Category: Superstructure

Can novels and, by extension, other works of art help us to think about money and trust in new ways? Could embracing alternative perspectives on trust and money help us to avoid climate catastrophe? Rob Hawkes shares a new version of a talk previously presented at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art as part of the One Fifteen at MIMA series of public talks. Highlighting the financial barriers often assumed to stand in the way of local, national, and global efforts to advance ecological and social justice, Rob situates the trust inherent in the act of money creation as much closer than we usually think to the trust fostered and demanded by experimental fiction. If “storytelling” is another word for “accounting,” then maybe we can learn to tell the story of money in new ways, and perhaps this can help us to save the planet.

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

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Transcript

What follows is a version of a talk that I gave last October at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, or MIMA, which – as its name suggests – is in the town of Middlesbrough in the North East of England. ‘The One Fifteen at MIMA’ is a monthly series of informal, public talks given by researchers from Teesside University, where I work, and my contribution to the series was entitled: ‘How can novels help us think about money…and maybe even save the planet?’ Now, this seemed like a good choice of topic when I first suggested it, but I realised soon afterwards that I’d set myself an absurdly difficult task: that of convincing my audience that story books can help to solve the climate crisis… which is ridiculous, of course, given that, as everybody knows, studying literature is a pointless waste of time! According, at least, to Emma Duncan, whose column in the Times newspaper last June ran under the headline: ‘We should cheer decline of humanities degrees’. In Duncan’s words: ‘As somebody whose taste for 19^th-century novels borders on the obsessive, I sympathise with the belief that we should encourage the study of our great books. But the decline of English as a subject for study at university seems to me a healthy development’.[1] Personally, I feel very similarly about bridges – I absolutely love using them to get to the other side of rivers, but I’m far from convinced that we should encourage any more young people to fritter away their time studying structural engineering… Everything’s online nowadays, isn’t it? – if I want to speak to someone on the other side of a river, I can just zoom them. Nevertheless, Emma Duncan’s article and others like it were (and remain) part of the context in which I originally offered this talk, in which I am recording this version now, and against which I want to argue that studying novels in universities does matter and, indeed, that doing so can help us to tackle some of today’s most urgent challenges.

Speaking at a press conference in July last year, a month that was later confirmed to have been the hottest ever recorded, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres underlined the immediately pressing need to take action on climate change. Among other calls for accelerated action, Guterres asserted that:

Promises made on international climate finance must be promises kept. Developed countries must honour their commitments to provide $100 billion a year to developing countries for climate support […]. No more delays; no more excuses.[2]

Nevertheless, only the previous month, in its Climate Finance Shadow Report, Oxfam had underlined that: ‘Even by their own generous accounting standards, developed countries are three years overdue on the commitment to mobilize US$100bn per year’.[3] This figure – 100bn US dollars per year – was agreed upon in the Copenhagen Accords in 2009 as the target to be reached by 2020 for the provision of climate-related financial support by high-income countries to low- and middle-income countries. Despite the ever-clearer evidence of the consequences of climate inaction, however, last September UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak caused consternation by pushing back previously announced Net-Zero targets for the phasing out of petrol and diesel vehicles and also of gas boilers for domestic heating. In a speech outlining his government’s new approach, Sunak observed of the process of installing an electric heat pump that: ‘For a family living in a terraced house in Darlington, the upfront cost could be around £10,000.[4] For anyone unfamiliar with the North East of England, the town of Darlington is around 16 miles from Middlesbrough, where I originally gave this talk, and I have no doubt that its residents heartily appreciated Mr Sunak’s concern for their welfare, as he continued: ‘Even the most committed advocates of Net Zero must recognise that if our solution is to force people to pay that kind of money support will collapse, and we’ll simply never get there’.[5] If our solution is to force families to pay £10,000 per household – that’s a pretty big if. Maybe the binary choice offered here between making families foot the bill and doing nothing is a false one. Even more recently, on 8 February 2024, a month that at that point was already breaking records for global temperatures, the UK Labour Party dramatically backtracked on its commitment to spend £28bn per year on green projects if elected to government because ‘fiscal rules come first’. What I really want to underline here is that, whether we’re focusing on the global question of climate finance, on the question of domestic spending on green infrastructure, or the more local question of how a family in Darlington should heat their home, the biggest barrier to attempts to avoid climate catastrophe is almost always imagined to be a lack of money.

