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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Crafting the California Public Banking Act with Sylvia Chi (In the Loop: Revolutionizing Public Finance, Ep. 4)

In this episode of In the Loop: Revolutionizing Public Finance, we sit down with lawyer, organizer, and policy architect Sylvia Chi to unpack the landmark passage and radical possibilities of California’s AB 857, the California Public Banking Act of 2019.

The conversation opens by tracing Chi’s political trajectory, showing how her early activism during Occupy Wall Street and the resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline developed into a structural critique of modern public finance. Witnessing public tax dollars continuously invested in mega-banks that bankroll the fossil fuel industry, Chi turned toward public banking as a practical mechanism for municipal divestment and reinvestment, reimagining finance not as an engine of extractive accumulation, but as a public utility serving social and environmental justice.

From there, we examine the legal and legislative construction of AB 857. Chi walks us through the strategic compromises demanded by Sacramento, offering a candid post-mortem on what it took to get the framework signed into law. Getting into the policy weeds, we challenge conventional regulatory orthodoxies around FDIC insurance, analyzing how federal deposit insurance often functions less as an objective financial necessity for public depositories than as an ideological safety stamp and political alibi for risk-averse lawmakers. Chi outlines a democratic counter-model to this dilemma: the potential for an interstate deposit insurance institution designed explicitly to shelter and federate a nationwide public banking network.

Broadening the scope to current regional efforts, we discuss the multi-municipality coalition pushing forward the East Bay Public Bank, while dissecting the aggressive misdirection deployed by corporate banking lobbies. In particular, we expose how commercial banking associations routinely deny the existence of banking deserts and underbanked communities to block democratic alternatives, and we examine the urgent need for public banking infrastructure to safely bank California’s cash-heavy cannabis industry, a sector systematically shut out by Wall Street. We conclude with a look at Chi’s present role as Senior Counsel for Public Grids, discussing how community organizing and public power expertise are uniting across the country to build a clean, publicly owned energy future.

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

Original music by Josh Klinghoffer 

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A Rhetorical History of Modern Money Theory with John T. Harvey

We speak with John T. Harvey about a new article he co-wrote with Billy Saas titled, “A Rhetorical History of Modern Money Theory,” out this month in the September 2026 issue of the Journal of Economic Issues. Harvey is Hal Wright Professor of Economics at Texas Christian University. We discuss his recent publication in the context of his broader career in heterodox economics. 

Modern Money Theory (MMT) (otherwise known as Modern Monetary Theory) is a heterodox macroeconomic school of thought that recognizes currency-issuing governments cannot run out of the money they create. Because the state issues the currency and requires taxes to be paid in that unit of account, it is never revenue-constrained. Instead, public spending is bound only by real productive capacity and available resources (labor, technology, materials), with inflation—not solvency—serving as the true economic limit.

In “A Rhetorical History of Modern Money Theory,” Saas and Harvey trace how MMT emerged not merely as a set of first principles, balance-sheet descriptions, and policy prescriptions, but also as a deliberate discursive and rhetorical intervention against dominant neoclassical paradigms and institutions. Orthodox economics relies heavily on moralizing metaphors of household frugality, naturalized market scarcity, and the false specter of government insolvency to enforce fiscal austerity. In response, MMT theorists developed new vocabularies, pedagogies, and public-facing rhetorical strategies to demystify money as a creature of law and public governance, demonstrating how public finance can be reclaimed for democratic purpose.

Throughout our conversation, Harvey reflects on the communicative struggles of heterodox economists, the pedagogical challenges of unseating entrenched neoclassical assumptions, the relationship between Post-Keynesian and Institutionalist traditions, and what a rhetorical history reveals about the future of political economy and public provisioning.

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.

Billy Saas

John Harvey, welcome to Money on the Left.

John Harvey

Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me. I’ve been looking forward to it.

Billy Saas

We’re going to talk a bit about some work that we collaborated on over some span of time. An article that just came out in the Journal of Economic Issues called “A Rhetorical History of Modern Monetary Theory,” but before we do that, tell us a little bit about your research background, how you came to do the work that you do at TCU (Texas Christian University) and otherwise.

John Harvey

Well, if I go all the way back to the University of Tennessee, where I went to undergrad, just because my dad got transferred to Knoxville halfway through my sophomore year of high school. But oh my gosh, what luck it was for me. So, I went to Tennessee initially as a physics major. It turns out physics is god awful boring. Then I went to political science, and I kind of missed the modeling stuff, you know? And I took an econ class, and at Tennessee, it was full of institutionalist, Texas institutional. I say, full, you know, there were 4 or 5, which even in the big department, that was a big concentration and the very first class I took was History of Economic Thought at the intro level.

And I was like, “wow, this is what I’ve been looking for all my life. I love this class. I’ll bet everybody else loved this class too.” Apparently, no, a lot of people don’t like economics. So that was Hans Jensen. Really nice man. Danish. Got his PhD at the University of Texas and fought in the resistance in World War Two. So, a really cool guy and absolutely hilarious. I ended up taking three more classes with him as an undergrad, and then I met some girl, who’s in the other room right now, in my senior year. So she still had a couple more years to go and I thought, “I’ll go here for my PhD. I love economics. I’m gonna do the PhD.”

I took the institutional list again for “Economic History” and “History of Economics,” but then I started taking the upper level macro and, god, it was awful. It was all mainstream stuff. One of the things I remember learning was that the Great Depression was because the money supply fell, which drove down prices, which caused firms to lower wages, which caused people to quit their jobs.

So apparently we had 25% unemployment because people quit their jobs. This, strangely enough, made no sense to me. So one day I found a book on my desk, Introduction to Post-Keynesian Economics, and I started reading. Then I was like, “this is what I want to do with my life.”

Scott Ferguson

Can we pause here? I have a couple of questions. One is, you know, it’s pretty special to have a department in the United States that has a handful of institutional economists. So I’m kind of curious about, do you have a sense of the politics of the formation of that department? 

The second question is, at what point did you realize you were in a relatively exceptional place? That this isn’t the econ degree that everyone gets in run of the mill departments across the country. 

Then the third question is, I want a little more detail on, “Oh, a post Keynesian book came across my desk.” So how does that even happen? 

John Harvey

I can do all three of those. The first one is easy because I don’t know. I don’t know how they ended up with a group of institutionalists there. Presumably somebody got there. Maybe it was Terry Neal or Anne Mayhew, who was the editor of the JEI back then. Not immediately when I started there, but she did eventually become that.

She was department chair and then Hans Jensen ended up there. I think [Christoph] Boehm went to Texas as well. Bill Cole, I don’t know how they all ended up there. But it’s kind of like, why is Chicago the largest Polish population in the world outside of Warsaw? Well, a couple of Poles got there and said, “this place is pretty nice, you ought to come over.”

I assume it was kind of the same way. As far as when I discovered it was something different, I guess it was in the middle of those, and it wasn’t even totally clear in the middle of those graduate level macro classes when we’re learning Barro-Grossman disequilibrium models and money illusion and stuff and it was so boring. It wasn’t like the undergrad macro that I had taken from institutionalists. These were all neoclassicals. I really had no backup plan. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do because this is really boring. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing this. 

Okay, so the backstory I do know about the book. I know why the book was on my desk. Right? So apparently Paul Kubik, one of the guys in my cohort, had left his book on my desk at some point and wandered off. I see this book on my desk, A Guide to Post Keynesian Economics, edited by Alfred Eichner.

I said, “hey, who owns this book?” And nobody answered and said, “well, let’s have a look at it.” I like to think it was the hand of God working through Paul Kubik that gave me this out. It kept going on about, “sure, we want to use math and structure, but we are kind of worried about the real world, about how realistic the model is, that unlike what [Milton] Friedman says, it does matter how unrealistic the assumptions are, because you’re not going to get a good model otherwise.”

To jump ahead to my first job, the department chair at Tennessee at the time was Bill Cole, his office mate in grad school at University of Texas was Dick Wates. Dick Wates was the chair at TCU and Dick Wates calls – we had no email back then – and said “have you got anybody decent coming out?” He said, “Well, not really, but I guess you can have a look at Harvey.” I haven’t even applied toTCU because they wanted the writing sample and I didn’t want to have to bother putting one together. I thought, “Okay, I’ll apply to TCU.” Well, it was full of institutionalists. I mean, Texas and Oklahoma were back then. So little did I realize, this is when it kind of slowly sinks in that you’re doing something different. I didn’t realize I couldn’t just do the research I thought made sense anywhere, and still get tenure and promotion.

At TCU, I was fine. Publishing in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics (JPKE) and Journal of Economic Issues (JEI) was perfectly fine. But man, if I went almost anywhere else, I wouldn’t have gotten tenure, let alone full professor. So anyway, I went to TCU. Today was the beginning of my 40th year at TCU, by the way. 

Scott Ferguson

Congratulations. 

John Harvey

Thank you. Class started today. I’ve been lucky, that it was a place where you could do research in a different school of thought and be rewarded. Now, I don’t know how long that will still be true after I leave, because the department is becoming increasingly neoclassical. Some of them are self-consciously wanting to keep it that way. Others don’t really care either way, but don’t really know of other schools of thought. Well, I will say we do have one really unique thing in our department. We have a class on Contending Perspectives and Economics. Not only do we have a class in that, which is incredibly unique, but it’s required of every major. You must take that class to get an econ degree.

I assume that will go away at some point after I’m gone, but at least right now. Oh, and by the way, in our annual or semester leave senior survey, when we ask what is our greatest strength, Number one reason is they say, “faculty,” which is a nice thing to hear. We do have a lot of faculty, regardless of school thought, who really care about teaching.

But number two is that class, “really glad you taught us different schools of thought.” That was really interesting. So, it’s something that they’re missing out on in other places. So, my research initially was that I’ve always been fascinated by business cycles, but it’s hard to compete in post Keynesian and institutional economics to get publications in something that is so well researched in both of those areas.

So I ended up doing exchange rates for a quarter of a century. I did nothing but exchange rate research. Nobody had done it in and from our school of thought. So, I was like, “okay, well, I’ll try to carve out a niche here.” So I did that. As I said, it’s my 40th year. So for about the first half of my career, I did exchange rates. I just got done publishing a book on business cycles and now I feel like I’m done with that. I finally felt like I could compete in the journals and in the volume and I’m going to go back to exchange rates now. Oh, in the first ten years of our fantasy football league, from 1989 to 1998, I won five championships. No one else won more than one. 

Scott Ferguson

I hope that’s at the top of your CV.

John Harvey

I used to put that on my syllabus for my students, “the owner and general manager of the West Cliff Colts.”

Billy Saas

Oh, yeah. You’ve actually written a book that corresponds with that course that’s so popular with the TCU econ students, Contending Perspectives in Economics. I can say that I’ve found that useful in my teaching with students in communication as well. I appreciate it particularly, and I think readers, if they haven’t looked at it, or listeners, if they haven’t looked at it, would also appreciate that. I think this is part of the reason that our collaboration has worked well, and we ended up in the places that we ended up together, was that you’re very sensitive to the argumentative structure and, the sort of the premises and the warrant of the claims of the different schools and how those function. Less overt in the book, but more overt in your other commentary and scholarship is how ideology sort of factors in and that being a major part of that real world story that you were searching for.

I would include that in the list of accomplishments and achievements. You were also the president of pluralism.

John Harvey

Yeah, the International Confederation of Associations for Pluralism in Economics (ICAPE).

I did that for about six years. It’s funny how the book came about, by the way. We already had created the class and there was no decent book out there, so I went to the Edward Elgar booth at the conference, and Edward Elgar, the guy after whom that thing is named, was still actively managing it at that point. And I said, “hey, have you guys got a book?” 

They had one that was like 20 years old. 

“Is there a newer one in this?”

And he did like a Jedi mind trick on me, because as I walked away I said, “yes, I need to write that book.”

It was nowhere on my radar that I was going to write that book. It was exhausting to write somebody else’s school of thought. Then one of the things I did with the book is that I sent every chapter except the neoclassical one. I was like, screw them. I sent every chapter to somebody, at least one person, sometimes two, in that school of thought to check it for me.

I was like, “hey, Austria!” I sent it to a couple Austrian friends of mine. “Would you be okay with this chapter and everything?” They suggested the change, and I changed everything. I went right along with it. The Marxist chapter. Oh my God. I can’t think of his name right now… Andrew? I can’t think of his last name.

Anyway, he sent me like six single spaced pages of what I had done wrong. It took me several weeks to work up the courage to actually read what he had said, and he was right. I cited everything and fixed it all up, but, man, I almost quit that book several times because it was a lot of work.

But I’m glad I did that now. It was totally different from anything else. I’m really into exchange rates and business cycles and that was just kind of a side trip that I took that worked out really well. So anyway, I’m glad that it is of some use.

Billy Saas

Yeah. The Austrian perspective on human nature is probably not super germane to your exchange rate research.

John Harvey

Not usually, yeah.

Billy Saas

Part of the charm and usefulness of that book and that project is those moments where you pause and say, “okay, well, what does this tell us about their perspective? Or what do we know, what have we seen, what has been written by advocates of this perspective on human nature?”

