fiction

The privileged role of debt jubilees in Graeber’s imagination makes the limitations of his program even clearer. If, for Graeber, money is always a fictitious debt based on fabricated charges of guilt and sin, then the paradigmatic emancipatory act becomes the jubilee: a sweeping cancellation that wipes the slate clean. Rolling Jubilee, debt strikes, and jubilees of various other kinds take center stage as a central horizon of contestation. Redesign is figured, if at all, as periodic amnesty. As a result, democratic control over social form culminates in the erasure of obligations, rather than the reconstruction of how they come into being. 

That binary—between a world organized as debt and the moment when debts are forgiven—misses something crucial for monetary politics. It confronts public credit as if it has to take the form of quantified, enforceable monetary debt in the first place. Obligation is assumed to be inherently accusatory, so justice can only arrive belatedly, on the back end, as cancellation. Democratic participation in public accounting is confined to the role of the cleanser. Democracy arrives after the fact to denounce and erase. It never participates in initially designing the qualitative credits, guarantees, and obligations that shape life chances in the first place. Coordination is declared a fiction, and “nature”—or informal communism—is expected to heal once the ledgers are burned.

By contrast, DPF begins from credit as coordination. Public credit is how a polity authorizes projects, backs institutions, and recognizes work over time. This perspective agrees that debts are made, not found; that they can be cruel; and that cancellation can be necessary. But it refuses to let jubilee exhaust the imagination of change. The more basic question becomes how to build and revise public credit systems so that fewer life-sustaining activities show up as “debts” at all. The aim, in other words, is to transform more and more of activities of care into ongoing, unconditional supports and rights.

From this standpoint, the crucial distinction is not between debt and gift, any more than between spontaneous communism and carceral abstraction. Instead, it is between accepting money primarily as a moral technology of guilt and discharge, and politicizing money as a public instrument for organizing capacities over time. The former naturally lends itself to a politics of refusal and periodic cancellation: waiting until the system becomes intolerable, then wiping away its records. The latter demands a different set of questions. Which institutions get to issue and record claims? How inclusive and revisable are their categories? How can extant commitments be escalated, contested, or amended? And how do our infrastructures coordinate across scales—from city budgets and public banks to unions, schools, clinics, and political campaigns?

Graeber’s work has done a great deal to denaturalize money and debt, as well as to expose the brutality of creditor morality. But if the jubilee is taken as the last word, it cuts off the very terrain where a democratic politics of money has to operate.

The debt imaginary clips our collective wings

Reckoning with the limits of jubilee politics becomes unavoidable when left economic discourse turns from critique to governance. Recent commentary surrounding Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York offers a striking example. For perhaps the first time in decades, a broad left audience is being asked to think about how a self-identified socialist should govern a major city, not just how to win one. Yet even in this ostensibly new terrain, the debt-centered framing quietly structures what counts as fiscal “realism.”

Three widely circulated pieces exemplify the problems with this approach: (1) the Debt Collective’s Substack post in In the Red; (2) a Jacobin article by Nathan Gusdorf; and (3) a Dissent essay by J. W. Mason.

The Debt Collective piece, “Zohran Won Main Street—Now He Must Face Wall Street,” opens with genuine enthusiasm about Mamdani’s victory, then pivots quickly to a central lesson: the real challenge is not policy vision but debt. Because cities “cannot print their own dollars,” they are likened to households that must borrow for anything beyond current revenue. New York’s dependence on the municipal bond market is construed as a “structural veto” held by Wall Street: before tax revenue can fund rent control, free transit, or childcare, it must first service bondholders. The article calls this a form of racialized extraction and urges Mamdani to align with a powerful debtors’ movement that can negotiate and cancel unjust obligations. The horizon of democratic agency is clear: organize as debtors to confront Wall Street and push for cancellation.

Nathan Gusdorf’s “Mayor Mamdani’s Budget Can Add Up” in Jacobin combines cautious optimism with a similar constraint story. Mamdani faces “real fiscal constraints — but also real opportunities.” New York is said to have a strong tax base and room for modest reforms, but state and local budgets are described as arenas where a “limited amount of revenue has to be divided up,” in contrast to the federal government’s deficit capacity. Gusdorf emphasizes legal balanced-budget rules and the risk of “real fiscal crises” if revenues fall short. Bond markets and state law appear as hard parameters; the responsible socialist mayor is encouraged to raise taxes on the rich, find efficiencies, and work within these limits. The tone is constructive, but the assumptions are all-too familiar: at the municipal level, money is a scarce fund to be carefully allocated, with borrowing tightly bounded by what markets will accept.

J. W. Mason’s Dissent essay, “What Can Zohran Accomplish?,” proceeds from the explicit premise that MMT cannot help. At the federal level, he writes, leftists who follow MMT are right that tax revenue and bond markets “should not be seen as constraints”; spending is a political question. Unfortunately, Mason reveals, “This is not the case at the city level.” New York cannot raise most taxes without state approval, cannot normally borrow for operating expenses, and must treat the level of debt acceptable to bond markets as a “genuine concern.” “At the city level,” he concludes, “‘how are you going to pay for that?’ is a question that has to be answered.” Municipal government is cast as a “creature of the state,” poorly suited to expand the public sector. For this reason, all major ambitions must ultimately defer to Albany and the markets, where tolerance for big ticket items remains forever uncertain.

Taken individually, each piece reads as a sober reality check for an excited left public. None explicitly disavows Mamdani’s agenda. All three acknowledge real legal and political obstacles. Read together, however, they function less as a vibrant debate than a set of tropes: a chorus of left economic expertise offering the same basic lesson in slightly different keys. Cities are debtors. Bond markets and state law are unsurpassable obstacles. Money at the municipal level is a latticework of obligations that are owed outward, not a field of credit that can be restructured from within. Readers are not invited to see the city’s fiscal politics as fundamentally contestable. Instead, public finance is staged as the shared baseline from which any and all “serious” conversations must proceed.

What is easy to miss in this emerging genre is that its alleged baseline is itself an artifact of an economic imaginary that, like Graeber, reduces money to quantified debt. In this imaginary, ethics means either repaying external obligations, or refusing them outright through debtor movements and jubilees. Governance, in this picture, demands either managing austerity responsibly or helping to organize refusals. Any attempt to adopt municipal bonds, public banks, or complementary currencies as positive instruments of democratic coordination starts to look naive or even dangerous. This is because such pro-active monetary politics seem to blur a line that inheritors of Graeber’s program wish to maintain. Informal care and struggle count as “real” politics, whereas formal public accounting belongs to the fallen realm of Schuld.

Meanwhile, this chorus conceals the genuine challenge Mamdani’s win presents. For too long, the U.S. left has taken for granted that real politics happens in movements and oppositional parties, while governance is what the state does afterward. Budgets, bond ordinances, and credit ratings belong to a later, compromised stage, or to a distant future when the left finally takes power. The Mamdani moment unsettles this habit of thinking. It forces the question of how to govern while struggling. It requires using existing fiscal tools to build new forms of support and capacity, rather than accepting those tools as fixed constraints. The convergence of the Debt Collective, Jacobin, and Dissent around debt, limits, and back-end jubilees can be read, in this sense, as a symptomatic recoil: an aversion to considering governance as a present-tense reality within a framework that tends to defer real politics to refusal and rupture.

What disappears in this chorus is precisely the terrain that DPF seeks to name. In the DPF paradigm, money is public credit in a strong sense: public institutions at every scale are already issuing and receiving promises that can be redesigned. The question is not simply how much New York can “prudently” borrow from Wall Street, but rather how the city’s own credit instruments can be reframed and rerouted as tools of democratic coordination.

From the standpoint of DPF, the immediate challenges look different:

  • not only to resist Wall Street’s structural veto, but also to reframe New York’s bonds as instruments that mobilize unions, pensions, and residents around shared projects;
  • not only to avoid borrowing, but also to build complementary currencies, public payment systems, and institutional “swap lines” between schools, clinics, unions, and campaigns that expand the field of receivability;
  • not only to determine extant constraints, but also to openly contest the inherited design choices that organize fiscal and legal limitations;
  • not only to resist capital and its vested interests, but also to organize coalitions that experiment with different ways of insulating essential services from federal sabotage and punishing rating agencies.

In the end, the imaginary of debt popularized by Graeber and amplified by today’s chorus of left experts threatens to clip our collective wings before we have left the ground. Conspicuously, the primal scenes of this imaginary are always elsewhere—at the still-unattainable heights of power, in the origins of the creditor’s encounter with the debtor, or in dramatic moments of refusal and jubilee. The generative infrastructural work of writing budgets (and writing about them), designing bond programs, creating complementary currencies, and revising accounting categories appears as naïve at best or collaborationist at worst.

Beyond refusal

DPF does not deny that debt can be cruel or that cancellation is often necessary. It simply refuses to let such scenarios exhaust the scope of left politics. Governance is not what comes after the real struggle is over. It is one of the main arenas in which struggles over what will count, quite literally, as a public obligation actually take place.

Within the DPF framework, the politics of refusal can be creatively transvalued. That is, we can redirect refusal to target the underlying legal architecture that naturalizes scarcity in the first place—what we describe as a “fourth area” of intervention. Rather than merely canceling particular debts or rejecting coordination altogether, this fourth area loudly repudiates the deep rules that restrict the powers of monetary creation to the federal government, while casting sub-federal entities as mere debtors. The point is to contest specific budget priorities in ways that simultaneously call out and labor to change the economic playing field itself. For example, at the same time as we work to advance Mamdani’s budget priorities, we can press at the federal level to amend the Constitution, extending the finance franchise to cities and states that have been denied monetary powers. 

Proposals like “Blue Bonds”—a Money on the Left initiative to politicize state bond issuance as public credit for democratic investment—often trigger familiar worries that “we” will simply be on the hook for more debt. It is striking that, from a horizon shaped by debt and jubilee, this kind of redesign can appear too risky or unrealistic, while large-scale debt cancellation is held out as the natural outer limit of the left’s political imagination. Why is it easier to picture ceremonially erasing all debts than to envision institutionally reclassifying them? Why merely work toward punctual cleansing when we can wholly rewrite certain obligations as public assets and guarantees? 

Many readers influenced by Graeber’s work, despite insisting on the fictive character of money and law, end up acquiescing to legal categories and balance-sheet positions as if they had only one possible meaning. Either we live inside the iron cage of debtor obligations, or we abolish it in a moment of jubilee. According to DPF, refusal calls for a very different strategy: make the existing playing field non-obligatory, so that more capacious arrangements of public credit can be built in its place.

This requires a different image of obligation, and of money. Instead of treating obligation only as quantified, enforceable debt to be discharged or forgiven, we can approach it as public credit: authorized capacity to coordinate work, infrastructure, and care over time. As a result, we avoid conflating ethics with a biopolitical ruse or a fleeting, pre-institutional kindness. Ethics involves the perpetual work of designing and contesting the fiscal and accounting forms that decide whose needs are seen, whose obligations are articulated, whose costs are counted, and whose futures are backed.

Graeber’s critique of debt and bureaucracy remains indispensable for anyone trying to build a more just monetary order. We argue not for setting his work aside, but rather for recognizing where its utopia of refusal leads to dead ends. The time has come to take up the emphatically political task of remaking credit systems as sites of democratic experimentation, obligation, and support. Graeber’s work can surely guide us, but it can only take us so far.

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Beyond Loans: The Public Grant-Making Bank 

By the Money on the Left Editorial Collective

Public banking has been gaining traction for years, driven by a growing recognition that our current financial system often fails to serve the public good. The Bank of North Dakota has operated successfully for over a century, and states like New York have recently seen legislation proposed to establish their own state-level public banking systems. Success at the state level informs the effort for a nationwide Public Banking Act proposed in Congress, which offers a vital first step towards building a more equitable and sustainable economy by establishing a federal charter for local and state public banks and creating a systemic channel to direct public deposits toward community investment.

To fully realize public banking’s potential, however, we must recognize that loans alone are insufficient for addressing all public needs. The loan model makes urgent community investment dependent on the ability to generate a profit and repay, when, in fact, the entire reason these initiatives require public support is the absence of a prospect for private sector profit. 

For this reason, we need to expand the public’s financial toolkit beyond traditional loans to include grants. The operating paradigm for the next generation must empower public banks to issue grants, thereby giving communities the financial resources they need and freeing them from the constraints of expected repayment. In what follows, we explore the groundbreaking potential of a Public Grant-Making Bank, which promises to revolutionize the meaning of money as a mechanism of Democratic Public Finance.

