UK Universities in Crisis? Time to Transform Higher Ed Finance

by Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson

Universities in the UK are in crisis. Job cuts in the sector are reaching ‘cataclysmic’ levels, with an estimated 10,000 already lost and many more at risk. Just days before Christmas, Coventry University confirmed shocking plans to make nearly 100 redundancies while transferring remaining staff to a subsidiary company on poorer terms and conditions. Such cuts harm the faculty and staff leaving the higher-education system as well as the diminished departments and institutions that remain. Downsizing higher education in the name of corporate efficiency squanders the collective expertise and experience in which immense public resources have been invested. This manufactured crisis, however, is far from inevitable. The time has come to revitalise higher education funding in the UK by extending what Cornell legal scholars Robert Hockett and Saule Omarova call ‘the finance franchise’ to universities.

Mischaracterised by university leaders as financial ‘saving’, austerity is in truth vandalism. It ravages decades of training, accrued and accredited knowledge, and publicly funded research. It abandons generations of students as the campuses and scholarly communities we invite them to join become, in multiple senses, impoverished. The fact that the asphyxiation of British higher education does not instantly count as a national scandal underlines the extent to which the austerity mindset continues to constrain our political imagination: even when the collapse of higher education is perceived as a problem, policymakers, academics, and the communities they serve are left with little recourse. One can only despair at the lack of viable alternatives. 

The immediate cause of the present catastrophe is a broken funding model. This model is based principally on tuition fees, financed by publicly provisioned student loans. Such fees rank among the highest in the world. The system is fundamentally unjust because it individualises the responsibility to fund higher education rather than treating it as a collective treasure. It also places the stability and supposed viability of courses of study, departments, institutions, and entire academic disciplines at the whim of a government-manufactured market. The Labour Party previously committed to eliminating tuition fees for universities. Keir Starmer’s Labour, however, dropped its pledge to scrap fees in England before the 2024 general election and, since entering government, has opted to increase fees for the first time since 2017. 

While student-based financing of higher education is the proximate cause of the present predicament, the roots of the crisis penetrate deep into the collective psyche. At its core, the current disaster stems from a deceptive Thatcherite conceit: ‘There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money.’ Such thinking is fantastical. It is also false. The private money paradigm essentially wishes away the British pound’s institutional foundations in the public sphere–namely, in Parliament, the Bank of England, and the Royal Mint. Instead, it imagines that the pound rises up from private individuals, as in the misleading myth that money originates in barter between otherwise unrelated agents. Thus beneath this twisted logic lies another Thatcherite pretense: There is no such thing as society; there are only individuals and their families. 

Those who oppose the current system of fees and loans regularly argue that the university system is a public good. We agree wholeheartedly. Yet in adopting the private money paradigm, the very same defenders of public education presuppose that the only alternative to the existing university loans system is one in which higher education is funded by the taxpayer. The trope of taxpayer money is the lynchpin in Thatcher’s private money paradigm. It upholds the backwards idea not only that fiscal outlays merely recycle private pounds, but also that the public good is somehow a burdensome drain on scarce public resources. The result pits communities against one another in a struggle over limited finances and frequently does so along conspicuously classed, gendered, and racialised lines. 

The reality–call it the public money paradigm–is just the reverse. Society exists. Contra libertine reveries, community is in fact inescapable. Money is a public good. The monetary system is a function of government, which can grant money-creation privileges to private banks and financial institutions. State capacity to finance public institutions is inexhaustible. In the words of John Maynard Keynes, ‘Anything we can actually do, we can afford.’ Taxation controls the distribution of wealth. At bottom, however, state spending never rests on private profit. This means that an impoverished public good such as the present higher-education system reflects an impoverished public imagination. Far from necessary medicine for economic ills, austerity answers injury with violence, attacking our capacity to provision and to hope. 

Now is the moment to think boldly and creatively about the financing of British universities. If higher education genuinely matters, then the state possesses all the monetary power needed to support it. The question is not if, but how. 

Practically speaking, Britain has any number of options at its disposal. The most conventional approach is, of course, for Parliament to provide funds by way of legislative appropriation. In addition to stemming recent and proposed cuts, such legislation would expand higher-ed provisioning where it is needed. Labour could also renew its pledge to eliminate tuition fees and shift the burden of payment from private to public. 

A second, more daring option is a public franchise model, elsewhere dubbed the uni currency project. According to this model, Parliament extends public money creation powers—Hockett and Omarova’s ‘finance franchise’—directly to the British university system. In this scenario, British universities would function much like banks, creating credit as needed in response to shifting needs and demands. As with private banks, university liquidity would be backstopped by the Bank of England, only in this case, universities would not generate money as private loans in order to turn a profit. Instead, universities would structure uni credit in the form of public grants payable to academic facilities and units charged with fulfilling specific academic missions and projects. 

In addition to eliminating tuition fees and repudiating austerity, a uni public franchise model for higher ed would go a long way to democratise university finance. First, putting budget decisions in the hands of universities stands to make such institutions more responsive to local circumstances. Second, the university finance franchise occasions opportunities to involve faculty, staff, students, and community stakeholders in establishing budgeting priorities. Third, liberating finance from hard monetary constraints promotes free thinking and debate across universities, in part, by widening job security and benefits to include all workers on public campuses and ending casualisation once and for all. The aim of the public franchise model is not to license willy-nilly cronyism or court moral hazard. It is to develop a new system of democratic accountability designed to cultivate talent, innovation, and problem-solving for the public good. 

A key challenge for transforming higher-ed finance is revising how we account for the university in crisis. When a student takes up study at a university, our current system accounts for their participation as if it were a cost or a liability rather than a benefit or an asset. We ask who should bear this cost rather than reckoning with the collective social benefits of education. We decide that the individual who studies must pay, in the future, via an interest-bearing loan. Likewise, university leadership counts the academic experts they employ as burdensome costs that, when faced with budgetary obstacles, must be efficiently trimmed. Rather than genuinely ameliorate extant problems, this type of accounting merely facilitates the managed decline of the education sector. 

The public-money paradigm, by contrast, enables us to account for the present situation differently. Indeed, we can tell another story, if we wish. Even now, undergraduate courses are provisioned and financed by a government-owned public body, which transfers funds directly to universities when students join their academic communities. This enables a process that educators and educatees the world over recognise as enriching. As all involved in higher education well know, students gain far more than mere subject knowledge or transferrable skills. Moreover, these gains do not end on graduation day. According to Judith Butler, ‘[A]s we leave the university,’ we take our ‘critical practices with us onto the street, into those spaces of work and love, and into our public lives.’ A university, in other words, does not exclusively benefit students. It is a locus of civic uplift and transformation. That we ever came to understand the gifts of higher education as unaffordable liabilities is absurd. 

At this hour of profound crisis, no options should be off the table, including the extension of the finance franchise to universities. In view of the cataclysmic failures of the present system and the dearth of alternative proposals, it is time to unleash the public credit that has always been at the heart of higher education and to recognise its potential to arrest the current crisis and to advance the public purpose. 

Unless we change course, British universities will no longer function as the community anchors they are today, nor will they continue to foster the attitudes of open-ended inquiry for which they are rightly championed or pioneer the solutions we desperately need to local, national, and global challenges. 

Unless we are open to new approaches to university finance, we will remain trapped by the austere logics that are destroying our cherished institutions. 

Unless we are willing to act imaginatively and fearlessly to save our universities now, we will soon find that there is nothing left to save.

* Every UK news outlet to which the authors sent this essay declined to publish it.

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Money & the Limits of Sovereignty

by Scott Ferguson

Money on the Left is proud to republish this talk by Scott Ferguson. It was initially presented at the request of Real Progressives on September 4, 2021. We reproduce the presentation here as a corrective to recent debates in and about Modern Monetary Theory, which continue to overlook Money on the Left’s contributions and insights.

As many of you are no doubt aware, my colleagues and I at the Money on the Left (MotL) Editorial Collective have offered some challenges to the notion of sovereignty within MMT scholarship over the last few years. I am grateful for this opportunity to explain and hopefully clarify (a) what we are actually claiming about money and sovereignty; (b) what we are certainly not saying; and (c) why all of this matters, in our view.  

MMT is, as we know, a state-based theory of endogenous credit money creation. This means that, for MMT, money arises from and remains primarily secured by centralized governments and that credit is created as needed as a function of monetary design.

The original MMT literature draws upon the German chartalist scholar Friedrich Knapp, who argued that money is first and foremost a token of the state. 

Where things get tricky, for myself and others in the MotL Collective, is that the modern nation-state has been overwhelmingly defined by the concept of sovereignty.  

Sovereignty, to begin with a preliminary definition, typically denotes a type of power characterized as the highest independent authority within a given territory. 

The most widely used notion of sovereignty is sometimes qualified as “political sovereignty,” referring to an entire political entity in all of its various functions, domains, and concerns.  

From this wider category, MMTers such as L. Randall Wray and Fadhel Kaboub have derived a theory of “monetary sovereignty.”  

Monetary sovereignty, for MMT, is linked to political sovereignty, but forms a specialized category of its own.  

This monetary type of sovereignty speaks, in a sense, to the economic dimensions of state power.  

One might say that monetary sovereignty, in this conception, is a sub-species of political sovereignty that reciprocally helps to shape the political order.  

Kaboub, in particular, has developed a helpful four-point list of criteria for defining monetary sovereignty. A so-called “full” monetary sovereign should include all four criteria. They are: 

(1) a country must issue its own currency  

(2) a country must levy taxes, fines and fees in its own currency  

(3) a country can only issue debt denominated in its own currency  

(4) a country must avoid currency pegs & engage internationally via floating exchange rates  

On the bases of these four criteria, Kaboub and others set forth an admittedly nuanced MMT approach to monetary sovereignty, one that works not in absolutes, but in degrees. 

Although not always evident in popular MMT discourse, deep down MMT does not actually promulgate a crude model of monetary sovereignty at all. MMT does not, for example, stretch monetary sovereignty between the twin extremes of “having” and “not having.” 

Instead, MMTers situate different monetary regimes with what they deem a “spectrum of monetary sovereignty.”  

According to this spectrum thinking, countries exhibit a wide variety of different monetary powers with respect to one another.  

No country is all-powerful since there are always political and resource constraints that must be confronted and negotiated.  

Conversely, no country can be totally without monetary capacities because any polity can create new credit regimes in order to freshly mobilize people and resources.

As I understand it, this spectrum approach is no mere quantitative checklist, either. 

At least at its best, it tends to be deployed in qualitative and historically contextualized ways such that, for example, one country may share two of the very same criteria with another but also have very different monetary powers at their disposal.  

Importantly, moreover, MMTers clearly discern that none of these features are natural or inevitable. They are politically and legally constructed over time and can always be challenged and redesigned.   

Indeed, I would maintain that these presumptions about contingency and transformability are precisely what MMTers have in mind when discussing monetary sovereignty, even as their language slips occasionally into logics of having and not having as a shorthand. 

Just because a particular country’s currency, for example, is pegged to the dollar today, according to MMTers, does not then condemn them to monetary powerlessness for eternity.  

That is why MMT’s theory of monetary sovereignty matters.  

This, I hope, is an accurate and judicious account of what MMT has meant by the expression “monetary sovereignty.”  

Now as I’ve stated, my colleagues and I at MotL have criticized the term sovereignty, complicating the role it has played both in MMT literature and in popular outreach.  

This has led some in the MMT community to feel confused and others quite resistant, imagining that what we are saying must somehow undercut MMT and its explanatory power.  

Well, I’m here tonight to not only clear up the confusion surrounding our critique of the concept of sovereignty, but also explain why we think our contribution improves rather than detracts from the MMT project.  

Let me commence by stating at the outset that I come in peace. I’m not here to destroy MMT. I’m honestly here to help. 

In this spirit, the first substantive point I want to make is a meta or methodological one.  

The point is this: Words and the concepts they express have complex histories and any account of sovereignty must attend to the history of the term itself.  

Indeed, words with seemingly stable meanings in one era can often mean something very different in another. Sometimes, a word can mean one thing and its very opposite!  

To take such tangled word histories seriously is not to indulge a type of nihilistic relativism in which we toss our hands in the air and declare that nothing means anything at all! To the contrary, it only means we should be aware of the words we use and their complex semantic legacies. 

This is especially true when it comes to the central and very important words we use to make sense of politics and economics.  

What about the word and idea of “sovereignty,” then?  

Turns out, it, too, has a history.   

Modern writers tacitly deny this all of the time. When modern thinkers turn back to ancient Greek, Roman or Christian writers to understand the allegedly antique origins of sovereignty, they retro-actively impose a modern conception of politics onto texts that were in truth never concerned with “sovereignty” as it is understood in the modern world.  

In actuality, the word sovereignty arose in early modern Europe over the long course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in order to articulate a new conception of political rule.  

Prior to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, people in the European and wider Mediterranean world referred to political rule most often as a matter of “imperium.”  

Imperium meant, pretty straightforwardly, “rule,” “authority or “command,” framed as a general condition or question.  

Today, when we hear this Latin term “imperium” we are apt to associate it with the nasty modern notion of “empire.” This implies the political and economic domination of vast lands and peoples, employing violent means toward exploitative ends.  

In its historical context, however, imperium did not actually mean empire or territorial domination in that specific and narrowly modern sense.  

In fact, the word rose to prominence within the Roman Republic well before the Empire.   

Imperium in the Roman Republic denoted broadly who, what, how, when and where authority rules. 

Particularly during the Middle Ages, the elasticity of this term proved handy since the period was very self-consciously defined by a dizzying array of overlapping and interdependent jurisdictions. 

While the Holy Roman Empire and Catholic Church oversaw enormous and interpenetrating realms, myriad kingdoms, manors, and townships within these realms formed a nested latticework of interlocking rights and obligations.  

In this period, it is crucial to stress, political rule was seen as a necessary and inescapable part of humanity’s social interdependence, no matter what form it took.  

Leaders and thinkers, too, expressly situated any particular political regime within a larger inter-reliant world of political, social, legal and religious relations, one that of course exceeded any specific ruler or regime.  

The Middle Ages definitely saw its fair share of wars, feuds, and crusades during which different and opposing communities fought over any number of matters pertaining to political rule and legal jurisdiction.  

However, medieval thought did not articulate any of such conflicts in terms of absolute insides and outsides, selves and others.  

Today, we may certainly level plenty of legitimate criticisms at the period’s hierarchical political economy and anti-democratic order of rewards and succession.  

Yet as any medieval historian will frankly tell you, the modern world’s cartoonish depictions of unquestioned authoritarianism during the Middle Ages simply hold no water. 

The medieval period did, in fact, witness plenty of political contestation, both in word and in deed.  

The period’s leaders and thinkers developed a keen sense for what constituted the legitimacy of rule. 

They appreciated the limits of authority.

Tyranny, too, was a concern, and was variously criticized and resisted.  

In late medieval and early modern Europe, however, various jurists, theologians and philosophers began to invent a new and quite unfamiliar idea of political rule, which broke severely with previous conceptions.  

To get at this historically novel idea, it is instructive to return to and inspect the word “sovereignty” itself.  

This word sovereignty combines the term “reign,” meaning “rule,” with a superlative prefix related to modern prefixes with which we are now familiar like “super” or “hyper,” meaning at once “above” and “beyond.”  

So, in a very literal sense, the word sovereignty is created to imagine a new kind of super or hyper power meant to rule over and above all others.  

With this, those who conceived sovereignty as an idea sought to reconceive and seemingly disentangle the multifarious and overlapping cascade that was Medieval rule.  

Their desire was to imagine and ground a type of authority that would be self-legitimating and stand outside of these medieval entanglements.  

It would do so in a number of interrelated ways. Here, I’m going to try to spell out eight: 

First, the notion of sovereignty tended to fuse political rule with individual will. That will might belong to a particular emperor or king, but it would also be later ascribed to a particular group of people, as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notorious idea of the “general will.”

Second, the concept of sovereignty aligned this notion of willful rule with a single site of power, which would then be associated with a very particular and distinctly bounded sense of territory.

Third, sovereignty as a concept demanded the political power would command exclusive authority over said territory, barring all other political actors.  

Fourth, sovereignty as an idea assumed that the political realm is an artificial construct erected through contract and backed by violence, or at least by the threat of violence.  

Fifth, it presumed that political & legal institutions are not necessary for organizing relations and mediating conflict between interdependent beings and realms, as was believed in the Middle Ages.  

Instead, the logic of sovereignty began with a so-called “state of nature,” wherein apparently disconnected and naturally independent individuals, families, or organizations come together as matter of choice and, ultimately, force.   

Sixth, the notion of sovereignty tended to subordinate every relationship or organization within a supposedly sovereign territory to an expression of the overarching sovereign will.  

Seventh, sovereignty starkly divided inside from outside sovereign borders.  

That is, it held not only that seemingly external concerns or domains were simply not a matter of sovereign responsibility, but also that the people within a sovereign territory were in no way related or beholden to those outside of it.    

Eighth, whether explicitly or implicitly, sovereignty created a political vacuum between territorial regimes. In opposition to the wildly interwoven jurisdictions of the Middle Ages, this raised constant questions and problems about the order of things in the seemingly external spaces between regimes.  

Perhaps the most well-known mature articulation of the early modern logic of sovereignty came from Thomas Hobbes in his well-known book, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. That book was published in 1651 during the uncertain period of the English Civil War. But in many ways, Hobbes represents the first early culmination of a tradition that includes many earlier works such as those written by French jurist Jean Bodin.  

I cannot offer a thorough or in any way satisfying summary of Hobbes’s or Bodin’s arguments here beyond the admittedly hand-wavy sketch I’ve already provided.   

Suffice it to say that throughout the early modern period, this new word and idea of sovereignty would be twisted in various and seemingly conflicting directions.  

Sovereignty, for instance, has equally underwrote absolutist arguments for the divine right of kings or, later, modern fascism, as well as Liberal and leftist ideas about Republicanism or socialism.  

Eventually, as we know, sovereignty would give rise to the idea and institution known as the modern nation-state.  

The modern nation-states presumes an independent organic or ethnically related community–sometimes conceived as a hybrid or melting pot of several communities.  

In any case, no matter what political form said community takes, the nation-state model imagines government as the expression or representative of that organic community’s independent will.  

Equally important, the modern nation-state presumes a particular global organization of politics, one that is comprised of supposedly independent territories.  

Such sovereign territories, goes this logic, relate to one another as external, regionally specific and ethnically bounded populations.  

This order of sovereign nation-states is sometimes referred to as the so-called “Westphalian” system after the famous “Treaty” or “Peace of Westphalia.” Constructed out of what were in fact two important treaties in the mid-17th century, the Peace of Westphalia brokered a new order of security between rival powers, closing a calamitous period of European religious warfare that had by that point killed approximately eight million people. 

It is now a truism that the Peace of Westphalia established the order of sovereign nation-states that gave rise to the modern world. 

For a critique of this just-so story, I recommend a great article from 2011 by Sebastian Schmidt titled, “To Order the Minds of Scholars: The Discourse of the Peace of Westphalia in International Relations Literature.” You can find it in the journal, International Studies Quarterly.  

As Schmidt and other critics have explained, the nation-state as we know it did not arrive overnight after the Peace of Westphalia.  

Nothing even close to its idealized early modern theorization arose as a generalized institutional form until the 19th century.  

Some have even argued that the nation-state as a general form doesn’t fully come into its own until the 20th century when the midcentury era of decolonization saw an explosion of freshly formed nation-states on the model of European sovereignty.  

For my colleagues and I at MotL, the ultimate problem with sovereignty and the modern nation-state system is two-fold.   

Put succinctly, we argue that the logic of sovereignty is not only violent, it is also outright false.    

Sovereignty as a concept is violent for many reasons. Most plainly, it is violent because it presumes that political rule is always founded upon violence or a monopoly on force.  

Yet fundamentally, for us, the logic of sovereignty is violent because it denies that everything in this world is interdependent—which is to say, meaningfully and necessarily intertwined–in both social and ecological senses.  

Meanwhile, we contend that sovereignty as a concept is false because everything, in our interpretation actually is interdependent, no matter how much the logics or institutions of sovereignty pretend they are not.   

The interlinked crises of global climate change are, of course, screaming evidence that autonomy is a myth and interdependence is the actual name of the game.  

But interdependence goes well beyond matters of crisis.  

It also provides at least as many opportunities for cooperation and participation as it does problems and competition.  

In any case, on MotL’s view, sovereignty disastrously fails to describe the reality of global political economy in any helpful way.  

Today, we would add, the world remains, in a sense, thoroughly medieval, by which I mean, that our world, too, remains a dizzying array of overlapping and interdependent jurisdictions, with credit creation occurring across and between different forms and scales.  

The idea of sovereignty does not permit us to actually perceive this, let alone change it for the improvement of humanity and the planet.  

To clarify: When we critique sovereignty as a concept, we are not flatly critiquing analysts, activists or legislators for focusing on the existing countries or governments in the world.  

We are all for politicizing, challenging, and transforming extant countries and governments for the better.  

Thus we do not in any way wish to ignore or overlook American, French, Japanese or Senegalese governments in the name of either a hyper-localist politics or a supranational globalism. 

Nor do we wish to immediately or unequivocally abolish the state.  

To the contrary, we don’t take the modern nation-state at its word about its own alleged sovereignty. Instead, we want to challenge this misconception, while working to radically transform and transcend the nation-state.  

In this way, we continue to argue that MMT’s fundamental insights about political economy are both correct and urgent.  

Our message is that, given its historical legacy and the problems associated with its meanings, sovereignty may not be the best descriptor for us to use when we are trying to understand present political economy and to release what have been historically repressed currency-creating powers.  

As a retort, one could persuasively argue that MMT has thoroughly transformed sovereignty’s original meaning by giving it a new and very specific set of definitions and criteria, none of which necessitate that we treat the modern-nation state as a self-standing and territorially bounded agent. 

To this we say: Fair enough! Our critique, then, may perhaps simply serve as a reminder that sovereignty’s semantic legacy is a problematic one. Maybe what we have to offer is merely a word of caution against perpetuating sovereignty’s unquestioned assumptions.  

But we can and do go further: The semantic baggage of terms like sovereignty has a tricky way of haunting new usages, even as they aim to outstrip their pasts.  

We see this around MMT, for example, when critics who, ignoring the nuances in the literature, conflate MMT with statism, as best, and autarky, at worst. 

It also comes from certain members within the MMT movement, who avowedly embrace MMT for ethno-nationalist politics.  

For this reason, we do recommend phasing out the language of sovereignty in order to avoid these problematic associations.  

Instead, we prefer to use the language of monetary “capacity,” “power,” “capability,” “agency,” or in some circumstances, “sustainability” and “resilience.”  

These terms, we think, better and more accurately describe what MMT is getting at in the first place.  

The largely unquestioned implications of sovereignty, we would also suggest, can hamper MMT from time to time, bogging us down in unnecessary contradictions.  

On one hand, for example, MMT stresses that money is an endogenous credit/debt relation, as opposed to, say, a finite thing, or a passive vehicle for individual preferences or an expression of commodified labor time.  

Money on this view is never recycled like a finite chit or embodiment of value. It is created from thin air by virtue of credit granting institutions endowed with different degrees of authority and receivability.  

On the other hand, however, MMT tells us that only sovereign currency-issuing governments have the power to create credit, while everyone else is condemned to be a mere user of credit that must recycle extant money throughout the economy.  

Such statements contradict one another.  

Which one is it? Is credit created from thin air through a hierarchy of money that extends in endogenous patterns from government to locality and across the globe?  

Or, is the government’s sovereign will the sole locus of infinite money creation, while every other person, group or institution must merely use and recycle said money as if it were a finite substance?  

The problem, here, I would wager is not that MMT is deep down just bluntly wrong or self-undermining.  

It is not wrong to emphasize the important and central role played by federal governments in organizing money.  

MMT does not undermine itself by explaining the hierarchy of endogenous monetary creation. 

The trouble is in tethering the government’s role in the process to language and assumptions of sovereignty, permitting sovereignty’s absolutist and exclusionary logics to creep back in.  

This is what creates these puzzling and, frankly, needless contradictions in MMT.   

In truth, I would suggest that MMT scholars know damn well and express all of the time that state money and endogenous money are not in conflict.  

MMT scholars know that credit issuance occurs in heterogeneous forms across global and local registers.  

While government currency issuers variously anchor these forms, we see myriad regimes of non-finite, non-recycled credit all of the time—from IMF Special Drawing Rights and Euro dollars to airline miles and Chuck E. Cheese tickets.  

The modern nation-state unquestionably plays important roles in authorizing, regulating and even informally sanctioning credit creation across these heterogeneous scales. And the nation-state is arguably the central institution with which we should now be concerned.  

But to take the nation-state seriously does not then mean that we must blind ourselves by naturalizing the fantasies of absolute independence and exclusivity baked into sovereignty as a historical term and concept.  

This matters not only for describing the current monetary systems of the world, but also for imaginatively transforming money into a more robust and democratic process.  

A great example of this is the proposal my colleagues and I have been developing for a public university issued credit system we call “the Uni.” 

The Uni, as we conceive it, would give credit creation capacity to cash-strapped public universities, which have been increasingly starved of funds by feckless state legislatures for decades. 

Extending what Hockett and Omarova call the “finance franchise” to public universities, the Uni would end austerity and privatization in public universities. It would also, on our design, increase the democratic agency of faculty, staff, students, and surrounding community members.

Perhaps the most mind-blowing aspect of the Uni, furthermore, is what it demonstrates about the plasticity of endogenous credit creation.

The Uni shows that no one is merely a passive user of a currency, that credit always precedes returns and that, as a result, money as such is never driven by recycling revenue.  

This has tremendous implications for democratic monetary design, challenging us to imagine credit systems that transcend not only revenue constraints but also the profit motive.  

Instead of finance franchisees lending money that must be paid back, for example, we can establish granting institutions that disburse credit not according to a logic of quantitative payback but, rather, through a qualitative logic of communal and environmental obligation.

Crucially, we think, the Uni can serve as a generalizable model for similar projects elsewhere, revealing MMT’s still-untapped potentials for political and economic transformation in unexpected ways.

From one point of view, the Uni is fully compatible with and wholly stems from MMT.  

At the same time, however, we believe that the language and logics of state sovereignty that linger in MMT sometimes have a tendency to squelch such imaginative leaps and possibilities.  

Now, I’d like to quickly sum up before concluding:  

  1. I come in peace, which is to say, I’ve spoken with you here tonight in order to improve rather than to condemn MMT. 
  2. MMT’s spectrum of monetary sovereignty is important and persuasive on its own terms.
  3. Sovereignty is neither an innocent nor ahistorical synonym for the power of the federal government. 
  4. Sovereignty arose as a very specific term and concept, which sought to expel interdependence from political thinking and organization. 
  5. The logic of sovereignty is not only violent, but also false.
  6. We can and should appeal to alternative words to describe the world of monetary governance such as monetary “agency,” “power,” “capacity,” and others.
  7. Moving beyond sovereignty enables us to expand MMT and iron out some unfortunate limits and contradictions in MMT discourse.

Thank you again for inviting me to share our work at the Money on the Left collective. I am honored to have had this chance to walk you through our thinking and concerns.

