Author: Money on the Left

In this special episode, Rob Hawkes joins Scott Ferguson and Will Beaman to discuss his new article “(Un)conditional Openness: Towards a Neochartalist Theory of Money and Trust,” which was recently published in Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice. The conversation traces the development of Rob’s long-standing interest in theories of trust from his doctoral research in literary studies towards an increasing fascination with the topic of money which eventually led him to MMT, neochartalism and the Money on the Left project. Rob recalls a jarring moment when, having become excited by the possibility of bringing MMT into his research on literature and trust, he realised that some neochartalists reject the idea that money is trust-based. Determined to think this relationship through in greater depth, Rob’s article reaches the conclusion that neochartalism demands a re-theorisation of the concept of trust itself. In this wide-ranging conversation, Rob, Scott, and Will work through some of the key moves the article makes, including the problematisation of barter-like theories of “calculative trust,” its consideration of the connection between trust and vulnerability, and the way trusting blurs the distinction between conditionality and unconditionality (as alluded to in the article’s title). Finally, the discussion addresses links between trust, the university (as an institution), and the uni currency proposal, and situates Rob’s work within the heterodox and heterogeneous interdisciplinary academic, para-academic, and extra-academic field that is contemporary neochartalism.

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Heterodox economist Jamee K. Moudud returns to Money on the Left to discuss his new book, Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez-Faire? (Routledge, 2025).

The phrase “institutions matter” is a common refrain among economists, including many who have proposed progressive alternatives to free market fundamentalism. For Moudud, however, this proposition doesn’t go far enough, leaving a host of problematic assumptions unquestioned. To remedy this, Moudud draws on the Original Institutional Economics and American Legal Realist traditions to propose a robust theory of legal institutionalism or institutional political economy.

At its core, Moudud argues, society is a political community founded on property rights, money, credit, constitutional law, and legally-endowed corporations. From this premise, he concludes that laissez-faire has never truly existed and that seemingly natural dichotomies between “state intervention” and “deregulation” or “free markets” and “market failures” are as baseless as they are false. Moudud’s book, by contrast, urges us to engage with legal-economic theory and history to understand what institutions are and what economic regulation truly means. He asks: How does law order the economy? How does money shape power relations?

Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism should be of interest to readers of economics, law, and public policy, as well as those in international and development studies or anyone seeking to explore progressive alternatives in this period of multiple crises.

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

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Scott Ferguson 

Jamee Moudud, welcome to Money on the Left. I should say, welcome back to Money on the Left. 

Jamee Moudud 

Thank you so much for the invitation. It’ll be a lot of fun talking to the two of you. 

Scott Ferguson 

We’ve invited you to speak with us yet again. I think you were first on Money on the Left in our inaugural first year. I think it was back in 2018.  

Jamee Moudud 

I think it was ages ago. 

Scott Ferguson 

At the time we spoke to you about the law and political economy and modern monetary theory nexus with a special concentration on questions of power. At the time, I believe that you told us you were working on a book which, as for those of us who write books, we know these are a long time in the making. 

Finally, you’ve written the book. The book has been recently published with Routledge. The title of the book is Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism and the subtitle provocative poses the question, The End of Laissez Faire? Welcome to Money on the Left, and I’m going to love to talk to you about your book.

Do you want to tell our listeners who were not familiar with your first interview, which everybody should go back and listen to, a little bit about your background and how you came to write this book. 

Jamee Moudud 

The background is, depending on how far you want to go, but in a previous life, I used to be an engineer. As an engineer, my politics changed. That was at Cornell. Then there was a professor there who suggested in the Department of City and Regional Planning that I go to the New School for Social Research to get my PhD in Economics. 

I had taken my first course in the government department on Marx with Susan Buck-Morss. That was an inspirational course for me. I was introduced to the Frankfurt School and Marx and all this. I went to the New School to get my PhD in Economics and became very interested in Marx. 

I joined Sarah Lawrence College once I finished my doctorate. That’s been an incredible journey for me because I was really enmeshed in this culture, which is interdisciplinary. There’s no disciplinary boundaries, entering into conversations with students and colleagues about Economics, but in conversation with history or politics. 

That kind of shaped the way I think about these issues. Then at some point, I think it had to do with the question of taxation, because I’ve been teaching courses on fiscal sociology. That tradition at Sarah Lawrence, I realized that I really don’t understand taxation, and economists, including heterodox economists. I was a heterodox economist. 

I don’t really like this term, but I use the term critical political economy. In my book, I realized that I just didn’t know what taxation means. We just take the small “t” in these equations, and we just run with that, whether we are in the classical or in the critical tradition. 

That was the rabbit hole for me. Once you understand that taxation falls on property and property rights and all this, like stocks and flows. Taxation is a flow, but it falls on a stock which is property. Then I said, well, I don’t know anything about property and the rest is history. 

Then I said, okay, I really need to understand this. I understood vaguely that, of course, property is a legal category, but what’s the relationship between law and economics? Then I realized, to my horror, as I started studying this stuff that there is an established law and economics tradition which dominates global and national policymaking and critical political economists have nothing as a rebuttal to New Institutional Economics, in particular Douglass North. This is the dominant paradigm, as we know, but I didn’t find any useful critique from the left, except in very broad strokes. They support austerity and central bank independence, but that’s not enough. 

Scott Ferguson 

Those are epiphenomenal in a certain way. 

Jamee Moudud 

Exactly. Also, and you must be knowing this too, Scott, that ever since Alice Amsden’s  book came out in the late 1980s on South Korean industrialization, there’s been huge literature, like Alice Amsden and then Robert Wade  and Ha-Joon Chang about the role of the state in in terms of industrialization. 

This was a challenge to the Washington Consensus. Everybody in the critical political economy tradition, that’s like your baby econ in graduate school. After a while, I became a little tired of listening to the same thing because it was the same incantation about the role of the state. I just started to think that now there’s something incomplete here. 

I mean, I get it, but there are variants of public policies with regard to economic and social development. A lot of this was literature focused on East Asia and this authoritarian period, which, needless to say, I’m not very sympathetic to. But virtually nobody really spoke much to the social democratic versions of these kinds of policies and especially in the postwar period: 50s and 60s. 

This is a time where you have a powerful labor movement and social democratic parties with at least some kind of a commitment to social justice. I felt like there’s something over here that needs to be understood analytically. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what that was. By this stroke of luck 

I came across Martha  McCluskey, whom we all know and admire and Christine Desan. 

Scott Ferguson 

We’ve interviewed her on the show. 

Jamee Moudud 

They really played such an important role in helping me think about the integral role of law with respect to the economy, not just the sideshow aspects of it. Every time I tell a critical political economist that law is kind of important, they say, “yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s important,  but let’s all first of all deal with the economy. Then we deal with law and politics.” I’m like, “no, I don’t think that’s the way to go.” 

Scott Ferguson 

From the point of view of somebody who is trained as a film and media studies scholar, the way you articulate this commitment to law as being constitutive reminds me of certain ways in media studies that scholars will make similar moves. 

They want to imagine that media are constitutive of social reality. So often it’s treated, to use this term again, as epiphenomenal.  

Jamee Moudud 

That’s so interesting. That is fascinating 

Scott Ferguson 

Too often it’s like, what happens when individuals encounter media, rather than how is media shaping and constituting social reality in the first place? Right. Between economics and law, and especially in the orthodox model, you have this kind of premediated origin story where things begin from a place of pre mediation and that’s the economy. Later you can have interventions of the state or law or the legal system. 

Jamee Moudud 

Absolutely. I just found that for myself. If you think about three broad intellectual traditions in critical political economy. One would be the Marxist tradition, the other would be the post-Keynesian tradition, and the third would be feminist economics. With the honorable exception of the feminists, the other two really articulate this kind of epiphenomenal view.  

Certainly in the Marxist tradition and Marxist economics, law and politics is part of the base superstructure argument. For the Post-Keynesian (PK) tradition, it’s not that they necessarily say that, but the whole story of the New Deal, for example, which the PK tradition relies so much on and I think in critical political economy, the New Deal plays a very important role both for the Marxists and for the Post Keynesians in that the post Keynesians kind of emphasize all that the state did and for the Marxists, what the state could not do. This is the seesaw effect on both sides. In the meantime, neither side talks about President Roosevelt’s “Brains Trust,” and the fact that these scholars in the brains trust were all lawyers and institutional economists trained in this tradition that I talk about in this book. They were thinking about markets very in a very thoughtful way. It was not just about state intervention or nonintervention, but it was something different. I really, for the life of me, couldn’t figure out why there was this blindness to this way of thinking about politics and economics. The exceptions in critical political economists were the feminists, because, in talking to them, it’s not that they would necessarily deal with this tradition, but they really understood that institutions and the cultures that shape institutions and are shaped by them, play a really central role in market relations. For example, there is this false dichotomy between the market and what happens in the household. 

There was this classic article by…who was it? It was about the unhappy marriage between Marxism and feminism. I think there was an article like that. I think that’s the point, where we focus on class but who are we talking about? Women? Are we talking about black people or are we talking about black women? I mean, like, what are we talking about here? 

It’s very odd. What is determining class, what is determining class’s intersection with race and gender. Then we’re talking about other forms of inequalities. That’s left under theorized. It’s more descriptive. “Oh yeah. We know that there’s racial or gender discrimination, but first of all, let’s deal with the economy and class relations.” 

Scott Ferguson 

Can I ask you – I guess it’s sort of personal – but I think it picks up on the history and the sociology of knowledge and collaboration. How did you stumble upon McCluskey’s work – and you are good friends now. How did this even happen in the first place? 

I will say that, in many ways, I was in my field and subfields for years yearning for – it’s easy for me to say in retrospect – the kinds of things I’m doing now but didn’t really have access. I didn’t even know where to go. It just so happens that some contingent circumstance led to another. 

So how did you make connections? 

Jamee Moudud 

Yeah, that’s an interesting one. It happened through an interlinked series of issues. One was I had co-organized with a colleague a conference at Sarah Lawrence on the Global South with the focus on South Asia, Pakistan, India, and so on. 

Scott Ferguson 

What year was this? 

Jamee Moudud 

This was in 2014. Spring of 2014. We raised some money. It was a really great three-day conference. One of the issues that came up in that conference was the question of taxation on land and property. This came up over and over again. I’m driving home at the end of this conference one night on the highway, and I’m thinking about exactly this question of taxation, which I talked about earlier.  I don’t really get it. 

Property, land and property, do I know property? So, there’s that. That was already getting the mind thinking. I came home and then I had to take my younger daughter, who was little at the time, to dance. I took her to the dance academy, and I’m waiting outside to pick her up, and I’m on my phone and I’m really intrigued. 

My brain is like that line from Dylan, “I’ve got a head full of ideas that’s driving me insane.” Yeah, that’s me. I’m sitting there on my phone. I’m thinking, law…capitalism. Has this been written about? Is this a thing? Chris Desan had been running our program at Harvard Law School on law and capitalism, something like this. 

Her name popped up. When I got to my laptop at home, I just wrote to her and I said, “I don’t think this person will respond.” These people are busy. Who has time to respond? This was late spring. Which professor has time in late spring to respond to a stranger? 

She, very graciously, responded to me within like two days. That was so nice to hear, and I was just really touched. She said, “well, this is really interesting that you’re interested” because I told her a little bit about my interests. She said, “Have you read Robert Hale?” I said, “never heard of him.” 

See, that’s the thing. Never heard of Robert Hale. She sent me Robert Gordon’s “Critical Legal Histories.” This classic paper. She said, “have you read this stuff?” I sat myself down and read it and when I read Hale, there’s that classic article on coercion under a non – coercive state, the 1923 article, “Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-coercive State”. 

I said, “Jeez, this is Adam Smith, this is Marx, this is classical political economy.” We have the formal trappings of equality in a bourgeois democracy, but we have inequality. I said, “oh, but there must be like a gazillion people who’ve written about this.”  So, then I had to go search.  

I studied Sraffa in graduate school, of course, which every self-respecting heterodox economist or critical political columnist does. I said, “oh, there must be literature on Sraffa and Hale or Smith and Hale,” and found nothing. What? So then, through one thing or the other, in my search, I came across the name of David Grewal. Oh, I’m sorry, one more thing. 

We can talk about this later on, I don’t know if you guys have heard about the Cambridge Capital Controversy and the capital critique. Yeah, you’ve heard of that. Okay. I won’t go into that right now, but John Robinson’s classic critique of marginal productivity theory and the production function, and there was this whole debate in which finally, Paul Samuelson in 1966, in a symposium on the Quarterly Journal of Economics, said that John Robinson, you’re right. 

Marginal productivity theory doesn’t work, which raised the question, “Okay, so if the distribution of income between wages and profits is not determined by supply and demand, or “market forces,” then what? Heterodox economics kind of stops there. Right? So, yeah, it’s the institutions. Okay. But that’s fine. So, I said, maybe there’s some law person who’s written about the capital critique. 

It turned out that David Grewal had. He was at Yale Law School at the time. I wrote to him, again, as a totally unknown person. He responded almost immediately, and he put me in touch – he cc’d, I think – Martha McCluskey in that. Then Martha McCluskey wrote to me. 

She wrote to me and she said, “would you like to come to this APPEAL (Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law) workshop,” it’s a two-day workshop at Suny Buffalo Law School. 

“Would you like to come to it and talk about income distribution?” I said, “I’d love to.” I went up there and then Christine Desan  had invited me to, 2- or 3-day event at Harvard. This was around summer of 2014, summer of 2015, this time period, maybe 2015. 

That was when I started to understand law. I understood that this is unexplored, and the law is playing this constitutive role and that law is not neutral, something apolitical, but instead profound. It’s political at its core. I met with Duncan Kennedy. I reached out to him. He reached back. We had coffee together when I went up to Harvard for the first time in 2015. He said, “would you like to have coffee?” I met him at a cafe. It was pouring outside, and he was so gracious. He said afterwards, “Can I drop you to your hotel?” and I said, “no, no, no, I can make it back.”  I make it back in the pouring rain to my hotel. 

He then emailed to say, “Are you okay?” This is so, so kind. In talking to Duncan and to Chris and to Martha and all these other folks, I realized how important politics is to law. Not just important, but it’s integral. It’s the entry point to culture because, whose politics are we talking about? 

I mean, it’s an obvious point, right?  So again, that’s when I began to be very skeptical of the word “state,” because state, used by everybody, implies this monolithic, brooding, omnipotent institution that just barks out orders and does this, that and the other. Of course, that’s not true. 

I mean, I wouldn’t want that to be true anyways, but it’s not even true even in an authoritarian capitalist country. There’s something else going on, which is not about the state. We use that as a shorthand in politics. Then the question is: whose politics? It should be pretty obvious here that we’re talking about a contextually changing political framework which creates the basis of the legal framework of society and that ultimately the economy is – I think it was Roberto Unger and also Abba Lerner who actually talked about institutions as frozen politics in the sense that they are the outcomes of what happens before and that those institutions’ property rights and contracts are an autonomous arena whereby people interact with each other and markets and firms compete and this, that and the other. This is the domain where all economists focus on modeling that economy. 