Of course, as we all know, and as Rishi Sunak’s predecessor Theresa May reminded us back in 2017: ‘there isn’t a magic money tree that we can shake that suddenly provides for everything that people want’.[7] May’s now infamous remark followed an all-too-familiar rhetorical pattern: We would all love to invest more in the NHS, or to pay public sector workers fairly, or to prevent school buildings from collapsing on our children’s heads, or to address the appalling levels of inequality in our society, or to give ourselves a fair to middling chance of avoiding total ecosystem collapse on planet earth… but we simply don’t have enough money. However, in my current research, I draw on a very different set of perspectives on money and its potential to serve the public purpose. Broadly, these can be summarised as neochartalist, or Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), and constitutional approaches to money. These approaches challenge the premises underpinning politicians’ claims that there is ‘no money’ for the provision of vital public services. As the sociologist Mary Mellor argues in her 2019 book Money: Myths, Truths, and Alternatives, in fact: ‘there are two sources of new money that could be described as magic money trees: state spending and bank lending’.[8] Indeed, as research published in 2022 by University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose emphasises, in the UK: ‘Government “spending” should […] be understood as a form of money creation’.[9] Now, I do appreciate that this probably sounds like a really wacky theory – the money in the Government’s coffers has to come from somewhere, right? However, it is demonstrably the case that, in the UK, whenever Parliament approves public spending, the money is made available (or, in other words, created) as if by magic, with no taxation or ‘borrowing’ involved. The UCL paper is evidenced, for example, by responses to freedom of information requests from the relevant government departments which show that this is indeed how it works. There is no reason for this to be at all controversial.

But what on earth, I hear you ask, does this have to do with novels? Well, my current research project rereads histories of literary innovation from the 1890s to the 1980s as openings towards new ways of understanding literature and money as founded upon trust, interdependence, and collectivity, emphasising money’s irreducible publicness and challenging, from a neochartalist perspective, the orthodox view of money as a medium of private exchange. The foundational role that trust plays in relation to money has long been recognised in the social sciences and especially by sociologists. Mellor points out that: ‘The “moneyness” of money reflects the trust people have in it, not the form and structure of the money itself. […] At whatever level it exists, money is pure trust’.[10] And, indeed, we can trace this idea back to one of the founders of sociology, Georg Simmel, who, in the highly influential The Philosophy of Money, first published in 1900, observes that:

Without the general trust that people have in each other, society itself would disintegrate, for very few relationships are based entirely upon what is known with certainty about another person […]. In the same way, money transactions would collapse without trust.[11]

Simmel, therefore, links the trust that holds society as a whole together to the trust underpinning money. Now, I do have some issues with Simmel’s perspectives on trust and money, which I would say are encapsulated by his use of the word: ‘transactions’. This is to say that the underlying assumption here is that money and, by extension, trust are essentially transactional phenomena. In my wider research on trust, I’ve looked at many definitions of the concept that include a calculative or strategic dimension: we decide or we agree to trust others (and we accept some of the disadvantages of being or becoming dependent upon others) in exchange for the benefits we gain from social cooperation – this is often how the story goes. However, this involves imagining that there is a stage prior to trusting and prior to interdependence, and that a collective life – Simmel’s ‘society itself’ – is something we negotiate and transact our way, somewhat reluctantly, towards. One of the things I claim in my work is that neochartalism, by situating money’s origins in the public rather than in the private domain, opens up new ways of seeing money as essentially collective and cooperative in the first place, which also means that trust has to play a foundational role in money creation rather than the after-the-event role of merely facilitating ‘money transactions’. I’m going to leave this to one side for now, though, because I think it is high time that I talked about some actual novels.