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Community Currencies with Jens Martignoni

Money on the Left speaks with Dr. Jens Martignoni, lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and chief editor of the International Journal of Community Currency Research (IJCCR). Community or complementary currencies are phenomena of great interest to monetary scholars and activists. We’ve spoken often about them on this show–whether about the Benjamins classroom currency at SUNY Cortland, the DVDs currency at Denison, or our recurring work on the Uni Currency Project. During our conversation with Martignoni, the appeal of such projects becomes clear. Community currencies not only lay bare the false claims of prevailing monetary orthodoxy–and in so doing make powerful teaching tools, as Jakob Feinig has argued. They also permit and even compel us to imagine a world that is otherwise–a world figured first in terms of abundance rather than primarily or exclusively in terms of scarcity. In our dialog, we focus on Martignoni’s provocative essay for the IJCCR, titled “Money is Not a Medium of Exchange.” In doing so, we reflect upon the limits of “exchange” as a framework for understanding money, while simultaneously experimenting with more generative linguistic and conceptual tools to help us re-imagine monetary 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.

Scott: Jens Martignoni, welcome to Money on the Left.

Jens Martignoni: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Scott: We’re happy to have you.

To start us off, we’d like you to tell our listeners a little bit about your background, your personal background, your professional background, and also how you came to take up a heterodox approach to questions of money and political economy.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, thank you. It’s kind of a long story, but I started in the northeast of Switzerland quite a time ago when I was born in a rural region. My first idea was then–when I was a little bit older–to go to the U.S. and to start as a rocket engineer and do space travels to the moon. Because I thought, yeah, we have some major problems and issues on this earth with our civilization. But this was maybe something from the gods.

But I took this track and went for becoming an engineer, mechanical engineer. But when I was there, even in the study then in the university, I found out that maybe it’s not a good idea to leave Earth, but maybe better to see that we have and find a better solution for our society. And therefore, I started as an engineer in different jobs, but was always thinking how we could improve or change our society or, let’s say, our behavior.

That was in the 1990s, a time when I moved to Zurich. This is the biggest city in Switzerland. There I found out that it would be a good thing to work differently, not as in a regular job or as an engineer, but more independently. And with a couple of friends, we founded an association to help us–self-help, let’s say–a kind of cooperative in a form of association. We started our own businesses, but together and tried to have an exchange and tried to build up a network. So like a startup, kind of startup platform before “startups” were a word, maybe.

Very soon we arrived at the point where we found out that, OK, it’s nice to exchange or to have projects together or something like that. But it’s also very important to get the money inside our circle. So, we found out that we have to establish a known monetary system in our association. And that was the first step. From a very practical point of view: how we can keep the resources inside and not flowing away and leaving us faster than they arrived.

So, we founded a kind of currency, a local currency in today’s term, which was quite unique. Somehow we had some ingenuity, not only me, but others together. Before, we didn’t find much about such systems. LETS was already on the market then. It’s from the Canada local exchange and trade system. But we had a different approach, more like a common approach.

However this worked, it was fun also for some years. But after a while, it turned out that it was not really working. It was helping us. It was fun. But we would have to invest a lot more energy, time and knowledge and also to have many more members, for example, to get it on a certain level. And so it disappeared slowly.

That was my first real experiment with such a system, a little bit out of the blue. We made many mistakes, if you look backwards. But it was just really a good thing. From then on, I was a little bit hooked and always thought about how to keep on in this topic. Professionally, I was then leaving this self-employment because I had founded a big project, which then was covered by the state. I became an employee again of this project and so on. But after a while, I was convinced that I have to add to my engineering degree, more economic knowledge to get along with this story. So I went, I did a master’s in an university here in Switzerland. And later on, I also did a Ph.D. in a university in Germany. And there, on both occasions, I took this topic of money or different monies or local currencies or whatever as a master thesis or a PhD thesis was included in that.

I started to become more of a researcher in this topic and then went on to be involved in some European research projects where I also did some parts concerning such monetary systems or such local exchange things. And yeah, that was a bit of the thread about the money. As for my personal situation, I stayed the whole time in Switzerland, except my visits in Germany, in the German University of Köln. But yeah, I was here and getting into contact with the worldwide networks of other people working on this local community or complementary currency. That was still until today. It’s a big issue.

But of course, as your question also posed: Why did I come to the heterodox approach? Because it’s not necessarily needed if you try to start a local currency. The orthodox or the classical approach does not really cover local currencies. It just says nothing about it. So, you can live together without bothering, maybe. But for me, it was very clear that something in conventional orthodox or classical theories cannot be true. So, I was always looking for how could money be seen, posing this famous question, “What is money?” There are many books written about this. Money is what you name it, for example.

Billy: Social construction.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, money is a social construction. This is harder to find, but you can find it. But yeah, money to become rich or money is psychological things about money or many things about what money is. And after a while, I came to the conclusion that maybe this question is not right. This is a kind of trick question. Because if you ask “what is money?” you presuppose money as existing entity. It is already here. It’s like a kind of plant species or a kind of rock formation. And you start to look at it and now you know what money is.

Usually it’s done by the history of coins that, “ah, this is money,” all the coins and developed like this and like that. For me, this was  a key moment, maybe when I thought, “okay, maybe this question is not good because money is made by men.” If you ask “what is money,” then also we should first ask who has made money and why? What exactly is it for? And is it really the same all the time? And so on and so on. It becomes more interesting if you look at it that way.

Billy: That’s a fascinating story. As somebody who very recently completed a class, I’m working with students all semester on complementary currencies. And in fact, each student was tasked with developing their own. I’ve talked about it a lot on the show. But I’m really curious to know what that initial in your co-op, what was the name of your currency? Because I think ultimately that becomes a vexing question for students. What did you call it? And was there any debate about what to call it?

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, we had some debates then. This association or this co-op was called “Flexibles.” Then, even the English name, it was very fancy in that time in Europe or in Switzerland. Because the name of the association was Flexible, we thought we named the currency after flexible and then existing predecessor of the Euro, it was the FLECÜ. So it was called “Flexibles-Ecu” and yeah it was a paper money–I don’t have one here unfortunately but there are still some I can send you an image. How do you spell ECU? Yes, this is a French word, “ECU,” but because in German, the U is with two points.

Scott: Umlaut.

Jens Martignoni: So it is, yeah, so it’s F L E C Ü umlaut. It was funny, we had one important issue: to find out how the money was traveling, where it’s going. We had a list on each bill where you had to fill in when you gave it to, when you bought something, when you gave it to the next. And you have to fill in when and for what and whom, from whom. And so after a while you had the whole list, you could see where this and for what this bill was, this note was spent. And this was for us a very important idea, somehow to track this.

Billy: It’s an engineering problem. Did you see it from the engineer’s lens?

Jens Martignoni: Maybe. Yeah, of course. In the end, then you pay 100 FLECÜ and you have 10 bills and then you have to write it 10 times on each of these 10 things. The next would give it to different sorts. So, you have a big mixture of things, this one from here, this one from there. But I think it was a good exercise to point towards the use of money, that each transaction really changes somehow the money or prints some new kind of color on it or kind of value. And so you could enforce, the idea was, of course, we wouldn’t like to travel it by like–“bought some cocaine” or whatever, or horrible environmental things, or I don’t know, “nuclear power plants- I bought one.” But I think this brought us a bit towards this idea that, “okay, money is changing from each transaction, is changing money somehow.” There were some interesting insights from this experiment.

Scott: It makes me think of library books on the one hand. You check out a library book, you can see who has checked it out—you know, sometimes decades of people checking it out. On the other hand, it also makes me think of what is actually now standard in private payment platforms, like Venmo, where you can record what the transaction is for, include emojis. So, all of this ends up shaping and creating different kinds of values that are certainly not the kinds of notions of value they could talk about in classical or neoclassical economics.

Billy: With the FLECÜ, did you did you go into that with any kind of theoretical framing background? Or, you said it was a practical project, did you draw on any pre-existing complementary local or community currencies as examples?

Jens Martignoni: Yes, very little. Interestingly enough, we had just more of an idea of how we would work. How our economy should be. Then this, we had, I think, one or two books from not really very theoretical approaches of about different aspects of money. The LETS, for example, was a little bit known, but not really, and we weren’t really happy with how they did it. So, we did another. I still hang on to this method to really start without knowledge in the monetary field. Because money and the currency, all this stuff is so overloaded with weird and wrong ideas. You start to dig into them and you lose–you’re lost. Then you load yourself with a lot of wrong stuff, wrong premises and so on. And if you start from nothing, it’s much likelier that you get to some interesting or useful solution. So a pity for all the theorists, of course, if I say that.

Billy: “Babylonian madness,” I think Keynes called it.

Jens Martignoni: Yes, course, then later on, for me, it was important also to study all this or a lot of such theories. But it was a good thing. And I think it somehow, to a certain degree, it worked without any theory at all.

Scott: Could you tell us a little bit about your graduate-level thesis about money and currency?

Jens Martignoni: Yes, I did a study about a bunch of existing local currencies in Switzerland, Germany, or in the German speaking part. The idea, there were two things: First, I found out that I should do a kind of classification typology because it was difficult to compare. There are so many systems like these LETS or time banks or maybe a regional currency–all kinds of different approaches because they mostly were started by local groups. Like myself, they did not know much and they took some system and changed it. So, it was very diverse.

So, one thing was this typology. The other was to find out some success factors.  If there are some really some points where these local, these small currencies are successful or how they fail or could have found and find out something about that. The typology was also published in English in 2012, I think, later on translated.

Interestingly enough, the typologies of money are quite an open field. Until today, there are some, but not really many. The reason is very simple: Because a long time it was believed that money is money. It’s one thing. So there’s no typology at all necessary. And then there were a lot of discussions about is or that. Is this money, or the checks money, or are the vouchers money? But always compared to that money that we have today or then the same. But as you go deeper, of course, you find out that money, that you have to have a typology because it’s just one option or one possibility how to do it.

Like we have it today in the dollar, for example, or very closely the same in the pound or in the francs or in the euro zone. The other thing is how such a local system would be successful. It was a small sample. I found out some things like, of course, you should have quite some resources, money to start up a new money, because it’s really hard work and it needs a lot. We forget it a little bit in our very big monetary system that we have today that there is a systems operation tax. Somehow we have to pay the banks and the computers are running and the vending machines and so on. But this appears in our very big economy.

Yet if you have a very small one, like in this local currency, then of course the costs can be high or the work you have to do to keep it running and or to get towards a certain number of members to have a stable situation. So the resource situation was very crucial. Then the design, of course, and then some other points like, “Do you have some initial working circles where money is flowing?” Can it be recycled? If not, then it will become difficult after a while.

Yeah, there was this study. It was interesting, but not really well read afterwards.

Billy: Sounds like, if it was translated and published in 2012 it would have been pretty useful in the context of the Greek discussion of leaving the Eurozone, where I think the startup costs of considering returning to the lira with ATMs, with actually designing, printing, rebranding essentially was prohibitive. So I appreciate that point very much.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, by the way, at that time, together with my colleague Christian Gelleri, he’s the founder of the Chiemgauer. This is such a regional currency in Bavaria, Germany.

Billy: My students studied it.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, it’s somehow successful. It’s really 20 years now, more than 20 years. At that time of the Greek troubles, he made a suggestion of parallel currency. So, not really going back, but to have a parallel currency. And we tried to suggest quite an option to do that. But yeah, it was not heard by the politicians.

Billy: Well, in that case, you had a semi-pseudo-heterodox finance minister who had very strong ideas about what ought to happen as well.

Jens Martignoni: You mean [Yanis] Varoufakis or no?

Billy: I do.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, he was not. He was from his side. It was good. But of course, he was then dismissed. Or he left. I don’t remember. So, he left.

Billy: We put together a small proposal, which was definitely not very closely considered, for Spain around the same time. 

Jens Martignoni: Oh, wow. Nice. Yeah, such ideas are too far away from these politicians, and unfortunately, at least to be considered, even to do some experiments.

Billy: You mentioned it’s good to have zero knowledge of money, but one of the things that I’ve come to appreciate more dearly over time is how it’s not, most people don’t have zero knowledge of money. They have lots and lots of knowledge, wrong knowledge, right? And misconceptions that to get to that zero point, there’s a lot of chaff you have to pull away to just have the discussion.

Scott: Meanwhile, people’s lives are on the line and they’re fire-selling public infrastructure in Greece to the lowest bidders in the private marketplace. I mean, we’re tearing our hair out. The world is burning, but nobody can expand their imaginations to think this way. And of course, it’s in many people’s interest not to do so.

Jens Martignoni: Yes, very true. However, back to my study, maybe, or shall we continue with the politics?

Scott: No, that’s fine. We can go back to your study.

Jens Martignoni: And yeah, that was this study about these local currencies. But as you maybe know, the failure rate is very, very, very high. And some have survived, just like the Chimgauer, or some even thrive, like the Sartex or in the Berkshire, what’s it called?

Billy: The Berkshires.

Scott: The Berkshires.

Jens Martignoni: The Berkshires, yeah, okay, something like this. Then that was, of course, also one of my conclusions that somehow this theory behind everything is also a major reason for failure. Because if there is a wrong theory and you still talk about “exchange,” money as a “medium of exchange,” for example, then you get somehow on the wrong track. Then it becomes even more difficult to build up such an alternative on a small scale.

So, that was also a point to continue and think and read more and go back in time to older scholars, especially in Germany, who had done quite amazing things 100 years ago. But then because of this Nazi time, everything was buried, or sometimes discredited, or however difficult to reach. So, I was also looking there and took other assumptions and options and talked to people and found that these regional and complementary currencies are a good test bed for monetary theory because everything is much smaller. You really see direct effects. You can think about it much more easily.

Scott: So you’ve hit the nerve that I see at the center of our conversation. Before we start messing around with this nerve I want to tell our listeners a little bit about how we found you. We at Money on the Left are always thinking about who can we communicate with? Who can we talk to? Who can teach us? Who can we teach? I would say, in general, our foundations are in macro political economy, but we are also interested in smaller scale or multi-level or nested levels of money and currency. Yet not all of us have spent a lot of time reading the literature about complementary and community currencies–some of us more than others. I think Billy has, for example. I think I’ve read less–and somebody among us mentioned your journal, the International Journal of Community Currency Research, which we should plug. I would invite you to say some things about where it came from and what it is and what its mission is. But we’ll hold off on that question for now.

So I found this journal and I’m just looking around as one does. I’m exploring. I’m clicking on links. And all of a sudden, I get to a fairly recent piece by you titled “Ideas for Debate, Elementary Monetary Concepts and Ideas: Part 2.” And here’s the doozy: “Money is not a Medium of Exchange.” My jaw dropped. My jaw dropped because we at Money on the Left feel like we’re the only ones out here saying “money is not a medium of exchange–stop talking about it as a medium of exchange.” 

We’re very influenced by Modern Monetary Theory. This is often referred to as “neo-chartalism.” We’re also influenced by a certain kind of critical legal work, especially associated with Christine Desan at Harvard University, who thinks of money as a constitutional project. But I would say that even in those discourses, which reject the barter origin story that money comes from bilateral barter exchanges between individuals, I would say that the trope of exchange still circulates. It’s still used. Maybe this is me above all else, but I personally think that this is such a toxic trope. It’s such a toxic frame. It’s a toxic topology. And it really eradicates larger systemic design questions and political questions and value questions from the get-go and just sort of wishes them away. Whether you’re an apologist for neoclassical economics or you are a critic along Marxist lines or any other school. So, I often feel like I’m screaming into the void: “Money is not exchange! Money is not exchange!” And instead it is…

Billy: I pat him on the head and I say, it’s okay, Scott.

Scott: Yeah, it’s okay. Calm down. Calm down. For me, this cuts to the heart of everything we’re trying to argue, that money is a public system. It’s a public utility. It’s inexhaustible. You can always afford to do whatever you can mobilize your community to do. Money is a system of public obligations and capacities. “Exchange” just eliminates all those possibilities from the ontology of money. Anyway, so I stumbled upon your provocation: “money is not a medium of exchange.” My jaw drops and I think to myself, oh my God, there’s another strange alien out there in the universe who also seems to think that we should not be talking about money as exchange, which is really hard to do. It’s really hard to do.

And not only that, when I opened your short provocation, I saw that you are influenced, as you were suggesting, by German writers that we are equally influenced by, probably above all, Georg Knapp. Maybe  you can tell us–take this in whatever order you wish– you can talk about the journal, where it came from, what its mission is and how it’s doing; and then eventually, I would really like to just hear you talk about this provocation of yours.

Jens Martignoni: Let’s talk about the exchange question first because energy is going through the ceiling. This idea that money is a medium of exchange is for me I think it’s a kind of methodological error but it’s not a bad error. It was like in the times of the 19th century, maybe, that the people started to use this research methods of the natural sciences towards to study the economy. And so you go into the economy, you look, you’re the spectator, you’re the subject, so you have to cut you off from the object. And then you look and you see there is something, there’s a coin going from here to here and there is some whatever bought going back. And so you say, “Ah, you see, this is an exchange!” And so, you start the next point where you say, “Okay, now the other has the money and this person has the good.” And what’s now with this money? What does it do? He doesn’t have anything he wanted somehow, but he has something he can find another thing he wanted.

So then, of course, you can say, “Okay, money is not really a good in this exchange.” So, it must be something else. It must be like a medium of exchange. And then you start this story from there. And the other myth you already mentioned from how money was then invented, I think that followed. Because you found out that money is a medium of exchange. They took it back to this village approach where everybody is trying to get cows against eggs and so on.

However, then you see it’s a kind of observation. It’s okay. And it’s also real. There is something kind of like a medium of exchange in that moment, in that situation, but it’s absolutely not useful to define or even see money as a whole. This is especially because this exchange theory also has two people, one and the other. And money is absolutely impossible with two people. You need at least three, otherwise it’s not money so you have to give another person money and then he or she can find someone else who takes the money instead of giving some goods to the other person. So you need at least three people for a monetary system and then this exchange thing starts to become more complicated and then, yeah, it starts, it complicates and complicates.

And so it’s better to leave it out and say, no, no, we cannot define money at all through this function. It’s even maybe not even really a function. It’s kind of an observation, kind of something happens there, but we have to go somewhere completely somewhere else. And of course, the main point in this transaction is that the other person, because the person who has the money and gives it to someone else, let’s say could be really happy. Finally, he gets rid of this paper, of this nothing, and he gets some real stuff. And the other person who gets this only paper, this promise, then, of course, has to be really sure that others are willing to give something against this sheer nothing paper. 

So the whole community of people accepting this money, this is the most important part. It must be a community or a bunch, a group of people accepting this money. Then, it’s money. That’s the point. Now, how you get these people together? You can also do it by force, like the king says, “This is money! Everybody has to accept it. I put the tax on you.” Or, you also have the option to say everybody likes joining. I am willing to do it. I’m part of it. That’s why I accept it. You have different options how this community comes into life.

Knapp then of course derived it from the other side. He said okay there is the state and the state because it’s a community, because it has the option of the king or whoever or of the government to say we are now accepting this money. This is now our money. Everybody should take it. Then it’s working. Then to put this obligation on everybody to have to take the money. And of course, there are some more technical and other clues you have to include that it really works. But this is the main point to start from there.

Then you also see that this obligation is a kind of credit. You can then also go to the credit theory or maybe think more about that point and then start from there. Yes. So these were my ideas. I’m still not finished and that’s also why I put this provocation into the journal to start a discussion and it worked. The hook went to you. You took it and I think we can can discuss it more and maybe frame it better or and find other ways and to strengthen this approach. 

Scott: Well I’d like to get into some of the messy and complicated details, especially about the relationship between what we typically just refer to as a currency or a national currency or a supranational currency and something more like a community or local currency. I’ve been really fascinated by troubling that binary, and to see where that takes us. But before we do that, I’d like you to talk about your journal and explain what the mission is and whatever else you’d like to say about it.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, exactly. The International Journal of Community Currency Research was funded, I think, twenty-two, three or four years ago by some, I think in Australia even. Then, it went to England. It was from some scholars in a private initiative, I think. And they started to collect articles about this phenomenon of community currencies. There have been other examples before, even script money and other things longer before, but the phenomenon restarted maybe around in the 90’s of the last century. And so this journal was able already then to collect some articles of some exotic scholars doing such work in their universities. And yes, after a while, it was passed over to the then-founded RAMICS.

RAMICS (Research Association on Monetary Innovation and Community and Complementary Currency Systems) is a research association for community currencies of academics who were in this field, or tried to be in this field. The journal was passed over to them because the original founders did not continue. And now it’s a part of RAMICS and it continues to publish articles about all kinds of alternative monetary systems or ideas, also practical approaches or things like that. We tried for quite a while to become more academic and to be ranked and so on, but it’s a little bit difficult. And in the last two or three years, it came even into a little bit of crisis because it lacked resources. So, we had very few articles only.

Then I took over about two or three years ago and now I try to rebuild it to make it a little bit stronger. For example, I have a better platform also to publish. So everything is a bit old-fashioned. But I think it’s still very valuable and there’s really a good, more than 140 articles already where this phenomenon of alternative money or different monetary approaches or whatever is collected in a very good way. And I try to do more and also to improve.

Also in this scene of complementary currency practitioners or community currency practitioners, it’s very usual that they start with money as a kind of exchange system. And so we have to start there and improve the exchange. Then, of course, I also tried to evangelize this topic a little bit, in the bubble itself. That was part of this provocation.

Yes, and RAMICS also has a biannual congress. The last one was just held in Rome in November. The next one will be in Rio–yes, I think in two years–where the people of this community or the academics of this field come together. But there are very few real professorships on that topic, I think, maybe three or four on this planet. And the other academics are on the side working on this topic or additional or somehow from another viewpoint. So it’s a small, how do you say, island still. But I think it’s very important to keep it and to rebuild it even and go forward, because the other side is not really delivering good results or better results in their research. So I think we can go to the front and present our results maybe also in a bit higher ranks. That’s about it.

Billy: We have our own humble, relatively new journal, and we can i think identify on the level of the editorial  policy being our editorial position being a little bit different because so many people have ideas about money they come with  yeah exchange-based or neoclassically informed or funded ideas, and it becomes a process of education in the editorial space, but not trying to shape. I guess where do you land if a neoclassical straight-up or orthodox proposal comes in? Maybe we can edit this out if we don’t want to include it, but what’s the position? What do you do in that moment? Tell us, please.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, nice to hear, by the way, about your journal. I also have to have a look in Twitter and maybe, yeah, the more the better, I think. However, yeah, what can you do? We don’t have so many of these papers because, of course, this community currency is already a kind of barrier.

Billy: It’s a niche.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, it’s a niche. But I think, of course, I would try to talk to the people or send some first editor’s review. If I find enough interesting ideas that could be confronted with the other ideas, or expanded or something, then I would encourage the author or try to convince him to add or to change a little bit or so on. And in the other, if it’s really completely going in another direction, I really send some polite instructions of how money could maybe be seen differently in the hope that he or she will at least be a little bit waken up.

Billy: Well, in your position as chief editor, are there any pieces that stand out to you over the last couple of years as particularly compelling, or where you would suggest new readers go to first when they visit your website and look at the journal?

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, well…

Billy: Standout articles.

Jens Martignoni: Yes, we have some…

Billy: Not a favorite, because they’re all great.

Jens Martignoni: Absolutely. Well, there are some classics like, for example, the articles of James Stoddard, who researched the Swiss franc against the WIR system. This is a very large-scale complementary currency in Switzerland. He found that it has some real economic impact already on the Swiss economy and some contrast cyclical impacts.

So, this is some interesting message for many people to start already, and also to see that if such a currency has certain, how to say, issues big enough, the impact starts to be visible because these are very, very small currencies. You have also research on the impact of such currencies with 200 people. So it’s very difficult to find the real impact of things, except the social side. There you can clearly find an impact. But we’d like to have the economic impact. And this is very difficult. 

Then we have quite a new article by Will Ruddick. This is not completely an academic article, but it’s a kind of ethnographic study about–I cannot say “exchange systems”– in Africa and also in other countries. He started to detect mechanisms how to manage the commons and to common labor and to work together and how this works. And I think it’s a very basic thing also to understand money without money. If it’s how this system of participation, of obligations, of capacities, how do you provide your work? What do you get from the others and so on? What are the possibilities and options that the people use or used or still use in some rural areas? And he has done very good, very nice work there–still continuing.

And what else? There are some articles about typologies. Also mine was, then I sent it to this journal. What a coincidence. No, but others also to see a bit of these typological approaches, which enable us to see more across monies and to recognize that it’s easier from this more systemic or design perspective where you can really see, “Ah, it’s different, ah, this one, this one, what happens?” And I think these articles are more like from Jérôme Blanc or others. There are some in this field which are really interesting and also well cited.

Scott: I’d like to bring us back to the topic I raised earlier, maybe getting into the weeds of some of the complications that I’ve found when thinking about complementary currencies, but also moving back and forth between larger macroeconomic currencies and  community or local forms. I found that I began with a more naive way of talking about these different types of currencies. But over the years–and largely because of a lot of  anxiety and pushback that I get from the world in response to talking about these things–it’s forced me and, I think, us to begin to complicate things. We need to recognize that you can’t think about money and currency as an atomized entity. Not only can you not think about it as an individual euro or an individual pound, but you can’t think of a money system as somehow hermetically sealed. It is designed in relationship to other systems that it participates in and relies on in reciprocal and very often asymmetrical ways. So there’s already a kind of leakage, I think, between any currency systems. They’re mutually interdependent in all kinds of ways, which is not to say that a local complementary currency in one city is going to have the same kind of power or capacity that a national or a supranational currency. 

It is to say that it’s important not to get so locked into the idea that every currency sinks and swims alone. So then, we’ve thought both theoretically, historically, but also in terms of contemporary examples of, well, what are some examples of where things get messier. One example has been taken up by a former colleague of ours, Maxximilian Seijo. At a certain point, Maxx started thinking about Knapp’s example in his well-known book, The State Theory of Money: the cloakroom. The cloakroom, you could call a complementary currency. It’s not denominated in Deutschmarks, right? It’s not denominated in dollars. A cloakroom has its own redemption system, its own obligation and capacities. But it also doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It doesn’t exist in a state of nature. It’s not in a desert and people just randomly come by and decide willingly whether they want to dump their coats or not.

It’s part of entertainment. It’s part of a whole economy that uses other units. A more pointed question I could lob to you: What counts as a local currency or a complementary currency? Does a cloakroom count? Do airline miles count? Do Starbucks gift cards count? Because they don’t have the same liquidity that the macro unit has, but they’re still being relatively priced in interdependent relationships with the macro currency. One of the reasons why this is really important to me is that there’s a tendency, as you know, to dismiss local currency projects as if they’re just weird or freakish. “That’s not how money works.”  Or, “Oh, that’s weak; it’s not going to work.“ And of course it ends up not working very often. But nobody says that about video game currencies. Nobody says that about credits for private businesses. Nobody says that about cloakrooms. I wonder to what extent that’s just a kind of ideological blockage that we have. Well, why not? Why won’t it work? 