Whether it be Minsky or Marx’s falling rate of profit or whatever it is. They’re trying to find regularities within or in that economy. That’s the whole story, I think, more or less in the broad Marxist tradition, trying to find patterns within capitalism, which is fine. I’m not disrespecting that, but I think it’s incomplete because they recognize that there are institutional variants of capitalism, but they will also say, “yeah, but there are these patterns that are common.” 

Whether you’re talking about the United States now or 100 years ago or Germany or South Africa or whatever, there are these variants, obviously, but here are these common patterns. Let’s say equalization of profit rates or recurrence of general economic crises. My response comes from that tradition because I was trained as a Marxist economist, but when I started getting into this area of study, I realized I could easily turn that argument around. I could say, “yeah, there are these common patterns, but there are also these variations. And how do you theorize that it’s not just a question of recognizing there are institutional variants of capitalism but analytically understanding this is the question?

That’s where I began to sort of break away from that sort of way of thinking. Move away from that sort of the econo-speak, as it were, to the kind of work that I’ve been doing for the last ten years, which is what we’re talking about right now. That’s a kind of a long-winded response to you, but I think that’s the way I think about this. 

William Saas 

Thank you for sharing your experience. It can be a pretty vertiginous experience to come to those questions the way that you did. The way that you narrate it is so lovely to listen to and then also to kind of identify with because I think that’s the story of a lot of us in this space. We all have been coming to questions that there are no clear disciplinary answers for and having to look into others. 

Once you do, you realize that there is no alternative to interdisciplinarity when it comes to the kinds of questions that we’re asking. 

Jamee Moudud 

Absolutely. That’s for sure.  

William Saas 

I identify with you as well, finding ready conversation and camaraderie with a few folks, enough to sustain you into the line of inquiry that you started on. This brings us nicely to your book. I wonder if you could, for our audience, walk us through the kind of big picture moves that you’re making here. 

What’s that story? We’ll probably stop you and chat about different portions throughout, but what’s the story of your book? 

Jamee Moudud 

Okay. First of all, let’s start with the title, which you already gave, but the first part of the title is a play on John R. Commons’ book, Legal Foundational Capitalism. My book’s title is Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism, which is for reasons that we just talked about and as I point out in the intro to the book in the subtitle The End of Laissez Faire? followed by a  question mark, that question mark is probably the most important part of this title and it represents the whole book. 

When I read Keynes’ classic article The End of Laissez Faire with no question mark, in which he said that following the slump of the 1920s we don’t want this 19th century Laissez Faire, we want state intervention. I read it and I said, “no, I don’t agree with you.” 

I’m sorry John Maynard Keynes; I don’t agree with you because it was a heroic rewriting of British economic history. That was really the path forward to the question mark, basically saying that there is no question of ending Laissez Faire either then or now. 

It never existed. It’s like the foundational myth of capitalism. Even the authors on the left will invoke it. 

Scott Ferguson 

Can I quickly interject, I had this kind of moment of revelation. It’s very similar when reading Adorno and Horkheimer for the millionth time over, and they have passages in their work in which they suggest that 19th century European economy was legitimately laissez faire and that, even though it was capitalistic, in a dialectical way there was nevertheless some commitment to individual freedom. 

We have since lost that in the age of monopoly capitalism and I think when I was like 22 years old and reading this in grad school, I would just nod along, right? But at a certain point when I got to these passages, they stuck out and I thought to myself, “no, no, no way, you’re taking the bait.” It was never this way. 

Jamee Moudud 

Absolutely. When you were talking, Scott, I was just thinking this is also a heroic rewriting of history by white men. We’re talking about slavery till 1863. What are we talking about over here? Women did not have the right to vote until 1919 in the United States, and I believe 1927 in the UK. 

What are we talking about? Like, are we talking about here? These are authors on the left broadly and they’re arguing like a John Locke saying this is the realm of freedom and then along comes a big bad state.  I decided in writing this book that what I want to do is pursue a method. 

The question of methodology is very important. That method is the bread and butter of all training in programs like the New School, where I got my PhD, or UMass-Amherst or any of these places, which is that theory is constructed in dialog with evidence, including historical evidence, history of economic thought and economic history. This is very different from the deductivist approach of neoclassical economics. I follow that same way of thinking about the engagement of theory with history, but for me, it was legal economic theory and legal economic history. I understood very clearly that you can’t really talk about theory without doing so. I should also mention another person who I owe a lot to, although he’s probably forgotten me. That is Morton Horwitz. I met him. He’s a lovely man. He gave me his folder on a course of economic regulation that he taught for a long time at Harvard Law School. 

I said, “I just can’t figure out where I’m going intellectually” and he said, “Well, take a look at this.” In reading Horwitz was really important for me because you understood going back to the early years of the Republic, property was not discovered, but it was constructed, reconstructed, fought over, and that the judges were not neutral. 

The judges were making policy, as he pointed out over and over again, and thereby distributing power relations within society. In this book, I focus on, first of all, the original institutional economists and the American legal realists as the theoretical launching off point. We can come back to that in a little bit, but I wanted to focus on money, property, as the core aspects of the economy and the business corporation. 

I thought to myself, I want to construct a theory which would weave through the theme of power, because that was what I took away as one of the most important aspects of Hale and all these folks. It’s about the question of power. Then, I wanted to also write about authoritarianism and Hayek. I’d been obsessed with Hayek for a long time. I teach Hayek, yeah. I think you’re smiling.  

Scott Ferguson 

Know your enemy. 

Jamee Moudud 

I totally agree. I teach Hayek in every course, and everybody would think that I’m some sort of a closeted libertarian. I connected that tradition of liberalism to authoritarianism. What I wanted to do was really make this book about an analysis of power in different contexts. In regard to money, for example, one of the first questions I asked myself when I read Desan’s book was, “How does this connect to the endogenous money tradition?”

The endogenous money tradition is what we cut our teeth on. How do you reckon with that? Then it struck me. Hayek really helped me here. Reading Hayek made it very clear that that strand of liberalism conceptualizes a society in pre political terms. 

He says very explicitly that society comes first and that’s where you have law. To his credit, all his writings were on law, but law itself arises spontaneously through some bizarre process that I’m still trying to figure out right after having written this book. It arises through some spontaneous order and the monetary system just arises in that particular way. 

Menger and Hayek come in this tradition. You can situate endogenous money in that approach too because you could just say just “yeah, Banks just figured it out with credit.” I believe there’s a French tradition, in the way that there was this classic debate between the Currency School and the Banking School in England, there was obviously a French equivalent to that. The French authors who were sort of more in line with the banking school were libertarians because they actually saw money just arising.  I said, “no, this can’t be right. This is obviously not true. It’s not even historically true.” 

I argued that, in fact, society is a political community. That changes the story completely because in a society, you can’t really have a society without an institutional framework. You have formal institutions, which is law, and informal institutions, which is language and culture that enmesh with each other. 

On that basis, you have the construction and reconstruction of any society distributing gradations of power within it across race and class and gender and all this and of course, its monetary system. If you come back to the endogenous money tradition, endogenous money is really about profit seeking behavior by banks. All profits seeking behavior, all market behavior, are embedded in this political community. 

Here, Karl Polanyi really helped me a lot also because, money, land and labor are all fictitious, as he puts it, and that laissez faire was planned, as he famously said. Then I understood money is a legal institution that has a political basis.This is shaped by its governance. Is it white folks? Is it colonial power? Is it a so-called neutral set of technocrats sitting in a central bank in a democracy? Whatever it is. That’s really the basis of the institutional hardwiring of the system. That is the basis of rethinking the relationship between economics and politics, which is very different from the libertarian view. 

One final issue was, which you see in the forward to the book by Desan, I have actually conjoined money and property rights. You’ve got property rights people who don’t deal with money and with money, you have people who don’t deal with property rights. 

As a store of wealth, money is property. It’s a particular kind of property that we can exchange. It’s a universal equivalent, but in a particular jurisdiction. If you say that it is property then can you apply Hohfeld to study property, then you can apply Hohfeld to money. 

Scott Ferguson 

They’re both permission structures. 

Jamee Moudud 

Absolutely. Permissions and prohibitions and whatever that may be. It will have regressive consequences. It’ll have progressive consequences, whatever that is. Then you get the variations of capitalism in terms of its monetary system and its property rights across space and time or different national contexts across history. I thought to myself, I don’t want to make this a book just about theory, because, you know, that’s not the way I do things. 

I’m going to give tons and tons of examples to say, “here is a way of rethinking capitalism.” I can give you evidence from not just the United States. I deliberately chose a comparative international historical framework. One of the chapters deals with three constitutions; the US, German and South African constitutions, as a way of thinking about property rights in constitutions. 

Thinking about how constitutional property rights interlink with other aspects of these constitutions and the systems of public finance. I argue that even if you have an elastic supply of public finance, if you’ve got a first-generation constitution, then it’s very hard. There are no economic, social, or environmental rights in the constitutional framework. You can have an elastic public finance, but who is benefiting? On the other hand, if you do have a progressive constitution, but you don’t have an elastic system of public finance, we’re talking about Europe here, then you see there’s a conflict right there. South Africa is a really great case in point. It’s a great constitution and an independent central bank, which is in fact in the constitution of that country. You all know about the discontent in that country for the black majority, 30 years after liberation. There’s this massive amount of inequality where you have a constitutionally protected right to public housing. 

That right by itself means very little if the state’s hands are legally tied in terms of actually creating public housing. Both of these two things are important. Coming back to your question about the themes, this question of monetary hardwiring also constrains policymaking, which also then provides the basis of authoritarianism. Once you say that you can go and just elect whoever you want to, you really cannot do anything about economic and social policies that tends to create, ultimately, the space for far-right politics. It’s easy to scapegoat and all that. One of the chapters deals with this sort of supposedly odd bedfellows, liberal realism, which is extolling the virtues of freedom and liberty, and fascism. What we’re seeing in our current moment is the flip side. I argue in one of the chapters that this seeming innocence of liberalism, of free markets plus democracy, you get where we are today in our current moment, where the Washington Consensus formula has collapsed in some sense. 

Scott Ferguson 

I want to flag some macro stakes that have become clear to me in reading the book and listening to you try to characterize your main moves. Coming back to what most economists and even heterodox economists do, they take, what I would call, a reified vision of the so-called economy as autonomous or quasi autonomous and then try to find what you call patterns. 

We can use the Marxist language of the laws of motion. You’re saying that – and I think we fully agree on this show – you’re missing this whole underlying layer. That whole underlying layer isn’t just a kind of locus of causality that has been foreclosed, but it’s also a locus of contestation and opening that up anew has powerful consequences. 

In my experience, and again, I’m not a heterodox economist, so I can’t fully speak to the field from within it, but I increasingly feel I am not convinced that it is okay to just kind of keep tracking the laws of motion in that rarefied realm, even from a radical leftist point of view, because it because it really is distorting and false. It mischaracterizes tensions and contradictions. It misconstrues what those contradictions are. I think you gave a great example. I think a fundamental contradiction in the constitutional construction of modern nation states is the various ways that literal constitutions construct property and money and the public purse, versus the seemingly progressive or regressive kind of social aims of that Constitution. 

That is a fundamental contradiction that is not legible, certainly not through neoclassical economics, but it’s not really legible in Marxism and it’s not even legible in Keynesianism, at least as it’s normally practiced. This, to me, just cracks open causal foundations, the analysis of phenomena like contradictions and their reverberating effects. Suddenly the so-called economy looks very different because you’re not you’re not approaching it from the same point of view. It opens up new possibilities for transformation. I’m not throwing any particular person under the bus, but I’ve been to several heterodox economics conferences and even critical legal studies conferences and even some of these great money conferences put on by Desan and others. 

Very often a trope will come up when you start bringing up big progressive policies like a federal job guarantee and inevitably, somebody will raise their hand in the audience and say, like, “but is that possible under capitalism?” What does that imply? First of all, we’re not saying it’s easy or that it’ll ever come to pass without a lot of hard fighting and work. 

What that implies is that the hard wiring, so to speak, is so hard wired that the laws of motion might as well be Newtonian and absolute. 

You can’t even, from the left, imagine or fight for or theorize or culturally explore what a job guarantee might even look or feel like or how it might be implemented. You’re not even allowed because we have to self-censor. We have to self-censor because, sorry, the laws of motion do not permit it. 

I think this is one of the central obstacles of left analysis and praxis that your book is opening up. 

Jamee Moudud 

Yeah, I totally agree. It’s interesting that you mentioned Newtonian analysis because I’m working on a new project – this probably is going to be another book – which is about visions of the market. That’s another whole conversation to have. I do think that coming back to that issue, as I point out in the book and I think you said it exactly right, saying that things could be changed for the better doesn’t mean that you just wave a magic wand and boom, it’s going to happen. 

Nobody’s saying that. In terms of theory, I draw a connection between Hohfeld, K. William Kapp , and John Maurice Clark, who actually wrote about social cost theory, that is to say, how corporations and businesses inflict social cost. I argue that, in fact, the extent to which corporations inflict social costs, such as environmental destruction or greenhouse gases, etc., etc., that that’s a function of the bundle of rights that they have. 

What kind of rights are encoded in what a corporation can do? Can it steal your and my data? This next book is going to be on, partly, on artificial intelligence. This conversation that we’re having in this platform, to what extent is a software actually taking our data, etc., that’s not just some neutral market forces. 

The law is enabling certain kinds of actions, which are legal. Saying that social costs could be reduced, that one could constrain tech or one could constrain industry from pumping out greenhouse gases and so on, it’s not that nobody’s going to say that’s easy. In fact, this is where historical analysis was very important. Look at the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. 

Before that, industry had a free hand in dumping as much chemical waste as they wanted. There’s no question that the environmental movement of the 1960s and maybe earlier, too, eventually changed the politics and the culture so that even the Republicans understood that. Maybe it’s not such a good idea to drink contaminated water and smoke and inhale smoke filled air. 

Thanks to landmark environmental policies or the consumer rights movement of the 1970s, we now take seat belts for granted. I always joke to my students, have you ever seen those old cars of the 1950s and 60s? They were death traps and the only safety measures were brakes and doors. How did seatbelts become mandatory? 

Or airbags later on? It came through this massive consumer rights movement, which industry fought tooth and nail against like it fought tooth and nail against environmental policy through the 1970s and 80s. None of these changes really just came about. They came about through a long struggle. You could always say, did they change the laws of motion of capitalism? Maybe not, but did they make the lives of people better? You would not be subject to crippling neck and facial injuries from a car accident like you would be in the 1950s? If you think about global healthcare systems, the fact that we do have universal health care in so many industrialized countries, and the fact that this is possible in the global South also, this is where the question of money comes in. 

Does that make a real difference to people’s lives? I think it would be kind of absurd to evoke the laws of motion of capitalism to get it. Just one more thing that struck me too, many of these changes in a progressive direction, if you look through the factory acts of the 19th century all the way to the 1970s, they happened in good and bad times. Capital was constrained to reduce social costs even when the economy at times was in crises, like the 1970s. 

It’s not quite correct to say that somehow in the final instance, politics has got to obey the laws of motion when the rate of profit has collapsed, there’s really nothing that one can do. That begs the question, how did these important environmental and consumer rights policies get implemented in the 1970s, when, by all accounts, the global economy was in a slump? 

In the case of Germany, the Co-Determination Act of 1976 was enacted, in the case of Italy, I think that they had this very important public health care legislation put in place in ‘78. You see all these anomalies coming up in different contexts in tough times, which I think raises the question. 

