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.”

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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The Fight for Public Banking with Washington State Senator Bob Hasegawa (In the Loop: Revolutionizing Public Finance, Ep. 3)

In this episode, hosts Tyler Suksawat, Will Beaman, and Scott Ferguson sit down with Washington State Senator Bob Hasegawa to explore his nearly two-decade campaign to establish a public bank in Washington State, launched in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street crash.

The conversation situates Hasegawa’s tireless public banking advocacy within his broader political formation. Born to a Japanese American family that suffered forced incarceration by the U.S. government during World War II, Hasegawa went on to enter the trades and join the Teamsters during a historic turning point for organized labor. As a leader in the rank-and-file movement to democratize the union and eradicate systemic corruption, Hasegawa was elected to union leadership in the Teamsters’ first-ever democratic vote, only to subsequently witness a disappointing return to corruption enabled by the Clinton administration. This early crucible in rank-and-file organizing and institutional power profoundly shaped his career in the Washington State House and Senate, grounding his legislative focus on labor rights, racial justice, and public accountability.

Dedicating the core of the discussion to the mechanics and necessity of public finance, Hasegawa articulates why public banks are vital tools for democratizing money, keeping public revenues working for local communities, and serving as a countercyclical buffer during market downturns. In a fascinating historical turn, Hasegawa walks through the founding of the Bank of North Dakota over a century ago, revealing how the agrarian movement behind the bank actually drew inspiration from progressive public ownership projects underway in Seattle at the time. This historical connection links the century-old legacy of the Bank of North Dakota directly back to Washington State, demonstrating that the current movement for public banking in Washington is coming full circle to its original inspiration. Finally, Hasegawa frames public banking as a truly global movement, exploring how different public financial structures around the world—such as Germany’s municipal Sparkassen system—can learn from one another, cooperate, and move in international solidarity to build an equitable, democratically governed financial architecture.

Check out the Substack for the Washington State Public Banking Workgroup currently chaired by Senator Hasegawa.

See here for the 2026 SB 5754 Work Session and Public Testimony for Hasegawa’s public banking legislation. 

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Original music by Josh Klinghoffer 

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What is the Loop? (In the Loop: Revolutionizing Public Finance, Ep. 2)


Building on the vision of Democratic Public Finance (DPF) introduced in our debut episode, hosts Will Beaman, Tyler Suksawat, and Scott Ferguson present a radical new proposal to expand sub-federal fiscal capacity: the Loop. 

For decades, local governments have been disciplined by Wall Street bond markets, forced into defensive austerity, while furnishing private creditors with hundreds of millions of dollars per year. The Loop breaks this poisonous cycle by authorizing a government-owned public bank to purchase municipal bonds directly from a state, county, or city. In turn, the bank can immediately deposit interest payments back into the government’s general fund, in effect, stopping the leak to Wall Street by establishing a distinctly public loop.

By internalizing debt service, the Loop transforms an extractive cost into a self-replenishing public fund, capturing interest payments to fund housing, transit, care infrastructure, and the arts. The result empowers cities to evaluate public investment based on real social and ecological capacity rather than bond market discipline. Drawing on our recent writings and coalition work around the Seattle Loop, our hosts explain how such daring innovations in DPF stand to reclaim municipal finance as a powerful instrument for democratic agency and collective care.

Related Reading & Resources

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Original music by Josh Klinghoffer 

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Measure for Measure: A Shakespearean Defense of the NYC Tenants’ Rights Movement

by Antonia Marrero 

On July 16, 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani gathered at the historic Tenement Museum alongside housing advocates and organizers to release New York City’s landmark Rental Ripoff Report. Shaped by testimony from thousands of working-class New Yorkers during the citywide Rental Ripoff Hearings, the report outlines a package of 23 policy reforms designed to hold negligent repeat-offender landlords accountable, enforce basic housing conditions, and legally recognize tenant unions.

Taking the stage to deliver a powerful address was Antonia Marrero, an organizer with the 196 & 214 Rockaway Parkway Tenant Union and a member of Housing Organizers for People’s Empowerment (HOPE). In a speech invoking Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Marrero likened the moral hypocrisy of powerful elites in 17th-century Vienna to the systemic abuses of modern corporate landlords, issuing a ringing call for tenant power, union solidarity, and housing justice.

Following the event, right-wing media outlets troublingly singled out Marrero’s address for mockery, attacking her characterization of evictions as a form of social violence and deriding the press conference as a “freak show.”

We at Money on the Left reject this sensationalized right-wing framing. To claim that displacement, homelessness, and the state-sanctioned removal of families from their homes are anything other than violent is an exercise in bad faith. Eviction is not a neutral transaction; it is a profound act of physical, emotional, and social violence visited upon working communities. Housing is a fundamental human right, tenants’ rights must be fiercely protected, and tenant organizing remains our strongest defense against predatory landlord harassment.

Below is the full transcript of Antonia Marrero’s speech, published here with her blessing.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Antonia Marrero, and I am thrilled to be a member of HOPE Tenant Union: Housing Organizers for People’s Empowerment. HOPE facilitates tenant unity, HOPE offers civic education, and HOPE insists on the high road, the path of justice and housing for all. I was honored to participate in this year’s Rental Ripoff Hearings, and I want to thank Michael Tiger, General Counsel of the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, who listened to my testimony and welcomed my questions with kindness. Mayor Mamdani’s Rental Ripoff Hearings will echo for generations–the way the lessons of this museum have increasingly resonated for generations.

When I think about HOPE, I think about Shakespeare. In the comedy Measure for Measure–set in Vienna, a city famous for its social housing–the character Isabella talks about the political machine. She says: “[A]uthority, though it err like others, hath yet a kind of medicine in itself, that skins the vice o’ the top.” Isabella, the novice nun, says: “[K]ings, landlords, bishops, judges, and inspectors, all these powerful figures … are subject to mistakes; but because they have power, their mistakes have little consequences, at least, little consequences to them.”

But Sister Isabella also says: “Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.” What my heart knows is that we are living in an epic chapter of history. An epic is not a romance, it’s not a melodrama. An epic is the story of a new order. Our city is turning the corner on Tenant Power. When we organize, we win results. The Mamdani Administration is emboldening us so that we no longer tolerate the violence of evictions as a matter of “business as usual.”

My landlord owns dozens of buildings, but he is not a steward of public trust. In fact, it is the opposite. Since 2005, I survived three faulty eviction cases. I have lost three friends to eviction, two of whom lived on my floor, and for the past year, our supportive housing neighbors have been dissuaded from joining our tenant union.

But today’s report shows there is a path forward.

I am grateful for Mayor Mamdani’s leadership, the commitment to improving our housing quality and holding “low road” landlords accountable, and the commitment to having tenant leaders — not just real estate leaders — at the decision-making table. Mayor Mamdani’s Rental Ripoff Hearings will be remembered in the Book of Lady Liberty, whose torch beacons the homeless, the tempest-tost, to our shores, so the greatest cosmopolis of interdependent neighborhoods that the world has ever known will set a new standard of what humanity can achieve when we prioritize collaboration over dominion, when we prioritize love over profit.

See a video of the full press conference here.

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Euthanize the Rentier: Seven Steps to Democratic Renewal

By Will Beaman

John Maynard Keynes’s call for the “euthanasia of the rentier” has long occupied an uneasy place on the left. In the decades after World War II, as a domesticated “bastard Keynesianism” became part of Cold War economic governance, the phrase often came to symbolize an idealist hope that class antagonism could be managed away through lower interest rates and expert macroeconomic policy. Yet Keynes’s metaphor permits a more capacious program than interest-rate management alone. Read today, amid the renewed possibility of left governance after Trump, the “euthanasia of the rentier” can be taken up as a deeper provocation. Rather than asking how to protect democracy from finance, we must ask how to redesign finance so that democratic commitments become the highest-priority promises in the system.
 
Today, promises to private creditors are treated as inviolable while democratic commitments—to employment, education, housing, public health, reparations, libraries, and ecological repair—are treated as mere aspirations to be fulfilled only sometimes as discretionary expenditures.
 
Euthanizing the rentier begins with inverting this hierarchy. Private financial claims should remain enforceable only insofar as they do not undermine the standing promises a democracy makes to the people it governs. And that means giving democratic commitments institutional form.
 
Reparations should be recognized by central banking and public finance institutions as a permanent public obligation capable of capitalizing the institutions charged with carrying it out.
 
Libraries, schools, and guaranteed employment should be recognized as productive public assets rather than accounting costs. Public balance sheets should be organized around expanding democratic capacity instead of maximizing returns to creditors. What does this mean concretely and institutionally?
 
First, it means establishing a hierarchy of public promises. Employment, housing, health, education, climate obligations, reparations, and basic public services become primary public commitments. When private financial promises conflict with this, they’re restructured and/or written off completely.
 
Second, it means turning democratic obligations into financeable public assets. Law should authorize institutions to record the capacities that reparations, the right to a job, etc. create as durable public assets and to issue claims against the continuing public commitment to maintain them.
 
Third, changing central bank collateral rules. Central banks should accept bonds and obligations issued for democratically authorized purposes, purchase them directly or through public intermediaries, and provide permanent refinancing facilities. Private investors should have no role to play.
 
Fourth, it means building public balance sheet institutions wherever it’s possible. Public banks, reparations trusts, employment authorities, housing funds, and municipal finance facilities should be empowered to hold public assets, issue promises of their own and collateralize public commitments.
 
Fifth, cut out bond markets. There are other ways to tell if an investment is sustainable than if it makes money for a rich person. Charter public banks and have them purchase bonds and deposit interests in public coffers like Money on the Left‘s “Seattle Loop” plan.

Sixth, formalize the breaking of creditor power by making creditor claims revisable by design rather than only during emergencies.

Lastly (seventhly), reform public accounting. Fiscal rules should measure whether spending creates and sustains real capacities, rather than treating all public outlays as costs. Record jobs, functioning institutions, public knowledge, and social stability as assets and capacities, not as costs.

In summary, euthanizing the rentier should prompt a constitutional reordering of public finance: Democratic commitments must be formalized as durable claims on the state, institutions must be created to carry and refinance those claims, and private creditors must lose the power to decide whether those promises are affordable.

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Weird Epistemologies of Money and Trust in Fitzgerald, Ford, and Larsen; or, Isn’t Money Weird?

By Rob Hawkes

What follows is a slightly expanded version of a talk I gave at the ‘Weird Modernisms’ conference at Loughborough University, UK (1-4 July 2026), a collaboration between the UK-based British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) and the US-based Modernist Studies Association (MSA). ‘Weird Modernisms’ brought over 400 delegates together in the midst of an escalating crisis in the UK’s higher education sector (UKHE), which has seen multiple course closures, departmental restructures, and over 30,000 job losses in the last 3 years. Around the world, many academics face similar threats and much worse, and yet, at a time of rising authoritarianism and ecological breakdown, the critical capacity to think beyond the status quo that universities exist to foster and expand could not be more vital. My acute frustration with the ‘shrinking’ of UKHE[1] is that it is driven by a disastrous funding model designed according to the logic of what I describe in my recent writing as the ‘private money paradigm’.[2] As Scott Ferguson and I wrote last year, the private money paradigm:

upholds the backwards idea not only that fiscal outlays merely recycle private pounds, but also that the public good is somehow a burdensome drain on scarce public resources. The result pits communities against one another in a struggle over limited finances and frequently does so along conspicuously classed, gendered, and racialised lines.[3]

As I hope to demonstrate in this essay, however, money is much weirder and more capacious than the austere and exclusionary monetary politics that’s now threatening the future of our universities (and much more besides) will ever allow.