In the interests of brevity, I’m going to give you a whistle-stop tour of a few of the novels that particularly interest me in order to explain how and why I think they can help us to understand trust and money in new ways. To be clear, my focus here is not going to be on novels that directly address the issue of climate change – in other words, I’m not specifically thinking about climate fiction or ‘cli-fi – and neither will I be discussing recent books by authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Cory Doctorow that explore MMT-informed perspectives within their narratives. Indeed, Doctorow’s latest novel The Lost Cause (2023) imagines a future in which Money on the Left’s ‘uni’ proposal for democratising university finance has been enacted, with significant and positive consequences. While these books are not my focus for today, though, I can point interested listeners towards Money on the Left’s interviews with both writers, which you can find on our website or wherever you get your podcasts, and to Maxx Seijo’s article ‘Money’s Place: Science Fiction, Realism & Modern Monetary Theory in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future’, which was published in our open-access journal Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice in September 2023. My current research project, however, looks at novels written a little longer ago, between the late nineteenth and the mid-late twentieth centuries, and this brings me to Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, first published in 1915, which is really the book that got me thinking about the issues of money and trust in be first place.

The Good Soldier’s narrator, John Dowell, is one of the most notoriously unreliable and, moreover, uncertain storytellers in twentieth century fiction. At the opening of the novel, one of his immediate difficulties is that – having discovered that the man he believed to be his closest friend, Edward Ashburnham, has conducted a nine-year love affair with his wife, Florence – he cannot decide whether the life he thought he had been living for close to a decade was in any sense ‘real’ or ‘true’. Moreover, Dowell is uncertain as to how best to describe the friend he now knows to have betrayed him (‘It is very difficult to give an all-round impression of any man’, he says at one stage), whilst clinging to the memory of the upstanding English gentleman he continues, inexplicably, to love and admire.[12] Edward Ashburnham, he declares early on in his narrative:

was the cleanest looking sort of chap;—an excellent magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in Hampshire, England. […] You would have said that he was just exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife with. And I trusted mine—and it was madness.^[13]

Dowell’s problem, as he frames it here, is one of trust. He trusted Edward and Florence, and yet, as he now understands it, this ‘was madness’. Nevertheless, as I’ve already mentioned, Dowell remains committed to his impression of Ashburnham as a good soldier, magistrate, landlord, and, above all, gentleman. Furthermore, Dowell’s questionable trustworthiness as a narrator, which stems from his uncertainty over both the details and the meaning of the tale he tries to tell, is inextricably bound up with his own difficulties as a truster. Ford, significantly, was a major literary modernist, which is to say that he was one of many figures from across the arts – including painters, composers, sculptors, film makers, architects, and so on, alongside writers – who were determined, in Ezra Pound’s words, to ‘make it new’ during the early decades of the twentieth century. Part of the argument of the book I’m currently writing – which is entitled Literature, Money, and Trust, 1890-1990: Monetary Modernisms – is that experimental works of art demand or require a form of openness to the new, to the unusual, to the strange, and to the unconventional on the part of readers, listeners, viewers, and audiences, or to put it another way, that they demand a kind of trust. Ford’s experiments with narrative form in The Good Soldier, then, mean that the reader is just as uncertain as Dowell about the events he narrates. Dowell’s sense of Florence’s untrustworthiness also leads him at one stage to observe: ‘that Florence was a personality of paper—that she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a banknote represents a certain quantity of gold’.[14] Thus, Dowell connects the trust we place in other people (and, indeed, in the representations of people we find in novels) to the trust we place in money. Of course, Ford was writing this at around the time of Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard following the outbreak of the First World War – so, the extent to which a banknote did represent ‘a certain quantity of gold’ was in doubt, perhaps for the first time in a century. There is far too much to say about gold money and the gold standard to do this topic justice here, especially given the connections many literary critics have made between metallic money, paper money, and the novel. However, I do want to underline the way that The Good Soldier is both preoccupied with trust at a formal and structural level – in terms of its experimental narrative technique, for example – and at a thematic level, as well as being simultaneously preoccupied with money.