How are you thinking about the relationship between politics and economics? Oh, one final one. You remember the East Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, and Thailand was the epicenter. That was 1998. But in 2002, I believe they actually created – I don’t know what the political circumstances were – the national health insurance system. This is a country in the global South. I think it was 2002. I think it was called the “30 Baht program” or Universal Coverage Scheme (UCS)Universal Coverage Scheme (UCS). I think that’s a big deal. I think we need to be cognizant of that as we’re desperately searching for alternatives. 

There are these instances that we need to understand. What are those ways that we can think about these issues? 

Scott Ferguson 

It’s really reminding me of another critical preoccupation I have, which is with critical and left theories of crisis that emerge from this dedication to a certain set of laws of motion. I find that most theories of crisis – it’s not to say that crises don’t occur, of course they occur, they occur all the time – but there’s a kind of necessary mechanical thinking that often creeps in that makes me want to just throw them all out. To come back to this theme, they’re so disabling. I think all these historical examples show us that. 

In the midst of these so-called crises, that’s when you can innovate and rewire the hard wiring toward beneficial ends. 

Jamee Moudud 

One thing that I’ve thought of doing in the book and ran out of space to do, but it would have been a fun thing to do. I think I might do this. Just take one country for which we have a lot of evidence. I don’t know, let’s just take the UK and sort of map various Factory Acts and their social acts. Map them against what Marxists call phases of accumulation and upturns and downturns. It would be a great way to sort of push back at this argument that many of these Factory Acts actually happen with no correlation.  

That’s my basic point. It’s pretty easy to show this. I’ve sort of casually looked at some of this information, but there’s no correlation here. The way one phrases the critique is important, it doesn’t mean that it’s an easy process that you just wave your wand and all that, but there’s a kind of reductionism that somehow in the final instance is the economy. 

In the current moment, when we are facing an existential threat as a civilization because of global heating. I don’t even call it climate change, which is a euphemism. It’s a global heating, an extreme weather. You’ve got powerful sectors of the capitalist class, not just the fossil fuel industry, but all those that benefit from it, like the financial sector, this, that and the other. There’s this interlocked web of power that is preventing what is an existential question now. What are we then as theorists going to say? “Well, okay, let the planet just destroy itself.”  

Scott Ferguson 

It’s the laws of motion! 

Jamee Moudud 

The laws of motion. I kid you not, I’ve actually seen articles coming out by various people about our current crisis and the deep structural problems of capitalist accumulation. I’m going, seriously? I mean, is this where we’re going with the deep structural problem? 

Scott Ferguson 

One of my pet peeves is that when Marxists start citing Larry Summers on secular stagnation, like, come on. 

Jamee Moudud 

Come on. I mean, I don’t know if this is the space to talk about this, but I do think that there is a contradiction in volume one of Capital. 

Scott Ferguson 

Go for it. Where else are you going to talk about it? 

Jamee Moudud 

I didn’t do this in the book. This is the first time that I’m going to do this. I think that Marx contradicts himself. Yeah, I studied Capital and taught it for many years. The contradiction is the following and I think it relates to actually our broader conversation. The first part of volume one, money just comes up. It just arises. 

Scott Ferguson 

Like Hayek, right? 

Jamee Moudud 

Exactly. Hayek and Menger. If you scoot forward in volume one too, I think chapter 31, he sounds like an LPE person. In fact, the bulk of Capital Volume One from bloody legislation to the Factory Acts, which comes earlier on. Then he talks explicitly about money in chapter 31, where he talks about the national debt, remember? There’s a really great passage on the Bank of England and the state’s role and all this kind of stuff. 

There’s a contradiction over what the theory of money is here. I thought, am I going crazy or am I missing something because, does money come up organically or is it the product of politics? I reached out to some Marxist economists, and I will not mention their names here, and I said, is there a contradiction here? 

They said, “Jamee, thank you so much for your email. No, I don’t see the problem.”  

“Why not?”  

“In the beginning of volume one, there is no state. There’s value creation, there’s value theory and then he brings in the state later on. It’s like a level of abstraction story.  

So, I said, “Wait a second. How can you have value creation without property rights? Contracts.” How can you be abstracting from the state in the beginning, you’re basically saying that class relations occur before politics, is that where you are going? Well, what does that even mean? I would much rather go then to the neoclassical side, because to their credit, the distribution of income is determined in the pre political space and marginal productivity theory. Okay fine. We don’t agree with it. I mean it’s a nonsense theory, I agree, but it’s at least consistent. But with Marx, you’re talking about an explicitly class-based analysis of the distribution of income. In which case, how are you possibly then abstracting from politics and law at the beginning of volume one? 

If you’re abstracting from politics and if you bring in politics and law, then that completely changes the theory of money at the beginning of Volume 1. 

Scott Ferguson 

I would say in response, this makes a lot of sense to me. I will also say that, to me, this is a symptom of Marx’s liberalism. You can say that he’s making an immanent critique of liberalism, but I’m not convinced that he achieves escape velocity. 

Jamee Moudud 

With any kind of theorist from the 19th century who’s written in a different language there’s always a question of translation into English. Again, the base superstructure model, which I critique in the book, he didn’t discuss that in his later works in volume one and two and three, but there’s an explicit discussion of that in the earlier Marx. Now, the question is, maybe he changed his mind, whatever it is, but I don’t know. In any case, there’s a clear contradiction that I see here in Volume One. I thought to myself, “I’m going to land myself in such trouble over here,” because he repeats the same trope that competition occurs before Leviathan, as he puts it. Leviathan, being the state. What? Are you saying business competition occurs pre-politically? This idea, as you’re quite right, it actually filters into contemporary economics and on the Marxist side. Not Marxist social and political theorists or historians like E.P. Thompson, who famously debunked the base superstructure. It’s the economists that are the problem. 

Scott Ferguson 

It also informs the humanities as well. 

Jamee Moudud 

You mean the base superstructure? 

Scott Ferguson 

Yeah. I would say that for most humanists, they do not accept a naive base superstructure model. I think they would claim that it’s much more complicated in Marxist texts. Whether they’re thinking this through Althusser or any number of others like the British Cultural Studies School and Stuart Hall. There’s lots of ways of complicating base superstructure. 

I don’t think the humanities has a self-consciously naive base superstructure model, but I would nevertheless say that the problems that we are diagnosed facing are rampant. Even if it’s not a straightforward, naive, binary opposition, top down, it’s nevertheless still operative. 

Jamee Moudud 

Which I think is so strange because some of these cultural theorists have also written about colonialism. When you look at the colonial enterprise, you can clearly see this constitutive role of law. I mean, you can see it everywhere, but I’m just saying that as a way by which common law systems were actually state created and imposed in India and elsewhere. 

These were policies of the state. It’s not that the state came in afterwards. They’re aware of all of this.  I think the strength of engaging with these critical traditions in law is that you really begin to understand that this hardwiring cannot just need to happen and the question about who’s the agent behind the hardwiring and who’s contesting it and how is it contested. 

So, then you sort of change the story around and the analysis around. I think most of these authors, and I guess humanities would have the same issues. They don’t really deal with this critical tradition in law. 

William Saas 

I just keep thinking about Kalecki’s “Political Aspects of Full Employment” in the context of this conversation. I’m wondering if we can figure something out where we come up with a critical thinker quiz that we have people take. Read Kalecki’s “Political Aspects of Full Employment” and tell us what your conclusion is at the end. 

There’s an example of not too many years ago of a popular left magazine publishing something on that; about and around that article that draws the conclusion that political full employment is just not possible. That’s not the lesson. I’m thinking about that because this conversation in your book makes me think a lot about the kind of prescriptions that follow from accepting and inheriting, uncritically, some of these baseline assumptions. 

I would, as an aside, wonder if even accepting them uncritically is too charitable but rather accepting them as a condition of their continued scholarly existence and relevance. So much has been built on the foundations that we’re talking about here that to get to the bottom is a threatening and kind of, again, vertiginous experience. 

Not all of us are into that. Some of the prescriptions or sort of affective attitudes that I think we see flowing from this on the outcomes side is accelerationism. Accelerationism has been implied in some of the things that we’re talking about. 

We’re talking about laws of motion and defeatism and a kind of throwing your hands up precisely in moments of crisis when you need to sort of ditch the realism and get on with something else. Something affirmative and something more in the idealistic space, which is also may be uncomfortable for people who have been steeped in this kind of defeatist political realism. 

I want to put in a word for them, though. Is it not the case we’ve evoked – and this is going exactly the opposite way, maybe it doesn’t work and maybe I’ll edit it out. But the forces that are – and I’m saying forces in quotation scare quotes – are arrayed by law currently so aggressively and are so entrenched. 

Scott Ferguson 

And invisible. 

William Saas 

And invisible and omnipresent that one could forgive them for proceeding in this kind of realist – that isn’t quite so realist, because it’s not attending to things that we’re talking about here, but… 

01;08;09;23 – 01;08;16;27 

Scott Ferguson 

Can you be an LPE pessimist? Is there a place for the LPE pessimism? 

William Saas 

Is there a space? Where does the worst pessimism exist? Yeah. I mean, is pessimism permissible in this space? 

Jamee Moudud 

Okay. All right. That’s a really great question. One of the things that I really struggled with in this book, and I think I did a fairly decent job, is that I didn’t want to say that. I wanted to sort of break away from either an unambiguous, optimistic view – which I don’t believe in – and also this pessimistic view. 

I always tell my students that as a student or a scholar of history, I’m neither a pessimist or an optimist, but I’m a realist. What does that mean? That means that change is possible, but it is hard. It is really hard and it may take a long time. I don’t know where that puts me, but I think I’ve been influenced a lot in my thinking by Wolfgang Streeck, the German sociologist’s really great book Re-forming Capitalism. There’s a dash between Re and forming. In which he talks about the fact that progressive labor legislation, which is what he focuses on in that book, has been pushed back by employers over many decades in favor of them. Kathleen Thelen, a political scientist at MIT, talks about institutional variations and that that’s where the power dynamic shifts in different ways. 

My point here is to simply say that whether or not social costs can be of different kinds and can be reduced, social costs created by capital can be reduced. It’s not obvious that they can be reduced easily. One way to think about this article is to say, well, look at globalization. There’s always this threat of capital flight. That’s real. I think we have to face up to that coming on the left, which doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t struggle for these important social rights. But it’s an important issue, right? It’s an important constraint or an important impediment to change. We need to be aware of this and how do we then think about this issue in countries lower down in the international and monetary hierarchy. That’s a real issue. I do think that, for me, the pessimistic part is the threat of capital flight. But then I say to myself, yeah, but that’s always been the case. Capital, even if it doesn’t actually go to some other jurisdiction, can always just invest at home and it can invest in financialization and all the rest of it, which doesn’t create good jobs and such. 

That’s always there. I don’t like to use the word middle ground, because I know that as a connotations built into it, but I’m trying to swim away from either pessimism, which one version of that comes from a kind of an economic reductionism, and the other one is a kind of a Pollyannaish view that you just need the good guys in power and that’s the end of the story. This is something that we haven’t talked so much about in this conversation, but I think it’s sort of popped up a few times. We’ve talked about power, but one of the issues that I’ve dealt with in the book, and I want to explore this more, is language and how that informs the way we think and our belief systems. You could be on the receiving end of this factory dumping chemical waste into the river, but you still believe that there’s something called a free market and that that’s the notion of efficiency. That word “efficiency” is a trope, but it’s a very powerful cultural trope. 

Everybody will talk about market efficiency, even to those who are on the receiving end of the ravages of the market. As long as that belief system remains then the power remains invisible. If you look at the cover of the book, that cover symbolizes something that I’m trying to do over here, that in fact power comes from the invisible ways by which politics has structured economic and social life. We need to, first of all, bring it out of the shadows. Make the invisible hand visible. The visible hand of politics was always behind the so-called invisible. I feel like that’s one important step towards a progressive alternative to sort of break away from state intervention versus nonintervention. The liberals and the progressives will say, “we want more regulation.” Remember, in the wake of, let’s say, the global financial crisis, this was the same standard line. “We need more regulation.” The conservatives would say the opposite. The point is that, leaving aside certain illegalities, the global financial crisis and the subprime mortgage framework was built on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, an act of Congress, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), 

The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. These were political decisions that created a legal basis for the growth of markets. I feel like people are not aware of something which is staring them in the face and that’s the power and the way by which power is exercised. 

Repeating that is, I think, very important. It’s a key piece of the puzzle. We don’t talk about it enough, this way of thinking about power, at least certainly not in economics. You can’t really talk about economic and social transformation, without, first of all, dealing with this crucial element of power. 

I’m very grateful that I’m having this conversation in this podcast because so much of the work that I see resonates with what I’ve seen my interest go into in this sort of cultural political economy. 

I don’t know if anybody is doing it, but culture is what’s behind the politics, which is behind the law, which is behind the economy. 

Scott Ferguson 

Yeah, and they’re always mixed up together. 

Jamee Moudud 

They are and they always have been. This current moment is nothing exceptional. It’s not at all exceptional. I think the power part is also something which has been around for a long time and has naturalized. You don’t think you can change it. 

Scott Ferguson 

I was going to ask you to speak in a little bit more detail about your analysis of colonial and imperial relations and developments specifically around constitutionality and public finance. This is one of those areas, not that there hasn’t been work done and you quote a lot of important work, and we’ve engaged with some of these authors on our own podcast, but I think this is another one of these areas of blindness, especially in the West. What are the political and legal conditions of possibility for the Global South debt crises, for example. You work through several different examples in the book, and I wanted to give you a platform to just talk a little bit more about that. 

Jamee Moudud 

Just a clarification, are you talking about the colonial period or are you talking about the post-colonial period? 

Scott Ferguson 

Both, but it’s up to you what you want to focus on here. 

Jamee Moudud 

I can do both. In terms of the colonial period, one of the things that I wanted to do was to say, there is this literature, Ha-Joon Chang’s classic book, Kicking Away the Ladder. Then you have Mehrsa Baradaran’s book about money and property.

I forget the book title exactly. She writes about banking and black banking. I thought to myself, when you look at the history of colonialism, one key issue is the way monetary systems were hardwired.I focused on England’s colonies of color versus the dominions such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. 

What I argued was that the way in which colonial systems of finance, public finance, central banking including, were promoted by the British in Australia, for example, or New Zealand, which were also very poor in the 19th century, gave legislatures far greater autonomy to promote economic, social and political development. By the time they become formally independent – I forget if it was the 1940s or whatever – they’re already in a place where, while much poorer compared to European countries, like New Zealand for example, they still have the basis of a pretty decent welfare state and a national health care system in the early 20th century. This freedom was not granted to the colonies of color. South Africa was different because there the South African Reserve Bank was created under the umbrella of the British Empire. Sir Henry Strakosch headed it. Strakosch pointed out that we need an elastic supply of credit to promote industrialization. Of course, that was for white folks, the white minority. The point here is that the design of monetary systems in the colonial period had two different logics and that, I argue, already set the stage for global inequalities way before the 1980s because a lot of the sort of issues of the Washington Consensus and so on tends to focus in the 1980s and 1990s and the debt crisis. But the roots of the problem lay much earlier, so that when many of these countries in the global South gained independence in the 1950s and 60s, they were already in a place, because of the prior way by which their monetary systems were hardwired, that put them way behind other colonies that were granted a better deal by England. 