At ‘Weird Modernisms’, I shared these thoughts during a panel on ‘Weird Epistemologies’, chaired by Ruth Clemens and also featuring brilliant presentations by Anna Dijkstra and Graham Borland. My essay considers three modernist writers whose works are centrally concerned with sexual, racial, and classed forms of passing. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), we learn of the transformation of ‘Mr Nobody from Nowhere’ Jimmy Gatz into Jay Gatsby, a transgression of class boundaries that takes place in a novel where several characters, including the narrator, may also be straight-passing queer people.[4] In Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Clare Kendry, a light-skinned African American woman, passes so successfully for a white person that even her racist husband is unaware of her background, and, in Ford Madox Ford’s The Rash Act (1933), Henry Martin Aluin Smith, an American who has been bankrupted by the Wall Street Crash, and Henry Monckton Allard Smith, a British millionaire, switch places after both plan to commit suicide on the same day. Thus, all of these texts feature characters who assume, perform, or inhabit identities that may be regarded as deceptive, fraudulent, or fake. Nevertheless, each novel also complicates the epistemological basis on which these performed selves might be understood to be straightforwardly ‘false’ (or indeed ‘true’). Building on the claim recently advanced by the Money on the Left editorial collective that ‘money is queer’, this essay adds the analogous observation that money is weird.[5] Here, I argue that Fitzgerald’s, Ford’s, and Larsen’s characters encapsulate and express money’s epistemological weirdness, due in part to the way their performances both problematise and depend upon trust. Thus, while financial circumstances appear both to drive and facilitate the deceptive acts of Jay Gatsby, Clare Kendry, and Henry Martin Aluin Smith, they also point towards what I describe elsewhere as the ‘(un)conditional openness’ without which neither monetary tokens nor experimental novels could do the weird things they do in and to our worlds.[6]

Before I say more about the three novels already mentioned, I want to go back to the book I’ve probably thought more about than any other in the last quarter of a century. As it happens, I gave my first ever academic conference paper almost twenty years ago, in September 2006, at the University of Birmingham. At that conference, I considered Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, beginning with this passage:

For who in this world can give anyone a character? Who in this world knows anything of any other heart—or of his own? I don’t mean to say that one cannot form an average estimate of the way a person will behave. But one cannot be certain of the way any man will behave in every case—and until one can do that a “character” is of no use to anyone.[7]

Two decades later, I continue to find this an endlessly fascinating moment in John Dowell’s narrative and I think the reason for this is its epistemological weirdness. Famously, The Good Soldier is obsessed with the problem of knowing: can we really know other people? Did Dowell ever truly know the real Edward Ashburnham (the supposed ‘good soldier’ of the novel’s title)? In Ford’s hands these questions also attain a metatextual dimension: what is the point of writing novels if we cannot know the characters that inhabit them?[8] Indeed, this points towards two ideas that are in productive tension throughout modernist fiction: a profound sense of the textuality of the self, its construction in discourse and its shifting unknowability, alongside the modernist commitment to descending deeper into the self than ever before, as exemplified by the development of the stream-of-consciousness technique.

It is with this tension in mind that I turn to Ford’s 1933 novel The Rash Act. Prior to its publication, Ford described The Rash Act as: ‘the beginning of a trilogy that is meant to do for the post-war world and the Crisis what the Tietjens tetralogy [better known as Parade’s End] did for the war’.[9] So, for Ford at least, The Rash Act was up there with one of his very best works and it was also very specifically about ‘the Crisis’ (in other words, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed). Like Parade’s End, The Rash Act is a time-shifted, impressionist, and fragmented narrative which makes extensive use of free-indirect style. In another sense, however, The Rash Act is a quite simple prince-and-pauper fairy-tale in which Henry Martin, a ‘down-and-out’ American, and the British millionaire Henry Monckton exchange identities after both attempt the rash act of suicide.[10] While Hugh succeeds in killing himself, Henry fails, but sustains a blow to his face which (along with the fact that the two look very similar) enables him to assume the other’s identity. This is from the moment just after Henry Martin’s failed suicide attempt:

A voice said:
‘This is Monsieur Monckton Smeez. . . .’
Another:
‘Vous ne le dites pas! . . . You don’t say! I wish I had his money. But not at the moment his face.’ […]
If he wasn’t at the bottom of the Mediterranean he was at the side of a road under some plane trees and he had changed his identity.[11]

So, immediately upon being mistaken for Hugh Monkton, Henry is thinking in terms of changing his identity and money is already part of the equation.

Henry Martin writhed. […] He tried to say:
‘You must not say that.’ But they were binding his jaw over his head with a lint bandage. . . . After all he had wished to be Hugh Monckton. Now he was.[12]

This refers the reader back to a scene earlier in the book, when the two men meet for the first time in a Provençal nightclub and Henry experiences an intense desire to switch places with Hugh. However, beyond the fantasy of trading places that the novel appears to offer, it also asks typically weird modernist questions about identity and the self: two important markers of Hugh Monckton’s identity here are his money and a facial scar that he acquired during the First World War. During the course of his failed suicide attempt, Henry sustains a similar injury and is thus mistaken for Hugh. If he gets his money and also gets his scar, does this transform Henry into Hugh?

Nella Larsen’s Passing, like The Rash Act, is a fragmented modernist narrative containing hermeneutic gaps, time-shifts, multiple ambiguities, and epistemological uncertainties. Ittells the story of two African American women, Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, both of whom are light-skinned enough to pass for white. While Irene only passes occasionally, Clare is married to a wealthy white supremacist who does not know and would not take kindly to knowing that she has, in the novel’s own terms, quote-unquote ‘Negro blood’.[13] Importantly, Clare, we learn, started passing in the first place to escape from poverty as well as from racism and so, like The Rash Act, Passing centres on a character who is motivated by money to take on or create a new identity. This is from the second chapter of Passing, as Irene and Clare discuss the topic of ‘passing’ for white:

“Tell me, honestly, haven’t you ever thought of ‘passing’?”
Irene answered promptly: “No. Why should I?” And […] hastened to add: “You see, Clare, I’ve everything I want. Except, perhaps, a little more money.”
At that Clare laughed […]. “Of course,” she declared, “that’s what everybody wants, just a little more money, even the people who have it. And I must say I don’t blame them. Money’s awfully nice to have. In fact, all things considered, I think, ’Rene, that it’s even worth the price.”[14]

Here, Larsen makes a very direct link between passing and money. The act of passing has apparently enabled Clare to get all that she wants in life (‘what everybody wants’) but it also entails a cost: ‘all things considered […] it’s even worth the price’. But, once again, there is also a sense that passing destabilises the categories and the hierarchies that both race and money have hitherto functioned to hold in place. Both novels, therefore, explore identities as discursively constructed, performed, and open to negotiation, contestation, and creative reimagining, while also placing money at the centre of their narratives of passing.

This essay is titled ‘Weird Epistemologies of Money and Trust’ and there is, perhaps, an obvious sense in which the novels discussed so far raise questions to do with trust and/or trickery, given their concentration on characters who ‘pretend’ to be people other than their ‘true’ selves. However, I would argue that, where questions of money and trust are concerned, these stories are about more than fraudulent and deceptive central characters. As I mentioned earlier, my recent work has made a distinction between the ‘private money paradigm’ of mainstream discourse and the ‘public money paradigm’, which my fellow members of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective and I advance in our writing and our activism. The private money paradigm dominates orthodox economic thought, teaching, and rhetoric as well as framing our political debates (see for example, the idea that a new Prime Minister needs the permission of ‘the markets’ to act in the public interest).[15] It insists that money originates in private exchange, that it is finite, scarce, and that ‘difficult decisions’ about who to exclude and marginalise must always be made according to the rules of ‘budget responsibility’.

This narrative of privation, limitation, and zero-sum binary choices is embedded in the transactional logic of exchange that we can trace back at least as far as Adam Smith’s infamous claim that there is ‘a certain propensity in human nature […] to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’.[16] And, indeed, despite there being no historical or anthropological evidence to support this view, most economics textbooks continue to explain that money is a ‘medium of exchange’ that emerged as a solution to the ‘double-coincidence-of-wants problem’ of barter.[17] This, for example, is from Case, Fair, and Oster’s widely-used Principles of Economics:

A barter system requires a double coincidence of wants for trade to take place. […] Some agreed-to medium of exchange […] neatly eliminates the double-coincidence-of-wants problem. […] Money is a lubricant in the functioning of a market economy.[18]

We can only speculate as to why the language of lubrication is so pervasive in economic writing, but it is echoed in Robert Putnam’s influential Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, where it is also associated with the concept of trust:

A society that relies on generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. Honesty and trust lubricate the inevitable frictions of social life.[19]

This is just one instance of a pervasive trend in the scholarly discourse on trust, which I’ve been tracing across a number of disciplines for quite some years now, and which frequently frames trusting in transactional terms as, if you like, a kind of barter system: I’ll trust you if you trust me back; I’ll trust you if I can be certain you won’t double cross me.[20] Here is another, even more recent, example from Philippa Ryan’s Trust and Distrust in Digital Economies (2019): ‘Trust has proven to be integral to economic development and human security, because trust is central to exchange’.[21] My contention in all of this is that strategic, transactional, or, indeed, ‘calculative trust’ is not trust at all;[22] and that a much better way to understand the concept is to think of it in terms of the openness to the other that Derek Attridge describes as essential to ‘responsible reading’.[23] Indeed, as I’ve previously put it, the ‘openness to newness, strangeness, and otherness’ (a list to which we might also add weirdness) that is ‘fostered and demanded by experimental fiction’ (and, indeed, other works of art) is much closer than we usually think to the trust inherent in the acts of using and creating money, which entail both performative promises to pay and collective acknowledgements of interdependence: IOU or, rather, we owe one another.[24]

For the purposes of this essay, what I want to highlight is that, while there is a way of reading both The Rash Act and Passing as stories in which identities are exchanged in barter-like transactions – Henry for Hugh (which, incidentally, is the title of the 1934 sequel to The Rash Act),[25] and African American for white – and while this reading might also foreground the idea of trust – other characters must trust that Henry is Hugh or that Clare is white to enable them to pass – such interpretations would miss important aspects of these texts. Indeed, from our perspective at Money on the Left, the weird epistemologies and malleabilities that we find in modernist texts, when it comes to questions of identity and selfhood, are neither separate nor separable from public money’s always-already ungraspable, capacious, and open-ended weirdness. So, however tempting it may be to conclude that, although Passing and The Rash Act complicate fixed ideas about identities – presenting them as shifting, ambiguous, and discursively constructed – they perpetuate an orthodox understanding of money as a realm of transactional zero-sum exchange, my colleagues at Money on the Left and I would say ‘whoa, hold on!’

As I mentioned at the beginning, at MotL we have been affirming for some time now that ‘money is queer’. As Scott Ferguson explains in his 2025 article ‘Analog Critique; or, Isn’t Money Queer?’:

By this, we mean not only that public money should be mobilized to serve LGBTQ2+ communities, but more profoundly that money as a social medium is never as straight or alienating as it feigns to be. Like language, money’s many words, sights, sounds, smells and feels never communicate exactly what they intend.[26]

Even more recently, Lea Steininger has added, in an article published just a couple of months ago (and which I heartily recommend):

Just as sexual/gender identities are not fixed but constructed through discourse and power, so too are economic goods and services not stable, preexisting entities. [… M]oney itself is queer in the sense that it embodies polyvalent and contestable public structures and performances, which cannot be reduced to the narrow definitions offered by dominant economic ideologies.[27]

My contention here is that the weird epistemologies that we find in modernist fiction can help us to ‘think queerly’ about money in a number of important ways. Moreover, if it is better understood as (un)conditional openness, and not as calculative exchange, then the trust involved both in reading modernist novels and in creating money is much weirder than we may hitherto have recognised. The recent celebration of weird modernisms in Loughborough, then, demands to be recognised not just as an expression of the weird obsessions of weird scholars, but as academia fulfilling what Stefan Collini has called its ‘governing purpose’, that of ‘extending human understanding through open-ended enquiry’.[28] As ‘choreographers of credit’, trust, and openness to newness, strangeness, and otherness, universities foster the very weirdness that the private money paradigm consistently fails to recognise, comprehend, or value.[29]

At the 2024 BAMS conference in Leeds, Scott Ferguson and I presented a paper on The Great Gatsby which we have since developed into a book chapter that came out in April this year in a volume titled Inflationary Modernities, edited by Wayne Stables and Kieran Brown.[30] In that chapter, we discuss this moment, when Nick meets Gatsby for the first time:

He smiled understandingly […]. It was one of those rare smiles […] that you may come across four or five times in life. […] It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished – and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.[31]

Returning to this passage in preparation for ‘Weird Modernisms’, I was struck once again by the way it exemplifies what Scott and I have described as Fitzgerald’s method of ‘impressionist accounting’.[32] Nick’s idea of Gatsby here wavers and blurs before his eyes so that, again, this is not simply a matter of ‘elegant young roughneck’ Jimmy Gatz pretending to be the extravagant party host Jay Gatsby. Instead, Gatsby complicates and queers (or perhaps I should say weirds) orthodox understandings of gendered, raced, classed, and sexual identity while also offering glimpses beyond the private money paradigm’s austere logic of exclusionary violence.