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, these are really important points, a lot of points to think about what exactly, or how do we define currency, or where is it exactly? And I think it’s in the systemic approach, it gets a bit easier if you see there are systems, and then there are borders, and then their interactions between different systems. So, if you have a small cloakroom system working for exactly one purpose. And then you have a large system, which is a multipurpose system, but wouldn’t work in a cloakroom, interestingly enough, if you give a dollar instead. Because you give your cloak, then you will not get back a dollar. And it would also be very complicated. You go back with a dollar, and then where is your cloak? It doesn’t work. The number, there is no number.

So it’s interesting that the money or such valuation areas maybe defined by some issues and some borders. And very interesting as in nature, the borders are the most interesting part to look at what happens in the systems come together. And I think this will be in the future a very interesting research field. But the situation now is, of course, a bit difficult, as you said, because we have one system, which is not really true, but it looks like one system of money worldwide. You can buy everything from the whole world. It works. Maybe some small exchange rates between, but nothing more. And then you have the smaller systems like, yeah, they are not really money or what do you do there? And if you have a false idea of this, that is one system or that is no system at all.

Usually they don’t say it’s a system. It’s like money. Money is money. That’s a hard thing. For my opinion, it’s true. We can have a really large definition or a very weak definition of money, like everything that is used from a certain bunch of people to regulate their economic relations, what we call money or something like that, in this direction.

And the air miles, yes, of course. Any vouchers are kind of, I would say, a pre-state of money because as soon as you just buy the voucher, go to the business and get it, and the business gets it back, it’s a kind of, well, it’s usually, maybe it’s a triangle. But as soon as you make a gift with a voucher to your nephew, then it becomes more the character of money because it’s transferred and somebody else then will be responsible for receiving or getting the benefit or whatever.

However, I think this border issue is an idea which I would like to research more, because the transfer to the border crossing of such a value is a very interesting moment. Because then a kind of economy one and economy two do interfere. Then if you take away this border, as it was done, for example, by this trade, different free trade things and so on, then you change a lot also. And if you have a border–Trump is maybe now reinstalling borders. And how do you say them? What’s the English word for?

Scott: Tariffs.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, he will put up tariffs. But I think it’s more interesting to see the exchange of the money, exchange rates. This is much more interesting. You could somehow avoid all tariffs and just in a future world, you could do everything by the exchange rate of the different monies to value different economic areas against another economic area. And to balance the world better, you would install different currencies and in a more or less homogeneous area economically. And then you would have transfers between different areas by adjusting the exchange rates to regulate the worldwide traffic or trade. I think that that would be an idea to go towards this instead of tariffs and so on.

But however, now I was moving a little bit far away from your question. Sorry.

Billy: That’s a really good one, Scott. On my campus, as on many other campuses, we have several complementary currency systems or parallel currency systems through meal plans and other sort of, you know, esoteric campus-driven or campus-based currency programs. So it’s interesting to start a conversation in the context of a classroom. It’s like, we’re going to make a complementary currency and then to take inventory about just how many similar sorts of systems exist around us. And that question of, you know, what separates, I think returns us to a question that was posed, but not pursued earlier in the conversation in the context of talking about the tax obligation. And I know Scott and many in our collective are, myself included, are uncomfortable with the concept and reject it maybe outright that that the system of like a successful monetary system is contingent on. That there has to be a force in the form of the state that can compel people, can coerce, can force violently to use the currency in one shape or form.

And so I guess I’m generally interested in your perspective on that question. Because when I think about it in the context of the complementary currencies that we’ve been talking about, like that may not normally read as complementary, but as you say, have their own use cases, the cloakroom. To a certain extent, on that view, that money is kind of inherently got a coercive element to it, all currencies, whether complementary, secondary, or parallel, exist at the pleasure or at the discretion of the sovereign. If the berkshire was truly successful or too successful it would probably be regulated out of existence. It exists in the United States in a sort of gray area. So, whether in the scholarship, in your journal, or in your own work, I think we have some of our answers to that question. But I’d be interested to hear where you land on that question, sovereignty, coercion, violence, and money.

Jens Martignoni: Money and power. Yeah, it’s true. This is, as I explained before, if you have this viewpoint of that money is a kind of collective agreement, let’s say in a neutral way, then, of course, it also means that the collective can force some individuals to behave differently. That’s very difficult to avoid.

But as we have invented democracy and other instruments to handle this a little bit more intelligently, I think the money of the future would include very strong input from the users. So I could kind of participate in decisions or maybe let’s say it better. It would make my decisions more clear to me and to the system. For example, the purchasing decisions could be translated directly into systems behavior and the kind of feedback. For example if in one system everybody would like to buy from the neighboring system some very nice stuff, all go there and buy it and there is an exchange and they can do it and then of course what’s going to happen is there will be a trade imbalance and the neighboring system sooner or later will ask back to them and say hey listen You buy and buy, but what can you offer? Because we work a lot and deliver. So what can you offer? And if you don’t offer anything, then it will get more expensive for you. The exchange rate will change.

So you could have a kind of direct feedback, if you start with your purchasing decisions. And, for example, also you could implement some kind of ordering system. You could pre-order things to be made for you later or they need a manufacturing time. And by this pre-ordering, the whole price could be calculated. And if everybody pre-orders and we have a lot of people who can work on that and then it will be a cheap price and so on. And that will be, so you decide directly and your influence really directly and you can see your direct influence in the system by your economical behavior. That would be one thing to make it more transparent. And also, of course, you’re working in today’s system. The money is not used in that way, that it’s really a direct feedback. It goes to the brick, or it’s trying out somewhere else. And on the other side, also, a very important part is to decide about the future. All investments, if you invest something, it means you prepare something for the future. A real investment, not a financial investment. And a real investment, for example, you build a plant, it will be able to produce whatever in the future. And now you invest and then in the future you have that plant and it will produce and you will not have another plant. It’s that plant. So you decide about the future.

And I think that’s a very important part to implement also in the monetary system that investing is done by democratic measures. You will decide” where do we want to go, really? So I think I started to answer your questions by the kind of solutions, but of course the problems are now there because still the simplest way of a monetary system is to impose it on the people and to use the credit system to suppress the people. If you get credit, you have to pay it back and the interest you have to pay additionally. So you have to get more money back than you get. And all these things should, of course, be reduced because otherwise you land where we are. It’s a power game. It’s good to hoard as much money as possible and so on and so on. And the more money you have, the more power you have. And in the design of new currencies, this must be as far as possible prevented. Yeah, for example, if you hoard money, you’re a systemic parasite.

All the other people have an obligation to work for that money that is in the system. So they have to wait until you spend it. And if you don’t spend it, maybe they die from hunger because they never could get your money. And so this is a kind of parasitic behavior and you can, yeah, that should be very transparent in a new system, in the existing system. It’s the opposite, of course.

Billy: We’re modeling in these complementary currencies the kind of currency we’d like to have for the future, democratically driven, even if it’s not that way today. I like that.

Jens Martignoni: Yes, not one answer. So you can have more democratic banking, for example. It’s a good step because the banks should be the investing part.

Billy: They’re deputized, right, by the government to sort of oversee that investment.

Jens Martignoni: Yes, and also this is, of course, the strange behavior of today’s economy that the government, at least the government, all people, democratic, should take the future of the state into its hands. But it has sold it to the banks somehow. And of course, then if you do that, I think that’s also a kind of secondary effect that the taxes become somehow meaningless or strange or kind of punishment. Because by the taxes, you don’t pay into your future. You pay for something and the future is going somewhere else, and the banks are lending the money to other people than the ones that would be good for the home, for the state, for example. So I think the failure of the state is very closely knitted to this behavior to this money that is not issued by the state. I don’t say it would be better in today’s state to really issue the money by the state, but at least it’s a big thing that it was separated from the state. I think you had such struggles in the US with the greenback and so on. And yeah, it’s really a pity that it was not, at least, it has not been understood by theory. And then we would have seen where we went.

Scott: I have one more provocation for you. It’s something I wrestle with all the time. And the only word I can use to describe this sort of question that I pose for myself is topology. The way that we kind of spatialize money, the way we imagine money as a kind of spatial arrangement. Of course, money is temporal, as we’ve been talking about. But it is also spatial and we have different models and imaginaries of spatialization. Some might be more helpful than others. And in some of your answers to our questions, what I would say is that you were using a topology of what I might call adjacency, where you have a system here and a system over there. And then the question is the border and where they interface.

I definitely think that there is a lot of explanatory power in this adjacency model, but I also in my own work have found limits to this adjacency model. I don’t have the end-all be-all answer. However, I tend to find that what adjacency leaves out is a topology of nesting, of deputizing and nesting of small systems and big systems. This opens up possibilities for analysis, but also for creative provisioning that adjacency will not. I’m curious, how does that strike you? Does that make some sense? How would you respond to that?

Jens Martignoni: Absolutely. No, no, you’re absolutely right. So maybe I went a bit too far because in the sense that to have a clear picture or a clearer picture, you could use this adjacency model and to separate first everything a little bit and you see, ah, this is going from here to here and from here to here. But of course, this is not really the reality. As you say, everything is nested. And where is the point of, what do you say, nestiness? The point where everything is nested, of course, it’s me, it’s you. It’s the human. The human decision maker, the person who uses the money, is the multi-agent nester. So I have my emeralds, I have my Swiss francs, I have my dollars, I have my berkshires. And of course, if you start to include the human itself in this picture, then you will go back.

First, it becomes completely different again, but maybe you still can keep the systemic simplicity a little bit in the back. But you have to deal with other effects like psychological or every moment. For example, we have such stories that in like, I think even 200 years ago or 250 years ago, one person in Zurich had a purse with about 30 different currencies, coins. And so because it was always very small currencies like the canton had one, the city had another one. So, if you have to go to buy something you to pay in different currency for the same. I think if you would have this silver coin, Austrian silver coin, and I have Basel copper coins. No, no, no, the Basel ones I don’t want. They are not good. So give me, give me this one from Paris. Yeah, okay, okay. So it was more like that. And I think this is, this is an important tier where we have to research too, or later on, maybe if we have a clear picture of the first, we can go to the second and look, and maybe go back.

I see it more like this. And that’s very crucial, of course, also what’s happening inside, because money is a kind of hybrid technique. It somehow exists as a paper or even a number, but it somehow is only in our heads. It’s somehow a kind of mental. And it’s like a hybrid thing. And so this is a big issue, how we could deal with that. Yes.

Billy: It seems like a good place to conclude our conversation. Jens Martignoni, thank you so much for joining us on Money on the Left.

Jens Martignoni: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), William Saas & Scott Ferguson (transcription), & Robert Rusch (graphic art)

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Law & Political Economy with Martha McCluskey

Billy Saas and guest-host Ben Wilson speak with Martha McCluskey about the ins and outs of the Law & Political Economy movement. McCluskey is Professor Emerita at the University at Buffalo School of Law and a progressive institution-builder. She has made foundational contributions to feminist research and activism in and beyond the academy, focusing on interrelations between economic and legal institutions. A long-time organizer of the Class Crits project and president of the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL), McCluskey has recently spearheaded the new Law & Political Economy Collective, which insists that “a better understanding of law’s role in upholding the present distribution of wealth and state power is crucial to a more just, sustainable future.” McCluskey’s expertise with construction and maintenance of durable institutions for the development and circulation of socially- and politically-attuned critical legal scholarship gives good reasons for hope in this time of great political unease. 

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Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Billy: Martha McCluskey, welcome to Money on the Left.

Martha McCluskey: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Billy: It’s super exciting to have you. We want to talk about your research and so much more. But I feel like in the current political moment, it makes good sense to just do a temperature check and see where your head’s at–your read on the current political situation. Maybe to kick us off: Where are you finding hope these days?

Martha McCluskey: I’m finding hope in creative institutions like Money on the Left, for example. Institution building: I guess the situation is incredibly scary and daunting. But I guess it fits with a lot of the things that I’ve been focused on in my work over the years of why we need to be building institutions that address a lot of different things, but particularly institutions that connect economic ideas and policies with cultural and the social world. So I’m really appreciative of what you do and of some of the other not powerful enough and not resourced enough organizations that are trying to do that work on the ground and change people’s basic ideas about the economy, about society, about democracy.

Billy: I know we definitely share your commitment to building institutions for a meaningfully better world. Lord knows there’s lots of institutions out there, but we have a specific institution building in mind. As you note, that means that we also don’t really expect robust revenue streams to help us build these institutions. Maybe we can start off by talking about your work with APPEAL, the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and Law. Can you walk us up to your involvement with APPEAL by way of your research? What brought you to that moment and where is APPEAL now?

Martha McCluskey: Yeah, it’s part of our institution building and the institution building that I have made, I guess, a big part of my work over the years. APPEAL really is part of a network of institutions. And right now, APPEAL is restructuring, merging to form the Law and Political Economy Collective. Part of that is that APPEAL grew out of another organization that I co-founded back in 2007 called Class Crits. In part, that was an effort with my colleague, Athena Mutua, at the University of Buffalo Law School to recognize that there wasn’t enough focused attention within law on the rise of neoliberal economics and the central political fact of growing inequality and the power that was giving to the right to, in a lot of different ways, to exacerbate racial, gender, sexual divisions and inflame those cultural issues. But the purpose of Class Crits was particularly to resist some of the efforts within law to separate class analysis and economic injustice from the cultural issues like critical race theory, critical feminist theory.

Institutionally and ideologically, there was a big split. If you focused on economic questions in law and economic justice from an aggressive perspective, you were, by definition, outside of the circles of the work being done on race, gender, sexuality, and various other categories of identity. APPEAL became really active, held a number of conferences, and particularly one on the financial crisis in 2010. Out of that, I realized that it was really important for the kind of work we were doing to connect legal scholars who were interested in this vision with progressive economists because part of the problem of the neoliberal dominance of law during my career has been the reduction of economics, even among progressives, to the basic neoclassical model and particularly to the most neoliberal strands of that model. It really continues to be a challenge to even get mainstream center, centrist, center left legal scholars and law professors and law students to imagine that we could, that there is a whole long history and extensive, exciting, great work being done in heterodox economics, if you want to call it that. So, the idea of APPEAL was precisely to bring together some of the active groups working in heterodox economics outside the neoclassical model with law scholars, in part because we thought that within economics also there wasn’t enough understanding of law and especially critical perspectives on law.

The organizing moments of APPEAL came from connections I just happened to have with some economists at UMass Amherst, a big bastion of political, bastion of some heterodox progressive economic work and the Political Economic Research Institute, PERI, at that institution. Although it went on to be mostly led by law scholars, for a while we had a major conference at UMass that brought in a diversity of heterodox economists and aired some of the debates and discussions within that field, as well as really connecting that group to law. We’ve continued in that way.

Billy: Would part of that story be coming into contact at some point, I imagine, with the Modern Money Network and the folks at Columbia who were interestested. Rohan Gray, Raúl Carrillo, when they were there?

Martha McCluskey: It was really exciting back when Raúl and Rohan were students still, when was that? I think it was 2017, we held an APPEAL conference and it was Frank Pasquale, one of our co-founders, who said, “Hey, there’s these really cool students at Columbia doing interesting things with money because we were focused especially on questions of finance and the financial crisis and the aftermath of that.” So I said, “Hey, let’s invite them and give them a chance to speak, hear what they’re doing.” Oh, I think actually it was even earlier. It was in 2014 that Rohan attended the APPEAL analysis workshop and spoke about his work there. So, okay, I go back even earlier.

It was really exciting to have them and they really fired up our thinking, opened up a lot of creative discussions. And Bill Black also was a part of that 2014 conference and other workshops as well. So it’s something we’ve engaged in. I think we’re not limited to or even full of people who are clearly on board and identify with Modern Money Theory. But it’s certainly one of the things that we’ve wanted to keep in discussion and to integrate in different ways into legal analysis.

Billy: I think that’s one of the most exciting things about being a part of these growing nascent institutions and trying to have the conversations that I think we’re trying to have is that there’s really not much because there’s not much existing infrastructure. You need to go out and meet new people and have new conversations in different contexts where you might not have anticipated having them before. It’s a lot of new connections.

Martha McCluskey: That’s another part of APPEAL and the new Law and Political Economy Collective group that we’re forming the beginning of 2025 from that. We already have been working on it. Part of that is the idea of really being open to newer scholars, younger scholars, scholars with a diversity of institutional positions and to resist some of the hierarchy that’s especially prominent in legal academia. You know, whose work is is cool and whose work is not? It’s that collaborative spirit that we really try to keep in in mind in APPEAL,the practice of democratizing ideas that we’re hoping will become a bigger part of the larger political universe.

Benjamin: Thank you so much for your work. Your paper that describes the evolution of APPEAL was giving me flashbacks to reading John Henry’s The Making of Neoclassical Economics, really the way that neoclassical economics pushes out Keynesian economics and emerges through the 50s and 60s and eventually in the 70s, entangling itself with law in particular to really gain a foothold and its strength. One of the outcomes of that is the dwindling accessibility of doctoral training for economists in heterodox economics and I’m getting the sense in my reading of of your work that similar work has been done in the legal profession. I’m wondering how successful has LPE and other groups been at taking back some of that space? As a follow-up, I think one of the things that might be an interesting approach because most of us heterodox economists like myself, we get jobs at teaching colleges, right? These don’t offer R1 PhDs sorts of training. If there’s an ability to build out undergraduate chapters of APPEAL, where we could recruit from English majors and philosophy majors and history majors and people that would be well suited for the study of class, race, gender analysis, and the history and evolution of these institutions, I think might be a fun way to get undergraduates involved.

Martha McCluskey: That’s a really interesting idea. One of the things we’ve been doing the last couple of years with APPEAL is we’ve had a series of regional workshops in New York City. These workshops have been organized by graduate students in economics at the New School for Social Research and John Jay College of Criminal Justice Economics Department. The students have been really active in organizing the conferences, deciding the programs, and the workshops themselves have really featured especially student work and student presentations.

Most recently, the one we had this October, we had several graduate students from UMass Amherst who were part of the organizing team, especially valuable in that. We’re looking ahead to expanding that. We have groups of students who have been very active in the workshops as well and have ideas for continuing that work. But in terms of undergraduates, one of our APPEAL board members who’s been in the lead in running the workshops is Jamee Moudud at Sarah Lawrence College. He has brought many of his undergraduates into the workshops themselves and into various roles off and on for working with APPEAL. I think they actually have a long political economy chapter there that does some work.

So I think there is a lot of room for expanding the energy among undergraduates. Although, I also think it would be important to have more, obviously–more researchers, more opportunities for PhD work in heterodox economics, especially in programs that would integrate some study of law and see that as more fundamental to many of the questions of economics and economic institutions.

Billy: Maybe we can pull back and get a little more historical or stick with the historical view for a little longer. The division you described and the blockage between different domains of research and legal studies, would it be fair to describe that in terms of law and economics versus critical legal studies? Or was the division more nuanced than that? Can you walk us through the major moments in that history that we’ve been covering in broad terms so far–of Ben mentioning John Henry’s work on neoclassical economics and the law and economics movement–and eventually now, well, with what y’all are doing with the law and political economy? Could you walk us through that story?

Martha McCluskey: Yeah, I think the division is deeper than the law and economics versus critical race, critical gender theory. It’s deeper. You’re either someone who does work on an economic so-called subject or someone who does work on a cultural subject. It’s almost the way legal education, legal curriculums are structured. So that’s part of the problem.

But Law and Economics certainly was, I’d say, very focused on widening that divide and successful in doing so. There’s one story about the division between the economic and the political that’s in the “Law and Political Economy Manifesto,” the article that came out of the Yale Law and Political Economy Project. In around 2020, I think that was. However, that article is a different story than I have from my work in Law and Political Economy over the years coming out of Class Crits, APPEAL. But especially that I came to Law and Political Economy through feminism in law, especially, and in a time when I started in legal academia was in the mid-1990s, and the 1996 welfare reform law was center stage. That framed my whole thinking about economics and helped to build my work in that area. It’s an interest in that.

One of the most central institutions that for me has been Martha Fineman’s Feminism and Legal Theory workshops over the years. Those workshops in the 1990s and going for at least 15 years after focused specifically on critiques of economic concepts and economic theories from a lens that looked at gender, race, and many other status categories. That really has shaped my view.

Benjamin: Along those lines, I think one of the really cool ways that you develop your critique of neoclassical economics is that you foreground their understanding of individuality, scarcity, competition, and how that puts things like culture, social and environmental concerns on the second path. It’s the second stage in the argument. And you begin to develop questions and imaginings of starting with these values first, social, gender, cultural, environmental, and then how that shifts our perspective and our thinkings about value.

I’m wondering, in moving beyond critique, if you could share some of your more positive imaginings about what the world looks like or how law can be constructed to emphasize one of these positives in the foregrounding of the argument rather than as the second iteration, so to speak.

Martha McCluskey: One key thing that I have taken from the feminism and legal theory workshops over the years and from Martha Fineman’s work on vulnerability theory is it’s really a fundamental reframing of law. It doesn’t necessarily focus on any one specific policy. I think it’s a framing that perhaps says, how do we evaluate law and justice? And, of course, Law and Economics frames that as maximizing aggregate societal resources as determined by individual subjective preferences in their market transactions, something like that.

Benjamin: Price equals value.

Martha McCluskey: Right, right, right. Except when it doesn’t. What vulnerability theory does that directly shifts that frame–and shifts the frame away from mainstream liberalism across the political spectrum–is to say, first and foremost, what is the relationship between individual and society? It’s rejecting the sense that you can even conceptually divide them, or see these as a question of opposition, even though there are plenty of conflicts. And I think it’s the sense that what is the subject of law is the question that the vulnerability theory that Martha Feynman has helped to develop. That’s the central question.

What’s the subject of law? Who is the person who should be the focus of law and government and who’s the subject that should be the focus of our idea of social good? What is the ontological basis for determining what the good is? What makes a policy closer to justice or not? The answer that vulnerability theory provides is that everyone, everyone, it should be the human being for one thing, the actual embodied human being, not the formal abstract individual, which could be a corporate person or anything else. It’s that the actual human being should be the subject of politics, of economy, of law, of our ideas of the social good. So what does that do for our positive understanding what policies we should pursue?

Well, I think it helps us see that the fundamental responsibility of the state is not to facilitate individual autonomy as it is in much of liberal theory, both more progressive, more conservative versions of that. And of course, in neoclassical economics, instead, we should evaluate policies in terms of the sense that everyone has bodily needs, has developmental needs, is situated in, embedded in a web of social relationships and institutional relationships.

The focus should be on how the state’s obligation and legal obligations to provide for this universally shared need for collective support, but at the same time being very attuned to the fact that being embodied and embedded means we each have very particularized needs for support depending on that position.

Maybe, for example, rather than answering the welfare reform debate questions of “can we afford support for whom?” “Who is the most deserving?” “Who is incapable?” “Whose dependency deserves to be the focus of law and government support?” It’s a question of how we can develop policies that provide support broadly.

It shouldn’t be a question of “are men doing enough?” “Are women doing enough to provide for family care,” for example? Should care be given inside the home or outside the home for children? Instead a question of how can the state meet its responsibility and law facilitate providing support for all parents, all children and all embodied beings for the universal developmental needs we all have for collective care, for education, for particularized responses to our developmental needs. stage of life, given our mortality, our susceptibility to various risks, et cetera.

Benjamin: One of the one of our common reads on campus here at Cortland this semester is The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté, who’s really challenging.

One of the one of the themes in the book is challenging the mind-body duality, insisting that the functioning of the body influences how the brain operates and the brain changes the body.

Then he pushes that forward into the environment. His work and upstream medicine and environmental health are all pushing this understanding of healthcare goes beyond just treatment of patients. And I think economics and law could adapt some of these languages of the patients and the environment and, helping to ameliorate some of the inflammation, for lack of a better word that so many of our communities and, spaces that people really have a hard time with it. I just finished an LPE Blog that looked at Yelp ratings of retail stores across different types of neighborhoods and map them and demonstrated that they’re really much poor customer service and environments for shopping and historically redlined neighborhoods and things of this nature. There’s so much space for creative analysis through GIS and mapping for thinking through how we would begin to develop the types of policies or ideas for the support of human development that you’re speaking of.

Martha McCluskey: Right, right.

Billy: In our conversation with Martha Fineman–which I suggest everyone tune into as a partner episode–she disclosed quite a bit about how her personal life story influenced her turn to what ended up in her development of theory of vulnerability as a basic state or status of the subject. Certainly not asking you to share anything you’re not comfortable with, but can you talk to us about how you got to what you got to when you brought feminism to law and to these institution building projects that you’ve event? How did you end up where you are?

Martha McCluskey: Big question. One story that comes to mind is, let’s see. When I went to law school, when I got to law school, it was I was motivated by some of the my concerns about my interest in exploring how people can widely accept something as completely normal, that if they stop to think about it and were really focused on it more carefully, it would recognize, you know, this is really outrageous or absurd or irrational or injustice. The work of feminism in the 1970s and early 1980s was really inspirational or formative for me in exposing sexual harassment. Because in my undergraduate years in college, there were many, I had professors who were so inspired by the civil rights movement and talking about how we could have overlooked or accepted for so many years the racial segregation in the South, for example. And yet at the same time, our campus was full of visual, very visual and dramatic expressions of misogyny and violence against women and sexual harassment and, you know, what we’d call today “rape culture”. And they didn’t see that as somehow an issue.

But women on campus organized and I was part of a group that did some work on that. But the new work at the time in identifying sexual harassment and violence against women within law and the rise of feminist legal theory addressing that was a big motivating factor for me to go to law school. When I got to law school in the mid-1980s, it was on the heels of a somewhat successful strike by the clerical workers at the law school to increase their working conditions and pay. In response, the women, many women at the law school organized to address what they saw as problems with the gender inequality in the classroom in particular. So we developed this pattern of empirically tracking who spoke in law school classrooms and some of the other classroom dynamics, and then going to the faculty and, and asking them, you know, what do you think of this? How can we better support women in the classroom? And we made packs to support each other and to change the classroom dynamics. And one of the classes where we started to do this was my federal income tax class. And we went to the professor and he said, oh, wow, I am all for feminism. I really, you know, I really support what you all are doing. But of course, federal income tax has nothing to do with, you know, the subject of gender.

I took that as a challenge and I said, okay, I’m going to do a paper and address a question of gender. I was particularly interested in how the idea of income was thoroughly gendered in practice. It just struck me as one of those economic concepts that seems so straightforward and normal. But when you look into how it operates in the law, it is all about constructing and distributing economic power. That also got me really interested in money, by the way. Before I had any of the insights from the various money scholarship that’s been going on with you folks and others. But the idea that money does not represent value, real value. At the same time, money does create and distribute real value in really important ways. So it’s worth paying attention to.

Billy: Yeah, well, maybe we could follow that strand a little bit.

Is it as simple as earlier in our conversation, you talked about coming into contact with folks at UMass Amherst and then the various conferences and seminars in the late 2000s and 2010s? What was your contact like, such as it was, with money theory or ideas about money leading up to that point? And do you remember first coming into contact with the money question and how it relates to these issues?