My next example is a very different kind of text: Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, which was first published in 1955. Highsmith was a pioneering crime novelist who, although not formally experimental in quite the same way as Ford, is increasingly recognised as a late modernist innovator. One of her best-known books, especially since the 1999 film adaptation starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow, The Talented Mr Ripley introduces the eponymous anti-hero Tom Ripley, who went on to feature in a series of thrillers from the 1950s to the early 1990s. In the early stages of the novel, Ripley is approached by a wealthy businessman named Herbert Greenleaf, who pays him to travel to Europe to try to persuade his hedonistic son Dickie to return home. Ripley agrees and soon finds himself in Italy explaining his many talents to Dickie Greenleaf himself:

‘Oh, I can do a number of things – valeting, baby-sitting, accounting – I’ve got an unfortunate talent for figures. No matter how drunk I get, I can always tell when a waiter’s cheating me on a bill. I can forge a signature, fly a helicopter, handle dice, impersonate practically anybody, cook – and do a one-man show in a nightclub in case the regular entertainer’s sick. Shall I go on?’[15]

Mr Ripley’s talents, significantly, include accounting, forgery, impersonation, and performance, and he makes use of all of the above when he proceeds to murder Dickie and then to steal his identity. If you have seen the 1999 film, which Anthony Minghella both adapted and directed, you might remember the scene in which this murder takes place and which depicts Tom as lashing out – during a boat trip, with one of the boat’s oars, in response to a barrage of insults from Dickie – and killing him almost by accident. Highsmith’s book, however, presents the reader with an altogether more chilling version of events. Indeed, before Dickie’s murder, the following series of thoughts passes through Tom’s mind:

Tom stared at Dickie’s closed eyelids. A crazy emotion of hate, of affection, of impatience and frustration was swelling in him, hampering his breathing. He wanted to kill Dickie. It was not the first time he had thought of it. […] If he killed him on this trip, Tom thought, he could simply say that some accident had happened. He could – He had just thought of something brilliant: he could become Dickie Greenleaf himself. He could do everything that Dickie did. He could […] set up an apartment in Rome or Paris, receive Dickie’s cheque every month and forge Dickie’s signature on it. He could step right into Dickie’s shoes.[16]

Here, and throughout the novel, Highsmith uses a form of what, in literary studies, we call free indirect style – without going too much into the technicalities, this is a means by which a third person narrator gives the reader a sense of listening in on a character’s thoughts without directly adopting that character’s first-person perspective. While The Good Soldier is told in the first person, by John Dowell himself, The Talented Mr Ripley is narrated in the third person throughout – it is ‘Tom stared at Dickie’s closed eyelids’ and ‘He wanted to kill Dickie’, not ‘I stared at Dickie’ or ‘I wanted to kill him’ – and yet, throughout the story, the reader sees everything from Tom Ripley’s perspective. Importantly, by inhabiting his point of view, the reader becomes complicit in his crimes – most readers, I think, want Tom to get away with his murders and to escape when it looks like he will be caught – and as well as raising ethical questions, this returns us to the question of trust. Highsmith’s novel is compelling and disturbing in equal measure, especially when we read the precise, cold, and detached descriptions of the way Tom, in the act of killing Dickie, ‘picked up the oar, as casually as if he were playing with it between his knees’, and then ‘came down with it on the top of Dickie’s head’, or of how ‘The edge of the oar cut a dull gash that filled with a line of blood as Tom watched.’[17] This is a long way from the crime of passion committed by Matt Damon’s Tom Ripley in the film version. And yet, if all we read in this novel is described from the perspective of a conman and a serial murderer, can we really trust the narrative? And if we find ourselves empathising with a calculating killer, can we trust ourselves?