The Public Banking Act, as previously proposed, makes significant strides. It seeks to establish a national framework, providing legal clarity for states and municipalities to create publicly owned banks. This structure would confer local control over investment, ensuring these banks are governed by public mandates that prioritize community needs over shareholder profits. The Public Banking Act would give public banks access to the Federal Reserve’s payment systems and liquidity facilities, integrating them into the broader financial architecture. The legislation allows them to fund local priorities like infrastructure, affordable housing, and renewable energy. Crucially, it mandates adherence to standards related to environmental justice and democratic governance, steering financial capacity toward the public good. 

The Public Banking Act’s proposed changes to the existing financial system are powerful; however, the legislation still operates within a capitalist paradigm of loan-based financing. By focusing primarily on loans, even at favorable rates, the model retains a core capitalist constraint: the expectation of financial repayment. This expectation means that any essential community investment must carry a calculable path to profit or guaranteed revenue sufficient to service the loan. When a project is defined by its social or ecological necessity rather than its ability to yield a private return, the loan structure fails. For instance, a loan for constructing protective sea walls, implementing watershed restoration, or funding universal local public transit will never meet a private profitability threshold. We cannot allow the constraints of private profit to obstruct the necessary path toward collective flourishing and stability. Such projects are essential, non-revenue-generating public goods that communities require for collective well-being.

To meet critical needs, we must expand the financial toolkit of public banking beyond traditional loans. We need a revised Public Banking Act that establishes a new class of financial institution: the Public Grant-Making Bank. A Public Grant-Making Bank actively tackles pressing social and ecological challenges where traditional, loan-based financing proves inadequate. 

The first pillar of this model involves restructuring finance as direct grants, rather than as loans. Instead of relying on future repayment, public banks would issue grants to projects based on their public mission. A Public Grant-Making Bank evaluates proposals by assessing their anticipated social and ecological effects. For example, funding the establishment of community-owned broadband networks would be evaluated on their contribution to equitable digital access and educational opportunity, not on a financial return model. If the qualitative assessment is strong, the grant is made. On this logic, a grant is still debt; only, it is a qualitative obligation to improve social and environmental conditions, rather than a quantitative obligation to repay a financial sum.

A core commitment to qualitative assessment requires a decisive legal shift. Local public banks, overseen by community-led boards, ought to be granted full discretion to issue finance based on community needs. Granting this authority requires major overhauls of banking laws, such as the Community Reinvestment Act, to legally authorize such non-financial metrics over traditional financial prudence. This authorization must be coupled with a legal liability shield for bank directors, protecting them from fiduciary duty claims when making mission-aligned grant decisions.

Any radical institutional change demands an equally radical monetary theory. Our financial regulatory system is typically conceived according to an erroneous, yet dominant “loanable funds” model, which posits that banks act as mere intermediaries, collecting pre-existing savings from lenders and then allocating those scarce funds to borrowers. Under this view, money is a finite resource, and any capital loss resulting from a grant poses an existential threat to the bank’s ability to maintain its pool of savings. However, we know from the credit theory of money that banks actually create money as credit when they extend financing. This means that when a bank issues a grant, it does not transfer pre-existing savings, but rather generates fresh financial assets in the community’s accounts.

The result inverts the traditional view of deficits. When a Public Grant-Making Bank issues a grant, it creates financial capacity for a community. In the process, the bank does not draw down its capital. It undergoes no depletion of pre-existing funds. Instead, the grant constitutes a creative act of democratic public provisioning in its own right. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)’s sectoral balances approach is illuminating here. Just as, according to MMT, public sector deficits are private sector assets, we must recognize that the bank’s alleged deficit is actually the community’s financial surplus. The grants are not a loss; they are creative endowments that increase the net financial wealth of the public. For these institutions, therefore, we must reframe the reigning ideology of the balance sheet entirely.

While the credit theory explains the mechanics of how all banks create money, current law is designed to punish institutions that act on this reality for the public good; therefore, we must redesign the legal framework to make public grant-making possible. If the bank’s financial deficit is simply the community’s newly created financial asset, specific legal changes are required, such as amendments to the Federal Reserve Act and the Federal Deposit Insurance Act to establish what we could call a Systemically Essential Public Grant-Making Charter. Crucially, this charter and all associated exemptions would apply only to the bank’s non-repayable grants. The charter would exempt these banks from closure based on mission-related grants. We would mandate the creation of a Public Commitment Reserve—a dedicated and nominally inexhaustible fund explicitly backed by the full faith and credit of the United States that covers the necessary operational deficit, effectively making the federal government the implicit equity partner. This mechanism ensures the bank’s stability while validating its singular mission by giving the granting function a 100% Risk Weight Exemption from standard capital rules like those stemming from Basel III.

Meanwhile, the new regulatory framework must reflect a new collective purpose. Regulatory oversight would necessarily shift from strict capital ratios to a Public Mission Fulfillment Index (PMFI). Regulators should utilize something like a Public Mission Fulfillment Index (PMFI), a qualitative and quantitative assessment tool that measures the Public Grant-Making Bank’s effectiveness. Instead of narrowly auditing assets and liabilities, the PMFI would evaluate the bank’s adherence to its public mandate, its effectiveness in achieving social and ecological outcomes such as specific climate adaptation goals or public health milestones, and its transparent governance structure. Performance would be judged not by profit margins, but by documented progress toward communal problem-solving, making the mission, not a zero-sum balance sheet, the legal measure of success.

The Public Banking Act can incentivize the creation of new banking institutions across state and municipal levels, but we hardly need to start from scratch. The existing landscape is already rich with institutions that currently implement grants, demonstrating that non-loan-based provisioning is a deeply established practice. Consider the vast network of federal bodies that allocate grants based on qualitative criteria: organizations like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation fund research based on merit and public benefit, alongside cultural institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. This federal effort is mirrored at the state level by agencies like the Departments of Labor, Health, and Energy; development-focused bodies such as the Appalachian Regional Commission; and, of course, our public university systems. Beyond government, the sector includes myriad non-profits and community foundations, including large institutions like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Ford Foundation, programmatic groups like Habitat for Humanity, and even small, local initiatives run by churches and food pantries. These well-established institutions prove that grant-based financing beyond profitability is already a central function of financial life in the United States. 

The Public Banking Act already contains language for empowering these organizations to become licensed public credit issuers. Like for-profit banks, such organizations draw on systemic knowledge of their recipients’ projects and the shifting contexts in which they operate. All that is needed is to equip them with financial capacities to expand and transform their current mandates in response to communal and ecological needs. Importantly, then, there is no one-size-fits-all model for Public Grant-Making Banks. We need diverse and nimble credit allocators for a heterogeneous and changing world.

The design of the Public Grant-Making Bank yields a robust new approach for achieving economic stability. Rather than naturalize private market prices while fetishizing liberal budget-balancing, public granting banks allow us to challenge the political composition of investment and pricing in the first place. The work of economist Isabella Weber is instructive here, as her analysis highlights how public management of supply chains and targeted price control mechanisms for essential goods can be powerful tools for ensuring stability. Extending this logic to finance, the Public Grant-Making Bank establishes a powerful counterweight to capital markets, where the price of credit and the required rate of return are set by private risk and profit motives. A strong public sector that effectively sets the price of capital at zero shifts essential financial resources from speculative activity to necessary public provisioning. The current political volatility, including the rise of radically anti-democratic policies, behaviors, and sentiments, often stems from a deep-seated economic insecurity that financial systems designed purely for private profit have created. The Public Grant-Making Bank offers a design intervention that directly addresses this insecurity, ensuring new financial capacity is continuously deployed where it is needed most.

The stability provided by the Public Grant-Making Bank acts as a profound form of local political agency and resilience. Decades of unnecessary austerity, perpetuated by establishment Democrats, conservatives, and authoritarians, have destabilized communities by systematically robbing them of financial resources required to provide for basic needs. Will Beaman highlights this vulnerability in his argument for fiscal insurgency, noting that the political viability of progressive public projects is often threatened by legislative sabotage. At the same time, Beaman reminds us, the history of the United States is replete with inspiring examples of local and national credit creation that successfully resisted and overcame austerity. This in mind, the Public Grant-Making Bank represents a critical mechanism for fiscal insurgency. Because it operates on the principle of the legally protected creation of public credit for social ends, its budget is untethered from the state and municipal budgetary processes that constrain investment by recourse to poisonous neoliberal and authoritarian ideologies. This grants local administrators the authority to direct public investment, ensuring their decisions are democratically accountable while actively bypassing those financial constraints. Such enduring capacity acts as a vital institutional guarantor of political stability, ensuring communities can maintain essential provisioning even when political conflicts over the budget attempt to impose sudden cuts.

Thus a Public Grant-Making Bank is more than a policy fix; it is a profound political act that challenges the hegemonic conception of money as a fundamentally capitalist tool. Regrettably, progressives and leftists regularly equate money with capitalism, viewing currency as a mere expression of private competition and exploitation. This dominant view, however, not only fortifies capitalist interests, but also fails to see that money is a contestable and inexhaustible public system, a complex and interdependent hierarchy of obligations and benefits that can always be restructured to serve communal ends. Others on the left attempt to redeem money by embracing the promise of truly egalitarian “exchange.” Examples of this impulse include schemes advocating a return to allegedly pure, decentralized systems like direct barter, or proposals that champion digital currencies built on blockchain technology. Yet these approaches—rooted in the myth that money evolves from direct barter—typically accept the capitalist premise that money is merely a facilitator of micro transactions, thereby failing to embrace the hierarchy of money as a democratic design problem.

The Public Grant-Making Bank is a political project that importantly defamiliarizes what money is. By showing that financial capacity can be intentionally created and distributed based on social and environmental needs rather than the expectation of repayment, the bank clears the way for wide-ranging contests and creative building when it comes to democratic monetary design. Moreover, this approach reframes and reclaims the very idea of granting, not as the decree of a ruling authority, but as a shared commitment to the community and an affirmation of public trust. As a result, the Public Grant-Making Bank becomes an essential step toward achieving what we have elsewhere called Democratic Public Finance, a radical vision where our collective financial system is explicitly designed to serve society, not extract profit.

Passing the extended Public Banking Act and establishing the Public Grant-Making Bank requires a focused national political campaign, starting today. The immediate challenge is immense, given the second Trump administration’s active use of state power to defund social programs, attack democratically-controlled cities, and punish political enemies. Compounding this political sabotage, a nationwide affordability crisis continues to push prices higher across essential goods and services. Yet a clear political opening exists: the recent 2026 blue electoral sweep, a victory underscored by the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor, signals an urgent public demand for structural solutions to the affordability crisis. The Public Grant-Making Bank can be a vital ingredient in this effort. We can begin straightaway by forging powerful coalitions, bringing together progressive legislators with organizations like the Working Families Party, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Debt Collective. Success is hardly certain, but the collective activity of imagining and organizing for this transformative financial architecture is itself a crucial political project that helps transform what counts as possible for public finance.

When we finally acknowledge money as public credit, we empower public banks to transition from mere lenders to catalysts of collective prosperity, underwriting the essential work of ecological restoration and community-making with direct grants. The initial Public Banking Act gives us the start. Our challenge now is to extend its vision and construct a system where financial design itself actively guarantees a just and ecologically stable world.

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Mamdani Win Could Be The First Step Towards Seizing The Means of Knowledge Production (Let CUNY Socialize EdTech for All of Us)

by Matt Seybold

This essay originally appeared on Matt Seybold’s The American Vandal Substack. We are grateful for his generous permission to republish it here.

An understandable response to the most-publicized outcome of yesterday’s election—Zohran Mamdani becoming Mayor-Elect of New York City—is to ask, however you feel about Mamdani, what impact does it have on anybody outside of the city and its admittedly enormous geographical zone of influence.

However successful Mamdani might be in making public transportation and childcare cheaper for New Yorkers, levying city taxes on oligarchs, and improving access to housing, 94% of the U.S. population will only experience those successes vicariously, or maybe diffusely over a long term, through multiplier effects and shifting norms.

However, I would like to propose that Mamdani could, in the span of a single term, dynamically change the entirety of U.S. higher education for the better. The City of New York, which is already the second-largest funder of the public City University of New York (CUNY), should infuse funds into CUNY expressly for the development of core education technology platforms like Learning Management Systems (LMS), Student Relationship Management (SRM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

If CUNY is successful in developing internally owned-and-operated substitutes for any or all of its Software As A Service (SaaS) contracts with for-profit EdTech firms (and their private equity owners), the development costs will very rapidly pay for themselves, merely by freeing the associated institutions (and the city) from ongoing Ponzi austerity extraction of public resources at the expense of investment elsewhere in the CUNY system.