John Harvey

By the way, that came from Hans Jensen, the guy that I took the first econ class from when he taught “History of Economic Thought,” he made a big deal out of it. Okay, these people weren’t just these people, they had hopes and dreams and visions and these things fed into what became their theoretical models and so forth.

I took that. In fact, I even cited it in the book, but that came from him from the very first class I ever took in econ.

Billy Saas

Very cool. To talk about how you and I first got to know each other from. I was aware of your work, and, at the time, was a member of a new division of the National Communication Association called the Economics Communication Society. We were going to hold a pre-conference at our 2017 meeting in Dallas and I was part of the organizing effort of that pre-conference.

I knew you were at TCU, I reached out and said, “hey, would you be interested in talking to us comm scholars, most of us in rhetoric about econ and maybe even specifically about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT),” because by that time, I think through your platform on Forbes, you had been pretty outspoken about MMT, and engaged their ideas in a fair and honest way. 

You said, “Sure.” We got together in Dallas that year, and you gave a talk that I think went down very well and was introducing much of the crowd to MMT. This is a bit of a snapshot in time. We’re in 2026 now. This was almost ten years ago. You would have been talking about MMT in front of a crowd that, for many of whom, had not even encountered it yet.

For all of MMT’s relative rise in that decade, there are still academics in other fields who would not have heard of it. I don’t know if that’s the case anymore.

Scott Ferguson

Oh, I say that it is. It’s okay. I encounter that all the time. You can never take that for granted. It’s been in every major news publication, but some people still have never heard of it. But I digress.

Billy Saas

So the paper that you presented there, I guess I would invite you to talk about your recollection of that pre-conference, your project in that paper and get us started on how we got to where we got to in RGA.

John Harvey

2017 is right. I was like, “oh, yeah, that’d be really cool to go over to Dallas.” I find that non-economists are much more open to what I have to say than economists or people who are trained in a certain way in economics. So I thought, “well, this would be really fun.”

Everyone was really nice. I remember when we went out to lunch afterwards, and chatted with various people. But I wrote a paper to go along with the presentation to kind of organize my thoughts and I do a lot of general background on economics. I think I showed how often certain search terms showed up in mainstream journals. Did you know, by the way, that if you go to look at their standard economics journal listing of their top ten journals? Seven do not use double blind review. Now, that’s kind of what science is built around, isn’t it? The double blind review.

Seven of the top ten journals supposedly in mainstream economics don’t use double blind review. One of them is by invitation only. Okay. All right. So you’re gonna have journals like that. Then six out of the remaining nine, they know who sent that paper and the referee knows who sent the paper.

You’re not going to tell me that there’s not a reason for that. So anyway, it’s terrible. So I went through things like that, sort of a general background in economics. But, I didn’t want to leave it there. I thought, “well, I’ve done all this work.” If I can jump into a little bit of background, I’ve coauthored papers before. Not very often. I’m usually on my own schedule, my own time, and I don’t do it much. But never, ever have I coauthored with somebody where there’s no way I could have written their part of the paper, and there’s no way I could have understood the things that you understood about the “A Rhetorical History of Modern Monetary Theory” piece that just came out in an issue with one of Scott’s papers.

For example, when you talked about Milton Friedman, and his “free to choose” and how you can see some parallels with the success of MMT. I would never have thought of that. Papers I’ve coauthored with economists, I probably could have written their part, and they probably could’ve written my part, but it was a lot easier to do it together.

Now, as you pointed out, it took us about ten years from the beginning of the idea to it actually being published. It went through a lot of changes over those years. This was the last round of sending it out, which took place about this time last year.

Then we got these massive comments from the referee that, oh my God, how will we ever address all this? But we did. And to me, it is one of the most unique papers I’ve ever written for the reason that there’s no way I could have done your part. I could not have had those insights. In the academy, we talk all the time about interdisciplinary research.

Wouldn’t that be great if we did it? This actually worked, we actually did it. We were more than the sum of the parts, and it worked out really well. I’m sorry that I’m talking about the creation of it without the content.

Billy Saas

No, no, I think that is interesting. For me, a huge part of the content is this meta content of its production and publication. Thank you for the kind words. I was deeply flattered in 2017 when you asked me after the pre-conference if I’d be interested in tuning it up for publication in a communication journal.

I guess the meta content that I would fill in is that those ten years and the many submissions to many different journals included submissions to communication and rhetorics focused journals with varying results, and varying contexts. So we had to pull it from one for disciplinary reasons. And then another one was a split review where the editor went the way of the second reviewer.

We ended up not giving up on that, but trying our luck and turning to a respected, long running, more squarely economics journal. We look at the other articles, it’s definitely an economics-ass economics journal in very straight ways. So we’ve ended up here now, and I’m super excited. I hope you would consider after those ten years, writing and coauthoring again, although I wouldn’t blame you if it didn’t ever again.

John Harvey

Well, let’s see some time in 2036.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah.

Billy Saas

So, a tremendous amount of fun. Very frustrating. Glad it’s out. And in fact, the day we’re recording this – we didn’t plan it this way, but – it came out today.

John Harvey

It came out today. It’s really neat, very exciting.

Billy Saas

So I’m going to step aside here. As one of the authors, I guess I’ll open up for some questions.

Scott Ferguson

I’ll step into the breach, because I want to know what this article is about. I mean, obviously I know because I read it, but we’ve been talking about the kind of meta history of how it came to be, which is interesting for all kinds of interpersonal, institutional reasons. But okay, so the title, just to say it again, “A Rhetorical History of Modern Money Theory.”  

So why is it titled that? Maybe that’s one place to start. And why does that matter? Why isn’t it called, “A History of Modern Money Theory?”

John Harvey

Well, let me toss in first, real quick. Over those ten years, there were a couple times where we both just kind of gave up on it. 

“Well, it was interesting, but, well…no, let’s give it another shot.”

“Ah, it didn’t work again, but let’s give it another shot.”

Another reason why I’m really proud of this piece is that we really worked really hard on this. Okay, so I had a piece come out in the JPKE last year and I wrote it in two weeks. It was pretty good. It was a survey article, and I had done a lot of the background research already, and I was on sabbatical. I like the article, but it took me like two weeks. I mean, maybe six months, if you count all the time I spent collecting the articles. I made a spreadsheet of the articles because it was going to be a survey piece.

So I wanted to say, “Okay, these articles fell into this category, these into this category.” This one, man, was hard, hard work. And I think it turned out great, but, I’m going to let Billy answer the question of why it’s title is that, because that’s his title.

Billy Saas

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I’m first of all a big fan of “no colon” in the title. This accomplishes that. It’s pretty straightforward. I think it does what it says on the tin and what it promises on the tin is connected with a kind of area of scholarship in rhetorical studies, in the kind of communication tradition where the discursive outputs and habits of a specific community are tracked over time in order to derive some kind of lesson or other.

As somebody who had been variously involved with on-the-ground arguments, but then from initial like early dissertation times, just very compelled by the arguments themselves made by Randall Wray, Stephanie Kelton and other MMTers. So this would have been the early 2010s when I came into contact with their scholarship. This is a history that I’ve outlined in the Liminalities piece that was published a couple of years after John would have given his keynote.

But we published a special issue of Liminalities from Money on the Left, where I describe some of this background. Anyway, a lot of research over time, a lot of reading of the blogs and kind of coming through my continuous contact with not only the blogs, the podcasts, the posts, the editorials, the comments in the comments section of the New York Times of MMTers.

Following that stuff very closely as sort of an interested party, but then also as a student of communication and someone interested in rhetoric, noticing that this seems to be a, if not entirely novel, certainly a deviation from the norm of how economics is done. I got interested in MMT from that perspective and started to try to bring to bear some of the tools and concepts that I got throughout my graduate studies on studying and trying to learn something from all of this reading and participating through conferences and otherwise, and this kind of broad discourse community. I think John brought the perspective in his keynote that was, I think, very much from a member of that sort of discourse community, from a more central perspective. I would actually like to put the question to you, John, how did you first come into contact with MMT? 

How did it meld with your institutional background? My entry into this was naive, and then educated and then, eventually, I guess not cynical, but tired encounters with all of this rhetoric over the years, and trying to make sense of it, also coming into contact with John, who was just a great person to offer additional perspective on how this stuff works and basically why MMT became so notable as a school of economic thought in the 2010s when it seemed like it had been a very long time since any school of economic thought had made such a splash on the national stage and international stage.

John Harvey

As Saas and Harvey say right here, “…progressed from a state of total obscurity to widespread notoriety, including mainstream economic discourse.” When I was in grad school and I realized I wanted to do non-mainstream stuff, Tennessee hired Paul Davidson, who was a huge name in post Keynesian economics.

I’d already finished my classes, so I talked to him by the copier and that was about it. But, we were all invited out to lunch – I say all, it’s just the two of us — with Chris Brown, who later became the editor of the JEI. We were there with Anne Mayhew and Terry Neal, two giants in institutional economics, and Paul Davidson and his wife, Louis and Alfred Eichner, who was another giant. I loved his stuff.

We’re sitting there and we’re not saying anything because we’re scared. The famous economists are all chatting and they said, “remember back when we thought we could make a change and we didn’t,” and I thought, “oh my God, that is not what I wanted to hear when I’m just about to finish my PhD and go out in the world.”

And so, these MMT people made a change. That’s what you’re pointing out. What makes it so unique is “wow, they were able to make inroads in a way nobody else did. I wonder how they did it?” That’s your rhetorical history of modern money theory. I wonder how they did it?

What remains to be done? What were the successes? What were the defeats? And I think we really do a good job. Having reread it last night, having not looked at it for at least a year, we do a good job pointing out what it was that was unique. That happened.

You asked about my introduction to MMT. It’s kind of funny, actually. Randall Wray and I got our PhD’s about the same time, so I’ve known him since way back then through institutionalist organizations. I’ve known Stephanie Kelton, I think, since she was Stephanie Bell and maybe before she got her PhD.

Pavlina Tcherneva, I can remember visiting her in her graduate school office when she was there. So I’ve known these people for years. I had never heard of MMT until I was having some discussion on, like an old person or a boomer, on Facebook and somebody said to me, “how long have you been into MMT?” I was like, “what does that stand for?” And then they told me I was like, “well, I just thought that was the right way to do macro.” I didn’t know that we had a name for it. I say this when Randall Wray’s book, Understanding Modern Money came out, whatever year that was.

I was one of the first reviewers of it for the Review of Social Economy. So I knew what the ideas were. I just didn’t know we had a name for it. So anyway, that’s how I just thought it made sense from a macro perspective. Now, I used to teach that the government had to eventually balance its budget.

Yes, I did, I used to teach that. Yeah. So did Randall Wray and so did Stephanie Kelton. We all did, because that’s what you heard. So it takes a while to figure these things out. Actually, one of the articles that made a big difference to me was one Randall Wray wrote. It was a Leading Institute piece on Social Security of all things.

He was talking about, “what if we were to hand out tokens to ride the subway to elderly people right now, or, they’d save up some tokens for later, but the main difference is, if there’s not a subway, there’s not a subway. Having the tokens is irrelevant.” That really hit me.

It took me a while to think through. In fact, in my review of Understanding Modern Money, I said, “it’s one of those books where you’ll read a paragraph and you just want to sit the book down for a while and think, ‘I don’t know what you just said, but wow, I’m going to have to think about that.’”

Scott Ferguson

How resistant were you? I’m always fascinated by people’s — I mean, this isn’t always the best way of putting it because it’s a religious term — conversion stories, right? Like how were you persuaded? Was it like, “oh, this seems to make sense, but I’m still a little confused. I have to figure it out.” Or did you have violent rejections of it and then have to kind of come back around?

John Harvey

I was excited to hear another viewpoint. I don’t think it’s just that because, you know, I could read an Austrian viewpoint that’s different and exciting and say, “I just didn’t sit with me.” But, I am always excited. Let’s see, today’s the 25th. In two weeks, I’m going to see the Sex Pistols in Dallas. Then I’m going to see The Damned in Dallas and then the Buzzcocks in Dallas. So I was always into different stuff. Everyone else was going to see Journey and Rush when I was in college and I was like, “Blaah,” and was gonna throw up, but, I’m going to go see the Dead Kennedys. 

Scott Ferguson

This is the best way to answer this question. Yes, yes. How did you take to MMT? “Well, let me tell you about my Sex Pistols.”

John Harvey

That’s right, that’s right. I was always open to it and don’t forget the first people that taught me were institutionalists. So that was my first introduction to economics. It was Adam Smith and Marx and Ricardo. So that’s what got me excited. I was always far more excited about the subject matter than I was about the tools.

I didn’t want the tools of analysis because, like I said, I started in physics, went to political science, and I enjoyed it. I majored in political science, but I like model building. So I like the structure and the math. I enjoy that, it’s the way my brain works. But I was always really interested in understanding the actual problems, regardless of whether the math can work it out or not with regard to how complicated it is. There’s some stuff in MMT that I don’t think makes any sense. So I will say that right there. Now, I have had people press me in interviews before, “what is it?” And I refused to answer it because as long as we’re under siege, there’s no point in picking on each other.

When we’re on top, then I’ll say, “by the way, I don’t think that makes sense. That was a silly idea.” So there are things I don’t think make sense. Just because it’s new and different, I don’t jump onto it. But it’s an interesting point, Scott. I never thought about that before.