At this juncture, it is important to acknowledge what may appear to be a tension in my claim that literary works – and especially experimental works – both demand and foster trust in the form of an openness to newness, strangeness, and otherness, given that I have so far chosen to focus on novels that foreground acts of deception, infidelity, betrayal, and even murder. I could say much more here about the difficulties scholars have faced when attempting to define trust and about my wider argument about the inevitable conceptual blurriness surrounding this fascinating term. However, this would be a different and a much longer talk. What I can say is that trusting is always an ethically-charged gamble – the risk of betrayal inheres in the act of trusting and there would be no need to trust either a literary text or another person if we could predict the outcome of doing so in advance. If we could guarantee that our openness to alterity and to the future would always have positive consequences, then it would not constitute a genuine act of trust. Moreover, there absolutely can be – indeed there are – tensions between the trust that literary form demands of the reader (such as the inhabiting of the protagonist’s perspective that Highsmith’s free indirect style calls for) and the imaginative territory that the text explores, which can of course be exclusionary, discriminatory, politically dubious, and/or morally indefensible. Similarly, I would argue that, although money creation is always an act of trust, this does not prevent it from being spent in exclusionary, discriminatory, politically dubious, and/or morally indefensible ways.

With this in mind, the final work of literature I want to discuss is Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, a postmodern novel set partly in Venice during the Napoleonic Wars. This text has two first-person narrators, Henri and Villanelle, each of whom repeatedly asks the reader to trust them, while simultaneously affirming that they are telling stories. The novel is, in this respect, an example of ‘historiographic metafiction’, a term coined by the critic Linda Hutcheon in 1987, the year in which The Passion was first published. In essence, this label refers to works that are highly self-reflexive, both about their own status as works of fiction and about the processes and procedures by which history is recorded and written down. In The Passion, historical figures, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, and settings, such as the city of Venice, appear alongside apparently magical characters and events. The novel’s second section, which is narrated by Villanelle, takes place in Venice, the ‘city of mazes’, where: ‘You may set off from the same place to the same place every day and never go by the same route’.[18] Moreover, as Villanelle explains at the beginning of her narrative: ‘Rumour has it that the inhabitants of this city walk on water. That, more bizarre still, their feet are webbed’.[19] This, then, is a magical city, inhabited by magical people, and yet the reader can never be certain as to whether the fantastical aspects of the story should be understood to have taken place or not because of the way the narrators continually raise the question of trust. Here is Villanelle describing a moment when it seems that she herself may have walked on water:

The surface of the canal had the look of polished jet. I took off my boots slowly, pulling the laces loose and easing them free. […]

Could I walk on that water?

Could I?

I faltered at the slippery steps leading into the dark. It was November, after all. I might die if I fell in. […]

I stepped out and in the morning they say a beggar was running round the Rialto talking about a young man who’d walked across the canal like it was solid.

I’m telling you stories. Trust me.[20]

The phrasing here is especially fascinating, I think, since Villanelle is describing her own actions and yet chooses to defer to what ‘they say’ a beggar later claimed to have witnessed, before repeating the line, which has already appeared several times in the novel’s apparently unrelated first section, narrated by Henri: ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me.’ Indeed, it is never clear whether this means ‘trust me in spite of the fact that I’m telling you stories’ or ‘trust me because I’m telling you stories’. In her afterword to the novel, Winterson notes that: ‘I wrote The Passion in 1986, boom-time of the Thatcher years, clock-race of yuppies and city boys, rich-quick, never count the cost’.[21] Thus, there is a connection between the financial climate of 1980s London and the novel’s magical, maze-like city of Venice, where nothing can be known for certain and where the casino plays a prominent role. Indeed, I would argue that Winterson’s self-conscious, postmodern attitude to truth, to history, and to storytelling, along with the issues we have already seen emerging in Ford’s and Highsmith’s novels, can help us to reflect more broadly on the relationships between literature, money, and trust.