CUNY-owned EdTech platforms would provide an additional public benefit by reclaiming student, instructional, and employee data, the reserve currency of technofeudalism which is presently being mined by EdTech operators like OpenAI, Oracle, KKR, Vista and Silver Lake Partners. Universities are currently paying these SaaS providers and their investors twice, first with large subscription fees and again with access and aggregation power over large troves of data produced by members of their campus communities.

Data security practices will, I believe, increasingly be a factor in student recruitment, but even if the monetization of data by corporatized institutions becomes a broadly-accepted social norm, the corporatized university should reserve this advantage for itself. For instance, they could scrape their own LMSs to train Large Language Models (LLMs), also internally-owned and operated (as Ted Underwood proposed earlier this week), or deploy cross-platform aggregation for retention programs, alumni fundraising campaigns, and upselling services, all things which many institution currently pay EdTech and consulting firms to do (with their access to private equity controlled troves of student data).

And here’s where the broad public benefit accrues. Once these platforms are in place on CUNY campuses, they can license them at cost to SUNY, to NYC Public Schools, potentially to any educational institution who chooses them over the always overpriced, often enshittified, ever-extractive for-profit EdTech platforms which, unfortunately, become de rigueur across U.S. higher eduction precisely because we failed to have the foresight to develop and retain control over educational technology when the best developers were already employed by universities, because universities had the best computing infrastructure.

CUNY is, conveniently, better positioned to become a public education software developer than almost any university in the country, having developed the Commons In A Box (CBOX) community-learning platform which it freely available to any school who wishes to install it.

A month ago, Christopher Newfield called for academics to “seize the means of knowledge production” by working “step by step, in an organizational way, toward direct control of universities.” As I noted in my recent podcast with Newfield, I think the most imperative, but also the most apparent pressure point for academics looking to act upon his call is education technology.

This will look different from campus to campus, but I believe on every campus instructional faculty can organize around some combination of better data hygiene, better solidarity with students and staff on issues of data security, greater transparency of budgeting and decision trees on EdTech, more faculty governance over institutional technology in collaboration with IT departments, and increased faculty autonomy over technology in their classrooms.

In New York City, with a new mayor who ran on both expanding investment in public education and reducing the power of rent-seeking enterprises, there is an immediate opportunity to reduce Ponzi austerity extraction by for-profit EdTech from New York City schools, and potentially to make a significant move towards socializing educational technology by providing platforms and models that can be exported and imitated anywhere.

Money on the Left

Democratic Public Finance

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome everybody. I am Scott Ferguson and I am here with my co-host Billy Sass. Say hi, Billy.

Billy Saas

Hi, Billy.

Scott Ferguson

Nice. And our guest co-host today, Money on the Left’s own, Will Beaman.

Will Beaman

Hi, guys. How are you doing?

Scott Ferguson

As good as we can be, as good as we can be. So, we are convening today’s discussion primarily to update our listeners who maybe aren’t as online as the rest of us and maybe are not as aware of some of our publication work that we’ve been doing largely during the second Trump administration. We’ve been writing a lot. Will, in particular, has been writing a lot, and really pushing the boundaries of our paradigm and its stakes and its consequences.

We want to talk about some of these publications. I think, centrally, what we want to do — and I think it’s important to begin with — is discuss our rather lengthy new work that we published, titled “Democratic Public Finance A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City.” After unpacking and situating this text, or maybe along the way, we can take detours. We can talk about some of the other writings that have surrounded this work or preceded this work.

To get us going, I’ll start by saying that Money on the Left has been developing, what I would say is, a unique but dependent paradigm, a way of approaching political economy from the point of view of certain foundational premises that we, as many people know, borrow from Modern Monetary Theory, as well as certain legal theories of money that often go under the heading of a constitutional approach to money, which was spearheaded by Christine Desan, who we’ve interviewed on this podcast in the past. I think a lot of people think of us as the MMT podcast or an MMT podcast. I think there actually is a podcast called the MMT podcast.

Will Beaman

Yeah, we don’t want to get sued.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah, yeah. We’re not that one.

Billy Saas

Would they sue us?

Scott Ferguson

I don’t know. I think we’re friends. Anyway, even though we draw on these other paradigms in many ways in solidarity with them, and we might consider ourselves as being part of them, we also have developed our own approach. It felt like there are certain kinds of assumptions and other limitations in these paradigms that we feel don’t go far enough. So, we come in peace. We’ve tried to expand, to speculate, to draw out further conclusions, to iron out certain contradictions in these other paradigms and essentially, we’ve been working on our own formulation. We all have been doing so separately and in collaboration in things like peer reviewed articles and blog posts and interviews and podcasts and all kinds of media.

But, I’d say that we don’t really have a user-friendly long form statement that just lays out the basic assumptions and our document that was published on October 10th of 2025, “Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City” does precisely that. On the one hand, it is a strategic document that’s aimed at this particular moment, at a threshold moment where we think and we hope that Zoran Mamdani becomes the mayor of New York City.

He is still a candidate, but we wrote this document in such a way that it would be addressed to Mamdani’s mayorship. So, we’re framing this in terms of a very exciting candidacy, a very exciting moment when a democratic socialist is hopefully and probably going to be elected to this office and thinking about what he can do to help fulfill his own promises that he’s making to the city, especially when it comes to fiscal policy. But it’s a double document because it also serves as a State of the Union address for us and just laying this paradigm that we’ve been working on for years and years and years. With that in mind, where do we want to start?

Will Beaman

Well, I think maybe one place to start would be a kind of a familiar distinction that MMTers are all too familiar with, which is between Modern Monetary Theory and the neoclassical paradigm. In this document, we mobilize and extend that distinction to problems and logics of governance.

There are two poles, or co-present impulses that animate and inform governance that we name, neoliberal public finance (NPF) and democratic public finance (DPF). Part of the strategy of this document is trying to not just tease out the limitations of neoliberal public finance and the possibilities of democratic public finance, but to expand both in such a way that they can speak to and be located in rhetorics that the Mamdani campaign has variously used. One thing that we talk about in this document a lot as  part of the frame is, no, Mamdani is not going out there saying “money is a boundless public utility and the idea that we need to raise taxes in order to do things is bullshit.” There are nevertheless surpluses of possibility and opportunity in a lot of the framings that he does. In a lot of ways, the DPF and NPF framing is a little bit of a code that we try to use to decode the present.

We could say some things about the nature of the kinds of recommendations that we make with this democratic public financing framework. There’s no greater lesson in the past than realizing you’ve stumbled into fascism. This is not a new insight. It is a constantly expanding and accreting insight that neoliberalism got us here. But there are certain ways that the moves and the playbook of the Trump administration via the shakedowns of public institutions, the withholding of funds —  whether that’s illegally impounding them or threatening to do so, which has a similar effect — or it is stalling and slow walking government. 

As we record this the Trump administration is withholding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food provisioning as a means to try to pressure Democrats to stop the shutdown. All of these moves are part of a playbook of authoritarian consolidation, certainly. But the building blocks of this playbook are in some ways thoroughly neoliberal. We’ve been acculturated already into a kind of learned helplessness in the face of whatever comes down the pipe economically and so neoliberal governance or neoliberalism is already recast governance as the administration of difficult choices and austerity.

The acquisition of funds has been used for quite some time in order to manufacture crises of electability. We hear this happening in The New York Times with Mamdani. Things like, “You know, it’s good. But what if he can’t? What if he can’t convince Albany to tax the rich,” and all these kinds of things that are staging the acquisition of funds as a train that’s coming towards us. But with Trump, the mask has slipped. What we’re seeing is that the Trump administration is hijacking and choreographing with the governing habits and conventional wisdom of neoliberal public finance as a paradigm. While it’s sort of an exhausted question of, “are we still under neoliberalism or is this fascism?” but part of what I think comes out of this is that there are neoliberal habits of thought that are being enlisted by fascism. Rather than  a vocal answer of whether this is fascism or whether this is neoliberalism, it’s the dynamic between them that matters. For that reason, we see all kinds of opportunities for other logics that this document tries to open up and explore.

Scott Ferguson

I think this is a great moment to kind of step back and talk about one of the fundamental premises and differences of, what I would call, our paradigm in relationship to, let’s say, the standard articulation of Modern Monetary Theory. We know that Modern Monetary Theory has opened up all kinds of possibilities in our thinking in the collective imagination. It’s been widely popularized, obviously. At the present moment, it is not ascendant because it has been largely blamed for the so-called inflation that we’ve been experiencing, which, of course, is a reading we would utterly reject. But despite these openings there are certain tensions and even contradictions within the original paradigm, which, I just want to say, the original paradigm of MMT is not even stable.

If you’re reading Warren Mosler’s version, it’s going to look different than Stephanie Kelton’s version, which is going to look different than Bill Mitchell’s version, and so on and so on. It’s not to say that there is one absolutely airtight MMT 101 paradigm, but nevertheless, part of that MMT 101 paradigm is a commitment to a notion of sovereignty and, what they call, monetary sovereignty. What this does is relegate the power of money creation to a singular entity, at least within a given political domain that is usually called the government or the state. I think it had more historical purchase when MMT was being developed and being popularized under the Obama administration, for example, when most of the fights were happening at the federal level, and there were questions of bailouts for the financial sector. “What are we going to do with Main Street? Are we going to do the same for Main Street as we’re doing for Wall Street?” The answer was no. 

The way that the monetary sovereignty framework was articulated made sense. The political climate at the time made it easy to ignore or to not see the limitations of that framework. I’m not saying that one couldn’t or shouldn’t have found the problems with the framework before, but I do think that the political situation has forced us into thinking further. The limitations of the framework are precisely its need to relegate monetary creation powers and the possibilities of democratizing money creation to only one entity, the state at the federal level or at the highest level.

What ends up happening in MMT 101 discourse is that everybody else, all other institutions are treated as money users. Money users have to just recycle the finite funds that the government has made available. Not only does this disempower a politics of monetary creation at all other levels, both sub federal and supra federal, like internationally, not only does it incapacitate monetary politics at all those other levels, but there’s also kind of a contradiction within MMT in order to maintain this notion of monetary sovereignty. 

I’ll just try to quickly spell it out for the Modern Monetary Theory 101 paradigm, which comes out of the post Keynesian school in part, is the assumption that money is endogenous, which means it is created in the form of credit and debt out of thin air, but not just by anybody, but by powerful institutions that proceed from the public sector.

These powers are delegated out to the private sector. So, banks create credit out of thin air because they’re empowered by the state to do so. The state does so because it holds the power to do so. So, there’s this commitment to the idea that all money is endogenous. It’s all created out of thin air by institutions with the power to do so.

Great. But then if that’s the assumption, if that’s the truth, then why suddenly turn around and say “No, no, no, no, no. It’s only the federal government that can do this,” even though you, on the other page of your text, have told us that everybody does this, and you’ve certainly said this about private banks. I think what we’ve been up to is actually ironing out some of the contradictions in most articulations of MMT 101 and saying, “no, let’s take endogenous money seriously.” If it’s really endogenous all the time and it’s never finite value circulating, or it’s never an expression of the commodity form. If it’s always institutional endogenous money, then that means that money is not relegated to the function of sovereignty.

This is not to say that money isn’t a function of power. Of course it is. This is not to say that there aren’t degrees and qualities of monetary creation powers. Of course there are. But let’s stop disempowering all these other levels of governance, all these other institutions that not only could be creating money, but I would argue, they are. I would argue that states and municipalities in the United States, when they spend they are creating money. When they tax, they are taxing and buttressing the taxation power of the whole system of the dollar. They’re not mere recyclers of a finite thing. That doesn’t ever happen according to our point of view.

From that fundamental tweak and ironing out of this tension or contradiction in MMT 101, it opens up all of these possibilities for us, not just for monetary politics or monetary design in a kind of narrow sense of political economy, but also in terms of analysis of history, of political fights, of coalition building, of coalition breaking, of enduring questions and critical theory, whether that’s about aesthetics or any number of questions.

For us, we agree that money is publicly founded, it’s institutional and it’s endogenous. Let’s take that seriously and stop constraining money under the sole authority of sovereignty. In doing so, suddenly we have this wide-open field of possibilities and a wide-open field of possibilities that we would argue are vital and critical for combating authoritarianism and fascism in the United States and around the world.