There you get to at least one important aspect of what causes these roots. I don’t know if it’s an irony or if it is just one of these blindfolds, but when these European countries are industrializing after the Second World War, they pursue pretty sensible policies, including progressive constitutions, progressive use of monetary systems, the Bank of France and such, and the role of public banking of various kinds. 

In the case of Germany, it was this publicly owned bank which is very huge now. The KfW ( Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau or Credit Institute for Reconstruction) played a very important role in German reconstruction. This was not an opportunity that existed or was allowed or even in the consciousness of the newly decolonized countries in the global South. 

Part of it may be because many of these – and I’m just speculating over here because this is not something that I studied – leaders or movements that were genuinely popular nonetheless, in the global South, still swung towards being either free market or state socialism. 

These were ill equipped states. You had the same logic of corruption and all the rest of it, which ultimately leads to payments crises and swings towards the so-called free market in the IMF. But what is written out of history is the really crucial ways by which monetary systems were structured in the case of Europe, including the smaller countries in northern Europe, like Sweden and Finland, which have powerful labor movements. 

They pursued industrial and social policies that actually did a pretty good job. Why was this not even in the framework to think about? I think that’s the missing story. 

Scott Ferguson 

There’s so much to say. It affects me even just teaching canonical film studies. When I get to the topic of what’s called third cinema, which is a kind of counter cinema, revolutionary cinema of the 60s and 70s that still has influence today, but its heyday was in the 60s and 70s all across the global South and Latin America and Africa and elsewhere. 

The scholarly framing, but also the polemical framing within the films themselves tells a story of global domination, exploitation and indebtedness without touching this underlying layer and, from my point of view, even from a critical point of view, it naturalizes that underlying layer. 

I’m here to introduce this topic to a film studies class and humanities context. I find myself constantly weighing how much do I want to go down this rabbit hole and how much do I not? Ultimately, we’re here today to learn about film, which is, of course, social and historical and political, but sometimes I do go too far. I start citing alternative work in monetary scholarship, but sometimes it’s not appropriate. I feel really torn even in my own pedagogy that this is such a crucial question that’s just totally ignored. 

Jamee Moudud 

I think part of the problem also, Scott, is that money is a mystery. Money is not something people even think about because it’s just liquid, right? Whereas Desan says it’s blood and it’s always been blood, and it’s created and recreated in different ways, in different contexts with different consequences. 

So that is part of the deeper problem, which is the opacity of economics itself. When you think that the economy and economics is this black box, then it’s easy to say it doesn’t really answer the questions that I’m interested in. I can think of the film studies student in one of their classes saying that “I’m really interested in global inequalities after the Second World War, but I then need to go do something else.” This is opposed to saying you can go into these other things, but here’s the way by which that economic structure was constructed at the end of the Second World War. The nice thing about endogenous money is that you don’t actually have to argue for it, everybody understands that money is integral to the economy. 

The fact that this monetary system was constructed in a particular way that had all these consequences for these countries as opposed to the global north, it can be done but I don’t think it’s necessarily in the consciousness of the way people think about money and economy and inequality. Then it becomes about other issues.  

William Saas 

Well, fantastic. If you had to boil down, as we so often do in blurb form today in our oppressive, omnipresent capitalist system, what’s the central lesson you hope that folks in LPE and in cultural studies and across disciplines, take away from this book? 

Jamee Moudud 

That’s a difficult question, but as you were asking the question, I was thinking, what’s been motivating me in writing this book? In fact, once I fell into this rabbit hole ten years ago, my career has been about understanding power in its different dimensions. I think that’s been an abiding interest of mine. 

This is where you can actually get people or cultural theorists into conversation with other scholars. That’s the connective tissue of the system itself. In the book, I think that theme of power weaves its way through this entire book, at every step of the way. 

Why did I actually deal with property rights and constitutional property rights and colonialism and the far right and Hayek? All these topics have an underlying thread running through them. I think that’s really one key point, which sort of brings you back to the title of the book; both the main title and the subtitle. The theme is understanding inequality, not just narrowly as the distribution of income, but social inequity. 

One thing I do think would be kind of interesting to point out: when I teach my students “Project 2025” I have them read that 900-page mandate, one thing that I want to draw their attention to is how interdisciplinary it is. 

One thing that the far right has revealed to us is that it is profoundly interdisciplinary. From attacks against LGBTQ+ rights to very technocratic discussions about trade policy to labor to environment, this, that and the other, you can see that the way they’re thinking about and the unitary executive theory, which goes back to the physiocrats, that these are enmeshed with each other. 

So, from that standpoint, I think a new left, if you want to put it in that way, has to think about alternatives, challenges and solutions in those interdisciplinary terms and to take those arguments on their own terms. There’s a need to pose these fundamental questions around power because that framework is creating in place a kind of a neo-Victorianism. 

That’s where the conversation for this new, new left has to go. Going back to foundational questions in economics, money and property rights and business cooperation and constitutions and these kinds of things, I think it would be a good place to start. Also, language and culture, and how they are interweaving with each other is where we need to go. 

That’s what I try to do in this book. In the final chapter, which is, towards a political, political economy, like reconstructing economics, I wanted to say that all economics is political economy, including neoclassical economics, because all economics or economic schools of thought have some theory of politics relative to economics. This is as true of Milton Friedman as it is a Friedrich Hayek as it is of anybody that’s Marxist and Post-Keynesian.  A political, political economy asks, “how is that institutional framework even constructed and reconstructed toward emphasizing the politics part to it?” I do think that that’s the way the conversation has to go and sort of try my best to do that in this book. 

Scott Ferguson 

I think that’s a beautiful place to end. Jamee, thanks so much for joining us once again. Everyone should go out and purchase at their favorite retailer The Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez Faire? 

Jamee Moudud 

With the question mark! 

Scott Ferguson 

Yes, with a question mark! This was great. 

Jamee Moudud 

Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun, such a lot of fun having this conversation.

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

In this episode, we share Part 2 of our coverage of The Black University & Community Currencies workshop (Click here for Part 1). Held April 25, 2025 on the campus of Morehouse College, the workshop fostered dialogue between students, faculty, and activists about the radical possibilities of public money for higher education, broadly, and for communities at and around Morehouse, specifically. The occasion for the workshop was the conclusion of a semester in which students enrolled in Professor Andrew Douglas’s advanced political theory course at Morehouse implemented a classroom currency called the CREDO for use by Morehouse students. 

In practice the CREDO bears close resemblance to complementary currencies like the Benjamins at SUNY Cortland, the DVDs at Denison University, and the Buckaroos at University of Missouri, Kansas City. One significant aspect that sets the CREDO apart is that it is the first we know of to have been implemented at an Historically Black College or University. Another unique attribute of the experiment is that students were invited–and very capably answered the call–by their professor to reflect publicly on their experience as users, advocates, and critics of the currency at an HBCU. 

In the first half of this two-part episode, we hear directly from Isaac Dia, Elijah Qualls, John Greene, and Bruce Malveaux–students at Morehouse College and participants in Professor Douglas’s advanced political theory course–about their experiences with the CREDO and its implications for the Black University concept. This part has been transcribed below. In the second half, we hear audio of the panel itself as it took place on April 25, 2025. Both halves of the episode reward close attention. Together they document a moment of substantial conceptual and political advance for public money theory and for the hermeneutics of provision.

A very special thank you to Isaac, Elijah, John, Bruce, and all others who participated in the panel discussion and interview.

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.

William Saas
Welcome to Money on the Left. It’s really nice to have you. As a way to kind of kick things off, what is the Credo? 

Elijah Qualls

The Credo is a currency that we established in our political theory course over the span of the semester. We did various tasks and jobs where we could accumulate the Credo. Primarily, this was done through community service. However, there were other events on campus that were approved through Dr. Douglas that we could also accumulate the Credo through. 

This was all with the purpose of accumulating 50 Credos to pay our taxes at the end of the semester. The entire idea and purpose of the Credo was to mobilize labor that would not have otherwise been done by students. 

William Saas 

Can you just sort of walk me through all the different ways you can earn them? 

Isaac Dia 

I feel like that was the freest way you could ever earn a currency. It was like, whatever you did, you could pretty much get a Credo. You can either do the community service, you would fill out a paper and for every hour or every certain amount of hours for community service, you would get a certain amount of Credos. 

You could buy Credos. Some people would pay $20 for 20 Credos. Some people pay $5 for 20 Credos. It’s just whatever they decided. Or you could either raise your hand, answer a question, and then they might give you between 5 to 50 Credos for whatever you answer. 

William Saas 

Andrew, was that built in or is that more of an informal thing that Isaac, you and other students developed yourselves? 

Andrew Douglas

Oh, no, that was an informal thing. I consulted mostly with Ben Wilson – and I’m going to blame Ben Wilson – ahead of time, because he’s been doing this up at SUNY Cortland.  I basically followed his model. The only officially sanctioned mechanism through which one could earn Credos was by doing community service, but they could do whatever community service they wanted to, they simply had to have their site supervisor fill out a form, indicating what work they did and how many hours.  I would pay them on 5 or 6 pay days over the course semester. Then the private sector just emerged organically, and it turned out that we had a couple of students who did a lot of work well beyond what was required to earn enough to pay the tax. 

They began to do business with their fellow classmates. It seemed like the private sector was flourishing in our classroom. 

John Greene 

If I could jump in, the special thing for me about it was kind of seeing the birth of a currency and seeing the way that a currency comes about, the way we read about in Moral Economies of Money. You have the government that establishes the demand and then they spend money on incentivizing certain labor, and then all of the money in the economy is coming directly from doing labor that is, ideally, democratically decided. Although, we never got around to actually voting on what we wanted to incentivize like we had planned. 

The idea being that, in a fundamental sense, when you have the government printing the money that is circulating in the economy, ideally, is coming directly from this labor that was incentivized by the government on a democratic basis. I thought that was very interesting and, to that point about the educational aspect, really showed exactly what we were learning about in some of our readings. 

William Saas 

Another theme of the panel that was recurrent, and I think, Isaac, you brought it up explicitly early on in the discussion, around the capacity of the Credo and the Uni and the public money perspective to educate. In your case, I think you say the best thing the Credo did was help to educate you about how money works. 

It could educate others how money works. With the US dollar, people have been educated for a very long time, through their whole lives, more or less, that money is kind of an alienating and alienable object. We come to be suspicious of it. It is the root of all evil. It is this thing that we want and revolted by at the same time. 

Can you talk to us about your experience of using the Credo? Did it feel like that to you? Was it a reinforcement of the education every time? Or was there, experientially, a moment where you felt like you might be falling into that kind of common experience of using money and having attitudes toward it that might resemble your attitudes towards the US dollar? 

Isaac Dia 

This was the one thing I was talking about during the panel. I feel like there shouldn’t be a tax for the Credo, because then that gets back to how we felt about it originally, where it is kind of transactional, where you feel that burden. When there was like a week left in class, that’s really when that private sector started to flourish because everyone was like, “oh my God, I’m like ten Credo short.” That’s when people were paying $20 for Credo. I think if we were to implement it into the real world, we could come up with a better idea for how we could get the Credo back and make sure so many people don’t have it as much instead of creating a tax. 

I know a lot of kids wanted to do a tax for the end of the year, like that’s how you would graduate. I feel like that just creates more of a burden, where you start to see the Credo like a regular dollar and you’re like, “I’m only doing this so I can graduate. I’m not doing this because I really enjoy it. This is just another burden we have.” So that would be my only thing – to get rid of taxes. 

Bruce Malveaux 

I have a counter. I think the tax is necessary because if no one had to go get it, I’m not sure many people would. It’s also deeper than just a tax. For me, it’s more like serving a community, because that’s at least what Morehouse was built off of and Morehouse got so far away from serving its community. 

So, I’m a fan of the tax. If it does get bigger, I wouldn’t mind the Credo being a community service graduation requirement. It would be how many Credos one needed to how much community service was required. Some majors are pretty deep and don’t have as much time as business majors, for example. 

John Greene 

Yeah, I would argue that the tax was kind of the entire point. The Credo is supposed to be a way of incentivizing labor that wouldn’t otherwise be incentivized and the traditional way of doing that is always coercion. In this case, failing the class is the power we have. 

In the case of governments, it is violence and throwing you in jail, or whatever that may be. As much as the coercive aspect of the system is an ideal, in our classroom or in government and in capitalism, I think the entire point of the exercise is to attempt to emulate that, to incentivize labor that we wouldn’t otherwise be doing. 

Elijah Qualls 

I think I agree with what you guys are saying about the need to incentivize people. For me personally, I didn’t have a base incentive to do the labor this semester. The reason why I did accumulate the Credo was because there was that tax at the end of the year. 

However, the reason why that tax was established was because there was not some larger market that we could operate in. We didn’t have any other way, yet, to use the Credo. We couldn’t buy things on campus with the Credo, and we didn’t even get to the point where we could use the Credo for extra credit. 

If we start adding those other kinds of ways, I don’t think it would be a coercive method. I think it would be a more cooperative means of incentives. It wouldn’t be “do this or else,” it would be “if you do this, then it opens up the opportunity for you to purchase other things.” 

Especially if we do extra credit that could cross over to other classes. I think that’s an easy way to get rid of the necessary taxation and more so drift towards a market, and then people will have an incentive to accumulate the Credo, because then they can use that in the market. 

John Greene 

I feel like that’s a question that we had throughout the class that we never fully answered. That being, every currency that we’ve ever had has been backed by the monopoly on violence that the government has by some sort of coercion. But we also brought up the idea that, in the current era, is that even why currencies continue to exist? If taxes disappear today in the United States, would people stop using the dollar? 

Will we no longer have a need for the dollar? You could kind of make arguments either way, I guess. It’s interesting, because it doesn’t feel like the tax is really the most important thing once you have a currency off the ground, but it’s also never really been tried before, as far as I know. 

That’s more of a question for you guys. What do you think? 

Andrew Douglas

I’m happy to jump in here. From my perspective, the great failure of the experiment was that we never really got around to democratizing monetary design. I, as the sovereign initially, created the exercise and we never really imposed the tax, imposed the terms for acquisition of the Credo and ideally, we would bring everybody into some conversations and some decision making over what that would entail and what that would look like. 

I suppose it was almost impossible to do that in the first run of this experiment. If we get it up and running, if we get a couple of professors buying in on a semester-by-semester basis, we could really begin to democratize some of the decision making around that. But coming back to the tax piece, we did have some very rich conversation over the course of this semester about how the tax obligation might begin to feel different or be experienced differently than it is in our day-to-day existence as US citizens who pay taxes where we feel and experience it as a burden and transactional. It might be experienced differently if we’re actively involved in making decisions about how we’re going to use the currency, what kind of work we’re going to promote, how we want to incentivize labor and engagement in various sorts of projects on and around campus. If we really buy into that, the idea of paying back a certain portion of that at the end of the semester feels less like an obligation and more like an exercise of our agency. 

We did have some really interesting conversations around that in the abstract, even if we never really got to the point where we could begin to democratize that tax obligation, that element that drives the currency in a certain respect. 