Regular Money on the Left listeners may recall that, last year, Scott Ferguson and I recorded a 3-part podcast series on the topic of ‘Postmodern Money Theory!’ The starting point for our discussion was the way that MMT is itself sometimes described as ‘postmodern’, the assumption being that this is obviously an insult and can function as a way of dismissing the whole idea. ‘Modern Monetary Theory’ people will say on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, ‘more like postmodern money theory’, equating postmodernism with an extreme relativism whereby nothing really means anything and you can make up any truth you like. The idea that the British government creates money when it spends – which, as I underlined earlier, really shouldn’t be a controversial notion – is imagined to be one that renders money itself a meaningless concept. By contrast, here at Money on the Left we embrace a heterodox understanding of public endogenous money that challenges the conventional view of money as a scarce commodity or a neutral ‘veil’ over the forms of private exchange that are sometimes assumed – by thinkers such as Simmel, for example – to be the basis of society itself. Indeed, we would argue that understanding money as a public utility, as a contested and contestable medium, as a site of political struggle, as (at least potentially) subject to democratic control, and, in my terms, as an expression of trust, makes money far more meaningful than meaningless.   

As Christine Desan puts it in her landmark 2014 study Making Money, if we want to understand money’s history and to think about where money comes from: ‘we could look for a creation story that explains how money emerges without assuming the exchange it is supposed to enable. […] We need a story that acknowledges, even draws upon, money’s constant construction’.[22] This is an important point, because we are not suggesting for a moment that money doesn’t facilitate and hasn’t facilitated private exchange or what we might now call marketisation. However, the mainstream view that markets come first, that markets are somehow part of the natural order of things, and that they lead, spontaneously to the emergence of money is one that Desan’s work challenges. As Desan goes on to affirm, thinking differently about its origins and about the very idea of money creation, ‘suggests that “making money” is a constitutional project’.[23] Jakob Feinig puts it like this in his 2022 book Moral Economies of Money:

Since money is a malleable institution, it can mobilise existing resources and build new productive capacities. In contexts marked by silencing [Feinig’s term for the processes by which money users are denied a role in shaping money creation], money can appear to dominate all actors […] instead of appearing as a flexible instrument that constellations of users and issuers can deploy to serve democratically defined purposes.[24]

In other words, understanding money as something that is constantly being constructed and reconstructed, created and recreated, and as ‘malleable’, ‘flexible’, and available to meet public and ‘democratically defined’ needs, opens up new possibilities for reclaiming money for emancipatory and, indeed, ecologically just politics. Once again, the contention underpinning my current research is that the trust we place in literature is best understood not as a form of calculative, transactional exchange – I’m willing to trust but only if I get something specific in return – but as the kind of openness to newness, strangeness, and otherness that’s called for by the novels I’ve been talking about today. Indeed, I argue that thinking about trusting literature in this way can help us to think about the trust inherent in money as much less transactional and much more participatory than we’ve been taught to think of it.

I want to finish with a reminder of what’s at stake here, which means returning to the outlandish claim I made at the start: that thinking about novels might help us to save the planet. As the MMT economists Yeva Nersisyan and Randall Wray put it in their 2021 article ‘Can We Afford the Green New Deal’: ‘Perhaps the biggest obstacle to the implementation of the GND is the belief that the government has to raise revenue to pay for it’.[25] As I have been affirming throughout this talk, the MMT view is that government spending is money creation and, thus, that there is no need to ‘raise revenue’ (as we conventionally imagine this process) to pay for a Green New Deal. Moreover, as Scott Ferguson and Ben Wilson put it: ‘The money question is up for grabs for the first time in nearly a century. Now, the relevant question is no longer, Who will find the money? It is, instead, Who will create it?’ [26] Indeed, this prompts the further question: how can money creation be redesigned in ways that advance rather than continuing to hinder social and ecological justice? In the words of Maren Poitras, director of the documentary film Finding the Money, which premiered in the USA last year: ‘This money piece, I think, is really the missing piece in the entire environmental movement’.[27] It is worth remembering that storytelling is another word for accounting and that, if we want to, we can tell the story of money in a new way: we can make it new, in other words. In my research, I suggest that the trust involved in using and creating money is much closer than we think to the trust involved in reading novels. Today, I hope I have managed to persuade you that thinking differently about literature, money, and trust might just open up new possibilities for avoiding climate catastrophe, and surely that is something worth putting our trust in.

