Zack Polanski’s Bold Politics Requires an Even Bolder Economic Vision: The Case for Democratic Public Finance

by Rob Hawkes


The Green Party of England and Wales is attracting new members in unprecedented numbers and achieving polling percentages that would have seemed impossible a year ago. However, tensions are building behind the scenes over the party’s economic programme. On December 12, 2025, just over 3 months since Zack Polanski’s election as party leader – the event responsible for the Greens’ surging popularity – Bloomberg reported on the impending launch of a new economic think tank named Verdant, a move motivated by the need to “convince voters” that the Green Party “can produce credible economic policy,” and described elsewhere as an effort to rein in Polanski’s radical economic vision. As Aaron Teater recently observed in the New Statesman, Polanski’s economic arguments sound “a lot like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).” For some, this is reason enough to celebrate Verdant as a necessary effort to dissuade the Green leader from further upsetting the infinitely wise protectors of all things good (otherwise known as bond traders). Other voices on the Marxist left of the Green Party dismiss MMT as a distraction from the task of challenging the widening inequalities and imbalances of class power in our society. Beyond these disagreements, a new framework we in the Money on the Left collective call Democratic Public Finance (DPF) stands ready to defend, recast, and extend the fresh economic thinking that continues to gather new supporters to Polanski’s “Bold Politics”. DPF takes us beyond questions such as “do we have enough fiscal space to fund green energy or to solve the crisis in higher education?” Instead, it asks: How can we empower local governments and universities to prioritise ecosocial justice and sustainability by redesigning money creation, underscoring their roles as allocators of public credit?

It is hardly surprising that Polanski faces resistance both within and beyond his own party; it has been clear from the start of his leadership that he rejects the narrow terms of the economic debate that have dominated British politics for over four decades (and have patently failed to deliver widespread and sustainable prosperity). On the day he was elected leader in September, Polanski appeared on the BBC’s Newsnight programme and it was quickly suggested that his party’s spending plans might “frighten” the financial markets “to death” (continuing a long-held journalistic tradition of imagining City financiers as a collection of Scooby-Doos reacting to fancy-dress monsters, not a self-interested group exerting anti-democratic pressure on politicians). In response, Polanski spoke of the need to “destroy this myth that a national economy is anything like a household budget” and added that “this idea that we need to balance the books… has come from decades of Tory and Labour politicians that have been pushing an austerity narrative.” In the course of the interview, he went on to assert: “We don’t need to borrow, we don’t need to tax and spend. We need to spend and tax,” deliberately evoking MMT’s understanding of public spending, whereby money issuance by the state logically precedes revenue (indeed, the word revenue comes from the French verb meaning “to return,” so taxation is in this sense less a case of “return to sender” than of “return to spender”).

Outside the bubble of mainstream political and economic discourse, then, it is well-established among heterodox economists, including MMT scholars, that the UK government spends through acts of public money creation and, therefore, that finding the money to fund public services is not the issue the vast majority of politicians, journalists, and their audiences imagine it to be. Margaret Thatcher’s infamous inversion of reality, “There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money,” could not be further from the truth. To anyone still steeped in the Thatcherite dogma that continues to impose false limits on the political debate and on democratic possibility in the UK, however, Polanski has been speaking a different language. Indeed, his election as Green Party leader may present the first genuine challenge to the economic orthodoxy from a major UK politician since Thatcher’s 1980s. Nevertheless, achieving the Green Party’s vision of a fair, democratic, inclusive, and sustainable society will require us to move beyond the talking points around debt and inflation according to which MMT is regularly pigeonholed by UK commentators such as Richard Murphy, and which fail to ask more searching questions about who creates money and for what purposes. Now is the time to bring Democratic Public Finance (DPF), which, as we explain here, “builds on MMT’s insights but pushes further,” to the forefront of the debate in the UK. This approach “redefines politics as the process of coordinating our abundant human and material resources within ecological limits, rather than exploitative competition for scarce funds” and reclaims “money as a contestable form of collective organization”.

On Newsnight, Polanski affirmed that “the idea that we need to worry about what the markets do… is just a fundamental inaccuracy at the very beginning of this conversation… I think we need to have a really nuanced conversation in this country about the national economy that breaks through some of these old myths.” The right-wing press has, of course, been quick to dismiss the Green leader’s “fantasy economics,” and the self-styled sensible centrist Rory Stewart recently professed to being “horrified beyond belief” by his economic views. Amidst this noise, we cannot afford to squander the opportunity to have the nuanced conversation about economics that Polanski calls for. However, public discussions of MMT frequently overlook the much deeper stakes that its arguments reveal, stakes that must now move to the front and centre of the struggle for a sustainable future. Indeed, against the backdrop of soaring inequality and the undeniable threat of climate catastrophe, influential voices within the Greens are now curiously aligned with those to the party’s right who wish to see its project fail altogether. Both groups seek to uphold the economic orthodoxy’s view of money as necessarily scarce, private, and thus irretrievably exclusionary. Meanwhile, DPF emphasises that the ecological and social justice that the Green Party exists to strive towards cannot be founded on this failed monetary logic.

The orthodoxy, which we name Neoliberal Public Finance (NPF), treats money as a thing that we either have or don’t have, of which there is a finite “supply,” and which we can run out of if we are not careful. This puts money – and the processes and rules under which it is created, determining where and to whom it is allocated and how and when it is receivable – beyond the reach of political and democratic design. Why can commercial banks legally create money but not local councils or NHS trusts? Why can’t credit be extended to support essential green infrastructure while ecologically destructive profiteering gets the green light? Why do we account for public services as if they were burdensome costs and not the shared assets they are? Why can’t local experiments with currency creation help to connect capacities and needs where they are most urgent? How can continuing on a pathway to ecosystem collapse be deemed “affordable,” while measures to avert climate breakdown are framed as frivolous luxuries? And how did we ever come to regard the concept of “budget responsibility” as compatible with a society where children go hungry while billionaire wealth rises by £35 million each day? 

Grace Blakeley, a vocal supporter of Zack Polanski’s leadership, concedes that MMT “largely describes the operation of fiscal and monetary policy correctly” but regards its insights as merely technocratic and thus irrelevant to the task of building “a democratic, popular movement, aimed at supporting people to take back control over their lives”. Meanwhile, Teater’s defence of Polanski’s MMT-inspired public statements emphasises once again that “taxpayers don’t fund the government; the government funds the taxpayers,” but then falls back on the notion that “maintaining market confidence” is a priority and suggests that this can and should be achieved by pursuing economic growth. Both Blakeley and Teater articulate something important about MMT and its relationship to Polanski’s economic vision, but both remain a crucial step away from DPF’s recognition of monetary design as itself a site of democratic struggle, where power is continually exerted and resisted, and where the fight for our most pressing ecological and social causes can and must be fought. In other words, Teater is right to frame fiscal policy as a question of mobilising resources just as Blakeley is right to view it as “a site of class struggle.” However, Teater relies on MMT’s language of monetary sovereignty, to which Polanski has himself occasionally appealed. For DPF, this limits all questions of democratic participation in the money system to the level of national government spending and shuts down the broader possibilities that a truly nuanced conversation about monetary design and its potential to advance ecosocial justice can open up. DPF shows us that the stifling of discussion about how money creation happens and how it could work differently serves the powerful just as well as the concept of “retail therapy,” or the myth of taxpayer money. As we affirm: “Money cannot be something we need to hoard to create a livable future. And it certainly cannot be scarce unless we make it so. Money is, instead, the world-making act of crediting those actors who construct the future.”

The Green Party already has a policy platform that chimes with the DPF approach, albeit in ways that are not yet fully or consciously vocalised. In its 2024 general election manifesto, for example, the party called for “the setting up of regional mutual banks to drive investment in decarbonisation and local economic sustainability by supporting investment in SMEs and community-owned enterprises and cooperatives.” Similarly, we argue for the creation of public banks that can extend credit to support communal and ecological needs (such as retrofitting housing, for instance), reframing such credit issuance in more responsible terms as grant-making as opposed to profiteering lending. The party also calls for public ownership of essential infrastructure such as transportation, water, and sustainable energy, as well as the extension of local democratic decision-making over issues such as housing and rent and the abolition of university tuition fees. As the Greens’ recent letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves puts it: “It is a political choice to keep people in poverty whilst billionaire and multimillionaire wealth grows larger.” DPF helps us to see all of these matters not as questions involving the redistribution of a finite pool of monetary tokens, but as matters of systemic design that have been absent from our public debates and hidden from democratic scrutiny for decades. It is time to put money creation, monetary design, and democratic public finance at the centre of the conversation about how we collectively create and fund a livable future for all.

Before we complain that any political agenda might “frighten” the financial markets, we need to recognise that all markets are politically and legally constituted in the first place and that ceding power over our democracy to bond traders is a choice, not a necessity. Zack Polanski is right to highlight that the “need to balance the books” has provided successive governments with the apparently “credible” smokescreen for an austerity programme that has only driven ecological and social injustice, enriching the already wealthy while destroying our communities and the planet we call home. DPF helps us to see that “the books” are themselves part of a system we have designed and can design differently if we choose. As 2025 draws to a close, we should all be “horrified beyond belief,” but not by Polanski’s calls to think differently about “the markets”. What ought to “frighten” us all “to death” is the status quo. With Democratic Public Finance at the heart of a new, bold, green economic vision, Zack Polanski can deliver on his promise to bring hope back into British politics.

Money on the Left1 Comment

Beyond Loans: The Public Grant-Making Bank 

By the Money on the Left Editorial Collective

Public banking has been gaining traction for years, driven by a growing recognition that our current financial system often fails to serve the public good. The Bank of North Dakota has operated successfully for over a century, and states like New York have recently seen legislation proposed to establish their own state-level public banking systems. Success at the state level informs the effort for a nationwide Public Banking Act proposed in Congress, which offers a vital first step towards building a more equitable and sustainable economy by establishing a federal charter for local and state public banks and creating a systemic channel to direct public deposits toward community investment.

To fully realize public banking’s potential, however, we must recognize that loans alone are insufficient for addressing all public needs. The loan model makes urgent community investment dependent on the ability to generate a profit and repay, when, in fact, the entire reason these initiatives require public support is the absence of a prospect for private sector profit. 

For this reason, we need to expand the public’s financial toolkit beyond traditional loans to include grants. The operating paradigm for the next generation must empower public banks to issue grants, thereby giving communities the financial resources they need and freeing them from the constraints of expected repayment. In what follows, we explore the groundbreaking potential of a Public Grant-Making Bank, which promises to revolutionize the meaning of money as a mechanism of Democratic Public Finance.

The Public Banking Act, as previously proposed, makes significant strides. It seeks to establish a national framework, providing legal clarity for states and municipalities to create publicly owned banks. This structure would confer local control over investment, ensuring these banks are governed by public mandates that prioritize community needs over shareholder profits. The Public Banking Act would give public banks access to the Federal Reserve’s payment systems and liquidity facilities, integrating them into the broader financial architecture. The legislation allows them to fund local priorities like infrastructure, affordable housing, and renewable energy. Crucially, it mandates adherence to standards related to environmental justice and democratic governance, steering financial capacity toward the public good. 

The Public Banking Act’s proposed changes to the existing financial system are powerful; however, the legislation still operates within a capitalist paradigm of loan-based financing. By focusing primarily on loans, even at favorable rates, the model retains a core capitalist constraint: the expectation of financial repayment. This expectation means that any essential community investment must carry a calculable path to profit or guaranteed revenue sufficient to service the loan. When a project is defined by its social or ecological necessity rather than its ability to yield a private return, the loan structure fails. For instance, a loan for constructing protective sea walls, implementing watershed restoration, or funding universal local public transit will never meet a private profitability threshold. We cannot allow the constraints of private profit to obstruct the necessary path toward collective flourishing and stability. Such projects are essential, non-revenue-generating public goods that communities require for collective well-being.

To meet critical needs, we must expand the financial toolkit of public banking beyond traditional loans. We need a revised Public Banking Act that establishes a new class of financial institution: the Public Grant-Making Bank. A Public Grant-Making Bank actively tackles pressing social and ecological challenges where traditional, loan-based financing proves inadequate. 

The first pillar of this model involves restructuring finance as direct grants, rather than as loans. Instead of relying on future repayment, public banks would issue grants to projects based on their public mission. A Public Grant-Making Bank evaluates proposals by assessing their anticipated social and ecological effects. For example, funding the establishment of community-owned broadband networks would be evaluated on their contribution to equitable digital access and educational opportunity, not on a financial return model. If the qualitative assessment is strong, the grant is made. On this logic, a grant is still debt; only, it is a qualitative obligation to improve social and environmental conditions, rather than a quantitative obligation to repay a financial sum.

A core commitment to qualitative assessment requires a decisive legal shift. Local public banks, overseen by community-led boards, ought to be granted full discretion to issue finance based on community needs. Granting this authority requires major overhauls of banking laws, such as the Community Reinvestment Act, to legally authorize such non-financial metrics over traditional financial prudence. This authorization must be coupled with a legal liability shield for bank directors, protecting them from fiduciary duty claims when making mission-aligned grant decisions.