I was excited to read something like that. The build up to the main point all made sense to me. And then the main point blew me away. I was like, now if the build up had made sense, like, for example, the thing I told you about what I learned in grad school that the money supply fell during the Great Depression, which caused prices to fall, which caused wages to fall, which caused people to quit their jobs. So 25% of unemployment was volunteer unemployment. That was unique and different. It was also stupid and so that one I didn’t jump on to. But the Randall Wray book, every time I would come across one of these ideas, “Oh, yeah. That’s good, that’s good, that’s good, that’s good. What? Okay, I got to think about that for a while, but that’s really interesting. I never thought of it that way before.” It sank in after that. So maybe it’s not just the Sex Pistols. Maybe it’s also that I thought that it made sense.

Scott Ferguson

That’s a great answer. The MMTers will often say, in the early days you could count on, maybe two hands the number of people who even knew about what they were up to, let alone agree with what they were up to.

Then we’ve seen this exponential growth over the years and you guys do a really great job at charting not only that growth, but the rhetorical strategies that are taken up and then the kind of rhetorical situations that crop up that help expand this discourse. So I’m wondering if you could take us back to the beginning and maybe we can just walk through this rhetorical history a bit, and we can pause at some emblematic moments.

John Harvey

Right. Well, Sass and Harvey say that it really came out of the post Keynesian thought listserv. This was back in the days of the early-ish internet. I was really excited about it. I was one of the first ones to present a paper that was very exciting on the Post Keynesian thought listserv.

It was on heuristic judgment theory. It was actually very helpful. It’s one of my most cited articles. I’m not sure why. I thought it was okay, but anyway, this was back in the 1990s, right Billy? 

Billy Saas

1993-ish.

John Harvey

Warren Mosler, who I finally met by the way, I’d never met him before. I was in Edinburgh.

Scott Ferguson

You met him in 93? 

John Harvey

This March. I never met him before. We exchanged things, but he came up to the Scottish Economic Festival that was in Edinburgh in March. I was speaking there. So he came up and we met. It was really nice. So anyway, he was a fund manager, and he was bringing up all these ideas that we associate with MMT.

Now, basically, a government that’s on a flexible exchange rate with a sovereign currency faces no budget constraint. They face many, many, many other constraints, but they don’t face a budget constraint. That’s where you get the straw man, “They say you can print money and there’s no consequences.” No, they don’t say that.

Nobody says that. Anyway, he’s pushing that and Randy and some of the others are like, “yeah, I don’t know…maybe,” and then it finally sort of congeals into this. There’s a bit of a history behind it. I just saw that last night, Billy, as I was reading through this, all the folks that Randall Wray cites as folks that had blazed this trail earlier.

Well, Abba Lerner, I guess, and others talked about this before, and then, Sass and Harvey say that this eventually evolved into a literature. We have Randall Wray’s Understanding Modern Money. Then we have Louis-Philippe Rochon write some stuff, all coming out of this conversation.

Then I think initially on the post Keynesian thought listserv, they were missing each other, at first. Then it kind of came around to, “Oh, wait, I see what you’re saying, and that all makes sense. But, yeah, I guess you’re right.” That’s the 1990s. I happen to have here on page 850 of Sass and Harvey, the Google hits for Modern Monetary Theory from 2000 to 2004, there were 191. And I won’t read every line here, but from 2020 to 2024, say, another five year period, there were 21,700. So 191, to 20 years later, 21,700. It outnumbered the hits of things like Austrian Business cycle theory, stuff like this. I’m sorry, I’ve skipped a couple of stages here.

We end up with these scholars from the post Keynesian thought list, writing scholarly stuff about what later is called MMT and then — and this is Billy’s idea entirely — Steve Keene, who is sort of associated with the MMT stuff, but more just sort of post Keynesian thought, he writes a book called, Debunking Economics.

He’s sick and tired of trying to argue with the mainstream. This is sort of separate from the whole MMT thing, but it ends up feeding into it. He’s sick and tired of trying to get into their journals. They’re not gonna pay any attention. They’re not going to listen to us. “So screw you,” as he says, “I’m taking the gloves off. We’re going to have a knock down, drag out fight.” One of my favorite things that Billy says in here, not me, he says he talks about some of the reviews of the book when it first came out, and he says they missed the point. They missed the important thing he did.

This is from the rhetorician. The really big thing he did was he took the fight to the street. He changed the level at which we’re going to take this fight. “You know what? Screw you. Do your stupid economics. Go ahead and assume away unemployment. All right, that’s fine. But I’m going to tell people that you’ve been assuming away unemployment. I’m going to tell people that.”

Steve Keen has a fantastic article on the economics of climate change and the horrible job that mainstream economics has done in examining climate change. “I’m going to tell people.”

By the way, we asked Steve Keen and Randall Wray if they would read the article for us and let us know if there were any factual errors or whatever.

Steve Keen apparently was a little nervous to read it. Then when he was done, he was like, “Oh my God. Thank you.” He had been put in such a central place of having shifted the argument.

Scott Ferguson

Something I want to point out just for our listeners. I mean, this is a deep cut, I don’t even think we’ve defined modern money theory. For the people who are listening, anybody who isn’t already a little bit on the inside. What I do want to suggest for people who are groping and trying to find anchors here, is what’s crucial here about what Keene did with Debunking Economics.

Debunking Economics is a popular book. It’s a trade press book. We’re talking about talking to the general public using non jargony, non specialized language in order to debunk economics for and to the general public. That’s the essential move here. So instead of fighting on the terrain of academic conferences and academic journal articles alone, he took this to the people and to the commercial press and put on his boxing gloves in that arena.

So the move was to expand the arena and change the medium.

John Harvey

Because you were never going to beat the neoclassicals in their own journals. I mean, that was just never going to happen and so he shifted over. Then there was the financial crisis, which created a leverage point for those who were arguing that neoclassical economics, especially the macro stuff, was really flawed.

They, initially, had all kinds of mea culpas and, you know, “oh, we didn’t know this could happen.” They eventually got over that and decided, “yeah, we know what was going to happen.” But, Steve Keene jumped in on that and then that’s it. Roughly speaking, I believe this is when all the other blogs started up as well, right? All the MMT…what’s the one at UMKC?

Billy Saas

New Economic Perspectives.  But I would say that part of the story, too, is Bill Mitchell.

He had started a blog as well in the early 2000 and Steve Keene also, before New Economic Perspectives, Keene and Mitchell both had their blogs going. Each, in a way, could make a claim to anticipating what happened in the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) and then afterwards would make claims to having seen it coming and cashing that in.

John Harvey

For Steve, there was an academic article on who did predict the financial crisis, and he laid out some really strict considerations and, he said, “well, you know, Keene did. Keene wasn’t always saying the sky is falling. He was saying, ‘the sky is falling for these specific reasons, based on a mathematical computer simulation I built back in 1995.’”

This is now 2007, and fairly accurate. Then, this created the opportunity for people who were critical of the mainstream to come in and talk, but not to talk to the mainstream. They all took off with blogs, and as it says in the article, Stephanie Kelton was the first one for New Economic Perspectives.

Another really important thing that is pointed out in the article is that non scholars, lay people, were welcome to the discussion. They were welcomed in and it created this grassroots support. There’s this one piece by Paul Krugman where he says, “this might be a bit wonkish.” 

Scott Ferguson

In parentheses.

John Harvey

I hate that! “I’m sorry, this is going to be a little bit too big for y’all. I’m going to try to dumb it down if I can.” They didn’t do that. They had conversations with people who weren’t professional economists and they spoke with them with respect and bothered to answer them. This created something that probably had never been possible before without the internet.

Scott Ferguson

A lot of that took place on social media and I was part of that. I was part of that project. There were several Facebook groups and many of the key MMT economists like Stephanie Kelton and Matt Forstater, they were there and Warren Moser was there, and they were explaining and they were engaging.

I mean, it was really a rhetorically rich situation. It was pretty amazing. It was interesting for me because I’m a trained scholar, but I’m not a trained economist. I felt it was an interesting position because I knew they were the academics and everybody was sort of looking to them to explain.

I had my own questions, but I was sort of the layperson in the group. It was a weird position for once. 

John Harvey

They did a fantastic job. Well, there’s this thing I just went to in Scotland, held by William Thompson, and it is all coming out of the whole MMT movement. They had all these policymakers or people that were interested in climate change and so forth.

It wasn’t for scholars, per se. But it was a fantastic meeting that took place over the course of 3 or 4 days. This wouldn’t have happened without these scholars, primarily from UMKC (University of Missouri-Kansas City). Here’s the other thing that’s great about the MMT stuff. As you said earlier, Scott, we haven’t really explained exactly what that is.

I mean, it’s just basically going to be there. As I said very briefly earlier, right now everyone’s freaking out over — what is it — $40 trillion of debt? 

“What are we going to do?” 

Oh, the same thing we did when it was $20 trillion, which is absolutely nothing. You can find so many quotes, even in mainstream economics on this. It’s impossible for the United States of America to default on debt in its own currency. It’s impossible. Now, have we wasted resources by using those $40 trillion or whatever he’s contributed by using those to attack Iran rather than address climate change? Yes. I mean, we have places to complain here.

Scott Ferguson

Are there distribution problems? Is this welfare for the rich? Yes.

John Harvey

That’s right. Yeah, absolutely. Are we running out of money? No, we’re not running out of money. When the federal government creates this money, they use it to command resources. 

I have a YouTube series, “The Cowboy Economist,” where I try to explain various concepts. The favorite one I ever made was on World War Two, because there is this myth in that fantastic Ken Burn’s World War Two series (The War). He went on and on about how America paid for the war itself, that we had the bond drives, and that’s how they pay for the war. 

Scott Ferguson

In the middle of a Great Depression.

John Harvey

So you’re telling me Ken Burns, that in 1941, when U.S unemployment is still almost 10%, that if we had not been able to borrow the money from grandma and granddad, who had just had their farm foreclosed on, if we were able to borrow that money, that regardless of our ability to produce goods and services, Hitler would have been marching down Broadway.

No, the money was irrelevant. We made up the money. It’s one of the good things that Covid did. That first summer of Covid, nobody argues that we just made it up. I mean, who did we borrow it from? China? That’s kind of where the whole thing started. Europe was in worse shape than we were.

We just made the money up. Are there consequences to that? Absolutely there are. Is bankruptcy one of them? No. That is a core concept. The federal government is not going to run out of money. What we do need to worry about is where it is placing its priorities in producing goods and services and activating resources and so forth.

Then a big part of that has become part of the whole MMT approach is the job guarantee. This goes a little bit further back into post Keynesian economics and institutionalists as well, the private sector does not automatically create a job for everyone who wants a job. Now that absolutely is the opposite of what mainstream economics believes, mainstream economics believes it does.

We don’t think it does. We believe that to the private sector, labor is a cost to be minimized. So, when they put in a screen in McDonald’s to put your order in, they laid somebody off. Now, I like to think, “Good. Now my Big Mac is cheaper.” That is good, as long as we’ve given something else for that person who got laid off to do.

That’s where the job program comes in. What the government should be doing is maintaining a continuous, “oh, you can’t find a job in the private sector? We’ve got one for you over here.”

“Oh. Am I going to be making hamburgers again?”

“No, because hamburgers are profitable. We leave that to the private sector. Now we’re going to have you help kids after school, or we’re going to help you address climate change. We’re going to have you rebuild the dikes in New Orleans or whatever there are.”

When we run out of social problems that are not profitable, then we can work. But until then, we’ve got all these things we could be using these resources for, and we don’t need the frickin Democrats telling us we need the tax first before we can do it.

We don’t need that, it’s just driving me insane. So anyway, that’s my rant on the MMT stuff that I think makes perfect sense. In fact, Melanie, my wife, is a huge fan. I was telling her in the car one day, “yeah, there’s some post Keynesians that don’t like the job guarantee.” 

She’s like, “What? What’s their idea?”

“Well, they don’t really have one.”

“Well, that’s why. They don’t have one!”

By the way, for those listeners who don’t really know what MMT is about, and is going to take a deep dive into it now, Melanie lives with me, it turns out, and had to see me give a talk on it three times before she said, “oh, now I get it,” because it is challenging so many conventional wisdoms all at once. It’s too much.

Scott Ferguson

It takes a while.

John Harvey

It does, it does. It takes a while. Then once it locks in, though, you’re like, “wow, this seems so obvious now.”

Scott Ferguson

You can’t unsee it.

John Harvey

Yeah, that’s right. In fact, we even have a quote in here from Stephanie Kelton where she says that very thing, that once you explain it to people, they’re like, “why didn’t they tell me this before? It makes so much sense.” Anyway, I’m sorry I went off on a little explanation of what MMT is.

Scott Ferguson

No, I love it, we need it. We needed it. We’ve already mentioned our dear friend Paul Krugman, who, I think, is actually getting more interesting in his post-New York Times ventures. But, you all provide a rhetorical analysis of a pretty critical role that he plays in amplifying the microphone for MMTers despite himself. So maybe you want to talk a little bit about that.