Martha McCluskey: Well, another big thing that formed me, it wasn’t academic scholarship directly, but I was working after law school as an attorney in the Maine State Public Advocate Office, which was charged with utility regulation and also workers’ compensation insurance regulation for a while.

In that job, the question, the routine question was, okay, what rates are fair and reasonable? In the case of workers’ comp, which I focused on, there was a constant question between the insurance companies coming in and saying, “oh dear, all the benefits for injured workers are just too expensive.” We have to raise the rates. You know, the workers are bringing more claims than we expected or maybe more questionable claims.

We have to keep charging businesses more. Of course, the businesses couldn’t resist it strongly and said, actually, this is going to be damaging to the state with some legitimate concerns. And the whole thing assumed that the insurance, the question of what are fair and reasonable insurance rates would be determined by these very technical quantitative analyses by highly paid actuaries, econometricians, and, you know, way beyond what I had any grasp of. But nobody was asking the basic questions. Okay, what’s the role of the insurance companies besides just tacking on a profit margin? What are they doing? And how is this financial, this financing system actually governing the whole system?

That’s what I focused on and with some other allies. And, you know, it turned out that we were able to show that there was a lot of room for insurance companies to actually play an active role in promoting safety, fair return to work, to really supporting the businesses, and ending that zero-sum question of, okay, who should we – win businesses or workers. And of course, workers are dependent on businesses. So it’s always the businesses who win. I think that really, that was a crystallizing moment for me in saying that financing is about governance. And it’s an enormously under-appreciated area to dig into the underlying questions of power and to get out of the really tough zero-sum debates about who deserves to, you know, be the winner and find ways of really shifting our imagination about what it, you know, how some of these basic economic institutions could work better for everyone–pretty much everyone except a few, in this case, AIG’s global profits.

Benjamin: The power story is really interesting about how they determine setting rates through these complex algorithms and econometrics. We see the same thing in the health economics chapters where they’re talking about the efficiency and the cost minimization of markets and these various markets for health services. Then they digress into this complex explanation about how pharmaceuticals price their drugs and how insurance companies determine rates for different classes of people and how they use these different metrics. It all becomes super confusing.

But one of the things that they never address is that the market is no longer determining the price anymore. Right? And that we don’t really have a good discussion about how we’re determining price. And if the market’s not doing it, then all the claims of fairness and the starting point that they articulate to protect these market institutions fall by the wayside because it’s no longer about equal exchange or neutral spaces. It’s about the folks to get to determine who these prices are. So one of the things that stuck out in my reading of some of your work is that discussion of value filters and developing different organizations. Have you come across other sorts of value filters or mechanisms or tools for countering the dominance of the profit narrative and efficiency and cost, etc.?

Martha McCluskey: Hmm. I guess those value filters focused more on how organizations run and the difficulties, the challenges of forming institutions and organizations on the ground, even within the small efforts of a long political economy, for example. How do we bring people together and help them work together across our inevitable differences and, you know, informed coalitions?

Benjamin: For example, if an insurance company was organizing and bringing together patients and doctors and customers along those lines, instead of always thinking about what is the extraction rate or the gateway, how much do we have to stop people from the threat of over-consuming medicine?

Martha McCluskey: Yeah. I mean, it’s not about their individual personal values like it is in an organization. I think we’re really trying to assemble people in a governing team. I think in the cases that you’re referring to that I’m imagining with insurance companies, it’s about setting up the systems that will do that, the underlying structural systems.

Like with insurance companies, I guess one lesson I come away with from my time doing that regulatory work was that the only way to keep those value filters going in the way that I would want in a progressive, democratizing, egalitarian direction, the only way is to change the interests and the structure of the interest governing the insurance companies. I mean, what we were able to do successfully is to break up the dominance of the private global commercial insurance industry in the state and to form a mutual, basically employer-run, semi-public, semi-private insurance company that arguably better delivered services both for workers and employers to some extent. Ideally, the real solution in my mind was in Maine and in other states to make that insurance should be governed by the stakeholders in a much more subject to much more stringent limits on outside interests. and, you know, to protect a more democratic governance and accountable governance structure.

Not only insurance, but especially the information that drives insurance, that states insurance data should be a public good, And there should be rules for public access, public scrutiny and resources for advocacy groups like my office for a brief time in Maine that were able to analyze the data and counter the insurance company arguments. So it’s about governance and about more democratic governance.

Billy: Yesterday, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy laid out in an opinion editorial for the Wall Street Journal their plans for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). There’s a number of things we could say about this, but one of the things that’s been interesting for me to try to do is to look for the continuities rather than get hung up on the most glaring discontinuity or the most glaring and spectacular aspects of this. They’re the big heroic entrepreneurs are coming in to fix Washington and Elon Musk is larger than life and offensive character. But comparing the institution that they’re purporting to bring or hoping to bring and the effects, the outcomes that they’re after to previous administrations. And how this emphasis on rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse and assuming the worst when it comes to government can be traced. You know, a lot of people are making the comparison.

I’m not the only one to say this, but the Obama administration, the first Obama administration coming in with its commission on fiscal responsibility–Bowles-Simpson–promising to balance the budget and reduce the deficit and all of that. One of the things that looking at the DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, this way does for us could be to illuminate just how unimaginative the left can be, has been about the place of government in, you know, producing an actually affirmatively better world that provides for a vulnerable subject, right? In ways that the current system doesn’t. As someone who is also interested in institutions and thinking institutionally a lot, I’d be really interested in your vision, such as it is, or if you have any, of what it left alternative to something like the Department of Government Efficiency might look like. We haven’t seen it at the national or federal level. What would it look like in your mind? Or, is that even something we should be chasing? Should it be something completely different in terms of its form?

Martha McCluskey: Wow, good question. One of the central themes of my work across a lot of different topic areas has been challenging the division between efficiency and equity, or could be whether you want to call it economic welfare or welfarism versus redistribution. That’s been a central theme because I resist what I see among left politics of saying, okay, there’s efficiency, but it’s not enough. Let’s focus more on distribution and, okay, how do we get power for redistribution? Efficiency is somehow a bad concept. And I think efficiency as it’s used is a quite deceptive idea, but that the damaging work that happens is in the rhetorical separation between efficiency or maximizing the pie on equity or dividing the so-called pie of societal resources–that the very idea that you can talk about efficiency without centrally making assumptions and implementing major judgments of value and political, you know, contested value-laden decisions and political decisions about who gets what, what matters and what doesn’t.

Actually, I think it’s really vital for scholars and critical people on the left, as well as activists, to grab hold of the idea of efficiency, maybe not using that term exactly, but maybe using it and turning it around. Because the idea of what is the public good, that’s really all the efficiency is about. It can be twisted in any way. The economic stuff around it is never used in a very determinate fashion. It’s a way of evading and depoliticizing the question of the public good.

But it’s a really important question. What are the resources that really are vital to our shared well-being and to our individual power within a collective system? I think that’s drawing on the vulnerability theory, for example. It’s as human beings, the resources that are the most scarce are not money. The resources that are scarce are our very particular bodily existence and the meaning and beauty and joy that we can get from that. And of course, that includes the environment. I think that an office of government efficiency would be great to have a shadow office of government efficiency, maybe. I think it would be really great to draw on, I think, a real legitimate popular sense that government isn’t giving us what matters.

Now, Elon Musk is not going to be the one that is going to answer that in a way that I think addresses what people are really concerned about. But if we had an Office of Government Efficiency, it would be to say that every, you know, that we should have much more robust supports for health, for education, for parenting, for disability, for all the needs of human existence, for environmental quality. That it would also provide a rhetorical and political details, stories, narratives about the way that those resources are generated, not by private individual transactions, but by the distribution of coordination, collective power, and that the government is central to doing that. Law is one way that access to collective of institutional power is generated. There’s a million ways in which the, yeah, that giving people power, whether it’s through unions to maximize the pie of support for workers is one thing, whether giving people the resources to support their families in terms of the developmental and bodily needs of family members, care, environment. So the jobs guarantee perhaps would be central to that.

Billy: Yeah, I wonder if maybe we could, you know, think of a Department of Government Abundance and Efficiency. Efficiency about managing abundance. But then also, those scarce resources are families, are relationships, are bodies. I think I’m into that idea of repurposing efficiency in that direction. I think the other thing that is maybe a discontinuity or distinct about the Department of Government of Efficiency as it threatens to come into existence Senator Musk and Ramaswamy is the unmitigated, unqualified enthusiasm and confidence and zeal that they’re bringing to the table here. They are so clear about what they want to do and how they want to do it. Maybe more important than that and more clear than that is there. I think there’s an enthusiasm. There’s a joy in it. A perverted joy, right? At the expense of others, literally. But I think that so often when progressive left ideas are even tentatively introduced on the national scale, it is with an apology and a doubt built in. I’m wondering if part of that alternative would have to be, this is how it is, this is how it’s going to go. And, you know, of course, leave out the mean-spirited, racist, misogynist, repudiate those outright. An affirmative alternative that embraces abundance and acknowledges the need for efficiency confidently and enthusiastically. Not so much a question, but a riff there.

Martha McCluskey: Yeah, yeah. That enthusiasm, that energy is interesting. And yes, ambition, ambitious ideas. My work has focused also over the years on the right and how the right in law and economics and in law and economics as a field has been built. Really ambitious and ambitious in its ideas, ambitious in its institution building, and ambitious in its confidence in a way in law, which is not what it says in its dogma, in its precepts, but it’s been a movement, like the amount of the investment in legal education, for example, and law and economics is huge. The excitement of building the Federalist Society and the octopus of Koch funded and Olin funded law and economics, you know, centers, institutions, law school. I think all of that shows an energy for both of these, with some intellectual value, the rethinking a lot of basic premises and institutions and being willing to say, no, we can, we can, you know, radically overhaul the Supreme Court, we can radically overhaul the idea of what it means to be rational as a policymaker, etc. So I’m all for that ambition. I also want to think you’re, this question raised, it reminds me of an article I wrote, “Are We Economic Engines, Too?” that talked about the way in which the whole idea of efficiency, of productivity, of like ambitious efforts to jumpstart innovation in the economy and to cut out waste, how that idea is thoroughly gendered.

And that goes back to a lot of the, even to my work in welfare reform. What do we think of as productive and not just gendered, but a construction of masculinity and masculine, white masculinity, white masculine ability to disrupt and sweep away what is an individual and institute dramatic change, but dramatic change that particularly relies on discrediting, discounting, and to some extent destroying mechanisms of accountability and shared governance. So I think that this idea of putting an emblem of toxic masculinity in charge or several of them in charge of government efficiency and making law and government into the sense of, “oh, that’s the wasteful friction.” “Those are the transaction costs.” “That’s what gets in the way of what really is the source of prosperity and power.” Instead of saying, no, where this power actually comes from is, you know, Musk’s fortunes have been made on, you know, getting government support and government protection and special deals.

Billy: What’s on the agenda for the next year or so, or what are you working on?

Martha McCluskey: Given the context, I am more focused on institution building in various ways than on, you know, writing another article immediately. I’m working on jumpstarting this new organization, our newly developed organization, the Law and Political Economy Collective, and trying to move forward with some of the work we’re doing with students, particularly and to more globally and in many ways build a vibrant Law and Political Economy movement, but one that perhaps takes more attention to some of the questions like of gender and of resisting the hierarchies within legal education. and beyond and is able perhaps to engage more on the ground in this time. That’s one thing.

In terms of my own work, I’m also interested eventually in looking at nonprofits and the ways in which money is governed and hidden and politicized or not through or mystified through the nonprofit industrial complex here. That in part comes from the work I did within the higher education system at SUNY on the power of private, seemingly so-called ostensibly private foundations. I’m interested in the ways in which public money is privatized by setting up so-called private or in practice private foundations that are privately governed, often not transparently in a university context, but also, say, by police forces.

All kinds of areas of government are being undemocratized, taken out of public view by using the assets of public institutions and public resources to generate private funds that then can be used in ways that would not stand the light of day. That’s one thing, but also the power, I’m also interested in the enormous power of nonprofits to advance industry interests and right-wing interests. The Koch network is a great example of that, but the way in which it’s not just a problem of profit that we have to deal with, But the way in which, you know, I think it’s the nonprofits channel coordination rights and the power that emanates from that outside of democratic spheres and against the interests of justice and the survival of humanity.

Billy: Any other places we should direct folks attention to, to look out for some of this work?

Martha McCluskey: Yeah, well, the Law and Political Economy Collective has a website with that name, and we’re building that out. And, and that’s, again, an umbrella organization that encompasses APPEAL, Class Crits, and an organization that grew out of the Law and Society Association, the global law and political economy network. So, we’ve encouraged people to stay in touch through that umbrella and participate in our, the events that we’re planning on, especially for this group, networking with economic students and law students and building relationships in that sector.

Billy: Martha McCluskey, thank you so much for your time and for joining us here on Money on the Left. I really enjoyed it.

Martha McCluskey: Thanks. This is great. Appreciate all your work and look forward to more.

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), William Saas & Scott Ferguson (transcription), & Robert Rusch (graphic art)

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Money, Modernism & Inflation in The Great Gatsby (Part 2)

Rob and Scott return to their dialog about modernism, inflation, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s celebrated 1925 novel The Great Gatsby (click here for Part 1). During their conversation, our co-hosts forge connections between the novel’s many complications of time and space and the attitudes to money and identity explored in the first part of this mini-series. For instance, they consider The Great Gatsby’s unusual manner of imagining the spatial dis/connectedness of West Egg, the ‘Valley of Ashes’ and New York City; the strange ways in which characters seem to be passively ‘borne’ between these locations; the ambiguous role that bonds of various kinds play in the text; and Nick Carraway’s blurry impressionist method of narrating (or accounting for) the events of the story. Along the way, Rob and Scott revisit one of the text’s most enduring symbols, the elusive figure of the green light, which burns bright from the end of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s dock on Long Island Sound. Associated both with U.S. money and the marvel of electricity, the novel’s green light points to the powers of public provisioning that conduct modern life and serves as a mysterious beacon of hope in which, we’re told, Gatsby continues to believe until the end. For Rob and Scott, this green light reveals the novel’s “political unconscious,” here understood as the process by which a repressed history of public provisioning nevertheless comes to contour the modern novel’s many formal and affective constructions. Finally, our co-hosts point to the U.S. government’s mass printing of copies of The Great Gatsby for its G.I.s during WW2, an act of public provisioning that proved foundational for the subsequent widespread popularity of Fitzgerald’s book and its canonization of as a classic of American literary modernism. Novel printer go brrr…!

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me” EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

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Artists in Academia with Tim Ridlen

We speak with Tim Ridlen about his new book, Intelligent Action: A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia (Rutgers University Press, 2024). Ridlen holds a PhD in Art History from the University of California, San Diego and is currently Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Film, Animation, and New Media at the University of Tampa. In Intelligent Action, Ridlen challenges dominant readings of mid-20th Century art preoccupied with critiques of the commodity form by shifting critical focus from the familiar spaces of the gallery & museum to the contested scenes of US higher education. 

Through archival research and analysis of artworks by Gyorgy Kepes, Allan Kaprow, Mel Bochner, and Suzanne Lacy, among others, Intelligent Action examines how these artists brought alternatives to dominant conceptions of research and knowledge production. The book is organized around specific institutional formations—artistic research centers, proposals, exhibitions on college campuses, and the establishment of new schools or pedagogic programs. Formal and social analysis demonstrate how artists responded to ideas of research, knowledge production, information, and pedagogy. Works discussed were produced between 1958 and 1975, a moment when boundaries between media were breaking down in response to technological, cultural, and generational change. In the context of academia, these artistic practices have taken up the look, feel, or language of various research and teaching practices. In some cases, artists bent to the demands of the cold war research university, while in others, artists developed new modes of practice and pedagogy. Reading these works through their institutional histories, Ridlen shows how artistic research practices and artistic subjectivity developed in the long 1960s within and alongside academia, transforming the role of artists in the process.

During our discussion, we consider the significance of Ridlen’s theorization of “intelligent action” for a democratic politics centered around public money, educational provisioning, and aesthetic experimentation. 

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

Scott: Tim Ridlen, welcome to Money on the Left.

Tim Ridlen: Thank you. I’m really excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Scott: We have invited you onto the podcast to discuss your brand new book from Rutgers University Press titled Intelligent Action, A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia. Before we get into this book, what its arguments are, what its big stakes are, we’d like to invite you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself, something about your professional background, perhaps your personal background, and how you came to write this interesting and compelling new book. 

Tim Ridlen: Sure. I will start a little bit before my turn towards a more scholarly form of practice, because it’s relevant to the book. I went to an art school in Chicago, the School of the Art Institute. I was headed towards becoming an art practitioner. I went on to do an MFA. Then, I was working freelance in New York, trying to do the art thing, trying to make a go of it, while also doing things like freelance artist assisting, freelance art handling for galleries and things like that. An important detail: during that time, I worked for this organization called e-flux, to which I refer in the introduction of the book. We can talk a little bit about why that’s important later. But I was always academically minded, even as I was artistically focused. And I think the experience of living in New York and not knowing where my next paycheck was going to come from prompted me to look at options. That’s when I decided to go into a PhD program. The PhD program that I went into was one of the first programs that was specifically for art practice. The way that it was set up though, was through an existing art history PhD program. You do all the training of an art historian, and then they call it a “concentration in art practice.” This was at the University of California, San Diego. I thought, “Well, that fits.” I think I could get into that program, first of all, and it fits with how I see myself. I went into that program thinking that I was going to continue making art, being an artist, finding a way to reconcile that with my more academic interests. That is what happened to a degree. Then the book project proved to be a culmination of a successful transition to more academic scholarly modes of producing work. Though I haven’t really made a lot of art recently, I nevertheless continue to think of myself as an artist, occupying a weird split between writing and thinking about other people’s art and potentially creating my own.

I mention all that because that is relevant to the topic of the book, the book being about artists in academia. It really came out of the experience of going into this PhD program. It was a pretty new PhD program and a new idea that artists should even think about getting PhDs. I entered this very self-reflexive mode because there was a lot of conversation going on about PhDs for artists, even if that was more in Europe. As for this program in the U.S., it wasn’t really clear if it was going to take off. To be honest, I’m not really so sure if it has even now. You know, this was around 2011 that I went into that program. At that time, there were lots of conversations and conferences for the College Art Association about whether or not this was going to become the new terminal degree. That, of course, hasn’t really come to pass. What has come to pass, however, is that there’s a lot of interest in artistic research. I thought maybe this will be a trend  during this time that I was working on this project. And I wasn’t really sure if it would come back. But what certainly was also at play is that there was a lot of interest in artists and education, not just, how do we educate artists in colleges and universities or art schools, but educational structures as potential forms for art making and art exhibiting. So, maybe we’re getting into the territory of the book now. Coming back to this organization that I worked for, e-flux: They were a big part of that around 2008, 2009, when I started working there.

Around that time, as a result of this interest in Europe and PhD programs for artists and artistic research, in addition to certain events that were connected to the artists who run e-flux, people started to talk about an “educational turn” in art. Then when you talk to people who’ve been around a little bit longer, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, this always comes back every 10 years.” So, this is not really anything new. But at the time, it seemed like there was an interest in education and artistic research, and those things are connected, but not necessarily the same. That’s a longish answer to the question of how I came about it. And there’s a little bit more. I would like to share a little bit more about e-flux just because it explains where I was coming from when I started the project.

E-flux is this artist-run organization. It’s not a nonprofit, and it’s not just a gallery space or something. So, I always have a hard time describing exactly what it is. But people probably know it mostly because of their email announcement service. They send out email announcements for exhibitions, and museums pay them. Basically, it’s advertising. And this money funds all kinds of interesting projects. Now, it funds a very reputable and influential journal. Not an academic journal in the sense that it’s not peer reviewed; but it is leading a lot of intellectual conversations in the art world. A lot of that came out of the artists Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda, who were the artists behind e-flux. They started to use the revenue that they were generating to do some very interesting projects, one of which was the Martha Rosler Library. That’s the example that I open the book with. Martha Rosler is an artist who is best known for her work in the 1970’s as a conceptual artist. One of her best known pieces is this photo-conceptual piece called “The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems.” In that piece, Rosler is critiquing documentary photography, critiquing systems of language and the way that they construct our ideas of the social world. It’s a very 1970’s kind of piece.

So, Martha Rosler is this artist that the artists at e-flux were looking to as a source of inspiration and legacy. Their project, “Martha Rosler Library,” took all of Rosler’s books and put them on display. They rented a space in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which just so happened to be exactly the neighborhood where, or blocks from the Bowery, where she had taken the images for the original project. And they exhibited her books. It was treated as an artwork at the same time that it was really just her personal library. And when you ask them about it, ask Martha Rosler or the artists at e-flux about it, they say: “Well, this started because she was looking for a place. She needed to move her books. She was looking for a space to store them. And they were like, let’s exhibit them.” It was a very successful project.

After its first exhibition in New York, it toured all over Europe. That was part of this educational turn–people were starting to get interested in thinking about artists as not just people that make paintings or do projects, but as people that study and research and read. What do they read? Let’s look at that. That became an interesting thing to actually exhibit as the artwork itself. Another other thing—although I don’t talk about this in the book–is there was at the time an exhibition called “Manifesta.” I mean, there still is. It’s a biennial exhibition. At the time, Anton Vidokle, the artist from e-flux, was invited to be one of the curators for this biennial. And the whole format for that biennial was they were going to run it like an art school. They were going to invite, they actually did, in fact, invite artists to apply. Then the idea was that they would come to Cyprus. They would come there and basically instead of an exhibition, it would be like a school. They would invite artists to teach classes and run seminars and that kind of thing. This was in the air when I started that project.

And that’s what interested me in approaching it and taking it on as a subject.

Billy: So in your research, like any good dissertation, it’s part biographical. Did you find that your turn to academe and your reasons for it were common among those artists that you looked into in the 60’s? Was it a way to bide time-slash subsidize your artwork?

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, I think that’s definitely it. Like I said, I was looking for institutional support. There’s all kinds of places you can get that kind of support. It’s not going into academia, but that was what I thought would work for me. And I think that definitely resonates with the artists that I was looking into.

People like Alan Kaprow, who is a major figure in the book, he’s got a great quote where he says something like, “You know, I used to think teaching was a way to buy the groceries. But, you know, now I’ve come to realize that it’s much, much more than that.” He admitted that at the beginning, it was a way to pay the bills. But then he starts to, throughout his career, engage more and more with academia as a site and a format that allows him to do more participatory kinds of work. So, I try to contest this narrative that art became more academic. That’s the standard line that you’ll get from people like Howard Singerman, who has a major book on the art schools and artists in universities.

He traces the history of the MFA degree. That book is very well-researched, I don’t disagree with anything that’s in it, but it tells the story of a tendency towards more academic development towards academia that culminates in the 70’s. I guess there’s truth to that; but I also try to point out that artists like Alan Kaprow were working in universities in the 1950’s, and not just working in universities, but making that a central component of their work. That actually starts much earlier. It has important consequences, especially for alternatives to engaging with ideas about research in academia.

Scott: One of the big claims for your whole project is putting pressure on a certain dominant reading of mid-late 20th century U.S. art that is pretty preoccupied with the problem of commodification, right? Could you talk about who’s behind those kinds of arguments? What are they really saying? And what does shifting the scene from the gallery or the museum to academia as a heterogeneous institution do to complicate this false story that’s out there?

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, I like that you call it a false story. It’s part of a larger position that in the book I also talk about. People like Boltanski and Chiappello have the idea that that the artistic protests of 1968 in France were somehow co-opted.

I do see this as part of a larger position out there. But to get to the question about who’s behind this idea of art as a critique of the commodity and what my response to that is, I mean, who’s not? Who’s not behind that idea in the sense that it’s a pretty mainstream way to understand the turn towards conceptual art? You could trace it all the way back to people like Clement Greenberg, to Abstract Expressionism and the idea of an autonomous work of art that is supposed to somehow be a refuge or a holdout from the commodification of everything else and every other part of our life.

So it starts with people like Greenberg, but of course, the big bête noire in the book is Benjamin Buchloh. Buchloh is a very respected art historian who has a famous seminal essay on conceptual art, where he critiques the turn towards language and information and what people had at the time called the “dematerialization” of art. Of course, there’s lots of questioning about whether art ever really dematerialized. In any case, Buchloh critiques conceptual art because he sees it as a breakdown between the role of the artist and the critic. He says there’s a separation of powers between people making art and people critiquing art and conceptual artists went too far in critiquing art. And he proposes that this is a dialectical process that began with Marcel Duchamp and Duchamp’s ready-mades. It then culminates in conceptual art. Buchloh thinks that the way out of this is a mode of art practice known as “institutional critique.” But what I’m trying to get at here is that Buchloh’s claim really functions to bring back into art practice some bounded form. Conceptual art broke the boundaries of what could be considered the artwork and what could be considered criticism, whereas institutional critique used the exhibition format or the institution itself as the container within which the artwork would be held so that it doesn’t spill over into some other role that I guess the critics are supposed to be in charge of.

Billy: Could you say something about the examples of that artist as critic? You mentioned Duchamp, but for listeners who may not have ready access, we’re talking about the toilet, right?

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, we’re talking about the toilet. We’re talking about “Fountain” (1917).

It’s starting with Duchamp, where he exhibits this urinal turned on its side. He gives it a title, calls it “Fountain,” submits it to this exhibition that was supposedly trying to be more open, trying to be more open to other kinds of work. And he does this under a false name, knowing that, of course, they will reject it because it’s ridiculous. Then writes about it, not revealing that he was actually the one that presented it.

He claims that it’s an artwork because the artist chose it. It’s an artwork because he gave it a title and that gives a new thought to the object. That’s the impulse that conceptual art runs with this idea that you can transform something into a work of art through the thought or, or through language. So conceptual artists starting in the mid-60’s start to really pick up on this idea that art can be an idea, that it doesn’t have to take a form or any one form, that art can be engaged with language.

There’s different flavors of conceptual art. There’s capital C conceptual art as a movement. And then there’s also conceptualisms and a lot of interest in talking about global conceptualisms. How did this turn in the 1960’s take place in different places? But by and large, conceptual art is an ontological break with how the artwork has been defined or how it has been contained. So, now you can have different iterations of artworks that are the exemplary materializations of the idea.

One of the figures I talk about in the book is a curator named Elayne Varian, who was at this college on the Upper East Side of New York. And she inadvertently was really important in developing conceptual art with the artist Mel Bochner. Mel Bochner is another seminal conceptual artist who is working with her on these exhibitions, sometimes as a co-curator, sometimes just as one of the exhibiting artists. They talk about this in “Art in Process” exhibition, this idea that artworks are just exemplary materializations of the idea. They make the point that the artwork is not just what you see on display, but somewhere else. And that’s why people say, well, it’s dematerializing, but of course, it always needs to take some form, I guess, in order to be exhibited. So, it’s not exactly correct to say that they’re dematerializing, but perhaps the idea that artworks take exemplary forms or exemplary materializations in different places at different times, and they can be, you know, fragmented or dispersed. The word that I use in the book is actually associated with the artist Mel Bochner. He talks about decentralized aesthetic experience, that the artwork can be decentralized. That’s one way to think about it.