Any radical institutional change demands an equally radical monetary theory. Our financial regulatory system is typically conceived according to an erroneous, yet dominant “loanable funds” model, which posits that banks act as mere intermediaries, collecting pre-existing savings from lenders and then allocating those scarce funds to borrowers. Under this view, money is a finite resource, and any capital loss resulting from a grant poses an existential threat to the bank’s ability to maintain its pool of savings. However, we know from the credit theory of money that banks actually create money as credit when they extend financing. This means that when a bank issues a grant, it does not transfer pre-existing savings, but rather generates fresh financial assets in the community’s accounts.

The result inverts the traditional view of deficits. When a Public Grant-Making Bank issues a grant, it creates financial capacity for a community. In the process, the bank does not draw down its capital. It undergoes no depletion of pre-existing funds. Instead, the grant constitutes a creative act of democratic public provisioning in its own right. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)’s sectoral balances approach is illuminating here. Just as, according to MMT, public sector deficits are private sector assets, we must recognize that the bank’s alleged deficit is actually the community’s financial surplus. The grants are not a loss; they are creative endowments that increase the net financial wealth of the public. For these institutions, therefore, we must reframe the reigning ideology of the balance sheet entirely.

While the credit theory explains the mechanics of how all banks create money, current law is designed to punish institutions that act on this reality for the public good; therefore, we must redesign the legal framework to make public grant-making possible. If the bank’s financial deficit is simply the community’s newly created financial asset, specific legal changes are required, such as amendments to the Federal Reserve Act and the Federal Deposit Insurance Act to establish what we could call a Systemically Essential Public Grant-Making Charter. Crucially, this charter and all associated exemptions would apply only to the bank’s non-repayable grants. The charter would exempt these banks from closure based on mission-related grants. We would mandate the creation of a Public Commitment Reserve—a dedicated and nominally inexhaustible fund explicitly backed by the full faith and credit of the United States that covers the necessary operational deficit, effectively making the federal government the implicit equity partner. This mechanism ensures the bank’s stability while validating its singular mission by giving the granting function a 100% Risk Weight Exemption from standard capital rules like those stemming from Basel III.

Meanwhile, the new regulatory framework must reflect a new collective purpose. Regulatory oversight would necessarily shift from strict capital ratios to a Public Mission Fulfillment Index (PMFI). Regulators should utilize something like a Public Mission Fulfillment Index (PMFI), a qualitative and quantitative assessment tool that measures the Public Grant-Making Bank’s effectiveness. Instead of narrowly auditing assets and liabilities, the PMFI would evaluate the bank’s adherence to its public mandate, its effectiveness in achieving social and ecological outcomes such as specific climate adaptation goals or public health milestones, and its transparent governance structure. Performance would be judged not by profit margins, but by documented progress toward communal problem-solving, making the mission, not a zero-sum balance sheet, the legal measure of success.

The Public Banking Act can incentivize the creation of new banking institutions across state and municipal levels, but we hardly need to start from scratch. The existing landscape is already rich with institutions that currently implement grants, demonstrating that non-loan-based provisioning is a deeply established practice. Consider the vast network of federal bodies that allocate grants based on qualitative criteria: organizations like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation fund research based on merit and public benefit, alongside cultural institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. This federal effort is mirrored at the state level by agencies like the Departments of Labor, Health, and Energy; development-focused bodies such as the Appalachian Regional Commission; and, of course, our public university systems. Beyond government, the sector includes myriad non-profits and community foundations, including large institutions like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Ford Foundation, programmatic groups like Habitat for Humanity, and even small, local initiatives run by churches and food pantries. These well-established institutions prove that grant-based financing beyond profitability is already a central function of financial life in the United States. 

The Public Banking Act already contains language for empowering these organizations to become licensed public credit issuers. Like for-profit banks, such organizations draw on systemic knowledge of their recipients’ projects and the shifting contexts in which they operate. All that is needed is to equip them with financial capacities to expand and transform their current mandates in response to communal and ecological needs. Importantly, then, there is no one-size-fits-all model for Public Grant-Making Banks. We need diverse and nimble credit allocators for a heterogeneous and changing world.

The design of the Public Grant-Making Bank yields a robust new approach for achieving economic stability. Rather than naturalize private market prices while fetishizing liberal budget-balancing, public granting banks allow us to challenge the political composition of investment and pricing in the first place. The work of economist Isabella Weber is instructive here, as her analysis highlights how public management of supply chains and targeted price control mechanisms for essential goods can be powerful tools for ensuring stability. Extending this logic to finance, the Public Grant-Making Bank establishes a powerful counterweight to capital markets, where the price of credit and the required rate of return are set by private risk and profit motives. A strong public sector that effectively sets the price of capital at zero shifts essential financial resources from speculative activity to necessary public provisioning. The current political volatility, including the rise of radically anti-democratic policies, behaviors, and sentiments, often stems from a deep-seated economic insecurity that financial systems designed purely for private profit have created. The Public Grant-Making Bank offers a design intervention that directly addresses this insecurity, ensuring new financial capacity is continuously deployed where it is needed most.

The stability provided by the Public Grant-Making Bank acts as a profound form of local political agency and resilience. Decades of unnecessary austerity, perpetuated by establishment Democrats, conservatives, and authoritarians, have destabilized communities by systematically robbing them of financial resources required to provide for basic needs. Will Beaman highlights this vulnerability in his argument for fiscal insurgency, noting that the political viability of progressive public projects is often threatened by legislative sabotage. At the same time, Beaman reminds us, the history of the United States is replete with inspiring examples of local and national credit creation that successfully resisted and overcame austerity. This in mind, the Public Grant-Making Bank represents a critical mechanism for fiscal insurgency. Because it operates on the principle of the legally protected creation of public credit for social ends, its budget is untethered from the state and municipal budgetary processes that constrain investment by recourse to poisonous neoliberal and authoritarian ideologies. This grants local administrators the authority to direct public investment, ensuring their decisions are democratically accountable while actively bypassing those financial constraints. Such enduring capacity acts as a vital institutional guarantor of political stability, ensuring communities can maintain essential provisioning even when political conflicts over the budget attempt to impose sudden cuts.

Thus a Public Grant-Making Bank is more than a policy fix; it is a profound political act that challenges the hegemonic conception of money as a fundamentally capitalist tool. Regrettably, progressives and leftists regularly equate money with capitalism, viewing currency as a mere expression of private competition and exploitation. This dominant view, however, not only fortifies capitalist interests, but also fails to see that money is a contestable and inexhaustible public system, a complex and interdependent hierarchy of obligations and benefits that can always be restructured to serve communal ends. Others on the left attempt to redeem money by embracing the promise of truly egalitarian “exchange.” Examples of this impulse include schemes advocating a return to allegedly pure, decentralized systems like direct barter, or proposals that champion digital currencies built on blockchain technology. Yet these approaches—rooted in the myth that money evolves from direct barter—typically accept the capitalist premise that money is merely a facilitator of micro transactions, thereby failing to embrace the hierarchy of money as a democratic design problem.

The Public Grant-Making Bank is a political project that importantly defamiliarizes what money is. By showing that financial capacity can be intentionally created and distributed based on social and environmental needs rather than the expectation of repayment, the bank clears the way for wide-ranging contests and creative building when it comes to democratic monetary design. Moreover, this approach reframes and reclaims the very idea of granting, not as the decree of a ruling authority, but as a shared commitment to the community and an affirmation of public trust. As a result, the Public Grant-Making Bank becomes an essential step toward achieving what we have elsewhere called Democratic Public Finance, a radical vision where our collective financial system is explicitly designed to serve society, not extract profit.

Passing the extended Public Banking Act and establishing the Public Grant-Making Bank requires a focused national political campaign, starting today. The immediate challenge is immense, given the second Trump administration’s active use of state power to defund social programs, attack democratically-controlled cities, and punish political enemies. Compounding this political sabotage, a nationwide affordability crisis continues to push prices higher across essential goods and services. Yet a clear political opening exists: the recent 2026 blue electoral sweep, a victory underscored by the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor, signals an urgent public demand for structural solutions to the affordability crisis. The Public Grant-Making Bank can be a vital ingredient in this effort. We can begin straightaway by forging powerful coalitions, bringing together progressive legislators with organizations like the Working Families Party, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Debt Collective. Success is hardly certain, but the collective activity of imagining and organizing for this transformative financial architecture is itself a crucial political project that helps transform what counts as possible for public finance.

When we finally acknowledge money as public credit, we empower public banks to transition from mere lenders to catalysts of collective prosperity, underwriting the essential work of ecological restoration and community-making with direct grants. The initial Public Banking Act gives us the start. Our challenge now is to extend its vision and construct a system where financial design itself actively guarantees a just and ecologically stable world.

Money on the Left2 Comments

Democratic Public Finance

Billy Saas and Scott Ferguson are joined by Will Beaman to discuss Money on the Left’s framework for what we call “Democratic Public Finance” (DPF). According to this paradigm, money is public credit, a capacious tool for mobilizing everyone’s capacities to meet our needs and build a desirable future. DPF redefines politics as the process of coordinating our abundant human and material resources within ecological limits, rather than as an austere and exploitative competition for scarce funds. With this, Money on the Left not only opens fresh horizons for left politics, but also directly challenges the fiscal sabotage routinely carried out by liberals, conservatives and the authoritarian right. 

In conceptualizing DPF, Money on the Left builds on insights from Modern Monetary Theory (MMT); but we also push beyond MMT’s delimitation of public money creation to the alleged sovereignty of the nation-state. Contrary to conventional accounts of MMT, we insist that money is a public, contested, and inexhaustible institution that must be politicized and redesigned across all levels of governance. 

During our discussion, our cohosts outline the approach to DPF presented in our recent long-form publication, “Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City.” Along the way, we tease out key insights from myriad other contemporary works, which variously leverage DPF to challenge the second Trump administration’s authoritarian radicalization of neoliberal economics. Such texts include co-authored pieces such as “Blue Bonds: A Fiscal Strategy for Overcoming Trump 2.0,” “How the Zetro Card can Save New York City (Really),” and “It’s Time for Complimentary Currencies,” as well as writings by Will Beaman like “How to New York Times Proof Mamdani’s Playbook,” “Blue Bonds: Duck or Rabbit?,” and “The Case for Fiscal Insurgency.” 

The conversation highlights the originality and urgency of Money on the Left’s core ideas for Democratic Public Finance. Since the discussion only scratches the surface of our writings, however, we encourage listeners to consult the linked publications above for a comprehensive engagement with DPF.

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

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Scott Ferguson

Welcome everybody. I am Scott Ferguson and I am here with my co-host Billy Sass. Say hi, Billy.

Billy Saas

Hi, Billy.

Scott Ferguson

Nice. And our guest co-host today, Money on the Left’s own, Will Beaman.

Will Beaman

Hi, guys. How are you doing?

Scott Ferguson

As good as we can be, as good as we can be. So, we are convening today’s discussion primarily to update our listeners who maybe aren’t as online as the rest of us and maybe are not as aware of some of our publication work that we’ve been doing largely during the second Trump administration. We’ve been writing a lot. Will, in particular, has been writing a lot, and really pushing the boundaries of our paradigm and its stakes and its consequences.

We want to talk about some of these publications. I think, centrally, what we want to do — and I think it’s important to begin with — is discuss our rather lengthy new work that we published, titled “Democratic Public Finance A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City.” After unpacking and situating this text, or maybe along the way, we can take detours. We can talk about some of the other writings that have surrounded this work or preceded this work.

To get us going, I’ll start by saying that Money on the Left has been developing, what I would say is, a unique but dependent paradigm, a way of approaching political economy from the point of view of certain foundational premises that we, as many people know, borrow from Modern Monetary Theory, as well as certain legal theories of money that often go under the heading of a constitutional approach to money, which was spearheaded by Christine Desan, who we’ve interviewed on this podcast in the past. I think a lot of people think of us as the MMT podcast or an MMT podcast. I think there actually is a podcast called the MMT podcast.

Will Beaman

Yeah, we don’t want to get sued.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah, yeah. We’re not that one.

Billy Saas

Would they sue us?

Scott Ferguson

I don’t know. I think we’re friends. Anyway, even though we draw on these other paradigms in many ways in solidarity with them, and we might consider ourselves as being part of them, we also have developed our own approach. It felt like there are certain kinds of assumptions and other limitations in these paradigms that we feel don’t go far enough. So, we come in peace. We’ve tried to expand, to speculate, to draw out further conclusions, to iron out certain contradictions in these other paradigms and essentially, we’ve been working on our own formulation. We all have been doing so separately and in collaboration in things like peer reviewed articles and blog posts and interviews and podcasts and all kinds of media.