Billy Saas

I would say, this was observed at the time by Matt Forstater too. It’s not completely novel but MMT is doing its thing in the blogs and many of the everyday readers of New Economic Perspectives made their way over to Krugman’s editorials and into the comment section and  that kind of pissed him off a little.

He started to respond to them, not by responding to them directly, but to respond to the ideas that he understood them to be proposing. Over a series of rejoinders from not just MMT but also Kean. I think the other part of the story that’s important is, Steve Kean was in his sights in these as well.

By responding to their arguments, by talking about them by name, he gives them a high profile that wasn’t available to them until then.

John Harvey

They have nothing to gain by engaging with us other than beginning to validate us. 

“You’re worth talking to. You’re idiots, but you’re worth talking to,” but totally ignoring us otherwise.

That’s one of the other things that’s the point of that in the article, is that Keane and others took aim at specific mainstream economists.

They didn’t just say, “well, the idea of the nonlocal fund theory of interest is flawed. And so-and-so said it and so and so was an idiot.”

Okay. Well, not quite like that, but it’s flawed. Well, as a matter of fact, I can point out pieces that Krugman has written where he clearly is buying into the Loanable Funds Theory of interest, which I won’t bore people with, but, my God, that didn’t make sense 200 years ago, let alone now. That’s not the way the financial system works. So anyway, yeah, they were taking specific aim, and most people didn’t take the bait, but Krugman did. Then we end up with, I think, Kenneth Rogoff actually says something about it.

Let me mention one other thing here that I don’t think we ever mentioned here. I don’t think we needed to, what’s his name? Romer. Paul Romer, who eventually won the Nobel Prize in economics. No, we don’t have it here. Paul Romer wrote a piece a few years ago, 2016, I think it was, on “The Trouble with Macroeconomics.”

He’s writing about his own school of thought, macroeconomics, and he literally says it is so bad it no longer qualifies as scientific research. Now, there’s not much more damning thing you can say to another supposed scientist, that it is not even science anymore. He says that modern macroeconomics in their school of thought no longer deals with the way human behavior works. He ends up making up names like fairies, you know, and so forth. They’re the things that are causing business cycles and so forth. Now, I would not agree with Romer’s final conclusion. That is, we should go back to an old style neoclassical Keynesian approach. But, man. I was at a conference with him, thanks to Steve Kean, actually, and I asked Romer about the article he wrote that blasted Milton Friedman and Rober Lucas and all these mainstream economists.

He said, “oh my God, I got so much hell for that. Not for what I said. But, ‘how dare you say something bad about Milton Friedman?’” Well, that’s not the way science is supposed to work. I know that scientists are people too, and that there’s absolutely going to be politics and personality conflicts.

I’m writing a chapter right now for a friend’s book, Louis-Philippe Rochon, on American Post Keynesian economics, and one of my sections in there is about how Joan Robinson at Cambridge simply wasn’t talking to this other economist and they marched out, and I’m like, “oh, God.We’re already under siege. Why are we fighting with each other?”

It’s interesting to me that somebody who later won a Nobel Prize, not for his work in macro, but elsewhere, he was like, “man, our macro is awful.” Many neoclassical economists hate their own macroeconomics. I’m not crazy about the micro either, but, at least it gives us some common ground to talk about these things.

But yeah. So the MMTers and Keane took specific aim at these individuals who were big names in neoclassical economics. Krugman at first, and then a couple of the others actually shot back and this helped. We’re in The New York Times, being made fun of, but nevertheless. 

Scott Ferguson

Then people get curious and then the blogs grow. I think another thing to point out here that I don’t think ended up in the final paper, because you can’t put everything in, is in the wake of the global financial crisis you also have students rising up. They want explanations. They’re like, “Why are you teaching us all this? This is BS that can’t deal with the crises that are breaking our world right now.” Several student organizations cropped up.

John Harvey

Paris was one of the first ones, I think. A French University, and then Cambridge.

Billy Saas

Well, I would say so you mentioned anger, Scott. While we don’t talk specifically about the student uprising, and I would say that we don’t get too deep into affect, but I think that that is very much part of the story. One of the earlier iterations of this piece was more about affective dimensions of MTV’s appeal.

Backing up just a little bit, part of what I find so fascinating and have found so fascinating about MMT’s rhetorical history is, so much of the thinking and self-reflection was done in public.

John Harvey

It’s a good point. It’s a good point. 

Billy Saas

Randall Wray’s blog is out there repeatedly trying to point out and consult readers for their feedback on ideas about how best to counteract the arguments of neoliberalism and so on.

There’s good evidence that that thinking ends up playing out in their public facing, it’s all public facing, but in some of their more high profile talks, papers and otherwise. So I really love that one of the invitations to this project, one of the inviting things about it was so much of it is the thinking behind the strategy is performed in public.

John Harvey

Yeah. I hadn’t thought about that, but that’s absolutely right. Of course, that endeared these people to the folks that were first reading about it. It was like, “Wow, I mean, Paul Krugman isn’t responding to my comments in The New York Times, but Randall Wray is, and that’s really cool.”

Billy Saas

I would say so, too. If I can put you on the spot a little bit here, John, when you gave that keynote talk, I remember what the affect was and the ad hominem and the way that MMT advocates were comporting themselves online was making you quite nervous and a little bit upset. As your collaborator on this for so long, it seems like there’s been some adjustment.

I guess maybe you can reflect on that. In what ways has that changed for you?

John Harvey

Yeah, you’re exactly right, Billy. Back when I was doing that talk, I was a bit worried about some of the grassroots people being more like assassins than ambassadors. They didn’t always have a really good understanding of the economics. They had some information about it, but not enough to really carry on a good argument.

That worried me. In part, I think it’s changed, and in part, I’ve changed my view. I think we need assassins as well as ambassadors, if that’s your personality. I’m not good at that. I’m more, “Well, thank you so much. It turns out I’m not a bastard. My parents were married when I was born, but, you know, on to your question.”

That’s what I used to do on my Forbes blog when I used to answer every comment. “You owe your students their money back!” 

“I’m going to get on that right away. I appreciate that, you know, also…”

That’s more my style. Other people, it’s not. Other people are going to attack. This is going to be a crazy analogy here, but I love military history. Part of the Soviet’s strategy for World War Three, had it happened, was, they were just going to attack everywhere at once. They were going to find out, “ooh, we are making some progress over here by Hamburg, let’s reinforce that.” So, alright, let’s attack everywhere at once.

There are going to be some people being assassins, some people being ambassadors, some people doing academic work, some people doing grassroots organizing. 

We’ll all do this and go “hey, where are we making some progress? Because you’re making use of your personal strengths and weaknesses in your approach and then, you know, we’ll push forward wherever we seem to be making progress.” I’m really excited about what William Thompson has been doing up in Scotland. But also, I think it’s changed somewhat. I don’t know if maybe I’m just hanging out with different people, but I know that Torrens University in Australia now offers that MMT based — it’s not really MMT based but it’s certainly one of the foundations of it — master’s degree in sustainability.

And a lot of those people who were really fired up about the ideas initially are now getting educated about them and getting a really good, solid foundation in macroeconomics and not just a few of the bumper sticker slogans from MMT, and that’s all they really know.

I think they’re just getting a lot more educated about it. By the way, the book I just came out with on business cycles is really boring. Especially the chapter I wrote the whole thing for, chapter four is why I wrote the book, and it’s a history of the US from 1954, I think, to 2020, which is our last recession.

It goes through, “Nixon did this and Reagan did that,” and so forth. That’s why I wrote the book. I wanted to write that part, which is probably the most boring part to anybody else. But that’s why I wrote the book. The beginning of it, however, is a theory of what causes business cycles.

I kind of wrote that for MMT people, but I didn’t write it for other economists. I have an appendix where I do the math and stuff. I wrote it to make it understandable, so that when they get into an argument with the mainstream economist, they can come back with some stuff. They can understand that.

And then chapter five is my policy chapter. That’s all the MMT job guarantee stuff. I thought they were lacking a deeper knowledge. They were full of enthusiasm, but I think that’s changed. I think that that’s actually changed. So you’re right, that was worrying me. It’s not worrying me now because, A) I think the people have changed and B) because I’m thinking, “well, maybe we need some assistance too, on the other hand.”

Billy Saas

Yeah. One more thing I’d say about the structure and maybe the to wrap up the story, bring us current to where we end off in the article, which is fairly contemporary. It would be to say that, I imagined and worked with throughout the writing process, I imagined Fred Lee’s A History of Heterodox Economics as a launching off point and also a foil for the kind of history that we were doing, because in that book, which is great and tells an amazing story of the sort of institutional history of heterodox economics and its multiple schools throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. It’s very much about sticking to the script and building an infrastructure for journals to be more successful as heterodox economists. Basically sticking with the model that had been tried and tested throughout the 20th century. What we have with MMT is an example, not the only example, but an example of a heterodox school getting off script and going — wildly at times, as Steve Kean put it — into the streets.

John Harvey

Right. Yeah.

Billy Saas

It’s not all about “into the streets” because after the Krugman moment and into the mid 2010’s, we have the first appointment of an MMT person to a significant high profile federal position like Stephanie Kelton, as the budget advisor for Bernie Sanders. Then we have our uptake in the conventional policy circles for, albeit unconventional candidates, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others who would end up hearing from Stephanie and others. As a result of the work that had been done making noise and the street team that had been developed right through conferences and other means, who would be going to some of the public meetings that these politicians would be participating in and asking them about things like the jobs guarantee or about MMT more specifically. Where I think we end up in the article, and starting in the introduction, the relative ascension of MMT. What’s been interesting about writing this over such a long period is that there were definitely some rises and falls and some rises and falls within that time period. As John said, the early days of the Covid era seem to have validated and elevated the MMT perspective and then subsequent…

Scott Ferguson

Mainstream commentators saying things like, “we’re all MMTers now.”

John Harvey

And blaming MMT for inflation.

Scott Ferguson

That’s right.

Billy Saas

I would say inevitably and somewhat predictably doing that. This piece, big picture, is an opportunity — in its ultimate form here — to reflect on the state of early MMT and MMT 1.0’s project today. What remains to be seen, what remains to be done, and especially in light of the apparent disregard for the fiscal situation for the public that is on display in the current administration.

John Harvey

But, the Democrats are driving me insane because they want to criticize Trump. Okay. Fair enough. But, you know, the $40 trillion debt is being talked about by just about every other person on Facebook. Several times I’ve started to type a comment, “I was like, oh my God, I don’t have the energy.”

There’s a local politician here, a very nice man who is no longer going to be a politician because they redistricted his area. So he’s no longer going to be able to win. But he’s a hard core, “Oh, we have to keep these Bernie Sanders types out, because they’re our MAGA.” I don’t know, I guess I’m in a stage where I just don’t have the energy right now to go in there and fight these fights.

This is where we need our assassins to go in there and say something about this. This has been really distressing to me the last few weeks, all the attention from the left on the debt. I saw somebody else sharing something, “the debt created by all Republican presidents, the debt created by all the Democratic presidents.”

We’ve got to shift that. We’ve got to shift it. Where we ended up in the article was, it seems that the big thing we haven’t been able to overcome is the fact that mainstream economics still holds the high ground. Every time, what would you think if you weren’t knowledgeable about all this?

Let’s use the analogy of cigarette smoking and cancer and if every time we tried to say cigarette smoking causes cancer, if the American Medical Association said, “no, it doesn’t,” well, what would we think? 

“I haven’t done any research on lungs in years. So, I have no idea whether that’s true or not.”

As long as the American Medical Association keeps saying “no, it doesn’t cause cancer,” then I’m going to think, “well, I don’t know who these jerks are that are saying it’s causing cancer, but they’re idiots,” so flip that around. 

“We can’t go bankrupt.” 

Then we have the American Economic Association say, “Yeah, you can.” 

Then you’d say, “I mean, yeah, we’ve got to have a balanced budget.” 

So who would I listen to if I weren’t an economist? I’d listen to all these other folks. So somehow they have to be discredited that their climate change research is terrible, that they’re macro research is saying, “let’s assume away unemployment.” Let’s hit that over and over and over and over. I don’t know exactly where. Maybe we do like the Soviets in World War Three and push in a lot of places at once and see where we make some progress. But until we can get rid of that last word from these economists who are going to say, “No, that’s not right, and we’re united on that,” I don’t know how we’re going to win this.

One of the things we do in this paper, by the way, and that was one of the last things we added, was, “what do you need to do to make a scholarly idea into policy?” We pulled this from the literature in public health, I think, where they have a lot of that. The scholars have done this research and are trying to actually make a difference in the real world.

There were four things that they talked about: 

1) Attract the attention of one or more friendly policy makers. 

Okay, we got that. All right. 

2) Convention the propriety of the desired policy. 

We mostly have that with Bernie Sanders, who was never an MMTer, but close enough. 

3) Persuade them to write, propose and promote appropriate legislation.

We haven’t done that yet, but maybe we can get there, but

4) Garner sufficient support from other legislators for this to become policy.

That’s not frickin happening, because the American Economic Association is going to step in and stop us every time. They’re going to say, “no, cigarette smoking doesn’t cause cancer.” Obviously, the American Medical Association had a positive role in that context, but, to me, that’s what’s stopping us.