William Saas

I run a similar kind of class, but we sort of live in that design part. We do the public money sort of orientation, and then we get into actual monetary design on campus, if we had to – in fact, students have to – design a currency to fill a gap to, to serve a need, and to serve a purpose that isn’t currently being served or is underserved by the current monetary regime. 

What would that look like? Students put together their proposals over the semester. This last time I taught it, one of the more illuminating things for me was to realize how much competition our designs would have, or do have, already on campus. I was kind of delighted when I was going back and listening to the tape because this didn’t show up so much – I don’t think we heard it in the panel – but I think someone, probably someone on this call – I couldn’t quite pinpoint the voice – said, “I want to talk about getting rid of the BEDC or something like that.” 

Elijah Qualls 

Yeah, the DCB. 

William Saas 

DCB okay. Somebody said under their breath, and we never ended up talking about it, but I suspect that it’s something like competition for the Credo or would be, prospectively. What is the DCB, what does DCB stand for and what is DCB in practice? 

Bruce Malveaux

I don’t know what DCB stands for, but it’s basically like a campus dollar. You buy in and they give you X amount of dollars. It’s tied to your meal plan. I don’t think you can buy DCB outside of a meal plan. So, you buy the meal plan, and they give you X amount of DCB to go to the campus store or eat at the food spots on campus. 

Elijah Qualls 

We talked about this a couple different times in our class as well. I’m not sure if I was the one who said that or not, but I do support that notion. I think the Credo should replace the DCB because the thing is, it comes as a part of whatever meal plan you will purchase at the beginning of the semester. 

There’s no way to accumulate more after that. Right? Say you come in as a freshman, you have to get the unlimited plan. I believe that comes with 230 DCB’s. That’s a 1 to 1 transference with the US dollar.  I think things are a little cheaper if you purchase with a DCB rather than using your debit card. 

Where I think the Credo would be more beneficial is, according to the plan that we have set up here, you can accumulate the Credo by doing certain things. For example, you know, again, the most surface level thing would be doing community service, right? However, towards the end of the school year, we began exploring some other ways that you could accumulate the Credo, but those could all be explored and expanded upon. 

The benefit to that is now you could use the Credo to buy things on campus just as you would with the DCB. And again, that goes back to what I was saying earlier about the market for the Credo. This would then create an incentive for people to accumulate the Credo and then, of course, conversely, that would mobilize labor and have more projects done that originally were not getting done. 

William Saas 

Thank you. Anybody google, in the meantime, what DCB means? What does it stand for? 

Elijah Qualls 

I’m trying to Google it, but I cannot find the definition for it. 

William Saas 

This is perfect because I’ll say – while you’re doing that – at Tulane, we have at least three. There’s Splash Cash, which basically anyone can buy in and you just get dollars on your ID card. Faculty, staff, students, everybody can do that. Then there’s Wave Bucks, which I think is a lot more like the DCB meal plan oriented buying stuff at the student convenience store, stuff like that. 

Then there’s Nola Bucks, which to me seems novel to Tulane, in some way, which is cash that the university forces you to buy and are only redeemable at certain businesses in the community. It’s meant to be spent at the local Domino’s, which was one place we discovered. 

But then, of course, it’s used so infrequently that the local Domino’s is like, “what are you trying to pay me with here? What is this? Nola Bucks? I don’t know what this is,” because they have a lot of turnover or whatnot. Anyway, in any case, for your class, Professor Douglass is the sovereign, but then we sort of exist in a hierarchy where there is already a complimentary currency or a community currency at Morehouse, which is more or less just a straight 1 to 1 with the US dollar, with a little bit of a discount and probably compulsory for those who live on campus. 

I wonder, it seems like there’s some productive problem space here to investigate, as my colleague Scott Ferguson would call it. We have these competing currencies on campus; how would we reckon with them in implementation of our own? 

Bruce Malveaux 

Oh, I was going to tell you, at Emory, if you don’t spend it, they give it back to you. Morehouse is a one of one. A true one of one. 

William Saas 

So, no getting it back. 

Bruce Malveaux 

No getting that back. I actually had a problem, I had too many DCB’s and started giving them away. My friend and I actually had too many DCB’s, so we went to Slim and Huskies and we just bought almost all the pieces and we gave them to the homeless. 

William Saas 

That’s great. Come to think of it, I just went to our student store and the shelves were pretty bare because, I think students loaded up on stuff with their surplus Wave Bucks at the end of the semester. Just to say, “I’m spending this money. You’re not having it Tulane.” 

Andrew Douglas 

Yeah. I was just going to add, I often wonder how helpful these sorts of competing currencies are in terms of getting folks to think about money and complementary currency in the way that we want to, because it’s simply a way for the institution to guarantee funding. Basically, it acts as a way to force students to pay upfront so that the college can budget and finance over the course of the semester and the academic year. 

The college is operating exclusively in a kind of orthodox monetary regime sort of way, a capitalist de-risking sort of way. The students experience it in a negative kind of way as something that’s imposed on them without any agency on their part. It’s the antithesis of the kind of democratizing work that we’re trying to do around complementary currency creation. 

I think it’s important to get students to realize that these complementary currencies are already functioning all around them. But at the same time, I worry that because people’s experience is already so negative with them that it may actually be counterproductive to the work of trying to imagine otherwise. 

William Saas 

I think you’re right. What I find interesting and where our discussions went in our class around these things was around the concept of seeing an infrastructure that’s already in place on campus that, if one were to be sort of revolution minded, one could be driven to try to operationalize that to serve your project or our project. 

I think you’re right that it’s a mechanism to capture money from students in advance and probably stash that in a savings account. They start earning interest on it immediately before you even get to campus. But something like Nola Bucks here, and maybe this is unique, it’s already an attempt. It has a kind of ethos of community participation built into it. 

There is an infrastructure, and there’s at least a rationale or an argument that we could take to the administration to say, “hey, look, we want to build this out in these ways.” I’m not so sure that the other ones aren’t there and so, Andrew brings up a great point. There’s a lot of negative feeling around these campus currencies that are already in place. 

What do we got? What can we do with that? 

Elijah Qualls 

I was going to say, with a lot of these conversations, the notion that I had for a majority of the semester was that those at the top should really be pushing for programs such as this. Our board of trustees are the ones who should really begin this movement. 

Then I started to realize they don’t really have, in my opinion, a reason to want to support this. I think the best way for this to really begin or to gain traction at Morehouse is for it to be a bottom-up sort of approach. 

We create an alternative to the DCB, show that it’s working, show that it has external benefits and validity and applicability. Then, maybe at that point, those higher up who have a say so in the infrastructure at Morehouse College would then see the benefits, because I do think Morehouse is very interested in its external image. 

A lot of its revenue, particularly from admissions, comes from image and legacy. One of the great things one could do for your image, especially as an HBCU, is to create some sort of currency that is feeding off of that Afrocentric mindset of helping each other with the sense of community and building each other up. 

Morehouse College being at the center of that would be pretty – revolutionary seems a bit hyperbolic – but pretty impactful and pretty powerful to see. I think that would bring a lot of attention back to Morehouse. I think that’s where the higher-ups vested interest would come from. It would come from an increase in popularity through a program such as this that started with the students. 

I think the students need to show that there is an incentive on a large scale for something like this. 

Isaac Dia 

What Elijah was talking about with the image is true. I think a really easy way to get them to care about the image where you can kill two birds with one stone, where we can help the community and we can better Morehouse’s image is with the restaurants we already have on campus. 

They kind of do this at Georgia Tech. That’s the only reason I know this. They have Buzz Cards, and with those Buzz Cards students can go to local restaurants, like Moe’s. I think it’s like Moe’s, Waffle House, and maybe Buffalo Wild Wings or something like that, where students can use their Buzz Card. It’s their version of the DCB. they can go there, and they can scan their card there. 

Now they’re eating really good food instead of the school cafeteria. I think if Morehouse wanted to improve their image and help the community, we could have more local businesses, like Slim and Huskies. There’s a Slim and Huskies on campus and there’s a Slim and Huskies five minutes away from campus. 

I think Morehouse should partner up with them where, if you’re just out and about and you stop with Slim and Huskies, you should be able to swipe your DCB card and you should be able to eat Slim and Huskies with your DCB card, because what’s the difference between that one and then the one that is out in real life? 

I think if they were to work with more local restaurants to provide better meals for kids, that’d be a great way to help the community and improve Morehouse’s image and the students win. It’s a triple win for everybody. 

John Greene 

I agree with ‘Jah. I think that’s kind of the crucial thing. It would have to start with the students. With the Nola Bucks, it seems like the school has a vested interest in attempting to get the students more involved in the community outside of campus. I feel like Morehouse has kind of the opposite attitude. 

I feel like we all have stories of people telling us and the school telling us that they don’t want us to go off campus. That it’s dangerous out there, and if you do leave, you should make sure you bring somebody with you. Don’t be out there by yourself. I volunteer with Midnight Riot on campus where we walk around, and we’ll pick up trash in the community. 

As we go, the students who run it are always pointing out, “Oh, yeah, Morehouse owns this plot of land. Look at it. Look at all the trash that’s all over it. They don’t take care of it. They own this land over here, but it’s covered in trash.” I think it would have to start with the students. It has to be because we wanted it, or because the faculty wanted it. It would have to be bottom up to the point where, for the board of trustees, it becomes in their best interest to put their money into it; otherwise, I don’t think they ever will. 

William Saas 

It seems like something like Midnight Riot and organizations like that could also be interesting, existing social infrastructure to tap into where there’s already activity off campus when you’re being told precisely not to go. I would imagine they’ve had to make a pretty persuasive argument to do the work that they’re doing. Credo, and when the way we’ve been talking about it, is not about destroying Morehouse as it exists and building something else whole cloth. It’s not it’s not revolutionary in its current iteration. That’s good because, you know, you go to Morehouse, but there is maybe something more transitional at play.  I love the bottom-up emphasis that was present in the panel and it’s present throughout our conversation here. Are there other infrastructures on campus that you could point to and tap to help break down those barriers? 

Elijah Qualls 

We already have some infrastructure in place that does focus on outreach and betterment of the community. I know we have prison education pipeline programs in place. I wouldn’t be the first to tell you about these because I’m not involved with them, but I know they exist, and I know they’re good programs that do quality work. 

I believe Judge Murray and the political science department at Morehouse College is pretty involved with that program, where they go into the prison system and they work on educating some of the inmates there and things like that. That’s one thing. I also know our Bonner Scholarship at Morehouse College is one of, if not, the most prestigious institutional scholarship that you can receive. 

It’s a full ride scholarship. In exchange, the students who receive that scholarship have to fulfill a certain amount of community service hours to maintain that full ride scholarship. Outside of that, there’s an expectation for every single registered student organization that they fulfill a certain amount of community service hours. My organization just filed to re-register as an RSO. 

One of the things that you have to submit is your community impact, like how many community service hours and things like that. You’ll see in certain areas here and there an interest in giving back to the community and improving the community. However, those are select cases. While those are multiple examples; we have a lot of RSO’s and the Bonner scholarship is pretty large, it is still not enough. It’s not like this is a campus wide thing and I think that’s where the Credo would really come in. That kind of separation and destruction of the wall that divides us is also very important, because right now our community service comes from a subconscious place of, “I’m in a better position than you right now, so I owe it to you to give back to you.” 

I don’t think we’re even scratching the surface of the potential of what a mutual exchange could look like. Right now, I think a lot of students at Morehouse think, “I’m at college. You’re not. I’m going to give back and help you.” However, they don’t come at it at all from a place of, “how can you also help me?” 

I think there is potential for a mutual exchange. The last point I wanted to make was how you mentioned the Black University, and whether or not Morehouse needs to be completely torn down and built up anew or can it just be restructured? If we’re looking at the most earnest idea of the Black University, I don’t think Morehouse can be that. 

I think that Credo is also an opportunity to improve Morehouse to get closer to that Black University concept. I don’t think Morehouse should ever be destroyed by any means. I think Morehouse does need to take some time and reflect on what it’s doing right now, because I think it’s rapidly losing sight of its original mission. 

I think that Credo will help the students to really understand what we’re about. Morehouse should not be about wealth accumulation, in my opinion, as a humanities major. I don’t think that all the students should just be focused on accumulating a gross amount of wealth. 

I think it’s got to be something completely different as Black people looking at how our predominantly Black communities, such as the West End, are doing right now. I don’t think wealth accumulation is the only way and then you just expect to give back your money. I think it should be something more focused and skewed towards the betterment of the community and the public benefit rather than the fiscal or the monetary benefit. 

John Greene 

Kind of on that same note of RSO’s and things like that in the Black University. Big shout out to the Writing and Thinking Society. I’m the president. I’m joking. We’ve been having lots of conversations about the decline of intellectualism. 

What was that one article that was in the Maroon Tiger that we read a while back about that? We’ve had lots of conversations about how our education here at Morehouse College isn’t as radical as we would like it to be and growing opposed to the idea of the Black University. We’ve been abandoning it. The idea that maybe the Credos job could be to create communities like the Writing and Thinking Society, where we can have these conversations and educate ourselves about these things that Morehouse may not want to be a part of its core curriculum because it’s too radical, because it’s not good for business or whatever the case may be. Moving Morehouse more towards the Black University could just look like creating incentives for organizations like that. 

Isaac Dia 

I’ll say for me, the one that I know about is with the Poetry Club at Morehouse. They also do prison education, but they do it through writing and poetry. What I think is more of an issue is events like the one I had in a Chinese literature class, where the speaker came in from Asia and she was telling us her life story alongside her writing and everything. There’s like so many events like that, like the poetry one, where we had inmates come, the ones they had been teaching, they came and performed a show where they showed us all the poetry they’ve been working on. 

When we have those important community events, Morehouse will never tell you because, I guess, they just don’t care. When you get an email from the school or you get an email from Handshake or an advisor, all the emails that they spam you with are always filled with Goldman Sachs. I get ten Goldman Sachs emails a day, or Blackrock, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. I get a million emails all the time from those four people. Morehouse, as a school they have their obligations they have to meet, but I feel like they need to have more of a balance where it’s like, “yes, you’re here at school to get an education, to get a job.” To be a complete person, a complete human, you also need community, so here’s some more community type stuff. I think that’s where more of the issue with Morehouse comes. A lot of the stuff they’re talking about, like the Midnight Riot, I have never even heard about it before. 

That’s why when you talk to a lot of students on campus and you tell them, “oh, yeah, I’m a part of this group, this organization,” or something, a lot of people are like, “oh, I had never heard about that before.” I think it’s more about getting more people to know about these programs because people want to do stuff. 

I think the biggest issue is they just don’t know where to go to get things done. 

John Greene 

This is stuff we can do now, really. Even at the level that it is currently with the Credo, with Dr. Douglas controlling everything. If Dr. Douglas just wanted to say next semester, “come up with a list of things and have people vote on whether or not they want the Credo to be given out based on attendance at Midnight Riot clean up events or going to certain events we have at the Writing and Thinking Society.” These are things that are actionable even before we expand too much further. 

William Saas 

The morning panel was largely about public money. “The Black University and Community Currencies” was the name of the event. The afternoon consisted of two panels: one featuring yourself, Professor Douglas, and Camille Franklin from Community Movement Builders and Jared Ball from Morgan State University. In that first panel you talked about – I don’t know if we can call it a tension, it’s more than that – the incompatibility of the vision of the Black University with existing structures of higher education generally and more specifically, the HBCU (Historically Black Colleges & Universities). Immediately after that we had a conversation with students about the Credo. I’m asking you to go back a couple weeks now, but is there anything that you have thought since that day, since that meeting about the relative compatibility of something like the Credo with the Black University? 