But, I’d say that we don’t really have a user-friendly long form statement that just lays out the basic assumptions and our document that was published on October 10th of 2025, “Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City” does precisely that. On the one hand, it is a strategic document that’s aimed at this particular moment, at a threshold moment where we think and we hope that Zoran Mamdani becomes the mayor of New York City.

He is still a candidate, but we wrote this document in such a way that it would be addressed to Mamdani’s mayorship. So, we’re framing this in terms of a very exciting candidacy, a very exciting moment when a democratic socialist is hopefully and probably going to be elected to this office and thinking about what he can do to help fulfill his own promises that he’s making to the city, especially when it comes to fiscal policy. But it’s a double document because it also serves as a State of the Union address for us and just laying this paradigm that we’ve been working on for years and years and years. With that in mind, where do we want to start?

Will Beaman

Well, I think maybe one place to start would be a kind of a familiar distinction that MMTers are all too familiar with, which is between Modern Monetary Theory and the neoclassical paradigm. In this document, we mobilize and extend that distinction to problems and logics of governance.

There are two poles, or co-present impulses that animate and inform governance that we name, neoliberal public finance (NPF) and democratic public finance (DPF). Part of the strategy of this document is trying to not just tease out the limitations of neoliberal public finance and the possibilities of democratic public finance, but to expand both in such a way that they can speak to and be located in rhetorics that the Mamdani campaign has variously used. One thing that we talk about in this document a lot as  part of the frame is, no, Mamdani is not going out there saying “money is a boundless public utility and the idea that we need to raise taxes in order to do things is bullshit.” There are nevertheless surpluses of possibility and opportunity in a lot of the framings that he does. In a lot of ways, the DPF and NPF framing is a little bit of a code that we try to use to decode the present.

We could say some things about the nature of the kinds of recommendations that we make with this democratic public financing framework. There’s no greater lesson in the past than realizing you’ve stumbled into fascism. This is not a new insight. It is a constantly expanding and accreting insight that neoliberalism got us here. But there are certain ways that the moves and the playbook of the Trump administration via the shakedowns of public institutions, the withholding of funds —  whether that’s illegally impounding them or threatening to do so, which has a similar effect — or it is stalling and slow walking government. 

As we record this the Trump administration is withholding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food provisioning as a means to try to pressure Democrats to stop the shutdown. All of these moves are part of a playbook of authoritarian consolidation, certainly. But the building blocks of this playbook are in some ways thoroughly neoliberal. We’ve been acculturated already into a kind of learned helplessness in the face of whatever comes down the pipe economically and so neoliberal governance or neoliberalism is already recast governance as the administration of difficult choices and austerity.

The acquisition of funds has been used for quite some time in order to manufacture crises of electability. We hear this happening in The New York Times with Mamdani. Things like, “You know, it’s good. But what if he can’t? What if he can’t convince Albany to tax the rich,” and all these kinds of things that are staging the acquisition of funds as a train that’s coming towards us. But with Trump, the mask has slipped. What we’re seeing is that the Trump administration is hijacking and choreographing with the governing habits and conventional wisdom of neoliberal public finance as a paradigm. While it’s sort of an exhausted question of, “are we still under neoliberalism or is this fascism?” but part of what I think comes out of this is that there are neoliberal habits of thought that are being enlisted by fascism. Rather than  a vocal answer of whether this is fascism or whether this is neoliberalism, it’s the dynamic between them that matters. For that reason, we see all kinds of opportunities for other logics that this document tries to open up and explore.

Scott Ferguson

I think this is a great moment to kind of step back and talk about one of the fundamental premises and differences of, what I would call, our paradigm in relationship to, let’s say, the standard articulation of Modern Monetary Theory. We know that Modern Monetary Theory has opened up all kinds of possibilities in our thinking in the collective imagination. It’s been widely popularized, obviously. At the present moment, it is not ascendant because it has been largely blamed for the so-called inflation that we’ve been experiencing, which, of course, is a reading we would utterly reject. But despite these openings there are certain tensions and even contradictions within the original paradigm, which, I just want to say, the original paradigm of MMT is not even stable.

If you’re reading Warren Mosler’s version, it’s going to look different than Stephanie Kelton’s version, which is going to look different than Bill Mitchell’s version, and so on and so on. It’s not to say that there is one absolutely airtight MMT 101 paradigm, but nevertheless, part of that MMT 101 paradigm is a commitment to a notion of sovereignty and, what they call, monetary sovereignty. What this does is relegate the power of money creation to a singular entity, at least within a given political domain that is usually called the government or the state. I think it had more historical purchase when MMT was being developed and being popularized under the Obama administration, for example, when most of the fights were happening at the federal level, and there were questions of bailouts for the financial sector. “What are we going to do with Main Street? Are we going to do the same for Main Street as we’re doing for Wall Street?” The answer was no. 

The way that the monetary sovereignty framework was articulated made sense. The political climate at the time made it easy to ignore or to not see the limitations of that framework. I’m not saying that one couldn’t or shouldn’t have found the problems with the framework before, but I do think that the political situation has forced us into thinking further. The limitations of the framework are precisely its need to relegate monetary creation powers and the possibilities of democratizing money creation to only one entity, the state at the federal level or at the highest level.

What ends up happening in MMT 101 discourse is that everybody else, all other institutions are treated as money users. Money users have to just recycle the finite funds that the government has made available. Not only does this disempower a politics of monetary creation at all other levels, both sub federal and supra federal, like internationally, not only does it incapacitate monetary politics at all those other levels, but there’s also kind of a contradiction within MMT in order to maintain this notion of monetary sovereignty. 

I’ll just try to quickly spell it out for the Modern Monetary Theory 101 paradigm, which comes out of the post Keynesian school in part, is the assumption that money is endogenous, which means it is created in the form of credit and debt out of thin air, but not just by anybody, but by powerful institutions that proceed from the public sector.

These powers are delegated out to the private sector. So, banks create credit out of thin air because they’re empowered by the state to do so. The state does so because it holds the power to do so. So, there’s this commitment to the idea that all money is endogenous. It’s all created out of thin air by institutions with the power to do so.

Great. But then if that’s the assumption, if that’s the truth, then why suddenly turn around and say “No, no, no, no, no. It’s only the federal government that can do this,” even though you, on the other page of your text, have told us that everybody does this, and you’ve certainly said this about private banks. I think what we’ve been up to is actually ironing out some of the contradictions in most articulations of MMT 101 and saying, “no, let’s take endogenous money seriously.” If it’s really endogenous all the time and it’s never finite value circulating, or it’s never an expression of the commodity form. If it’s always institutional endogenous money, then that means that money is not relegated to the function of sovereignty.

This is not to say that money isn’t a function of power. Of course it is. This is not to say that there aren’t degrees and qualities of monetary creation powers. Of course there are. But let’s stop disempowering all these other levels of governance, all these other institutions that not only could be creating money, but I would argue, they are. I would argue that states and municipalities in the United States, when they spend they are creating money. When they tax, they are taxing and buttressing the taxation power of the whole system of the dollar. They’re not mere recyclers of a finite thing. That doesn’t ever happen according to our point of view.

From that fundamental tweak and ironing out of this tension or contradiction in MMT 101, it opens up all of these possibilities for us, not just for monetary politics or monetary design in a kind of narrow sense of political economy, but also in terms of analysis of history, of political fights, of coalition building, of coalition breaking, of enduring questions and critical theory, whether that’s about aesthetics or any number of questions.

For us, we agree that money is publicly founded, it’s institutional and it’s endogenous. Let’s take that seriously and stop constraining money under the sole authority of sovereignty. In doing so, suddenly we have this wide-open field of possibilities and a wide-open field of possibilities that we would argue are vital and critical for combating authoritarianism and fascism in the United States and around the world.

Will Beaman

That’s really well said. I would add, we’re certainly not denying the importance of grappling and contending with power and authority, but in a lot of ways, what we’re arguing for is to not take power at its word as to who participates in it and who doesn’t and where agency is located and where agency is not located. When you set up these really hard binaries between who has agency and who doesn’t under “XYZ” objective conditions, and the idea of sovereignty is the epitome of this because it means exception. Exception from an overall lack of agency. The one who acts rather than the one who receives.That’s going to come back in this discussion, I think, because one of our re-framings of MMT is taking seriously reception as a point of agency too and the typical MMT story of fiscal circuits of money being spent into existence and then taxed not as functions of sovereign power, but as choreographies of issuance and reception that unfold along a lot of different contested institutions.

But just to tie this back to this critique of neoliberal public finance and the way that it establishes or to use a more phallic sovereignty metaphor, erects certain nodes or choke points or key events at which the left or liberals or the left liberal coalition has an opportunity or a window to provision society. However, it turns on whether or not we get the taxpayer to say yes or, whether or not the economy as it’s construed as a sublime external force says yes. This is not unique to MMT either. On the Superstructure podcast years ago, we were critiquing debates that were happening in the early 2020s about which theory of change is correct, as if there’s a single answer. As if change doesn’t unfold through multiple theories. Likewise, I think that the MMT’s insistence that we have this empowering mapping of where power is located and “look, at the places where it is located, it can take care of everyone.”

Nevertheless, we end up bringing back in this sort of logic of deferring possibility to the outcome of a rigged game, basically. It didn’t feel as much like a rigged game when it was 2021 and Biden seems to be a decent president compared to what I think many in the Sanders and Warren camps were expecting. But to your point, Scott, in this moment, deferral is really not an option. We also see political evidence all around us that there’s a massive appetite for politics that does not defer to some moment after the midterms or after 2028.

Billy Saas

Well, there’s something there to say about that. While it’s very exciting to consider this alongside the great success and momentum of the Mamdani campaign, there’s a certain extent of the deferral of possibility that we can also locate and attach to an electoral politics. We’re waiting for accommodation of these views by candidates and eventually people who hold office confronted, almost inevitably —  and we hope not this time —  by a kind of rhetoric of pragmatism and the inevitability of shedding possibility through the process of lawmaking and presiding and what democratic public finance also enables us to do is to look at those smaller scale avowedly non sovereign. There is no, or typically not, an army or an armed force behind the creation and circulation of complementary currencies within communities and so helping us at the same time as we encourage and continue to participate in a our own kind of realist way with electoral politics, we also look at and get excited about smaller scale interventions from the bottom up. 

That is, I think, ultimately what small “d” democrats, people who believe in democratic politics and governance, where we can almost immediately locate our agency and opportunities for participation. So, at the same time as there’s a kind of narrowing function of neoliberal public finance, everything leads to the decision of the sovereign. The sovereign is never going to accommodate, never really going to give grace, or maybe rarely and in limited form. Democratic public finance gives us a much broader path with many more forks and possibilities.

Scott Ferguson

That’s right, that’s right. I’m going to read a little bit of the intro. This isn’t the exact beginning of the text, but just to give a flavor of the text, and we will obviously provide links in the show notes for all of our listeners who haven’t been tracking our website, but largely interface with us through their ears. Here it goes:

“This document argues that building a just future requires shifting from the reigning ideology of Neoliberal Public Finance (NPF) to Democratic Public Finance (DPF). NPF constrains democratic possibilities by perpetuating the idea that money is always private, uncontrollable, and scarce. If money is scarce, so too are housing or jobs. NPF seems natural and almost unassailable, both as law and as a mode of framing collective life. It underwrites the neoliberal habit of acquiescence, which trains politicians and publics to treat fiscal sabotage as an impersonal event to be managed, not contested.

DPF, by contrast, asserts that money is an unlimited and disputable public good which can always be reorganized to serve people and the environment.”

And recall here that’s “reorganize,” not finding the money to spend for your big-ticket items.

“For DPF, money is an inexhaustible institution, involving an always ongoing and deeply public process through which societies mobilize their capacities and create their future. Imagine a city where public banks extend zero-interest credit to retrofit housing, or where a Job Guarantee program is financed through democratic credit issuance. This is the vision of DPF: not scarcity, but capacity; not limits, but collective potential.”

So that’s a nice and relatively coherent and powerful articulation of this contrast that we’re setting up. The document goes on to talk about the ways that we break up different aspects of democratic public finance as an alternative to neoliberal public finance and those four —  what we call —  strategic areas. Of course, they’re all connected. Just for the sake of writing, conceptualizing, and talking about politicizing, we name these four strategic areas. One more thing I’ll say is that each area is, at least from a conventional point of view, potentially more challenging than the next.

Now, ideological conditions could shift in what counts as the most challenging. But at the present moment, we conceive of these being ranked in order of the easiest to pursue to the hardest to pursue. So, number one is “Reframing Debt Issuance and Taxation” according to the paradigm of democratic public finance. So, all that’s doing is pointing out that these tools that everybody knows about, nobody’s arguing about whether New York City or Minneapolis, or a small county in Nevada, taxes or issues debt. They all do it. It’s a question of what it means and what are the politics surrounding it and what really are questions of responsibility and risk around these instruments. Our argument would be: that needs to be rethought and reframed.