That’s where our focus needs to be. Okay, so let’s bring up something depressing, as is if this wasn’t already. I was at a conference at University of Texas where Jamie Galbraith was. A fantastic economist. Great person. This is the part of the conference where we’re all just drinking beer.

And so I said to Jamie, “you know, well, what do you think our odds of winning are?”

“Oh, we’re not going to win.” That’s what he said. “But what else are we going to do? What else are we going to do but fight for what we think makes sense? But yeah, we’re not going to win.”

All right, I actually take some strength from that. I don’t have to measure my success by whether or not I got this policy in place. I want to measure it by the fact that I’m still fighting and we’re still pushing back. So I don’t know if listeners now are very sad or very happy. I hope it’s both at the same time. Clear your head of that idea. It’s like in Band of Brothers, and I believe it’s episode three, where they’re trying to talk to that fella Blithe who won’t fire his gun. He’s really scared. I think it’s Winters who’s talking to him. He says, “look, the problem is you already think you’re going to live. You need to think to yourself, ‘I’m not going to make it through this’ and then you’ll be able to do what you need to do.”

So, maybe that’s us. Maybe we’re the Private Blithe of the economics communication discipline. Look, don’t measure your success by whether or not you win, measure your success by whether or not you stay true to what you know academically, scholarly and morally.

Morally. It is immoral to see people as we do all the time here in Fort Worth, I know you do in New Orleans, I assume in Tampa, all the homeless people. That is a policy choice. There is no reason that has to exist. It is a choice. As long as you keep fighting on the right side, I’ll tell you something else too now that I’m on this soapbox. When those economists I mentioned earlier, when Chris Brown and I went to lunch with these four famous economists and they said, “oh, no, remember, we thought we could make a change and we didn’t.”

Yes, you did, four famous economists, because you kept the idea going to where eventually people like Stephanie Kelton could put it into play because she learned from John Henry.

Nice man. Institutionalist. I don’t know if you know her story or not. She was not majoring in econ. She was majoring in, like, accounting. She took an econ class from John Henry, and John was like, “you know, you’re really good at it, and you should minor in it.”

“Oh, okay.” So he got her hooked, right?

He’s like, “you know, you’re doing really well on this minor. You should major in it. Then you should go to grad school in this.”

So she did. Does John Henry have a New York Times bestselling book? No, but he made it happen. He kept those ideas alive. He was a great teacher. He excited her, and she pursued that.

Scott Ferguson

You walked into the point I was going to make, which is, clearly there are rises and falls, and we can talk about the way that in mainstream discourse MMT was having moment after moment after moment. It kind of peaks during early Covid and then falls off and everybody blames it for the inflation, which for the record, is utter BS.

But I think you brought us back to what I think is the most important, which is not just that it is politically and morally righteous to keep fighting, but also to keep building and to keep nurturing. You know what, we do. We keep doing that. That has its own kinds of ups and downs that don’t track when they follow different narratives.

For example, something you guys don’t talk about in the article is MMT adjacent economists are central bank advisors to central banks all around the world. Nobody ever reports on that or freaks out that Scott Fulwiler is talking to the Central Bank of Indonesia. I don’t know if that’s exactly right, but that kind of stuff has gone on throughout.

That’s not as spectacular as Kelton becoming Bernie’s top economist. This work keeps going on, the pedagogy continues, it evolves, the institution is reproducing itself. We have multiple going-concerns. That isn’t such a clear story of success or failure. That’s living.

That’s collective action. That’s reproducing ourselves.

John Harvey

Right. They’re doing such a great job at Torrens with educating people about these things. So yeah, we just have to keep going. New people are finding out about this all the time. Policy activists, who are leaning our way but don’t see an answer because all they’ve ever heard is what the Democrats view or the equivalent in their country of economics, which is just a sort of slightly left mainstream economics version that is still handicapped by the idea that, “oh, but the economy takes care of itself. We have to balance the budget.”

At the end of my book, in the policy section I’m talking about how the Democrats say, “small business, small businesses are the job creators.” The big job creator was the Cold War and the big job creator was World War Two.

Our problems were gone overnight. 1.9% unemployment. Now, granted, there’s a lot of war stuff going on, but otherwise. Think about it, what if we had built all that stuff and just pushed it off into the ocean, which we did at the end of the war. Imagine all the planes and tanks that got destroyed.

What if we had just built them in Detroit and pushed them into Lake Michigan? It still would have created this much employment as we had anyway.

Scott Ferguson

That’s your version of the Keynes line about digging holes and filling them up.

John Harvey

That’s right, that’s right. There’s no need to do that because we have lots of social problems that we could be addressing. It’d be nice if people in Gary, Indiana, had electricity.

Billy Saas

Well, as Coretta Scott King put it, this nation has never dealt, honestly, with the question of a peacetime economy. I think it’s fair to say that aligns with where we land in the piece and where we will move forward — with hope and despair in equal measure. Yeehaw.

Yeah. Thank you so much, John.

John Harvey

Thank you guys.

Billy Saas

Thank you for joining us. Really appreciate you joining us for Money on the Left.

John Harvey

May the force be with you.

* 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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Reclaiming Money’s Public Powers for Imaginative Intersectional Politics

By Rob Hawkes

Alongside my Money on the Left colleagues Will Beaman and Tyler Suksawat, I recently joined Gus Dunn-Hindle of the Maine People’s Alliance to discuss public money and public banking on the Beacon Podcast. During the conversation, I cited our podcast’s regular opening announcement that Money on the Left is ‘a monthly interdisciplinary podcast that reclaims money’s public powers for imaginative intersectional politics.’ The imaginative part of this is especially important – when we free up our imaginations to think about monetary design in new ways, we can begin to move beyond the austerity mindset that condemns millions to poverty, even in the wealthy societies of the global north, while treating extreme inequality and social exclusion as natural and inevitable facts of life.

Many of today’s most intractable challenges, from crumbling public services to the accelerating ecological crisis, look very different when we cease to view them through the orthodox prism of monetary scarcity, privation, and limitation. For the former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas, ‘the failure to rise to the challenge of the nature and climate emergencies’ is reflective of an ‘imagination deficit’ and ‘a failure to imagine that a better world is possible’. Indeed, as Cory Doctorow points out, the ‘true meaning’ of Margaret Thatcher’s famous slogan ‘There is no alternative’ (TINA) ‘isn’t “No alternative is possible,” but rather, “Stop trying to think of an alternative.”’ Speaking as a sci-fi writer, Doctorow likes to quip that ‘thinking of alternatives is literally my job.’ In Doctorow’s fiction, most notably in 2023’s The Lost Cause, the envisioning of an alternative future engages directly with the emancipatory potential of democratic public finance, when a character recalls a moment in the past when ‘Towns and universities started minting their own currencies’ (a nod to Money on the Left’s Uni Currency Project). In the novel, this ‘wildcat money’ becomes an engine of democratic possibility and change.

This is one of the many reasons why cultural analysis – from the MCU to literary modernism – has always been central to the Money on the Left project. As I wrote last month, ‘what connects my approach to the interpretation of cultural, monetary, and political forms to our group’s proposals for public banking, municipal bond issuance, and university finance’ is the framework we at MotL call ‘the public money paradigm’. And ‘when we understand that inequality and exclusionary violence are built into the logic of private money we can begin to imagine new possibilities for monetary design founded on democratic inclusion, collectivity, and care.’

This is also why the intersectional part of ‘imaginative intersectional politics’ is vital. From the perspective of the private-money-based orthodoxy, the pursuit of justice appears as a series of either/or battles where the liberation of the marginalised can only ever come at another’s expense. It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that this summer’s hounding of Jason Arday, an autistic black professor, first out of British academia and then to his shocking and untimely death has taken place in the midst of an increasingly brutal financial crisis in the UK’s higher education sector (which, as The Sunday Times recently revealed, saw universities collectively spending over £400 million excluding people from its workforce through redundancy schemes in 2024-25 alone). This is not to suggest that the austerity wrecking ball that’s currently trashing courses, departments, disciplines, and institutions across UKHE was responsible for Professor Arday’s death in any direct or uncomplicated sense. As Kieran Rose argues, the ‘ONLY reason’ Jason Arday’s story became a ‘story’ after he was publicly accused of plagiarism by a known eugenicist was ‘because of racism’. Nevertheless, the fact that UKHE has been systematically starved of funds while simultaneously facing relentless attacks on its commitments to equality, diversity, and inclusion, has undoubtedly damaged the already precarious safety of marginalised groups and individuals such as Arday within our academic communities.

The vision of zero-sum exchange that defines the private money paradigm also corresponds closely with the rationale underpinning attempts to split the queer community by pitting LGB against TQIA2+ as well as the ‘overdiagnosis’ panics that, in the UK, have coalesced around Dame Uta Frith’s divisive and exclusionary views on autism and Channel 4’s irresponsible documentary ‘The Great ADHD Myth?’ Since March, when a piece appeared in the TES titled ‘why I no longer think autism is a spectrum’, Frith, an autism researcher since the 1960s, has repeatedly been given a platform across new media (including podcasts), legacy media, and academic publications from which to take issue with the present interpretation of the diagnostic criteria for autism and especially to question the validity of late diagnosis. Meanwhile, ‘The Great ADHD Myth?’ aired on 18 August and asked ‘whether ADHD is a genuine neurodevelopmental disorder, or a social construct’. As Rose explains: ‘These aren’t isolated stories, instead, they sit within a much wider journalistic ecology in which Autism and ADHD repeatedly appear alongside welfare expenditure, SEND budgets, NHS demand, school absence, social-care pressures and questions about who genuinely deserves support.’

In each of these cases, then, those whose full participation in society is impeded by racism, transphobia, and/or ableism are regarded as competing for scarce resources in a world where there is never enough to go around. In a private money universe of barter-like trade-offs, care for the vulnerable must always come at the cost of someone else’s suffering. By contrast, reclaiming money’s public powers for imaginative intersectional politics means recognising that monetary design choices shape and condition everything from our hierarchies of academic privilege to university funding crises, battles over trans rights, SEND provision in schools, and the wider recognition, accommodation, and support afforded to disabled people. Picturing another world is not the same thing as bringing one into being, of course, but freeing our imaginations from the austere limits of the private money paradigm is an important first step towards a better, more inclusive, and sustainable future.

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Money Is Weird

by Rob Hawkes

Isn’t it strange that social inclusion and climate justice appear unaffordable, but not the status quo?

In July, I presented at the Weird Modernisms conference at Loughborough University. My talk (which you can read here) argued that money is weird. This may sound like a rather bizarre claim; let me explain.

The word ‘weird’ suggests strangeness or oddness but, of course, also carries connotations of the magical and the supernatural (think of Macbeth’s ‘weird sisters’). Indeed, evidence of money’s uncanny ability to ‘emerge from thin air’ is all around us, from government spending to bank lending, from complementary currencies to video game coins, and from high street store credit to crypto. And yet, our media and political debates remain dominated by the insistence that there is simply not enough money to fight economic injustice or to avert climate catastrophe. Stop trying to imagine a different, better world, they scream at us. We’d all like to see less poverty, properly funded/functioning public services, a liveable planet, etc., but what can you do if the markets aren’t in favour? Sure, we can always pay for wars, but a socially inclusive and ecologically sustainable society is unaffordable. Weird, huh?

Perhaps it is unsurprising that the inherent strangeness of money and the language we use to discuss it is ignored, overlooked, and repressed in mainstream discourse. Just as the economic orthodoxy functions to preserve existing social hierarchies – which are simultaneously patriarchal, white supremacist, imperialist, classist, ableist, hetero- and neuronormative – the way we routinely discuss public finance and the limitations we impose on monetary design are thoroughly normative and rest on the exclusion of the inexpressible weirdness of money and the humans who create it.

At the conclusion of my talk in Loughborough, I turned to the words of the neuroqueer theorist Nick Walker, who explains in Neuroqueer Heresies (2021) that: ‘Neuronormativity and heteronormativity, in essence, are systems of artificial restriction on human potential. By their very nature, they limit our possibilities. To neuroqueer is to refuse to be constrained by those limits.’ It is no coincidence that neurodivergent people have often been dismissed and/or vilified as weird (and, by extension, as magical, uncanny, supernatural, even monstrous), but as Walker also affirms, ‘anyone can liberate themselves from the strictures of normativity.’ In asserting that money is weird, it is my hope that we can all ‘unzip’ our ‘normal-person monetary imaginations’ and refuse to be constrained by the artificial restrictions the economic orthodoxy imposes on our understanding of money’s limitless creative potential. The status quo relies on the exclusion of weirdness, strangeness, and otherness to maintain its illusion of affordability. To build an inclusive and sustainable future, we’ll need to recognise and celebrate money as malleable, redesignable, and thus much weirder than we’ve been taught to think.

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Democracy Needs Public Media with Victor Pickard

Victor Pickard returns to Money on the Left six years after his first appearance on the show to discuss the state of the U.S. media system under Trump 2.0. Pickard is C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Co-Director at the Media, Inequality & Change Center. Placing current developments in broad historical context, Pickard situates today’s media crisis within a century-long struggle to establish and maintain genuine public media against the overpowering dominance and relentless pushback of private corporate media.