Isaac Dia 

I think that the Credo can work with the Black University. I think that the only way the Black University can work is if you have a project like the Credo, because when you’re creating a Black University, if we’re going to use the Duboisian way – which I know, like Doctor Douglass loves to bring up – it’s all about being in community with the people around you. In order to have that community, you need to have a currency that can support that community. I think the Credo is the perfect way to do that. When the Black University is the one who’s issuing currency, when they’re the ones who hold the monetary power, we know that they can issue projects that will benefit the currency. They’re more likely to issue money that will benefit the community rather than a private bank who is profit-focused. This one is more community oriented and community driven. I think that when you have a real Duboisian Black University, they’ll just fundamentally come up with their own currency to help support their people because they realize they can’t rely on the US dollar or the federal system to support them in the ways that they need to be supported. 

John Greene 

I would say that the Black University is not something that could ever make money, in a capitalist sense. It’s even fundamentally opposed to the idea that its goal should be to fit into that structure. Its goal should be to envision something newer, to be a venue for new ideas separate from the current white capitalist, individualistic world that we currently live in. 

I guess you could also say that it is fundamentally incompatible with something like the Credo because of what the Credo does to replicate the current capitalist system. You could also argue that the Credo is the perfect thing to allow for people to, whilst rebelling and envisioning something new, still survive and maintain their own lives whilst participating in this work that otherwise would not be able to make them money traditionally. 

Isaac Dia 

When you say the Credo replicates the capitalist system, I’m not sure I really understand. Do you think you could explain it? 

John Greene

Just in that you’re taking the money and you’re working for it and you’re paying for it. There is the idea that there would be a private sector and the eventual goal, especially for the Credo to work in something like a Black University, you would probably need to get to the level we talked about, having it backed by the Fed or by the US dollar in some way. This wraps it around into being a form of capitalism and a different branch of the capitalist system, even if it would be more of a public money centered thing. It still would be fundamentally connected to the system that the Black University would be trying to disconnect itself from. 

Andrew Douglas 

I’ll just add, we didn’t get into Marx in the class, but Dubois, in his later years, turned Marxist. It depends on how far we take that critique of capital and the value form and the wage relation. I think your intuition, John, is moving in that direction. Even a kind of community controlled or designed and managed currency is still mobilizing commodified labor power and is still operating within the wage relation. 

There are certainly critiques of the capitalist value form that would take issue with that. I think your intuition is kind of moving in a kind of conventional Marxist direction there. 

John Greene 

Yeah, I do agree with that, I think. 

William Saas 

Isaac, are you satisfied by John’s answer there? 

Isaac Dia 

Yeah, I understand the answer. I don’t think I agree with his outcome, but I definitely get where he’s coming from. 

William Saas 

On what grounds do you disagree? 

Isaac Dia 

I can see how, if the Credo were to continue in a traditional sense, we could end up with the same wage exploitation and capital relations that exist now, but  since we’re using it in the Black University and the Black University is here for radical change, this gives us the opportunity to implement real change. 

I think, if the Credo is actually to be used, we don’t have to tie it to the US dollar. That’s a way people get stuck; we don’t have to do the conventional thing anymore. We can branch out. If we really want to dismantle the system that’s going on, why would we then take our dollars to reintroduce them back to the US dollar, when we can use the Credo as its own form of currency? 

We can get people to actually use that rather than US dollars. That’s just the way I was thinking about it. So that’s the only reason I disagree. 

John Greene 

That’s an issue that rears its head over and over again. To what degree should you be participating in the system to work against the system? Working within the system can often make it easier for you to sustain yourself and cast a broader net in whatever movement you’re building. 

However, often you can end up being corrupted by the system and replicating the system versus attempting to do your own thing, which requires much more sacrifice. It will likely mean a lot less people will be involved in your movement – initially, at least – but can maintain some sort of purity, but what does that even mean if you don’t get anything done right? 

Isaac Dia 

Yeah. It sounds like we’re on the same page. 

Bruce Malveaux 

My question would be, how would you get people to use the Credo as a US dollar? What would the Credo be used for that the US dollar couldn’t be used for? 

Isaac Dia 

That’s always the toughest question. Getting people to use the Credo is something I talked about during the panel. If I gave you a dollar and if I gave you a Credo and I said, “hey, for the Credo, you have much more power in how you can spend it and how it’s invested,” I think more people would take that option over me just giving them a regular US dollar. If you were to really educate people on the power that they can have with the new money that we want to introduce into the world, I think they would be a little more accepting of the new dollar, the new Credo, rather than a traditional US dollar where they really don’t have much of a say in how it’s spent, how it’s used, or the value of it. If you tell somebody, “You can determine the value of the Credo,” like, let’s say one day you want to make one Credo worth five Credos instead of one Credo. Then, I think people will be down for an idea like that, when you can tell them, “You can get money for research with the Credos,” I think more people will be more willing to use it once they can understand the power that they can now hold from a more democratized currency. I think that’s how you get more people to use it. 

Bruce Malveaux 

Who will take the loss? 

Isaac Dia 

The currency issuer.  Morehouse would take the loss if we were using the Black University as an example. 

Andrew Douglas 

I think what you’re speaking about, Isaac, is the power of monetary agency. Currently, as we’re sort of taught to think about how we use the US dollar, we don’t have a sense that we have any agency in its design, in its management, in its issuance. What we’re thinking about here is bringing a smaller local community together in a much more democratic way to exercise some agency over how that currency is issued, against what it’s issued, what kind of labor we want to try to mobilize, what sorts of things we want to invest in. Bruce, to your point, I think part of the idea behind this, anyway, is to get beyond some of the strictures of zero sum thinking, so that our instinct isn’t always to think about who’s going to take the loss, but to think about what we can do for one another through relationships of reciprocity, through relationships of give and take, democratizing those relationships in ways that are more mutually self-satisfying to participants in the process. I get where you go with that question of loss. We had some serious conversations in the classroom about how an institution, like a Morehouse, could afford to experiment with this complimentary currency given the fact that the institution and its business model and its legal status is still, by and large, beholden to the orthodoxy of the US dollar. 

William Saas 

This is great. Isaac in the panel, you very optimistically said the biggest benefit of the Credo project is the education that we can get from it. “We” being the students in the class. I think more broadly we’ve been talking about anyone who participates in such a project. You also kind of get a little bit more pointed and specific and suggest that the Credo assignment would be “fantastic,” your words, for the economics department. I want to suggest that, as an audience member, I found that to be intriguing for a couple of reasons. I think that would be pretty uncommon for an economics department. As you know, no doubt, from the kind of survey of neoclassical orthodoxy and mainstream economics that you would have gotten in your class, that many of them have no place for money in their syllabus. 

In fact, money is kind of thought to be this thing that’s not that interesting. Why would they do it? I’m holding out that maybe the Morehouse economics department would be interested, but if you could expand on that comment, why would it be particularly good for economics departments to do it? Why might they be particularly receptive to an assignment related to developing and using a classroom currency? 

Isaac Dia 

My thinking behind why an economics department would really love a Credo was – this gets back to my main point – the education that the Credo can provide is almost unlimited. I’ve had to take macro and microeconomics as a course requirement for Morehouse. 

When you’re learning about those concepts, kind of like how we do in political science, money is treated as a given. They just assume that this is how money works, this is what it is used for. We’re just going to show you the math behind it. 

When I think about introducing the Credo, the student’s brain would explode and they’d be like, “oh, my goodness.” I, as an economist, now that I know there’s this thing called the finance franchise. The Fed uses interest rates and unemployment to regulate how much money is in the economy and the way that it’s used. The banks are issued money by them and the banks can create money on their own. This will show them that me, as an individual, will have a say in how money is used. Now I can take my knowledge, and I can go to a company like Goldman Sachs. I can even go to the government. We can have people who understand what money can do for them, and they can go into the system, like in government and the federal system, maybe they can even go to – if they really want to help take down the “evil capitalist,” quote unquote, they can go to like a Blackrock or Goldman Sachs and start applying the knowledge to help improve their communities. 

William Saas 

And you got the email addresses of Blackrock and Wells Fargo because the email you every day. 

Isaac Dia 

Oh yeah. Yeah. 

John Greene 

That kind of plays into the whole question of, “what is the goal of current education in economics?” Are they just educated to reproduce the current system? Would they be receptive to new ideas, like the Credo, that MMT are attempting to put onto the table? 

The idea of monetary silencing, the idea that economics and politics have been brought to us as separate entities for so long and that one of the primary goals of MMT is to bring them back together again. To end this monetary silencing, to show that politics and economics are one in the same in many ways. 

I think that would certainly be very interesting. I just don’t know if that is ever going to be the purpose of current economics as we know it.  

Andrew Douglas

If I could just jump in here, my econ colleagues are wonderful, I love them to death. There’s only a handful of them. We’re a tiny college, right? I don’t think any of them really teach money regularly or certainly don’t specialize in monetary policy. I think that means, interestingly, there’s a lot of potential there. I don’t know that there’s going to be any kind of principled or committed pushback, necessarily. Part of what I’m interested in as a political scientist is thinking about money as a creature of law and politics and wrestling money away from economics as a discipline to some extent and anchoring it in political science as a discipline. 

Realizing that all of these things are interdisciplinary. Money is an enormously and naturally interdependent and interdisciplinary sort of thing. The founder of our department here at Morehouse, Robert Brisbane, initiated political science instruction back in 1948. We have a thing called the Brisbane Institute that’s been moribund for a number of years. 

I want to try to revitalize it and put the Credo project at the center. The purpose of that institute was to provide a kind of home for public facing, publicly engaged political science teaching and learning. It seems to me that the Credo project is an ideal project to relaunch that institute, tapping into some of the more aspirational dimensions of our mission: past, present and future. 

William Saas 

That’s incredibly exciting to hear. I didn’t know that. Did you talk about that in class, or is that that fresh? 

John Greene 

We talked about it a bit. 

William Saas 

Awesome. We have the Credo at Morehouse. Morehouse and its relation to the West End. What about Atlanta? Where does the Credo come in in the municipal city context of where you all live? 

Andrew Douglas 

This is something we talked about a bit in class, thinking about creating the demand for the currency as we scale it from a campus currency to potentially a community currency, and potentially to be something that could be used to pay staff, faculty, and students in wages. We’ve talked about appealing to the city of Atlanta to allow Credos to be used for city tax purposes, and appealing to the city to demonstrate its commitment to Morehouse, Spelman, Clark, and all the schools of the Atlanta University Center. They have long treasured these universities as these core Atlanta institutions. This would be a great way for the city to demonstrate its commitment to these institutions by agreeing to accept institutionally issued currency for city tax purposes. 

Of course, that would go a long way toward creating a demand such that if people could use the Credo to pay their city taxes or at least a portion of it, they would be more willing to accept Credos as a portion of their wages. This is something we’ve talked about. I know, again, Benjamin Wilson, has been on Money on the Left talking about trying to experiment with this in Ithaca, and other places up in New York, but coming back to the point we mentioned earlier about a student driven bottom-up approach to this, nobody is more persuasive than the students themselves. If they approach the city council, the mayor’s office, the city reps with a proposal like this, I think it would be very hard for elected officials in the city of Atlanta to just shoot that down.  

William Saas 

We got some ambassadors for it on this call. That’s tremendously exciting to hear about as a prospect combined with the Brisbane Institute. It sounds like an amazing one-two-punch. We’ll have to have you back when that starts to roll out. 

In the meantime, by way of closing, I know that Andrew has been at this for a couple of years, at least a few years, talking about public money in your classes. I’m interested in hearing about whether and how John, Isaac and Elijah have had occasion since taking the course to teach someone else about public money, to walk them through public money, MMT, and constitutional theory. What’s that been like? 

Elijah Qualls 

I have two different instances. When I was leaving Morehouse, I was on my way back to Ohio and my dad was driving me. It’s about an eight-hour drive. We were just kind of sitting and talking and I think my dad may end up listening to this podcast later on. 

He’ll be the first one to tell you he’s very conservatively minded. A lot of his ideals go towards the right. When being presented with something like this, his immediate responses were to provide push back and ask questions transparently like, “How realistic do you think this is? 

Do you really think this would actually work? Why would people want to buy into it?” Quite frankly, he was asking the same questions that our class was asking at the beginning of this semester. This is hard, especially coming from the public money lens, right? It’s not necessarily taking your concept of economics and turning it on its head, but it is significantly contradicting a lot of the concepts that we had already understood. 

It was interesting to speak with him about it. In the end, he still didn’t buy into it, but I did not expect him to, of course. That was one instance. Also, talking to the student body at the workshop that we had. I don’t know if you had seen it, but during lunch there were a couple students who had come to my table, and I was explaining it to them. 

It is a tough thing, in my first few interactions with it coming from Dr. Douglass, I still was struggling to buy into this whole notion, especially with MMT. I’m like, “what are you talking about, our taxes don’t actually go towards anything?” It’s a difficult thing because you’re socialized your entire life to understand that the roads you drive on, the freeways you take, and all the public entities that you enjoy are funded effectively by you. 

If I understand MMT correctly, it takes that notion and retorts, “what your taxes serve to do is legitimize the US dollar and the public good that you enjoy could have been funded whether you paid taxes or not, in theory.” Right. I will say, even to those who are listening to this podcast now and they’re like, “this seems a little far fetched,” that’s a normal response. That’s how I responded. But it’s important to explore and leave no question unanswered. Ask all the questions you may have. When you do that, you begin to see the legitimacy behind the modern monetary theory and behind the public money concept. I think talking to the students and some family members about this has helped me gain a better understanding of the theory and see where it can apply and then what we can do with it, particularly, of course, looking at the “uni” project and the Credo. 

John Greene 

I have also explained it to my parents. I also have one friend who’s a super ultra mega liberal, and I’d be going back and forth with him and trying to turn him into a comrade. It never really goes well. I’ll have him on the ropes and then he’ll come back the next day, having refortified himself. One of the times we were talking, I was just like, “yeah, you know, the government prints money and taxpayer money is a myth” and all this MMT stuff. 

I tried to take him through the whole thing and then eventually loop that back around to get him to agree and it didn’t work, but I think he was buying some of the MMT stuff at least. 

Isaac Dia 

Yeah. I’m a little luckier than Elijah and John. My parents, like my whole family are pretty tired of capitalism already. When I had told them, “There might be an alternative,” they’re just like, “hey, sign me up for it. You don’t even have to tell me. Just sign me up.” 

I’ve been pretty lucky. I think the biggest challenge has been trying to incorporate a complementary currency in real life. I do stuff on the side. I have my own little organization in things I do. As a way to practice and see if this can work, I’ve tried to implement my own currency or where I’m not too focused on the dollar, exactly. If I need something, is there a way I can get it without having to exactly pay for it? I know it sounds like I’m stealing, but I promise I’m not. I just try and find an alternative to using the US dollar as much, and that’s been like a huge challenge for me. When you approach somebody and need camera equipment, I’m like, “hey, I know I need all this equipment from you. I don’t have money, but I can provide something else.” Trying to explain that to people and show them how it can be beneficial to them has been a challenge, but it’s something I’ve been working on in practice. 