The image at the top of this essay is the ‘Weird Pride’ flag, co-created in 2021 by autistic writers, advocates, and community organisers Fergus Murray and  Quinn Dexter for the first Weird Pride Day (March 4th), ‘a day for people to embrace their weirdness, and reject the stigma associated with being weird’.[33] In Murray’s words: ‘Creativity is driven by divergent perspectives, and squashed by demands for conformity.’[34] To conclude, then, I want to turn to the words of the neuroqueer theorist Nick Walker and to affirm that, by embracing what Walker calls ‘beautiful weirdness’, we can open up new possibilities not only for rejecting normative attitudes to identity but also for jettisoning the economic orthodoxies embedded in the private money paradigm. I suspect that every delegate at the ‘Weird Modernisms’ conference was there because at some point in the past they’d been willing to approach the beautiful weirdness of modernist art with an attitude of openness and trust. As Walker explains:

[A]nyone can liberate themselves from the strictures of normativity. The already neurodivergent can reconnect with, and cultivate previously suppressed or undeveloped capacities, in order to more fully manifest their potentials for beautiful weirdness, and those whom we call neurotypicals are just potential neuroqueer mutant comrades who haven’t yet woken up and figured out how to unzip their normal-person suits.[35]

My hope is that by embracing weird modernisms and by affirming, not only that money is queer but also that money is weirder than the austerity mindset that’s currently doing its utmost to destroy our universities, and indeed our planet, will ever be able to appreciate or contain, we can build a postnormal, inclusive and sustainable world and unzip our ‘normal-person suits’ (along with our normal-person monetary imaginations) together.

[1] I refer here to QMUCU’s indispensable ‘UK HE Shrinking’ webpage: https://qmucu.org/qmul-transformation/uk-he-shrinking/

[2] See, for example, Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson, ‘Green-Lighting Gatsby: Austere Modernisms, Exuberant Avant-Gardes, and their Orgastic Futures’, in Inflationary Modernities: Literature, Culture, and Economy, ed. Wayne Stables and Kieran Brown (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), 21-47; and Rob Hawkes, ‘“Too paranoid for you?”: Suspicion, Trust and (Post/Meta?)Modern Money in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge’, in Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature, ed. Adam Kelly and Katerina Pavlidi (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), 185-204.

[3] Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson, ‘UK Universities in Crisis? Time to Transform Higher Ed Finance’, Money on the Left, 16 January 2025: https://moneyontheleft.org/2025/01/16/uk-universities-in-crisis-time-to-transform-higher-ed-finance/

[4] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby [1925] (Penguin,1990), 123.

[5] Scott Ferguson, ‘Analog Critique; or, Isn’t Money Queer?’, Public Culture 37.1 (2025), 86.

[6] Rob Hawkes, ‘(Un)conditional Openness: Towards a Neochartalist Theory of Money and Trust’, Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice 1.1 (2025), 1-42. See also Rob Hawkes, Scott Ferguson, and Will Beaman, ‘(Un)conditional Openness: Towards a Neochartalist Theory of Money and Trust’, Money on the Left, 4 July 2025: https://moneyontheleft.org/2025/07/04/unconditional-openness-towards-a-neochartalist-theory-of-money-and-trust-2/

[7] Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard (Norton, 2012), 105-8.

[8] My first academic conference paper subsequently developed into my first academic publication, which was on this very topic. See Rob Hawkes, ‘Personalities of Paper: Characterisation in A Call and The Good Soldier ’, in Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations, ed. Andrzej Gasiorek and Daniel Moore (Rodopi, 2008), 43-60.

[9] Ford Madox Ford, letter to Ray Long, 2 July 1932, Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton University Press, 1965), 208.

[10] Ford Madox Ford, The Rash Act [1933] (Carcanet, 1982), 74. For further discussion of this fascinating novel, see Rob Hawkes, ‘Trusting in Provence: Financial Crisis in The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh’, in Ford Madox Ford, France and Provence, ed. Dominique Lemarchal and Claire Davison-Pégon (Rodopi, 2011), 229-42; and ‘Bogus Modernism: Impersonation, Deception and Trust in Ford Madox Ford and Evelyn Waugh’, in Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism: Continuities, Revisions, Speculations, ed. Bénédicte Coste, Catherine Delyfer, and Christine Reynier (Routledge, 2017), 175-86.

[11] Ford, The Rash Act, 212.

[12] Ford, The Rash Act, 211-12.

[13] Nella Larsen, Passing [1929], in Quicksand and Passing (Serpent’s Tail, 2014), 158.

[14] Larsen, Passing, 160.

[15] ‘Andy Burnham would enter Downing Street already “boxed in” by financial markets’ according to a recent piece in the Guardian by Alex Daniel: ‘“Walking a tightrope”: Burnham’s borrowing plans clash with fiscal realities’, Guardian, 24 June 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/24/walking-a-tightrope-andy-burnham-borrowing-clash-fiscal-realities

[16] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations [1776] (Penguin, 1999), 116.

[17] Karl E. Case, Ray C. Fair, and Sharon M. Oster, Principles of Economics, 10th edn. (Prentice Hall, 2012), 502.

[18] Case et al., Principles of Economics, 502.

[19] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster, 2000), 135.

[20] See Hawkes, ‘(Un)conditional Openness’; and Hawkes, ‘“Too paranoid for you?”’ for detailed discussions of these issues.

[21] Philippa Ryan, Trust and Distrust in Digital Economies (Routledge, 2019), 3.

[22] According to Laura Poppo, Kevin Zheng Zhou and Julie J. Li, calculative trust ‘informs expectations by deliberately and rationally assessing forward-looking conditions’ and ‘hinges on the relative values of cheating […] and cooperation’. Poppo et al., ‘When Can You Trust “Trust”? Calculative Trust, Relational Trust, and Supplier Performance’, Strategic Management Journal 37.4 (2016): 725, 724.

[23] See Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004).

[24] Rob Hawkes, ‘How can novels help us think about money… and maybe even save the planet?’, Money on the Left, 26 February 2024: https://moneyontheleft.org/2024/02/26/how-can-novels-help-us-think-about-money-and-maybe-even-save-the-planetguest-lecture/

[25] Ford Madox Ford, Henry for Hugh (J.B. Lippincott, 1934).

[26] Ferguson, ‘Analog Critique’, 86.

[27] L. E. Steininger, ‘Against inflation: queer-feminist monetary (and price) theory’, Review of International Political Economy (2026), 18.

[28] Stefan Collini, What Are Universities For? (Penguin, 2012), 91.

[29] Scott Ferguson, Benjamin Wilson, William Saas, and Maxximilian Seijo, ‘Overcoming COVID-19 Requires Rethinking University Finance,’ b2o (2020): https://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/scott-ferguson-benjamin-wilson-william-saas-maxximilian-seijo-overcoming-covid-19-requires-rethinking-university-finance/

[30] Hawkes and Ferguson, ‘Green-Lighting Gatsby’, 21-47.

[31] Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 49.

[32] Hawkes and Ferguson, ‘Green-Lighting Gatsby’, 33-6.

[33] Weird Pride Day (n.d): https://weirdpride.day/

[34] Stimpunks Foundation, ‘Weird’ (n.d.): https://stimpunks.org/glossary/weird/

[35] Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities (Autonomous Press, 2021), 190.

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Public Employment & Training from the Great Society to the “End of Welfare as We Know It”

This month, Scott Ferguson speaks with Mario Rendina about the politics of public employment and training in the United States as they shifted over the course of the late 20th century. Unlike our standard episodes, this conversation is an archival treat: it was originally recorded 11 years ago in 2015, three years before the Money on the Left podcast officially began.

Rendina brings over thirty years of hands-on experience working within municipal government in Tampa Bay, Florida—specifically within Hillsborough County. Grounded in his extensive career as a local administrator, Rendina walks us through the decades he spent supervising county initiatives, sketching out how local experimentation actively moved with and against broad macroeconomic shifts at the federal level.

As Rendina explains, local administrators routinely interpreted federal laws regulating public employment and training rather than passively accepting top-down mandates as fixed or uncontestable. Despite federal directives to prioritize private-sector placement, Rendina and his colleagues routinely found creative ways to bolster and expand public employment—whether by baking future public employment contracts into library building projects or dynamically staffing their own municipal offices.

Throughout the interview, Rendina’s testimony tacitly underscores a core Money on the Left lesson: we must not underestimate the institutional and communal capacities that regional governments always-already have at their disposal. While pro-social change requires funding, local institutions can actively leverage their crediting powers and existing infrastructure to mobilize and value local communities.

Ultimately, the conversation maps a troubling yet instructive historical trajectory from Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society to Bill Clinton’s notorious “end to welfare as we know it.” While the federal government never fully committed to a well-compensated, non-exclusive public job guarantee during this era, Rendina’s account highlights genuine pro-social advances we can still learn from today. Crucially, it recounts how Reaganite and Clintonian neoliberalism systematically undercut these endeavors over time, defunding public training programs and increasingly privatizing their leadership, operations, and aims.

Conducted with an eye toward future struggles for a federal Job Guarantee grounded in an inalienable right to work, this interview provides a vital archive from which to advance modern movements for public provisioning.

Additional Resources:

  • The Full, Raw Audio: Listen to the complete, unedited 2015 recording on our SoundCloud.
  • Conference Presentation: Watch Mario Rendina’s presentation delivered at the inaugural Money on the Left Conference at the University of South Florida in 2018.

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

So, this is Scott Ferguson. This recording is being done on Sunday, July 12th, 2015. I’m here with…

Mario Rendina

This is Mario Rendina. I have worked with employment and training programs since October of 1969. I remember this because I remember looking down at my very first report. I was the statistician for a concentrated employment program (CEP) and I remember looking down at my first report, and I remember keeping that report in my bottom file drawer, and I would look at it every time I wondered about when did I start working in employment and training?

And I looked down there and there was that October of 1969 report. So I’m pretty sure when I got involved in employment and training programs. That’s when it was.

Scott Ferguson

To explain what has brought us together, I’m interested in Modern Monetary Theory and their ideas about large, publicly funded, full employment programs. These programs would be used countercyclically in relationship to the expansions and contractions of the market. You, Mario, have years of experience not only in job training and in job placement, but when there were opportunities – if I’m understanding you right – when there were opportunities, meaning when there was public funding available, indirect job creation. You have already told me some of these stories about creative ways that this was done. I guess, to me, this conversation, in addition to learning from you, about this history and what we can draw from this history to move forward, but it is basically bringing the power that Modern Monetary Theory or MMT brings us, which is the power to use fiscal policy to fund public works programs as much as we need to. With your experience and know-how – I guess one way of putting this question more simply is – what would you do to bring about full employment in the United States if you had no fiscal limits?

Well, we can start by just talking about your career and let your career be kind of a window into this whole larger history. We should start with where we are right now and what county you’re working in.

Mario Rendina

Right. Well, basically, my career started with the concentrated employment program in Tampa, which was the Tampa CEP, also known as TCEP. There are a bunch of people still around that were involved in the sub-program. 

Scott Ferguson

And what did that stand for?

Mario Rendina

The Tampa Concentrated Employment Program. I can’t remember exactly how many, but I think there were only about nine in the country and they focused on specific areas. For example, in Tampa, it was an extremely poor area of Tampa focused, not the whole of the city of Tampa, but on a specific target area. So it was literally focused down on working at the problems in a very specific area. And it was so highly directed to that area that all the staff, which included coaches for participants in the program, coaches that would get people out of bed in the morning if they didn’t show up for appointments.

You had counselors that were trying to come up with an employability plan for the participant. You had job developers that were going out and finding jobs in the community for folks. You had supportive services. We had a supportive services section, which could buy boots and uniforms or whatever was necessary for the employment of an individual.

Scott Ferguson

Is that where something like childcare could be funded?

Mario Rendina

Daycare was the biggest piece of support services, for us, it was child daycare. Of course, it was a hugely important piece of any US person’s employability plan. So anyhow, it was a concentrated employment program and so all these people were supposed to come from the target area, which made it a very pure group kind of thing. Everybody knew everybody else’s business pretty well. You just live down the block from me, and that’s why you’re coming to get me out of bed in the morning, because I didn’t show up for the job interview. 

Scott Ferguson

Oh, wow. So, it had a community feel.