Other conceptual artists were more invested in analytical philosophy. The idea that artwork was a proposition, that something like Duchamp’s “Fountain” was simply a proposition. This is an artwork, and therefore, it’s within the logic of analytical philosophy. But I think the other strains like Mel Bochner’s are more interesting because they don’t get lost in the instrumental logic of analytical philosophy.

Scott: To pick up on the latter part of my question, how would you say your shift of focus in this history to academic institutions and the figure of the artist as researcher in some more conformist and some more radical ways, how does that challenge the going fall story that’s perpetuated by a figure like Benjamin Buchloh about the decline of mid-century art.

Tim Ridlen: Yeah. Thank you for bringing me back to that, because that’s an important point. So in challenging the idea that the turn to conceptual art was a critique of the commodity, that wasn’t something that I set out to do. That was something that I came upon because I was looking at these artists who were working in academia. And what I started to see there is that if you think about what artists were doing as a response to what people in academia were doing, specifically, you know, Cold War researchers, you saw a development, you know, you could think about it as a, in some cases, as a critique of knowledge production, as opposed to the commodity fetish. So if there’s a critique to be had there, it was a, or, you know, intervention that these artists were making, it wasn’t just about the commodity formula.

It certainly was in some spaces, right? But when you turn your attention to the university and academia and what research was supposed to be at that time, you see something different. You just see a little bit more, you see a different understanding of what creativity is or what art making is about, what it’s meant to do. And you get a little bit away from the idea that art making is about producing objects. And you get closer to the idea that art making is a process of, I don’t want to say producing knowledge, but a little bit, that’s where it starts out. The expectation for artists in academia is that they would be producing knowledge. But in fact, what artists do often, the artists that I look at, at least, and the ones that I’m interested in, they don’t just focus on producing knowledge. They focus often on creating experiences, right? Aesthetic experience. And that doesn’t always look like producing knowledge the way that it did for other Cold War researchers, right?

What that leads to is a transformation of who the artist is. And the way I talk about it in the book is that it’s not really just about literally what were artists doing, but what does it mean to be an artist for society, for people outside of academia? What do they think of as the artist’s role or what an artist does? And what I observe and argue for in the book is that in the attempt on the part of these artists to engage with and challenge knowledge production, they end up reconfiguring the artist as somebody who is, you know, it moves away from this idea of the artist as creative genius and visionary sole author of this artwork and towards something where the artist is actually engaged in society, engaged in the world. And that doesn’t necessarily mean producing objects, but it means engaging in the social sphere. So it leads into socially engaged art practices and examples of that. I mean, Martha Rosler is an example of that. Somebody who starts out as a conceptual artist and then, you know, especially with some of her projects becomes more of a socially engaged artist where she’s doing things, projects in New York that are engaged with, you know, housing, the housing crisis in New York in the 80’s. So, the upshot of all this engagement with the university is not just a more academic art, but it is a socially engaged art where it moves from university to the wider polis. So for folks like Buchloh, conceptual art is a bridge too far.

Billy: So for folks like Buchloh, conceptual art is a bridge too far. For whatever else it is, it’s undermining the traditional, conventional infrastructures and institutions of art, capital A. And this is happening at a time where there’s thought to be all sorts of threats to tradition, convention and the moral foundation of, you know, in the context of the United States the U.S. polity, could you talk a little bit about how that may or may not have been coded or understood by folks like Buchloh or the concept the work of the conceptual artist might have been perceived by folks at the time and and since then as participating in some way in, you know, the great communist conspiracy or, on the other hand, the great CIA conspiracies of the time in the heat of the Cold War.

Tim Ridlen: I’m not sure if I can totally speak to what Buchloh, how Buchloh would have read these conceptual artists in the context of the Cold War.

But what I can say, I think what’s relevant to your question here is that there were some artists engaging. I mean, there’s, I’m trying to think here. The artists that I discuss in the book, conceptual artists are one group of artists that I discuss. They’re a stop along the way in this trajectory for artists in universities. And really, these artists in universities start out more pressured by the demands of the Cold War, which is to say that, We must produce, you know, we’re going to fund works that really produce basic research without necessarily knowing what that might lead to.

So, you know, Vannevar Bush’s statement on universities was that research is this endless frontier–some artists like György Kepes at MIT really bought into this idea that artists should try to be like researchers. He conformed to these expectations in ways that other artists did not. Artists that I look at who are at Rutgers University, Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts, and George Brecht who wasn’t teaching at Rutgers, but he was part of their milieu. They paid lip service to some of these demands that the universities should be helping to fight the Cold War through developing research. They paid lip service in some places to get money, but they were also very critical of this idea. They point out that basic research in the sciences really serves technology. You alluded to the space race and things like that, but it’s less clear what basic research in the arts leads to. They arrive at this answer that it leads to a reconfiguration of subjectivity, through what it looks like to be an artist, and that becomes a model for what it looks like for other people, for what the experience of life is like in this late 20th century.

Scott: It actually reminds me of an episode we did with a professor of dance, Colleen Hooper, years ago. I think it was during our first season. She conducted important research into the CETA programs under Nixon, which were poorly designed to address unemployment and had all kinds of stipulations attached to the public monies that were being allocated for this purpose. But a bunch of artists across fields and media, including dancers and dance choreographers, they were canny.They saw a chance to have financial and institutional support and to build up whatever they were doing.

They changed their identities and their rhetorical frames to gain access to this support. But then at the same time, they ended up variously challenging the power-structures-that-be, some in more radical ways than others. All that’s happening actually at the same time as the art researchers that you’re talking about.

This is not to excuse them, the ones that are more in line with the Cold War science research model that’s serving American militarized commercial imperialism around the globe. But it’s to say that there’s another lesson here in seizing an institution, seizing a funding opportunity and experimenting with that.

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, exactly. And that’s exactly the point that I try to make in the book is that these artists were engaging with what other scholars have called the knowledge-based polis. But my argument is they engage with this knowledge-based polis only then to expand that to the polis at large. That becomes this starting point. And the way that it happens is multifaceted.

I should say, Buchloh is a Marxist. I’m not sure if I made that clear, but he is influenced by Greenberg and Adorno and Frankfurt School thinking. So, what would he make of all this? How was he thinking about this in relation to the Cold War? He was just through and through a Frankfurt school art critic. So that bears pointing out and clarifying.

Scott: He’s not afraid of any communist conspiracies. He is the communist conspirator.

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, he’s not a traditionalist by any means. He’s thought of, he’s part of October, the leading art journal that is still probably today considered the most, you know, rigorous. He’s the most representative Frankfurt School person among October critics. But yeah, the October critics are not concerned about artists being communists.

Billy: Well, I mean, it’s happening in the context of all this. I guess, is all of this contest and debate and innovation happening somehow insulated from the broader politics of the time? I’m just trying to get a sense for how shaped it is by the Red Scare, essentially, in any way, shape, or form. 

Tim Ridlen: Conceptual art is a fulcrum. It’s a moment, it’s a particular turning point. And that’s not my argument. A lot of people make that argument. Peter Osborne, art historian, talks about how all contemporary art can be explained as conceptual art, that now that conceptual art was this particularly important turning point.

Buchloh is also engaging in that idea that conceptual art was a particular turning point, but for him, it was a misstep and it only gets reconciled because some of that turned into institutional critique. So in a way, the book is not only about conceptual art, but that is still a pivot point. I try to explain that as well. When people talk about conceptual art, sometimes they’ll say, well, we’ve actually got artists who are more associated with Fluxus in the early 1960’s, who were proto-conceptual artists. So oftentimes, some of the artists that I’m looking at, like Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts, are read as proto-conceptual artists.

Conceptual art before actual conceptual art became what it became. And there’s truth to that. For example, I write about Jack Burnham, who was also at MIT, but he had a big break with György Kepes. He was writing about what he called “systems aesthetics.” That was his name for what he saw happening with conceptual art. It was still connected to the kinds of Cold War research that was going on with things like cybernetics. But he was saying, “Well, look, this is the art that we’re seeing today in the 1960’s. This work is a lot more like systems rather than objects.” So, that kind of thing wasn’t called conceptual art, but it was certainly a precursor to conceptual art. So there is an important place for conceptual art in the book, But Scott’s right that it’s not just about conceptual art.

Research and artists working in the university started out doing things that looked like lectures or being invited to universities where they would give a talk and then do a Happening, which is what Kaprow was famous for. Then, they could have some discussion afterwards that might look like a seminar. The idea was that these forms of support that the university was providing enabled more participatory kinds of art and more things like that would eventually become conceptual art or be conceived and labeled conceptual art at a later point.

Scott: I’d like to invite you to explore some of these examples in greater detail. Maybe talk a little bit about Kaprow’s works, his lectures with some specificity?

Tim Ridlen: Sure. Like I said, Kaprow is a major figure in the book. He is most known for the Happening. A lot of people did Happenings, people like Carolee Schneemann and Claes Oldenburg. This is the 60’s. Sometimes Happenings have just been understood as performance art. It really comes out of the influence of John Cage.

Artists like Allan Kaprow and others such as George Brecht and Robert Watts, who are teaching and associated with Rutgers University, they take this class, this composition class with John Cage that’s happening at the New School in 1957 to 1959. They take the composition class and they try to apply the ideas and methods of chance composition that Cage is talking about to visual art. But what that ends up looking like is time-based performance type art that Kaprow calls a “Happening” and Fluxus artists start to conceive of as “Events.” There’s a number of different outgrowths from that class and that intersection with Cage. Kaprow is just one iteration of that.

He’s showing in galleries in New York, but he’s also doing some of these Happenings on campus at Rutgers University. One of the first ones that he does is a piece called “Communication,” which is essentially part of a series of lectures that he and Robert Watts had organized at Rutgers. It uses the lecture format to disrupt the idea that art communicates in any direct way. He’s standing on stage lighting matches. There’s this red light going off. There’s banners that are hanging from the balcony. There’s a recording that’s playing; that’s the part where he’s actually giving his speech about the idea of communication, which a lot of people were talking about who are associated with cybernetics research. 

He was critiquing this idea that art was about communicating directly in that recorded speech. There, he planted some people in the back of the room to start taking tin cans out of a bag so that it would be noisy in the audience. He’s doing this performance and that one looks more like a performance because he’s standing up at the lectern and performing these actions and you’re hearing this recorded speech. He continues to do things that look more and more participatory, more like rituals or something. He comes up with these ideas for activities that he and the students or other participants will do. And usually what that looks like is that he will give a lecture and explain the piece. Oftentimes, there’s a complicated score that shows what the different parts of the Happening are going to be. Then maybe the next day, everybody will come together and do that Happening. Not in all cases, but in some cases, there would be this discussion afterwards of what that was like.

So my reading of Kaprow’s trajectory is that he does lots of Happenings in the beginning that are more focused on him as a central actor. But he moves more and more towards participants being involved. It also starts to put explicitly in conflict things like his intention, which he tries to spell out in the score and in the lecture, and the experience of actually participating. So I think that part of what develops over the course of his career, in the 60’s at least, as he does more of these Happenings on college campuses is that his authorial control or imprint on the work kind of, it doesn’t go away, but it becomes joined by the actual experience of the participants, right? So he’s been, in some cases, critics have understood Kaprow’s approach to incorporating chance in his work as distinct from John Cage because Kaprow still tried to say, well, I am the artist. I am creating this. This is my project.

But I think that that might have been true at the very beginning, but I think that it’s a little bit more complicated than that. I think that in a way, as he goes on in his career, he starts to think, you know, include more participation and then start to think about the place of the artist in all of this work. And what we eventually come to in the book is that Kaprow starts to talk more and more about un-arting, about leaving art, right? About a transformation of the artist into something else, right?

And I think that’s his influence when he’s at CalArts, that’s when he starts to write these texts about un-arting and leaving the art profession or leaving the idea of being an artist. It intersects literally at CalArts with the Feminist Art Program. And so I think that’s where you start to see his political interest in participatory structures starts to have something in common with the Feminist Art Program, but also literally intersects with the Feminist Art Program at CalArts. So at CalArts, when Kaprow gets there, he is one of three major strains of influence at CalArts and the visual arts. There’s Kaprow, along with some other Fluxus artists like Allison Knowles.

So they’re one big influence on the artists at CalArts. Then there’s John Baldessari, who was brought up from University of California, San Diego, to teach at CalArts. And he is the West Coast conceptual artist that I discuss also in this chapter on CalArts. And then there’s the Feminist Art Program, which CalArts brings down from Fresno State University, and that’s run by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro.

I discussed the intersection of those three strains at CalArts. And the artist Suzanne Lacey, who’s one of the students at CalArts at this time, is one of the artists who comes out of the Feminist Art Program. So she’s a student of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. And she starts to use consciousness-raising meetings as a starting point for some of her works. And that looks very much like the kinds of discussions that Kaprow is having before and after his happenings.

I don’t think it’s just a one-to-one, it’s not a question of influence, but it is a question of Kaprow, in his engagement with Suzanne Lacy, also starts to think of what he’s doing in these same terms as a mutual conversation that’s happening between them. And so in noticing that, I started to notice the latent political stakes of what Kaprow was doing much earlier in the late 50’s that culminates in the socially engaged art that Suzanne Lacy was doing. Her best known project “Three Weeks in May,” where she, it’s a multifaceted project where she gets data from the police, police data about rapes in the city. And she creates this map that shows where rapes have been happening around the city. And she also goes around the city and, you know, marks in different places where these rapes are occurring. All of that came out of consciousness raising groups that she was a part of where women were recognizing this shared experience. And she puts that into this project “Three Weeks in May” and really engages with public space to bring some of this to light, right? And so she’s engaged. That’s one of the examples where it’s like some of what we’re seeing here is artists who are taking on a new role, who are taking on a new understanding of what they can do, and then engaging in, you know, the wider world, engaging outside beyond the boundaries of the university or the campus itself.

Scott: Can you talk a little bit more about the Feminist Art Program and some of their productions and how they end up challenging a certain patriarchal male-centered approach to art and art pedagogy? 

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, the Feminist Art Program is really interesting. It starts in Fresno by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. It moves to CalArts in 1971. One of the first major projects that they do in CalArts is a project called Woman House, where they get access to this house, and they basically turn it into a studio, an art studio, and a place for installations and exhibitions and performance art, things like that. One of the goals of the Feminist Art Program that Judy Chicago talks about was really trying to break down the barriers of the male dominated art world. She talks about how she would see her male counterparts furiously taking notes when they’re in a sculpture class about how to set up the manual saw or something, because they know realistically that they’re going to run a studio of their own one day. And she thought that that was the kind of thing that was really lacking, that wasn’t really emphasized for female art students. And she said, we’re going to take this on by really giving students the professional skills that they need, right? Transform it. That means everything from fixing up the drywall, repairing things in the house, to putting on performances there that comment on the experience of being a woman in the 1970’s.

What ends up happening that’s interesting is that, although the goal for people like Judy Chicago was to professionalize these artists, people like Suzanne Lacy, who was one of the students, she doesn’t just become an artist in the mold of other artists at the time. All of the experience of doing this Woman House project, it transforms the possibilities or the imagined possibilities for what art can do, right? So it becomes more about socially engaged art that, maybe it’s also coming out of performance art and things like that so it has these interesting upshots that weren’t necessarily the the intention of of Judy Chicago. That there’s a lot more to it, it’s more complicated.

Scott: That’s great. If you have more to say, you can say it; but if not that’s great, too. 

Tim Ridlen: i mean the kinds of things that—one of the things that comes up a little bit in the book is that there are many artists who are part of this, not just Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro but the the students that were there as well. But one of the things that Miriam Schapiro’s work was doing, Miriam Schapiro was doing things that were more straightforward painting, although she was part of this Woman House project as well. But they start to explore what Miriam Shapiro called central core imagery, which is like trying to work on questions of representation, how feminine imagery is seen, to try to reconfigure it as not passive but active. And in some cases that looks like painting and in some cases that looks like these plays that Judy Chicago was doing called “Cock and Cunt Play” where they’re working with these props of, genitalia props and they’re doing these, they’re play acting these conversations between a man and a woman that are very over-the-top, ironic critiques of these gender roles.

And then she doesn’t just do that as a performance. She actually takes that around when she’s invited to college campuses and has students perform that play as a way to, maybe it’s crude or simplistic or something, but it’s effective as a way to, you know, draw attention to these gendered roles and gendered representation, in the way that those things get represented.

Scott: I want to give you an opportunity to talk about the theoretical framework for the book, which is encapsulated in the title, Intelligent Action.You take that title from John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher, and you run with it in your own direction. Would you discuss what intelligent action means for you in this project?

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, you’re right. It comes from Dewey, and it’s not like Dewey had a theory of intelligent action. It’s really a phrase that he uses once or twice and that I run with. It also happens to be a phrase or at least variations on that phrase that Kaprow also uses. He talks about intelligent activity. And so starting with Dewey, I guess that’s the best place to start.

Dewey was an influence on some of these artists, but it’s not the only influence. To give you a quick brief on Dewey’s philosophy of art, he has this idea that when he talks about art, he’s really talking about aesthetic experience. So he’s talking about not just making art, but seeing art. And he’s also not just talking about art. He’s actually talking about any experience that you might consider aesthetic. And for him, he uses this metaphor of a stone rolling down a hill. And he says, you know, the stone rolls down the hill, not passively, but actively, right? Feeling all of the little bumps along the way. And an aesthetic experience can be considered aesthetic, not just everyday experience, when it is consummated in some way. He uses the word consummated. So that it has this quality of wholeness, that it comes to some moment of completion. And so some of these artists were influenced by that, and that’s how they understand things like their Happenings, but it wasn’t strictly like an application of Dewey. So for me, that’s why I tried to start there, but articulate this idea of intelligent action, where these artists, again, as a result of them being in the university, they start to think about other places, other parts of this aesthetic experience. So the aesthetic experience is not just what you see or what you experience somatically, but also there’s an inner dimension to it. What are you thinking about? So the language becomes a part of that and other systems of knowledge can become a part of that. And the idea of intelligent action is that is a little bit messier than what Dewey proposes. Dewey proposes this very nice idea of this whole consummated aesthetic experience. And he doesn’t really have in mind something that I bring to the table as well, which is that sometimes this experience has conflicts within it or tensions within it. I mean, Dewey was also concerned with democracy. And in a way, there’s a link here between his theories of aesthetic experience and his idea, his writing about education. Part of his critique, as I understand it, of education at the time, turn of the 20th century, he’s talking about how schools are missing this aesthetic dimension, right? They don’t bring this aesthetic dimension to learning. And that folds into his his critique or his ideas about democracy, that we need these moments of understanding the aesthetic dimension to learning and working together.

And I guess that involves recognizing this experiential dimension. But to return, I’m probably getting on a tangent there, to return to his idea of aesthetic experience. And the way that I try to supplement that is that I try to bring in or allow a bit more for this idea that within an aesthetic experience, sure, maybe there’s some conclusion or consummatory character, as Dewey calls it, but there’s also lots of room for tension and conflict to be staged within that. So the way that I talk about it with the work of these artists is that in some cases they are staging the conflict between, you know, language and vision and experience in the case of Kaprow where he, or even his intentions as the artist and the experience as the participant, that staging that conflict or that disconnect is part of what intelligent action is about.

The other thing that I borrow from Dewey, actually I’m borrowing it from a thinker named Hans Joas, and he’s writing about Dewey. He pulls out of Dewey this idea of “ends in view,” the idea that, you know, again, going back to this idea of the stone rolling down the hill, that action in the present or experience in the present is also guided by or informed by this end in view. And he distinguishes the end in view from a goal because it’s not just goal-oriented action, but it’s this way in which the action in the present has some end in mind and is informed by that end and moves towards that end.

And so it’s not just a matter of arriving at the end and reflecting back on the experience, right? That would be more maybe like the idea of contemplating a work of art. But it is about this aesthetic experience that is in creativity that is in action, right? Creativity that is in action. And for somebody like Joas, it’s not just the creativity of making art, it’s the creativity of social action. That’s also the link there.

The other important influences here on this idea of intelligent action are Donna Haraway and Gayatri Spivak, who both talk a lot about doubling, right? So Haraway’s idea of situated knowledge resonates with what Joas attributes to Dewey as situated creativity. And Haraway talks about this idea that there’s always at least two modes of knowing, right? That we’re always experiencing at least two kinds of knowledge or ways of knowing. Spivak in particular, who’s interested in a critique of enlightenment institutions from a post-colonial perspective, talks a lot about playing the “double bind.” That’s her phrase for talking about how does one work within these institutions that have these demands of, you know, whether it’s research or enlightenment reason, what does one do with that? And she talks about the role of the aesthetic as, again, this conflictual model that the aesthetic is that space for play. And the phrase, I mean, interestingly, the phrase playing the double bind, she’s getting that from Gregory Bateson and applying it in a different way. But basically it’s a way of saying like, well, what do you do with these competing demands? And play is a very interesting connection because people like Kaprow also talk about play. People like Joas in his reading of Dewey is also talking about this idea of situated creativity as play. But play is not just about open-ended, you know, messing around, but it actually is informed by some end in view, even if that end is not instrumental in the same way.

Billy: Could you reflect on what has happened to the artist as academic in the intervening years? The 60’s are a very active time, and a different time in a lot of ways. Of course, beginning in the 70’s and into the 80’s, we get the dawn of the neoliberal era and the imperatives of the university change, the experiences of academics and students change. So I’m not asking you to write a sequel, but if you did, what would it look like? What do you think you would pick up on as continuities and divergences? 

Tim Ridlen: Hmm, that’s a good question. 

Billy: It’s a bit speculative, but let’s riff. 

Tim Ridlen: Well, I’m thinking, I mean, initially I was going to answer your question by bringing us back to where we started in terms of things like relational aesthetics that artists start to engage with—sometimes that goes by socially engaged art or dialogical aesthetics. There’s all kinds of names for this work that actually begins with people like Suzanne Lacy in the 70’s, and then has this continuation today, this tradition that continues today. And that is joined by artistic research. And I think, I guess, that brings me back to where I started, where I said, you know, in the early 2000s, there’s this interest in artistic research, a lot of which comes from the Bologna process in Europe, which was a standardization framework.

Once the EU was in place, there was this attempt to standardize university education in Europe that was called the Bologna process. And that’s what led to the creation of PhDs for artists. So initially I was going to say, well, that’s part of the story, but I think there’s obviously a big gap in the middle there. There’s also a disconnect because that’s something that’s happening in Europe. And I’m talking about, I’m really just talking about US context. But I guess if I were going to start to think about what happens in universities, I think some of the big changes are, I mean, like, I don’t have a lot of this history of the university in the 80’s at my fingertips, but there are quite a lot of changes, like you mentioned, like the university is becoming more and more neoliberal throughout the 80’s and I think that that has some pretty dire consequences for the possibilities of artists working within those institutions. But I guess the way that I read it is that there’s this move from the university to the wider social sphere. So I guess that’s where you get artists who are doing things that look like socially engaged art or even look like education out in the public. And maybe in some cases they are supporting that work through university positions. It’s like in the late 70’s that the MFA degree becomes the terminal degree. So artists have a more secure position in the university. And that doesn’t always doesn’t translate into research-based art the way that it might have been pushed or impressed upon artists that they need to frame their work as research earlier in this history. But it did continue to give them security so that they wouldn’t necessarily have to be gallery selling artists. And then there are really good, I mean, there are really good texts out there about socially engaged art in the 1980’s, some of which takes pedagogic form.

So like Adair Rounthwaite’s book, Asking the Audience, in a way, there are parts of that book that could be sequels to what I’m talking about, because she’s talking about socially engaged art and how it engages in some of these pedagogic forms, not just in the university, but in other places. So that might be something to take up. I think in my next, thinking about a future project, It probably won’t be about the university per se, but it would potentially be about transformation of art away from, you know, medium specificity and objects to, you know, a transformed role for artists. 

Billy: And if I could maybe offer and see what you think about this, the university in the 60’s is, if nothing else, a lot cheaper, a lot more accessible in certain ways and a lot more exclusive in other ways. Today, of course, working at a university, as opposed to if you could get employment back in the 60’s, there are more and different positions, but a lot more precarity as well to distribute across ranks and things. Students are paying a lot more.

I guess I’m trying to think about, you know, the allure or the space that artists may feel today in academia, the invitation from your own experience, right, to have support for your work and to also think about that work. It seems like there’s different constraints, pressures today that artists in academe would feel, and then that it might be a more hostile, in some ways, place.

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s definitely some truth to that. And I mean, you know, there are reasons to critique the MFA degree, as people have talked about it as, at worst, a Ponzi scheme, you know, like the idea that you’re going to take out a loan and go to an MFA program, which being somebody who’s in academia now, you can see a lot of times master’s programs, not necessarily MFA programs, but a lot of times master’s programs are like money-making devices for universities.

And so there’s definitely room for a critique there of the idea of getting an MFA, that it sells you this idea that you’re gonna make it as an artist if you get an MFA, and that’s not necessarily the case. I don’t think the PhD has become like that, at least not in the US. There might be a little bit different story in Europe.

So, yeah, I mean, I certainly, I guess in a way what I was, I’m aware of that critique, and I don’t think that it’s wrong, the critique of the university as this, there’s some problems there. I guess with the book, part of what I was trying to do was learn something. Well, I guess one of the things that I was concerned about was the way that that critique of the university and specifically getting an MFA or giving money to get an MFA that might not guarantee a career. I wanted to try to separate that very real critique from the persistent critique that going to school or going to a university as an artist is somehow taming the artist or somehow, you know, taking away the creative genius. I guess what I was interested in was to push back against that anti-academicism that I saw. It’s weird because at the same time I mentioned there was this educational turn, what seemed to immediately follow was this idea that MFA programs are ruined, and that really pushback against artistic research. Good things came out of it, like rethinking artistic research as artistic thought.

But I think also some of those critiques are easily bound, they easily return to this idea that the artist is some representative of a free-thinking individual that sounds naive or sounds naive at best or, at worst, perpetuates a neoliberal way of thinking that artists should be independent people, like freelancers with projects instead of people with institutional support. So, that was part of my concern and I definitely think that the university costs too much money. There’s a problem here with the way that students are asked to pay and then fund these programs. And that idea is that you need it, that you have to have it in order to be an artist. And that’s just not true. But at the same time, it too easily ends up becoming part of a logic that I think is also problematic. This logic that artists are meant to be like starving in an attic somewhere, because they’re brilliant, you know, something. Brilliant in a way that’s not academic. Brilliant in a way that’s somehow outside the bounds of intellectual activity or thinking, right? That it’s something else.

Billy: I’m reminded of how cultural critic and commentator, Mark Fisher, liked to talk about how the Beatles were on the dole for the production of some of their finest music. And I’m just thinking about that because there were, you know, different kinds of supports in Europe in the 60’s. Thinking about the remnants of the welfare state in the context of the 1960’s versus the complete wasteland of, you know, social support for that could fund somebody who wanted to just make art. It’s just not an option for most people.

Tim Ridlen: Yeah.

Billy: I think where we land with Money on the Left is like, we find lots redeeming, I think, in academia and share your critiques.