William Saas 

What’s funny is that there are multiple ways to get things. Paying for them, straight-out, in US dollars is the easiest way. There’s a hierarchy here. You can also use a credit card. I’m not saying do that either. I’m saying that – and it came up in the panel and across the panels – there are alternative currencies that people use all the time to pay for things like airline miles, like credit card company points. 

Well, I’ve certainly learned a lot, both through our conversation today and from your panel discussion. I want to thank each of you so much for your time today and for all of your deep and meaningful thinking about this very important and central question of monetary agency and of monetary design in our current moment of democratic turmoil. 

Even if we weren’t where we are today, it would still be critically important for reasons that I think you spell out in your work. Thank you so much for joining us at Money on the Left. 

John Greene

Thanks for your questions. It was a fun conversation. 

Isaac Dia 

Yeah. Thank you for having this. I enjoyed it.

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

We speak with Lauren Arrington about her forthcoming book on women artists in the Federal Arts Project. The Great Depression rendered 140,000 women and girls across the United States homeless. In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt founded the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that employed 8.5 million people over the course of eight years. Soon, the WPA instituted a landmark ruling forbidding sexual discrimination. As a result, between thirty and forty percent of newly hired artists on federal projects were women. This equity of opportunity enabled women to rise to positions of leadership and have access to resources that had a lasting effect on national institutions and on the history of art. In her book, Arrington challenges the popular memory of WPA art as a story of straight white men. Instead, she argues that the works of art that many women created under the Federal Arts Project made visible Black, immigrant, and women’s lives in a way that challenged segregationist, xenophobic, and sexist structures intrinsic in the nation’s institutions.

During our conversation, Arrington explores the extraordinary achievements and tribulations of New Deal women artists and administrators. Among them include Alice Neel, Gwendolyn Bennett, Augusta Savage, Georgette Seabrooke, Lenore Thomas, and Pablita Velarde. Along the way, we track how these women and the Federal Art Project more broadly came under fire from local and national government officials who attempted to censor or suppress their radical work, to fire them from their jobs or force their resignations from projects, and to investigate them for “un-American” activity. We contemplate the challenges of writing histories of lost and often deliberately destroyed archives. And we consider the lessons of women’s participation in the Federal Arts Project for the future politics of public arts provisioning.

Lauren Arrington is Chair and Professor of English at University of South Florida.

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

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Scott Ferguson

Lauren Arrington, welcome to Money on the Left.

Lauren Arrington

Thanks. I’m so glad to be here with you.

Scott Ferguson

I am so happy to have you here with me. We’ve invited you on the show this month to talk to us about a book that you’ve just finished writing and is in production and is not out yet. It doesn’t even have a title yet, although you’ve told me you’re floating some ideas. It is about women artists, diverse women artists, who worked and contested, and variously participated in the shaping of the New Deal arts programs.

Before we get into our discussion about your new book, I want to invite you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself; your professional background, what discipline you’re in, the kind of research you’ve done up until this moment, before we turn to this particular book project.

Lauren Arrington

Sure.  I’m a Professor of English at the University of South Florida. I grew up in Florida and came back about two years ago after spending most of my career in the UK, and most recently in Ireland. I did my doctorate at Oxford University and then just ended up staying in the UK by various good fortunes.

My doctoral research — I only belatedly realized — kind of set me on the course of the common thread that runs through all of my books. I was working on the question of government funding of the Irish National Theater and the impact that that funding had on the theater’s productions. I started out my career as a literary scholar, focusing mostly on Irish literature and then British literature.

The big kind of monolith in Irish literary history was that there was no censorship of the theater in Ireland, that it was a free theater, unlike the theaters in Britain, which had censorship coming from the Lord Chamberlain’s office. But that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, because if you’re taking state money, particularly from a government like the early Irish one that has a really strong ideological program, surely, they’re going to want some measure of compliance in the kind of art you’re producing. Can there really be free art when you’re taking government money?

I investigated that question and was able to turn up some new archival sources and show that actually there were private compromises and even instances of self-censorship from some really big players like W. B. Yates, who was a director of the theater. He is best known as a poet and was also a playwright. That rewrote the question of how state funding and the arts worked in the early Irish state. After that, my second book was about an Irish socialist republican called Constance Markievicz. Her last name was a Polish name because she married a Polish artist that she met in Paris where they were both in art school. Her movements in art circles in Paris and London and Dublin are what mobilized her to the politics which she arrived at socialist republicanism.

I was really interested in, after writing that biography, staying in the field of life writing. My most recent book was a group biography of poets including Yates and Ezra Pound, who were living in Rapallo, Italy, during the early years of Mussolini’s regime. I was thinking about the question of fascist aesthetics, how fascism in Italy took a very aesthetic impetus.

It was very different to German National Socialism and the way that certain ideas, particularly ideas about the past, were recovered and represented in art and in Mussolini’s Italy. I was thinking about the way that those poets were influenced by those aesthetics that were coming through the regime and being, in many ways, interpreted by Ezra Pound.

Most people think Ezra Pound is fascist. He’s arrested by the Americans and has a famous trial in the US. He goes back to Italy as soon as he can, gives a fascist salute, famously, from the boat. But most people don’t think about the poets who are visiting him and in his circle as having any kind of fascist orientation.

I was thinking particularly about the ways that those aesthetics were encoded in poetry that we might not really see. That was my book, The Poets of Rapallo, which came out in 2021 during the pandemic. The pandemic is actually where I started thinking about this book that I’ve just finished, which is going to come out with St. Martin’s Press, which is a division of Macmillan, in late 2026.

Scott Ferguson

The through line seems fairly clear. You’ve been thinking about how state finance variously inflects aesthetic production and social life. It would seem very natural that you would turn to similar questions during the New Deal in the United States. But maybe you can talk to us a little bit more about what motivated you to make this particular turn.

I kept wondering, were you thinking about this during the end of Trump 1.0 or did that come after?

Lauren Arrington

It was actually after the project began — which is kind of strange now to think about, given what’s happening on or in our federal landscape — but the project actually began in a moment of optimism.

Scott Ferguson

That’s what I was wondering.

Lauren Arrington

Yeah. We were living in Ireland, where I had taken a job at a university. It was lockdown, which meant something very different in most of Europe to what it meant in the US, particularly in Florida, where there were very few pandemic restrictions. In Ireland, it was about two years of restriction on social life.

During the depths of the pandemic, we couldn’t leave our apartment except to go grocery shopping once a week, and everyone was permitted to take one walk a day, but you couldn’t go further than a mile from your house. It was a very dark psychic landscape that most of us were living in.

There was, of course, also a very real economic impact and the Irish state saw this.  Politicians started thinking about the concept of universal basic income, which of course has been circulating for a while. In particular, they were thinking about how a version of that could be applied to visual artists, performing artists and writers in Ireland because there had been an immediate and detrimental effect on performing arts and visual arts, particularly with exhibitions closed.

There were no gigs, no concerts, no pubs even to play in. Book buying went up slightly, but then new books often went under the radar because there couldn’t be the kinds of launches that bring the media attention that, particularly, emerging authors need. The Irish state began a pilot scheme for artists and writers to sort of fund a base level of income in a way to compensate for those losses of the pandemic.

I was seeing all this unfold, and I was thinking about the New Deal. Why is nobody talking about FDR?  This is the precedent here. I started reading and doing research on the New Deal from my laptop because there were no libraries open.

Everything that I kept reading was turning up the very same story, dry history, post office art, rural programs, which were important, but seemed to be the only story. We’re all hearing about the Farm Services Administration. We all know Dorothea Lange’s photographs, the Dust Bowl migration murals that are kind of glorifying this American colonialist expansion.

I started going deeper and deeper. I was like, this can’t be all there was. Then I started reading about the community arts projects and community art centers. I started finding names that I didn’t recognize and digging as far as I could into various archives wondering, “who are these people?”

There were a lot of women, particularly women of color, communist women, Native American women, who had been written out of the historical record.  I thought I really wanted to tell their stories and not just the story of the arts projects again. I didn’t want to write another doorstop book about the New Deal.

I wanted to write a book that was focused on the lives of these women and how, in the midst of the depression, they found ways to live as artists and to keep themselves creatively alive, and the role that the state played in making that kind of creativity possible.

Scott Ferguson

Maybe we can pull back to the beginning of the New Deal and the very idea about financing the arts. How did that come about? How was it shaped at first? How was it variously discriminatory toward women and people of color? And how did some of those broader contestations play out?

Lauren Arrington

Right. We all talk about FDR as the architect of the New Deal, but actually the architect was probably Harry Hopkins. He was who did the real idea generation, we might say, and as for this aspect of Roosevelt’s presidency, he was his right hand and top adviser. Hopkins had this vision for this kind of national structure.

He invited Holger Cahill, who was involved in the early Museum of Modern Art, to think through this process. Holger Cahill tapped a woman called Audrey McMahon, who had started a pilot project to help fund artists in New York, where there was, of course, a high concentration of artists for various reasons.

For one, the nature of New York as an arts and cultural hub, also, the Great Migration, which brought new energy into the city and new networks and new kinds of artistic production. Audrey McMahon had piloted this program for artists in New York. Holger Cahill knew about it, so he invited Audrey McMahon to come to DC and talk about the idea.

Out of those conversations emerged the Federal Arts Project. McMahon remained a key player because she was appointed as director of the Federal Arts Project for New York which means that she has probably the most powerful position in all of the federal arts project because of the volume of artists that she’s dealing with.

She’s also a woman torn between bureaucracy and passion. She has a real passion for art. She is involved in the art education at NYU, which is where she starts this pilot project. But she also is an administrator and is constrained by the bureaucracy with which she is presented. She always has to make her budget.

In doing that, she’s forced to make some pretty harsh cuts at key points to the federal arts projects that are handed down to her. The artists don’t see that. They don’t understand how she’s squeezed between an idea that actually originated with her, although she doesn’t really get the credit for it and the pressures that she’s under that are coming from DC.

The Artists Union actually pickets her offices, which comes together in order to defend the right of artists to have employment and fair working conditions, and they advocate for those rights under the New Deal. They come to picket McMahon’s office. She doesn’t know what to do. She gets angry, I think, because she doesn’t feel seen or understood.

Because she’s an administrator, she’s automatically vilified as, like, a department chair.

As soon as you become an administrator, you’re like a baddie, right? No matter your intentions. She doesn’t feel seen. She gets really angry at the artists, at their inability to understand the economic constraints.  That the budget isn’t bottomless, right? There are only so many funds. But she does make some pretty big missteps.

One of those is understanding the way that racism is inherent to the structures of the New Deal. Despite what they’re saying in DC, it has a racist structure of privilege encoded in it, and she cuts black jobs first. She participates in that. Black artists then form their own union, which is open to anybody, but it’s primarily black artists, in order to lobby for that reinstatement.

And they actually have some measure of success and get jobs reinstated early on in the project. Soon those are eventually cut as the project is pruned and ultimately decimated as we head into the Second World War.

Scott Ferguson

I think for a lot of people, we imagine that when we think about the New Deal arts projects, we think there were some photographs documenting poverty in the Dust Bowl. There was a lot of easel painting of the so-called “American scene,” which were potentially, not only ideologically conservative, but also aesthetically conservative; not pushing beyond perspectival conventions that had been around since the Renaissance.

 I think we also have a sense of a certain kind of paternalism, which of course was there and so were the American scene paintings. In this kind of paternalism, or “Well, we’re just funding some art, and everybody does what they’re supposed to do and then it’s over.”

Whereas what your project shows us is that it was improvised and contested and messy and involved all kinds of creative triumphs, as well as horrible, horrible decisions and problematic organizations. I think one of the many impulses in this book that I really picked up on, and I actually regret framing this book at the outset as being just about artists,

is thinking about people in leadership roles, whether they are literally artists who are taking up leadership roles or are just variously taking up these organizing roles, because without that work there would be no artwork. I’m so fascinated by potentially even thinking about the aesthetic dimensions of what it is to organize, to socially reproduce.

What does it mean to have a school that teaches children how to sculpt, how to do printmaking, how to write poetry or whatever it’s going to be? And I love that you’ve introduced this right away. You can’t separate it. This isn’t just a story of some solo artists. It’s a story of a whole improvised apparatus of administrators and artists, and sometimes people cross roles.

Lauren Arrington

Absolutely. That was one of the things that made this book so hard to write because, like I said, I didn’t want to write a doorstop history of the New Deal arts projects. The challenge was how to convey that sense of collectivity among a handful of artists whose careers I wanted to highlight, and I began thinking about it as a group biography.

Folks were asking me early on, “How is this a group biography?” “Did they know each other?” You know what I mean? Because it wasn’t like the Bloomsbury Group where there were geographical constraints and a common artistic purpose, the sense of starting something new together and a lot of direct collaboration between these artists.

When you’re an artist, most artists are kind of working on their own. I allowed that to get in my head a little bit. Then I realized that actually it is a group biography because the structures create the group.

Scott Ferguson

And the groups create the structures. One of the moments that I love is when you’re talking about as the Harlem Renaissance is dying down and the depression is kicking up, Harlem starts to kind of create these new spaces that were actually, in certain ways, more based on group solidarity and were less beholden to white rich patrons who very much put their stamp on what would count as representations of black life.

Lauren Arrington

Absolutely. There was a real desire in Harlem, particularly, to get away from that legacy of the Harlem Renaissance as being the product of white patronage and a desire to advocate for black artists to be in administrative roles. Charles Alston is an important collaborator with Augusta Savage in that regard. He has a group that is more like a group called the 306 group, and they meet in what was an old horse stable in Harlem and have political conversations and conversations about art and conversations about the economy and conversations about what power means now.

That’s where we see this push against McMahon, and against the Federal Arts Project to instate more black administrators who have better salaries and better opportunities and to eliminate that kind of glass ceiling. But we know that there are tensions there, too, between folks who rose to prominence under the old order and folks coming up with a new way of doing things.

Even in Harlem, we’re seeing those kinds of tensions between the old guard of the Harlem Renaissance and new visionaries like Augusta Savage. Several of these artists, like Pablita Velarde is another one of those artists who we could talk about, who has to face challenges from within her own local network as well as challenges from the government apparatus in order to do the work that she feels compelled to do.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah, let’s switch to her because that pushes us across the country, right? They’re in a very different scene with a different set of political legacies, constraints, entanglements, and horrors.

Lauren Arrington

Yeah, absolutely. Pablita Velarde was a pueblo woman who grew up just north of Santa Fe. She, like Augusta Savage, shows talent as an artist from a really young age, but is constrained by social convention in terms of the role that she should play. Women in Pueblo culture were not artists, they worked with textiles. They should not be visual artists. Pablita Velarde is sent to a boarding school in Santa Fe where she, because of an early iteration of the federal arts project, is introduced to mural painting. Through that she is mentored as an artist and through those connections that she makes at her school, she is tapped by the National Park Service to make art for Bandelier National Monument, which is a big national monument under the National Park Service. It is northwest of Santa Fe and just south of Los Alamos, where the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, had started, making this national park, and they’re now building a visitor’s center, and they realized they need some art for the exhibits. So, she is sideways funded through the Federal Arts Project to make that art there. But again, she’s faced with constraints about what the Park Service believes Pueblo culture should look like and her own direct experience of growing up under Tewa culture in particular.