Mario Rendina

It definitely had a community feel to it. I ended up in the program simply because they couldn’t find somebody that had any kind of a statistical background in the target area. So they had to pull from outside the target area in order to get a statistician in there, even though I had failed statistics once and passed it finally once it was social science statistics for social science sociology majors that had it completed in their major. So, in any case, I was brought in by a friend who, in fact, had gone to Vanderbilt and virtually completed his master’s degree. He said, “you need to come over here.”

Now, I had come from being the first man in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in Hillsborough County. I had engaged them for one year. I said, “I will work for you for one year.” That was my promise. At the end of the year, I went with the TCEP program as a statistician, he had moved to a position of evaluator. These are very, very important things in any programs that we need to look at in the future. It’s evaluating the program. I think one of the major problems that we have is that we’re not doing any monitoring and evaluation of what we do. Did it work?

How well did it work? How is the staff doing? What are the outputs? Where did it screw up in the middle? How does the front end work? So anyhow, the concentrated employment programs were, to my mind, clearly experiments in how we do manpower programs where we have concentrations of poverty and all the things that are implicit there. So that was the CEP programs, and they can be found. You can look them up. There’s very, very little information on the CEPs, but the forerunner of all of that was the Manpower Development and Training Act, MDTA. 

Scott Ferguson

What year was that? 

Mario Rendina

1962. 

MDTA was, as much as I can recall, it went to the school systems for vocational training, manpower development through the school systems, the VoTech system. But it also had an element of on the job training and I think they looked a little bit toward the unions as to what could we do in terms of on the job training?

Basically, it was a subsidy to the private sector for a given occupation. Basically, the policy was that the government would pay one half of the wage for a specific period of time. You had MDTA and so you might have welding going on in the school system and you might have on the job training, doing whatever jobs that the private sector wanted that you were going to pay half for over a specific period of time. That was a pretty limited program, at least in the Tampa area. I think the funding was such that you could maybe put together a complete welding program or something like that, where you’re actually buying the hardware as well as uniforms and that kind of stuff.

Pretty expensive stuff. Then you’d have an OJT (On-the-Job Training) program on the side, which could in fact lead to the skills training, which had a skills training component and you had on the job training components. That is what I remember about the way we operated here. There may have been some other variability, but with the CEP program, you brought in EOA Money, Economic Opportunity Act.

Now we’re talking about President Johnson, right? So it’s “war on poverty” money and it was flexible. That was what brought your counselors, your job developers, the staffing to carry out very much expanded training programs and we’re talking about structural unemployment. There’s no question we’re talking about structural unemployment here. So, virtually, in terms of training, if somebody didn’t have a G.E.D., we’d start there. You do a G.E.D., you get your G.E.D., and then meanwhile, the counselor was trying to develop an employability plan that would go on from the G.E.D. You need the G.E.D. in order to go into clerical training, and so forth.

Meanwhile, of course, for the women, we’re providing child daycare in most cases. We were, in fact, an avenue for welfare recipients. Also, if the case manager welfare could get one of our people into the CEP program, then they knew that we could take care of them and the welfare people didn’t know how to get people on jobs.

So there was the WIN (Work Incentive Program) program, which was later actually. There’s Project Hopeful early on, but, these programs would have a sewing class, that would be your project. So, to be able to get somebody into a program where the client could literally move through the program to reach their capability in terms of education and training, was a big deal.

So they would love to have us take on a participant, and the person was tracked through what was called a central records unit. Now, this was the first tracking mechanism for any of this stuff that was done at a local level. We’re talking about a federal grant, a federal grant to a local area…

Scott Ferguson

One time or ongoing?

Mario Rendina

You would renew it. It was an annual renewal with a contract. It was approximately 3.5in thick. All the regulations related to the CEP are there as part of the contract. And you had assurances that ran on for 50 pages and so forth and so on. Then you probably had a good inch and a half of a programmatic description and budgets.

And so it was a highly structured program in terms of what are you going to do? You’re going to have both statistically and narrative wise, you’re talking about how many you’re going to do? How are you going to bring them into the program? How many are you going to bring into the program? 

What’s the flow through the program? What’s it going to be? How many people are you going to put in on the job training and so forth? But the “and so forth” was the critical part of it, and that was skills training of anything that could be offered by the VoTech system in Hillsborough County, which was absolutely extensive.

We had Erwin VoTech later. I’m not sure that Erwin existed originally. Erwin has everything up to LPN training in the medical area and we had welding and auto mechanics and diesel mechanics and all kinds of other things. But virtually anything that they had and also the things that the community college had. So you have his very, very wide range of available training. On staff, we also had a test administrator. So the test administrator would determine that there was one basic test of adult basic education. I don’t know how I remember that, but, yeah, it was a test on basic education. That would be the first thing that would give you an idea of where the person’s grade level was and so forth.

This test administrator could administer a number of tests. We have ways of determining proper directions of people, whether or not they’re succeeding or not in terms of our design versus the school systems design or what have you, but the central record unit was keeping track of all this, and you would see somebody go into a training component and you would know how long they were there, and you would know what happened to them after they came out of that training.

Where did they go from there? All of this was done on a key punch machine and this is brand new stuff. Nobody else had this kind of a drive system. We had a key punch machine and a counter sorter. The counter sorter is the machine that you see in the old FBI movies when they wanted to show high tech stuff.

It’s the machine that made a huge amount of noise and went “BARARARA” and all the punch cards would go into different piles. Well, we had different decks. We had a deck for intake and it would give you the characteristics of the participants. That deck represented the characteristics of the participants. Then when somebody would move from one place like intake to assessment and orientation.

So, anyhow, you might be in this component, you go assessment and orientation, then you move on to maybe skills training or on the job training or something like that. We had teams that were composed of a coach, a counselor, a job developer – at least those three positions that I can recall. People were being handled by six teams, so we would look at the overall statistics of the program at the end of the month and say, “okay, overall, we had so many placements. We had so many dropouts of different kinds, but we also have evaluations of two types.”

One was of each of the teams. Each team had its own set of statistics that were identical to our inputs and outputs. How many people did you send to orientation? How many people did you send to skills training? How were the exits from your team? So the teams were the output of the total system was the aggregate of the units. So each team was being closely monitored and again, I emphasize, monitoring is the only way that you can achieve anything in these kinds of programs.

You have to know what you’re doing and have responsible staff. In order to affix responsibility, you break it down into units that are small enough to where you can look at it and say, “how come Mary ended up dropping out?” So what do we do? We have a meeting every month with every team. We had one monitor or one evaluator that did nothing but the teams and was responsible for doing reports on six teams every month, on every aspect of those teams. On the other side, we had a monitor that would look at the components. How did we do in welding training? It might be by institution. How did we do in skills training? And we had some subcontractors. So we might be looking at that subcontractor that had a very specific kind of a job.

So anyhow, it was a very comprehensive system in terms of tracking individuals through the system. You often discovered what your problems were as you went along and you would fix the system as you went along. So, you know, people are stacking up here at assessment of orientation. What’s going on there? Maybe we should maybe filter down the front end a little bit so that we can handle all the people that are stacking up. Teams can only handle a case load of so many.

I think we were an unusual program of, maybe, nine in the country. So anyhow, that was an interesting program. That was the first one that comprehensively included all these wonderful things like support services and training and so forth.

The delightful person that ran the summer program, which was a summer program. Delightful lady who was probably someone that was dead serious about making a success of her life as a professional, and ran this program. She had maybe more than a high school education, you know, possibly community college.

She ran an elaborate summer program. We’re talking about a couple million dollars worth of summer programs in all the parks and recreation areas and a lot of county departments. It was a huge job. So it was someone who was taking great advantage of being a staff member in an organization that respected black staff for their abilities.

She had the ability to do this. Wow. Great. Let’s let her do that. Let’s have her do that. I think we tried to figure out how somebody would work out best in the organization. Our counselors were largely degreed people. It started out with the counselors. Under the CEP, that was actually a subcontractor of the job service, the teams of the counselors and job developers were under the job service in our house, but they had a director that was in our house that was the job service. Why? Probably because of the job development part of it. You don’t want to have job placement being done by anybody other than the job service. Right? So you have them over your structure that results in job placement. So that was there. But the counselors could be degreed, and they didn’t have to come from the area because it was under a subcontract.

It was a subcontract of the job service, so they weren’t required to hire only from the target area. So we did have professional counselors, two of which I had brought in later into the social record unit to be monitors or evaluators or statisticians. But in any case, all of these folks worked together as teams.

Everybody we had had quirks. Okay. Weird personal kinds of stories.The fiscal officer was a Vietnam vet. He had fixed F-4 Phantoms at one of the bases in Vietnam. He was about my age, I guess, at the time and he was a tremendous fiscal officer.

He could throw money around pretty well in terms of putting it in the right places and he was known to be a Vietnam vet. I had been a little sailor boy at one time or another, “No, no, I’m not, I’m not the right type to take care of situations.” Right? But we could serve virtually any population that came to us.

Well, we quite purposefully developed training that we knew was in demand that was portable. You are talking about demand occupations, but actually one of the more important things is portability. Portability of an occupation. If you’re a nurse here, you can be a nurse there. LPN, same thing. So the medical stuff is really important in terms of portability.

But anyhow, we saw a demand for therapeutic massage. It paid pretty well. It was portable, and it was the kind of thing that we could buy the table. We could buy the training from a training provider. We could do those things, and we could place them, and that was fine.

The Department of Labor went bananas. Well, when they saw the placement that we had placed a massage therapist with anybody, labor went bananas. “What are you guys doing down there? Somebody is going to get a hold of it, the paper is going to get a hold of it.”

The paper did discover that it was a legitimate placement. That was really flying on the edge. But we knew that that was a portable occupation that had a certain amount of demand. And so we’d risk these things. We’d say, “okay, this is a small school. Let’s give them one. Let’s see if they can turn out one massage therapist where they can place. And if that works out, we’ll give them one more.”

I mean, we were not afraid to do a one off of something. So that’s a pretty good example of what was really pretty out there on the edge of what the government and society was willing to do. You could say it’s therapeutic massage and you could back it up, but it just didn’t sound so.

So we were out there on the edge on a lot of things and we’d have a lot of situations in which we would have two competing privates, like in truck driver training and a CDL (certified driver’s license) will get you a job anywhere. Again, portability. If you can drive a big rig, you can get a job here, you can get a job there. We needed jobs for men, also. I mean, at that point we were just thinking about demand occupations. So you’d have some friction between two privates that both did the same kinds of things. We’d decide on the basis of outcomes on who we’d be using most. We wouldn’t be exclusive to one or the other.

Scott Ferguson

So how often, in these programs, in the late 60s into the 70s, how often did you find that there were always demand sectors that you could train, support, and funnel people into?

Mario Rendina

Yeah. I remember inflation but as the economy receded, we were getting into a major recession eventually. Then it became really difficult. But it was at that point that CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) went to public service employment. Title VI. Title VI of CEDA is public service employment. It was countercyclical.

We were working with structural unemployment. That was our big deal. All of a sudden we’re talking about countercyclical. And we were saying, “what the hell is countercyclical? Counter to what? It’s a cycle, right? Counter to what cycle?” You know, we didn’t know cyclical.

Scott Ferguson

What year is this? 

Mario Rendian

It was ‘73 that the act was made. But I’m pretty sure our recession was getting into the early 80s. You can probably place better than I can.

Scott Ferguson

I think there were several in there.

Mario Rendina

There were several in there. But one that was most profound is when they started pouring a lot of money into Title VI. It was interesting because under the CEP, under TCEP, under the original program, they had, what I now can only assume, was Labor’s attempt at a pilot for public service employment.

We got a small grant for the public employment program and it was like $30,000 or something. What the heck are you going to do with $30,000? And it needed to be a public employee. How many can you hire for $30,000? I amused myself by saying, “look, we’ve got a program that if I hire them into the Central Records unit, they can enroll themselves. They can put themselves into a job, which is to monitor themselves.”

I said, “you know, this could be done with $30,000. You can’t hire more than one person. Why not hire somebody that can also help us out with the rest of our monitoring and stuff.” So anyhow, that was the public employment program and the giggle on that one was I said, “public employment program. Ah! It’s the PEP program!” Labor came down on me like you wouldn’t believe, with Palmdale boots, “No, we’re calling it the PEP program. You can’t call it the program.” “Okay.” But it was this tiny little thing, but it really was the forerunner of the whole Title VI public employment. They didn’t get much of a test out of us.