The second category is “Mobilizing People Differently: Public Sector Expansion, the Public School System, and the Multiplicity of Credits.” This is where we talk about how monetary credits across scales of different degrees of receivability, capacity, and power are always being used in all kinds of ways to mobilize people. This is the case for airline miles. This is the case for Starbucks gift cards. This is the case for municipal fiscal policy. It’s happening all the time. But we’re suggesting that the public sector needs to get creative about the way that it actually designs systems of accreditation or of crediting that may not entirely be about high powered dollars, but nevertheless have strong, democratic, supportive, caring capacities that can work in tandem with fights over the spending, but more specifically, design and creation of high powered dollars.

Then we have category three: “Creating Public Banking and Payments Infrastructure.” We, at Money on the Left, clearly have investments in a major public banking initiative and legislation at the federal level, and also democratizing our payment system as well at the federal level. But you don’t have to just do it at the federal level. You can do it at the state level. You can also do it at the city level and at the municipal level. We’re moving into even more active, high-power dollar design, with category three. 

Category four is arguably the most challenging and that is actually: “Challenging the Deep Structure of Neoliberal Finance in Municipal, State & Federal Law.” This is us, in a way, taking our advance on MMT to the maximal level. So, I would say most of the time, MMT 101 discourse tends to take the design of the current system more or less for granted and sometimes this comes out in tropes that have been questioned within the MMT 101 movement. But there are framings like, “oh, we’re just describing what exists. We’re not saying we need a new system. We’re just telling you how it works, and you can use this system if you know how it works, you can use it for other purposes and you can do nice things with it.” Whereas we want to say, “no, no, no, there are design trajectories and constraints that are built into the system that should not be there.” 

The Constitution of the United States should not forbid sub-federal entities from creating money. That’s anti-democratic. It’s especially anti-democratic because the same federal legal structure allows for private institutions to create private credit all over these municipalities. Right? So, you’re licensing and enabling private creditors, you’re disabling public creditors. I would also say that that language in the Constitution is false, because I would say that public institutions at the federal level do actually circulate credit. They do that all the time in all kinds of different forms. So even though you might say, “oh, well, it’s against the law for a state to issue credit or to create money,” I would say they do it all the time. This is a controversial claim, but nevertheless, I think this is our position.

This fourth section is really about getting at those deep legal structures and saying those are social constructs. They were social constructs that were constructed out of struggles for power. If the left wants to really, really, really revolutionize the system and create conditions of possibility that are going to allow for genuine democracy and collective caretaking and contestation, you have to go after these deep legal structures. So, that’s the four areas. I don’t know if you all want to start with one and move toward four. Where do we want to go from here?

Billy Saas

Maybe we can move into discussion of each of them through reference to Will’s prolific article and commentary. Maybe we could pivot to that.

Will Beaman

So, I will say that because everything that we do is a collective project. All of this that we’re talking about in this document has been showing up in what I’ve been writing and, to some extent, vice versa. That’s just how collectivity works. But I would say that my madness at the beginning of the summer started with being, honestly, hypnotized by the rhetoric and communication and sophisticated aesthetic forms of the Mamdani campaign.

One of the first pieces that I wrote this summer about that, “How to New York Times-proof the Mamdani Campaign,” was, in a lot of ways, taking up the theme in the first section: capacity being where we should focus our analysis rather than on the amount of dollars that are located here and there and need to be gathered. That, of course, is very MMT 101. If you have the real resources you can afford it and money is just a unit of account. But I think there are ways of describing capacity as a process of humanization that are less developed but present everywhere. This is something that I think the Mamdani campaign does really, really well.

In that particular piece, I talked about an ad that he did after he won the Democratic primary, where he sort of broke down all of the different demographic cultural, geographic, you name it, components of his victory. In doing so, he was able to not just —  refute is not even the right word because it was so much more profound than that —  reframe Beltway pundit conversation about the conventional horizons of possibility for this or that kind of politics with this or that group of voters or voters in general, but also getting away from that very macro and reductive caricature of what is politically possible and what is considered fringe to voters as a bloc.

This video that Mamdani did basically answered in a different way how he paid for it. How did he pay for the win? This opened up another theme that I was sort of thinking about and exploring this summer, which is that, a campaign sits in a sort of a liminal space that it often occupies in our own kind of mapping of things. It’s outside of politics. Right? It’s the stuff that happens before you’re in power, so it doesn’t really count. It also is largely volunteer work. It’s off the books. It’s not part of the economy either and yet it’s a massive logistical operation with a history and with capacities. A successful campaign does what successful fiscal authority does, which is creatively reread public capacities. I drew an analogy in that piece between the way that he was talking about and breaking down the various public capacities that paid for his win. What if this was extended to how he spoke about fiscal policy through governance? This is something that, to a certain extent, we can see traces of what both he and, frankly, lots of politicians are doing already.

We want to affirm that and highlight it and connect it to a project of giving that kind of rhetoric it’s due in fiscal terms. Something that I have not yet been able to write about, because I’m now fighting for my life and my doctoral program, is a lot of his videos since then. This is drawing on my past experiences in Scott’s Film and Media Studies MA program. I’ve been hypnotized in a very similar way by how he uses the close up in this series that he’s been doing, where he tells stories of famous New Yorkers and he tells them in close up, and they often are individuals who, in this or that way, are marginalized. But the close up, as we, in film studies, know from a long tradition of writing about the humanizing qualities of the close up and of photography, has this ability to cut through preconceived reductive notions that we have about people. The close up confers dignity as well as opacity and mystery and complexity on to individuals and onto people who we otherwise think of as individuals, or we think of them as part of a group or whatever.

In an interdependent world, there are so many things that we can say about ourselves and about others. There’s this tradition in our cinema of using the close up to open up complexity rather than close it. In light of this kind of conversation about real capacity, I thought, this visual language that he’s using is light years ahead of the kinds of rhetoric that we’re used to hearing and participating in about how many hard-working Americans there are in this country. The kind of nascent or underdeveloped ways of talking about economic capacity and, in this way also, I think, because we do come from a humanities tradition, there is a skepticism that we have about enlisting people as parts of a top-down notion of capacity. It’s something we have been in group therapy for several years. Saying, “well, you’re an economic asset,” as if to reduce. 

In so much of Mamdani rhetoric, by focusing in the visual language of the eye contact and the close up and the storytelling and the way that he tells another person’s story, both you and that person, because the direct address in these close ups is ambiguous, he does so as the government or as a public representative. Talk about transcending the confessional mode. To me it has been opening up a world of thinking about all the different ways that we already humanize people in visual and aesthetic and rhetorical forms and how tragically disconnected that often is from the language that we use to talk about what we can do as a city. Or what we can do as a society and a culture in ways that interface directly with fiscal politics? That’s one throughline that shows up also in this document that we all collectively worked on, which says basically, it’s the capacity that you need to pay attention to.

We already build the city every day. We don’t need a permission slip from somebody who sees themselves in mutually exclusive terms as the taxpayer, or the benevolent billionaire who will create jobs, but only if you’re not rude. We don’t need to route our own self-understanding through those dehumanizing prisms and chokepoints.

A big part of the first section that’s really important to me is identifying within Mamdani’s own rhetoric both ways that he’s already talking about capacity that shift the conversation away intuitively from “how are you going to pay for it?” because once you’ve done an entire campaign talking about all the ways that something is physically and materially and socially, culturally, etc. possible to do, then for “how you pay for it?” to come in at the 11th hour reads as more transparently sabotage than it does in the kind of current neoliberal mode of politics where we take it for granted that “how you pay for it monetarily” is basically a proxy for how you pay for it materially, because all material things have to be paid for, therefore, paying for something monetarily is basically just another way of saying, “can we do this?” And the answer then is always “no,” because Albany says no.

Scott Ferguson

Another part of what you’re talking about that I find to be so powerful, and it is something that is in Mamdani’s rhetoric and with even further amplification and connecting it to fiscal politics, can be just so vital, is really revaluing people. In this case, in New York City, people that are currently —  under the neoliberal order and the fascist neoliberal order —  seen as liabilities, as drains on the system as they drain away our tax dollars by using their SNAP benefits. Instead, seeing our community members who might be struggling with employment or who might be struggling with finding a secure home, revaluing them as assets that are not being utilized. Seeing them as qualitatively rich, interesting community members that we’re just abandoning and we’re failing to value.

To be honest, I would say that’s even latent in MMT 101 as well. I think the way that Mamdani is using his communication strategies, his rhetoric and his policy framings is pushing us more in that direction. Now, I want to leave to another related topic in which I would say, at least on the face of it, it’s less of an analogy to money, but it’s Mamdani getting closer and closer to money. Now, I don’t think any of us think that “there’s money in itself and then there’s other things that are not money.” You know, we understand that sort of everything is money. Nevertheless, right over the summer and into the fall, Mamdani has been using certain proto or just straight up monetary designs in order to mobilize people. One of them is something called the Zetro card. Does somebody want to unpack the Zetro card and what he’s been doing with the Zetro card?

Will Beaman

Sure. We wrote another piece at some point in the past few weeks about that, which was sort of a tongue in cheek, a serious / not serious / but actually serious piece saying that the Zetro card could be scaled up and used to save New York City.

And what is the Zetro card? It began early in the campaign. It’s a very playful punch card that is obviously a pun on the Metro card, but with Z for Zoran, and this is a kind of an interesting detail of it. It emerged as a way for the campaign to sell merch beyond their legal allowance to do so. What this was was if you participate in canvasses and phone banks and whatever, the Zetro credits are issued and you can trade those in for posters and and merchandise, and it’s such a great example of what we’ve been calling a duck rabbit problem, named after the famous optical illusion from like 100 years ago. It is that image where you look and ask if it is a duck or is it a rabbit? It depends on which you see first, but after you see one, you probably are then going to see the other and then you can see both. It’s such a great figure for this paradigm, where, on the one hand, this is a punch card and this is just moving posters. Who cares? It’s playful and it’s fun. But on the other hand, it does have all the elements of the entire thing that we’re pitching already in miniature, right? Right down to the fact that it began as a creative workaround to legal limits.

Also, I think it exploits, in a good way, the category error that something being part of a campaign does for people, where you hear, “Well, it’s not real though, so why would we even scrutinize this?” That cuts both ways, right? Like, we had a lot of people saying like, “dude, I’m pretty sure it’s just a punch card,” and fair enough. It is just a punch card. And yet it also is not right. You see the punch card, rabbit or you see the endogenous money duck.

Scott Ferguson

And, dude, those fed notes are just like pieces of paper.

Will Beaman

Yeah. It’s all just bitcoin. What we actually have is a fiscal circuit. That is, credit being issued and redeemed in order to provision work and mobilize capacity. What we talked about in that piece is we sort of mocked up what it might look like to continue the Zetro card as a campaign practice after the campaign is over.

This draws on legibilities like the Bernie Sanders campaign, which talked about campaigning as something that you do year-round. AOC talks about this as well. One of the reasons that she always performs so well in her district despite being probably the most caricatured and villainized politician in the country, is they never let up on the infrastructure of communication and engagement with their constituents, including but also beyond, of course, all the ways that you would help your constituents during your day job when you’re a politician. But they also never stopped canvassing. They never stopped campaigning. I would argue there is precedent for that. But we thought through what some sort of micro steps could be that are still in the realm of being playful. To be clear, fiscal policy should be playful.

How can we be playful until we pull the wool out from over their eyes? I could very easily imagine a lot of the organizations that make up the Mamdani coalition accepting Zetro credits in exchange for part or full payments of membership dues, of ways to deepen participation in an organization to get opportunities for speaking time at meetings, to gain access to certain leadership positions.

All of these, of course, raise all kinds of ethical dilemmas to work through, but these are the same ethical dilemmas that already exist in organizations, which is —  it’s sort of is the classic problem —  when you say that there’s that there’s no hierarchy, you leave it up to all the implicit hierarchies in the world to decide who gets access to what.

Who you know and who you have good credit with becomes a way of controlling and gatekeeping one’s way of relating to opportunity within an organization. This is similar to employment. We thought initially of some first steps that the Zetro card could take in coalition with partnering institutions.

One could also imagine worker-owned co-ops and restaurants and DSA bars that are frequented and run by members accepting these on a particular day and then that turns into a full-time thing and so on. But what’s really kind of interesting in thinking about this is that it can scale and it can keep scaling in very kind of non-linear and cascading and unpredictable ways, because if this were to become a very popular thing, one could imagine co-ops and unions and organization chapters and other campaigns, even, accepting Zetro credits and maybe issuing their own credits, which then can be accepted by the same organizations that accept Zetro credits. Right. Then all of this can eventually interface with the kind of longer-term legal changes and transformations that we’re trying to loosen the always loose and imperfect distinction between what is the official and the unofficial currency, because they’re predicated on a falsehood.

What does it mean to issue money versus just issue credit? What is a harmless gaming currency and what is shadow banking? All these things that are malleable, but that we’re used to thinking of their malleability as being a function of the fact that it’s the rich and the powerful who promote these things. The Zetro card is an ongoing campaign technology. I hope that it continues after the campaign ends, but it also is just an interesting kind of pedagogical thought experiment for thinking through and living and embodying this way of seeing fiscal policy.

It also is just so emblematic of Mamdani’s whole style, which is to introduce playfulness and games. We can talk about the famous scavenger hunt that he did in New York City as well. But these games that provision a campaign, they provision participation and nurture capacity and keep people limbered up and ready to get out to vote and ready to volunteer and keep those keep that muscle memory fresh.

Scott Ferguson

I think another thing that the Zetro card participates in and opens up is, what MMT discourse gets called, the hierarchy of money. The fact is that the campaign used higher power dollar credits, which they got through donations to pay vendors to make the merch. Then they’re redeeming the Zetro card credits by giving people this merch, but that merch wasn’t free. I think the lessons here are multiple. One is, for us, there’s no such thing as autonomous money. There’s no autonomy at the level of the so-called sovereign. There’s no autonomy at the level of a community currency or a Zetro card. It’s interdependence all the way up and down. So, get rid of the dream of autonomy, it doesn’t work. 

Two, its lower-level credit is always participating in higher level credit and vice versa. Higher level just means more receivability, more, what we call liquidity, wider receivability and with that comes power. With that comes capacitation. But still the lower forms of credit are not nothing. I think we want to get past this idea that, “oh, well, at the end of the day, you know, what matters is real dollars, buy the merch and all this fuzzy, silly credit that’s being issued and redeemed to this Zetro card is a bunch of hot air, right?” Or it’s not really real, when in fact, no, that’s actually how the dollar system works all the time. It plays out through this interdependent hierarchy and those so-called lower-level orders are qualitatively different. But I would say they are just as important. They’re just as important. I mean, this was really noticeable in the 18th and 19th century when you had different banks issuing their own liabilities.

Then you would have all of these complicated payment schedules and redeemability. There would be charts that tell that the Bank of X’s notes are only worth this much when you go into that state. It was a total mess. But you had a sense that without your local bank that creates the credits, you’re fucked, right? Like those lower-level credits that might not be quite as stable are still your lifeblood. Coming back to all the activity that the Zetro card mobilizes in one of the most important cities on the planet, it is tremendous. So that lower-level credit is deeply, deeply meaningful. It’s political. It can be democratized. You can be creative with it, but not in a way that pretends that it’s somehow autonomous or that you don’t have to deal with those higher-level credit issues at the same time.

Will Beaman

That’s fantastic. One other thing that I would add before we move on is, I think that whether it’s the Zetro card or the scavenger hunt that Zoran did over the summer, I think we make a mistake if we make the sovereignty mistake. If we attribute these just to the charisma of Mamdani, or just to how infectious his smile is and all of that. In order for a smile to be infectious, we have to want to smile. It demonstrates that there is a deep capacity that that I suspect has a history of in politics that, for fiscal politics, politics of participation and circuits of coordinated activity in the public interest that are not on the rhythm of taxpayer funding showdowns and the impoundments of funds and what did Donald Trump say and how are the markets going to react to it? All that kind of stuff. 

I think in a lot of ways, what Mamdani is recognizing is that there is an already existing desire for somebody to charismatically convene people to have fun. Something else that I’ve been writing about in the context of brat summer with the Kamala Harris campaign and Dark Brandon before that, the caricature of Biden, is that the coalition will come up with charisma for you even if you don’t have it. There are genres, and camp is a big one for moments when there’s a big gap between who the politician is and who you want them to be. There are genres that are rehearsed and practiced and that are activated again and again that signal and extend the charisma and the authority to convene people to politicians on the condition that they don’t suck. On the condition that they don’t betray the coalition. I think that this is what differentiates Mamdani, obviously, from Harris and Biden.

I think that Harris and Biden saw their star power as somehow a reflection on themselves, rather than as a long-cultivated expression and desire on the part of voters for a Dark Brandon or for a brat figure, or for any of these figures. So, I think that, were Mamdani to take this all for granted and pivot to the center, my hunch is that people would stop showing up for the scavenger hunts. I think that this provides an alternative framework in very rough, hand-wavy terms, to get at what I think sovereignty is always trying to get at, which is this authority as differentiation, as seeming ability to convene people. But if we misread that as power from outside society ordering society around, then we take for granted all the ongoing coordination and cooperation and fantasy and desire on the part of people that makes authority work. When we think in these terms, then we can see Trump’s fiscal politics as an extension of his whole persona, which is something that the far right has been rehearsing since Obama, or earlier than Obama. This desire for a sovereign for a Dirty Harry-type figure who’s going to be lawless and ruthless and hypocritical and all of that means, basically, that you’re going to be protected as a follower from being held accountable because you too are unaccountable.

That’s a certain form of governance and of authority, or a currency, if you will. But it’s not the only one. It’s actually really important to be attentive to it as a genre rather than as the new political world that we’re living in where everybody needs to copy Trump, which is, I think, how Gavin Newsom, for example, has read this moment. When we see these moments of a star just seemingly emerging out of nowhere as something more like a franchise that has been rehearsed from the bottom up or maybe we would say from the middle out, to be granted with conditions, or without conditions in the case of Trump, although I bet if Trump started to respect other people, the franchise would shut him down. There are even still conditions there too, right?

Scott Ferguson

Right. We should say just outright, his unaccountability is a collective project. It’s not coming from an autonomous place of absolute power that everybody just bends the knee to. It’s that there is a whole infrastructure of people and organizations who carry out that unaccountability collectively, because that’s what they want to happen. Right? It’s the same structure, but it’s just used for evil.

Will Beaman

In the context of a little experiment, like the scavenger hunt or the Zetro card or looking at a campaign and turnout as being like a miniature fiscal event or a miniature employment event, we can maybe think, or we can rethink a lot of the sovereignty-derived insights of MMT, like the finance franchise being an extension of sovereign power to banks from the fiscal authority.

If we see the fiscal authority itself not as a sovereign in itself, but as a collective public project, then we are able to see genres and forms of franchise as collective public projects as well. I think that that’s just another bridge that sort of allows us to do an end run around this whole thing and connect these seemingly nonpolitical or superfluous or silly campaign techniques before so-called power has been taken to governance and authority.

Billy Saas

I wanted to add that I think what the Trump constituency that was ready to realize the franchise was responding to is that he’s willing to hang out with them for extended periods of time and just shoot the bull for hours and hours at these campaigns. Maybe we can round out the conversation by coming to two of the more recent Vertical pieces, one of which very helpfully categorizes or names within the realm of democratic public finance what the Mamdani campaign is up to and what other campaigns and what other constituencies can aspire to, which is fiscal insurgency. This is a phrase that I like quite a lot and that captures and describes what we’ve been talking about. So, I wonder if we can talk a little bit about fiscal insurgency as a kind of broad framework within a framework. Maybe we can close out with a more recent piece on “The Paradox of Political Thrift” and maybe, not to game out Mamdani’s chances, but we can take stock of the scene and note all of the idiosyncrasies and exciting developments we can notice here in the end of October 2025.

Will Beaman

Yeah, absolutely. So that one is my term, but it expresses a lot of the same things that we are expressing in the DPF and NPF concepts in the “Mam-document” that we’ve been circulating. Listener, I want you to know that both of my co-hosts laughed, but they’re on mute.

Scott Ferguson

I’ve unmuted so I can guffaw audibly.

*laughs*

Will Beaman

Okay. Thank you. These [laughs] are my back pay. I’m playing with the idea of insurgency and occupation here. I mean, I’m not really playing with it. I’m obviously thinking about it for very reasonable reasons. Typically, we think of an insurgency as sort of a military term, and we often lose sight of what makes insurgent campaigns successful, whether they’re peaceful or not. To be absolutely clear, we are peaceful. We come in peace in all ways. It is a recognition that you have to be embedded in society, and you have to look to and lean upon infrastructures that already exist.

I think that what we have been articulating in the “Mam-document” and also in a lot of these other Vertical pieces and in this conversation, is that agency is actually all around us. If we take the neoliberals or the fascists at their word, that agency is over there, not over here —  wherever “here” may be —  then we end up being duped by a rigged playbook. So, in a context where Trump is threatening to impound funds or when the state of New York and Albany was, in a liberal idiom, threatening to withhold funds for Mamdani’s plans, it changes the entire dynamic of that situation. One could model and conduct and enact fiscal agency without routing it through these rigged choke points. Fiscal insurgency is my name for that. It’s ultimately a historical phenomenon that we see in places where, for political or for economic reasons too, like in the Great Depression, if credit is not available to employ people to keep patterned payments that stabilize social obligations moving, in those contexts, if all that dries up, people still need that and the fact that credit is endogenous comes out in all kinds of ways. 

The Greenback, during the Civil War, was issued when private banks were unable and unwilling to finance the union’s survival and tax dollars were not enough, the Army was mobilized, and the war effort was mobilized with these things called Greenbacks. World War Two, we had a bond drive. In the Great Depression, we have all kinds of, so-called, low-level currencies that emerged as municipal notes. Before that, in the 19th century, banknotes were all over the place, some of them on a very crypto-style imaginary, being these entrepreneurial institutions on the literal frontier of American imperialism out West. There was a free banking movement. You also had lots of credit experiments and rhetorics of talking about money that were grappling with ethics and grappling with interdependence and grappling with real problems of liquidity being absent.

Fiscal insurgency is – and I’ll just I’ll quote from this from this piece here:

“Fiscal insurgency is not isolation. It is not about retreating into localism or walling off states from the national economy. It is about building protective circuits of credit that keep democratic life functioning even when sabotage is staged from above. Insulation means refusing to let billionaires or authoritarian actors dictate the terms of survival.”

I also think that this contrasts very sharply with Gavin Newsom. He’s a very mixed bag, and ultimately, a lot of the wavering on transphobia and on civil rights is disqualifying full stop, but Gavin Newsom has sort of become an early emblem of Democratic local electeds creatively resisting the Trump administration.

Pushing back on Trump’s redistricting is obviously good, but there is, I think, an overall vibe of countering Trump’s illegality with the same until he backs down. “We’re going to fight fire with fire identically.” A lot of the rhetoric that’s been coming out of Newsom’s office and among his boosters is throwing around ideas like “if we stop funding the federal government in order to teach the red states a lesson,” or proposing different versions of what they call a “soft secession.” As an aside, it’s mind boggling to me that you can talk about soft secession and not make as many waves as when you talk about creating credit. I should say ruffles as many feathers. I wish you could create waves talking about creating credit.

I think that this framework of fiscal insurgency refuses zero sum logics and doesn’t try to counteract them by saying, “well, actually, it’s the Trump administration who represents the welfare queens of society, which is all of the places in Appalachia and Mississippi who are voting for Trump, but if it weren’t for the taxpayers in California, they wouldn’t have jobs or health care.” The other thing that the idea of insurgency is sort of trying to answer is that — and this goes back to the scavenger hunt —  it is possible to claim continuity and stability as a form of resistance. I think that the left’s playbook often, especially owing to a lot of inheritances from the Marxist tradition and the labor movement and all of that, has a very mixed legacy of both. I want to differentiate between instances that I think are not always differentiated between. There’s strikes and striking and the withholding of labor.

To be clear, I love a strike and support a strike. But there are also instances where workers have staged takeovers of factories, and they’ve done various things to keep the world running rather than stop it. I would want to trouble this binary between keeping the world running and stopping it anyway. Right now, we’re in the middle of a government shutdown that’s absolutely necessary in order to put pressure on the incentive structure of the Republican Party and the political infrastructure that supports it. There’s all kinds of reasons why strikes are incredibly effective in doing that, but when you import that logic to money and you think about, “well, our only tool in the toolkit must be to stop paying taxes, which fund all spending and bring everything to a halt,” you’re playing into the Trump playbook, which is showdowns. These are showdowns predicated on money being finite. I see opportunities and openings for a rhetoric of fiscal insurgency in the improvisations and coordinated efforts of blue state governors, but I also see neoliberal public finance present too.

That is my idea with the fiscal insurgency and maybe, Scott, if you want to tie that back to the Mamdani document before we go on to the other Vertical piece, I don’t want that to fall by the wayside.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah, I think that one of the things that this brings to mind is the multiple time horizons that we have in mind in structuring the “Mam-document,” which I’m just going to constantly say for eternity.

Will Beaman

The term is going to be in the show notes.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah. So, on the one hand, we offer strategies for immediate needs. In terms of legibility, those are the lowest hanging fruit, which would start with just reframing the function of taxation. There’s a massive tax the rich campaign in New York City, right now, and we support it. Every billionaire is a policy failure that remains true. Tax the hell out of them. In the short term, that is going to, as we can put it in a technical sense, increase your dollar balances, New York City. You can spend those high-powered dollars to build municipal grocery stores and make fast, free, and easily accessible buses and more.

In terms of bond issuance, we have something we haven’t talked about yet. Early on in this year, we were trying to think of immediate, legible fiscal strategies for resisting the Trump administration and resisting what was at that point, largely illegal impoundments that were cutting federal financing for vital services and institutions that help people live and work and have homes and eat and have health care. So, we proposed a bond drive to save democracy, and we called it and still are calling it blue bonds. A blue bonds bond drive. Blue for democratically controlled states because we associate the Democratic Party with the color blue. So, we’re calling them blue bonds for that reason.

Those are immediate strategies for getting high powered dollars into action to help people now. But we also have longer time horizons and more long-term strategies. One is challenging these fundamental laws, balanced budget amendments in state constitutions. When it comes to New York City, the so-called fiscal crisis of 1975, was one of the watersheds that ushers in the neoliberal era. It came along with a lot of new constrictive neoliberal fiscal laws about how much debt the city can issue in the future. All kinds of rules about budgeting to rein it in and keep it under control. Those rules were created by humans. They can be recreated by humans; they can be restructured by humans. But those are long term fights. They’re not going to be immediately legible to the public. But if you have a movement that is legible around, say, a Mamdani administration, then you imagine a way in which those long-term fights get introduced and become more and more exciting and more and more legible.

But there’s other long-term horizons that aren’t just about resistance but are about provisioning. This gets us back to area two, mobilizing people differently through creating credit at the sub federal level. We’ve been talking a lot about this at the level of the campaign, at the level of organizations. I love that you just passingly mentioned DSA bars that will create and redeem these credits, but we also have long term vital institutions in the city and everywhere else, quite frankly, that we can be reorganizing and thinking in terms of endogenous credit making. The big example that we give in the “Mam-document” is using the public school system.

So, the public school system is, in multiple senses, an accrediting institution. Students earn credits by going to school and by completing their schoolwork and by becoming educated. The schools themselves are a credit. They’re given credit to operate as schools by accrediting agencies that are themselves accredited by the government to be able to make those accrediting gestures in the first place.

There’s a whole hierarchy of crediting here, and you don’t need to build them from scratch. They’re already here. What happens if you start thinking more in terms of a public service economy and thinking about an end aim being something like a Green New Deal that has a public service component and a job guarantee at the heart of it.

So why not start in kindergarten? Why not start in first grade, second grade and start to do little baby steps here? Literally almost. Babies are almost literally baby steps toward public service. It’s not just a matter of providing institutional credit that isn’t dollars, but institutional credit for service labor. That’s going to benefit the school; benefit the society around the school, the neighborhoods around the school. It’s not just a matter of doing that, but it’s also a matter of being creative along the way. I love this, and this was not me. I didn’t come up with this. It was another member of our organization.

I love this example so much. So, the idea that we propose is this: you start a program where grade schoolers are helping to clean up their classrooms and their hallways. Right? And you know what? They already do this in Japan, and they probably do this in some places in the United States. But it’s not as routinized as it is in Japan. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It’s incredible. Maybe the younger kids mostly take care of the immediate classroom and the hallways. But maybe the older kids are going off campus. They’re maintaining and beautifying the environment around their campus.

It doesn’t have to be just that. It can be any number of public service activities. I mean, it could be fun things. The sky’s the limit, right? But you’re providing various kinds of credit and that could be just your participation grade. It gets factored in your participation grade. Or it could be something more major, like, “here’s a certificate for a year’s worth of public service.” It could be any number of ways of accrediting and this such a cool idea as a specific idea, but as a model, it’s to me amazing.

So, if you’re having kids doing, let’s say, what might count as janitorial work, right? Well, then what’s going on with the janitorial staff on campus? Well, the janitorial staff are the experts. They know what cleaning products work on which surfaces. You might think Windex is a good idea, but actually this other scrub is a good idea and use this kind of rag because this other kind of rag isn’t going to work. They have expertise. Why don’t we enlist the janitorial staff as pedagogues, as teachers who can teach, who can teach and help supervise and orchestrate this kind of work. The next part we do with a nod to the Mamdani campaign which is promising to reclassify preschool teachers as teachers that will give them the dignity of a certain status with certain kinds of benefits. I don’t know the ins and outs of it; I just know the basic move that they’re trying to make. What if, as part of this reorganization of crediting public service work, we change the designation and give a new kind of credit to janitorial staff? Now the janitorial staff are teachers and maybe the culinary staff, like the people who work in the cafeteria, maybe they get to be pedagogues, too and they’re teaching. They’re teaching cooking and place setting and cleaning up after everybody dines. What does that do? That can raise the pay, that can create certain kinds of tenure benefits for janitorial and cooking staff.

Suddenly you’re conferring new kinds of dignity, new kinds of credit in an institution that’s already enduring and powerful that a lot of people in society really, really value. They value the fact that they have these public schools, which are free, and they can trust to send their children to even though we’re in the midst of them being increasingly defunded, etc.

So, what would it mean to build up a scenario like that? To be transvaluing the people who participate along the way and essentially recreating the class structure that’s built into our public school system at the present. Then we can start thinking about, “if we’re taxing, we’re issuing bonds, and what if we’re creating a public banking system and opening up our higher power dollar balances at the same time.” If we’re working on that horizon at the same time, then we could start talking about a job guarantee at the level of the city.

So maybe that starts out of the school system, as there’s a teen unemployment crisis around the country right now, and there’s definitely one in New York City that they’re very aware of. What if you start a pilot job guarantee for whoever qualifies as the most vulnerable of teens in New York City? You start there.

You see how it goes. Maybe there’s a path to post-graduation employment. Maybe that path is subsidized. Maybe it’s in the public sector. Maybe it’s with nonprofits, with the public sector, supplementing the salaries for a certain amount of time or in perpetuity for these jobs. Then from there, maybe you expand it to all teens, whatever it is, 16- to 18-year-olds, or whatever we want to decide it’s going to be. 16- to 18-year-olds in New York City are guaranteed a public job.

Then from there you start piloting, opening it up to more and more people and then once you’re really rolling, it becomes a citywide job guarantee organized toward the goals of social justice, inclusion, community building and green sustainability. To me, and I’m saying this because I didn’t write this part of the document, that is such a powerful vision of not just what’s possible, like in a particular sector, but for what’s possible in general.

I think what we were talking about before with the Zetro card and coalition credits is equally a part of this project. But I do think that the education model might speak or might light up imaginations for certain people precisely because these feel like long existing stable institutions can support it, without having to build it from the ground up. Not that I’m opposed to building from the ground up either.

Will Beaman

I’m salivating listening to that. That’s amazing. It occurs to me that this also resonates in a really interesting way with a theme of this campaign and the very contested discourse which is another institutional logic of carcerality and the way that a lot of how Mamdani has framed his reforms to the police state is in terms of, “well, police fight violent crime, they’re not they shouldn’t be social workers. That’s not fair to expect of them.” Of course, we should say that there’s tons of really important work and thinking and activism around creeping carceral logics that are present within the school system. So I don’t want to oppose them as institutions that are lived in, but the vision of schooling that you are referring to as one that views pedagogy in such a broad way that it enfolds a lot of work that people do as also being pedagogical work, sits alongside this other discourse that we’ve been having, which is how the solution to everything is to arrest people and put them in prisons. It’s interesting because I think this is another case where there’s sort of subtle discourse already happening about classification, which of course ties back to our earlier conversation about valuing assets and the dignity that attention to some of the pedagogy that everybody in a school setting is participating in, which is often subsumed or erased by this fraught and racialized imaginary of care work that is invisible, “but I don’t know who’s around my kids” and all of that kind of stuff. This is, to me, a different way of conceiving care as pedagogy, I love it. I’m all about it.

Scott Ferguson

We should probably also say something about, strategic area three of the document: “Creating Public Alternatives to Commercial Banking and Payments.” We are supporters of the public banking movement. We’ve been outspoken supporters at the federal level. Of The Public Banking Act. This kind of politics of public banking should be taken to the state or municipal level.

We’re not alone in this. There’s a whole public banking movement that also is interested in this as well. Connected to this is also developing a public payment system, what has been dubbed like a public Venmo. We’re really following a friend of the show, Robert Hockett, Cornell law professor who has worked with various politicians at the state level in New York and has written legislation that has not passed yet but has been proposed several times. So, we’re really piggybacking on Hackett’s work and all the supporters of Hackett’s work to create public banking and to create these public payment systems. In the research that we did, it seems like even though this was all proposed at the state level. By the way, Mamdani has, as an official, supported those. This is not news to Mamdani.

Will Beaman

The horizon of it might be news, the horizon that we want to do and how it leads to a complementary currency and all of that.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah, exactly. In our research, it seems like there’s a possibility in which you don’t have to get Albany fully on board for the full bill for establishing a New York state public banking system. You would only need Albany to add an amendment to a specific clause in state law, which essentially bars corporations from acting as banks and the amendment would just be, you know, “except for New York City’s public bank.” It would just exempt it. That still would be a fight. If you had the “tax the rich” energy behind that fight, then that fight might be winnable. What happens when you have a public bank? 

Well suddenly you can bank all the unbanked people. You can push the private industries that are currently serving and exploiting those people, like the payday lending industry and the credit card industry, who are taking these vulnerable people who don’t have money and don’t have banking resources, and charging them through the nose with high interest rates that they cannot afford.

To have a public bank, you can immediately include people who have been excluded. You can also create a whole system of public investment that is predicated on low or no interest loans, and we’d have to look into the legality of all this. The major requirements for the loans are primarily to realize specific qualitative social and ecological goals. If you realize those goals, then you can continue to get low or no interest loans from the public bank. So you can democratize and socialize investment in that way while pushing out exploitative, private financial firms. Then the payments system side of this also has been developed as a legal framework by Robert Hockett, again at the state level.

If you’re pursuing a public bank at the level of New York City, you then will have the legal framework that opens up the possibility of creating a payment system as well. It can be digital. It can work through an app. Our colleague, Rowan Gray, is really interested in something that’s called e cash. This allows for digital payments to work with the kind of anonymity and privacy protection that traditional paper note and middle coin cash does. You can experiment in all kinds of different ways with this.

It doesn’t have to just look like a Venmo app. I mean, that could be one interface, but it could be any number of things. This puts pressure on credit card companies. I actually think —  to speak slightly like a Marxist —  I actually think that this would be extremely attractive to the petty bourgeoisie, you know, mom and pop bodega owner.

Will Beaman

I was just going to say, as we’re recording, there was a really fun, cool speech that he gave with an organization representing bodegas.

Scott Ferguson

People who run businesses in the city who are not major corporations. They are sacked with transaction fees left and right by Visa, Mastercard, etc., etc. and they hate it. My late father in law, he didn’t live in New York City, he lived in a small town in Iowa, but he had a small shop. He was a shoe repairman and sold clothing as well. He hated the credit card companies. No, he was no progressive or radical or anything, but I could totally see him going like, “oh, wow. Yeah, I can just have an electronic payment system in my store, and I don’t have to pay more for it or charge customers more for it. Sign me up.” This is just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, there’s so much that you can do and there’s so much that can be changed and so much collective fiscal capacity that could be unlocked if we pursue a citywide public banking and payment system.

Billy Saas

That’s excellent. I think it’s a good place to leave it.

Will Beaman

Thank you so much.

Billy Saas

Listeners, you can check out all of this stuff we’ve been talking about on Money on the Left dot org and also on Monthly Review Online.

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


Money on the Left

Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City

Summary

This document elaborates an emerging economic paradigm that is already latent in Zohran Mamdani’s plans and practices. The paradigm, which we call Democratic Public Finance (DPF), reframes money as an inexhaustible and malleable public institution. According to DPF, money is public credit, a capacious tool for mobilizing everyone’s capacities to meet our needs and build a desirable future. Contrary to economic orthodoxy, this paradigm redefines politics as the process of coordinating our abundant human and material resources within ecological limits, rather than exploitative competition for scarce funds. DPF is the process of making collective capacities visible, organizing them democratically, and enabling us to care for each other. Understood in this way, DPF discloses previously invisible possibilities for communal well-being and denaturalizes the impoverished suppositions that legitimize fiscal obstruction by establishment liberals, conservatives, and right-wing demagogues alike.

Mamdani has already displayed unparalleled political expertise in debunking myths about public spending. We build on this expertise, equipping the mayoralty with tools to openly and comprehensively challenge what we call Neoliberal Public Finance (NPF). NPF is an ideology and governance practice built on the false premise that money is a scarce private resource. NPF stages politics as a zero-sum game, assuming that communities can only deploy their capacities if they acquire money from taxpayers and bondholders. Undermining robust fiscal programs, NPF devalues extant collective capacities and obscures New York City’s potentials. The result not only validates ongoing neoliberal austerity, but also enables the right-wing destruction of public services and the expulsion of vulnerable persons from the country and its institutions. Ultimately, NPF serves as a consistent excuse for inaction, leaving genuine democratic projects vulnerable to fiscal sabotage.

In what follows, we outline four strategies for the Mamdani mayoralty to consider. All four strategies are grounded in current proposals advanced by the Mamdani team. Each strategy is designed to advance inclusive democratic projects, while undermining the political legitimacy of manufactured crises perpetuated by establishment Democrats and the Trump administration:

1. Reframing Debt and Taxation: Reframes current taxation and debt limits as not only arbitrary, but also as irresponsible limits on what we can do for our communities. The aim is to publicly explain and contest current rules about municipal debt and taxation, highlighting how the rhetoric of money scarcity devalues workers’ actual and potential contributions.

2. Mobilizing People Differently: Expands the public sector by using multiple forms of credit, particularly within the public school system, to create a culture of public service and a pipeline to a citywide Job Guarantee program.

3. Creating Public Banking and Payments Infrastructure: Establishes municipal-level public banking and a “Public Venmo” to democratize finance, serve the unbanked, and build a resilient local economy independent of Wall Street and insulated from federal political volatility.

4. Challenging Deep Legal Structures: Commences a long-term contestation of foundational laws at the municipal, state, and federal levels (e.g., balanced budget amendments), which legally enforce NPF’s austerity logic.

The document concludes with a bibliography, which provides the theoretical and historical foundations for the principles of DPF outlined in this proposal.

* See here for a PDF version of this document.

Introduction: From Neoliberal to Democratic Public Finance

Across the political spectrum, most people still believe that the U.S. economy is governed by immutable laws of supply and demand. On this logic, unemployment, rising rents, or scarcity of public goods are natural outcomes, not political choices. This market-centric worldview gives rise to misdiagnoses of social problems. Worse, it tends to validate pathological solutions that do far more harm than good. Take the oft-repeated notion that deporting migrants will “free up” jobs and homes. Such ideas not only justify ongoing state violence; they also mask the real challenge at issue: overcoming our collective misunderstanding of public finance so that we can openly care for our communities and planet.

The present text argues that a robust response to the ills of market ideology requires cultivating shared knowledge about the political constitution of money. When communities grasp money as a contestable form of collective organization, large-scale public jobs and housing programs become eminently possible. Once this knowledge is widely shared, “illegal migration” no longer appears as a problem. Responding to establishment handwringing and right-wing cruelty becomes an opportunity to build a democratic and inclusive future.

This document argues that building a just future requires shifting from the reigning ideology of Neoliberal Public Finance (NPF) to Democratic Public Finance (DPF). NPF constrains democratic possibilities by perpetuating the idea that money is always private, uncontrollable, and scarce. If money is scarce, so too are housing or jobs. NPF seems natural and almost unassailable, both as law and as a mode of framing collective life. It underwrites the neoliberal habit of acquiescence, which trains politicians and publics to treat fiscal sabotage as an impersonal event to be managed, not contested.

DPF, by contrast, asserts that money is an unlimited and disputable public good which can always be reorganized to serve people and the environment. For DPF, money is an inexhaustible institution, involving an always-ongoing and deeply public process through which societies mobilize their capacities and create their future. Imagine a city where public banks extend zero-interest credit to retrofit housing, or where a Job Guarantee program is financed through democratic credit issuance. This is the vision of DPF: not scarcity, but capacity; not limits, but collective potential.

A centuries-old tradition of legal and economic knowledge stands ready to support DPF: the credit theory of money. The credit theory of money demonstrates that when a governing institution issues or spends money, it credits the receiver, and records it as a debit in its books. Later, money can return to the issuer in payment of fines, dues, taxes, or other payments. When it does, the issuer credits itself and erases the debit. After its creation and before its return to the issuer and eventual erasure, money can mediate activities among money users. This is the crux of the credit theory: Money is the process of its creation, transmission, and final deletion. The credit theory of money could also be called the “monetary theory of credit” because it emphasizes that money is credit and credit, money. Therefore, this document will use “money” and “credit” interchangeably.

If money is the ongoing process of issuing and deleting credits, it cannot be solely understood as an inert quantity that reflects past accomplishments. Money cannot be something we need to hoard to create a livable future. And it certainly cannot be scarce unless we make it so. Money is, instead, the world-making act of crediting those actors who construct the future.

As a crediting operation, money involves record keeping: the issuer notes credits on a ledger (analog or digital); it can also issue tokens such as coins or banknotes that have served as “distributed ledgers” for millennia. The form money takes is secondary. No technological innovation can displace its essence, even as it constitutively shapes its operations and scope. All money is credit; all money, always, is an operation where crediting someone’s balance sheet means recording a debit on someone else’s. All money is orchestrated by a public entity situated at the center of a collectivity. In the United States and its predecessor polities, a wide range of actors, including colonies, states, and the federal government, but also municipalities and commercial entities such as banks, have operated ledgers, activating the capacities of millions of people. The economic situation in which we find ourselves currently—defined by myriad atrocities as well as capabilities—is the outcome of a long history of crediting operations.

These crediting operations never occur at random. All money, without exception, is a function of political design, as the legal scholar Christine Desan has pointed out. In everyday practice, some actors, but not others, are authorized to operate our crediting facilities, according to rules that govern for what purposes, and for whom, they can do so. How we answer the questions of monetary design is how the future takes shape. Thus DPF must name current rules, engage them, and propose avenues for democratic change. Just as exclusionary crediting patterns under the redlining scheme created a segregated housing sector, inclusive forms of money will make a just and inclusive world.

Readers of this document may recognize elements of DPF in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which has gained traction among progressive economists and challenged neoliberal assumptions about the federal budget. MMT rightly insists that the federal government, as a currency issuer, can never “run out” of money, and that many forms of human suffering—unemployment, lack of housing, and other unmet needs—result from artificial budget constraints. This document, however, presents Democratic Public Finance (DPF) as a broader political framework than MMT alone. Whereas MMT typically centers the federal government’s capacity to issue currency, DPF reframes all levels of collective life—federal, state, city—as potential sites of monetary transformation.

DPF builds on MMT’s insights but pushes further: it sees money not just as a federal tool but as a design system embedded in law and governance at every level. It asks how public credit can be mobilized even within existing constraints—and how those constraints themselves can be named, politicized, and changed.

Contrary to conventional treatments of MMT, which often focus on technical truths about sovereign currency issuance, DPF is a form of democratic participation. It becomes a way of seeing, naming, and expanding what is possible, not only fiscally, but also politically. At the city level, this means exploring how to expand crediting capacity through public banking, rethinking debt rules, and transforming public service employment, all as part of a broader struggle over the meaning and purpose of money itself.

First, DPF reframes collective life as an open-ended crediting process that occurs at all levels, including the municipal. DPF refuses to accept the premise of money scarcity, and always looks for creative ways of crediting those who need it most.

Second, DPF is a mode of knowing the world differently: It is the process of learning about our capacities, possibilities, and needs.

Third, DPF is the process of naming the current rules of monetary design while rejecting the neoliberal premises that underlie it. With this, DPF challenges their status as a hard limit and static constraint. To this end, DPF advances and enhances multiple crediting institutions to mobilize people.

A DPF-informed challenge to NPF’s money scarcity logic can deepen the transformative impact of Zohran Mamdani’s vision.

The Mamdani team already undermines NPF and has taken important steps toward DPF. When it denounces current debt rules as arbitrary, it challenges NPF. When it highlights the city’s vast and diverse resources—from public sector assets to workers’ capacities—it undermines NPF. When it creates a sense of collective possibilities and responsibility, it undermines NPF. When it frames prices as a multifaceted political problem grounded in law, it undermines NPF’s core tenet that prices can be an apolitical market outcome if the public sector does not “interfere.” When Mamdani highlights the city’s vast unmet needs, from housing and childcare to food, and proposes feasible solutions for making life affordable, it makes economic life legible as a changeable provisioning system. These highly popular challenges to neoliberal orthodoxy have validated and strengthened forms of collective knowledge that are uniquely suited for advancing DPF.

At present, Mamdani’s agenda challenges some features of NPF, such as its extension of municipality bond issuance to fund public housing. Rhetorically, however, he has not fully broken with NPF’s scarce money framing. This choice, of course, has a number of advantages. Above all, it enables Mamdani to focus on specific city projects and programs without introducing unfamiliar and potentially challenging ideas about public finance. That said, leaving NPF undisputed also has significant drawbacks. For such reasons, we urge the Mamdani mayoralty to go much further.

There are at least five reasons why leaving NPF largely intact damages Mamdani’s program for NYC. First, when we allow the appearance of money scarcity to persist, current human capacities and biophysical resources can appear secondary to money’s availability, and potentially redundant. For instance, unemployed people can appear as a burden to the public purse and a cost to deserving taxpayers, not a tragic instance of exclusion and lost capacity that could be mobilized by credit creation.

Second, when money can continue to appear scarce, there is a tendency to see politics as the process of groups vying for scarce public outlays, rather than a future-oriented democratic coordination of capacities for the common good. Thereby, NPF plays down people’s actual and potential contributions, creates fertile ground for exclusion, and distracts from a present that demands world-making.

Third, when money seems limited, taxpayers and bondholders can continue to present themselves as the center of political debate because we seem to depend on their money. It gives the voices of those who present themselves as taxpayers and bondholders special legitimacy as the alleged source of public financing, while of course disempowering everyone else. Instead of people who can presently claim certain assets, they are presented as the only geese that lay the golden eggs. They are those who ultimately pay. They are the pillars of the community on whose shoulders our collective welfare rests. Or, so we are told.

Fourth, leaving the assumption of money scarcity intact helps eclipse monetary design questions. Because money appears as a scarce quantity, not a political process of crediting and debiting, the rules that govern its issuance become less legible. This eclipsing shrinks the space of political possibilities because it becomes difficult to develop a widely shared language for public banking or a public payments system as a possibility within reach, just as urgent as freezing rents or expanding public childcare, and with potential effects that go beyond a single sector.

Fifth, when monetary capacity is regarded as a delimited resource, it induces political paralysis. Neoliberal ideology dictates that a democracy with tremendous organizational and productive capacity must nevertheless be held hostage by the veto power of private money holders. In countless scenarios, when talented organizers are ready, coalitional energy is real, and the democratic appetite for change is present, the dominant political imagination consistently stalls at the threshold of private investors. The assumption that only billionaires or suburban taxpayers can provision democracy has become so entrenched that it is easier to imagine acquiescing to authoritarianism than bypassing this veto.

In sum, NPF makes collective capacities less legible or appear redundant; it spells exclusion, enforces unjust hierarchies, and sabotages political action. NPF is an unjust past’s best bet to extend itself into the future, but DPF is here to say it has overstayed its welcome. If NPF says No, we can’t!, DPF asks What do we wish to accomplish together? DPF involves collective decision-making about how we want to live and work in community based on an accurate understanding of money as a world-making public institution.

This document sketches four areas through which NYC can maximally expand crediting operations to its residents as it engages current rules, mobilizes people’s capacities democratically, and builds empowering forms of economic knowledge. Each of these areas can stand on its own; together, they constitute a broad challenge to NPF. Individually, reframing each area can extend municipal crediting operations. If one of the areas for action falls short, then controversies about it nonetheless contribute to the overall goal of undermining NPF. DPF can still be advanced in the other areas. In addition, many of the anticipated gains are not easily reversed.

The core message is: Money is a malleable public institution we use so people can serve one another. This message must come through in practice, not as a doctrine but a reframing of politics that touches most areas of public life—a constant challenge to NPF. NPF must be addressed, not as a static limit or a hard constraint but a series of politically created chokepoints that currently limit what we can do for each other.

The remainder of this document outlines four strategic domains where DPF principles can be operationalized in NYC. Each area demonstrates how rethinking monetary design can unlock democratic possibilities and challenge the assumptions of NPF.

The four strategic areas we cover include:

  1. Reframing Debt Issuance and Taxation
  2. Mobilizing People Differently: Public Sector Expansion, the Public School System, and the Multiplicity of Credits
  3. Creating Public Banking and Payments Infrastructure
  4. Challenging the deep structure of neoliberal finance in municipal, state & federal law

1. Reframing Debt Issuance & Taxation

The premise of this section is simple but robust: To advance DPF and deepen its challenge to NPF, Mamdani can reframe current taxation and debt limits as both arbitrary and irresponsible constraints. Mamdani can explain the current rules about municipal taxation and debt and emphasize how illusions of money scarcity devalue workers’ actual and potential contributions. Mamdani has much to gain, and little to lose, from connecting people’s capacities to the monetary chokepoints that are currently obstacles to mobilizing them fully.

This is the message: The rules of NPF prevent the city from democratically mobilizing people to accomplish urgent tasks. NPF hurts people who need support and limits democratic decision-making about the city’s priorities. It limits what we can do for each other. We have the people.  We have the needs. Let us cooperate and build: fast and free buses, affordable childcare, and public grocery stores. Do not sabotage our ambitions through NPF. Don’t be reckless.