Will Beaman

That’s really well said. I would add, we’re certainly not denying the importance of grappling and contending with power and authority, but in a lot of ways, what we’re arguing for is to not take power at its word as to who participates in it and who doesn’t and where agency is located and where agency is not located. When you set up these really hard binaries between who has agency and who doesn’t under “XYZ” objective conditions, and the idea of sovereignty is the epitome of this because it means exception. Exception from an overall lack of agency. The one who acts rather than the one who receives.That’s going to come back in this discussion, I think, because one of our re-framings of MMT is taking seriously reception as a point of agency too and the typical MMT story of fiscal circuits of money being spent into existence and then taxed not as functions of sovereign power, but as choreographies of issuance and reception that unfold along a lot of different contested institutions.

But just to tie this back to this critique of neoliberal public finance and the way that it establishes or to use a more phallic sovereignty metaphor, erects certain nodes or choke points or key events at which the left or liberals or the left liberal coalition has an opportunity or a window to provision society. However, it turns on whether or not we get the taxpayer to say yes or, whether or not the economy as it’s construed as a sublime external force says yes. This is not unique to MMT either. On the Superstructure podcast years ago, we were critiquing debates that were happening in the early 2020s about which theory of change is correct, as if there’s a single answer. As if change doesn’t unfold through multiple theories. Likewise, I think that the MMT’s insistence that we have this empowering mapping of where power is located and “look, at the places where it is located, it can take care of everyone.”

Nevertheless, we end up bringing back in this sort of logic of deferring possibility to the outcome of a rigged game, basically. It didn’t feel as much like a rigged game when it was 2021 and Biden seems to be a decent president compared to what I think many in the Sanders and Warren camps were expecting. But to your point, Scott, in this moment, deferral is really not an option. We also see political evidence all around us that there’s a massive appetite for politics that does not defer to some moment after the midterms or after 2028.

Billy Saas

Well, there’s something there to say about that. While it’s very exciting to consider this alongside the great success and momentum of the Mamdani campaign, there’s a certain extent of the deferral of possibility that we can also locate and attach to an electoral politics. We’re waiting for accommodation of these views by candidates and eventually people who hold office confronted, almost inevitably —  and we hope not this time —  by a kind of rhetoric of pragmatism and the inevitability of shedding possibility through the process of lawmaking and presiding and what democratic public finance also enables us to do is to look at those smaller scale avowedly non sovereign. There is no, or typically not, an army or an armed force behind the creation and circulation of complementary currencies within communities and so helping us at the same time as we encourage and continue to participate in a our own kind of realist way with electoral politics, we also look at and get excited about smaller scale interventions from the bottom up. 

That is, I think, ultimately what small “d” democrats, people who believe in democratic politics and governance, where we can almost immediately locate our agency and opportunities for participation. So, at the same time as there’s a kind of narrowing function of neoliberal public finance, everything leads to the decision of the sovereign. The sovereign is never going to accommodate, never really going to give grace, or maybe rarely and in limited form. Democratic public finance gives us a much broader path with many more forks and possibilities.

Scott Ferguson

That’s right, that’s right. I’m going to read a little bit of the intro. This isn’t the exact beginning of the text, but just to give a flavor of the text, and we will obviously provide links in the show notes for all of our listeners who haven’t been tracking our website, but largely interface with us through their ears. Here it goes:

“This document argues that building a just future requires shifting from the reigning ideology of Neoliberal Public Finance (NPF) to Democratic Public Finance (DPF). NPF constrains democratic possibilities by perpetuating the idea that money is always private, uncontrollable, and scarce. If money is scarce, so too are housing or jobs. NPF seems natural and almost unassailable, both as law and as a mode of framing collective life. It underwrites the neoliberal habit of acquiescence, which trains politicians and publics to treat fiscal sabotage as an impersonal event to be managed, not contested.

DPF, by contrast, asserts that money is an unlimited and disputable public good which can always be reorganized to serve people and the environment.”

And recall here that’s “reorganize,” not finding the money to spend for your big-ticket items.

“For DPF, money is an inexhaustible institution, involving an always ongoing and deeply public process through which societies mobilize their capacities and create their future. Imagine a city where public banks extend zero-interest credit to retrofit housing, or where a Job Guarantee program is financed through democratic credit issuance. This is the vision of DPF: not scarcity, but capacity; not limits, but collective potential.”

So that’s a nice and relatively coherent and powerful articulation of this contrast that we’re setting up. The document goes on to talk about the ways that we break up different aspects of democratic public finance as an alternative to neoliberal public finance and those four —  what we call —  strategic areas. Of course, they’re all connected. Just for the sake of writing, conceptualizing, and talking about politicizing, we name these four strategic areas. One more thing I’ll say is that each area is, at least from a conventional point of view, potentially more challenging than the next.

Now, ideological conditions could shift in what counts as the most challenging. But at the present moment, we conceive of these being ranked in order of the easiest to pursue to the hardest to pursue. So, number one is “Reframing Debt Issuance and Taxation” according to the paradigm of democratic public finance. So, all that’s doing is pointing out that these tools that everybody knows about, nobody’s arguing about whether New York City or Minneapolis, or a small county in Nevada, taxes or issues debt. They all do it. It’s a question of what it means and what are the politics surrounding it and what really are questions of responsibility and risk around these instruments. Our argument would be: that needs to be rethought and reframed.

The second category is “Mobilizing People Differently: Public Sector Expansion, the Public School System, and the Multiplicity of Credits.” This is where we talk about how monetary credits across scales of different degrees of receivability, capacity, and power are always being used in all kinds of ways to mobilize people. This is the case for airline miles. This is the case for Starbucks gift cards. This is the case for municipal fiscal policy. It’s happening all the time. But we’re suggesting that the public sector needs to get creative about the way that it actually designs systems of accreditation or of crediting that may not entirely be about high powered dollars, but nevertheless have strong, democratic, supportive, caring capacities that can work in tandem with fights over the spending, but more specifically, design and creation of high powered dollars.

Then we have category three: “Creating Public Banking and Payments Infrastructure.” We, at Money on the Left, clearly have investments in a major public banking initiative and legislation at the federal level, and also democratizing our payment system as well at the federal level. But you don’t have to just do it at the federal level. You can do it at the state level. You can also do it at the city level and at the municipal level. We’re moving into even more active, high-power dollar design, with category three. 

Category four is arguably the most challenging and that is actually: “Challenging the Deep Structure of Neoliberal Finance in Municipal, State & Federal Law.” This is us, in a way, taking our advance on MMT to the maximal level. So, I would say most of the time, MMT 101 discourse tends to take the design of the current system more or less for granted and sometimes this comes out in tropes that have been questioned within the MMT 101 movement. But there are framings like, “oh, we’re just describing what exists. We’re not saying we need a new system. We’re just telling you how it works, and you can use this system if you know how it works, you can use it for other purposes and you can do nice things with it.” Whereas we want to say, “no, no, no, there are design trajectories and constraints that are built into the system that should not be there.” 

The Constitution of the United States should not forbid sub-federal entities from creating money. That’s anti-democratic. It’s especially anti-democratic because the same federal legal structure allows for private institutions to create private credit all over these municipalities. Right? So, you’re licensing and enabling private creditors, you’re disabling public creditors. I would also say that that language in the Constitution is false, because I would say that public institutions at the federal level do actually circulate credit. They do that all the time in all kinds of different forms. So even though you might say, “oh, well, it’s against the law for a state to issue credit or to create money,” I would say they do it all the time. This is a controversial claim, but nevertheless, I think this is our position.

This fourth section is really about getting at those deep legal structures and saying those are social constructs. They were social constructs that were constructed out of struggles for power. If the left wants to really, really, really revolutionize the system and create conditions of possibility that are going to allow for genuine democracy and collective caretaking and contestation, you have to go after these deep legal structures. So, that’s the four areas. I don’t know if you all want to start with one and move toward four. Where do we want to go from here?

Billy Saas

Maybe we can move into discussion of each of them through reference to Will’s prolific article and commentary. Maybe we could pivot to that.

Will Beaman

So, I will say that because everything that we do is a collective project. All of this that we’re talking about in this document has been showing up in what I’ve been writing and, to some extent, vice versa. That’s just how collectivity works. But I would say that my madness at the beginning of the summer started with being, honestly, hypnotized by the rhetoric and communication and sophisticated aesthetic forms of the Mamdani campaign.

One of the first pieces that I wrote this summer about that, “How to New York Times-proof the Mamdani Campaign,” was, in a lot of ways, taking up the theme in the first section: capacity being where we should focus our analysis rather than on the amount of dollars that are located here and there and need to be gathered. That, of course, is very MMT 101. If you have the real resources you can afford it and money is just a unit of account. But I think there are ways of describing capacity as a process of humanization that are less developed but present everywhere. This is something that I think the Mamdani campaign does really, really well.

In that particular piece, I talked about an ad that he did after he won the Democratic primary, where he sort of broke down all of the different demographic cultural, geographic, you name it, components of his victory. In doing so, he was able to not just —  refute is not even the right word because it was so much more profound than that —  reframe Beltway pundit conversation about the conventional horizons of possibility for this or that kind of politics with this or that group of voters or voters in general, but also getting away from that very macro and reductive caricature of what is politically possible and what is considered fringe to voters as a bloc.

This video that Mamdani did basically answered in a different way how he paid for it. How did he pay for the win? This opened up another theme that I was sort of thinking about and exploring this summer, which is that, a campaign sits in a sort of a liminal space that it often occupies in our own kind of mapping of things. It’s outside of politics. Right? It’s the stuff that happens before you’re in power, so it doesn’t really count. It also is largely volunteer work. It’s off the books. It’s not part of the economy either and yet it’s a massive logistical operation with a history and with capacities. A successful campaign does what successful fiscal authority does, which is creatively reread public capacities. I drew an analogy in that piece between the way that he was talking about and breaking down the various public capacities that paid for his win. What if this was extended to how he spoke about fiscal policy through governance? This is something that, to a certain extent, we can see traces of what both he and, frankly, lots of politicians are doing already.

We want to affirm that and highlight it and connect it to a project of giving that kind of rhetoric it’s due in fiscal terms. Something that I have not yet been able to write about, because I’m now fighting for my life and my doctoral program, is a lot of his videos since then. This is drawing on my past experiences in Scott’s Film and Media Studies MA program. I’ve been hypnotized in a very similar way by how he uses the close up in this series that he’s been doing, where he tells stories of famous New Yorkers and he tells them in close up, and they often are individuals who, in this or that way, are marginalized. But the close up, as we, in film studies, know from a long tradition of writing about the humanizing qualities of the close up and of photography, has this ability to cut through preconceived reductive notions that we have about people. The close up confers dignity as well as opacity and mystery and complexity on to individuals and onto people who we otherwise think of as individuals, or we think of them as part of a group or whatever.

In an interdependent world, there are so many things that we can say about ourselves and about others. There’s this tradition in our cinema of using the close up to open up complexity rather than close it. In light of this kind of conversation about real capacity, I thought, this visual language that he’s using is light years ahead of the kinds of rhetoric that we’re used to hearing and participating in about how many hard-working Americans there are in this country. The kind of nascent or underdeveloped ways of talking about economic capacity and, in this way also, I think, because we do come from a humanities tradition, there is a skepticism that we have about enlisting people as parts of a top-down notion of capacity. It’s something we have been in group therapy for several years. Saying, “well, you’re an economic asset,” as if to reduce. 

In so much of Mamdani rhetoric, by focusing in the visual language of the eye contact and the close up and the storytelling and the way that he tells another person’s story, both you and that person, because the direct address in these close ups is ambiguous, he does so as the government or as a public representative. Talk about transcending the confessional mode. To me it has been opening up a world of thinking about all the different ways that we already humanize people in visual and aesthetic and rhetorical forms and how tragically disconnected that often is from the language that we use to talk about what we can do as a city. Or what we can do as a society and a culture in ways that interface directly with fiscal politics? That’s one throughline that shows up also in this document that we all collectively worked on, which says basically, it’s the capacity that you need to pay attention to.

We already build the city every day. We don’t need a permission slip from somebody who sees themselves in mutually exclusive terms as the taxpayer, or the benevolent billionaire who will create jobs, but only if you’re not rude. We don’t need to route our own self-understanding through those dehumanizing prisms and chokepoints.