We had one, right? We converted them. We turned them into full-time employee. They worked up until 2000. They retired from the county. Anyhow, prior to 1970, we were under the hospital welfare board of Hillsborough County. That’s who the grant came to. In January of 1970, we became a county department. So, there’s the transition where we became county employees, but we were funded throughout the whole CETA and so forth. So anyhow, that is kind of a divisor, because all of a sudden you have to have benefits and so forth.

You’re getting into recession and public service employment and Title VI. What does it do? Jobs for people that met the definition of unemployed for a very short period of time. It was the job service definition of unemployed, meaning that you didn’t have a job and you were seeking employment, you had to be seeking employment, and you didn’t have a job for a period of time. I don’t know what it is, two weeks. Whatever it was back then, it was a relatively short period of time.

Scott Ferguson

So this wasn’t really for the long term unemployed.

Mario Rendina

Well, it was because people are coming out of college and they don’t have a job and they don’t have a horizon for a job. We employed a lot of those too. But, what was it for? Okay, it was government jobs that had a huge diversity in Hillsborough County. I’ll get into that in a minute. 

But also for private not-for-profits. And it was jobs. All we would pay is the salaries. So in the county, we built all the boardwalks at Lotus Lake Park, for example, and several other parks. The county would provide the materials and we did all the labor, including a supervisor. You had a contractor that was out of business who knew how to bang lumber together and make boardwalks.

Hire him as the supervisor. What do you do? You hire them at prevailing wages. We need to think about that in MMT, right? We’re hiring people in government at prevailing wages for the job. One guy is banging lumber. He gets that wage and it’s all established in the government structure, right?

We can create new jobs, but basically, let’s say we’re just filling jobs descriptions that exist in, say, the county and city structure and at those prevailing wages. It’s supposed to be a two year term and by that time, the economy will have recovered or the economy recovered enough for the counties and cities to pick up these people.

Okay, the same thing is going on in the state.

Scott Ferguson

Because their tax revenues are increasing.

Mario Rendina

So that’s the presumption. 

Scott Ferguson

Then they can afford to take these people on as full time employees and your funding mechanism ceases to support these jobs.

Mario Rendina

Right, and that’s the concept. Also for private not-for-profits. That was, I think, a very elegant idea because, in a recession, one of the first organizations to feel the pressure is private not-for-profits. I don’t have enough money to give any to the end of the line people. So we had onesies and twosies out there. It would be a job description: “I need a secretary in order to run my whole operation.” So the private not-for-profits, we had bunches of them. They would simply give us a two page proposal saying “I need this for that.”

We ended up with a complete public service employment section. You had the structural unemployment section over here basically doing all the structural unemployment stuff and you have public service employment over here. It was a separate shop. The city did their own and the county did their own.

They simply said, “you’re going to get $6 million and you’re going to get $6 million. Do with it the way you want.” The piece I was looking at was, let’s say, the county’s portion. So we got all the county departments, find out what their needs were and this was over and above whatever they were doing, they had to be over and above whatever they were doing.

Good. So you’re going to create a new library, but you don’t have any staff for it because your budget lines are full-on librarians. You get that built, fine, with public service employment, you can hire librarians that need to meet the eligibility requirements to be libraries, that just an example.

Scott Ferguson

And you can train them if you need to.

Mario Rendina

You could do that. There was a title in which you could do training and employment together. It was designed more for youth, where you do training in a job, and a kind of work experience with related training.

We always wanted it related. None of this business about sweeping the floor over here and learning to be an accountant over here. It had to be related. Anyhow, not too much training. You were usually picking up somebody that had a construction job over here, and see if we have a construction job over here.

So, the areas, in, in the county structure, there were most impacted were, were, things like parks and recreation. Okay. And, where, where you needed staff and where you could train them. You’re training them on the job with county employees at no cost. You know, that’s the cost of doing business is training, is training a new, you know, recreation work.

Okay. Parks and Rec was a big one. That is the single largest part of a summer program when school was out. Where the people in the city, the poor people in the city and in the county send their kids? They send them to the parks. And what we would do is staff those parks.

We had recreation leaders who would take smaller kids and supervise their volleyball or whatever the games were, you’d become recreation leaders. We had park ranger trainees that would help the park rangers with whatever they were doing, which might be emptying the big trash cans into the whatever.

But, it gave jobs for all these people and it provided child daycare for thousands of working parents. It was a marvelous program. Everybody loved that program. So it was fantastic. And it came out under Title 2 at one point. It was the only part that wasn’t structural under Title 2, it was a jobs program. Anyhow, that’s how public service employment was supposed to work, also. It was that you had a need and a way to impact it was staff. If it required equipment or nuts and bolts, that was at the county’s expense. Then the labor was on that side. This is one of the areas where it caught a lot of hell, in terms of the press, because it did have a minimal requirement up front, you could place professionals straight out of college. Okay. They did have student loans. They were people that were going to contribute to the economy if they could get a job. Some of the super examples of that kind of thing that bothers some people sometimes is that the state attorney was E.J. Salcines at the time, and E.J. had come from a school in Texas, this law school in Texas.

And that school became known as EJU, “E.J. Salcines University,” because he would bring them over and they would qualify because they had just been through law school. They didn’t have a job. They had been unemployed for two weeks. They were seeking employment and they would qualify for that. We staffed the State Attorney’s office and if they passed the bar, he’d hire them as full time. Not a bad thing. Mark Ober, our current state attorney? He was from public service employment. 

Okay, there was some high level stuff that went on, as well as low level stuff. I remember a guy that came in under CEDA, but it was the very, very beginning of CEDA and another good friend of mine was a counselor at the time.

I eventually hired him to do monitoring and evaluation of teams, but he was a counselor of one of our teams, and he got this guy, Vietnam veteran, wired to the gills. He was just a wired guy, stringy, strong Vietnam veteran. Crazy. “Yeah, I need a job. I want a job. Get me a job.” Our counselor, my good friend, says, “okay, look, here’s the deal. You give me 30 days retention and I’ll put you on a job. And you know what? You give me 30 days of retention, and you can come back to me, and we’ll talk about it again, and I might put you on another job, but you got to give me 30 days retention.” Playing the statistics game, but to the advantage of the client and to our own advantage. I mean, you know, this kid was beginning to learn how to hold a job. “I gotta hold it for 30 days. I gotta do that or he won’t give me another job.” I went to one of my retirement functions and he was there. He was there after he had gone through the structural program. We eventually got him over into public service employment with the Parks and Recreation Department. He was a multi-trade worker. He could change locks on every park in the county. I saw him one time when he was out there working with some of our summer program people, putting together a dock or floating dock. Yeah, that’s an enormous success. You can see public service employment as being abused. You can see it as being used properly. The whole thing has to do with how you’re going to implement a program. It all has to do with that.

Our implementation, I think, was highly successful, inasmuch as we converted 40% of the people we put into those jobs into full time employment with the county organization or with the private not-for-profit, I don’t think anybody else in the country did that. So it had to do with implementation and taking the regulations seriously.

You know, the regulations are saying that you are supposed to convert people as the economy improves and so forth and so on. So, when budget time would come around, we would say, “pay attention to your PSE people, you know, if you can make a spot in your budget for that PSE person, you need to take them.”

And at some point we started paying the benefits too, because to start with, all we were doing was paying the wages. At some point somebody decided, “oh my God, these people would do benefits.” And that came straight out of the public till, fortunately out of the national money, to back pay the benefits.

I say fortunate for local governments because, you know, there was a lot of back pay due. But anyhow, they really became exactly the same as county employees. A lot of those converted. So there were successes and, and there could easily be abuses. It was easy to have an abuse there.

And of course, the abuses are the ones that hit the papers. But as a program, think about the idea of WPA (Works Progress Administration) but think about that as having it go from top to bottom. Okay. Now we’re telling you about block grants again. CEDA was successful in as much as it got the attention of local governments, because it was a block grant to areas of a certain size.

It gave them a lot of muscle in a lot of ways. But what did it do? It could also take care of an awful lot of things that were going on in addition to, maybe, somebody building boardwalks. We had a pothole crew out there. Let me tell you how much people like the pothole crew.

Because, what happens? “I got a pothole in my yard! People are breaking their axles here.” 

“Call the county commissioner for your area.” 

“I got them potholes here.” 

You know, it was a huge success. It’s two guys behind a truck with asphalt, two shovels and a tamper.

By God, you saw that pothole and the politicians were going bananas. “Wow, what a program!” You can do infrastructure stuff at that level all the way up. That’s what I think needs to be done. First of all, you define infrastructure very broadly to include, at the high end of the whole thing, the electric grid.

Scott Ferguson

Sure. And bridges and dams and…

Mario Rendina

Bridges and dams and all that. And you look at the federal block grants to do those things. My God, the interstate highway system, the bridges, etc.. And let’s not forget the power grid. That’s part of our infrastructure. So you’ve got those, but then you do a block grant to the states and to areas of a certain size, and each takes care of its own and you call them infrastructure projects. They have to be infrastructure projects at the local level, at the state level, and at the federal level. Now you’re picking it up from the bottom to the top, okay. And when you’re doing this big stuff up here, you’re also hiring people at this level and the state is doing the same thing and the local levels are doing the same things.

Scott Ferguson

Things are flowing up and down at the same time.

Mario Rendina

Absolutely. My God, money can’t be spent better than that. You can probably follow the regulations. You see what I mean? If you broadly define infrastructure, so that you get to the pothole, but you say infrastructure and by God, I can write a regulation that says this is infrastructure and your projects must be inside of this parameter.

I can monitor that. I can determine whether you’re ripping me off or not as a local government, as a state government, or if I’m a IAG (Industry Advisory Group) at the federal level. I can see if that’s what is happening. So that is what I see as the cure-all of that. You could get a lot of political mileage behind it if people remember what they could do in their Title VI projects, because there were one offs and there were projects and the projects are what I’m talking about here, being the parks, the boardwalks, the, you know whatever.

Scott Ferguson

And this is during the 70s and the 80s.

Mario Rendina

Yeah.

Scott Ferguson

So did Tampa, or Hillsborough County, have a better time than the rest of the country as a result of these projects, do you think?

Mario Rendina

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s sort of like WPA, right? Okay. You go to North Florida and you go to the Suwannee River anywhere on the Suwannee River.

You will find, within two miles, every two miles, you’ll find a concrete boat launch that is made out of concrete, that was done and poured in the 30s and I guarantee you it is the best boat launch you have ever seen in your life. The whole concept of projects can work fine.

That was done by local labor, no doubt. It can also be very high quality stuff, but with the boardwalks and all that stuff, if you live around Hillsborough County, you need to talk to people. I wish some of the people that put people in public service employment were around that you could talk to because it was a very, very broad program and I’m only remembering some of the projects that went down.

Scott Ferguson

So there was a moment of regained autonomy at the county level where you could do a lot of good. Then came this new legislation from the feds. 

Mario Rendina

We pretty much continued to do the adult work. Yeah. All of that worked out pretty, pretty darn well, really. Meanwhile it’s becoming more and more private and at some point, the Job Training Partnership Act rears its head and JTPA is clearly going to be a private sector dominated council. The JTPA council is going to be private sector dominated and it was. So the shift then goes from government control of everything that’s going on, under a council that they have absolute control over. Everybody is getting what they want anyhow, so it’s not a big deal, to a more private sector dominated kind of thing. The whole thing came back together at one point with city staff and county staff.

Okay, you’re backing in two silos.

But I was like, at one point, the director of both of the operating staffs, whether it was county or city, I was now a county staff member. We’ve gone over to JTPA. But the councils wanted to create one council. They said, “we’re not going to have two CEDA councils,” because for a while there we had two CEDA councils chugging along.

We said, “no wait a minute. The superintendent of schools, they have a meeting over here and then two weeks later he has a meeting over here with this CEDa council. All that crap got to be brought back together. Everybody agrees? Yes, it does, but what we’re going to do is we’re going to run parallel until JTPA goes along. We are going to have one council that controls both of them. Okay. Now this is where privatizing comes into it, because at some point, the director of the council and that staff becomes privatized in every county in the state of Florida, every prime sponsor in the state of Florida, with the exception of Hillsborough.

Hillsborough was the last holdout, where it was run by the government, and at that point, county was the government entity.

Scott Ferguson

What are the political forces or legal changes that create this privatization?

Mario Rendina

The JTPA Council is very private sector oriented.

Scott Ferguson

Which comes from legislation. The law was written to be private sector oriented.

Mario Rendina

Yep. Yep. Absolutely. A lot of the councils really wanted the private sector to have the ball and run with it. 

Scott Ferguson

What years are we talking about? 

Mario Rendina

I don’t know. The JTPA, we can look up. But anyhow, when JTPA forms that’s when…

Scott Ferguson

Is this the 90s?

Mario Rendina

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re in the 90s. 

Scott Ferguson

Is this part of Clinton’s?

Mario Rendina

Could be, but he was mostly under CEDA. Nixon formed CEDA. So Ford’s in there, but only for a short while, a couple of years and then Carter. That continues and that was CEDA all through there. Yeah. And I think you can say JTPA is basically a baby of Clinton’s in the 1990s.

I remember my friend and fiscal officer went to work for the Department of Labor, and ended up in Colorado and the Denver office. He said, “You’ll never see a more Republican president than Clinton.” I think he was alluding to the privatization that we were beginning to see.

When the board started becoming private not-for-profits, the law clearly read that the buck stops at the political entities doorstep. Okay, but what would happen is you’d have a bad audit on somebody, and they’d work out some way where the political entity didn’t have to pay money. “Okay, well, we’ll reduce your funding by that $10,000 and then you play games with it up there in Atlanta and make sure that everybody’s made whole.”

So it was never a real threat. Around the state, they became private, not-for-profit, they incorporated. Then they would take the whole show and run with it. Budget, finance, bank accounts, they ran the whole thing. It became a privatized unit and the county was still over here. Here’s the very, very important distinction between the CEDA system and JTPA to follow. As long as it was under the county, for example, or the city or whatever, but under this county, every contract, every modification of contract, anything that had to do with change or new had to go through the county’s budget and finance office. It had to go through the county’s legal office.

It had to go through every office that any agenda item had to go through. It was difficult to do fraud and abuse when it had to go through county legal and county budget and finance, the budgets had to balance. They had to equal the amount of money you had available. They had to add up to something.

They had to do that, you couldn’t put in hidden little items. They might get found. So when you allow the privatization, because it’s the government that allows the privatization, you become a private board. And the county could still say, “oh yeah, we’ll listen to you. You’re a private board. We’ll listen to you. But the money comes through us because we hold the bag on any illegal activities that go on in any of the funds. We’re still holding the bag over here.” And at some point, they gave that up and said, “okay, you guys have got it wrong.” Even though they really were still holding the bag, they gave away the shop.

And when you do that, then you start having things that happened here and other places.

Scott Ferguson

Like what? What happens?.

Mario Rendina

Well, you can decide to have extremely lavish staff parties, like what happened here. The next thing that really happens, though, at the same time as the board becomes privatized, along comes TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) of which is what? Which is Clinton. Clinton’s welfare will no longer be as it has always been. What do they call it?

Scott Ferguson

The end of welfare as we know it.

Mario Rendina

The end of welfare as we know it. It comes in at the same time as these entities are becoming privatized and Mario’s right in the middle of this mess. Okay. At some point, I became the TANF director, also. Staff director. Writer, too. I did the planning for it. We had a contract, right for TANF. I can’t remember what god awful stuff it incorporated. But anyhow, I had a planner write a proposal and it went out to the world and back came Goodwill Industries and Lockheed Martin.

Oh, yes, Lockheed Martin. They make rockets. They also wanted to do – and did – TANF programs. Not in this area. We got Goodwill and then somebody over there had another agency and over the period of a couple of years, this entity would get rid of Goodwill and get in somebody else. I was there the day that Lockheed Martin showed up at the county trying to talk the county into going with them.

But anyhow, I put out the proposal for TANF with a neophyte planner. She was bright. All this stuff has to go in there. You know, you have got to fix that and so it goes out as an RFP (request for proposal).

We got back 2 in. thick volumes about “how we’re going to do this,” “how Goodwill is going to do all this stuff,” and so forth. So TANF got totally inner meshed with that mess. The councils became the same thing. I mean the TANF council became part of the overall council.

Not only that, but critical to the whole thing is the privatized councils at a state level all get together. We all meet together and we have an organization that is an organization composed of all the executive directors, that are executive directors now because they are privatized. We all get together and we form an organization.

Our organization is so politically powerful, particularly with the private sector, that we tell the state we want the employment service and they got it. This employment service here in the city of Tampa, throughout Hillsborough County and throughout the state are run by the workforce boards, the privatized workforce boards those directors are under and literally say yay or nay to who is going to be the next executive director for the chief of that office.

Okay. So all that is basically under a private, not-for-profit. It’s a private sector deal. All of it. That’s the horror of the whole thing. Hey, when was the last time that you heard, “oh, there’s going to be a workforce board meeting that maybe you should attend?” Or, “gee, I wonder what’s going on with TANF these days?”

Scott Ferguson

So, I want to have you spell out, in a bullet point kind of way, some of the key points of fallout.

One is, concentrated power and lack of transparency and lack of open public engagement.

Mario Rendina

Are you talking about now? 

Scott Ferguson

What I mean, what’s happened since the 90s in your experience? Another thing that you’ve told me about previously that I want to have you talk about, but I’m assuming there are other points that followed as well. But, one is about data collection in contrast to your early experience collections and what all this means for people.

Mario Rendina

Devolution. As long as the government held the bag and things needed to filter through its organizational structure in order to become a product of the board of county commissioners or or the mayor, as long as that filtering process was there, I think two things happened. It was basically for the public good. Okay. We’re approving projects that are for the public good.

Whatever they are training, whatever it is, private sector training doesn’t make any difference. We’re doing all this for the public good because that’s what we do as a government. We filter through all these mechanisms to make sure that it’s good, that it doesn’t look like any fraud and abuses in the middle of this thing. It’s for the public good.

And we have all the controls. One I didn’t mention is that you have a county audit. We also got audited by the county as well as a required independent audit. So you had an independent audit, but the county audited you too. Okay. Now you move over to a privatized board and a privatized organization organization.

Let’s say, I run a private school and I get on that board and I say, “Let’s take any non demand occupation. What I teach in my school is a non-demand occupation. It is what I teach.” But I’m a member of the board and this guy over here is a member of the board, and the school system doesn’t like it.

The school system says “we don’t want you to teach non-demand occupations.” So there’s some squabbling going on there, but they have 50% of the board in the private sector, 50% of the board. It has to be more than 50%. So it’s 50% plus a guy or gal, okay.

So he says, “hey private sector guys. What do you think? I mean, can I do this?” he says, “it’s this damn system school system that is giving me a hard time about this. You know these non-demand occupations that I’m training people in, they’re perfectly fine. If you can get enough of your buddies to say “yeah, okay, we’ll let you have that kind of training.”

And I tried to find demand occupations on the computer and I’m going to follow up on it in a little bit, but I think the system has completely collapsed. You know, the school system, I’m sure, does things in demand occupations and community college because that’s the bread and butter. But in terms of the system, I have no idea what’s going on there.

It’s all maneuvering and not for the public good. That’s the point. It’s for yourselves. We’ve gotten independent. We’re a private not-for-profit organization and by God, if we want to go over and have a conference over in Melbourne, let’s go to the space center. Let’s have a conference over there. Another example: we’re going to have one down in Naples. Naples is a very expensive place. So we go down there and of course in a lavish hotel and all that. Like I say, speakers are of no particular consequence. I think I was a speaker at a number of these, and I was of no particular consequence.

We’re going to do this and then, “okay, it’s golf time!” The links out there are horribly expensive, but we’re holding the event in a hotel where the links are, and you just go out and say, “Oh, okay, so it’s 3:30pm. Well, okay, just enough of the stuff over here. We’re going to go play golf.” I don’t play golf. So they went on to play golf and then you have the evening doing evening social and so forth and so on and then get back together for the next day. But, when you’re privatized, you can do that. How about you try to get a party through the board of county commissioners?

Not only that, under government, you get a per diem. I’m sure you run into that in the education system, right? You got a per diem, you’re going to go over here and you’re going to get so much, so much a day for meals and whatever and either, enough to cover the room, or if it happens to be an expensive place, they cover the room and give you the per diem for the meals.

That goes away in your private not-for-profit. You say, “yeah, I think we ought to have a per diem that, first of all, is going to cover the hotel, whatever that is, and then $200 a day? You think we can live on $200, so let’s do $200 a day plus the room,” for example, you could do that.

As long as it’s policy, as long as we all agree that that is the policy, compared to when you try and do it without it being the policy and the director is in trouble. But if you can get everybody to agree that this is policy. The state will have to let it go by the same, let it go by, I mean, well, it’s policy…It’s not very good policy, but it’s policy.

Scott Ferguson

So maybe a final question.

Is there more of a problem matching people with demand sectors? Is that what you see as the crucial task with public works as a supplement in a way where in a counter-cyclical way or what?

I mean, if the goal is full employment, by which we mean, there is always a job made available for anyone who wants.

Mario Rendina

I think what it boils down to is you have to decide one thing. You have to decide whether or not the employment and training of people is a government function or not. I think it’s as simple as that. It’s either something that the government does or it’s something the government doesn’t do. And as long as the government does it, it will be in the public interest in some way or other.

The minute that it’s not the government’s job, who’s the oversight? And it all boils down to that. It boils down to oversight. And that really gets into your whole business about monitoring and statistics and management information systems and all that. As long as it is considered a function of government, I think you’re okay and the funds come down to the government to spend with all of its safety nets and so forth.

When it gets over on the private side, it is completely opaque. I can’t tell you. I’m a product of the business and I couldn’t tell you the name of what the job service is now. It’s changed three times since I retired ten years ago.

It’s changed three times. It’s the Agency for Workforce Innovation or it’s the Bay Area Workforce something or other. Not the job service anymore.

So, you know, that basically boils the nut down to, it needs to be defined either as a government function or not. And if it’s not, you’re going to get what we got and so we’ve got to move back the other way. 

Scott Ferguson

Well thank you so much. This has been so illuminating. 

Mario Rendina

I’ve had a terrific time. As Lois [my spouse] would tell you, I could go on for hours about this stuff.

* 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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(It’s Not) All About Olivia: A Study in Citations, Retroactive & Otherwise

by Jonathan Haynes

A different girl now, but there’s nothing new

— Olivia Rodrigo, “déjà vu” (written by Olivia Rodrigo, Daniel Nigro, Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff & St. Vincent, and everybody’s team)

The Taylor Swift–Olivia Rodrigo “feud” is bullshit. It makes me angry — and, I’ll admit, it breaks my heart — to watch the Livies and the Swifties snipe at each other online. And it frustrates me that every Olivia profiler has to circle back to it, when somehow Swift never gets asked the same question, yet lives by its terms to the degree that her last album often plays like a hymn to a certain celebrity football player’s[1] phallus.[2] I know parasocial investment can be real and even nourishing. But this particular mystery is doing harm. It’s not how art works. It is, depressingly, how oligarchic neoliberalism works.

The story the culture wants to tell about Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift is All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950): the adoring ingénue who studies the star, learns her moves, and then slips the knife in. And the aging star, watching it happen, curdling into vindictiveness as the protégée takes what was hers. It’s an irresistible script because it gives everyone a villain to choose. Either Rodrigo, a self-proclaimed Swifty from early childhood on, is Eve Harrington — the thief, borrowing too much and calling it homage, who echoed Swift’s “Cruel Summer” on “déjà vu” closely enough that Swift’s camp landed a retroactive writing credit to the tune of millions of dollars — or Swift is Margo Channing at her most petty, the elder star so threatened by her younger (self) that she has to litigate a credit. And it’s a stupid bind, because the script only offers those two roles, jealous predator or past-her-prime grudge-holder. The more honest story — the one the All About Eve, Taylor vs. Olivia mythology obscures from us — is lineage.[3]

Call it the Catfight Economy[4], and grant right away that the diagnosis isn’t mine — critics have been describing this for years, and the manufactured rivalry has a whole literature behind it (and about it; among many other works, Brian De Palma’s 2012 film Passion also tells the All About Eve story, via Persona [Ingmar Bergman 1966] and Mulholland Drive [Lynch 2000]). To summarize: two successful women cannot share a professional space without one of them being a threat to the other. The press supplies the frame, the fans supply the labor, the platforms supply the distribution, and that leaves two artists narrated into a fight neither one started, so far as any human who doesn’t actually know them personally knows. And surely their friends don’t even know, really, whether or not Swift and Rodrigo are “frosty” in real life.