It would also be great if we had means and mechanisms in place at the level of policy to just pay artists, you know, more directly as artists who would then have, you know, more discretion about whether or not they would seek additional employment at a university, for example, where they might feel, you know, variously part of a system that tends to divert student energy in directions that they might not need to go and student resources and finances in ways that aren’t super helpful.

So I guess I’m saying, I don’t imagine you’d be opposed to a job guarantee for artists, but I wonder if you have any thoughts on what that might do for your history and maybe the future of the artist as an academic or as a researcher.

Tim Ridlen: That sounds great. And that is a little bit, I mean, that is a little bit the story of how I, of why I went into academia in the sense that I mean, it’s sort of funny to think about now that I thought it was a source of stability, that I thought it was going to be a more stable job than being an artist or trying to make a living in the art world as a freelance art handler or artist assistant.

Because, you know, now I can say this as somebody who works in academia, that it’s not any more stable. I mean, maybe a little bit more stable. But yeah, it was funny. But I also think that what you’re saying is also how I understood these artists, like I mentioned earlier, Kaprow, who did say, like, I started teaching to pay the bills, but then realized that there was a lot more to it. I mean, I think that echoes what you’re saying.

And yeah, the idea that some artists might still engage with the university is definitely true. I mean, I don’t think it’s in all cases that artists take jobs just to make money because a lot of artists, there are examples of artists who make tons of money in the gallery art world and they also take teaching jobs, you know? So there’s as many examples of ways to engage with academia or not, as there are artists out there. 

I’m gonna take us in another direction here because you mentioned, how does this book potentially fit with Money on the Left and, your project, which I know a little bit about from talking to Scott and reading Scott’s book and things like that. And I think one of the things that was, in addition to some of the projects that you guys have been involved with–the Uni, right? That’s really interesting way in which the university becomes this staging ground for something larger. 

Scott: Right. 

Tim Ridlen: And for me, that’s how I’m understanding transformation that’s happening from the late 50’s into the 70’s—that there’s a transformation that occurs in the way that people can imagine what artists do, right? And that it goes from thinking that artists are like people who make objects. And at the very best, according to somebody like Benjamin Buchloh, they can critique the commodity fetish through the kinds of objects that they produce. But part of what I’m saying here is that, well, what happens with artists in the university is that we start to see that artists can do something else. And, and that’s not just a transformation in artists’ roles, like, oh, artists can also be useful or something. Instead of just making paintings, they can also build bridges or something. It’s actually a transformation that happens because we start to imagine artists not as these beautiful souls with creative genius who are going to express something insightful about the world, but they’re actually more like researchers, but it’s not necessarily the research that produces new technologies or better television or better missiles.

There are researchers that actually stage aesthetic experiences that are intellectually informed, that are intelligently informed, intelligent action coming back around as the name that I apply, that I come up with for that. So I think that that’s my understanding of how the book might resonate with some of the interests of your podcast.

The other thing that I’ll say that I think is interesting, that I found really interesting in talking to Scott and learning a little bit about MMT, was that there’s a lot of the criticism from people like Buchloh that comes out of the Frankfurt School based on this idea that artworks work under the same logic as the commodity or the commodity fetish. Value is developed or, let’s say, deposited in the object, and then the object goes and gets exhibited, and it’s then withdrawn by the viewer, right?

So what was interesting to hear about and learn about was the idea that value doesn’t necessarily inhere in an object in that way, but has its origin somewhere else. 

Scott: Right. 

Tim Ridlen: And I think, Scott, you can put better words on this, but this idea of a fiat currency comes to mind, that understanding of value, where value in money comes from. And I guess,, that really, there’s other critiques of this commodity fetish that I think are also interesting. So there’s multiple ways to understand this.

But one of the things that I think the book does underneath the surface, maybe not always overtly, but one of the things that the book does and that I’m interested in continuing is rethinking how we understand art away from this idea that it somehow works the way that the commodity fetish works. Yeah. So those are my own thoughts on what my project might have to do with the things that you all are interested in here. But I don’t know if that’s accurate.

Scott: I think it’s accurate. I’m going to add one more twist. So in formulating your theory of intelligent action, you know, you’re starting with John Dewey, you’re moving through Spivak and multiple authors. One author that you haven’t mentioned on the podcast that you do cite is Paolo Freire, right? And, you know, radical pedagogue and pedagogical theorist. I was really taken with his critique of the hegemonic model of learning. And that hegemonic model assumes that the teacher is a kind of vat that’s filled up with stuff. In this case, it’s knowledge or data or whatever. And that the student or the class is empty and they come and get their heads filled up with this stuff. Right. And I agree with Freire that this traditional model of teaching and learning is garbage. It doesn’t work that way. And trying to pursue pedagogy as if it works that way is a big problem.

But what I found really interesting apropos of this conversation and thinking about connections between your project and money on the left is that Freire calls it the banking concept of teaching and learning. And from a Money on the Left point of view, what’s so fun and funny about that is that that’s not actually how banking works. Banking is not about having emptiness and fullness and moving, you know, bits of value from one place to another. Banking is an institution that is driven by multiple values and money is created ex nihilo as a function of its authority and its standing in a particular community.

This doesn’t make banks good. This doesn’t make the corporate private banking sector morally OK. But in terms of just thinking about, well, how do we understand, how do we contest, and how do we build otherwise? Banking doesn’t even work according to the banking concept of teaching and learning. So I think that there’s all kinds of sparks and resonances that can happen there between these two categories.

Tim Ridlen: Yeah, exactly. And the parallel that gets made actually by Grant Kester, he actually makes this similar comparison to Freire that, you know, it’s the parallel is that meaning gets deposited in the object to be taken out later. That’s the parallel that Kester makes. And yeah, that’s what’s being contested or, you know, what I’m trying to go around or think about in another way.

But yeah, you’re right. Freire is not interested in banking and getting that metaphor correct. But what he is interested, to riff on that a little bit, one of the things that comes up in the book is that some artists in the university, like György Kepes, are interested in creative problem solving. I had to think about this a little bit because Freire talks about problem posing versus problem solving. And I thought that was an interesting distinction because somebody like Kepes is interested in creative problem solving and making artists useful in this crude way. There’s more to his thinking than just that, because he also talks about aesthetic virtue. Well, he doesn’t talk about aesthetic virtue, but his way of thinking about what art does has been referred to, and I like this phrase, as cultivating aesthetic virtue among students.

So Kepes is a little bit more complicated, but he’s still thinking about creativity as part of this instrumental problem-solving. And Freire talks about problem posing. And I think that people like Henry Giroux also, he’s building on Freire, but pointing out the ways in which Freire’s idea of problem posing is not so instrumental. It’s not really intended to be this instrumental problem solving.

Scott: Tim, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. Everybody should go out and buy Intelligent Action, a history of artistic research, aesthetic experience, and artists in academia. Thank you.

Tim Ridlen: Thank you for having me.

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Billy Saas, Scott Ferguson & Tim Ridlen (transcription), & Robert Rusch (graphic art)

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Direct Job Creation in America with Steven Attewell (New Transcript!)

This month we are re-publishing our conversation with Steven Attewell along with a new written transcript and episode graphic. Attewell is author of the incredible book, People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America from FDR to Reagan, published in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania Press. The book examines the history of job creation programs in the United States from the Great Depression to the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978.

Unfortunately, Attwell passed away last spring. Yet his work endures as historically robust and eminently humane approach to public policy. We dedicate this re-publication to his legacy.

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

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

Billy Saas:  Steven Attewell, welcome to Money on the Left.

Steven Attewell:  Thank you for having me.

Billy Saas:  Would you start off by telling us a little bit about your scholarly background and how you came to write People Must Live by Work?

Steven Attewell:  Sure. So I am a rare beast called a policy historian. I sort of got into it because I was interested in political history, but I didn’t want to do the history of great men. I wanted to look at how the government worked. I found that there was this subfield that did the kind of stuff I was interested in. So I started as an undergraduate history major at Columbia, and then there was a history PhD program at UCSB that had a large number of policy historians who I could learn from, as opposed to just one person. I came to write People Must Live by Work, I actually write a little bit about this in the introduction, I was inspired by my experience of reading Arthur Schlesinger’s description of the Civil Works Administration in his classic The Coming of the New Deal, which was like the first history of the New Deal after World War Two. At the same time, while I was watching the Democratic presidential primary debates in 2004. I was listening to all of these candidates talking about the need to create jobs, build jobs, grow jobs, etc, you know, touting their plans. And at the same time, I was reading Schlesinger’s account of how the US government had created more than 4 million jobs in less than three months, at a time at which the most advanced administrative technologies available were the rotary phone and the carbon copy. As a budding policy wonk, I went on to the websites of these, John Edwards, and John Kerry, and Dick Gephardt, and looked at what their plans were. They amounted to little more than these very small pots of money for small business loans or tax credits or stuff like that. The difference in ambition between the past and the present fascinated me. My question was, Why is nobody talking about the Civil Works Administration? Why did no one teach me this in school? Why did I have to stumble across it in the book? That’s what inspired me to start this project.

Maxx Seijo:  So as you’re just mentioning there in your book, you foreground what you call the politics of direct job creation, and you trace this throughout the 20th century. We’re wondering if you could perhaps talk about how this history and foregrounding it complicates our historical memory of what’s imaginable?

Steven Attewell:  Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think the main thing is we have a vision in our collective political imagination of the way our system of social and economic policy is supposed to work, right? This is social security. This is the welfare state. This is what the federal government does to manage the economy. And there’s this giant missing hole in terms of how everything was supposed to work. For example, one of the things that blew my mind when I started was that direct job creation was built into the Social Security Plan. It was always supposed to have this extra leg to the stool, this extra safety net under the safety net to catch everybody, and it’s not there. And the fact that it’s not there explains a lot. Of the problems in our welfare state, like why people slip through the cracks, why our system is not as generous as it ought to be. Likewise, on the economic policy side, why is it that the United States is,  even in its golden age of the 40s through the 70s in terms of the economy, why is it that we had higher unemployment than the rest of Europe, or the whole of Western Europe? It’s because there was this missing part. We had a plan for what the post-war world should look like, and then we didn’t execute it. And as a result, we have this huge vulnerability that when there’s a sudden downturn in the economy and mass unemployment, we have these very indirect tools to deal with it that take a while to go into effect. Whether or not you’ve put enough resources into them, it’s very uncertain. It’s missing this additional lever, and that really kind of complicates our understanding of what the state should look like. The next kind of thing that it complicates to me, which ties into this is, we have this popular conception that World War Two ended the Great Depression, and that the New Deal failed to end the Great Depression. That plays a big part in our historical imagination of, what is the possible? What can the government do and what can’t it do? Why do people say, Oh, the government can’t create jobs or the President can’t really, directly affect the economy. It’s because we have this false impression that we tried these programs and they failed. The reality is, they succeeded enormously. But that really complicates our understanding of the world, because what it gets at, fundamentally, is that unemployment is unnecessary, that we are a rich enough and powerful enough country, that we can have whatever unemployment rate we want. It’s just that for whatever reason, we have decided to just have high levels of unemployment.

Scott Ferguson:  So in the book, you trace four main moments in the history of direct job creation politics in the 20th century, the New Deal, the immediate post-World War Two era, the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, and the debate surrounding the Humphrey Hawkins Bill during the 1970s. Can you walk us through these moments? What defines each moment? What carries over from one to the next? What’s lost, what’s gained?

Steven Attewell:  Great question. So to start with the New Deal, I think it’s primarily sort of defined by experimentation. So you have this kind of unorthodox group of social workers, amateur social scientists, economists, civil engineers, who are coming up with a new way of doing things on the fly, because the old system has broken. We used to have this old sort of voluntary state and local system of poor relief, and it’s completely collapsed because it can’t handle the demand on it during the Great Depression. At the same time, they’re coming to this sort of more moral ideological position that says, people want work, they don’t want handouts, they don’t want charity. We have to give them what they want. It’s the right thing to do. So they come up with this program of direct job creation where they just say, look, let’s, let’s not worry about public works contracts. Let’s not worry about expanding the civil service or whatever. Let’s just directly hire people. Let’s just go out, give them paychecks, put them to work. Along the way, as they go from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to the Civil Works Administration to the Works Progress Administration, they’re coming up with economic theories, with a policy regime and an ideology, and then a whole bunch of evidence about what works. Even though we’ve come to think of them as these sort of temporary emergency programs, almost from the beginning, they’re saying, this needs to be permanent. This has to be the way that the US government functions. One of the scholars whose work inspired me, Edwin Amenta, describes this as a jobs and assistance state, as opposed to a welfare state, that it wasn’t just a small program, it was this is fundamentally how you know citizens are going to interact with the government and how the government is going to interact with the economy. And it works for eight years that large numbers of people, big sections of the workforce are hired through these programs and are lifted out of destitution. The economy grows at a very fast pace. Unemployment drops dramatically, and by the end of it, the people who run these programs are absolutely convinced they have a successful experiment on their hands. Then you get this sort of disjuncture with World War Two. Not so much, because World War Two ended the Great Depression. I think it was over before the US entered World War Two. But, basically, the government shifts from directly employing people to build public works to directly employing people to smash fascism.

Scott Ferguson:  Can I ask you something about the New Deal moment? In the book, you suggest that there are at least two competing, let’s say, philosophies or schools, that then sort of compete for attention and resources. There’s the camp that’s interested in direct job creation, that is people oriented, and the goal of which, as I understand it, is to find people jobs first and foremost. Whereas the other camp is the traditional public works camp, which seems to privilege projects over people. Can you elaborate?

Steven Attewell:  Yeah, I would say it’s not just a competition between those two. It’s a competition between a lot of different ways of doing things, a lot of viewpoints. The New Deal, it wasn’t that it lacked ideology, it just had many, many ideologies that were all competing for control. So, during the Committee on Economic Security, you had a big fight between direct job creation folks and unemployment insurance advocates. Then you had a fight between the direct job creation folks and the Public Works folks. And there, what was really at stake was you have this old tradition since the Progressive Era, of being very suspicious about the fiscal state, that there was this fear that the government was inefficient, that it was corrupt, that it would waste money, that it couldn’t manage things efficiently. And so what you needed to do was, “run government like a business”. Use all of these mechanisms to ensure that the government is getting good value for money. This is our default when we think about public works today. It’s why, during the great recession, we were worried about shovel ready projects. This is where the whole fear about “boondoggles” comes from. What the direct job creation folks did was they sort of turned efficiency on its head. They said, rather than figuring out how much we can produce per person employed, which is the driving mentality for these kinds of very capital machinery intensive ways of doing public works. They said, let’s focus on creating the most number of jobs per dollar, and then see what we can do with that manpower, with that labor power. You had people both within and without the WPA who came to this conclusion. John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, writes a book called The Economic Effects of Public Works in 1943 in which he compares the Public Works Administration with the Works Progress Administration. He says, this DJC stuff is way more efficient when it comes to actually doing what we want it to do, which is produce enough jobs to bring down unemployment and that traditional Public Works has this limiting factor. It’s very slow to get off the ground. Because it’s indirect, because it’s working through these private contractors, you tend to create relatively few new jobs. There’s a lot more jobs going to people who are already working, and the private contractors are trying to make a profit, so they’re trying to keep as much money in their own hands as possible. Thankfully, in 1935, the WPA was able to out hustle the Public Works Administration on a bureaucratic level. They figure out that they’ve got the authority to run projects independently if they’re worth $25,000 or less, so what they do is they just take bigger projects and then subdivide them into $25,000 chunks, and all of a sudden they can just run the whole system by themselves. But they also attack on an intellectual level, and they make these interesting alliances with Keynesians, with people like Lauchlin Currie and Leon Henderson, Marriner Eccles. They’re all sort of saying, all these people who really care about how much consumer demand can we pump out into the economy, and they sort of say, hey, our program is a great way of shunting a lot of consumer demand into the bottom of the economy, the lowest paid people who will go out and spend it immediately. So help us. Help us get more budget, and we will do the work of Keynesianism. So that’s kind of how the conflict shakes out during the New Deal.

Maxx Seijo:  So then it sort of proceeds into the transition of World War Two, which I believe you were starting to articulate. Was wondering if you could talk more about that?

Steven Attewell:  Sure. So the major thing that happened during World War Two is that first of all, you have the US’s first and kind of only experience with real full employment, where unemployment is below 3% it’s hovering around 1-1.5%. This builds a certain kind of confidence within the government that they know how to do this now, and especially a confidence in a kind of economic planning. It’s very Keynesian. It’s very sort of technical. It’s about statistics and modeling. Then there’s this kind of utopian, good government vision that this will somehow move beyond political conflict. That these New Deal programs were broadly successful, but they involve political fights. You had to get appropriations through Congress. You had to make sure that there were projects in every single county in America, so that incumbents would fight for their districts. They thought, wouldn’t it be cleaner and better if we just allowed the executive branch and experts in the executive branch to do things like modulate tax withholding rates or modulate the budget without interference from Congress, and that that will allow us to have full employment without conflict. What you have happened is there’s this bill, originally the Full Employment bill. It eventually becomes the Maximum Employment bill, and eventually just the Employment Act, which is a plan to establish full employment as the economic policy of the United States. This is paralleled by bills that are happening, you know, across the rest of the Western world. But what they do is they got the enforcement mechanics. All the employment bill becomes is a vehicle for creating a presidential report, making recommendations to Congress that a special committee will look into. But there’s no teeth to it. What astonished me about this, when I dug into the archives, is its liberals doing this. It’s not conservatives killing the bill. It is people like Senator Robert Wagner of New York. The guy who wrote half of the New Deal, basically, and they’re coming out with these reports saying this is not going to be another WPA. We’re not going to have a literal right to a job. We are going to create enough job openings that people can have work, and we’re going to do this through this planning method. And so this sort of whole legacy of the New Deal gets ripped out. As a result, when the full employment bill gets watered down, and watered down, and watered down, what you have is this sort of general commitment that the federal government has a responsibility to make sure that unemployment doesn’t get too high, but no real direct mechanism for doing that. So when you then get to the War on Poverty…

Maxx Seijio:  Before you get there, I just wanted to ask about a specific point. As you probably know and familiar with, Alan Brinkley argues that the reason for this liberal support of watering down the New Deal and into the war, is that there starts to be a sort of mirror by which American liberals look across the pond into Europe and see Nazi fascism as a sort of State Employment Guarantee. So I was wondering what you thought of that, and if you thought that contributed to this sort of shift and transition away from rights based employment?

Steven Attewell:  I mean, I admire Alan Brinkley’s work, but I think he’s wrong on this point. So, for example, one of the great social Keynesians, Alvin Hansen, called the American Keynes, really wants Keynesianism to work through these big public investments, right? Healthcare, housing, education, science, public infrastructure, you name it. He comes up with a full employment plan himself. He’s very influential in advising the people drafting the Employment Act. But I’ve seen memos in which he basically says, You know what, why don’t we just gut all of this social, Keynesian stuff from the bill? He’s talking about eliminating his own work, and he’s not doing it because he says, Oh, I’m worried that we’ll become fascist. He says, Well, we can just do it later. What it really comes down to, for me, is this overconfidence in technical expertise within the executive branch, that all they thought they needed to get right was the process, and then they could take over and do the rest later. Once you had the Council of Economic Advisors up and running, they would come out with the correct social Keynesian plan, so it didn’t need to be spelled out in the bill. Lo and behold, when the bill passes and the Council of Economic Advisers gets going, there’s no way to actually get the social Keynesian thing that they wanted. In some ways, they’d voluntarily disarmed because they thought they’d already won.

Billy Saas:  Then you take us into the civil rights movement, what happened then?

Steven Attewell:  This is where the “what is lost and what is gained and what is carried over?” is really important. In the 1960s, the federal government was relearning this from scratch, the New Deal agencies were gone. There’s no transmission of information to the future. What you instead have is that memory is preserved within the sort of social democratic wing of the civil rights movement, people like Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin. It’s not a coincidence that when they’re putting together the freedom budget, they’re working very closely with Leon Keyserling, who was a young New Dealer. He was the guy who wrote most of Wagner’s legislation and helped to write the Employment Act of 1946. He’s sort of come around a little bit on direct job creation, although he’s more of an old school social Keynesian. The problem is, there’s no synthesis between these two groups. In the Labor Department under Willard Wirtz, you’ve got people who are starting to work their way towards this idea that job training isn’t enough. We have a very discriminatory labor market. The federal government’s gonna need to give Black people jobs to bring down the racial gap in unemployment. Likewise, in the Office of Economic Opportunity, the War on Poverty agency, where they initially are very gung ho on the idea of: the problem with the poor is that they’re politically disempowered, so we’ll create these community action programs, and that will mobilize the poor to demand a fair share, and that’s how they stop being poor. Well, shit, that’s very politically controversial. Stop that. Don’t want to do that anymore. Then they also have this idea that the problem with the poor is that they are culturally deprived, or educationally deprived, or that they lack skills. So we’ll just give them a huge amount of job training programs and education programs to equalize this, and they run into a couple big problems. One of which is, they’re training people, and then there’s no jobs on the end of it, or they’re providing a lot of education. But the problem is, education takes decades to show any effect, right? You start Head Start. It’s a great program, right? But you’re not going to know whether you know that’s going to make a real difference in someone’s life 10-15 years later. So they’re starting to come around on this idea that there’s this thing called the poverty gap. It’s how much money would you need to give the poor of America to bring them above the poverty line? So now they’re really starting to think fighting poverty requires redistribution of material resources. And one of the things that they end up with, the OEO, is they say, let’s just create a jobs program. But those two agencies never have a synthesis with the folks in the civil rights movement who’ve already worked this out decades earlier and are trying to get them to do this thing. Then, as you start to get into the mid to late 60s, you start to get a problem, which is inflation. That Keynesians had gained control of the levers of power in the 1960s by demonstrating that they had mastery of the economy. They’d done the tax cut, the tax cut had worked, the economy boomed. But now, between the domestic boom and Vietnam, you’ve got overheating of the economy, you’ve got inflation, and that means you can’t have more spending, right? Because that’s going to fight against your attempts to keep inflation in check. It also means that the Keynesians switch from wanting a tax cut to wanting a tax increase, because they want to cool down domestic demand, and they know that the quid pro quo from Congress is going to be: you want us to raise taxes? You’re gonna have to cut the War on Poverty spending. So the problem with the 60s, the way that I think about this moment, is that there is this disjuncture between the policy learning that’s going on and the realm of political possibility. That there is this window from, really, 1964 to 1966, or really, maybe just late 65 but anyway, before the midterm elections of 1966, where you could perhaps do something on direct job creation, and by the time that they figured out that’s what they want to do, the moment is lost. They don’t have a working majority in Congress anymore. The support that they might have had out there for jobs has been squandered by anti-Vietnam sentiment and a backlash against the New Left and the civil rights movement. You hit a wall in the late 60s, especially because once Nixon becomes president, you’re not going to go anywhere. And that’s what leads us to the 70s.

Scott Ferguson:  So a lot of your narrative, which is very rich and informative, a lot of your narrative is about sort of the inner policy circles and fractures and fights. But I wonder if you could trace back through some of this history and shine a bit more light on social movements and calls for or the lack of calls for, direct job creation from the 30s into the late 1960s and maybe highlight a few important moments along the way. Like, I think our listeners might like to hear a little bit more about something you mentioned in passing, the Freedom Budget.

Steven Attewell:  Sure. So starting with the 30s, the person who’s really done the best work on sort of social movements and jobs in the 30s, is Chad Alan Goldberg, who looks at left wing social movements of the unemployed in the 1930s, some of which were associated with the Communist Party, some of which were associated with the Socialist Party, some of which were associated with the CIO unions. They were a very strong presence for direct job creation. They wanted jobs. They made protests in favor of jobs. What’s interesting in the 30s is that you get this kind of inside, outside politics. So for example, direct job creation workers, like WPA workers, were organized into unions. There were two of them. In fact, there was one called the Workers Alliance, which was a popular front, communist-socialist party, joint. Then there was the UAW, which organized its own New Deal Workers Union, because so many of their members get laid off from the auto industry and then go to work for the WPA. So they just sort of follow them into the WPA. You get this interesting dynamic where these unions and social movements will protest. They say, We want higher wages, we want more jobs. This isn’t good enough. And then agency officials like Aubrey Williams, for example, will come out and say, You’re right. Help us lobby Congress to get more money so that we can do those things. There’s a useful collaboration going on, but at the same time, it is at somewhat arm’s length. The New Deal doesn’t formally recognize these unions, informally it will. There’s a lot of going back and forth on prevailing wages is something that they’re always negotiating with the labor movement. Then when you get to the 60s, direct job creation is seen by the civil rights movement, or I should say, by many sections of the civil rights movement, as necessary for a whole bunch of reasons. One, it’s necessary for achieving the material ambitions of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King has this great statement where he says, people have to be able to buy the sandwich at the lunch counter that they’ve just won the right to sit down at. One of the things that is being fought for by the civil rights movement is jobs and higher wages. It’s the reason why, in the March on Washington in 1963 the title of the March is a March for Jobs and Freedom. Because even, as you know, there’s a good economy in the 60s, rates of unemployment for African Americans were way higher than for whites. It’s also seen as important for breaking the triangle of segregation, the triangle of jobs, housing, and education. Even if you now legally, de jure, can buy a house in a white neighborhood, you can’t afford it because your job isn’t good enough. And your job isn’t good enough because you don’t have the formal qualifications to get a good job. But in order to get the formal qualifications, I need to go to a good school. Well, the good schools are good because they’re in high property value neighborhoods that are putting more money into schools. So the idea is, well, jobs is one of the ways that you can break that triangle. That you can give people good paying jobs, then not only will their neighborhoods get better, but maybe they can move into better neighborhoods and get a better education for their kids and so on and so forth. And then finally, it’s seen as important for building across racial working class coalition because a lot of people in the civil rights movement, even before the trouble signs in the economy are really visible, realize that if there’s going to be a conflict between white workers and Black workers over a limited pool of jobs, then white workers are going to go and vote for the racists. So the idea is, if we can use direct job creation to create enough jobs for everybody, and this is the vision of the Freedom Budget, that if there’s enough jobs for everybody, then you can have fair employment without anybody losing. You can have affirmative action, that you can help all of these people who’ve been kept out of the labor market and kept out of good jobs without freaking out white working class voters who are like, clinging to their toehold on the on the national economy, and getting them to go vote for George Wallace.

Billy Saas:  Help us put going to the 70s off as long as possible. Sort of circle back a little bit and ask you to comment on a little bit more about the role of, like, political economic orthodoxy and kind of shaping the decisions of these policymakers and these people in the positions of making decisions about direct job creation. Keynesianism, neoclassical economics, institutionalism, what’s going on?