---

[1] Emma Duncan, ‘We should cheer decline of humanities degrees’, The Times, 16 June 2023.

[2] UN Secretary-General António Guterres, 27 July 2023, accessed 24 October 2023: https://press.un.org/en/2023/sgsm21893.doc.htm

[3] Oxfam, Climate Finance Shadow Report, June 2023.

[4] Rishi Sunak, ‘PM speech on Net Zero: 20 September 2023’, accessed 24 October 2023: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-on-net-zero-20-september-2023

[5] Sunak, ‘PM speech on Net Zero’.

[6] Kiran Stacey and Fiona Harvey, ‘Labour cuts £28bn green investment pledge by half’, Guardian, 8 February 2024, accessed 23 February 2023: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/08/labour-cuts-28bn-green-investment-pledge-by-half

[7] UK Prime Minister Theresa May, 2 June 2017.

[8] Mary Mellor, Money: Myths, Truths, and Alternatives (Polity Press, 2019), 117.

[9] Andrew Berkeley et al., ‘The self-financing state’, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (2022), 2.

[10] Mellor, Money, 6-8. Emphasis added.

[11] Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money [1900] (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 191. Emphasis added.

[12] Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard (New York: Norton, 2012), 105.

[13] Ford, The Good Soldier, 14.

[14] Ford, The Good Soldier, 86.

[15] Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley (London: Vintage, 1999), 51.

[16] Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley, 87-8.

[17] Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley, 90-1.

[18] Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (London: Vintage, 2001), 49.

[19] Winterson, The Passion, 49.

[20] Winterson, The Passion, 69.

[21] Winterson, The Passion, 161.

[22] Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 38.

[23] Desan, Making Money, 69.

[24] Jakob Feinig, Moral Economies of Money: Politics and the Monetary Constitution of Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), 12.

[25] Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray, ‘Can We Afford the Green New Deal?’, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 44.1 (2021), 71.

[26] Scott Ferguson and Benjamin Wilson, ‘Stop Trying to Find the Money – Create It’, Academe 108.4 (Fall 2022).

[27] Maren Poitras, director of Finding the Money (2023), qtd. Pam Grady, ‘“Finding the Money” documentary explores another angle to national debt’, San Francisco Chronicle, 12 October 2023.

Sandeep Vaheesan (@sandeepvaheesan) joins Scott Ferguson on the Superstructure podcast to discuss the still-undecided political significance of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Their conversation focuses on Vaheesan’s article, “The IRA is Still Being Formed: An Episode in America’s Past Contains Important Lessons for How We Move Forward in Greening the Economy,” published recently in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. 

While present left debate about the IRA tends to split over whether the legislation ultimately breaks with or confirms the tenets of neoliberal governance, Vaheesan turns our attention to the ongoing contestation over the bill’s implementation across heterogeneous domains. Vaheesan puts the current struggle into perspective by reflecting on the historical fight surrounding the construction and operation of the Boulder (a.k.a. “Hoover”) Dam. 

In the case of the federal provisioning of the Boulder Dam in the 1920’s, a strong public utility—the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power —was well positioned to control water and power as public goods, despite efforts by the conservative Hoover administration to wholly privatize the process. What is more, the success of this project laid the groundwork for later rural electrification programs under FDR’s New Deal. 

Today, Vaheesan sees similar potential for public control over the IRA’s implementation because the legislation crucially extends investment and production tax credits, which were formerly available only to for-profit entities, to community-controlled public and cooperative electric utilities. For this reason, the meaning and fate of the IRA remains up-for-grabs. Should community-controlled public and cooperative electric utilities seize hold of the IRA’s democratic potentials, Vaheesan suggests, the process stands to build significant capacities for a more expansive Green New Deal. 