A big part of the first section that’s really important to me is identifying within Mamdani’s own rhetoric both ways that he’s already talking about capacity that shift the conversation away intuitively from “how are you going to pay for it?” because once you’ve done an entire campaign talking about all the ways that something is physically and materially and socially, culturally, etc. possible to do, then for “how you pay for it?” to come in at the 11th hour reads as more transparently sabotage than it does in the kind of current neoliberal mode of politics where we take it for granted that “how you pay for it monetarily” is basically a proxy for how you pay for it materially, because all material things have to be paid for, therefore, paying for something monetarily is basically just another way of saying, “can we do this?” And the answer then is always “no,” because Albany says no.

Scott Ferguson

Another part of what you’re talking about that I find to be so powerful, and it is something that is in Mamdani’s rhetoric and with even further amplification and connecting it to fiscal politics, can be just so vital, is really revaluing people. In this case, in New York City, people that are currently —  under the neoliberal order and the fascist neoliberal order —  seen as liabilities, as drains on the system as they drain away our tax dollars by using their SNAP benefits. Instead, seeing our community members who might be struggling with employment or who might be struggling with finding a secure home, revaluing them as assets that are not being utilized. Seeing them as qualitatively rich, interesting community members that we’re just abandoning and we’re failing to value.

To be honest, I would say that’s even latent in MMT 101 as well. I think the way that Mamdani is using his communication strategies, his rhetoric and his policy framings is pushing us more in that direction. Now, I want to leave to another related topic in which I would say, at least on the face of it, it’s less of an analogy to money, but it’s Mamdani getting closer and closer to money. Now, I don’t think any of us think that “there’s money in itself and then there’s other things that are not money.” You know, we understand that sort of everything is money. Nevertheless, right over the summer and into the fall, Mamdani has been using certain proto or just straight up monetary designs in order to mobilize people. One of them is something called the Zetro card. Does somebody want to unpack the Zetro card and what he’s been doing with the Zetro card?

Will Beaman

Sure. We wrote another piece at some point in the past few weeks about that, which was sort of a tongue in cheek, a serious / not serious / but actually serious piece saying that the Zetro card could be scaled up and used to save New York City.

And what is the Zetro card? It began early in the campaign. It’s a very playful punch card that is obviously a pun on the Metro card, but with Z for Zoran, and this is a kind of an interesting detail of it. It emerged as a way for the campaign to sell merch beyond their legal allowance to do so. What this was was if you participate in canvasses and phone banks and whatever, the Zetro credits are issued and you can trade those in for posters and and merchandise, and it’s such a great example of what we’ve been calling a duck rabbit problem, named after the famous optical illusion from like 100 years ago. It is that image where you look and ask if it is a duck or is it a rabbit? It depends on which you see first, but after you see one, you probably are then going to see the other and then you can see both. It’s such a great figure for this paradigm, where, on the one hand, this is a punch card and this is just moving posters. Who cares? It’s playful and it’s fun. But on the other hand, it does have all the elements of the entire thing that we’re pitching already in miniature, right? Right down to the fact that it began as a creative workaround to legal limits.

Also, I think it exploits, in a good way, the category error that something being part of a campaign does for people, where you hear, “Well, it’s not real though, so why would we even scrutinize this?” That cuts both ways, right? Like, we had a lot of people saying like, “dude, I’m pretty sure it’s just a punch card,” and fair enough. It is just a punch card. And yet it also is not right. You see the punch card, rabbit or you see the endogenous money duck.

Scott Ferguson

And, dude, those fed notes are just like pieces of paper.

Will Beaman

Yeah. It’s all just bitcoin. What we actually have is a fiscal circuit. That is, credit being issued and redeemed in order to provision work and mobilize capacity. What we talked about in that piece is we sort of mocked up what it might look like to continue the Zetro card as a campaign practice after the campaign is over.

This draws on legibilities like the Bernie Sanders campaign, which talked about campaigning as something that you do year-round. AOC talks about this as well. One of the reasons that she always performs so well in her district despite being probably the most caricatured and villainized politician in the country, is they never let up on the infrastructure of communication and engagement with their constituents, including but also beyond, of course, all the ways that you would help your constituents during your day job when you’re a politician. But they also never stopped canvassing. They never stopped campaigning. I would argue there is precedent for that. But we thought through what some sort of micro steps could be that are still in the realm of being playful. To be clear, fiscal policy should be playful.

How can we be playful until we pull the wool out from over their eyes? I could very easily imagine a lot of the organizations that make up the Mamdani coalition accepting Zetro credits in exchange for part or full payments of membership dues, of ways to deepen participation in an organization to get opportunities for speaking time at meetings, to gain access to certain leadership positions.

All of these, of course, raise all kinds of ethical dilemmas to work through, but these are the same ethical dilemmas that already exist in organizations, which is —  it’s sort of is the classic problem —  when you say that there’s that there’s no hierarchy, you leave it up to all the implicit hierarchies in the world to decide who gets access to what.

Who you know and who you have good credit with becomes a way of controlling and gatekeeping one’s way of relating to opportunity within an organization. This is similar to employment. We thought initially of some first steps that the Zetro card could take in coalition with partnering institutions.

One could also imagine worker-owned co-ops and restaurants and DSA bars that are frequented and run by members accepting these on a particular day and then that turns into a full-time thing and so on. But what’s really kind of interesting in thinking about this is that it can scale and it can keep scaling in very kind of non-linear and cascading and unpredictable ways, because if this were to become a very popular thing, one could imagine co-ops and unions and organization chapters and other campaigns, even, accepting Zetro credits and maybe issuing their own credits, which then can be accepted by the same organizations that accept Zetro credits. Right. Then all of this can eventually interface with the kind of longer-term legal changes and transformations that we’re trying to loosen the always loose and imperfect distinction between what is the official and the unofficial currency, because they’re predicated on a falsehood.

What does it mean to issue money versus just issue credit? What is a harmless gaming currency and what is shadow banking? All these things that are malleable, but that we’re used to thinking of their malleability as being a function of the fact that it’s the rich and the powerful who promote these things. The Zetro card is an ongoing campaign technology. I hope that it continues after the campaign ends, but it also is just an interesting kind of pedagogical thought experiment for thinking through and living and embodying this way of seeing fiscal policy.

It also is just so emblematic of Mamdani’s whole style, which is to introduce playfulness and games. We can talk about the famous scavenger hunt that he did in New York City as well. But these games that provision a campaign, they provision participation and nurture capacity and keep people limbered up and ready to get out to vote and ready to volunteer and keep those keep that muscle memory fresh.

Scott Ferguson

I think another thing that the Zetro card participates in and opens up is, what MMT discourse gets called, the hierarchy of money. The fact is that the campaign used higher power dollar credits, which they got through donations to pay vendors to make the merch. Then they’re redeeming the Zetro card credits by giving people this merch, but that merch wasn’t free. I think the lessons here are multiple. One is, for us, there’s no such thing as autonomous money. There’s no autonomy at the level of the so-called sovereign. There’s no autonomy at the level of a community currency or a Zetro card. It’s interdependence all the way up and down. So, get rid of the dream of autonomy, it doesn’t work. 

Two, its lower-level credit is always participating in higher level credit and vice versa. Higher level just means more receivability, more, what we call liquidity, wider receivability and with that comes power. With that comes capacitation. But still the lower forms of credit are not nothing. I think we want to get past this idea that, “oh, well, at the end of the day, you know, what matters is real dollars, buy the merch and all this fuzzy, silly credit that’s being issued and redeemed to this Zetro card is a bunch of hot air, right?” Or it’s not really real, when in fact, no, that’s actually how the dollar system works all the time. It plays out through this interdependent hierarchy and those so-called lower-level orders are qualitatively different. But I would say they are just as important. They’re just as important. I mean, this was really noticeable in the 18th and 19th century when you had different banks issuing their own liabilities.

Then you would have all of these complicated payment schedules and redeemability. There would be charts that tell that the Bank of X’s notes are only worth this much when you go into that state. It was a total mess. But you had a sense that without your local bank that creates the credits, you’re fucked, right? Like those lower-level credits that might not be quite as stable are still your lifeblood. Coming back to all the activity that the Zetro card mobilizes in one of the most important cities on the planet, it is tremendous. So that lower-level credit is deeply, deeply meaningful. It’s political. It can be democratized. You can be creative with it, but not in a way that pretends that it’s somehow autonomous or that you don’t have to deal with those higher-level credit issues at the same time.

Will Beaman

That’s fantastic. One other thing that I would add before we move on is, I think that whether it’s the Zetro card or the scavenger hunt that Zoran did over the summer, I think we make a mistake if we make the sovereignty mistake. If we attribute these just to the charisma of Mamdani, or just to how infectious his smile is and all of that. In order for a smile to be infectious, we have to want to smile. It demonstrates that there is a deep capacity that that I suspect has a history of in politics that, for fiscal politics, politics of participation and circuits of coordinated activity in the public interest that are not on the rhythm of taxpayer funding showdowns and the impoundments of funds and what did Donald Trump say and how are the markets going to react to it? All that kind of stuff. 

I think in a lot of ways, what Mamdani is recognizing is that there is an already existing desire for somebody to charismatically convene people to have fun. Something else that I’ve been writing about in the context of brat summer with the Kamala Harris campaign and Dark Brandon before that, the caricature of Biden, is that the coalition will come up with charisma for you even if you don’t have it. There are genres, and camp is a big one for moments when there’s a big gap between who the politician is and who you want them to be. There are genres that are rehearsed and practiced and that are activated again and again that signal and extend the charisma and the authority to convene people to politicians on the condition that they don’t suck. On the condition that they don’t betray the coalition. I think that this is what differentiates Mamdani, obviously, from Harris and Biden.

I think that Harris and Biden saw their star power as somehow a reflection on themselves, rather than as a long-cultivated expression and desire on the part of voters for a Dark Brandon or for a brat figure, or for any of these figures. So, I think that, were Mamdani to take this all for granted and pivot to the center, my hunch is that people would stop showing up for the scavenger hunts. I think that this provides an alternative framework in very rough, hand-wavy terms, to get at what I think sovereignty is always trying to get at, which is this authority as differentiation, as seeming ability to convene people. But if we misread that as power from outside society ordering society around, then we take for granted all the ongoing coordination and cooperation and fantasy and desire on the part of people that makes authority work. When we think in these terms, then we can see Trump’s fiscal politics as an extension of his whole persona, which is something that the far right has been rehearsing since Obama, or earlier than Obama. This desire for a sovereign for a Dirty Harry-type figure who’s going to be lawless and ruthless and hypocritical and all of that means, basically, that you’re going to be protected as a follower from being held accountable because you too are unaccountable.

That’s a certain form of governance and of authority, or a currency, if you will. But it’s not the only one. It’s actually really important to be attentive to it as a genre rather than as the new political world that we’re living in where everybody needs to copy Trump, which is, I think, how Gavin Newsom, for example, has read this moment. When we see these moments of a star just seemingly emerging out of nowhere as something more like a franchise that has been rehearsed from the bottom up or maybe we would say from the middle out, to be granted with conditions, or without conditions in the case of Trump, although I bet if Trump started to respect other people, the franchise would shut him down. There are even still conditions there too, right?

Scott Ferguson

Right. We should say just outright, his unaccountability is a collective project. It’s not coming from an autonomous place of absolute power that everybody just bends the knee to. It’s that there is a whole infrastructure of people and organizations who carry out that unaccountability collectively, because that’s what they want to happen. Right? It’s the same structure, but it’s just used for evil.

Will Beaman

In the context of a little experiment, like the scavenger hunt or the Zetro card or looking at a campaign and turnout as being like a miniature fiscal event or a miniature employment event, we can maybe think, or we can rethink a lot of the sovereignty-derived insights of MMT, like the finance franchise being an extension of sovereign power to banks from the fiscal authority.

If we see the fiscal authority itself not as a sovereign in itself, but as a collective public project, then we are able to see genres and forms of franchise as collective public projects as well. I think that that’s just another bridge that sort of allows us to do an end run around this whole thing and connect these seemingly nonpolitical or superfluous or silly campaign techniques before so-called power has been taken to governance and authority.

Billy Saas

I wanted to add that I think what the Trump constituency that was ready to realize the franchise was responding to is that he’s willing to hang out with them for extended periods of time and just shoot the bull for hours and hours at these campaigns. Maybe we can round out the conversation by coming to two of the more recent Vertical pieces, one of which very helpfully categorizes or names within the realm of democratic public finance what the Mamdani campaign is up to and what other campaigns and what other constituencies can aspire to, which is fiscal insurgency. This is a phrase that I like quite a lot and that captures and describes what we’ve been talking about. So, I wonder if we can talk a little bit about fiscal insurgency as a kind of broad framework within a framework. Maybe we can close out with a more recent piece on “The Paradox of Political Thrift” and maybe, not to game out Mamdani’s chances, but we can take stock of the scene and note all of the idiosyncrasies and exciting developments we can notice here in the end of October 2025.

Will Beaman

Yeah, absolutely. So that one is my term, but it expresses a lot of the same things that we are expressing in the DPF and NPF concepts in the “Mam-document” that we’ve been circulating. Listener, I want you to know that both of my co-hosts laughed, but they’re on mute.

Scott Ferguson

I’ve unmuted so I can guffaw audibly.

*laughs*

Will Beaman

Okay. Thank you. These [laughs] are my back pay. I’m playing with the idea of insurgency and occupation here. I mean, I’m not really playing with it. I’m obviously thinking about it for very reasonable reasons. Typically, we think of an insurgency as sort of a military term, and we often lose sight of what makes insurgent campaigns successful, whether they’re peaceful or not. To be absolutely clear, we are peaceful. We come in peace in all ways. It is a recognition that you have to be embedded in society, and you have to look to and lean upon infrastructures that already exist.

I think that what we have been articulating in the “Mam-document” and also in a lot of these other Vertical pieces and in this conversation, is that agency is actually all around us. If we take the neoliberals or the fascists at their word, that agency is over there, not over here —  wherever “here” may be —  then we end up being duped by a rigged playbook. So, in a context where Trump is threatening to impound funds or when the state of New York and Albany was, in a liberal idiom, threatening to withhold funds for Mamdani’s plans, it changes the entire dynamic of that situation. One could model and conduct and enact fiscal agency without routing it through these rigged choke points. Fiscal insurgency is my name for that. It’s ultimately a historical phenomenon that we see in places where, for political or for economic reasons too, like in the Great Depression, if credit is not available to employ people to keep patterned payments that stabilize social obligations moving, in those contexts, if all that dries up, people still need that and the fact that credit is endogenous comes out in all kinds of ways. 

The Greenback, during the Civil War, was issued when private banks were unable and unwilling to finance the union’s survival and tax dollars were not enough, the Army was mobilized, and the war effort was mobilized with these things called Greenbacks. World War Two, we had a bond drive. In the Great Depression, we have all kinds of, so-called, low-level currencies that emerged as municipal notes. Before that, in the 19th century, banknotes were all over the place, some of them on a very crypto-style imaginary, being these entrepreneurial institutions on the literal frontier of American imperialism out West. There was a free banking movement. You also had lots of credit experiments and rhetorics of talking about money that were grappling with ethics and grappling with interdependence and grappling with real problems of liquidity being absent.

Fiscal insurgency is – and I’ll just I’ll quote from this from this piece here:

“Fiscal insurgency is not isolation. It is not about retreating into localism or walling off states from the national economy. It is about building protective circuits of credit that keep democratic life functioning even when sabotage is staged from above. Insulation means refusing to let billionaires or authoritarian actors dictate the terms of survival.”

I also think that this contrasts very sharply with Gavin Newsom. He’s a very mixed bag, and ultimately, a lot of the wavering on transphobia and on civil rights is disqualifying full stop, but Gavin Newsom has sort of become an early emblem of Democratic local electeds creatively resisting the Trump administration.

Pushing back on Trump’s redistricting is obviously good, but there is, I think, an overall vibe of countering Trump’s illegality with the same until he backs down. “We’re going to fight fire with fire identically.” A lot of the rhetoric that’s been coming out of Newsom’s office and among his boosters is throwing around ideas like “if we stop funding the federal government in order to teach the red states a lesson,” or proposing different versions of what they call a “soft secession.” As an aside, it’s mind boggling to me that you can talk about soft secession and not make as many waves as when you talk about creating credit. I should say ruffles as many feathers. I wish you could create waves talking about creating credit.

I think that this framework of fiscal insurgency refuses zero sum logics and doesn’t try to counteract them by saying, “well, actually, it’s the Trump administration who represents the welfare queens of society, which is all of the places in Appalachia and Mississippi who are voting for Trump, but if it weren’t for the taxpayers in California, they wouldn’t have jobs or health care.” The other thing that the idea of insurgency is sort of trying to answer is that — and this goes back to the scavenger hunt —  it is possible to claim continuity and stability as a form of resistance. I think that the left’s playbook often, especially owing to a lot of inheritances from the Marxist tradition and the labor movement and all of that, has a very mixed legacy of both. I want to differentiate between instances that I think are not always differentiated between. There’s strikes and striking and the withholding of labor.

To be clear, I love a strike and support a strike. But there are also instances where workers have staged takeovers of factories, and they’ve done various things to keep the world running rather than stop it. I would want to trouble this binary between keeping the world running and stopping it anyway. Right now, we’re in the middle of a government shutdown that’s absolutely necessary in order to put pressure on the incentive structure of the Republican Party and the political infrastructure that supports it. There’s all kinds of reasons why strikes are incredibly effective in doing that, but when you import that logic to money and you think about, “well, our only tool in the toolkit must be to stop paying taxes, which fund all spending and bring everything to a halt,” you’re playing into the Trump playbook, which is showdowns. These are showdowns predicated on money being finite. I see opportunities and openings for a rhetoric of fiscal insurgency in the improvisations and coordinated efforts of blue state governors, but I also see neoliberal public finance present too.

That is my idea with the fiscal insurgency and maybe, Scott, if you want to tie that back to the Mamdani document before we go on to the other Vertical piece, I don’t want that to fall by the wayside.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah, I think that one of the things that this brings to mind is the multiple time horizons that we have in mind in structuring the “Mam-document,” which I’m just going to constantly say for eternity.

Will Beaman

The term is going to be in the show notes.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah. So, on the one hand, we offer strategies for immediate needs. In terms of legibility, those are the lowest hanging fruit, which would start with just reframing the function of taxation. There’s a massive tax the rich campaign in New York City, right now, and we support it. Every billionaire is a policy failure that remains true. Tax the hell out of them. In the short term, that is going to, as we can put it in a technical sense, increase your dollar balances, New York City. You can spend those high-powered dollars to build municipal grocery stores and make fast, free, and easily accessible buses and more.

In terms of bond issuance, we have something we haven’t talked about yet. Early on in this year, we were trying to think of immediate, legible fiscal strategies for resisting the Trump administration and resisting what was at that point, largely illegal impoundments that were cutting federal financing for vital services and institutions that help people live and work and have homes and eat and have health care. So, we proposed a bond drive to save democracy, and we called it and still are calling it blue bonds. A blue bonds bond drive. Blue for democratically controlled states because we associate the Democratic Party with the color blue. So, we’re calling them blue bonds for that reason.

Those are immediate strategies for getting high powered dollars into action to help people now. But we also have longer time horizons and more long-term strategies. One is challenging these fundamental laws, balanced budget amendments in state constitutions. When it comes to New York City, the so-called fiscal crisis of 1975, was one of the watersheds that ushers in the neoliberal era. It came along with a lot of new constrictive neoliberal fiscal laws about how much debt the city can issue in the future. All kinds of rules about budgeting to rein it in and keep it under control. Those rules were created by humans. They can be recreated by humans; they can be restructured by humans. But those are long term fights. They’re not going to be immediately legible to the public. But if you have a movement that is legible around, say, a Mamdani administration, then you imagine a way in which those long-term fights get introduced and become more and more exciting and more and more legible.

But there’s other long-term horizons that aren’t just about resistance but are about provisioning. This gets us back to area two, mobilizing people differently through creating credit at the sub federal level. We’ve been talking a lot about this at the level of the campaign, at the level of organizations. I love that you just passingly mentioned DSA bars that will create and redeem these credits, but we also have long term vital institutions in the city and everywhere else, quite frankly, that we can be reorganizing and thinking in terms of endogenous credit making. The big example that we give in the “Mam-document” is using the public school system.

So, the public school system is, in multiple senses, an accrediting institution. Students earn credits by going to school and by completing their schoolwork and by becoming educated. The schools themselves are a credit. They’re given credit to operate as schools by accrediting agencies that are themselves accredited by the government to be able to make those accrediting gestures in the first place.

There’s a whole hierarchy of crediting here, and you don’t need to build them from scratch. They’re already here. What happens if you start thinking more in terms of a public service economy and thinking about an end aim being something like a Green New Deal that has a public service component and a job guarantee at the heart of it.

So why not start in kindergarten? Why not start in first grade, second grade and start to do little baby steps here? Literally almost. Babies are almost literally baby steps toward public service. It’s not just a matter of providing institutional credit that isn’t dollars, but institutional credit for service labor. That’s going to benefit the school; benefit the society around the school, the neighborhoods around the school. It’s not just a matter of doing that, but it’s also a matter of being creative along the way. I love this, and this was not me. I didn’t come up with this. It was another member of our organization.

I love this example so much. So, the idea that we propose is this: you start a program where grade schoolers are helping to clean up their classrooms and their hallways. Right? And you know what? They already do this in Japan, and they probably do this in some places in the United States. But it’s not as routinized as it is in Japan. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It’s incredible. Maybe the younger kids mostly take care of the immediate classroom and the hallways. But maybe the older kids are going off campus. They’re maintaining and beautifying the environment around their campus.

It doesn’t have to be just that. It can be any number of public service activities. I mean, it could be fun things. The sky’s the limit, right? But you’re providing various kinds of credit and that could be just your participation grade. It gets factored in your participation grade. Or it could be something more major, like, “here’s a certificate for a year’s worth of public service.” It could be any number of ways of accrediting and this such a cool idea as a specific idea, but as a model, it’s to me amazing.

So, if you’re having kids doing, let’s say, what might count as janitorial work, right? Well, then what’s going on with the janitorial staff on campus? Well, the janitorial staff are the experts. They know what cleaning products work on which surfaces. You might think Windex is a good idea, but actually this other scrub is a good idea and use this kind of rag because this other kind of rag isn’t going to work. They have expertise. Why don’t we enlist the janitorial staff as pedagogues, as teachers who can teach, who can teach and help supervise and orchestrate this kind of work. The next part we do with a nod to the Mamdani campaign which is promising to reclassify preschool teachers as teachers that will give them the dignity of a certain status with certain kinds of benefits. I don’t know the ins and outs of it; I just know the basic move that they’re trying to make. What if, as part of this reorganization of crediting public service work, we change the designation and give a new kind of credit to janitorial staff? Now the janitorial staff are teachers and maybe the culinary staff, like the people who work in the cafeteria, maybe they get to be pedagogues, too and they’re teaching. They’re teaching cooking and place setting and cleaning up after everybody dines. What does that do? That can raise the pay, that can create certain kinds of tenure benefits for janitorial and cooking staff.

Suddenly you’re conferring new kinds of dignity, new kinds of credit in an institution that’s already enduring and powerful that a lot of people in society really, really value. They value the fact that they have these public schools, which are free, and they can trust to send their children to even though we’re in the midst of them being increasingly defunded, etc.

So, what would it mean to build up a scenario like that? To be transvaluing the people who participate along the way and essentially recreating the class structure that’s built into our public school system at the present. Then we can start thinking about, “if we’re taxing, we’re issuing bonds, and what if we’re creating a public banking system and opening up our higher power dollar balances at the same time.” If we’re working on that horizon at the same time, then we could start talking about a job guarantee at the level of the city.

So maybe that starts out of the school system, as there’s a teen unemployment crisis around the country right now, and there’s definitely one in New York City that they’re very aware of. What if you start a pilot job guarantee for whoever qualifies as the most vulnerable of teens in New York City? You start there.

You see how it goes. Maybe there’s a path to post-graduation employment. Maybe that path is subsidized. Maybe it’s in the public sector. Maybe it’s with nonprofits, with the public sector, supplementing the salaries for a certain amount of time or in perpetuity for these jobs. Then from there, maybe you expand it to all teens, whatever it is, 16- to 18-year-olds, or whatever we want to decide it’s going to be. 16- to 18-year-olds in New York City are guaranteed a public job.

Then from there you start piloting, opening it up to more and more people and then once you’re really rolling, it becomes a citywide job guarantee organized toward the goals of social justice, inclusion, community building and green sustainability. To me, and I’m saying this because I didn’t write this part of the document, that is such a powerful vision of not just what’s possible, like in a particular sector, but for what’s possible in general.

I think what we were talking about before with the Zetro card and coalition credits is equally a part of this project. But I do think that the education model might speak or might light up imaginations for certain people precisely because these feel like long existing stable institutions can support it, without having to build it from the ground up. Not that I’m opposed to building from the ground up either.

Will Beaman

I’m salivating listening to that. That’s amazing. It occurs to me that this also resonates in a really interesting way with a theme of this campaign and the very contested discourse which is another institutional logic of carcerality and the way that a lot of how Mamdani has framed his reforms to the police state is in terms of, “well, police fight violent crime, they’re not they shouldn’t be social workers. That’s not fair to expect of them.” Of course, we should say that there’s tons of really important work and thinking and activism around creeping carceral logics that are present within the school system. So I don’t want to oppose them as institutions that are lived in, but the vision of schooling that you are referring to as one that views pedagogy in such a broad way that it enfolds a lot of work that people do as also being pedagogical work, sits alongside this other discourse that we’ve been having, which is how the solution to everything is to arrest people and put them in prisons. It’s interesting because I think this is another case where there’s sort of subtle discourse already happening about classification, which of course ties back to our earlier conversation about valuing assets and the dignity that attention to some of the pedagogy that everybody in a school setting is participating in, which is often subsumed or erased by this fraught and racialized imaginary of care work that is invisible, “but I don’t know who’s around my kids” and all of that kind of stuff. This is, to me, a different way of conceiving care as pedagogy, I love it. I’m all about it.

Scott Ferguson

We should probably also say something about, strategic area three of the document: “Creating Public Alternatives to Commercial Banking and Payments.” We are supporters of the public banking movement. We’ve been outspoken supporters at the federal level. Of The Public Banking Act. This kind of politics of public banking should be taken to the state or municipal level.

We’re not alone in this. There’s a whole public banking movement that also is interested in this as well. Connected to this is also developing a public payment system, what has been dubbed like a public Venmo. We’re really following a friend of the show, Robert Hockett, Cornell law professor who has worked with various politicians at the state level in New York and has written legislation that has not passed yet but has been proposed several times. So, we’re really piggybacking on Hackett’s work and all the supporters of Hackett’s work to create public banking and to create these public payment systems. In the research that we did, it seems like even though this was all proposed at the state level. By the way, Mamdani has, as an official, supported those. This is not news to Mamdani.

Will Beaman

The horizon of it might be news, the horizon that we want to do and how it leads to a complementary currency and all of that.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah, exactly. In our research, it seems like there’s a possibility in which you don’t have to get Albany fully on board for the full bill for establishing a New York state public banking system. You would only need Albany to add an amendment to a specific clause in state law, which essentially bars corporations from acting as banks and the amendment would just be, you know, “except for New York City’s public bank.” It would just exempt it. That still would be a fight. If you had the “tax the rich” energy behind that fight, then that fight might be winnable. What happens when you have a public bank? 

Well suddenly you can bank all the unbanked people. You can push the private industries that are currently serving and exploiting those people, like the payday lending industry and the credit card industry, who are taking these vulnerable people who don’t have money and don’t have banking resources, and charging them through the nose with high interest rates that they cannot afford.

To have a public bank, you can immediately include people who have been excluded. You can also create a whole system of public investment that is predicated on low or no interest loans, and we’d have to look into the legality of all this. The major requirements for the loans are primarily to realize specific qualitative social and ecological goals. If you realize those goals, then you can continue to get low or no interest loans from the public bank. So you can democratize and socialize investment in that way while pushing out exploitative, private financial firms. Then the payments system side of this also has been developed as a legal framework by Robert Hockett, again at the state level.

If you’re pursuing a public bank at the level of New York City, you then will have the legal framework that opens up the possibility of creating a payment system as well. It can be digital. It can work through an app. Our colleague, Rowan Gray, is really interested in something that’s called e cash. This allows for digital payments to work with the kind of anonymity and privacy protection that traditional paper note and middle coin cash does. You can experiment in all kinds of different ways with this.

It doesn’t have to just look like a Venmo app. I mean, that could be one interface, but it could be any number of things. This puts pressure on credit card companies. I actually think —  to speak slightly like a Marxist —  I actually think that this would be extremely attractive to the petty bourgeoisie, you know, mom and pop bodega owner.

Will Beaman

I was just going to say, as we’re recording, there was a really fun, cool speech that he gave with an organization representing bodegas.

Scott Ferguson

People who run businesses in the city who are not major corporations. They are sacked with transaction fees left and right by Visa, Mastercard, etc., etc. and they hate it. My late father in law, he didn’t live in New York City, he lived in a small town in Iowa, but he had a small shop. He was a shoe repairman and sold clothing as well. He hated the credit card companies. No, he was no progressive or radical or anything, but I could totally see him going like, “oh, wow. Yeah, I can just have an electronic payment system in my store, and I don’t have to pay more for it or charge customers more for it. Sign me up.” This is just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, there’s so much that you can do and there’s so much that can be changed and so much collective fiscal capacity that could be unlocked if we pursue a citywide public banking and payment system.

Billy Saas

That’s excellent. I think it’s a good place to leave it.

Will Beaman

Thank you so much.

Billy Saas

Listeners, you can check out all of this stuff we’ve been talking about on Money on the Left dot org and also on Monthly Review Online.

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


Money on the Left

The Paradox of Political Thrift

By Will Beaman

Democratic endorsement politics around Zohran Mamdani continue to bend in ways that feel at once familiar and strange. A spokesman for House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries brushed off Senator Chris Van Hollen’s endorsement with a Trumpian dismissal—“Chris Van Who?” Meanwhile, Governor Kathy Hochul published an endorsement in the New York Times, listing disagreements with Mamdani before endorsing him anyway. On The Rachel Maddow Show, Kamala Harris endorsed “the Democrat in the race” without naming Mamdani, and then pivoted to other contests.

These are not the same kind of gesture. I stay with these moments because they carry a larger question: how do gestures get taken up—shutting rooms down, or opening them—when the stakes are fiscal and political at once? Jeffries’s move is not an endorsement with qualification; it is the refusal of endorsement as such. It puts allies in deliberately vulnerable positions to flip some of them into collaborators with a loyalty regime. The result is an anemic, fractured coalition—a few battered yes-people, and almost no one else. The core misread is methodological, not personal: under this anti-democratic habit of leadership, responsibility to a coalition—with its conditions, accountabilities, and shared decision paths—registers as disloyalty. Conditional support is treated as a threat to hierarchy rather than a way to coordinate. A gesture that could organize co-governance is read as an attempt at sabotage. And here the comparison turns uncanny: collaboration with an unaccountable party apparatus works the same way as the Trump regime—leaders manufacture precarity to flip partners into collaborators, preserving access for some while starving everyone else. 

Hochul and Harris are doing something else. Yes, their endorsements are calculative and cynical. At the same time, they provide a repeatable model for the Democratic coalition to mobilize on some basis other than Trumpian loyalty. Both are improvising here, but their improvisations are conditioned by a shifting field of shared playbooks within the coalition. First, the usual patterns of withholding that Jeffries and Schumer tried to deploy against Mamdani failed to break his campaign’s spine of cross-endorsements and shared priorities. And crucially, warm endorsements from NYC Comptroller Brad Lander and Sen. Elizabeth Warren—leaders who were in tension with the Sanders campaign in 2020—offered a frame Hochul and Harris could follow: name the differences and endorse anyway. In practice, that creates promises—concrete commitments others can attach their work to. If either leader later reverts to withholding or loyalty tests, the channel they opened will close quickly; if they carry the tension, the partnership becomes sturdier. Because these invitations run across difference—across factions, geographies, and idioms—the mobilization they enable routinely outscales what any single actor’s allegedly scarce political capital can buy from loyalists or a cult of true believers

The Paradox of Political Thrift

In the early years of the Great Depression, economist John Maynard Keynes diagnosed what he called the paradox of thrift. The more that private investors tried to save money by withholding investment, the more impoverished everyone became—and the more dire their calculations for what awaited them on the other side if they did invest. Caution, when universalized, deepened the crisis it meant to avert. Keynes is remembered as a proponent of “deficit spending” in emergencies. The real man was more complicated, but the intuition is simple: what looks like prudence from an individual’s balance sheet can become ruinous in aggregate. Public investment, viewed as deficit spending from the standpoint of the cautious investor, was in fact surplus creation for the public as a whole. From the macro perspective, savings were not depleted but provisioned by spending.

Call the present moment of democratic weakness and collaboration a paradox of political thrift. The hoarding of endorsements—treated as a form of scarce political capital rather than a renewable public surplus—has steadily weakened the immune system of democratic politics. Party leaders mistake coordination for power, conditional support for risk, and coalition itself for debt. These are the political implications of austerity thinking. It recasts the party’s health as a matter of personal thrift: save your endorsements, save your reputation, spend only on the safe bet. The result, as Keynes would have predicted, is contraction. Each act of withholding tightens the circle until only the most loyal remain, and loyalty replaces shared responsibility as an inflexible medium of governance.

The alternative is not reckless spending but collective investment—deficit spending from the point of view of party elites, surplus creation from the point of view of the coalition. Endorsements, acknowledgments, and small public acts of co-governance are the political analogs of public investment: they create openings for new work to begin. They are promises, not withdrawals. Where austerity politics hoard recognition, coalition politics extend it; where machine politics imagines scarce political capital, the coalition practices renewable credit.

Debt or Credit?

Political gestures work this way: not as the disclosure of hidden loyalties, but as reversible stagecraft. In past writings, I have referred to the famous drawing that looks like a duck or a rabbit. That reversibility is not unusual or a trick. It is how coalitions move—how people who do not agree on everything still act together. We often read polyvalence as insincerity, or worse, as a dog whistle. Dog whistles exist; they are the manipulative, irresponsible form of polyvalence. But polyvalence itself is an ordinary and even essential feature of public life.

With that in view, consider two ways of reading. The dialectical tradition, following Marx, registers multiplicity as contradiction and seeks transformation by staging contradiction as untenable. A dialogic reading (in reference to the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin) mediates multiplicity without synthesis so that multiple voices remain usable at once. The dialectical tradition sharpens opposition to achieve transformation; the dialogic tradition sustains tension as a productive reversibility that enables coordination. Read dialogically, the gestures of Hochul and Harris are reversible in their meaning—both hedge and partnership. Our task is to set up the board for partnership.

This reversibility move applies to public finance. As Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) reminds us, the very existence of money means that an issuer somewhere is in a deficit position equal to the money that exists. But the same accounts can be read forward as capacity, if we think from the perspective of the world. What is moralized as debt functions as credit: it comes from nowhere and it authorizes collective endeavors. There is no essence of money to be revealed. To borrow another term from Bakhtin, debt or credit—duck or rabbit—is “unfinalizable” because it lives in dialogue.

Holding both readings in view is not an equivocation. It is a maneuver that widens the field of action so that the debt reading can be reconstructed as credit—from backward-looking guilt to forward-looking capacity.

Two theoretical inheritances pull us toward the debt reading. First, a dialectical reflex—when generalized to money and obligation—reduces money to capital and commodity production. In that frame, credit is read as an exploitative claim on future labor that keeps people ensnared in commodity production—in short, credit is read as debt. Politics becomes a long accounting of labor in service to capital rather than shared work in and for one’s community.

A second inheritance comes from what might be called philosophies of difference, from Nietzsche to post-structuralism. Here, notions of obligation and responsibility emerge from the retroactive moralization of some real or perceived injury and persist as regimes of control. Visibility and recognition amount to categorization and surveillance. It is a powerful way to see domination, but it detains the present in a fabricated past of sin and debt with no possibility of repair at any sort of scale.

The dialogic course moves differently. It neither compresses contradiction into a single resolving line nor dissolves it into fragments. It holds tension so people who disagree can still act together. Money is read forward as capacity rather than backward as guilt. Interpreted from a dialectical horizon, this may look like a retreat from conflict or synthesis. It is not. For philosophies of difference, this may look like an attempt to detain immanent generativity in a top-down idiom of capacity. It is not. Reading money as credit rather than debt reorients obligation from forced detention in the past to newly visible capacities and responsibilities that organize repair in the present.

The Politics of Receivability

In the most conventional explanations of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), money is considered receivable because the state requires it for taxes, fees, and other obligations—by threat of force. Historical accounts of this happening in colonial contexts appear to corroborate Nietzsche’s account of money as the arbitrary imposition of debt through violence. But publics do not only take up money (or any other public symbol or gesture) because they are threatened with violence; they also do so because they can coordinate their lives with them.