Steven Attewell:  So one of the things that’s really interesting when I was looking at direct job creation is that it was very mutable as an economic philosophy, mutable in political economic terms. They could speak the language of Keynesians. They could say Hey, we’re all about demand. We understand that the problem with the economy is deficient consumption. Our program has the best marginal propensity to consume, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And try to get their support. But they could also go over to the Institutionalists and say, Hey, man, you talk about administered prices and monopoly. What about monopsony? Right? That we’ve got these massive corporations that are depressing wages because they control whether or not you get a job. So if the public sector can break open that monopsony and restore competition for wages, then all of a sudden, you’re gonna get enough demand out there for these overly rigid prices. By the way, they could even flirt with the production for use people in the 1930s, the quasi-socialists, and say, Hey, we employ all of these people. Who says, it all has to be public works? Why can’t we make clothes for people? Why can’t we can food and distribute it to people? Why can’t we build housing? They have this sort of mutability. But then, if you look from the 30s to the 70s, Keynesianism especially plays a changing role. That in the 1930s the two groups are simpatico, right? Because Keynesians are all about pushing more spending, and this is a great vehicle for pushing more spending. Then, in the 1940s, they got very confident and thought, we don’t need these people anymore. We can just do this directly through manipulating the budget, manipulating the tax code. So they sort of kick them to the curb. And then in the 60s, you know, because they’re doing their own thing, they start to see them as hostile, like you’re screwing up our budgets, you’re screwing up our tax plans. Then, the real thing is in the 70s. Because the 70s is when the centerpiece of the neoclassical synthesis of Keynesianism and neoclassical economics, the Phillips Curve, breaks down. There’s no longer a stable relationship between inflation and unemployment that would allow a government to just pick a point and adjust interest rates, and you’d get the sort of hands free economic planning that you wanted. They’re increasingly in the 70s, under threat from neoconservative economists like Milton Friedman, who are saying you can’t do any of this, right? There is this thing called NAIRU. It means that you can’t have full employment, that any kind of government activism is going to fail. Because he had, “predicted” the breakdown of the Phillips Curve, had “predicted” stagflation, these Keynesians are really unsure. They lose their confidence. So what you see in the 1970s, especially in these hearings over the Humphrey Hawkins Act, is that Keynesians kind of Splinter as an expert community. You have some of them who say, the Humphrey Hawkins Act is what we need, inflation is not that big a deal, unemployment is more important. You’ve got other people who say any attempt to bring down unemployment is going to cause hyperinflation. We can’t rock the boat. We don’t know what’s going to happen. So just back away from full employment as an objective. As a result, the Humphrey Hawkins Act was not passed in 1976. Now, it was going to get vetoed by Gerald Ford anyway, but it sort of interrupted the process of consensus building around this piece of legislation. Then, unfortunately, one of the biggest kinds of “right wing Keynesians”, this guy called Charles Schultz, becomes Carter’s head of the CEA. When the Carter administration has to deal with the Humphrey Hawkins act, he’s the lead negotiator, and he’s like, totally in opposition.

Scott Ferguson:  So you’ve walked us back to Humphrey Hawkins. So what I’d like us to do now is to sort of take a wider shot and tell our listeners, who are less familiar with the Humphrey Hawkins bill and the fight and the gutting of the bill, what is this? What is this legislation? Where did it come from? How did it transform over time? Go.

Steven Attewell:  Great. The broader context is that in 1973 you had the worst recession since the Great Depression, right? It lasts from ’73-’75, unemployment goes up to like 10%, 11%, everyone’s freaking out. One of the responses to this is the creation of CETA, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, which creates about three quarters of a million jobs. So direct job creation now, once again, is in power. It’s in the government. It is the biggest function of the Labor Department. So now, it’s not just some people in the civil rights movement or a few wonks in a few agencies. This is the biggest thing that the Labor Department does is employ people directly. That is the context for the Humphrey Hawkins Act because now that they’ve built this capacity, they want to go further and create a right to a job to actually deal with the mass unemployment, because 750,000 jobs is not bad, but there’s 7 million people who are unemployed. It’s not dealing with the bulk of the problem. So the Humphrey Hawkins Act is a compromise between two different perspectives. One of them is from Congressman Augustus Hawkins, who is the founder of the Congressional Black Caucus. He is an old school, New Deal Democrat from South Central Los Angeles, and his version of this is based on Scandinavian social democracy. That envisions a system in which people have a legal right to a job. The way that is enforced is that you have local planning councils who come up with a shelf of programs. Then you have what’s called a job guarantee office, which replaces the unemployment office. If you don’t have a job, you go into this, and you apply for a job, and they’re then coordinating with the Labor Department and the executive and say, Okay, we have this many unemployed people. We need projects that will put them to work. So they take projects off the shelf, and they send people to what’s called the standby Job Corps, which is like a new WPA, basically. So it’s this kind of nice little tripartite system, but it’s very statist, right? All of this is happening pretty much on the public side, and it’s like very militantly backed by the right to sue the government. That if you need a job and the government won’t give you a job, you can go in and sue the federal government, and the courts will force them to give you a job. The other version of this is Hubert Humphrey. Hubert Humphrey had run for president in 1968. He’d lost, but he’s still a senator, or he gets back into the Senate, I should say, because he’d been the vice president. He starts working with our old friend, Leon Keyserling, who’s still around, who had been a major supporter of his in 1968. He had written a lot of speeches for him. What Humphrey wants to do is to amend the 1946 Employment Act and put numerical teeth into it to say it’s not enough that the President transmits a report to Congress about the economy. It’s not enough that we have a Council of Economic Advisors. You have to transmit a budget to the Congress that says that unemployment will be brought down to 3% or less. So they merge these two bills. Keyserling isn’t as much into the direct job creation stuff. He wants Hawkins to accept more of this kind of Keynesian economic planning stuff, but he accepts there’s going to be some role for direct job creation. They get into a big fight with Keynesians in 1976 where Hubert Humphrey and Hawkins are pushing this bill through the Congress, Keyserling is testifying before Congress, and he’s getting into a bunch of fights with economists who are saying we got to be worried about inflation. Keyserling has this very interesting perspective where he says, it’s not that full employment causes inflation; unemployment causes inflation because if you don’t have full utilization of the economy, then you’ve got bottlenecks and increasing prices for parts and raw materials and stuff like that, and that increases the prices of manufactured goods. So if you have full, full employment, prices will actually decrease, because those inputs will be cheaper. But this is like a big fight that you know they don’t agree with. So after the 1976 elections, they think they’re in a good position, that the Humphrey Hawkins Act was endorsed in the Democratic platform of 1976. Tip O’Neill likes and he’s running the house. They even get Jimmy Carter to sign on to it, even though it’s very tepid. And then the weirdest thing happens. This is a very similar story to what happens with healthcare under Carter, which is Carter having endorsed this stuff now says “I have my own plan”, and since he’s the president, everyone sort of stops and lets him do his plan. His plan is called the Program for Better Jobs and Income, PBJI. It’s not a great acronym. PBJI tries to do everything. It tries to say, Okay, we want to deal with poverty, we want to deal with unemployment, and we want to deal with welfare all in one go. So what it would do is, if you were unemployed and were able to work, there would be direct job creation. If you were employed but still poor, there would basically be a guaranteed above poverty wage through an expansion of the earned income tax credit. And if you were poor and couldn’t work, they would create a national welfare benefit. This is a very tortuous process. It goes on for nine months where you have people in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare who are only interested in the welfare side of things. You have people in the Labor Department who are only interested in the jobs side of things. Then you’ve got all of the economic departments, the CEA, the Treasury, Commerce, the Fed, who are like, this is terrible. We don’t want any of this. And Charles Schultz goes to Carter to say, Hey, remember how you also promise not to raise the deficit? And Carter says, Okay, fine. Give me a version of the PBJI that doesn’t increase spending. The people running it say that’s impossible. You can’t deal with unemployment, poverty, welfare and not spend any new money. So the plan cracks up. It goes nowhere in Congress. Everyone involved hates it, but it’s delayed dealing with the Humphrey Hawkins act for nine months, and then they start negotiating. The Carter administration starts negotiating with Senator Humphrey and Congressman Hawkins over the Humphrey Hawkins act, and Carter, in his infinite wisdom, appoints Charles Schultz to be the lead negotiator. This guy testified against the bill in 1976. Schultz fights this thing tooth and nail. He goes round and round and round. Ironically, on political economy. He’s like, No, but inflation, Phillips curve, this stuff I believe in, I’m gonna fight for it. I don’t want binding targets for unemployment. I don’t want direct job creation. What I found in the archives, is that at the same time that he’s grinding this whole thing to a halt, he’s also going to people in Congress and saying, hey, I want you to sabotage this bill. He’s literally stabbing them in the back. Almost a year goes by. This is why the Humphrey Hawkins act gets passed in late 78 instead of immediately, and by this point, it’s been cut to ribbons. What astonishes me is even after they have completely defanged this bill to the point where it’s essentially a paper tiger, just like the Employment Act of 1946, even after that, you’ve still got people in the Carter administration figuring out ways to not enforce this. They’re soliciting opinions from the Office of Legal Counsel, saying, can we ignore this law? Can we not enforce it? This contributes to this sort of breakup between Carter and the left of the Democratic Party. That culminates in Teddy Kennedy running against him in 1980 and Carter losing the presidency in 1980.

Maxx Seijo:  That’s a whirlwind of the history of this breakup of the last real bill that we’ve seen to raise the potential of a jobs guarantee in this country. I was wondering, because you do cite in your description of Humphrey Hawkins, one of the main problems is that Jimmy Carter sort of tried to smash all these things together into one bill that preceded Humphrey Hawkins on the debate schedule, and one of the principal issues was that he didn’t want to raise spending. That sort of made me think, because we are the Money on the Left Podcast, I was wondering if you could talk about at what point in this project you arrived or came to MMT, and how that informs the way you think about these moments.

Steven Attewell:  Ah, it’s a great question. So I came to MMT sometime in graduate school. I was reading a lot of political economy, fairly widely. I was reading Vickrey, I was reading a lot of Minsky, and then I ran across, where is it I actually have my copy on my desk? Yeah, I ran across Understanding Modern Money by L. Randall Wray. It kind of made me rethink a lot of stuff. Because in addition to writing this book, I had been doing a lot of blogging about direct job creation and trying to come up with my own plan, and trying to figure out how much it would cost, and how would you pay for it. I had been working on this kind of dodge where I said, Look, because I had noticed, during the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve had just created $7 trillion out of nowhere, and it didn’t create hyperinflation. I was like, Huh, why don’t we set up a system where, like, we’ll have direct job creation fund that’ll be financed with a payroll tax or something like that, but it can borrow from the Fed, so that when you have a recession, instead of having to support itself with its own revenue, it can take out a theoretically infinite zero interest loan from the Fed and then eventually pay it back. Then I read L. Randall Wray, and I was like, Oh, I’ve kind of backdoored my way into this. Or we could just tell the Fed to write the government a check. That would be a simpler way to do this. It kind of changed my thinking about this. I mean, I’m still fairly new to MMT. I’m still trying to sort of work my way through some questions about, Okay, how do we figure out how much money we can create relative to the real productive capacity of the economy? How do you operationalize that? To what extent are back doors useful if credit is all about faith, right? How do you work the magic of convincing people that money is real and liberate this power for public good? Because that’s the thing that L. Randall Wray’s work, and then, later, when I’ve read more MMT, have really gotten me to think about is this enormous power that is monetary power that we only use for the interest of a very powerful, but small industry, right? We created $7 trillion for the financial sector. We didn’t create $7 trillion for people whose houses were getting foreclosed on, or people who are going unemployed, or people who didn’t have health insurance. I was like, why don’t we use this power for everybody, not just for the people who are actually doing the best.

Billy Saas:  So one of the more exciting developments coming out of the MMT world now is the talk about not just a jobs guarantee, but a Green New Deal. There’s heavy borrowing from the rhetoric around the New Deal that you cover throughout your book. Could you maybe talk about and comment on or just join us in wonder at the Sunrise Movement and the call for the Green New Deal?

Steven Attewell:  Yeah, so I’m absolutely fascinated by the Green New Deal. I think it’s like one of the smartest things that the left has come up with since Medicare for All. It’s not so much that it’s incredibly technically complicated on its own, although it will be, but just the way of thinking about it, right? When I was talking about, how do you sell people on the faith of this, on the dream of this? What really got to me about the Green New Deal is, I wrote about this at Lawyers, Guns and Money, is it’s a way of doing everything that the left cares about. It’s about job guarantee. It’s about education and training. It’s about the fight for 15. It’s about environmental justice, it’s about racial justice, it’s about universal health care. It’s about child care, it’s about unions, but it’s in one vision that we can then talk to people about. It’s not a 50 point plan for every single issue. It is the vehicle through which everything else flows. And I think it’s goddamn brilliant. It’s one of those things that people really, really like. If you pull people on the Green New Deal, they like it. It’s even more popular than job guarantee, full stop, because it combines everything that people like about the job guarantee with all of the stuff that they care about on a whole host of other issues.

Billy Saas:  It’s got a much better ring than PBJI.

Steven Attewell:  Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Let us never follow the Carter administration on anything having to do with branding and public relations, please,

Billy Saas:  Or fiscal policy, or much else.

Scott Ferguson:  So from the point of view of your new book, what are the key lessons that we should be drawing for not just the fight for a job guarantee, but more expansively, this Green New Deal?

Steven Attewell:  So, yeah, this is something I was thinking about recently, and I’m actually working on a paper, hopefully that’ll be co written between myself and Phil Harvey, about what are these lessons? At the moment, I think there are three main ones. I don’t know if everyone’s going to agree on this, but this is what I’ve come to the conclusion on. Number one, I think methods of organization really matter. That it matters that direct job creation is public and not private. I don’t think it’s going to work if we try to do this through things like tax credits and subsidies to private employers, right? That’s the Ro Khanna model. It matters that it’s federal and not state or local. This is where I actually differ from people like the CBP’s plan, and the Levy Institute’s plan, so Wray and Sandy Darity, and also Cory Booker’s proposal, which is, if you look through the whole history of like American social and economic policy, one of the key flaws that we’ve always had to deal with is federalism. That anytime you introduce a role for the states, you introduce this enormous capacity for regional variation. That is a polite way of saying racial discrimination. The best example of this is the Affordable Care Act, right? If it hadn’t been for Justice Roberts saying that the Medicaid expansion was voluntary, there would be millions of people in Texas and Florida and all throughout the deep South who would have health insurance right now. The reason they don’t is because those states are fundamentally opposed to the idea of Black people getting any help from the government. The same thing will happen with the job guarantee. We can see this from the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty. The War on Poverty was deeply disliked in the South because it gave poor Black people an alternative to the white controlled labor market. In Mississippi, that was absolutely hated. So I think the federal government needs to run this. It’s not that the state and local governments and NGOs can’t be like sponsors, can’t propose projects and help out with money and give people a place to slot into, but the federal government has to be in the driver’s seat. Second thing, scale and scope matters. Direct job creation has to be large enough in relation to the size of the problem to have a real impact. So for example, the Cory Booker experimental model, I don’t think it’ll work now. Granted, right now, unemployment is super low, but it’s not going to stay that way forever. So in the future, if we need DJC to actually step up and bring unemployment rates down, it’s got to be big enough to do that. It’s got to have a big enough impact on the economy. The second part of that is how you organize the work matters. Like, what kind of stuff are you doing? We’ve already talked about the way that the greenness really matters, because it energizes people who really care about climate change, and the fact that this planet is going to be unlivable in 12 years if we don’t do something, that if we don’t do anything in the next 12 years, the world will become unlivable. But also things like, for example, light versus heavy construction. If we’re going to build stuff, do we rely on a model that says, let’s buy or rent as many cranes and backhoes and steamrollers as is possible to bring down the number of workers we need to the smallest number. Or do we say, we’ve got a lot of unemployed people, their labor is valuable. Let’s give them tools and put them to work. Let’s be labor intensive. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. Finally, under that point, the mix of infrastructure and services matters. One of the things that people have been worried about is that if all of this work is in construction, it’s going to be very heavily tilted towards men and leave a lot of women behind, or just people who aren’t suited to construction work, like people with disabilities, like myself. So in the 1970s like one of the real advances, CETA had a lot of problems, but one of the things it did right was it created what was called public service employment jobs. There’s all kinds of services that people need, whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s childcare, whether it’s education, whether it’s elder care or whether it’s just making the rest of the government work more efficiently. Put enough people into the DMV that the line takes five minutes. It’s that kind of stuff that legitimately touches people. The third thing is, there’s gonna be conflict within the broader left slash center left, like the Democratic Party, family, whatever you want to call it, and we need to be ready for it. On the one hand, direct job creation scares the hell out of some people for a couple different reasons. It is more statist. It is the government employing people. It involves more spending. It bypasses a lot of traditional stakeholders, like private contractors, state and local governments. Although, you know, as I said, I think there’s a role for state and local governments. It also challenges powerful, sometimes semi-conscious ideas about the necessity of unemployment and the worth of unemployed workers, that there’s this assumption that people who are unemployed are non-productive, are not worthwhile, are lazy or stupid or whatever, and so they have no value. The reality is, unemployed workers have this enormous value that is constantly being lost, right? There’s no way of preserving the labor power of someone who’s not working. Another thing is that given that direct job creation is only going to happen if and when Democrats control all three branches of government, one of the biggest problems we’re gonna have to deal with is not so much the right. They’re gonna hate this idea, but either we beat them or it never happens. But it’s people on the left to center left. We’re gonna have to deal with budget hawks. We’re gonna have to deal with other centrists who are crazy worried about deficits, and we’re also going to have to deal with other leftists, like universal basic income enthusiasts, who see direct job creation as a competitor for budget dollars and political oxygen. Then the fourth thing I’ll say is that visibility really matters. I think one of the ways that we kind of missed a trick when it came to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is that we tried to make things hidden. I think the best example of this is the payroll tax credit that no one realized they got. I was thinking back to when the Bush tax cuts happened, and they sent out mail to everyone in America with a picture of George Bush’s face and saying, Hey, we got you a tax cut. We should do stuff like that. The WPA had these big red, white and blue posters on all of their job sites, so that everyone knew where the WPA project in their community was. When it came to ARRA, there were these kinds of ugly orange signs. But unless you were driving, you couldn’t really see them. There needs to be a mix of projects, and we have to be a little bit crassly political about this. We need to make sure that there are projects in every congressional district in America, and we need to make them very, very visible. My thing that I’m nuts about is I believe very strongly in giving people cards. You get a social security card, right? That’s something in your wallet that you can look at, and it’s a tangible connection between you and the government. If it were up to me, I would say, okay, Green New Deal, awesome. The job guarantee part of it, or the income guarantee part of it, or the living wage part of it. Everyone needs a card in their wallet, a laminated piece of plastic that they can sort of say, even if it’s only a symbolic function, to say this is something you have from the government. This is a right that you now have, that you can exercise. You have a protection that you don’t have already.

Maxx Seijo:  Well with that Stephen Attewell, thank you so much for coming on Money on the Left.

Steven Attewell:  My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. If you’re interested in this stuff, Public at Work is available through the University of Pennsylvania Press or on Amazon.com.

Maxx Seijo:  Perfect.

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Mike Lewis (transcription), & Robert Rusch (graphic art)

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Tribal Nations & Eco-Feminist Provisioning with Josefina Li

We speak with Josefina Li, Assistant Director of the International Program Center at Bemidji State University and doctoral candidate at University of Missouri, Kansas City. Josefina’s dissertation research brings feminist and ecological economic traditions into conversation with Modern Monetary Theory. We first encountered Li’s work at the inaugural “Money on the Left” conference, which was held at University of South Florida in Spring 2018. At that conference, Li delivered a paper that explored the prospects of developing community currencies and implementing job guarantee programs in tribal nations. We were thrilled to finally speak with Li on the podcast and to learn more about her ongoing project of envisioning a jobs guarantee program for an ecofeminist future.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

Billy Saas:  Josefina Li, welcome to Money on the Left.

Josefina Li:  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Scott Ferguson:  Well, it’s our pleasure. We met you many moons ago in 2018 when a few of us held a conference at the University of South Florida that we titled Money on the Left, and you came and presented your work at the time on tribal nations and the prospect of starting a job guarantee on reservations, and we were very taken by this work, and we immediately turned around and started a podcast called Money on the Left, and we invited you onto this podcast, I think, within the first year, but you were more of a beginning PhD student at the time and you wanted more time to develop your ideas. Which is fair enough, and we’ve reached out to you again, and you’ve agreed to share some of your more mature thoughts on this and other issues such as eco-feminist theorizations and developments of Modern Monetary Theory and the job guarantee. But for our listeners who likely don’t know much about you, maybe you can tell them a little bit about yourself and your training, your background and some of your professional interests, yeah, well, thank

Josefina Li:  Yeah, well thank you, Scott, for that background story of how I came to this podcast. I went to the University of Missouri Kansas City for my undergraduate and my graduate program. I’m a UMKC home breed. I was an undergraduate research assistant for Dr Mathew Forstater, and just stayed on with them for the PhD program. When I presented at the conference this idea of a tribal job guarantee, I was living and teaching in Minnesota. At the time, I was working at the University of Minnesota Duluth, but I lived in Bemidji. Bemidji is a city, and for listeners who might think Bemidji, the name sounds a little different than an English word, you would be correct. It is not English. It’s Ojibwe. So a language spoken by the tribal nations there. In Ojibwe, Bemidji means water flows through land. So Bemidji is also known as the first city on the Mississippi. It’s just about 45 minutes from the headwater of the Mississippi, and it’s located in the center of a triangle marked by three tribal nations and so as a PhD student studying at UMKC, I was exposed to the literature of MMT, of job guarantee, and some of the newer theoretician in the field have started to feel a little bit of frustration, given the gridlock of Washington, DC, it’s really hard to pass a federal level job guarantee. So we’re looking for grassroot ways to organize at the community level, ways to mobilize underutilized resources. So community currency, this is certainly not new. It has existed for many, many years, in response to a crisis, basically whenever a community does not have enough money, it seeks to create some more. So that community currency field is not new. However, very few people in that literature have also read MMT, so there seemed to be a bridge that needed to be made at the same time. We also know, you know, from the legal perspective that the federal government does not want competition with US dollars, so there’s a lot of restriction around who can issue currency for circulation. And these three tribal nations surrounding religion, Red Lake Tribal Nation, for example, is an entirely close tribal nation in the US, and they have sovereignty. So the thought that came to mind as well, if you are a sovereign nation, what is, what marks, what represents sovereignty better than having your currency? And that’s kind of the few reasons that led to the idea of a tribal job guarantee funded by what I call Junia, which is the Ojibwe word for money. I realize I’m supposed to be introducing myself, but I kind of went a little bit into the work presented in 2018 Yeah, and I currently work at Bemidji State University as the Assistant Director of the International Program Center. So I also work with international students and US students studying abroad. I came to the US as an extreme student when I was 17. So that work feels a little bit like a circle, coming to a full circle.

Billy Saas:  Let’s talk about the Zhooniyaa, can you walk us through that project?

Josefina Li:  I think what prompted me to do this, other than the few things I’ve mentioned, is just the geographic location with the Native nations. Also, we were seeing socio-economic problems in Bemidji, we are keenly aware of the socio economic problems that face the Indian countries and intensifies in Indian countries. We’re keenly aware of the unemployment, poverty, lack of meaningful economic opportunities on the reservation, and all of these we know from research also contribute to other social problems. We know the Bureau of Indian Affairs, they try to track data and reports, and they do have some grants to support the Indian countries, but a story that we often heard is they would apply for some federal grants, they would set up a project, and by the time the money runs out, everything shuts down. You go back to square one. We have a Walmart located just off the highway here, and this pattern, whenever welfare checks are released, you will see a lot of people go in there shopping. And we know as economists that when you spend at a local business, a higher percent of that cash stays in the community and continues in circulation. Versus if you spend at Walmart or national chain, Big Box Company, a lot of that ends up leaving the community. Murray in 2018, using county level data, sampled five reservations, and they show that the one big reason for the decline in retail services was because earnings were flowing out of the reservation rather than coming in, to be more exact, of $6 million annually. So that’s a big, serious outflow of earning problems. At the same time, the Indian countries also face problems of lack of capital, financial capital, lack of human capital, and means to develop it. And that also goes back to my example of when the grants run out. If you don’t have the capital to maintain the infrastructure, then the operation can just come to a sudden halt. There’s also poor, mismanaged natural resources, competition from the non-native or non-Indian markets. Knowing these socio-economic problems, my thoughts are, I also feel like Indian nations have often been presented with these ideas. Like, oh, this can solve your problem. That can and to some degree, they feel or I feel a little resistance from them on, accepting sort of outsider proposals and solutions. So that goes a little bit into the political development of me trying to present and talk to some of the community members about this idea. One other practical problem with working with the Indian nations is it’s no different than working with any other governing bodies. There’s turnovers in the government. So if the current leader is interested in your project. That might go on for a little bit, but then, if there is a change at the leadership level, that idea could also come to a halt. At the time, the Zhooniyaa idea I proposed was for the tribal government to start by imposing a household civic tax. Certainly the idea came from MMT’s tax driven money idea. One of my critique to the existing community currencies, alternative currencies out there, was that if they understood that taxes were not there to finance spending, but rather to create demand for the currency, then they would understand that there needs to be some sort of, not necessarily tax per se, but some sort of universal obligation placed on the currency users so that they would continue to use the currency. And tribal government is a governing body, and they have the ability to impose a household civic tax, which would be universal  within the boundaries of the tribal nations. Also, the three tribal nations could engage in some sort of internal trading. We would also target businesses with products of higher local components. And that goes again to the idea of the more money stays in the community, the more circulations, then you would put the money supply and demand would be higher. The one other component I wanted to throw in there to create even more demand for the currency was energy. So Red Lake Nation, for example, started a project of solar power production. That gets into some other complicated utility company related issues. But the thought is, everyone needs to use electricity, right? It’s a universal demand. If the tribal government could also be producing solar power, producing utility and energy, and if they would accept Junior as a currency to pay for the utility that would create additional demand and help with the circulation in the community. The funds, I kind of build on the idea of solar Commons. The funds can be generated by a solar Commons. That helps with setting up the system to promote circulation and use. I would then say, what sort of shifted my research focus away from that was a conversation actually attending another conference. This was organized at Salem State, just outside of Portland, Oregon. It was a group of MMT related people talking about or envisioning possibilities of using public banking for social provisioning. At that conference, I met a couple of people from, I think, the Osage Nation. There was also some legal experts. So we had some conversation about the legality of a tribe issuing their own currency. So the research I had found, or literature I have found at the time states that their sovereignty would include currency issuing. But they brought to my attention, and I only know a little bit about that, some treaty language which would prevent the tribal nations from marshaling resources for war. So there’s some language in the treaty regarding if you were to issue currency, then you could be raising resources that potentially engage in warfares with the states, and that’s certainly not allowed. Now, ultimately, which way or how it would go would have to be fought out in the court. As an economist, I am here to envision what our future society would like. I think of myself as a dreamer, also as a mother. We like to envision what kind of world we want our children to live in. So I’m envisioning but I also know there are some challenges regarding the legality of the currency, and that what has to be determined in the courtroom, not in the sphere of economics.

Billy Saas:  In the MMT community, I think on this podcast, and more broadly, we understand our ambition to be in the service of democracy and equity and justice. So I’d be interested to know how that factored into or would factor into conversations you might have in approaching tribal nations about something like the Junia.