Drawing on his recent writing and policy interventions, Pickard breaks down three distinct layers of media capture: capitalistic, oligarchic, and authoritarian. Crucially, our conversation stresses how the foundational layer—the capitalistic privatization of news and communication as market commodities rather than vital public goods—directly conditions and enables the other two. As long as media institutions remain captured by capitalist imperatives, treating political information as a vehicle for private control and exploitation, attempts to counter oligarchic consolidation or authoritarian coercion will fail to address the root causes of our institutional breakdown.

During our discussion, we explore the history of the struggle to build public media in the United States, from early twentieth-century regulatory choices that privatized the public airwaves to the gradual weakening of public-interest protections and the chronic underfunding of public broadcasting. Against this hyper-commercialized landscape, we insist upon the necessity of fighting for democratic, diverse, and locally sensitive public media infrastructures. Rather than relying on broken advertising models or corporate philanthropy, we explore what it would mean to construct non-capitalist, community-governed media systems designed from the bottom up to serve local publics.

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

Victor Pickard, welcome back to Money on the Left.

Victor Pickard

Thanks so much for having me. It’s good to see you guys again.

Scott Ferguson

It’s great to see you. You are an expert at the political composition and history of the US media system, thinking specifically about the press, but also other aspects of the media system, how it’s developed over time, how it’s been fought over over time, insisting that it’s been constructed and reconstructed, nothing about it is natural. You have plenty of important critiques of the way that our media system has been privatized to the detriment of the public, and we spoke to you, I think, six years ago, back in 2020, checking in with your analysis back then.

And we wanted to invite you back because it seems to us that maybe things have shifted a little bit and not for the better. And we’ve been following your work and finding your updated analyzes very helpful. Another thing that we really find helpful about your work is that you’re not just a critic. You insist on having a kind of capacious, future-oriented imagination that is centering the public, centering the possibilities for public options for public media, public media ownership, different kinds of designs, different kinds of constructs, especially during these dark times.

So we wanted to bring you on and learn more from you about what you’ve been doing recently and helping us to understand what’s going on with the US media system today and how we get here. So that’s a wide open question, but you can start wherever you want.

Victor Pickard

Great. Well, thank you for this invitation and I’m so delighted to have this conversation with you all. I can’t believe it’s been six years. That blows my mind. But of course, a few things have changed or a few things have happened, at least, since then. Much of my analysis, for better or for worse, has not changed as far as what’s wrong with the US media system in particular, and what we need to do to try to fix or at least confront some of these problems.

But in many ways it still has accelerated. It has qualitatively shifted in important ways, and there are a lot of different places where we could kind of dip in and depart from, for example, obviously the journalism crisis, which I’m assuming is something we talked about six years ago, has only gotten worse. Quite predictably, that has gotten much worse.

The latest calculation I saw is that since the early 2000, we’ve lost about 81% of our local journalists in the US, you know, more than 40% of our local newspapers, so that now tens of millions of Americans are living in news deserts, in areas with little or no access to local news media whatsoever. So this is catastrophic for any kind of semblance of democratic society.

And certainly during Trump 2.0, we’ve seen nothing constructive happening on this front whatsoever in terms of trying to address the journalism crisis in any structural, substantive way. That’s not to start out on such a dismal note, but certainly things have gotten much worse. There are many pathologies that we could talk about.

I’ll leave it there for now to see which direction you’d like to go and of course, I’m sure we’re going to talk about the future of public media, whether there is a future for public media. But you tell me where you’d like to go first.

Billy Saas

I’m incredibly excited to talk about the future and to do some vision work with you and chart the path forward out of this mess, but I think it might be a good place for us to start with the the death of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a kind of case study of where we are, something that had been on the chopping block or in the sights of conservatives in this country for a long time, finally seems to have have suffered, at least at the institutional level, its public support, which was minimal in the first place, but now is zero through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

So if we could talk about that in the state of the Public Broadcasting Act in 2026.

Victor Pickard

Sure. Yeah, that’s not the most cheerful place to start. But of course, we should probably warn our listeners that this is not going to be a cheery conversation. Despite all the doom and gloom, I will try to hit on a few points of at least potential optimism and hopes. But we won’t get there yet. So we’ll start out with the doom and gloom. 

So regarding the CPB, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as you suggest, Billy, it was never adequately funded. It was established with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and just to back up for a moment to talk about the strange history that led to the very belated and suboptimal establishment of public broadcasting in the United States.

Unlike most democratic countries around the world, when we established our broadcast media system in the United States, and of course, we’re speaking specifically about radio in the early 30s, we went down a very different path compared to most other democracies. To be more specific, we created a highly privatized and commercialized broadcast media system, which again, was very different. We were pretty much a global anomaly by not establishing a more public oriented broadcast media system and, of course, a media system that was dependent on the public airwaves.

I mean, it was inherently a public resource that we then essentially handed over primarily to two large corporations in the early 30s, CBS and NBC. And we can get more into the weeds on this history momentarily if we want to geek out on that, but long story short, because we went down this commercial trajectory, there was this ongoing media reform activism that tried to create a different kind of system.

At the same time, there was a growing awareness of all the systemic limitations that a commercial broadcast media system has vis a vis democratic society. In other words, we found out quite glaringly that there were a number of things that a commercial broadcasting system would never do, would never make sure that all communities have access to a baseline level of news and information, and also cultural and educational fare.

So as we went through the 50s and 60s and some of your listeners may have heard about the famous speech by then FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow in 1961, when he referred to, especially television in general, as a vast wasteland, there was this growing awareness that we needed a systemic alternative to deliver on some of our informational and communication needs.

So that is a very long winded wind up to basically set the stage for why we finally established a public broadcasting system in the late 60s in the United States that was always woefully underfunded. It was never insulated sufficiently from economic precarity and from political pressures, because it was being funded on this annual appropriations process and it was being funded or at least mediated through this CPB organization, where the federal government would fund CPB to then allocate a certain amount of money to various stations, television, radio stations around the country.

Just to bring it up to our current or recent moment, so, as I said, it was always chronically underfunded up until last year, when it was finally defunded completely, it was getting a whopping dollar $1.60 per person per year at the federal level. I mean, this was literally off the chart compared to most Democratic countries around the world.

Compared to the Brits, they were spending close to $100 per person per year for the BBC and many other western European, or northern European countries were spending well over $100 per person per year, and it shows in the health of their democratic societies. We were this global outlier for the pittance that we were allocating towards our public broadcasting system and then even that was phased out by congressional Republicans and by the Trump administration, so that now they’re getting zero at the federal level. This has created all kinds of problems, especially for rural stations, that really disproportionately relied on federal funding to stay afloat. Ironically, it is often in Trump voting regions where its public broadcasting stations are suffering the most.

So those are just a few of the highlights of both the history that led us to this moment, and where we are at this very moment with our public broadcasting system.

Scott Ferguson

And you have been developing, recently, a kind of tripartite – and I don’t know how you would characterize it – if it’s a question of stages, if it’s a question of periodization or more a question of impulses that might be interpenetrating in different ways at different moments, I’ll let you answer it.

Victor Pickard

I like that.

Scott Ferguson

Okay. There. Let’s roll with that.

Victor Pickard

I might steal that. 

Scott Ferguson

Okay. Go for it. 

Victor Pickard

Of course, these are all metaphors all the way down, but one of the ways that I was trying to think of this was that, for understandable reasons – and we might get into this as well – in recent years, especially during Trump 2.0, there’s been a growing awareness and sensitivity towards what we might think of them as these media oligarchs; the Elon Musk and Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and the Ellison’s, the Murdochs. There are these right wing moguls that control so much of our media and so understandably, our attention is being drawn to this glaringly evident problem.

But what I’m trying to show in my work is that the structural conditions that allow for the oligarchs to capture so much of our media really traces back to these capitalistic logics. Before we even start thinking about oligarchic capture of our media, and, of course, another growing concern with the Trump administration is just flat out authoritarian capture of our media, but we also need to understand how there initially was this capitalistic capture. I think the metaphor I use is that they are nested or overlapping, but however we want to phrase it, there are these different stages of capture of our media system and to really try to penetrate to the core root of the structural problem, I do try to bring it back to the capitalist capture. As much as it’s always fun to talk about these cartoon villains like the Musks and the Ellisons who are so easy to hate, but it’s much more than these bad billionaires doing bad things, right. It’s not a bad apples argument. It really is more deeply systemic. 

That’s why throughout my work, I try to really surface these inflection points where our media became captured by these hyper commercial logics. We already touched on one around our broadcast media.

I’d pinpoint 1934 when we passed the Communications Act of 1934, that, again, initially privatized and commercialized our broadcast media. But if we want to trace back to one of these inflection points with our print media, I’d say we’d have to go back to the 80s, the 1880s, when so much of our newspaper industry became so inordinately dependent on advertising revenue.

Up until the 1880s, it was much more of a mixed, or today we might call it a blended revenue model, where newspapers typically were getting support from individual readers. We call them subscribers today, perhaps. They were also getting funding from political parties. They were getting a large amount of funding, especially through coastal subsidies from the government to the tune of what would be the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars in today’s currency. The industry was being subsidized in basically very cheap circulation through the entire postal system throughout the 1800s. Even to this present day, there’s still pretty meager print subsidies still at work. So when we start bringing this into focus, we see that it was only when our core media systems became so hyper commercialized that they became biased against and essentially turned against democracy in many important ways.

And of course, looking at the newspaper industry again, once it became so dependent on advertising revenues, it really changed the relationship between newspaper owners and reading audiences. Instead of seeing their readers as first and foremost engaged citizens of a polity, and of course, we should always be clear that oftentimes publishers weren’t truly trying to reach all members of society, that it was always certain members, especially white propertied men, going back to the earliest days of our newspaper system, but they still saw their readers as citizens instead of consumers.

Once they became so dependent on advertising revenue, where they were trying to capture the attention of their readers and deliver those readers to advertisers, this really changed the core relationships between newspapers and democratic society. So these are just the broad strokes of how there were these structural transformations of our core media when they became captured by these hyper commercial logics, these capitalistic logics.

Of course, once our media became primarily commodities, that really teed it up and made it ready-made assets for oligarchs to just start buying up all these various media properties into massive conglomerates and large monopolistic corporations. That’s pretty much where we are today. But again, I think we need to understand those initial capitalistic logics that took over our media to really understand how we got to this point today.

Scott Ferguson

Something that’s in the news as of this week. This interview won’t come out for a couple of weeks. But in the news this week is that California is leading a lawsuit with several dozen other states or so to block this Paramount deal that seems ill advised and scary for countless reasons. But I think through your analysis and your stressing that at the bottom of this is capitalist capture, it’s privatization of public infrastructures, public possibilities, I think this case brings your analysis out more because, at least as I initially read the terms of the lawsuit, they’re just a kind of anti-monopoly, a kind of antitrust suit where the claim is being made that this is bad because it’s going to reduce competition. Right. And so, great. I mean, I don’t want this deal to go through and I hope they win. But it seems like the terms of the lawsuit, at least from what I’ve read, are all just taking for granted that privatization feature that has become so naturalized.

Victor Pickard

That’s right. I think you’re absolutely right. And I agree with you, Scott. Both things are true once, which is, for this merger to go through, it would be bad. It would make bad things even worse. But at the same time, simply stopping this merger and the rationale that’s being used to stop the merger, at least potentially stopping the merger – it’s an ongoing battle – it’s really indicative of this core misdiagnosis of our media crisis, which is, they aren’t just monopoly problems that we are grappling with. They are capitalism problems at root. And so to stop this merger and even to try to break up some of these conglomerates, which to be clear, I think we should do, I think that would be a step in the right direction to really try to break them down  to paraphrase a terrible thing that Grover Norquist once said, break it down to the size of being able to drown it in a bathtub.

He, of course, is talking about government. You might think that way about these media monopolies, right? At least cut down on their political and economic power, which is a threat to democratic society. Make no mistake about it. However, having smaller capitalist media organizations won’t solve many of our problems, won’t solve the news deserts problem, won’t solve what Zuboff has talked about in terms of surveillance capitalism.

It’s still going to be capitalism that we’re dealing with. So we really do need to try to create a non capitalistic media system. Stopping a merger or two or even trust busting some of these big combines will not bring us to that solution. So I think we need to be clear about that.

Scott Ferguson

I want to compliment you and suggest to one of the points of convergence between our project in your project, which is, yes, we have a critique of the privatization of public goods, and for us, that includes all kinds of forms of mediation and for us in particular, money as a form of mediation, which is a public good that has been, arguably even more so than journalism and broadcast media and print media, has been privatized in our country.

But what I love hearing from you, and whenever I talk to you, whenever I engage with your work, is that you don’t use your critique of these capitalist structures as the opportunity to just kind of shrug and say, “well, we live in a capitalist society, and unless there’s a revolution tomorrow, it’s just going to be capitalism and those are the laws of capitalism.” I think we share this commitment that, no, it’s being constructed and reconstructed every day, and we always have to be making choices about how the public is empowering people and empowering the private sector, let’s say, over the public sector. So I think we really share that commitment that it is always up for grabs. There are no laws of capitalism that tell us that this is just going to go on for infinity.