In that broader sense, ‘receivability’ names how acts are staged so they can be taken up across disagreement and still carried forward. The “we differ, but I still endorse” formulation leaves the difference in place while delivering partnership—not unity by erasure, but coordination through what many can accept and act on together.

What matters is not only that reversibility exists, but that the range of live readings can shift. The hedged endorsement that might once have landed as cynicism alone now works as a coordinating gesture. The mocking dismissal that might once have been shrugged off now registers as sabotage. These are not accidents of personality; they mark a change in what the coalition can take up. I call this a credit event—not a literal event, but a shift in reading practice that reorganizes time: it rereads the archive, widens what counts as usable partnership now, and opens near-future moves. 

The Archive Reopened (2008–Present)

Read through this dialogic framework, today’s Democratic endorsement politics permits us to reread the last two decades as rehearsals for two political tendencies: one that engages leaders in accountable coordination, and another that yearns for leaders who model exemption from accountability.

Looking back to 2008, we can see that Barack Obama’s coalition brought together multiple ideals of democratic renewal. For those politically marginalized in the Bush and Clinton years that Obama brought into the fold, the campaign promised a more democratic and inclusive relationship between politicians and their base. For many white supporters anxious about their position and identity amid global economic changes, the campaign offered a script of redemption and innocence through post-racial politics. At the same time, Obama’s operation prototyped a digital organizing hub that choreographed small-dollar giving alongside small-labor contributions—house parties, phone banks, canvasses—staging the campaign as a collective production that would persist in different forms and venues for years. These were not just fundraising tools, but early formats of distributed coordination.

The public backlash to the Great Financial Crisis and the administration’s handling was fractured between these voices inside the coalition. The small-d democratic wing of the Obama coalition concerned with reform responded to disillusionment with demands for accountability. Occupy Wall Street brought “the 99%” thrown under the bus for financial elites out in public to testify to their existence. Black Lives Matter held the Democratic Party accountable for its continued investment in mass incarceration, calling on politicians to say the names of Black victims of police violence who are normally rendered nameless through rituals of criminalization. Emerging campaign choreographies of time and effort were repurposed to serve movement infrastructures of accountability and care.

At the same time, the politics of white innocence and colorblind redemption that brought many into the Obama camp broke down with the destruction of its longest standing symbol: homeownership. Libertarian movements like the Tea Party and spectacles like Cliven Bundy’s 2014 armed showdown with the federal government rejected social responsibility as government overreach on behalf of a parasitic underclass. Libertarians were less concerned with the daily government overreach enacted through police violence, redeeming “blue lives” as a protected class to be showered with resources and shielded from accountability. Outrage news cycles, list-building, and direct-response fundraising fused into a grievance-validating infrastructure—less about coordinated volunteer labor, more about converting outrage into pledges of loyalty and cash on demand.

The 2016 Democratic primary surfaced these dynamics inside the Democratic coalition for the first time post-Obama. What was expected to be a coronation for Hillary Clinton became a surprisingly competitive contest with Bernie Sanders, whom Clinton and her backers cast as disloyal to the party—missing that his base viewed that stance as a virtue. As with Obama’s 2008 outsider bid against Clinton, the Sanders campaign carried both an inversion of Clinton’s inside/outside loyalty politics—flipped but not deconstructed—and an impulse toward co-governance and accountability. When Black Lives Matter organizers disrupted campaign events, the Sanders operation was reluctant to move beyond a colorblind, class-reductionist posture. Some Sanders supporters questioned why he was being critiqued at all when Clinton’s “tough on crime” record was so much worse for BLM’s priorities. Meanwhile, the campaign’s small-dollar model and mass volunteer phone/text banks widened the sense that a campaign could run entirely on recurring public contributions—money and labor—pledged and renewed like a wartime bond drive. And beneath these campaign practices, the organizations that emerged in its wake—Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Sunrise Movement—became contested laboratories for coalition politics. From this mosaic, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and later Zohran Mamdani emerged.

The Clinton campaign, for its part, adopted BLM’s moral vocabulary as a ritual of white exculpation—direct identification with Black Americans in place of accountable commitments. “We face a complex set of political challenges,” Hillary Clinton tweeted in February 2016. “They’re intersectional, reinforcing, & we’ve got to take them all on.” Sensing this was not working, Barack Obama told the Congressional Black Caucus gala in September 2016 that it would be a “personal insult” if Black voters failed to turn out for Clinton. In the end, one-sided appeals to loyalty did not work. Depressed Black turnout proved instrumental not only to Sanders’s loss in the primary but to Clinton’s loss in the general.

Trump’s 2016 campaign recognized the increasing centrality of innocence, exceptionalism and grievance to the Republican base. The campaign hijacked existing forms of horse-race punditry, crisis reporting in media and learned helplessness among politicians in the face of sublime economic forces to flip the usual rituals of emotional blackmail and crisis staging used to discipline party fringes into pageants of humiliation and coerced loyalty. The result was the institutionalization—through Trump—of a right wing social project to dispense permission and innocence to supporters in return for their loyalty and identification, shored up by conspiracy theories and a constant churn of internal enemies to humiliate. Now, in Trump’s second term, old habits of neoliberal governance fully co-opted to stage routine fiscal chokepoints around “finding the money” as mob-style shakedowns designed to flip liberal institutions into servile collaborators. 

Biden’s 2020 campaign reactivated the language of democratic renewal, promising to “restore the soul of America” and inviting citizens to see themselves as participants in collective repair. Yet the familiar pattern returned: once in office, the administration treated accountability as disloyalty. Progressive organizers and digital creators who had been courted as partners were cut off when they criticized Gaza policy, climate inaction, or the decision to seek a second term. Biden’s refusal to hold Trump accountable for January 6 and his enthusiastic support for the genocide in Palestine against cries and pleas from Democratic voters collapsed whatever high ground that administration had into a loyalty cult without a following.

With the collapse of any hope for accountability, campy irony emerged as an affective genre for sustaining investment in Democratic politics. “Dark Brandon” stylized the gap between the real Biden and the one voters needed—an ironic fantasy of competence and backbone conjured by the coalition itself. It was not a cult of personality but a collective experiment in franchising charisma—a conditional line of credit that Biden misread as unconditional devotion. The same misreading repeated with Kamala Harris’s “brat summer,” when lighthearted camp energy from online publics was read as uncritical fandom instead of a playful rehearsal of participation and possibility—redeemable at the polls only through accountable politics. Harris ignored the Uncommitted campaign, reading its demands for a seat at the table as disloyalty. Why should Harris be held accountable for her position on Gaza, party loyalists asked, when Trump is so much worse? From this perspective, “Brat Summer” and the Uncommitted campaign were two faces of the same durable structure: a coalition reclaiming and regulating its political investment in franchised form, with conditions and obligations extended to authority figures. 

All of this brings us to the Mamdani moment, in the eye of a national authoritarian takeover. Where other Democratic leaders mistook provisional star power for personal greatness, Mamdani has treated it as a platform for shared authorship. His campaign’s citywide #ZcavengerHunt and ongoing Zetro Card do more than “energize”—they choreograph specific commitments with dates, thresholds, and roles, turning attention into work others can pick up. The games make visible what earlier cycles only hinted at: affect, credit, and coordination can be provisioned locally; recognition is not a prize but a relay. Participation comes with responsibilities leaders must meet, and when they do, the channel widens. Read this way, the campaign has begun to map a different circuit from Trumpism’s pageants of loyalty and punishment—a coalition loop that converts coalition demands into campaign promises, promises kept into usable capacity, and spent capacity into a renewed franchise on larger terms. These habits already function like fiscal authority franchised from the middle—authority that works because publics have rehearsed in advance how to receive, carry, retire, and re-issue it.

Fiscal Insurgency and the New Finance Franchise

Viewed in hindsight, these democratic rehearsals of small-dollar and small-labor capacity can be read as fiscal policy with a different and complementary issuance structure—a new finance franchise. The finance franchise was coined by legal theorists Robert Hockett and Saule Omarova, to describe the public–private architecture of modern money. In their account, chartered banks and licensed financial institutions operate as state franchises of monetary authority. Like a restaurant franchisee carrying a parent brand’s guarantees, banks extend the public’s credit under license. The upshot is simple, but radical in its implication: Every bank loan is a public issuance routed through regulated (even under the guise of deregulation) agents—an institutional foundation that grounds Modern Monetary Theory’s claim that all money is public and boundless before it is private and scarce.

The theoretical framework and reconstructed history developed here points to a new finance franchise with an expanded view of causality and new horizons of possibility. It lives not in sovereign power, but in a rehearsed public capacity extended to political leaders: a franchised authority to mobilize a coalition for assigned roles and responsibilities, renewed and enlarged periodically with demonstrations of courage and accountability. Like the legal finance franchise, it creates credit ex nihilo—not by ‘finding the money’ but by staging credible promises and work to match. Unlike legal sovereignty, however, it does not rest on an originary act of exception that renders money as debt. Sovereignty appears, like debt, as a gloss: a retrospective claim laid over authority that is, in practice, dependent, coordinative, and provisioned in common.

In this expanded sense, the finance franchise is polyvocal and contested. Every contribution, canvass shift, or meme drive carries a small piece of public capacity, rehearsed in advance of formal institutions. Where traditional fiscal policy moves through budgets and appropriations, these unofficial circuits move through commitment and follow-through. And there are multiple formats that do not necessarily align: when Democratic leaders read loyalty politics into franchised accountability (as with Jeffries’s refusal to endorse, or with Biden/Harris treating activism as disloyalty), the channel stalls. When leaders read conditional solidarity into those same formats (as with Hochul’s “we differ, I endorse” and Uncommitted’s posted conditions), the channel opens. The difference is more substantial than tone—it is the whole format. 

These coalition habits—small-dollar subscriptions, shared volunteer work, conditional endorsements—already coordinate fiscal capacity from the middle. The task now is to formalize and extend them.

Blue Bonds and Solidarity Bond Drives

One logical extension of the new finance franchise is what Money on the Left has called Blue Bonds. Blue Bonds refers to ordinary municipal bonds, framed politically as credit to coordinate public life despite Trump’s attempts to sabotage it rather than debt held by the private sector. A progressive city comptroller could invest public pensions in Blue Bonds, undoing the early neoliberal gesture that tied them to Wall Street. Whether bonds are treated as the debt duck or the credit rabbit is a live political question. A post-Trump government could simply retire the bonds at an appropriate time or convert them to other kinds of public assets—because they would have served their actual purpose: keeping democracy funded and public employment steady, not enriching the private sector. And in the meantime, a national bond drive for democracy would stabilize Blue Bonds for years to come.

The popular enthusiasm for small-dollar giving that defined the Sanders and Warren campaigns, and that continues to sustain countless local initiatives through ActBlue, already points in this direction. The same public that sustains campaigns with recurring small dollars is well-positioned to sustain bond drives that keep services running when federal support is sabotaged. When supporters contribute to causes that act visibly and accountably, they are not merely donating—they are underwriting capacity. Blue Bonds would formalize that same logic as democratic fiscal infrastructure. They would transform sporadic enthusiasm into lasting commitment, turning the habits of coalition politics into enduring instruments of public credit. A solidarity bond drive makes that commitment legible: it tells the story of how communities can fund their own continuities when national politics stalls.

Complementary Currencies and Swap Lines

Locating the finance franchise in the rehearsed capacities of our civil society makes informal circuits of public provision visible everywhere. Complementary currencies are a more structured format that puts these circuits in dialogue with official fiscal circuits more broadly, foregrounding receivability—where are credits usable and for what?—as a live political question. Money on the Left has written at length about expanding the Zetro Card, university-issued “Unis”, and all manner of coalition credits for Democratic Socialists of America and other organizations. To the extent that credits can be receivable for local taxes (as with progressive local governments), basic goods and services (as with municipal vendors and private businesses) or pathways to institutional opportunities and responsibilities (as with coalition organizations), the coordinative capacity of that fiscal circuit is expanded. 

The governing principle of complementary currency is thus not separateness from the dollar, but what high finance calls “swap lines”—practices of conversion and receivability between fiscal circuits that preserve their distinctness while enabling coordination at scale. Just as central banks maintain swap lines to stabilize currencies without forcing them into uniformity, coalitions can establish all kinds of reciprocal arrangements between campaigns, unions, schools, clinics, and local governments. Such arrangements build on the same pluralism that defines a healthy democratic coalition—diverse idioms and responsibilities held together by mutual recognition rather than a single rule. They make visible a plural fiscal landscape and provide a language for the coordination that we practice every day.

Money on the Left