What interests me is less the mechanism than its ideology: the things the Catfight Economy quietly trains us to believe. It teaches that influence is theft, that admiration is weakness, that producing art is powerful and receiving art is debt (I fully intend the sexual resonances there). That there is only ever one musical chair and the other woman is already sitting in it. It is a scarcity story dressed as gossip.

The machine is not exclusively aimed at women. Pop has always run on manufactured antagonism, Beatles versus Stones, Beach Boys versus Beatles, Blur versus Oasis, Biggie versus Pac. But the men’s versions tend to read as competition between equals, a sport with two champions, even a spur to better work. Consider the Kendrick–Drake cage match of 2024, which also managed to steal the spotlight from the quiet revolution surfacing at that year’s Grammys, where six of the eight Album of the Year nominees were women, including Rodrigo and Swift (the eventual winner – I’m still throwing beers at the screen that told me Midnights beat GUTS), a changing of the guard that held the stage about as long as it took two megalomaniacal, multi-millionaire assholes to start calling each other domestic abusers and pedophiles in public (I love much of the work of both of them). America crowned Kendrick Lamar the winner of the Drake battle-to-the-death the following year, when a hundred million people, both in the bleachers and at home, sang along as he hurled a blistering insult at his former collaborator at the Super Bowl.[5]

A metaphor for America in general in 2024, I guess.

When turned on women, the same machine sours[6]: the rivalry curdles into a catfight, and only one of them is allowed to survive it. A field with room for only one is a field that never has to take women’s art seriously as a tradition.

Consider the blows Swift absorbed to clear the commercial ground Rodrigo now shares with her. She came up through the Nashville songwriting machine as a teenage girl who had to have the best idea in the room just to be heard by professionals twice her age.[7] She spent years as a target of an online abuse campaign that ran through Kanye West and the people around him. And in 2019 she watched the masters to her first six albums get sold out from under her when Big Machine was acquired by Scooter Braun — who had managed West for years — an event that crystallized, in public and at her expense, exactly how little her little girl self’s signature on a contract was worth. Each of these events is also a Catfight Economy event in its way: each got covered as drama, as personality, as Taylor-being-Taylor, when each was actually structural — a girl up against an industry built to extract from her.

Rodrigo’s generation negotiated in the shadow of that lesson. Where Swift had to re-record her own catalogue to reclaim it — Taylor’s Version — Rodrigo and peers like Chappell Roan entered an industry where creative control had become a thing a young woman could think to ask for, because they had all just watched the cost of not asking. There will never need to be a GUTS (Olivia’s Version). That absence is Swift’s bequest. This is the inheritance the rivalry frame can’t see: the older artist’s losses became the younger artist’s terms.

Which is what makes the recently announced Daisy Chain Fields concert so important. The festival Rodrigo founded is something more than a festival and more than a tribute to the Lilith Fair; it is the Catfight Economy’s exact inverse, built on purpose. Where the Catfight Economy profits by pitting women against each other, Daisy Chain Fields is dedicated — in Rodrigo’s own words[8] — to the belief that “joy, community, and creativity can inspire meaningful change,” celebrating the voices, artistry, and contributions of women in music. Where the Catfight Economy extracts value from women and routes it to platforms and press, Daisy Chain Fields routes its net proceeds outward, to nonprofits advancing and advocating for women and girls. Where the Catfight Economy insists inspiration and curiosity must harden into competition, the mission statement insists on “knowledge, strength, and action.” It closes on an image that is Olivia’s whole argument in one line — daisies are “wild and beautiful,” and “as a chain they are strong and unbreakable.”

Seen this way, Rodrigo’s so-called evasiveness about Swift in interviews[9] stops looking like coldness and starts looking like intellectual consistency. She has been on the record about hating the manufactured-feud framing, and her refusal to feed it is the same gesture as the festival: a person who has built an explicit stand against the Catfight Economy is not going to step into its oldest set piece on cue.

So the mythology gets it backward. All About Eve is a story about a theater with one dressing room and one star, where the only way up is to displace the woman already standing in the spotlight. Eve doesn’t want to make her own work, she wants Margo’s part, Margo’s audience, Margo’s life. That is the only plot the Catfight Economy knows how to run, and it is the plot it keeps trying to cast Rodrigo into. Swift, more than anyone, knows it, and she has spent a career writing it (among millions of other things) down. “Clara Bow,” the closing song on The Tortured Poets Department (2024), is the It-girl assembly line set to music: the industry’s eye slides from Clara Bow to Stevie Nicks to, in the final verse, Taylor Swift herself, each new arrival told she’s the real thing, dazzling, the new god worth worshipping — until the eye moves on to the next one, who has an edge the last one never did. It is Margo Channing’s nightmare written by Margo, the star narrating her own replacement on the same conveyor that carried her in. And believe me, there is a ton of fan and critical speculation that this is one of many Swift songs about Rodrigo, which is so much more than missing the point. It’s a cruel[10] irony.

Swift is the great chronicler of the trap. But the interesting relationship between these two artists isn’t antagonism, it’s transmission: the elder who took the structural punishment, and the younger who studied the wreckage and wrote her way around it. Rodrigo is rejecting the whole theater and building a field of daisies. Swift sings the cage with unmatched clarity, and thus, somewhat like the Jane Austen of D.A. Miller’s monograph[11], transcends it; Rodrigo, standing on the ground Swift cleared, gets to start dismantling it.

[1] Travis Kelce’s.

[2] Taylor Swift, “Wood,” The Life of a Showgirl, Republic Records, 2025.

[3]A caveat, because it would be ultra-shitty to let it pass without saying so: getting a retroactive co-write on a song you didn’t write is a graceless thing to accept, and Swift accepted it. But the music business is litigious to its bones, and a young artist is so incentivized to hand over the co-credit and the royalty points rather than prolong the online nastiness that — five years later — it is somehow still a story that Elvis Costello did not sue Olivia Rodrigo. None of which is to claim Swift invented the position she occupies. She has predecessors, obviously, and similar All About Eve stories have been told about Madonna and Mariah Carey many times over. But the lineage I’m tracing isn’t stylistic, it’s structural — the terms of creative control a young woman can now think to ask for. And the asymmetry of admiration matters: Rodrigo arrived a self-proclaimed Swifty, modeling herself on a songwriter-auteur with total command of her own persona and catalogue. Swift arrived a girl gushing about LeAnn Rimes — herself a teenage phenom, but the inheritance there was a way of singing, by way of Patsy Cline, not a way of owning your work. The bequest I mean is the one Swift’s own losses created, not the longer history of women in pop, which runs back well beyond her.

[4]I am thinking here of Gloria Steinem’s “Catfight Theory of History,” from an editorial she co-wrote with Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. The occasion was the release on streaming of Mrs. America, an historical film (TV show? Content thing?) that she believed portrayed the fight for the ERA as a catfight between her and Phyllis Schlafly instead of “a battle between the ERA and economic interests.” (LA Times, “Why ‘Mrs. America’ is bad for American women,” July 30, Covid year zero).

[5]“A Minor” is funny and clever. Lamar is also a genius who won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. Nonetheless, if I were scoring that Superbowl scene, it would be to “All the lonely people,” and “Eleanor Rigby” (The Beatles, Revolver, Capital Records, 1966) is in E minor.

[6]Olivia Rodrigo, Sour, Interscope Records, 2021.

[7] See Taylor Swift’s interview for the NYT project, The 30 Greatest Living Songwriters (2026). Come to think of it, why isn’t Billy Joel on that list? I haven’t checked, but I bet Swift had him on her ballot. And Olivia – who might have made the list herself had the new one come out before the list dropped – David Byrne nominated her on his own (citation forthcoming, I know I read that somewhere) – well, we already know from “déjà vu” that she was “the one who taught you Billy Joel.”

[8]It could have been her “team.” What is an author?

[9]See (hear?) the NYT Popcast interview with Rodrigo, in which Joe Coscarelli and Jon Caramanica ask her intelligently designed questions about the “frostiness” between her and Swift, so that she can redirect without sounding like she’s hiding something. Good journalism still happens there!

[10]Taylor Swift, “Cruel Summer,” Lover, Republic Records, 2019.

[11]Miller, D.A., Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, Princeton University Press: 2005.

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Invisible Republic (With Apologies to Greil Marcus)

By Jonathan Haynes

Given the miserable state of American life generally, here’s a thing that astonishes me. Two of the best homegrown popular artworks I can think of came out recently, within months of each other, are enormously popular, and are political (I beg you to please stay with me here): Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. You could read each as a defiant argument for the humanities. Of course it’s unclear whether the artists know they’re making that argument, or would say so if they knew.

Listen to how they explain how their new works came to be. Anderson (Esquire): “Vineland was always going to be too hard to adapt, so I stole the parts that spoke to me and just started running like a thief.” Rodrigo (NYT Popcast): “I was really inspired by this book Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux. She’s having this affair with this person and she’s not quite happy, she’s kind of going insane… I was really inspired by all of the ways in which love makes you insane and miserable.”

Wait. Back up. You guys are reading Ernaux and Pynchon? Like it’s nothing. Like it’s just something that you do. Meanwhile I’m sitting here listening to Pod Save America with a gun in my mouth.

After all, these are quintessential LA artists — Anderson out of the San Fernando Valley, Rodrigo originally out of Temecula — who actually get to make art in an industry town that has lost its industry, as devastatingly and, hopefully not but seemingly permanently, as any coal or steel town lost its in the seventies. Brilliant people with decades of experience at every tier of the entertainment business can’t get jobs at CVS or Target in 2026. (I have a friend like this, a superior researcher and writer with excellent pedagogical skills and a stunning depth of knowledge of movie history and culture. If you’re hiring, DM me and I’ll connect you.). But I’m not making the easy point that PTA and OR are privileged to make the art they want. Sure, they have one-percent lifestyles that buy them room to concentrate, instead of lives frantically lived between DoorDash and Lyft shifts. Nor am I saying I’m just glad they’re using that privilege well, though I obviously do think that. I’m not even really talking about them. I’m talking about the astonishing, vertiginous fact that there exists a massive popular audience for their work — an Invisible Republic, if you will — that consumes it not just avidly but ecstatically.

I’ve never actually cried to an Olivia Rodrigo song. I loved “drivers license” in 2021 because of its stylistic mastery; my initial reaction was exhilaration at the rare aesthetic achievement, and I started thinking about the implied connection to the canon of American rock and roll “car songs,” including the previous year’s “Murder Most Foul,” Bob Dylan’s masterpiece about the Kennedy assassination. Great bad trip car songs bracketed the pandemic. Dylan’s arrived in the first month of quarantine, when auto-mobility became a deadly thing. Her song came ten months later, amid the first vaccine roll-out, when it felt safer, but still low-key miserable, to drive your car places.

(Here, my ingenious sister-in-law, the novelist Megan Moores, would interrupt: there is plenty of textual evidence You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is about a romance with a guy with just such an emotional deficit who knows all the words to “Just Like Heaven.”)

Historically, crying to Olivia Rodrigo songs is the primary mode of engagement with her. There is a TikTok genre dedicated to getting deep in your feelings while listening to her songs. My favorite of those that I’ve seen is the guy with red eyes and dribbling snot blurting out the titles of the songs on the new album that turned him into a sniveling wreck: “Fuck you, ‘begged.’ Fuck you, ‘honeybee.’ Fuck you, ‘less.’ Fuck you, ‘cigarette smoke.’” Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is on record as having bawled her eyes out hearing “drivers license” for the first time. Right after the song dropped, there was an SNL sketch about gruff guys wearing flannel shirts getting into their feelings in a pool hall. The whole world was gutted by that song, allegedly. I loved it but experienced it…differently (Dylan, etc.).

But with “honeybee,” Olivia Rodrigo wrecked me too. She did it out of the blue with a couplet on a song that has gotten some flack for being out of the sonic universe of most of the album. It sounds like a Disney tune, a fair description meant as a criticism, to which I retort, one of the most celebrated American directors of all time just released (on the same day as Olivia’s new album) a blockbuster movie that “discloses” that his entire psychic universe — and the universe’s — is organized around “When You Wish Upon a Star.” John Lennon closed the turbulent White Album with a song that was explicitly based on Disney music. St. Vincent did a whole album based on that sound and called it Actor. Olivia Rodrigo, now occasional St. Vincent collaborator, began her professional life as a child actor in Disney shows (do your own research).