Ferguson and Vaheesan close their conversation by considering the social construction of and  disputes about public money in both contemporary and historical contexts. 

Vaheesan is legal director of the Open Markets Institute and author of a forthcoming book titled, Democracy in Power (University of Chicago Press) on the history and future of cooperative and public power in the United States.  

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

Photo by Gabriele Holtermann, AMNY

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

Scott Ferguson is joined on the Superstructure podcast by Ruth E. Kastner, philosopher of physics and research associate at the University of Maryland. In their conversation, Ferguson and Kastner explore metaphysical resonances between Modern Monetary Theory’s approach to money and Kastner’s “Transactional Interpretation” of quantum physics.

Setting the stage for their dialog, Ferguson and Kastner critique orthodox commitments in both economics and physics to a pre-relational individuality: what medieval theologian John Duns Scotus famously called thisness or, “haecceity.” When being is contracted to mere haecceity, they argue, causality is reduced to local and unidirectional events in a manner that overlooks global conditions of possibility. In contrast, Ferguson and Kastner affirm an irreducibly relational ontology for monetary and quantum theory alike. This relational ontology comprises broader patterns of potential, which orthodox methods have rendered imperceptible. It also takes seriously non-local notions of causality, especially that unfamiliar all-at-onceness that Albert Einstein once derided as “spooky action at a distance.” 

Along the way, Ferguson and Kastner consider a host of interdisciplinary analogies–for example, between monetary receivability in heterodox economics and so-called “absorber waves” in the Interaction Interpretation of quantum mechanics. At the same time, however, they remain careful not to collapse distinctions between political economy and quantum theory. Far from impractical navel gazing, such speculations harbor very real worldly consequences for interdisciplinary theory and practice.  

  
For more information, check out Kastner’s website as well as her recent paper on “Quantum Haecceity” mentioned during the podcast. 

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

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

In the third installment of Superstructure’s “Postmodern Money Theory!” series, Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson wrap up their discussion of B.S. Johnson’s novella, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, which self-consciously weaves money and accounting into the very fabric of literary form. Rob and Scott tease out the text’s lingering potentials and blindspots in order to problematize dominant forms of political economic and aesthetic critique. (Click the following links for Part 1 and Part 2.)

To start, our co-hosts zero in on the book’s estrangement of taxation. Characterizing taxation as a zero-sum game that breeds extreme pettiness, resentment, and violence, the book critically distances itself from orthodox visions of money, while providing only faint hints of possible alternatives. Next, Rob and Scott read Christie Malry’s generative tensions alongside two misleading tendencies in critical theory, both of which are predicated on the false barter story of money’s origins. 

The first tendency links the end of gold standards to the rise of modernism and postmodernism, respectively. Advanced by the likes of Jean-Joseph Goux, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson, this expressly lapsarian tendency frets an absolute volatilization of forms and values across political economy and aesthetics, rather than affirming a contestable and imaginative politics of public inscription unencumbered by legally sanctioned austerities and inequalities. 

The second tendency, meanwhile, casts the orthodox problem of dyadic exchange in terms of debt and credit. From Friedrich Nietzsche to David Graeber, this discourse reduces debt to narrow oppositions between domination and freedom, while foreclosing credit’s collective and always disputable caretaking capacities. Although both impulses inform Christy Malry’s construction, Rob and Scott underscore the ways that Johnson’s constant formal experimentation subtly reframes and exceeds these tendencies’ erroneous totalizing judgments.  

Finally, Rob and Scott uncover money’s repressed public foundations and alternatives in Christy Malry’s allegorical conclusion. Working to redeem Johnson’s unrealized longings for socialism, the co-hosts consider the text’s enigmatic appeals to credit overdrafts and debt write-offs in relation to its tragicomic play on Christ’s sacrificial death. 

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

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting