Category: DPF

By Anna Minsky

The following speech was read on March 28^th at a progressive New York City synagogue, a guest sermon by one of the congregants. In the Jewish tradition, each week we read one part (a “parsha”) of the Torah (the first five books of the bible) aloud in Hebrew. Then someone, often a Rabbi, offers “words of Torah” (dvar Torah or drash). At this synagogue at least, the idea is to use the text as a jumping off point. There is no presumption that the text is true or just, only that it is worth discussing.  The terms haShem (literally, the name) and The One are used here in lieu of “G-d” to convey that such a thing is too big to be known or personified.

Shabat shalom.

Obligation. Honor. Reckoning. Redemption. These are all words that have both a moral meaning and a money meaning.

Today’s Torah reading comes from Parshat Tzav.  Tzav means oblige. It has the same root as mitzvah. s/ Tzav is an absolutely *riveting* passage that goes back over how to perform five different ritual offerings that were already described in last week’s parsha, but this time with more attention to the role of the priest. But seriously, Parshat Tzav must be important because it is a list of instructions and Torah means instruction. The ritual for each offering begins with, zot torat ha: now this is the torah of… And, more-or-less, the description of each offering is punctuated with, kadosh kedushim hu: it is a holiest holy portion, referring to the part of the offering that goes to the priest.

So, this is the Torah of Obligation. What do we owe to haShem and what do we owe to each other? In the text, we owe a shlamim offering. It could be from the herd or the flock or a goat. We owe a minhah offering. It must be grain, with salt, oil, and frankincense, but no leavening. And, significantly, we are told the exact amount to bring each morning and evening, and we are instructed that the priests get to eat a part of it. These two offerings and the olah offering are considered obligatory.  In contrast, the last two offerings, the hattat and asham, are accrued based on your behavior.  More about those later.

In late temple times the instructions in the Torah about obligations to The One likely shaped the local economy more than obligations to the state. Roman authorities were content with minimal tribute, and their local governors were mostly unstable. Meanwhile, the Torah had already been entrenched for centuries. There was even a sacred currency that could be used for offerings and tithes. People likely took the Torah instructions seriously, but paid a priest to make offerings, rather than literally bringing a tenth of an efa of grain in the morning and another tenth of an efa in the evening. They saw their relationship with haShem as transactional.

Kadosh kedushim hu. It is a holiest holy portion.

Now this is the Torah of Honor.  So, what do you think? Is it impure to owe money? Is it a sin not to repay a debt?

It is no secret that cartels and bullies use debt as a pretext for violence and cruelty. For example, in 2014 credit agencies downgraded Puerto Rico’s bonds, forcing them to pay off their debts by reducing services and pensions, that is by reducing care for the people who live there.  There is no honor in paying off a debt if it is a cause for neglect. But also families and friends use debt as a pretext for companionship. I am in the debt of this community for creating a meal train when I was sick, and that’s a good thing because it makes me want to sign up for a meal train for someone else. The difference between cruelty and connection has to do with who keeps the ledger. If we think of money as a thing that can be hoarded that might prompt us to be cruel. But if we think of money only as an abstraction, that might prompt us to use it to coordinate care.

Kadosh kedushim hu. It is a holiest holy portion.

Now, this is the Torah of Reckoning. Is it possible that one origin of money was in temple ledgers?  For example, the temple might record that Linda hadn’t brought a shlamim offering. Perhaps, also, Carol wants some of Linda’s saplings to plant a vineyard.  She could say to Linda, give me a few saplings, and I will promise to bring a shlamim offering to the temple on your behalf. Linda could then bring that promissory note to the temple, and they could record that the obligation of the shlamim offering had been switched from Linda to Carol.  All of a sudden, we essentially have paper money, and what makes it possible is the ledger that is being maintained by the temple. So the verses about how a shlamim offering could be from the herd, the flock, or a goat could be interpreted as important material information about exchange values that allow for the coordinated distribution of resources within a community of friends and neighbors. Although we no longer make offerings at the temple, Parshat Tzav is still relevant because we still coordinate the distribution of resources. And to give an honest reckoning, we do it badly.

Thinking about our relationships with The One and among ourselves as something transactional might feel yucky, but I would offer that we can reject the fake morality pedaled by banks that it is honorable to “honor” a debt incurred to a usurer. We *can* organize transactions around caring.

Kadosh kedushim hu. It is a holiest holy portion.

And finally, this is the Torah of Redemption. I am going to spend the remainder of this drash talking about Democratic Public Finance, an idea I’ve been learning about from the Money on the Left editorial collective. Today is the perfect day to talk about it, not just because of Parshat Tzav, *but also* because today is No Kings Day, *and also* the state budget is due on Wednesday.

I think we’re all on the same page that when the President claims the unilateral right not to spend funds that Congress has appropriated, that is King behavior and we won’t stand for it.  But I also want you to think about this unitary executive theory of money, not as a departure from, but a continuation of the austerity framework of our much-too-powerful governor, Kathy Hochul, who says that we can’t “afford” to invest in renewable energy.  Just as we shouldn’t let the president be the arbiter of when money can be spent, so too, we should not let the banks, traders, and hedge fund managers be the arbiters.

Under the current regime corporate banks, and not democratically elected local governments, have the power to create credit.  What kind of democracy is that?  Kathy Hochul claims that money is a scarce private resource, but Democratic Public Finance thinks of money as just a way to coordinate the distribution of resources and capacities.  If there is enough food in New York City to feed every person in New York City, then it is simply not the case that we can’t afford to feed everyone. If there are enough people to shovel the snow, then it is simply not the case that we can’t afford to have the sidewalks passable for people in wheelchairs.  If it is physically possible to build solar and wind farms and a pipeline to bring hydropower from Quebec, how can we afford *not* to do these things? All we, as a multiracial small-d democratic city and state, have to do is ask what we wish to accomplish together and then take control of the ledger to credit the people who step up to do the accomplishing. For example, one way to do this would be to issue literal credits that could be redeemed to pay taxes or obtain food from state-run groceries.

Another idea from democratic public finance is to borrow money from people rather than banks. Instead of donating money to centrist democrats to defeat MAGA, we could invest our money in arts programs, libraries, and parks in New York City, Cincinnati, Seattle and Tulsa, expanding blue cities so that people can live in them free from cars and guns, and organize together to take back their state legislatures.

These are policy ideas we could advocate for. If you are interested in taking some smaller first steps together, I am always looking for study partners, and maybe we could consider writing a joint letter to the mayor or governor, or starting some inventive crediting systems within our own community, perhaps for kids or teen assistants.

I said I would return to the hattat and asham offerings. These are offerings you would make if you needed purification or to atone for a sin. The implication is that you had incurred some debt for impurity or, perhaps, cruelty. It is not wrong to have a debt, but it is wrong to usurp the ledger.  The premise of Parshat Tzav is that haShem controls the ledger, but post-temple, I think that we all should control the ledger, democratically.

What’s more, while it might seem like Parshat Tzav is just instructions for the priests, let’s not forget Parshat Yitro, where we read v’atem t’hiyuli mamlechet cohanim: we should be a *nation* of priests. 

On top of Parshat Tzav, no kings, and an impending state budget deadline, today we observe Shabbat haGadol, the last shabbat before Pesach, the holiday of redemption. To redeem is literally to acquire something by paying off a debt, perhaps by making a hattat or asham offering.

But I say redemption is meaningless if we are not a nation of priests, if we do not wield the ledger to distribute our labor and resources to care for one another.

Kadosh kedushim hu. It is a holiest holy portion.

Good Shabbos.

* The featured image above features an ancient silver Shekel of Tyre from the Second Temple period dated 64/3 BC.

** Watch Anna Minsky read her remarks here:

Toward an International Democratic Public Finance Framework

By Will Beaman

The liberal international order faces a crisis of legitimacy, and the struggle to define its aftermath is already being organized through competing visions of global order. In the present turn, the far right has seized that terrain to stage a false choice: either accept imperial internationalism or retreat into nationalist rivalry.

This essay develops the Democratic Public Finance (DPF) framework into the domain of foreign policy and international economic governance. Reparative internationalism names the political horizon of that extension. DPF begins from a simple premise: public money and fiscal authority should be organized to expand democratic participation and shared capacity rather than to enforce artificial scarcity or market discipline.

The international monetary system makes this premise unavoidable. Nowhere is the tension between democratic participation and financial hierarchy more visible than in the global institutions that govern liquidity, development, and employment across borders.

This also requires a broader understanding of economic democracy and internationalism than political economy often supplies. Economic democracy is too often reduced to questions of workplace control, redistribution, and ownership, while international solidarity is not yet joined to the kinds of public design and institutional coordination that would support democratic repair and reconstruction in the present. A Democratic Public Finance approach insists that institutions of money, credit, and employment are central to both.

Even where strands of political economy have under-theorized money, credit, and employment as constitutive of economic democracy, or the role of internationalist architecture in liberation struggles, these questions remain open. They belong to a heterogeneous problem space shaped by developmental economics, mid-century postcolonial thought, and the 1974 call for a New International Economic Order. That declaration, advanced by newly independent states, demanded structural changes to trade, finance, technology transfer, and development governance. These questions stand alongside more recent decolonial monetary and macroeconomic work, including Fadhel Kaboub’s analyses of postcolonial economic relations and advocacy for political and climate reparations and Ndongo Samba Sylla’s critiques of monetary imperialism and neoliberalism’s colonial roots. What is more, Kaboub and Sylla join Andrés Arauz in calling for forms of regional monetary solidarity across Africa and Latin America. Democratic Public Finance revives and recomposes these longstanding questions through a focus on international public design and interoperability: the construction of institutions that widen fiscal space, coordinate liquidity, and secure full employment across borders without reinstalling the nation-state or any imperial power as the singular anchor of economic order.

What appears as an external constraint is often already an effect of how cross-border obligations are organized, recognized, and supported. International architecture, in that sense, is not a downstream consequence of discrete political achievements. It is part of the contested infrastructure through which those achievements become possible, legible, or durable in the first place.

These questions remain live today in debates over what happens when countries must use up their stocks of dollars and other widely accepted reserve assets to pay for imports, service debts, and steady their currencies. When that cushion runs down, governments face mounting pressure. They may be forced to cut spending, suppress demand, or seek outside support on punitive terms simply to keep external payments flowing.

When countries struggle to secure the dollars they need for imports, debt service, and other external payments, the resulting instability should not be mistaken for a self-moving market process. It reflects an international monetary architecture in which dollar support is selectively provisioned rather than organized around democratic participation or fiscal space. That selectivity is not incidental. It is an imperial design logic that recasts questions of public monetary design as matters of U.S. charity and benevolence and, in the present authoritarian turn, is increasingly restaged as a pageantry of opening and closing windows of solidarity and support according to loyalty and fealty.

The consequences then appear in the specific exchanges through which domestic money is traded against dollars, in the pricing of imports, and in the servicing of foreign debts. Governments and central banks then try to keep those arrangements from breaking down by using up their dollar holdings, keeping domestic currencies from falling further against the dollar, making borrowing more expensive, or taking other steps to resist the reorganization of claims in favor of dollar-denominated assets and to preserve the payment relationships on which imports, debts, and public responsibilities depend. These are defensive responses to terms that are rendered legible as neutral, ordinary, and unavoidable, while making other ways of organizing support, obligation, and participation across borders harder to name and sustain.

Too often, these dilemmas are staged as a choice between insulated national monetary autonomy and permanent exposure to external discipline. International Democratic Public Finance begins elsewhere. It treats those pressures not as fixed conditions within which each country must fight for survival, but as symptoms of a global monetary architecture organized around hierarchy, scarcity, and competitive vulnerability.

For decades, the dominant vision of international order presented itself as a framework for shared prosperity, development, and stability. In practice, however, liberal internationalism organized economic life across borders through hierarchically structured financial and trade institutions, which repeatedly treated austerity, privatization, and unemployment as the price of participation for countries facing external payment pressures.

As faith in this institutional order has eroded, the far right has offered its own alternative: nationalist competition among strong states, each seeking advantage in a world of strategic rivalry.

Neither model addresses the underlying problem. Liberal internationalism preserves hierarchical financial arrangements that restrict fiscal space for most of the world. Nationalist internationalism abandons cooperation altogether and risks normalizing economic fragmentation and geopolitical conflict.

What is needed instead is a different framework for international economic governance—one grounded not in hierarchy or withdrawal but in participation.

A reparative foreign policy therefore requires more than a change in diplomatic posture. It requires treating the international monetary system itself as a site of democratic public finance rather than as an instrument of imperial hierarchy.

I. Authority as Participation

A reparative international architecture begins by reframing how authority operates. In the prevailing international order, authority is exercised through hierarchy: a small number of powerful states and financial centers shape the conditions under which other societies must govern their economies.

The alternative is participation. Participation does not simply redistribute power within an existing hierarchy. It reorganizes the institutions through which economic life is governed so that societies can participate in shaping the economic conditions that govern their lives.

This shift has a certain experimental quality. Participation is not merely a new map of who belongs within an existing order. It is a world-making practice through which democratic capacity is built across borders.

A participatory international architecture continues the unfinished work of decolonization by changing the institutional conditions under which political and economic decisions are made. Instead of requiring countries to navigate rules designed elsewhere and enforced through external discipline, it creates institutions through which societies can participate in shaping the economic and financial environment that governs them.

In this sense, decolonization is not only a political project but a monetary one: it requires transforming the institutions that govern liquidity, credit, and employment so that they expand democratic participation rather than enforce financial hierarchy.

For Democratic Public Finance, foreign policy therefore begins with the institutions that govern money, liquidity, and fiscal space across borders.

Internationalism, in this sense, means organizing the institutions of money, credit, and employment so that societies can participate in shaping the economic conditions that govern their lives.

Anti-imperialism, correspondingly, means building institutions that prevent any power from monopolizing the monetary and financial conditions under which other societies must govern their economic lives. What these debates too often share is a survivalist baseline: a picture of self-enclosed political units forced to defend themselves within a hostile monetary environment rather than participate in designing the institutions that govern that environment in the first place.

II. The Monetary Question

Countries pursuing ambitious domestic programs are often forced into austerity, unemployment, privatization, or political retreat not because those outcomes are economically inevitable, but because access to dollars and reserve assets remains scarce, hierarchical, and politically managed.

International Democratic Public Finance does not treat externally denominated debt as a settled social fact. Even the most sophisticated MMT discussion has often treated foreign-currency debt as a stable marker on a spectrum of sovereignty, agency or capacity, as though “externality” were simply there to be measured. But what counts as external denomination is itself conditioned by an ongoing order of collective design: by the legal, financial, administrative, and discursive arrangements through which receivability, refinancing, reserve practice, enforcement, and public support are organized across borders and rendered durable as common sense. The topology is therefore the reverse of what it often seems. Sovereign refusal, denomination, or imposition does not stand prior to international monetary design. It is itself organized through that design. The issue, then, is not simply what degree of room for maneuver a country possesses in advance. It is how the international monetary order organizes the terms on which its obligations will count, travel, and be supported.

This is why the dollar’s global role cannot be treated as neutral—and certainly not as a foundation for democratic renewal. When access to dollars and other widely accepted reserve assets is concentrated at the top of the system, fiscal space everywhere becomes organized around imperial asymmetries. In the current order, that fragility is often resolved through austerity: governments are told to cut spending, suppress wages, privatize assets, or tolerate unemployment in order to regain access to the external means of payment they need for imports, debt service, and exchange-rate support.

Reforming this system requires expanding the institutional mechanisms through which countries can gain access to the external means of payment they need when they face dollar shortages and other external payment pressures, without sacrificing domestic democratic priorities.

One concrete example already exists in the network of central bank swap lines that the Federal Reserve extended during the global financial crisis and again during the pandemic. These facilities stabilized global financial markets by allowing foreign central banks to access dollars when they faced payment shortages. Yet access to these lines remains restricted to a small group of privileged partners.

A reparative international architecture would expand such mechanisms and place them within multilateral institutions so that access to the external means of payment countries need is not a discretionary tool of imperial power but a normal feature of global economic governance.

Other paths point in a similar direction. In Africa and Latin America, regional monetary proposals associated with thinkers such as Ndongo Samba Sylla and Andrés Arauz have emphasized currency cooperation, regional clearing, and solidarity-based reserve arrangements as ways to reduce dependence on hierarchical dollar mediation. These efforts underscore that reparative internationalism need not mean a more benevolent top-down order. It can also mean building interoperable institutions below and across the current hierarchy.

Such reforms would not eliminate international inequality overnight. But they would reduce the ability of financial hierarchy to discipline democratic governments pursuing full employment in an inclusive way.

III. Employment, Industrial Strategy, and Participation

Debates about development strategy often frame employment as a byproduct of industrialization. According to this view, jobs should emerge naturally from successful sectors and industries institutionally positioned to attract investment and external demand.

A participatory framework reverses that priority. Employment is not merely an outcome of economic strategy; it is a condition of democratic participation.

This does not mean abandoning industrial policy. It means recognizing that industrialization can proceed under different background conditions. One option is to organize economic life around unemployment as a disciplinary mechanism, forcing workers and communities to compete for access to livelihood and public standing. Another is to establish employment as a public commitment, ensuring that participation in economic life is not contingent on meeting a narrow test of market usefulness.

That distinction matters because unemployment is not simply an economic shortfall. It is also a way of sorting people into more and less legitimate forms of social contribution. A participatory framework rejects that sorting function. It insists that industrial transformation should widen the terms on which people can appear as contributors to public life, rather than narrowing them around one dominant image of usefulness.

Economic democracy, in this sense, means organizing the institutions of money, credit, and employment so that participation in public life does not depend on meeting a narrow test of market usefulness.

Full employment has long functioned as a public aspiration, especially in the postwar period, when mass unemployment came to be seen as incompatible with democratic legitimacy. But over time the concept was narrowed. In much mainstream economic theory, full employment no longer means that everyone who wants to work can do so. It names a moving threshold consistent with a certain tolerated level of unemployment, often justified through concepts such as the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment. Under that definition, full employment becomes a vague macroeconomic target rather than an institutional obligation.

This narrowing is often defended through the language of inflation. Inflation is treated not only as a technical problem of prices but as a signal that participation has exceeded its proper bounds: that wages are rising too quickly, that public spending has become excessive, or that “make-work” has replaced disciplined production. In this way, inflation discourse helps naturalize a background level of unemployment as a necessary restraint on social excess. It also organizes distinctions between forms of labor that are recognized as productive and those that are cast as marginal, redundant, or improperly supported—distinctions that have long been entangled with judgments about skill, disability, and social worth.

Democratic renewal has to reject those logics more fundamentally. When unemployment is treated as the necessary price of order, and inflation as evidence of improper public spending or socially excessive participation, the ground is laid for harsher distinctions between worthy and unworthy labor, disciplined and undisciplined populations, productive and burdensome life. Those distinctions do not mechanically produce fascism, but they help make fascist categories newly legible. A democratic politics of full employment cannot simply soften those judgments at the margins. It has to reorganize the terms on which participation, contribution, and public support are recognized in the first place.

A participatory framework rejects that narrowing. Full employment is not simply a desirable aggregate outcome. It is a democratic commitment that requires institutions capable of creating work when private markets do not. It also reframes the problem of inflation, not as a reason to withhold participation, but as a question of how to organize spending, production, and pricing so that expanded participation can be sustained without reproducing the categories of excess and exclusion that authoritarian politics exploits.

A job guarantee is one way of giving that commitment concrete form. It is a public commitment to provide employment to anyone who wants to work, rather than leaving access to livelihood to the disciplinary terms of the market. It belongs to a longer history of demands for democratic inclusion, civil rights, and public responsibility for livelihood. Its importance here is not only programmatic but conceptual: it names a form of full employment that refuses to treat access to work as a privilege allocated through unemployment, exclusion, or externally imposed scarcity.

This commitment should not be confined within national borders. In the current international order, even the effort to secure full employment is constrained by dollar dependence and external payment hierarchies. If unemployment is treated as an acceptable adjustment mechanism in the global economy, the result will be recurring cycles of austerity, migration crises, and political instability.

A reparative international architecture must therefore treat full employment as a shared global objective. Job guarantees provide one way to institutionalize that commitment. By establishing employment as a right rather than a privilege, they ensure that industrial transformation occurs within a framework of participation rather than exclusion.

IV. Beyond Benevolence

This framework is not a call for American benevolence. A system in which the United States occasionally extends support while retaining the power to withdraw it would simply reproduce the exceptional and discretionary character of imperial governance.

The goal instead is to embed access to external means of payment, balance-of-payments support, and employment commitments within international institutions. Balance-of-payments support here means securing and stabilizing access to the international currencies needed to meet external payment obligations without slashing jobs, wages, or public spending. This matters in part because currencies are never singular or self-enclosed objects. As I have argued elsewhere, “the dollar itself is not a coherent entity. It is already a choreography: a composite of coins, notes, deposits, reserves, and credit instruments—issued across the balance sheets of banks, treasuries, courts, and municipal governments, each with their own histories, idioms, and institutional rhythms. It has never been a single thing.”

One existing coordinate for thinking through that transition is the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). Created and allocated by the IMF, SDRs are an international reserve asset—a potential claim on widely usable member currencies—that can widen access to external means of payment without reducing support to bilateral favor or market punishment. They do not solve the problem on their own, but they point toward forms of international monetary coordination less dependent on unilateral U.S. discretion and more compatible with a reparative architecture.

Balance-of-payments support from the United States to postcolonial countries could be a step in that direction. But it should be understood as transitional—part of a broader effort to embed these responsibilities in multilateral frameworks that prevent any single state from monopolizing the conditions of global economic governance.

Nor does reparative internationalism require Americans to endure economic hardship as a form of reparation. On the contrary, it requires domestic fiscal policy in the United States itself to be organized around full employment and job guarantees. A country that manages its own economy through unemployment and scarcity cannot credibly support a more participatory global order.

The issue is not simply that support has too often been distributed cruelly rather than kindly. It is that support itself has been organized as an instrument of selective favor rather than as an ordinary condition of international participation. In the present authoritarian turn, that selectivity becomes more theatrical–and more spectacularly brutal–but it is not new.

The aim is not sacrifice but an order in which coordination is institutionally secured: a world in which societies can pursue democratic economic strategies without being disciplined by external financial constraints.

V. Practicing Reparative Internationalism in the Present

Progressive lawmakers do not need to command international institutions in order to begin advancing this framework. The present already offers ways to begin institutionalizing it.

Part of that work is rhetorical. It involves recognizing people, places, and forms of labor as public capacities where dominant policy language still treats them as fiscal burdens or economic costs, while refusing the assumption that unemployment, migration, or underdevelopment represent excess human lives to be managed through discipline. Even before institutions change, political language can begin to reorganize what counts as value, capacity, and participation.

Part of the work is domestic and programmatic. Public employment initiatives, care infrastructure, green development, debt relief, and other DPF-style policies do more than address local needs. They rehearse a governing logic in which public money is used to widen participation and build collective capacity. They help establish that full employment is not a fantasy or a slogan, but an institutional obligation.

Part of the work is transitional and international. Progressive lawmakers can support debt restructuring, oppose austerity conditionality, advocate for expanded swap lines, and back reforms that give other countries greater room to pursue inclusive social provisioning. These measures fall short of a fully reparative architecture. But they help soften the ground for one by weakening the idea that global order must be organized through scarcity, punishment, and hierarchy.

Because these hierarchies are continuously organized rather than simply inherited, they can be contested in the present through rhetoric, program design, and transitional institutional demands.

Reparative internationalism, then, is not only a future arrangement at the level of global institutions. It is an inter-temporal practice of recognizing capacity where others see cost, widening participation where others impose discipline, and advancing reforms that loosen the grip of hierarchical finance.

VI. Conclusion

The crises of the twenty-first century—financial instability, climate change, migration, and geopolitical fragmentation—cannot be addressed through a return to the institutions and assumptions of the late twentieth century.

What is required instead is a reparative internationalism centered on participation.

This means building and revising institutions to widen fiscal and democratic space rather than restricting it through austerity and external payment discipline. It means refusing to predicate participation in public life on a narrow test of economic usefulness. And it means treating participation as a world-making practice through which democratic capacity is built across borders.

The point is not merely to redistribute capacity within a fixed world order, but to reorganize the terms on which capacities, obligations, and claims come to count at all.

The goal is not a world organized around hierarchy or benevolent patronage, but one in which societies can participate in shaping the economic conditions that govern their lives.

In that sense, reparative internationalism names the unfinished institutional work of decolonization: a world organized around democratic participation.

By Rob Hawkes

There is a spectre haunting Nigel Farage. The spectre of a beaver.

On 11 March 2026, the Bank of England announced that, following a public consultation, its next series of banknotes will feature images of the UK’s wildlife in place of historical figures, which have adorned our currency since the 1970s.

Mr. Farage was quick to describe this move as “absolutely crackers” (and, of course, “woke”) in a social media video which begins with a triumphant hailing of “our great British banknotes” and their images of “giant figures like Winston Churchill.” Soon, however, his tone shifts to one of ridicule: “And yet, they’re proposing that we replace people like him with a picture of a beaver. No I’m not making it up, this is actually what they’re proposing.” The Reform UK leader has never been one to let the truth get in the way of a good bit of faux outrage, but, if his “I’m not making it up” wasn’t enough of a clue that the facts might have undergone some stretching, a brief check of the BoE’s press release confirms that the “specific wildlife” the public would like to see depicted on the currency has yet to be determined via a further consultation process. Mr Farage, it seems, has conjured a phantom beaver.

One can only speculate as to why this particular animal spirit haunts Farage’s paranoid imagination but, considering Reform UK’s deep commitment to women’s rights, it is surely a mere accident that his mind landed on a word with a history in misogynistic slang. There is no knowing, either, why the thought of losing Jane Austen, JMW Turner, or Alan Turing from the “great British banknote” has not proved quite so distressing, either to our political leaders (Kemi Badenoch is also very cross), or to the BBC Question Time audience member who saw the replacement of Churchill as “surrendering to the radical left wing.” One of the panelists, the broadcaster Kay Burley, responded: “I think as long as we’ve got enough of them in our pockets at the end of the week, I don’t really care what’s on the back of my banknote.” Indeed, from the point of view of mainstream economics, which sees money as a politically-neutral medium of exchange, the material and aesthetic properties of monetary tokens are of no consequence. However, while we can question the motives underlying this week’s eruption of “anti-woke” anger, the questions of monetary design this episode opens up are anything but trivial.

As Alfred Mitchell Innes wrote in 1913, money is “credit and nothing but credit.” Indeed, in a powerful sense, Churchill, Austen, Turner, and Turing are all the posthumous recipients of public credit in the form of recognition, celebration, citation, and acknowledgement via the visual design of the existing £5, £10, £20, and £50 notes. In Turing’s case, in particular, this credit is also an act of reparation following the violence he endured at the hands of the British state in his lifetime. As well as bearing images of Churchill, Austen, Turner, and Turing, our banknotes announce that they “promise to pay.” And yet, this public promise also encompasses a commitment to redeem, to receive, to acknowledge, and to accept. In broader terms, the UK’s monetary system as a whole recognises the contributions of those who serve the public purpose – from health, to education, to social care – in the form of public credit.

As one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries, you could argue that the UK now owes far more to its wildlife than to its revered historical figures. And yet, the panic over the removal of Churchill points to the ingrained logic of austerity at the centre of British politics today. Acknowledging our past need not come at the expense of provisioning the future, but for Farage and those who share his worldview, these will always appear as zero-sum trade-offs. Despite living in one of the world’s richest countries, we are told, there is not enough to go round – someone must be left out, whether it’s animals vs. dead politicians or hungry children vs. cold pensioners, we’re always in a world of either/or and never both/and. Thus, striving for ecological sustainability and renewal, averting climate breakdown and arresting species loss, or meeting the needs of those our society marginalises (including migrants, people of colour, LGBTQIA+ communities, women, and disabled people), are imagined to be achievable only as a consequence of someone else’s suffering. However, as we at Money on the Left have been arguing in our work on Democratic Public Finance, while systemic exclusion is baked into the present logic of monetary design, this is not and has never been inevitable – we can design another, more inclusive and sustainable system just as we can redesign our banknotes.

Farage’s phantom beaver betrays an even deeper fear of democratic inclusion. As a thought experiment, let us imagine for a moment that a twenty-first century political leader might deliberately and unsubtly choose to imply that Churchill, the warlike epitome of masculine strength and defiance, was to be replaced by a euphemism long used to belittle and sexualise women. Might this indicate a wider hostility to women’s inclusion in the political and public spheres? Might the lack of comparable concern over the loss of a woman writer, an artist, or a gay man from the “great British banknote” also be telling? The BoE made the decision to feature wildlife on its new notes after an extensive public consultation. This was a more democratic choice than could ever have been arrived at had the Bank simply asked Nigel Farage what he might consider too “woke” or asked the man in the Question Time audience what would count as “surrendering to the radical left wing.” As we saw in the aftermath of the recent Gorton and Denton by-election, which saw Farage’s party’s candidate Matt Goodwin losing to the Greens’ Hannah Spencer, Reform UK’s instinct is to blame the public when it makes a decision it doesn’t like. By contrast, Democratic Public Finance invites everyone to join the conversation, not just about who or what we recognise and celebrate in the visual design of our currency, but how the monetary system itself functions, which people, places, and causes truly deserve public credit, and how acknowledging our shared past need never be pitted against our ability to build a better, more just, inclusive and sustainable future.

As Robyn Ollett and I wrote for Money on the Left last August, “the stories we tell about our communities and the people that build them are intimately bound up with the way we account for them in monetary terms.” We have since launched the Where Credit’s Due project in Middlesbrough with the aim of building intersectional solidarity and fostering conversations about monetary design in both visual and systemic senses. We began with a screening of Maren Poitras’s 2023 documentary Finding the Money – in which Lua K. Yuille observes that: “If money is natural, who has the money is natural as well” – and followed this with a series of workshops at Middlesbrough’s Dorman Museum, where our participants have experimented with designs for their own “Dorman Dollars” (see the image above). As these events have explored, neither the aesthetics nor the politics of monetary design are natural or inevitable. In place of the orthodox story, which tells us that the suffering of marginalised people and neglected places is necessary and that austerity’s exclusionary logic is the mark of responsible government, we have been learning how to tell new stories of money’s creative potential. In place of the phantom of inclusion-as-zero-sum-competition and the fear of democracy that haunts Nigel Farage, we offer Democratic Public Finance’s vision of ecosocial justice, which refuses to imagine false binary oppositions between wildlife and people, between men and women, or between the past and the future.

By Will Beaman

This essay is lightly adapted from a talk delivered at the 2026 American Comparative Literature Association conference. It contributes to a growing body of endogenous money theorization that we at Money on the Left call Democratic Public Finance (DPF). DPF begins from the distributed and publicly mediated character of political-economic life, approaching money, credit, and accounting as contested infrastructures that are at once citational and coordinative. My contribution to that project here concerns the conditions of legibility for political-economic imaginaries.

Fiscal practices and counter-practices unfold within spatial and temporal genres that rehearse what feels like a “realistic” order of operations: where money is imagined to come from and what must happen for it to name and remunerate social capacities. In those genres, design questions are often staged as discoverable facts about economic reality that necessarily constrain politics. But they can also be staged additively, so that public spending expands who and what can count. At stake throughout is how public money is imagined and how public obligation is organized.

One familiar name for this problem in endogenous money discourse is the finance franchise: the idea that monetary power is extended through licensed issuers and delegated circuits. That mapping matters, but it can mislead when it encourages us to treat monetary agency as primarily top-down. My wager is that the finance franchise is also organized from the middle, through durable genres and rehearsals that make monetary agency legible in public life. The franchise, in other words, is not only a legal architecture. It is also a genre environment that trains what public agency can look like and when it can count. Borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin, I call these patterned organizations fiscal chronotopes: time-space forms through which a world becomes legible as a sequence of events, obligations, and thresholds.

A key feature of these chronotopes is that they are often polyvocal. The same practice can remain stable while supporting more than one coherent reading. That is one reason fiscal forms travel across heterogeneous publics. It also means analysis cannot treat perception as passive reception, as if fiscal reality simply presents itself and we merely record it. What is often called “fiscal reality,” including in MMT and endogenous money discourse, is too often treated as a stable object waiting to be revealed. Here I treat it instead as reversible stagecraft: a field of gestures and formats that can sustain more than one stable reading and that trains what becomes legible as responsibility and what becomes actionable, or receivable, as public obligation.

Duck-Rabbits and Fiscal Reality

We can think about this with the famous duck-rabbit optical illusion. The drawing can be seen either as a duck facing left or a rabbit facing right. The same lines support two incompatible but equally stable readings, and that is precisely why the image circulates. Gestalt phenomenology took this as evidence that perception is not passive reception but active organization. What we see depends on both figure and orientation. The duck-rabbit shows that the same object can support different gestalt wholes without collapsing into incoherence.

That claim matters here for two reasons. First, it helps describe a dynamic that shapes the present: an inherited neoliberal temporality of passive administration amid crisis can be flipped into open authoritarian bullying without becoming identical to it. Neoliberal governance has long rehearsed a fiscal chronotope in which government is staged as the administration of scarcity. Capacity appears fixed, and the acquisition of scarce funds takes the form of a hostage negotiation in which the rich and powerful must be satisfied before money can be spent legitimately. In that chronotope, the destruction of infrastructure and capacity – austerity, underemployment, deferred maintenance – is moralized as a settlement required to keep the public books balanced.

Authoritarian politics plays off that form. It preserves the scarcity framing and the hostage structure, but converts the earlier posture of impotence before “the market” into a spectacle of punishment and reward. The “winners and losers” of globalization become something closer to the “winners and losers” of The Apprentice. Where neoliberalism moralizes constraint as necessity, the shakedown celebrates it as domination and as proof of the exceptionality of Trump’s supporters. The two chronotopes therefore share recognizable features, which is part of what makes collaboration and institutional capture possible. But they organize those features into different narratives of agency and responsibility.

Second, the duck-rabbit offers a rule for reading the campaign practices I turn to next. Last summer, Mamdani’s campaign ran a citywide scavenger hunt called the #ZcavengerHunt and introduced the Zetro Card, a playful punchcard through which volunteer contributions became receivable for campaign merchandise. The question is not whether these practices are really fiscal governance in disguise. The point is that they can be participation formats and, at the same time, rehearsals of public credit and fiscal authority. They make participation legible, and they can later help make other kinds of fiscal action feel actionable. In that sense, they point toward a new finance franchise whose conditions of possibility are distributed and democratic: authority gathered and renewed through rehearsal rather than granted only from above.

With this in mind, I read #ZcavengerHunt and the Zetro Card as formats that organize fiscal time and space. They are not policy proposals in disguise, but participation devices whose polyvalence trains what counts as collective action and what later counts as legitimate public work. The point is not to decide whether they are “really” fiscal politics or “merely” campaign theater. It is to track what they make variously legible (and hence variously actionable), and how their multi-legibility lets them travel across heterogeneous publics without requiring doctrinal consensus.

The #ZcavengerHunt

I begin with #ZcavengerHunt, which composes a bounded public present, and then turn my attention to the Zetro Card as a more durable rhythm of participation and completion. In the #ZcavengerHunt on a warm day in August, people moved through a sequence of locations, following prompts posted in real time and showing up in large numbers. It was playful and conspicuously gamified, but it was also immediately recognizable as a campaign event: a way to generate momentum, attention, and contact.

The chronotopic question, though, is what kind of time and space the format composed, and what that composition made legible. #ZcavengerHunt organized routes and gathering points so that participation took a clear, shared shape. A city that often appears as dispersed constituencies and isolated commutes was briefly refigured as a coordinated circuit: a public moving through space together according to a posted order.

This helps explain why so many people on social media reached for the same comparison and said Mamdani had finally made “Pokemon Go to the Polls” happen in earnest. The comparison points to more than fun. It names the way a game can give political participation a navigable form, one that does not require prior expertise, ideological unity, or even a single reason for being there. You do not have to be converted to join. You just have to be able to read the next move and keep going.

Campaigns sit awkwardly within the dominant governance chronotope. They happen before governance, and much of their labor is volunteer-based, informal, and hard to count. In a genre environment that tends to recognize work only once it is officially authorized and paid, campaigning can become strangely unreal: “just politics,” “just vibes,” or “just messaging,” as if the labor of coordination does not count as labor.

#ZcavengerHunt pushes against that occlusion. It renders campaign labor legible as a visible, shared activity while remaining playful, and that playfulness matters because it lets participation count without first taking on solemnity. A scavenger hunt does not require participants to share the same inner narrative about why they are there; it requires only that they inhabit the same sequence. People can show up for different reasons and still cohere as a public. That is not a weakness but part of how democratic forms remain durable across heterogeneous readings.

#ZcavengerHunt is not public works in the sense of a municipal project. But it does rehearse public work by rendering coordination labor legible and staging completion as something a public can do together in the open. It rehearses turnout and GOTV, but also the broader premise that collective activity can be organized as an ordinary feature of public life rather than dismissed as a break from “real” administration. A related form appears in the more recent snow-shoveling mobilization: a public standard is set, capacity is scaled to meet it, and the work itself is the primary obligation rather than a revenue-constrained aspiration.

The Zetro Card

The Zetro Card began as a workaround. At one point in the campaign’s fundraising, election-law rules constrained the sale of campaign merchandise. The usual sequence could no longer operate in the same way. Rather than treat that constraint as a hard stop, the campaign invented another format for recognition and circulation. The Zetro Card is that format: a playful punchcard that volunteers receive at canvasses, phone banks, pop-ups, and other events, stamped for contributions and made receivable for campaign merchandise once enough stamps accumulate.

It is immediately recognizable as gamification, and it is partly that. But the origin story matters because it shows how quickly constraints become questions of form. The card does not arise from a neutral design space. It emerges within a rule-bound environment that forces the campaign to ask how value and recognition can keep moving when a familiar channel narrows. That is endogenous improvisation in miniature: a practical restaging of how participation can be honored under constraint.

As I suggested at the time in a joking-not-joking piece for Money on the Left, the punchcard format also invites expansion. It offers a way of thinking through how organizing labor might become legible as something closer to public work without pretending the campaign had already become the city. The Zetro Card’s meaning was flexible from the start. The same format reads equally well as merch logistics, volunteer morale, or a revisable experiment in how recognition might be formalized and scaled.

Where #ZcavengerHunt gave campaign mobilization the form of an attraction, the Zetro Card established form that can persist across time. Contributions that are otherwise informal and hard to count are gathered into a shared rhythm rather than fading back into the background as “just politics.” That continuity should not be confused with seamlessness. The card works because it is modular: it can absorb uneven moments of participation while preserving a stable form. Continuity, in this sense, is not the absence of interruption but the achievement of a repeated public rhythm.

If #ZcavengerHunt made campaigning legible as collective movement all at once, the Zetro Card makes it legible as ongoing work that can persist without constant spectacle. The duck-rabbit point holds here too. The card can be read straightforwardly as morale, retention, and branding. It can also be read as a rehearsal of public credit in miniature because it stages a relationship among contribution, recognition, and redemption. Those readings do not cancel each other. Its political usefulness depends on remaining legible in both registers at once.

From Campaigning to Governing

What this adds to the campaign-versus-governance question is not a fantasy of immediate substitution but a shift in genre. The Zetro Card treats participation as something that can carry forward and return as recognition over time. It offers a small but suggestive model of how collective capacities get named and taken up through repeatable formats. When the scene shifts to snow shoveling as paid public work organized around an accessibility standard, the register changes. But the underlying wager remains familiar: the work comes first as an obligation we can name, and the question of coordination follows from that obligation rather than preempting it.

Many commentators described #ZcavengerHunt and the Zetro Card as Mamdani’s way of responding to fascist terror with fun and levity, and that is true enough. But fun and levity are chronotopic. They organize political time differently from the rhythm of fiscal and political crisis that has dominated neoliberal governance and returned in Trump’s threats and shakedowns. Within dominant fiscal chronotopes, crisis appears as something that suspends public obligation rather than reinforcing it.

The campaign practices matter because they elaborate a different, more democratic public chronotope. #ZcavengerHunt exemplifies an event whose form is nonetheless repeatable, while the Zetro Card extends that same participatory logic into a more continuous sequence of recognition and coordination. In both cases, levity is not a retreat from politics but an effect of agency: a way of making collective capacity feel present and repeatable under conditions designed to make agency feel foreclosed. If neoliberal and MAGA temporalities narrow the field of action, these practices widen it by building forms in which people can act together without waiting for permission in advance.

That framing also helps clarify why the shift from campaign to governance is not a clean break. The same administration can operate in more than one chronotopic tense at once because it inherits institutions and media habits that keep staging money as if it originates in private pockets and enters public life only through reluctant concession. In the early months of Mamdani’s term, that tension has been visible in real time. Libraries were cut recently in the name of efficiency, a recognizably neoliberal move that treats capacity as fixed and management as the art of trimming. Last weekend, by contrast, snow-shoveling capacity was dramatically scaled up around a clear public standard of sidewalk accessibility. The public messaging around recruiting shovelers had its own playful, mobilizing energy, closer in spirit to the campaign experiments than to the dour genre of austerity.

The snow-shoveling episode matters because it puts a different orientation on display. Productive capacity appears here as a political variable rather than a ceiling. The public standard comes first — accessibility as constitutive of public space — and labor is then scaled to meet it. Operationally, the cash management and accounting settlement for that expansion happens afterward through ongoing negotiation and coordination. That, too, can be read in duck-rabbit fashion. In a familiar neoliberal reading, belated settlement is framed as debt that must be “paid back,” as if the city has put extra shoveling on a public credit card that will eventually come due. But belated settlement also makes something else visible: once scale becomes adjustable in order to meet a standard, the question “how are you going to pay for it?” is already being treated as a design question rather than an external veto on what counts as an obligation.

That is the fork in the road these campaign rehearsals help make visible. One path translates public need back into scarcity management, with the destruction of capacity repeatedly framed as responsibility. The other treats care capacity and employment as public ends and treats settlement as an ongoing political task rather than using it to delay action. Fiscal chronotopes are the genre environments in which those paths become legible in the first place, where some sequences of permission and closure feel natural and others do not. The wager behind these playful practices is that changing what a public can recognize is often the first step toward changing what it can do, and that democratic public finance, especially amid open sabotage and non-cooperation from the federal government, depends on rehearsing alternative temporalities and keeping them publicly legible.