The couplet:

I hope I never see what your face looks like going

A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing

The purity of these lines is astonishing and lifts the album lyrically (whatever you think of Disney songs) into very rarified company. I think Lorenz Hart, at least the one played by Ethan Hawke in the new Linklater film, would have been proud to have written them. At the exact second I was admiring the craft, the eleven-year-old who sobbed at ET knocked me on my ass.

I hope I never see what your face looks like going

A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing

I am seeing a lot of faces going these days: my parents’ faces, the childish face of my now-teenage son, my own face.

The mortal irony of this lyric is that if she got her wish, she’d spend her whole life watching this person’s face going.

Fuck you, “honeybee.”

There is another TikTok from a listening party where Rodrigo plays the new album for fans hearing it cold, a live mic resting on her knee. As the chorus of “stupid song” climbs higher than you expect it to go, the room starts leaking into the audio — a gasp, “oh my god,” and then the screaming. Those people weren’t screaming before. The music made them do it. The screams are the flip side of the sobs, and sometimes done simultaneously. And it’s like Dylan — those verses in “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” in which the words just keep piling up and you never know when or where they’re going to land. Allen Ginsberg said everything in Dylan was “collected into that one column of air coming out of him and the vibration of the sound,” and that fits Olivia Rodrigo even better. And it also fits the climactic One Battle After Another car chase that Scott Ferguson and I worked through on the Money on the Left podcast, Superstructure.

Switched on Pop names the mechanism better than I can: spiraling. On their recent podcast dedicated to You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the musicologist Nate Sloan hears Rodrigo’s choruses as those coin funnels in children’s museums: you set a penny on its edge and it circles the bowl, faster and tighter as it falls, until it loses its orbit and drops through the hole at the center. The Rodrigo chorus does the same — the line winds and accelerates, as she spins out more and more words and lifts ever higher into her vocal register, until it lands on the title phrase and drops out of motion. “Kiss me and I might drop dead.” “I love you more than any stupid song could ever say.” The orbit, then the hole. And it is the same shape Anderson cuts in One Battle After Another: a VistaVision camera with a telephoto lens strapped to the nose of a Dodge Charger, the car running the undulating California hills, the pursuit going on and on over those swells until Chase Infiniti slams on the brakes. Two funnels, two dead stops. And in both cases, a mixed-race girl behind the wheel. Make of that coincidence what you will. I’ll leave that question open, as I imagine that Greil Marcus would.

But the invisible republic that I borrow Marcus’s title to identify is built precisely out of rhymes like that one — uncanny correspondences the culture throws up without being asked, which it falls to criticism only to notice, and to refuse to explain away.

It brings into unwitting communion beleaguered English teachers grading endless piles of AP exams, college students with gender studies degrees graduating into an American void, rock critic Substackers traveling hundreds of miles in The Paranoid Style band tee shirts to see Hamell on Trial in a beloved local music venue that is closing soon (where will we go?), movie-scene-deconstructing 35-year-old YouTubers who can’t get over the color timing in One Battle and issue their manifestos from their parents’ living rooms, lonely denizens of livvieshq on Instagram with “maggots for brains,” and work from home tech guys with moldy Ph.D.s who spend their days busily feeding their careers into AI tools.

This essay is already piled high with allusions, but I must add one more — George Miller’s masterpiece, Babe: Pig in the City. I’m thinking of the scene – it always makes me sob – when Babe saves the Bull Terrier from drowning and the Bull Terrier says “Whatever the pig says, goes” to all the other animals. And so all of these different species — who are, in some cases, even biologically, instinctively, constitutively driven to hate and fear each other, and in others, to blithely ignore each other — must share the jelly beans. Or everyone starves.

And then they become an army.

UPDATE: 24 hours after the present essay was published, this announcement went out to subscribers from the official Olivia Rodrigo mailing list.

* Note that alphabetical order, asked to do nothing but sort names, quietly places Bikini Kill above some of the biggest stars in the world — including the promoter herself.


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The Barter Myth & the Conceptual Foundations of Economic Modernity

Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice
Vol. 1, No. 2 (2026)
ISSN 2833-051X

The Barter Myth & the Conceptual Foundations of Economic Modernity
By Jean-Michel Servet

Abstract

The barter myth—the claim that money emerged from a prior system of direct exchange—occupies a foundational place in modern economic thought. While standard critiques of the barter myth emphasize its lack of empirical support, this article advances a more capacious approach that situates the myth within the conceptual formation of economic modernity itself. Earlier monetary writings generally treated money as inseparable from political authority and social order. By contrast, the barter myth imagines a world of isolated individuals exchanging goods without monetary mediation, presenting exchange as the natural basis of human society.

Jean-Michel Servet is Honorary Professor at Université Lumière Lyon 2 and Professor emeritus at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. An economist by training, he is the author of numerous articles and books on monetary history, theory, and policy.

Jakob Feinig is Associate Professor at Binghamton University (Department of Human Development). He is the author of Moral Economies of Money (Stanford, 2022).

MotL Servet Barter Myth TranslationDownload

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I Think You’re What’s Wrong With Me: On Influence, Absorption, and Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love’

By Jonathan Haynes

Watch what happens when the reviews of Olivia Rodrigo’s third album — a concept record that tracks a single romance from first date to bitter aftermath — go looking for its value. Almost without exception they find it somewhere other than in Rodrigo: in the older male band she references, in the New Wave gods her producer conjures, in the Gen X canon her sound supposedly pays its respects to. The dominant critical move is to sort the tracks into the Swiftian and the Smithian and grade each by which influence wins (Slate Magazine literally does this), and the songs that come out on top are reliably the Cure-saturated ones, praised as the moments where the record connects to something serious, something legitimate, something a man made first. I want to name this as the symptom it is, and the stakes are larger than one album. We are at a moment when pop music by young women is taken more seriously than it has ever been, and yet the reflex persists — even among women writing the reviews — to locate the worth of that music in a male precursor who authorizes it, rather than in the woman herself. The song-by-song tally is not just a clumsy method. It is the gatekeeping impulse wearing the costume of rigor: the search for the father who makes the daughter’s work admissible. And it is exactly backwards, because You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is an album about a woman who does not borrow her authority from the canon but absorbs the canon into herself, who takes the male precursor everyone is reaching for and makes him sing her words. The critics handing Rodrigo’s value upstream to Robert Smith have the current running the wrong direction. The record reverses it.

Right from the start, in the third line of the first song (“drop dead”), Rodrigo mobilizes the Cure as a narrative instrument. “You know all the words to Just Like Heaven.” The Cure is not Rodrigo’s stylistic frame imposed from above. It is his music — the crush’s — and so when the record itself begins to sound like The Cure, the sound is not homage but possession. We are listening to a consciousness being colonized by a lover’s taste, the way one absorbs a partner’s vocabulary, their sleep schedule, their way of seeing, their taste in music. This is the Annie Ernaux problematic Rodrigo named directly in her New York Times Popcast interview when she cited Simple Passion — that slim, clinical diary of an affair that consumes a whole life — as the inspiration for “stupid song”: passion as affliction, a desire that floods and saturates everything like illness or insanity. Ernaux’s achievement is a collision of registers — flat, exact, diaristic notation applied to total erotic derangement — and that collision is exactly what the album performs. The Swiftian lyric is the deadpan diary; the Cure engulfment is the derangement the diary is recording. You cannot separate them, because the lyric is narrating the sonic takeover as it happens. The title says as much before a note plays: You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is not a description of a moment in the romance but the verdict on the whole of it. Darkness was inside the love from the first date.

This is why the song-by-song method fails in this case. A critic who prefers the Cure-leaning tracks to the Swift-leaning ones believes, ironically, that he is identifying her most original mode (measured against a presumed Gen Z pop-princess archetype). He is in fact charting the depth of the character’s possession, crowning as most hers the songs where she is most someone else’s. The thing the critic likes more is the symptom. And it’s a double bind for her: measured against Smith she is borrowing, measured against Swift she is belated, and either way the verdict denies her any artistic ground of her own. Variety gets closest to the truth with its line that the album “tracks the arc of a love affair: Rodrigo’s love affair with the Cure,” but means it as a witticism about influence, not as a structural argument. The album dramatizes its own sound as a love-symptom. No tally of borrowed gestures can register that, because the borrowed gestures are not influences to be scored, they are characters in the story. And the impulse to score them, to find the songs where the male precursor is most present and crown those the best, is oddly shared by the character Rodrigo has created: the conviction that value must be located in him.

But Rodrigo is too strong an artist to leave the influences as influences, and here the argument turns. She sublates The Cure — cancels it as an external source and preserves it as her own material, lifted onto a plane where it no longer points back at Robert Smith but expresses Olivia Rodrigo. The song “the cure” arrives at rue album midpoint, but it is not about The Cure — nor does it particularly sound like them. This negation is the point. This is what divides what she is doing from pastiche, which stays marked as borrowed. By the back half of the record the Cure-ness is simply her sound, the influence negated as foreign and retained as self. And then comes the benediction, the moment where the structure becomes flesh: Smith himself appears on “what’s wrong with me” — singing, playing bass, embodied inside her track. Not sampled, not echoed. The precursor walks into the song he has been haunting and takes a part, and he takes it on the diagnostic song, the one that asks the Ernaux question directly, which is exactly where an internalized voice would speak. He is not a guest star. He is the second half of her brain — the absorbed half answering the diaristic half, two voices staring down the same dread from opposing ends. This is the form of a dialectic and not the form of a love duet.

Here is a fact underemphasized or ignored in the deadline reviews: Smith is singing her words and her music, in a style that resembles his own. The man has been made to perform a Robert Smith who is now her creation — voicing her reconstruction of his idiom, handed back to him to inhabit. This inverts the entire vector of influence. Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” runs one way: the latecomer swerves from the precursor, clears space against his priority, escapes the father. Rodrigo does the opposite. She absorbs Smith so completely that she can write him, and he ratifies the absorption by consenting to sing her writing-of-him. It is apophrades literalized — the return of the dead made to seem authored by the living — except he is actually there, performing his own style after it has passed through her and come out as hers. The strong artist is not the one who escapes the source. She is the one who can produce the source as her own material and have it agree to perform her. That is the furthest claim anyone can make on a precursor, and Rodrigo makes it on the record, in his voice, with his hands on the bass. The reviews are still at “cool, Robert Smith’s on it.” The album is at “Robert Smith consents to being Olivia Rodrigo’s creation.”

But that consent is not a concession. It is the proof that what she does is additive rather than competitive. The credit-and-citation model the reviews run on knows only two roles, the original and the impostor, and it is built to adjudicate who owns what. Rodrigo is not playing that game. She does not depose the precursor. She brings the whole canon kicking and screaming into a world it has to share with her.

One last observation (finally caught up with her interview on Jimmy Kimmel the other night). The biographical Rodrigo’s father reportedly has seen the Cure thirty times; he wept when he finally met Robert Smith; his phone screensaver is now a photo of the two of them. She has said her dad spent her childhood “introducing me to all the bands he went to see when he was my age” — among them, The Cure. So The Cure is the father’s music before it is anyone else’s in this drama, the canon handed down the paternal line, and her father, as it happens, is by profession a family therapist — an analyst. Now consider the fascinating work the album’s romantic plot is doing with that inheritance. The boyfriend knows all the words to “Just Like Heaven.” He loves The Cure, which is to say he loves her father’s music, the music she was raised on, the sound of the house she grew up in. And the buried logic of the infatuation, never stated outright but everywhere in the songs, is that this is why she falls for him: he loves what her father loves, he carries the paternal music, and so he arrives already occupying the place the father holds. That is the Freudian pattern, stated plainly — the daughter drawn to the man who returns to her the father, the beloved chosen because he stands where the parent stood.

So it turns out that the album itself is not only a concept album that tells a coherent beginning to end story; it’s a double plot. The story of the romance and break-up mirrors the larger one we have been unpacking the whole time — the artist’s relation to the canon she was raised inside. The main plot ends with a painful break-up. The other climaxes with the man who made the music she was raised on — idol to both lover and father — walking in to perform her recreation of him, and the world receives not Robert Smith but Olivia Rodrigo’s Robert Smith, authored by the singular genius of Olivia Rodrigo.

* See here for a follow-up reflection from the author.

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