Victor Pickard

Yeah, I, of course, couldn’t agree more with what you’re saying. I guess, at heart, I’m a Gramscian when it comes to thinking through these things and hegemonic power relationships always need to be recreated day in and day out. There is an inherent kind of open-endedness to all this.

As long as we say there is no alternative, the so-called “TINA” [“there is no alternative”] premise, then we won’t even be able to imagine alternatives. It’s always going to be a challenge to be realistic about what we can do in the immediate future. A great example would be trying to stop these mergers and trying to hopefully even break down some of these media conglomerates, but we must have a bolder, more systemic vision for what needs to happen on our political horizons that we’re working towards for the long term.

But we have to do our best to try to articulate what this different kind of system could and should look like. There’s different ways of phrasing this. A wonky phrase is “non-reformist reforms” could be one approach, one framework that we’re using where we’re doing what we can given the immediate terrain of struggle, but always with an eye towards the long term to trying to create greater possibilities for transformation down the road, and we have to try to keep these things in mind all at once.

It’s never easy, but we must try.

Scott Ferguson

Maybe before we get into some of your constructive ideas, I’d like us, in part for analysis and catching everybody up to speed, but also kind of for the archive, we think of our show as not just being topical, we’re building an archive. So I wonder if we could just spend a few minutes talking about what this Trump 2.0 is doing to the media system and perhaps with some focus on Brendan Carr and what he’s been up to.

I mean, I think a lot of people are aware of the harassment of late night and daytime TV.The takeover of CBS, the installing of Bari Weiss. There’s so many different aspects of this, but what’s your analysis of how this is playing out?

Victor Pickard

That’s a great question. A big chunk of the current book project that I’m working on right now is trying to make sense of all this. I constantly have to go into these chapters and update the latest thing that the Trump administration is doing.

Essentially they’re trying to weaponize every instrument at their disposal. So that includes everything from frivolous lawsuits to relying on an apparatchik like Brendan Car at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to carry out Trump’s agenda and serve as his attack dog, and basically do everything they can in their power to ensure that our entire media system looks and sounds like Fox News and brooks no dissent.

They’re trying to undercut any capacity for dissenting views for independent journalism. This takes the form in so many different ways. In addition to the things that I just mentioned, it takes a form of trying to facilitate these media mergers that we’ve been talking about with the Ellison’s, these friendly oligarchs that the Trump administration can lean on.

Really, they’ve taken a page out of the Viktor Orbán  playbook for controlling the media, which, again, goes back to some of the things we were just talking about about oligarchic media capture. An authoritarian regime like Viktor Orbán and like Trump can quickly realize that they don’t have to take over newsrooms by gunpoint. Instead, they can rely on friendly, aligned oligarchs.

They can change media policy to, again, undercut any kind of potential for independent journalism. They defund public media in various ways. They capture public media. We’re just seeing all these things happening at once. It’s quite overwhelming to try to even make sense of all of it, and also just constantly verbally attacking journalists, which has an indirect effect of really chilling news media discourse.

Journalists quickly internalize what they’re allowed to cover or what’s going to cause problems, what’s going to be inherently controversial. So take all these pieces together, and we are basically left with a very compliant media system, much worse than Trump 1.0. We’re seeing the media falling in line underneath these official Trump narratives and talking points being amplified.

Of course, during all this, a very strong right wing media sphere is gaining more and more traction all the time with the Ellisons taking over CBS News, for example, and now potentially CNN as well, even owning a chunk of TikTok. I mean, you have Musk taking over what used to be known as Twitter. So we’re seeing so much of our infrastructure become captured in this way so it’s constantly amplifying and just flooding the zone with Trump approved narratives. It has an effect on our politics and on any hope for any semblance of democratic society.

Billy Saas

So to find our way to some hope, where do we look? You mentioned that the United States started off on the wrong foot or on the capitalistic foot, and we stayed on that path and that has shaped everything that we are seeing and experiencing today.

We can’t go back in time, but can we look at present at those other countries and societies that did things differently as models today? Is that enough? Is there sort of fallacy of composition as the US becomes so hegemonic that there’s no model that we could look to that would scale? Where do we start looking and where have you found some promise when it comes to working our way out of this?

I mean, of course, you’ve got, “stopping the mergers.” You’ve mentioned a couple of options, but what else can we be looking toward?

Victor Pickard

Sure. It’s always an important question to ask. I think it kind of presupposes what we’ve been discussing all along, which is that there’s nothing inevitable or natural about our current media system. It was socially constructed, was based on political decisions and policy decisions that can be unmade or made differently. That always needs to be our analytical starting point.

Beyond that we need to also look internationally, not just historically, but internationally, to look at historical contingency, but then look at these other practices, perhaps best practices, how things could be done differently. Another important starting point is to look at public media systems around the world. I don’t think there’s an ideal model out there that I would say, “we must do that,” but I think at the very least, we begin by looking at how the strongest democratic societies – I mentioned this in passing earlier – empirically, we can show the strongest democratic countries on the planet also have the most robust public broadcasting systems. Now, I don’t think that we should take from that the assumption that we need to simply throw more money at NPR or PBS. But I do think a starting point would be to try to bring the funding of our public media up in line with global norms. If we were each spending $100 per capita per year towards our public broadcasting system, we would have an amazing public media system.

But beyond that, any kind of romanticism I may have harbored towards the BBC has been beaten out of me by my British friends. So I don’t want to make that mistake of saying that that’s some kind of ideal model. When I hear about their problems, I kind of wish we had those problems here in the US.

But nonetheless, I think, at the very least, if we were to begin with the kind of funding level that the BBC has and then radically democratize to make sure that the public media system that we have to rebuild here. This really is another key point too – there is a silver lining. This starts getting more into the kind of hopefulness. The silver lining to the destruction that Trump has brought upon so many of our core systems and infrastructures really gives us this rare historical opportunity to rebuild things from the ground up and to remind ourselves that what we had before was not necessarily awesome. It was always already, inherently, structurally flawed, especially our media system. To be able to reset and rebuild, reconstruct, reimagine is really an incredible opportunity. It’s something that we’ll be able to start working on hopefully in just a couple of years. 

Scott Ferguson

That’s a word I keep seeing more and more and it’s very exciting. The word is reconstruction. It’s got the resonance with post-Civil War with what the Radical Republicans were up to and that feels very exciting. That’s across the board. That’s not just about the media in a narrow sense, that’s about all of our institutions. There’s a sense that so many of our institutions were inadequate and that’s in part what got us into this mess in the first place.

Victor Pickard

That’s absolutely right. We can imagine something better, you know, building back better, as it were. Something that, of course, I think we could do much better than the Biden administration was able to do. But I do think that begins with imagining a public alternative to our failing commercial media system. It really should be based on these principles of not just deprivatization, decommodification, but really radical democratization.

Why I think of it as radical is that I think it has to be based on radical participatory democracy that really begins at the local level and that, of course, is where our media crisis is most acute: around the utter collapse of local journalism and by extension also the collapse of emergency communications, to give one example. We can unfortunately assume that that’s only going to become more of a problem in the years ahead with the growing, ever worsening climate crisis. So we really need to have this infrastructure in place and it can’t be a commercial infrastructure. These are not things that a commercial media system can do or will ever do.

To begin on that basis, if we’re really going to confront the news deserts problem, if we’re really going to maintain this normative benchmark that all members of society should have access to a baseline level of news and information, then that really has to be a public media system. I think it’s something that we’ll have to really work on and hash out at the local level.

I think it should be federally guaranteed, but locally owned and controlled, locally governed. There are ways we can do this. We can devolve control down from the federal to state and local levels or other models we can look to. On one level, some of this seems utopian by necessity and I think in a practical sense, we need to be utopian right now, but at the same time, I think there are concrete examples of this happening internationally and in our own history and so I really think we can broaden our political imaginary about what’s possible.

Scott Ferguson

Some of the concrete ideas that you’ve discussed is using and amplifying and transforming extant public infrastructures, like local libraries, for example. I remember from your 2020 book, talking about the ways that actually this public media movement uses university radio stations as a kind of testing ground. 

So public universities and public libraries being extant, public infrastructures that we could be building out in new ways.

Victor Pickard

Absolutely. I think we have these already existing public infrastructures that we can leverage. I would also include post offices. There are tens of thousands of post offices across the country in far flung locations, and that is critical public infrastructure. It also would be poetic if we were to deploy our postal system towards disseminating news and information, which really was its original purpose in this country. It was primarily a newspaper delivery infrastructure, where up to 95% of the weight of the postal system into the 1800s was made up of newspapers.

So I think just using those spaces as a place where we can house local, community journalists. In fact, speaking of real world examples, in the middle of the cornfields in Urbana, Illinois, media activists more than 20 years ago raised funds and bought the downtown post office. To this day, it serves as this multimedia hub for community news media production.

I think that’s a great proof of concept of something that we could replicate across the country. Also, Public Access Media Centers like the PEG (Public, Educational, and Governmental) stations). There’s a fantastic one in Philadelphia here called Philly Cam that’s also multimedia. It does video, audio, and various kinds of media production and it involves members of the community.

These are things that we can point out and say this isn’t just pie in the sky dreaming. These kinds of models already exist. We need to find ways to replicate them and to scale them and I think that’s possible.

Scott Ferguson

What do you think about the scale of politics and advocacy now? I think for us, in our experience, in our theoretical framework, there’s no proper scale. All scales matter and you take up whatever scale of politicizing that seems to be open that you’re aware of. If that means doing something locally and then trying to scale it up, fine.

If that means you’ve got a mass movement that’s pressuring Congress members, then you do that. I mean, ideally, you do all of it at the same time and you probably share this approach. But I’m curious if you have a sense when it comes to the politics of media broadcast print journalism, and what’s worked, what hasn’t worked. Are there any lessons here in terms of just the scale of politicizing this?

Victor Pickard

Right now, just out of sheer necessity, we have to focus on the state and local levels. In fact, and again, this is keeping with our theme of trying to be a little more hopeful as we’re looking across this blasted landscape, we’re seeing so many things here. I’m thinking of like Mamdani’s  New York, it’s sort of like a return to the sewer socialists of old.

But I do think at the municipal level, there’s some real opportunity at the state level. We’re already seeing a number of blue or purplish states, because I’m thinking of including Pennsylvania in this category, but at the state level, we’re seeing a number of public investment schemes towards subsidizing local journalism. So the exemplar has always been sort of the gold standard has been the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, where they’ve been allocating millions of dollars towards local journalistic initiatives and have been quite successful.

California just passed a recent civic media bill that’s going to put at least potentially tens of millions of dollars towards the local journalism we’re seeing here in Pennsylvania. Chris Rabb, who recently won a primary, is most likely going to the US Congress – he was my state representative at the state legislature – has been pushing a bill modeled after the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium. So there are all these signs of hope at the state level where we’re moving in this direction, where we recognize that there is no commercial future for the local journalism that we need. We’re going to need public investments. We’re going to need to shift towards this predominantly public media model, especially at the local level.

When I’m thinking of scale, I don’t necessarily mean scaling it up to the federal level, although I do think at a certain point we are going to have to have these policy interventions at the federal level, but it’s also just about replication and just learning what is something that could work in communities across the country.

I’ve been talking more and more, probably six years ago with you guys about this idea of a public media center based in every community across the country that, again, is federally guaranteed but locally owned and controlled. So I think we need to have those dreams on our horizon and just work towards it however we can.

Billy Saas

Talking about federal guarantees and evolving control over these local, state and municipal media systems, you can imagine, and we frequently do, that people are going to ask, “how are you going to pay for that?” in this context. That’s where we come in and with respect to the current media landscape and the death of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, you noted that a pretty fatal flaw of the Public Banking Act was to bring the issue up for a vote every year or two in terms of the funding.

That’s exactly what happened this time. They voted for zero funding and that was it. That makes it contentious and up for grabs more often than we would like it to be. That’s certainly not a guarantee, right? If you look at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as maybe a model today, they received their funding directly from the Federal Reserve on a guaranteed basis and the near death of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is much easier avoided because it was that guaranteed direct payment from the Federal Reserve rather than routing through Congress. I don’t imagine, as we’re thinking in utopian terms, and we’re thinking small and local, that we have much faith or belief that the Fed can be operationalized in that way soon. But there are maybe other ways that we could fund these local initiatives.

I wonder if that has come up in your recent thinking at all, like, okay, so we get these motivated local journalists together with the spirit of revivifying local public institutions, how do we pay for their lunches, right? Or how do we keep the lights on?

Victor Pickard

Yeah. Always such a wickedly daunting question, “How do you pay for it?” But I really try to make sure that’s a conversation starter, not a conversation stopper. I think we have to begin with the core assumption that we need insulated, permanent and adequate funding for the media that we need, that democracy requires. There are at least a couple of different models. I mean, ideally, yes, that could come directly out of the Treasury.

There could instead be an autonomous endowed fund to support the media that we need. The original blueprint for our public broadcasting system in the United States was modeled a little bit like the BBC. The BBC has historically had a license. Everyone pays this license fee so it has this guaranteed revenue stream. The initial blueprint for our public broadcasting system was that there would be an excise tax of up to 5% on television sets, and this was in the original Carnegie plan, which almost verbatim became the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, except that key detail didn’t make it into the final cut.