Scott Ferguson

You suggest in the book that a lot of the dictates from the white administrators is based on relatively old and problematic, ethnographic research. There’s also the interesting twist that there are certain rituals or aspects of Native American life that perhaps shouldn’t be depicted in public, if I’m remembering correctly. There’s all kinds of constraints and challenges that she’s negotiating.

Lauren Arrington

That’s right, that’s right. Even within Pueblo culture, which is very much a Spanish invention, from one way of colonization of what is now the American Southwest, there are different cultures. Pablita Velarde grew up on Santa Clara Pueblo, which is a settlement of a group of people descended from the Tewa people who were absorbed into a more hegemonic kind of Pueblo culture.

There were particular dances that were not supposed to be witnessed by women. There are other dances that should only be witnessed by members of that culture and not subject to tourists. Pablita Velarde is torn between portraying what she sees as these beautiful, celebratory parts of her culture and the cultural diktat that those are private moments.

The question over whether she should portray that actually comes when she’s further along in the Bandelier National Monument project, because early on she’s basically prescribed paintings that have been or gleaned by employees of the National Park Service from reading ethnographic research that doesn’t even relate to her culture. They’re just being absorbed and purported to be like Tewa Pueblo dances, Tewa Pueblo traditions.

They actually belong to completely different cultures altogether. There is just this hegemonic idea of what, quote, “Pueblo culture” is like. She starts to push against that, to add her own levels of detail, and then as she’s given more agency in the project, she starts to develop her own ideas for scenes that she would like to paint for the visitor’s center.

Scott Ferguson

This might be a nice opportunity to plunge into some aesthetic strategies and details. Your book is filled with beautiful readings of various artworks of various styles. Do you want to talk about Velarde’s particular kind of aesthetic strategies with reference to one or more works that you unpack in the book?

Lauren Arrington

Sure. I want to talk a little bit about my visit to the archive where the paintings are held. The paintings are in Tucson at the Western Archeological Conservation Center, which is a division of the National Park Service. It took months and months and months for me to get a visit arranged to the conservation center. 

Scott Ferguson

Why was that? Was that pandemic related or…?

Lauren Arrington

That was staffing related. So again, if we talk about federal resources, when I got there I realized the issue, and some really helpful archivists explained to me that there had been various furloughs. 

Scott Ferguson

Austere staffing.

Lauren Arrington

Exactly, austerity staffing. Meanwhile, their inboxes kept filling up, and so it was only when I picked up the phone right before I was getting ready to head off on my archive trips that I was able to get through.

They were so helpful once I was there. So helpful. But one of the restrictions of the archive is that there were a number of paintings that I could not take pictures of because there had been conversations with the Tribal Council that they should not be reproduced. 

Scott Ferguson

For what reason?

Lauren Arrington

The images depicted should not be witnessed by Anglo people, folks from outside of Pueblo culture. So those ideas that Velarde was working with when she was making the paintings persist with regard to certain paintings. Her paintings are very a flat style of painting, which – in art history – was contested because it was very much imposed in a way as a Santa Fe style of painting drawn from an ethnographic primitivist view of what art from the region historically looked like and a desire, in a way, to perpetuate a linear history of a particular art style. There was an art teacher called Dorothy Dunn, who taught at Santa Fe Indian School, where Velarde was, that schooled the children in this particular style of painting.

When we are thinking about Augusta Savage and the freedom that students had in her studio to experiment with clay, there’s a kind of an inverse situation in Santa Fe Indian School where we have a white art historian teaching “Native American art” to students from the pueblos in the surrounding region who been steeped in that culture for their entire lives.

It’s very prescriptive, this kind of Santa Fe style, but it takes off. It’s very popular. It has a market, and that’s one of the reasons that these artists were encouraged to perpetuate the style as well, because it’s sold to tourists and we see Velarde making an income for herself once she finishes school, by being able to sell this art.

Scott Ferguson

I want to make sure that we talk a little bit about the challenges of this archive, which I can let you explain, but it’s rather slim for political and historical reasons. Maybe talk a little bit about why the archive is so slim and what kinds of challenges that you’ve faced in researching and writing, and how you’ve tried to get around these absences.

Lauren Arrington

Yeah. If I had known this book was going to be so challenging to write, I like to think I would still have written it, but I am not so sure. And let me tell you, my next book is going to be about someone who has left thousands of pages of archives.

Scott Ferguson

Yes.

Lauren Arrington

I am tired from sleuthing. Writing about underrepresented artists, you have those challenges of there not being the funding structures in place, perceptions of value that mean that their archives have been preserved. Sometimes we know that’s because of economic status, and sometimes that is because of structural racism. Sometimes that is because of the politics of the artists themselves, or what parts of their lives that they were not comfortable having preserved.

I’m thinking particularly here about an artist called Lenore Thomas Straus. Lenore Thomas, as she was when she was working on the project, was commissioned to create a series of friezes for the first planned town in the United States called Green Belt, in Maryland, just outside of D.C. 

Scott Ferguson

A proto suburb.

Lauren Arrington

Exactly. You can read about this in the book, but basically the whole project of these green belt towns were segregationist and Lenore Thomas fought against that. The kinds of scenes that she wanted to depict in those friezes were anti-lynching and anti-lynching sculpture that is censored.

But in relation to her archive, what I’m thinking about is that Lenore Thomas was queer. She had a lover, Sally Ringe, who she lived with in Virginia and then in Maryland. She was also a communist. She had two huge black marks against her in terms of the McCarthy era. Lenore Thomas’s archive, which exists in the Greenbelt Museum, curated by a wonderful archivist, Megan Sharon Young, consists of mostly photographs. Not letters and not personal papers. Just photographs of her and photographs that she took of her work in Greenbelt.

When I was writing about Lenore, I wrote mostly from photographs in order to understand things like her perception of the world around her. I could contrast the photographs that she took with official photographs from the New Deal agencies in order to understand how she was contesting those racist hierarchies of power as they played out on the Greenbelt site.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about that? One of my many favorite parts of this book is when you’re contrasting. What’s the name of the photographer who uses angles in a very racialized way? You read her photography and argue how she is pushing against that. Can you spell out these details that are still a little fuzzy for me to remember.

Lauren Arrington

Yeah, sure. Carl Mydans is one of the main photographers on the Greenbelt site. He’s probably who you’re thinking about, but in the whole photographic section of the resettlement administration, as it was called, and the farm security administration where Dorothea Lange works, they were taught a particular photographic aesthetic that played to what you were talking about earlier in terms of this white, paternalistic, colonialist American dream.

Firstly, Greenbelt was not a segregated work site. There were white workers and black workers on the site, but they were captured doing very different kinds of labor and photographed in prejudicial ways. Mydans photographed these white workers often from a low angle. You see them against these like clear blue skies; you can intuit it’s blue even though they’re black and white. There are clear skies, and these almost three-quarter profile portraits presenting this heroic portrait of upstanding American laborers. Right? The black workers are photographed from a high angle. They’re photographed by Mydans, and he’s obviously standing on something, a ladder or a truck or something.

He’s pointing the camera down and so you see the tops of their heads. You literally see them against the dirt. It is the opposite image for these black workers. That is deliberate, as we know from Dorothea Lange’s recollections of how she was taught to take photographs, how she was told to take photographs, which she pushed against. We also see, when you contrast with Lenore Thomas’s photographs, which are very much on the level in every way, you see how those politics are conveyed in those kinds of images.

I spent time thinking about the photographs and thinking about how Lenore Thomas shows us what she thinks and what she believes when she can’t tell us in her archive.

Scott Ferguson

Speaking of form, I am curious, I’ve never written a trade press book. For our listeners.  ,we’re academics, we usually write academic monographs in a scholarly rhetoric or frame. Different fields and subfields have their own customs and standards, but we all write fairly similarly in this mode. A trade press book, however, is for a popular readership.

That mode of address is supposed to not be scholarly, and it’s supposed to be a little looser and warmer and not everything is footnoted. I’m wondering, what was it like composing in that more popular mode? What kind of challenges did you face?

Did you learn lessons about your own voice and its range?

Lauren Arrington

Well, I guess the first thing I’d want to respond to is what I think is a misconception that trade writing is not supposed to be scholarly, but I think that that informs some conceptions about scholarly writing and what it is supposed to be like. I respect writers, it is a hard thing to sit down and write.

No matter what genre you’re writing, props for doing it. The kind of writing that I’m interested in is writing that is enjoyable to read and writing that strives to convey quite complex ideas like we’ve been talking about in terms of the photographic aesthetics, in a way that appeals to readers, in a way that also teaches. It teaches in such a way that we’re communicating as peers to readers, who are picking up books and opening them and wanting to learn. Not feeling like there needs to be a distance in the diction or the structure between the writer and the reader. Rather, we’re meeting on the page in a way that I can bring my expertise and what I’ve learned and communicate it to a reader who maybe never even heard about the subject but is interested, using language that’s easy to understand, that takes its time in order to explain big concepts if we need to talk about big concepts, we’ll usually dwell on that rather than just throwing out a term and expecting immediate recognition and then moving on or digging right down into the deep stuff, but instead, actually slowing down and thinking about what things mean. That’s one of the most enjoyable things to me about the process of writing this book has been learning to slow down and sit with an image,, a painting, a photograph, a person, a place, and write about it in a way that brings it to life to someone who’s never seen it or been there or shows something new about it to someone to whom it’s quite familiar. I was lucky to have benefited from The Robert and Ina Caro Award from Biographers International Organization to support research for this project. Bob Caro is the hero, really, of this kind of writing. He’s the genius behind this kind of biographical writing.

He talks about when he was writing his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, of going to live in the Hill Country of Texas so that he could understand the landscape and the people and the frames of meaning that Johnson grew up under. I could not go and live in Santa Clara Pueblo for a few years with my family in order to write this book, but I could travel there. I stood in the landscape, right?

I thought about what it means and my whole frames of meaning changed as a result. Writing this book changed me because I thought, when I was sitting in Dublin digging up names of artists I thought were interesting, that nobody had heard of them. Pablita Velarde was one of them and then I got to New Mexico and she was everywhere.

People refer to her by her first name, like, “oh, Pablita,” and her paintings are in the state house and she’s on license plates, she’s everywhere. It’s like, well, how ignorant were we to presume that Pablita Velarde was an unknown? I think that writing a trade book also requires you to think about other experiences and lives removed from your own and what amazing knowledge readers will also be bringing to the subject.

Scott Ferguson

That’s lovely. I want to ask questions about lessons. Lessons for today. Lessons for tomorrow. I will say that we at Money on the Left have been long advocates for a federal job guarantee that would be financed by the federal government and provide living quality work for everyone and anyone who wants it and can contribute to their community and not be threatened by unemployment.

It would include all kinds of benefits along the way. We are certainly advocates for the Green New Deal, which is not on everyone’s lips right now in the middle of an authoritarian takeover of our federal government, but we remain advocates for it. We hold out the dream and the possibility for a publicly led employment society that is financing interesting, wonderful, creative and inspiring labor that would include aesthetic labor. Usually, at least in the context of the history of the United States, the New Deal is, for better and for worse, the model. It’s the template that you have to reckon with.

It’s the precedent that you have to look to and decide what’s worth saving and what’s worth recuperating. I find your book to be really inspiring for that problem, for that project, because it shakes up our frames of reference, to use the term that you’ve been using. It makes the challenge of going back to the New Deal feel fresh again, rather than kind of stale or, just dismissing it as if it was all just white supremacy and paternalism. Or the opposite: that it was socialism in America and we had finally done it. I don’t know who actually believes that. I’m wondering, what are some of the lessons that you’ve taken away or that were maybe tacit or implicit for what this means for a future of politics, of state financing, of the arts?

I will say that, one of the threads that I picked up on, that we talk a lot about when we talk about the politics of the job guarantee, is the way that publicly financed employment, especially guaranteed employment, which we know these projects were not guaranteed at all, but especially guaranteed employment can potentially free up laborers, including artists, to not only experiment, but to extract themselves from abusive situations, whether that’s an abusive partner or it’s a controlling, white patronage class.

That’s one thing, for example, that comes to mind that feels like an important lesson from the stories that you’re telling. What else do we take forward from this past?

Lauren Arrington

I think one of the things that we have to understand, which is very difficult for folks who are steeped in the American psyche, is that these things take time. It takes time to build sustainable infrastructures. That was one of the problems with the New Deal arts projects, that there was this massive expansion and then a contraction and the resentment that came with that, and then a little bit of expansion and then the whole thing was scrubbed, basically, because of a need to invest in the war economy and to pivot the arts to the war economy.

I think one of the issues that we have in the US is the four-year — hopefully, what is still a four-year presidential term — and this false binary of the political landscape being either Republican or Democrat.

The four-year turnover means that when do you have time to actually build a program.  FDR had too many terms, one would argue, and exercised too much presidential power. This is really the problem and not a solution. It’s not really a lesson, Scott. It’s a question of, how do you build a sustainable infrastructure if you need to have a turnover in leadership?

The answer is that you require agencies that are not politicized in order to make these programs happen. That was also one of the issues with the New Deal is that all these agencies were tied so closely to FDR’s presidency that they couldn’t exist without him and Hopkins at the helm.

That leads me to think about the NEH, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and lessons that we can take there about the need to protect these independent agencies from the executive office and the need to preserve them, constitutionally or otherwise, in order to have a solid platform for the long term projects.

I was reading back and as I was finishing the book, the cuts started coming. I was trying to finish it at the end of 2024, and it was a slog. Then the election happened, and the executive orders started coming down, and it just really mobilized me to finish this book quickly because it felt like it had a new object.

There was a new context that I was responding to, and it just so happened to line up, unfortunately. But anyway, what I wanted to say is that the NEH was encouraged by scientists who were depressed and frightened by the possibility of nuclear apocalypse and the belief that in a nuclear age, with the rapidity of scientific evolution and the threat that that brought to our existence. The humanities were crucial to preserving our morality, our ethics, our sense of why it matters, what our value is. I am skeptical about whether 50 years later from the congressional testimony of nuclear scientists advocating for the National Endowment of the Humanities, if scientists and humanists can still find commonality because we have become so siloed and so intent on our own individual projects and our disciplines, but also, as individuals we’ve become so individualistic. Can we see value outside of ourselves that was there at the New Deal?

That was there in the 50s. I have a measure of hope that we can get there again, but it requires us to maybe allow ourselves to experience these apocalyptic moments like we had with the pandemic. A time when suddenly things are stripped back and you realize what matters in your day to day, right?

The people around you, your health, your well-being, your mind, you know? With the constant treadmill of the consumer cycle, the workday, the targets, when do we have time to think about these things? I think there are a few lessons there. One is to take back from 2020 or 2021 and how, a few years ago, our existence was threatened then and the imagination that was required to bring us out of it and how we can recover that and allow that to stay with us. That as soon as we’re comfortable, we don’t go back to business as usual. Maybe we require these outside threats to our humanity in order to prioritize our cultures.

Scott Ferguson

That’s a beautiful way to end our conversation. Thank you so much for coming on Money on the Left and exploring your recent work with us.

Lauren Arrington

I really appreciate it, Scott. Thanks for having me on today.

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