Josefina Li:  I mean, full disclosure, I have not approached the tribal governments themselves, so I have talked with nonprofit that works on the tribal land with various things and just different stakeholders that have worked with them, but I have not brought the idea to the tribal leader themselves, so I don’t know exactly how they would react. I would like to get back to that idea someday just to see if there’s any possibility of implementation. But I certainly agree, and you’ve also given me a great idea on sort of the angle to pivot the idea. One of the benefits of the community currency is the participatory democracy aspect. When the currency is issued at the federal level, a lot of the decisions in the monetary system are so far removed from the everyday concern at the local level. So a lot of the proponents of community currency are citing the reason as sort of an insulation of the regional economy and also bringing the decision making process back to the community. Those two being really important to the design of the currency and the reason for using alternative currency. So I do know that the tribal nations very much value having that decision making right at the tribal level in a way that also respects their tradition and way of life and their values. So, yeah, I really appreciate that, that angle.

Billy Saas:  I feel like it’s a sort of default or de facto angle for a lot of MMTers. So less like an angle, more like an assumption.

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, as opposed to just a technocratic economist who comes in and consults and advises and tells people what to do and disrupts…

Billy Saas:  This isn’t micro loans, in other words. On the question of community currency and legality, I think that there’s something interesting going on here between your conversation with legal scholars and the folks from the Osage Nation and what happens in, say, Western Massachusetts with the Berkshares program. It’s my understanding that complementary currency, itself, exists in a kind of gray area, legally, broadly, something like Berkshires or other community complementary currencies. They could be taken out or subject to some kind of enforcement against them, but they’re not. They don’t tend to be. I wonder if I have some thoughts, if that same kind of leeway or flexibility would apply if it were introduced into a tribal nation context where there are treaties like that. Certainly nobody’s making the argument that the Berkshares are getting ready to militarize, or the Berkshires. It’s interesting that there is a kind of gray area, but it doesn’t stop in certain directions, but it seems like an obstacle that might present differently in the context of tribal nations. I wonder if you have any thoughts along those lines around the history of complementary currency and the kind of free pass that seems to be given for lots of those projects and experiments.

Josefina Li:  Yeah. When I brought the idea up to the Osage people from legal backgrounds, I got the sense that it was dead on arrival, just no, but looking at the history is how the court has made decisions regarding what is deemed as a currency that comes in competition with the US dollar and what is not. I think that’s probably an area for further research. There also might be a forthcoming paper (in the American Review of Political Economy) by Ely Fair from Knox college, attacks the history of complementary currency and how it’s been thought out in the courtrooms, and seems like how much it resembles US dollars is used for primarily exchanges, circulations or use value, the level, the scale of acceptability, and the geographic location, distribution of the trade. These are all factors that play into whether something is legal or not. Ultimately, the judging factor is the federal government does not want currency to be replacing the US dollars and in competition with it. It’s also the emission of the currency, which also means some gray area and room for digital currency. We’re talking about new developments, the development of digital currency and a new way to keep track of the ledger. It’s definitely something communities can look into as a way around some of the constitutional restrictions on local state entities or other organizations issuing currency. This is certainly something I can circle back to and bring it back to the local nations here to see if it’s possible. Yeah, I feel like there’s still room. Again. I’m just not a legal scholar who wants to challenge that in one way or another.

Scott Ferguson:  Yeah, that makes sense. I do think it’s worth stating aloud some of the tacit assumptions that structure these contests and these decisions and the precedents, right? So obviously, we’re talking about a history of racism and settler colonialism that’s structuring the language of these treaties and this legal language, right? As opposed to, I mean, let’s take a radical counter example. You know, what was it? A week or so ago, Donald Trump promised if he wins the election to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve or something like this. Bitcoin, along this logic, would be competition with the dollar. But here we have a former President of the United States saying that he would establish this at the federal level. So I recognize that what your project is to think about a more democratic economic design for peoples who are struggling and have suffered from oppression, and these legal structures are real obstacles. But I think right, obviously the broader framework and the broader historical politics are pretty glaringly racist and sort of arbitrary or hypocritical, right? What counts as a form of credit that threatens the dollar is not an objective, neutral question?

Josefina Li:  Yeah, absolutely. And just to add on, on top of that, I think the reason we’re calling for local currency for the tribal nations or any community needing to have an alternative currency is because their needs are not met by the federal dollars. And the Berkshare is a great and relatively long lasting system, but a closer examination will reveal that the incentive for participants to engage with this dual, it’s essentially a dual currency system and to deal with the annoyance of exchanging, keeping track of that is that discount. So they, I think it’s a 90 cents on $1 or 95 cents on $1 discount for using the Berkshare. It’s used predominantly in the farmers market for produce. So the community currency, in that sense, also at a freely exchangeable or convertible to the US dollars, really limits that currency’s ability to mobilize underutilized resources. You’re not really issuing or putting more money supply into the economy, if anyone is free to exchange it back to the dollars, at a one to one ratio. Also, for those that have read the MMT literature, would know this free, convertible currency is essentially like a foreign government that has their currency pegged to US dollars. So they’re not really monopoly issuers of that currency, which means they do not have both the fiscal and monetary tools at their disposal. If they are not free to issue their currency, instead it is pegged, they’re limited by the supply of US dollars. That also means they have to import whatever monetary policy that the US is implementing, and that essentially means the community is importing whatever macro economic policy at the federal level. That, in a sense, kind of defeats the purpose of implementing a local currency, because the community has underemployment and capacity for human resources. So, legally, a local money that succeeds at becoming the term they use in the legal sentencing was, not sure if sentencing is the right word, is “ordinary”. So if the currency becomes ordinary, it becomes legal. But for a local currency to be successful at its economic goals, it needs to be ordinary. We want it to be circulating for that Keynesian multiplier effect to kick in. So a local money which succeeds at becoming ordinary may also succeed at being illegal. I think that just adds a level of kind of irony to all of this.

Billy Saas:  I wonder if it’s not the emission so much or the fact of the currency existing, a complimentary or community currency, for example, again, the Berkshares. That’s not the threat, the fact that it exists, and circulates and is emitted and used in exchange, but that perhaps in the context, the very reason that you are critiquing those currencies for their ignorance of or unawareness of tax driven money. The fact that money tends to derive its value from being tax driven. In the context of tribal nations, if they were to roll out something like this currency, it would not actually rise to the level of threat or noteworthy competition until it was collected back in taxes by that local government. That may be the missing ingredient, why complementary currencies have been sort of untroubled or not very notably challenged is because of that ignorance. Because once there become two sovereigns who are collecting taxes, that’s where the threat comes from. That’s the real competition. Because otherwise, like you say, it’s a parallel currency that is always going to be sort of redeemed in dollars, but if you don’t have to redeem it in dollars, then maybe that’s the source of competition. What do you think?

Josefina Li:  Yeah, I mean, if you don’t have to redeem for dollars, then it certainly is a competitive force. I would also add, when I use the word tax, many remind me that for everyday people, who do not think in the framework of tax driven money, there’s a negative connotation associated with tax. It is something to take away from the people, and in a community that is so impoverished, to think that there could be even more added on to what they’ve already been asked for, seems like a really hard starting point. I do think pivoting and highlighting the part of the participatory democracy aspect could be more appealing. We’re avoiding the use of the term tax. We know it’s not tax, it’s that obligation, it’s that debt relation. It’s knowing that you can ultimately settle some sort of obligation with this money or thing or zhooniya. That’s what makes people want to accept it. So getting past and understanding that could be a game changer.

Scott Ferguson:  This is probably a good time to pivot to some of your more recent work in your dissertation project, where you’re trying to bring ideas from Ecological Economics and feminist economics into a kind of synthetic dialog with Modern Monetary Theory and adjacent heterodox thinking. Maybe you can walk us through how you came to these ideas, and why they’re so important for you.

Josefina Li:  I’ve been sort of stewed and raised out of the job guarantee and MMT tradition, having had key people like Stephanie Kelton, Randy Wray and Mathew Forstater as my teachers. Dr Forstater pointed me in the right direction. The names are Donatella Alessandrini. I became aware of this political Italian feminist group and their writing, including Sylvia Federici and others. I have learned some ecofeminism in grad school. I have come to another, in an earlier chapter of my dissertation, outline this fundamental incompatibility between the capitalist mode of production and sustainability and ecofeminism is kind of shared this, this fundamental principle that capitalism is built or necessarily requires the exploitation of nature and women and slavery, the colonial. All of that is how capitalism came to be. Federici’s work in Caliban and the Witch should kind of track the historical transition from feudalism to capitalism to show this exploitation and situating an ecofeminism is double exploitation of the environment and of women. Having been a woman who has engaged in the role of social reproduction, the more I engage with their literature, the more I could relate and appreciate the way that the care economy is theorized in their framework. Because oftentimes when we think of the feminist movement, we think of increasing female labor force participation rates. We think of incorporating females into the market economy. Even, you know, in the context of the care work, how can we do so much? How can we do that? It just tracks the last 100 years. It’s this massive market type of commodification of work that is produced in the home front. You know, as the family grows to a dual income family, a lot of time, we become time poor. The concept of time poverty is real, and so therefore you have to make up the time lost by saving it somewhere else. And so that’s when packaged food, frozen meals, you know, childcare, all of these become available and commodified. The industrialized food production system is at the backbone of modern dual income family households. As I’m living through this myself, I’m constantly struggling between, do I save the time and whip a meal together with something that’s easily off the pulled off the shelf from a store, but the same time I value so much of getting down on my knees and gardening, picking off the excess tomato leaves, growing a garden, and then preparing the meal that is from the land and table. This constant pull of how the time is spent between production in the market economy and reproduction in the household front. When I engaged with the Italian political feminist work, it all made sense. This divide between the sphere of social reproduction and production was not so much of a divide before the Industrial Revolution. In my work, I started with a little bit of history of economic thought. So I thought it was important to trace back to the classical political writers and see how wage is seen in the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and even Marx himself. So I write a little bit on wages as a social reproduction, because when you’re writing in the context of classes, you have labor, capital, and a landlord. You have these classes that are essentially competing for the outputs, each making a claim of the output based on their property ownership. Do you own labor power? You earn a wage? Do you own land? You earn rents. You are a property owner, then you earn profits or claim. Everyone can make a claim. Even though we know from the writings of mainly classical political writers with a labor theory of value, they would say that labor is the primary creation or source of profit and economic output. But because of the framework of this class struggle, wage is a result of this power dynamic and struggle amongst the classes and Smith was very clear that the Capitalists have the upper hand in this struggle. They are more likely to hold out for much longer than the labor and I mean, also a plug. This is why we need to have a labor union. Even though the capitalist class would try to squeeze Labor Wages as low as possible, they understand that, at the very minimum, there needs to be a level to allow the social reproduction of the laboring population. Which is also why I have situated my research and my thinking in the concept of social provisioning. So economics is not a study of scarce resources among competing ends, but rather a study of social provisioning, that is how society organized themselves for social provision, and that includes social reproduction. For so many women, and through the division of labor and market economy, the work that used to be done and still needs to be done, the social reproduction still needs to be done, became something outside of the market. If economists are only studying market activities or market production, we’re overlooking an entire sector, so huge, such a sector in the economy. So the more I engage with the feminist literature, the more I’m thinking how can the job guarantee and MMT literature also serve some of these concerns in the feminist writing? Some of the feminist including Alessandrini, as also they were aware of the job guarantee proposal. Their one critique was the job guarantee is saying, everyone who’s willing and able to work shows up and gets paid a going wage. But we all know that wage as an institution post the classical political writers, it became a prize that is set in the labor market through competitive forces. So wages are part of this capitalist market production system. It comes with everything else that comes with commodification of work, of female or women’s work. So they have that critique of wage institutions as the backbone of job guarantee. So I am thinking to myself, job guarantee has so many other benefits, including it being, if it’s implemented at the government level, which has non capitalist social objectives, they do not have to be profit driven. Does that create space for recognizing the alternative livelihood, recognizing, not valuation, using the word valorization of women’s work and where, how does community currency fit in? How does community production fit in? That’s kind of how it all started, because they do fit together.

Billy Saas:  What have you discovered, and what do you make of the prospects of this project in this liminal moment?

Josefina Li:  Yeah, that’s a great question. I really appreciate that question. I feel really optimistic with this synthesizing work of job guarantee, MMT, feminist economics, the sustainability aspect. I do think that a community powered job guarantee can be a vehicle to achieve social justice and sustainability. I think we can start from, starting from the basics. For the listeners who are maybe not as familiar with the job guarantee idea, I’m going to reiterate its non capitalist mode of production that came from Abba Lerner’s functional finance tradition. In functional financing, the key being the functional, it opens up a whole space of thinking about financing, thinking about money. Because if we’re allowed to pursue other social and environmental objectives, and we also know from a variety of writers, including Jakob Feinig, who presented on the same panel as me back at the conference, glad to see that his book is out, had demonstrated to readers that money as a social institution is shaped by social and political forces. It represents power relations and also gender hierarchy, but it’s also malleable. It is a social technology that can be redesigned and produced, and I’m glad to hear, Billy, that you have your students engaging in that exact exercise in the classroom. Understanding. MMT means that we have a new way of thinking of money and to design it in a way to accomplish the things we want to accomplish. A job guarantee in the same long train of thoughts. In designing the program, there’s space to reinvent the meaning of work and employment. Jobs could be created to address justice and sustainability. Going back to the tribal proposal, there’s a lot of gap of community needs that could be fulfilled by a community currency powered job guarantee. There’s a lot of trails that could be updated. We know there are a lot of community needs which are not fulfilled by private markets. Because there’s no profits to be generated. It does not mean they do not function. They do not provide important social functioning or environmental sustainability. Tying it back to the feminist perspective, I think I’m being really optimistic, because just the simple fact that we are bringing to light this whole sphere of social reproduction, and that it creates value, and not just to think of it as non market activities, or think of it as the care economy or the Love economy that women engage with because they love. Let’s do the right thing, to valorize the work so that we could finally rediscover what love means. If anything we learned from the global pandemic is when there is a gap in the social reproduction, someone needs to step in and fill that gap. And oftentimes we see it’s women, where migrant workers, or intersectionality is real. It’s migrant women, immigrant women, women of color doing, performing those jobs. It also means the traditional idea of incorporating women into the capitalist market production will somehow solve all the problems. Well, no, it would just follow this path of least resistance, if you will, right? So, yes, you incorporate the white women into the market economy, but then all the social reproduction just gets pushed onto the women of color, black women. So that was some of the other critiques that black feminist writers had early on to feminist writing in general. Not to mention, the traditional benefits that come with job guarantee, which I’m sure many of your audience are familiar with: it being a buffer stock that sets the floor of pricing for labor skills, maintenance and being complementary to the private sector. Perhaps we need to address the feminist issue, their critique of wage being in what they call the wage institution. So maybe calling it a social provisioning gift. But it’s not just what we call it. The work that we’re doing at home, I’m just going to give food production as an example. Food production is such a window that allows us to just look at all of the non-market activities, how it’s been overlooked, from growing food from the garden or preparing a meal, meal prepping, freezing, or foraging food. There’s so much that goes into food production that shows love, but also it is the bedrock of the neighboring population being able to perform their productive work in the market economy. So essentially, the rest of the economy, the capitalist system, rests on the work of social reproduction that is not recognized. We’re not just paying them a wage, but also recognizing their contribution to our social provision. Yeah, so if a woman wants to be a girl power and as a CEO of a company, that’s great. But if they just want to provide healthy meals to their family, that work also needs to be recognized. I think a community currency powered job guarantee would allow for this alternative valorization of a different livelihood. One of the sociologists used the term “radical homemaking”. I love that idea of radicalizing just in the kitchen.

Scott Ferguson:  This is one of the first things that became clear to me and the most exciting to me when I first came to Modern Monetary Theory and heterodox understandings of money and credit. Once I unlearned the idea that money was simply just an expression of a private market economy and simply an expression of the capitalist mode of production, it precisely opened up alternative frameworks, like what you’re calling the social provisioning framework, and allowed us to think that we can do lots of different things with money that isn’t just about exploitative wage labor. I also was very compelled of what this meant for feminist causes and impulses, intersectional feminist impulses, precisely for socializing care work. So I really, really appreciate this work that you’re doing. I think I have a comment and then a question. One comment is, I think one of the many reasons we like to invite people like you onto our podcast to discuss your work is because, I think in the larger culture, MMT has some recognition, but it’s often treated as sort of one technocratic explanation for how things work and what we can do, as against another one. I don’t blame the MMT messaging for that, I think that’s the context that we’re in. I think somebody like Stephanie Kelton has to bring a certain kind of technical expertise to the table and fight toe to toe with people like Jason Furman or Larry Summers, and there’s a gendered element there as well. But I think so often MMT ends up needing to defend itself on technocratic grounds that what gets lost in the broader public is all the sort of rich not just potential of of the framework, but all the rich work that’s going on pedagogically in institutions like UMKC and people asking more and more questions, right? It’s not over. MMT isn’t done. It’s an ongoing project. So I just really like talking to and platforming you and your work and others just to honor that kind of creativity and problem solving that keeps going on. So that’s my comment. My question is, do you have thoughts in your work about specific programs, right? So you know one option is just to offer wages for housework, and that could come in the form of welfare benefits or care benefits. It could be a kind of laissez faire approach which just says here is access to money, to credit, in thanks for the work that you do in your home. And there’s probably a place for that. But what about socializing and restructuring feminized and racialized care work? What kinds of programs, public programs, whether it’s at the community level or at larger scales. Do you find yourself thinking about, meditating on, maybe developing ideas about?

Josefina Li:  In my free time, what very little I have, that’s what I meditate on and focus on. I mean, I love the concept of sociological imagination. I think we all need a little imagination. And so also, I was just at Dr Forstater’s recent workshop where he had shared some alternative methodology, and Adolf Lowe being the one of the people he had cited his instrumentalism, which essentially says, you start with the vision, your goal, where do you want to get to? Then you work backwards. So that’s a little bit kind of how I’m thinking this through. I know the end result is we want to have some sort of post capitalist society that’s socially just and environmentally sustainable. We know that the current capitalist mode of production is destroying that. So what do we need to have in between, to work backwards so we can get to that, to that goal? I certainly think there is still a place for the work that Kelton is doing at the federal level. We’re still going to be pushing for a Green New Deal, job guarantee. But there’s also so much power in the idea of Commoning, and I think we can accomplish that Commoning idea at The community level. In my survey of different community complementary currencies that existed, Bristol pounds being one that is linked to a municipal tax. So there has been a kind of a renewed, maybe a resurgence, of the thinking of designing community currency with a tax component, so working with municipal or county level governments for the implementation of this community currency, because their tax base is also really wide and the services they provide are all community based. My kids pay the cities for their swimming lessons. We use the State Park and the city skate park extensively. They also provide a lot of youth program campaigns. So these are all services that could be settled in the currency. So, calling it wages or not, recognizing the work that’s done in the social reproduction sphere would mean that for women who are growing a garden or a foraging mushrooms to put on the table that are never sold in the market economy, that work can now be recognized, and I don’t know if compensated is the right…or enumerated, recognized for their contribution in this currency. The currency has an emphasis on a really strong local emphasis. If it’s local, borrowing some of the lessons from community currencies that are “LETS” which stands for Local Exchange Trade System to boost more local exchanges so that the production here where the money is to value. Let me organize my thoughts here.

Scott Ferguson:  No problem. 

Josefina Li:  Money is circulated, issued, produced to recognize the use value rather than the exchange value, so much as the dollars. To quote someone, I can’t remember who recently I read, we’re using improved means to achieve unimproved ends. If we’re realizing the end is a just, sustainable society where I know the name of the farmers that raised the cow that’s sitting on my table, and I know those kinds of production, local production, also has a much lower ecological footprints. By valuing and encouraging these local production, social production, in providing the currency to facilitate that exchange, it has the benefit of both ecological sustainability as well as the gender conscientiousness, recognizing the value of the work in caring and loving. I don’t know if I’m answering your question on designing this currency. I know there has to be a tax component, and the more additional sort of add on demand there is, the stronger this currency will be. So again, I would revisit two things, food and energy. That is, two things that we cannot live without. As I also mentioned, Local production of food and energy also have much lower, again, ecological footprints. So if energy could be locally sourced with solar production, and if food can be locally produced and purchased, exchanged, if you consider those as you know the debt relation when you use or buy or consume those things. If that debt can be settled with the community currency, that also broadens the base of the demand. Yeah, I certainly invite everyone to join me in a little re-envisioning, or envisioning.

Scott Ferguson:  All of that makes a lot of sense to me, and all that is very exciting. I was also imagining, rather than individual homemakers foraging by themselves, there could be a foraging cooperative and a foraging bank and a seed bank. Not that these things don’t exist. They do exist, but not everywhere. I guess I was just interested in some ideas for organizations, groups, facilitations that would do the work of more than just offering a basic income, right? Say, you’re doing this work at home. We know it’s hard. Here’s some welfare benefits for it. And for some people that might be what they need. But I also think we all share a desire to not just remunerate the work that is done in the home, but rather transform it and make it less of a burden, socialize it, transform it, make it more joyous.

Josefina Li:  Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s really the million dollar question here. I don’t pretend to have the answer. I think the entity, and there’s also a lot of legal questions and how to set this up with the city or the county trustee to a bank that then issues and monitors and tracks the digital ledger of the currency that could be one way. Keep in mind, this is a job guarantee, so it’s not just providing an income to stay at home moms for foraging and cooking. But also anyone who is unemployed and has skills and ways to contribute or wants to do, I know local nonprofits are under a lot of pressure to provide a lot of resources to much needed community, and they’re also kind of in competition with one another on a limited pool of volunteers in the community.

Scott Ferguson:  And grants.

Josefina Li:  Right? So the currency could also, I’m just now again, adding another demand employee were essentially as a bonus wage to people who are performing volunteer or civic duties in the community. Again, there has been much literature written on the different green jobs, maybe perhaps more labor intensive but environmentally sustainable jobs that could be performed by the job guarantee population. There is one idea by Ely Fair. In this proposal, they said the city would impose this Civic tax. It has to also be readily available for people to get a hold of this currency. So if you’re not participating in this job guarantee program, you’re not working for the city, or you’re not foraging right, or preparing a meal, you can also buy it from the city at $20 US dollars. That, again, sets a floor of wage offering, effectively driving up the real wages in the private sector. So there’s a lot of different ideas we’re getting into the practical nitty gritties, details of designing the currency. Again, I don’t have all of the answers. I hope my contribution is really for us to, first of all, a community currency, redesigning it, we have to add a tax driven component to it, and broaden the base to bring in food and energy production. The higher the acceptability. It should not be designed as a system of free convertibility to the US dollars. That, we do know. I don’t have the answer for you. I’m sorry.

Billy Saas:  You’ve got the vision, though, and we’re very much into the visioning. On that note, you mentioned a couple times part of that vision being post capitalist, but I think for some listeners and for some readers of MMT and adjacent literatures, you say post capitalist, they might presume or often, in Marxist literature particularly, post capitalist means post money. Or it implicates or implies post money. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Money will continue to play. In fact, we’ll have a central role in this post capitalist imaginary that we that you’re providing us with.

Josefina Li:  Yeah, I really appreciate that comment. Absolutely. You know, as we all know, in the understanding of money as a debt relation, it’s a set of relationships. In fact, one other benefit I don’t know if I’ve mentioned with community or local currency, is through this network of trading, you’re also strengthening community networks and these community local relationships. For someone who is cooking a meal at home, or someone else might have the skills of growing just the best tomatoes in their garden, we have a lot of forests here, so lots of woodworkers. They can make nice cabinetry. I might know a handful of people that I trade with, but without the local currency, that trade will be very limited to a very small circle. The idea of a local currency is –and recognizing money as, again, the debt relation–will facilitate and encourage reciprocity exchanging the community so that someone maybe I’ve never met, I could purchase a meal at her home and try some authentic frying taco and someone else could do you know, my driveway in exchange for this doesn’t have to be trading, right? It’s not bartering anymore thanks to the existence of a digital, modernized local currency. So post capitalist definitely does not mean post money. In fact, money as a debt relation has long existed before. It probably has existed as long as written language or any writing system.

Scott Ferguson:  Jo Li, thanks so much for joining us on Money on the Left. We really appreciated your visit with us.

Josefina Li:  Thank you so much for having me. I’ve also learned a lot, and you’ve also given me some great insights and ideas for further studies.

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Mike Lewis (transcription), & Robert Rusch (graphic art)

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Make America Laugh Again with Maggie Hennefeld

Hosts Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) welcome Maggie Hennefeld (@magshenny) to the Superstructure podcast to discuss her essay, “Make America Laugh Again,” published in Minneapolis’s Star Tribune. Previously ridiculed, Kamala Harris’s signature laughter has emerged as an electrifying rallying cry for her last-minute candidacy for President of the United States. “Harris’ laughter has become a national symbol of collective healing,” Hennefeld argues, “affirming the powers of contagious joy to unite community across the bitter divisions of culture and identity. … [L]aughter is a lifeline for resistance against the global onslaught of authoritarian hate and fearmongering.” Analyzing the carnivalesque slogans and memes surrounding the Harris campaign, our conversation draws surprising parallels between feminist laughter in fin-de-siècle cinema and in contemporary online cultures. 

Maggie Hennefeld is a feminist scholar of silent cinema and professor in the Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the author of Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2024) and Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia University Press, 2018). She is also co-curator of the four-disc DVD/Blu-ray set Cinema’s First Nasty Women. 

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me” EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting



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Money, Modernism & Inflation in The Great Gatsby

Rob Hawkes (@robbhawkes) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) kick off a new Superstructure series about money, modernism, and inflation by revisiting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s widely-read novel, The Great Gatsby (1925).  

In this first episode of the series, Rob and Scott complicate orthodox notions of inflation that treat economic crises past and present as mechanical results of excess money printing. They do so by reconsidering modernist art and literature’s fraught relations with notions of austerity and excess. While inflation has been associated, by modernist writers and scholars alike, with a crisis of faith in representation, Rob and Scott problematize reductive narratives that link economic, literary, and aesthetic exuberance to the relativization and loss of all value, offering limitation and privation as the only routes to sustainable creativity. Such narratives, they argue, not only mischaracterize the generativity of modernist experimentation, but also dangerously undermine modernism’s transformative challenges to unjust social orders, including hierarchies of race, class, gender and sexuality.  

Working out a heterodox alternative, Rob and Scott turn to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, well-known for holding the exuberance of the jazz age and the relativising effects of its cubist narrative in tension with the deflationary impacts of the various crashes the novel thematizes and attempts to contain. In the past, scholars and critics have interpreted Gatsby as a cautionary tale, one that apparently warns against the extravagances of the Roaring Twenties and even foretells the coming Wall Street crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression. In Rob and Scott’s account, by contrast, Fitzgerald’s text unleashes rich experimental energies that point beyond the rigid austerity/excess binary through which it is frequently framed. They acknowledge how the book’s preoccupation with private persons and desires can abet “monetary silencing,” Jakob Feinig’s term for the repression of monetary knowledge and participation. At the same time, however, Rob and Scott contend that the way Gatsby implicitly connects credit issuance to social critique and creativity harbors urgent lessons for contemporary debates about money, inflation and culture. 

Click here for the second installment in this series. 

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me” EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

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