So we always left it in this very precarious situation. I’ve very loosely calculated that we need a budget of about $30 billion a year to support a national public media system. That’s really not, if you look at what we’re spending now on our war on Iran or like whatever tax cuts that were in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.

This is pocket change, right? This is not that much. As much as I do think we need to talk about that, I also try not to get too caught up in the weeds about it, because that too often derails the conversation. I think what’s as important, if not more important, is to also talk about how the money is allocated and how those decisions are made.

I’ve looked at things like community action programs during the LBJ administration’s anti-poverty initiatives. It was based on this assumption that the communities themselves who were purportedly being helped with these funds, had to have a say, had to have representation in deciding how that money is going to be spent. I think that also needs to be a core feature of how this new kind of public media system should be designed, that local communities really help determine how this money is being allocated.

Scott Ferguson

This is maybe just a different way of getting at the reconstruction question, but I think that at least in certain social circles. I think of Cory Doctorow’s now often-used term enshittification. I think the fact that that term circulates so widely is an index of its usefulness in calling out the reality of what’s going on.

I think that there is a strong sense, at least in parts of public discourse, that our media system sucks. One question would be, what’s the difference between this vast wasteland and the vast wasteland of 1950s commercial television? A part of me wants to go back to that vast wasteland. It seemed less of a vast wasteland by comparison.

Victor Pickard

Less enshittified.

Scott Ferguson

Although, you know, plenty racist and patriarchal and sexist. I guess I wonder, it seems like there’s an opportunity just in terms of public opinion about our media. It just seems like such a shit show, right? The way that television has exploded into all these streaming services that you have to buy à la carte that nobody can afford. You’re constantly buying one and then subscribing and then stopping. The whole thing seems like such a big mess. Let me put it another way. Even if we’re going to accept the capitalist logic by capitalist logic standards, I don’t think that you can put out a bunch of surveys today and have the so-called customers, instead of citizens, say that they are happy, or say that they’re enjoying themselves.

Maybe there are swaths of the public that really like what’s going on. But it seems to me that there’s a lot of unhappiness.

Victor Pickard

I couldn’t agree more. I agree also that this is an opportunity, or at least it should give us some leverage over steering what’s already low opinion towards our media, towards something more constructive. But that is where it often gets lost. Even this notion of enshittification, although Doctorow is clear, though I don’t think clear enough, but he does say in his writings that this is stemming from these hyper capitalistic logics. Enshittification is what you get, this is what capitalism does to our media.

Scott Ferguson

Right, this is not a natural evolutionary tendency of technology or something like that.

Victor Pickard

Exactly, but too often the critique sort of stops with, “oh, it just sucks,” and not why does it suck? That’s where we all have work to do, to try to connect these dots to show people,” oh, it sucks because they don’t care whether you enjoy it or not. They’re just trying to extract as much value in and generate as much profit from this as possible.”

So once you start understanding that that is where this hyper capitalistic logic takes us, then we begin to realize, “oh, we have to build something new that’s not so dependent, that’s not so pegged so closely to these capitalistic market relationships.” It’s this very inchoate sense of, our media system sucks, we want something better, but to understand how we get there, to create something better, we really have to understand the structural roots of these problems, right? This is what capitalism does to our media. That’s what I’m trying to walk through in my own work. But going back to the original idea, though, I do think it’s another silver lining with Trump 2.0 that people are carrying and thinking and talking more about media ownership, for example, than they normally ever would.

And so that, again, is a fleeting window of opportunity that we really should try to exploit.

Scott Ferguson

This is part of the mystery of how we got Trump. How did the latter day Trump come to be? How did he become president? There’s all kinds of explanations for this, like these ridiculous claims coming out of the last election, not the left, but the Democrats need their own Joe Rogan.

A bunch of big donor Democrats are going to do the great search for our own Joe Rogan, as if Joe Rogan is single handedly responsible for putting Trump back in into the White House. I guess I tend to think more in terms of the long game. I guess it seems to me that the neoliberal legislation that was ushered in under the Clinton administration, not that it single handedly did anything because nothing is single handed, everything is always up for grabs. But it seems to me that in privatizing the internet, in its commercial construction in the way that they did, they essentially took what was mostly on AM radio and Fox News and just opened the door for that sensibility to take over. I think about the way that the centrist, neoliberal Democrats who helped engineer that system just screwed themselves, and screwed their party.

I don’t know if that makes any sense. I don’t know if this is even worth keeping in, but I’m just curious if you have any thoughts about that.

Victor Pickard

Yeah, I do. I have a lot of thoughts on all that and I agree with the thrust of that line of reasoning, which is certainly under what we’ve come to refer to as this kind of neoliberal paradigm. We basically privatize public goods and we undercut capacity for healthy public discourse about anything by ensuring that there’s little journalism, because journalism typically costs money to produce. Good journalism costs money to produce and it also is often bad for business because it often would take an adversarial position, even by simply reporting on things factually, often does not redound to the business interests. For these reasons and more, we have created such a public sphere, but really we’ve ensured that there is very little public sphere beyond just like shouting and commentary and shouting heads on ubiquitous screens, but not really creating the capacity to develop political consciousness and a healthy political consciousness outside of kind of proto fascistic formations.

I’m also being very vague here, but basically, I’m agreeing with the premise that systemically, at a structural level, we basically undercut the preconditions, the necessary preconditions for a healthy democratic society. We’ve undercut any kind of viable communication infrastructure and the internet is another one of these examples of privatizing what inherently began as a public resource.

The internet was a testament to socialistic fostering of a media system. It was born out of pub massive public subsidies and then was essentially handed over to a handful of corporations and continued to develop along those trajectories so that when social media firms took root, it was assumed that they were beyond reach of public policy, they could not be subjected to democratic decision making.

This has all helped. I would always be careful in the kind of causal relationships that I draw. But at the very least, they are contributing factors to the rise of Trump and where we are today.

Scott Ferguson

Sure. And then, of course, there’s Section 230 and the fact that these social media companies are not liable for what is said on their websites. Yeah.

Victor Pickard

Yeah. I mean, there are so many of these kinds of policy decisions or indecisions. Sometimes the shorthand is this kind of Silicon Valley, techno libertarian ethos, but it was just always assumed from the get-go that we couldn’t regulate them, that they were just beyond reach, that somehow these new technologies were magical in a particular way, that we just could not try to wield any sort of public policy over them.

Now we’re reaping the rewards of those earlier mistakes.

Scott Ferguson

Right. And that’s what’s happening with the generative AI push now. 

Victor Pickard

We’ve seen this movie before. The same discourses are being deployed. It’s treated as something like fait accompli. It’s already beyond our control. This is where things are headed and we need to just adapt to these new technologies instead of trying to steer them in democratic ways and making sure that they’re serving our social needs, and not simply the profit imperatives of a handful of tech oligarchs.

Scott Ferguson

Is there anything in your tracking of the contemporary situation beyond the basic point that all of this oligarchic and authoritarian capture is predicated on a deep privatization that is unjust and ill conceived? Is there anything else that’s going on in the contemporary media scape that you wish people were attending to more? Because I think in a sense, these are front page headlines, like California going after the Ellison’s for the Paramount deal.

Is there anything else that you can attune us to that maybe the public isn’t thinking about or that isn’t being framed for everybody in a flashing headline.

Victor Pickard

I would keep coming back to the same drum I’ve been beating on forever, which is the collapse of local journalism and how that is treated as something that’s utterly beyond our control. It’s like a natural disaster. It might be unfortunate, in fact, many people think it’s unfortunate to the extent that they even know about it even now.

I mean, in our little circles, it probably seems like such old news and it’s so banal to even bring it up again, but the fact is, survey data show consistently that the vast majority of Americans have no idea that there’s any kind of journalism crisis. They think they have access to more news and information than they’ve ever had before.

That is such a problem. The fact that people don’t even know that the crisis is happening and then the extent that they are aware of it, again, it’s thought of as just something completely beyond the reach of public policy, it’s beyond our control, it’s an act of God and we really need to start seeing this as a political decision if we’re allowing 81% of our local journalists to lose their jobs. It’s just mind blowing. There was that weekly newspaper in Kansas a couple of years ago where local authorities marched in and shut it down because it had ran some article that offended some local elite and that was treated as a national scandal that people would come in and shut down a local newsroom.

But when the market is doing that day in and day out, there’s this kind of sociology of resignation where it’s like, “that’s unfortunate, but, you know, the market has spoken and there’s just nothing we can do about it.” That’s a very long winded answer to your excellent question, which is, that’s an example of something that should be headlines every day about what’s happening to our local journalism.

In so many ways that’s much more fundamental than what the media oligarchs are doing right now  and if a couple corporations merge, these are bad things, but this is nothing compared to the utter collapse of our local journalism.

Billy Saas

Well, thank you so much for that reminder and for joining us again on Money on the Left six years later, let’s not let another six years pass without another conversation. This has been lovely. Victor Pickard, thank you so much for joining us again.

Victor Pickard

Thank you both for having me. It’s always great to talk to you. Let’s definitely make sure we don’t wait another six years. Hopefully the next time we talk, we’ll have even more hopeful things. Lots of things will have changed by then. We will have solved all these problems and we can just talk about how great it is.

* 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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Prototyping Democratic Public Finance With the Seattle Loop

By Will Beaman

Seattle is once again being told that a projected budget deficit requires difficult choices about which public commitments the city can continue to honor. Councilmember Robert Kettle recently used the city’s projected $175 million shortfall to call for a budget “realignment” around essential needs, explicitly opening the door to withdrawing from public work judged to benefit only particular groups. Money on the Left’s Seattle Loop model offers a way to enlarge the city’s financial capacity while reorganizing the relationships among public commitments, institutions, and constituencies.

The Seattle Loop is a proposal to establish a municipal bank that can purchase Seattle’s bonds. When the city pays interest on those bonds, the money flows back from the bank into the city’s own general fund, where it can support further lending and public investment. This creates a continuing circuit between the city’s commitments and the financial capacity available to fulfill them. Rather than allowing municipal interest payments to leave the public realm as income for private creditors, the Loop keeps that income circulating through Seattle’s own institutions.

The Loop also offers a prototype for a different way of governing. Progressive programs are usually introduced into a fiscal system that treats the public budget as a fixed quantity to be divided. Every commitment consequently appears to reduce the amount available for another commitment. Political constituencies enter the budget process as competing claims on scarce money, even when meeting their needs would strengthen the same social fabric.

This structure shapes how people understand one another. A new public commitment comes to appear as a cost imposed on everyone whose own needs remain unmet. The budget thus translates social interdependence into fiscal competition. People who depend on different institutions are encouraged to ask whose program must shrink and whose expectations must be deferred.

Even progressive governments can enlarge the funds available for public provision and distribute them more fairly while remaining caught in this antagonistic structure. So long as public needs must be assembled into a finite package, the pressure to rank them does not disappear. It shifts toward defining which commitments are sufficiently basic, universal, or broadly beneficial to deserve inclusion. Those categories can always be narrowed, and people whose needs are less easily represented as common can be cut away from the public they are supposed to share. Coalition then becomes an exercise in negotiating which differences the budget will recognize and which forms of life must be excluded or deferred.

Once we question the background assumption that money is inherently scarce, however, the social fabric comes into view as an additive ecology. A well-supported institution expands the capacities of the people and institutions around it. Its workers receive income and the communities it serves gain resources to participate in public life. These effects cascade throughout society, far beyond the line item where the initial spending appears.

Conventional public budgeting has difficulty representing this additive quality. It records the financial commitment at the point where money is spent, while the real capacities provisioned through that commitment are represented only where they generate profits. What appears in the budget as a collection of separate costs functions socially as a mutually reinforcing ecology.

The Seattle Loop gives this ecology a more honest financial expression. The city’s commitments become part of the asset base of a public bank, while the bank’s activity generates income and financial capacity that can support further commitments. Budget priorities enter a circuit in which spending helps sustain the institutions that make additional spending possible.

All of this works because money itself is an expandable accounting instrument, even when the productive capacities it mobilizes cannot be expanded all at once. Those capacities can impose real limits on what a city can accomplish at any given moment. The Loop makes those limits questions of coordination and sequencing rather than reasons to treat every new commitment as a subtraction from a fixed fund. It asks what Seattle can produce now, where additional capacity must be developed, and how public investment can expand what becomes possible over time.

This changes the meaning of fiscal responsibility. Responsibility extends beyond keeping each commitment within its assigned budgetary container to designing relationships through which public institutions can support one another over time. The city can govern its financial system as part of the social ecology it is responsible for sustaining.

For progressives, this points toward an additive conception of coalition. Constituencies do not enter public life solely as claimants seeking their share of a common fund. Their flourishing can expand the capacities on which others depend. Public finance can organize these connections, making solidarity into a durable institutional relationship rather than an appeal for groups to accept sacrifices on one another’s behalf.

The Seattle Loop is a local proposal, but its political implications extend beyond Seattle. It suggests that progressive governance can build institutions through which public commitments accumulate, reinforce one another, and generate new possibilities for collective action. A budget that forces constituencies to experience one another as costs will continually weaken the public it is supposed to serve. An additive financial architecture can help our democracy become more stable and resilient through the very act of providing for itself.

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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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