This perspective also allows Mamdani to connect ICE (and other harmful public organizations) to the problem of collective provisioning. ICE takes away potentially useful people, who in turn become violence workers to deport people who are contributing in many ways and want to continue doing so. This is not only cruel; it also destroys important webs of social provisioning. Ours is the work of care against the work of violence. Ours is the work of creating future generations versus the work of destroying livelihoods, erasing contributions, and creating suffering. It is the call of the “manosphere” versus the call of care. The NPF budgetary chokepoint and ICE are similar: both represent a reckless sabotage of production and a foolish, uncaring disruption. Countering sabotage and destruction could include creating good job options for people who might consider becoming ICE agents.

The messaging about taxation could be modified along these lines: We presently have to tax the rich to mobilize our labor, but that does not take away from the fact that we are doing the work ourselves. Taxing the rich is good for democracy and necessary for keeping the city’s dollar balances up under current rules, but it ought not limit what we can achieve together. People’s capacities and needs are at the center of the political universe, not taxpayer’s bank accounts. When someone says, “Mamdani thinks there is a Santa,” we should respond with: “We are our own Santa.” When someone says, “By increasing taxes, you are chasing the goose that lays the gilded eggs,” the answer is: “We lay our own eggs.”

Bond issuance practices and messaging can also be modified in this spirit. For instance, the city government could organize bond drives at advantageous rates. It is reasonable to believe there would be subscribers far beyond NYC because of the city’s central place in the global political imaginary and its potential to become a model for transformative change. Many people who donate to blue campaigns might buy such bonds. Instead of donating to campaigns, people would be investing in city infrastructure, and the line between donations and bonds could become blurred. The message could be: We need bond drives, and we are grateful to subscribers who help us minimize pressure on the budget. At the same time, it is us who do the work, and it is us who coordinate our efforts. People’s capacities, skills, and resources precede the dollar balances created by bond sales. This is similar in spirit to war bond drives, even if the context and purpose is distinct: While public discourse valued subscribers, no one doubted who was really going to war. Bond issuance coupled with political messaging has the further advantage of tying asset ownership to a political project. Unlike donations, owning a bond forges a longer-term connection.

There are also strategic advantages to deepening Mamdani’s challenge to NPF. First, a DPF reframing allows the city government to reject the unpopular role of austerity manager. Second, it allows the city to put pressure on those who could attempt to enforce NPF, while staying on message about New Yorkers’ capacities, resources, and needs. Third, not engaging the assumptions of NPF while making “hard choices” means re-anchoring the fictitious chokepoint at the center of collective life, which necessarily implies devaluing the potential contributions and collective resources that could be mobilized to meet urgent needs.

Unless NPF assumptions are challenged head-on, they are bound to shape how the city’s capacities, resources, and agency become legible. Unless NPF assumptions are rejected explicitly, capacities and democratic processes appear downstream from “finding the money.” Even if it can never fully erase an awareness of actual possibilities on the ground, NPF makes people’s capacities seem redundant and solutions appear utopian when they are at arm’s reach.

A DPF reframing of taxation and bond issuance marks a departure from typical progressive discourse, which does not challenge the NPF idea of a monetary chokehold, either taking it for granted or considering the legal forms NPF takes as unchallengeable. These are the typical reasons given for not challenging the money scarcity tenet: It sounds reasonable and plausible to politicians, economists, and other members of the public. Because neoliberal claims about money scarcity are ubiquitous, how to persuade the public is an open question. It might also appear pointless at the municipal level: Given how entrenched NPF as law and frame, why bother with ideas that seem out of reach? Finally, adding another contentious issue to an already bold political project could strain resources.

These objections should be weighed carefully. At the same time, it is important to note that the emphasis on actual capacities of workers is already at the core of Mamdani’s vision, that the shift to a DPF framing can be accomplished gradually and at first, almost imperceptibly. It does not rely on declaring “We are all municipal MMTers now.” And it can leave a lasting impression with important implications for future politics: “Do you remember the mayor who consistently said that our work can always be mobilized, that money is not the limit, that we should be able to mobilize our work democratically when we decide what we want to accomplish together?”

2. Mobilizing People Differently: Public Sector Expansion, the Public School System & the Multiplicity of Credits

The central claim of Area 2 is: A municipality that seeks to maximally expand its crediting operations ought to broaden its definition of money and explore complementary crediting tools. To this end, this section introduces the hierarchy of money and discusses its possibilities and limits using the example of educational systems and their crediting operations.

Not all money/credit is the same: This is the hierarchy of money. At the top is “high-powered money”—commercial banks’ balances with the central bank and federal fiscal appropriations. One step lower is the money in bank deposits—banks’ promise to exchange our balances for dollars at par on demand, or settle balances with other money users electronically. Commercial and governmental actors routinely combine such high-level dollars with lower-level credit systems: Airline miles, Starbucks gift cards, campus currencies, and gaming money are much farther down the hierarchy of money, yet they are immensely profitable and/or strategically useful for their issuers—the entities that issue them, regulate their use, and accept them back in payment to themselves.

The money question becomes multidimensional when lower-level crediting operations come into view. Governmental institutions ceaselessly issue credit, or accredit other institutions to do so in their stead: When the government doesn’t issue money, it charters banks to do so. When the public education sector does not issue credits or diplomas, DOE and other (DOE-accredited) accrediting agencies license private schools and universities that do the same. Governments also issue credits in the form of rebates for access to public facilities for certain groups (e.g. reduced entry fees for veterans). Finally, the public sector also maintains a broader legal system through which these public and commercial crediting systems can work. Collective life is a multifaceted crediting process, and politics is how we decide about the rules according to which this is done.

The Mamdani campaign’s Zetro card program illustrates how money functions as a social tool of credit to mobilize community labor and resources. During the campaign, the Mamdani team issued Zetro cards to volunteers, crediting them for their canvassing and organizing hours. These cards could then be redeemed for campaign merchandise. The system creates an effective monetary circuit for coordinating collective capacities. It demonstrates in real-time that we do not need to wait for scarce dollars to organize our collective capacities; we can institute our own systems of credit to acknowledge labor, foster community, and work toward a shared goal. The Zetro card, then, is not merely a clever organizing tactic; it is a living example of how we can build a more just and responsive economy from the ground up by understanding money as inexhaustible public credit.

As part of this logic, municipal governments ought to fully exploit the multiplicity of crediting possibilities, and deploy it in tandem with high-level dollars. Lower-level crediting systems, such as those deployed in the education sector, are not subject to NPF chokepoints (even if curved grading echoes NPF’s artificial scarcity). While they are distinct from dollars, at scale, they are a powerful means of mobilizing, valuing, rewarding and developing capacities and people and can be used to complement dollar expenses.

The logic of this section can be illustrated through the example of a decades-old summer camp in upstate New York, where returning campers, as they grow older and become more experienced, are gradually integrated into the supervising/instructional framework through several crediting systems. At first, campers earn badges for tasks accomplished (similar to scout ranks). At age 13, they can become Counselors-in-Training (CITs) who assist Counselors in some tasks. Now, they are already credited in the sense that their tuition is reduced and they can claim credit for their work on their CV. When they turn 16, CITs can apply to become Counselors, and become responsible for a group. This is a full summer job with dual crediting in dollars and work experience; they no longer pay tuition. Later, they can become specialized instructors, lifeguards, etc., with increasing dollar-denominated credit. At each step, they are credited in multiple ways and trained for the next step. While employment may not be guaranteed, there is a strong expectation that there is already a place for everyone who wants a job. This is a well-thought-out system that, at a small scale, captures the logic of a public education system that can expand into a larger public sector.

Outside of summer camps, the logic of dual crediting is ubiquitous in the process of “CV building”: For instance, as interns, people receive a mix of credit for work done and a modest wage; as professionals, people get “credit” for a job done (a line on the CV), and are credited in dollars. All educational systems, public and private, operate with multiple forms of credits and debits: For instance, higher education and research systems issue course credits, degrees, diplomas, awards and recognitions at all levels. They recognize “as credit” work experience, and at higher levels recognize and demand qualitative or quantitative evidence of merit, such as peer-reviewed publications. At the apex, the creditors themselves need to be credentialled (e.g., the higher education accreditation systems). In tandem with these multiple crediting systems, educational institutions rely on and administer a crediting/debiting system denominated in dollars that involves tuition, government funding, donations, fees and fines, and outlays of all kinds, e.g. as salaries for instructors or administrators. Educational systems manage the interaction of multiple crediting systems which situate them in broader social relations: Education functions because internal credits (e.g. diplomas) are recognized outside.

This section proposes expanding and formalizing the logic of multiple crediting systems, and making it part of a public sector expansion at the scale of the city. “Internal” credits can serve as an auxiliary engine to the dollar crediting system. Lower-level credit does not replace an engagement with NPF at the higher levels of money, but it makes the higher-level dollars more impactful and helps create a dynamic in which DPF can thrive and NPF becomes more implausible.

Imagine this sequence of crediting operations in which the summer camp serves as a model for combined “internal” educational and “external” dollar credit: Elementary and middle school students can become used to the idea of public service early on, for instance by involving them in custodial tasks, food preparation, or gardening for one period per day. There is successful precedent for this in Japan, and there are similar, and popular, programs in many schools in the U.S. today, e.g. when older elementary school students help teachers with the youngest. Custodians and cooks, on the model of home economics teachers, could become part of the academic staff; that is, they would be recognized as teachers. In addition to performing tasks that are unsuitable for students, they would manage and supervise students in collaboration with school leadership and other teachers.

At this early stage, students would be credited with grades (e.g. conduct grades) and through a credit/rewards system such as ice cream credits from nearby stores (a practice that already exists). Using educational credits to mobilize students in this way would have many desirable effects: If the spirit of public service is already present in kindergarten, students think of themselves less as passive consumers of educational services and more as active participants in a public process. This could be the beginning of a generational experience of public service and collective responsibility.

It could also redefine custodians, kitchen staff, and their work: They are already doing pedagogical work when they instruct students about how to dispose of waste etc., but they are at a disadvantage as long as they are not formally defined as teachers. This redefinition of workers is similar to the proposed upgrading of childcare workers to teacher status, an (ac)crediting operation that involves a higher salary but is not limited to this form of credit. It is worth noting that school districts have experience onboarding workers from “other” professions. It is also worth noting that, once this is accomplished, it is difficult to undo: If hundreds of custodians have been defined as teachers, they have contracts, union representation, etc.

In a context of a teen unemployment crisis, such internal crediting systems could be complemented by a plural credit system that includes dollars and subsidized public-purpose employment with high school credit. Initially, this could be a small-scale teen employment pilot project for the least enfranchised teens. If employers retain workers at the end of the period, their salaries could be subsidized. This program could be gradually expanded to include all teens. It is important to note that this would have to go hand in hand with a growing public sector in all areas of life (on the model of the proposed childcare expansion, and as part of the public sector expansion such as the Department of Community Safety, prevention first, Community Mental Health Navigators, EMT, violence interrupters). Similar to High School ROTC, but in the radically distinct context of local public service, youth could become familiar with possible future roles as they transition from high school credits and summer internships to public service employment. As it grows, its popular support base will also grow, and it would become more difficult to undo (similar to Social Security). Eventually, this logic can lead to a citywide Job Guarantee.

Note that this logic is radically distinct from a range of other options. (1) This is not a mere expansion of monetary benefits (e.g. the Uruguay of the Frente Amplio government after 2005) because it would tie crediting operations not to a diagnosed need (lack of money) and present high-powered money, by itself, as a remedy; instead, it would deploy multiple crediting systems to integrate people into a democratizing economic life that fulfills needs. (2) It is even more radically distinct from neoliberal “Hail Mary” job market insertion programs that first train people and then abandon them. (3) Neither is it a New Deal-style temporary employment program: It goes hand in hand with a sustained and carefully planned public sector expansion. There are wins each step of the way, these wins are difficult to undo quickly or completely even if there is, say, an electoral defeat.

In sum, multiple crediting operations can drive a planned, gradual expansion of the public sector, a revaluation of different kinds of work, a mobilization of human capacities, and a pedagogical process that mimics, at the scale of New York City, the summer camp logic sketched above. This is the spirit of a Green New Deal at the scale of NYC and should be creatively extended across sectors.

In addition to reframing the budget process and developing already-existing lower-level crediting systems, a DPF strategy could challenge the corporate domination of banking and payments.

3. Creating Public Alternatives to Commercial Banking and Payments

This is the premise of Area 3: If crediting operations create the future, democratizing such operations is at the core of a more inclusive and just politics. Today, banking and payments are dominated by commercial banks, credit card companies, and payday lenders.

Recent New York legislative history offers bold solutions that can advance DPF in this context: The New York Public Banking Act (NYPB) and the Inclusive Value Ledger Act (IVL). The NYPB would establish a regulatory framework allowing New York municipalities to create their own public banks. These banks would be chartered to serve the public interest, not Wall Street, and could provide essential services like low-cost loans for public infrastructure, small businesses, and affordable housing. They would also provide a free, safe and surveillance-free place for New York residents to manage their money, thereby banking the unbanked.

This legal and institutional foundation will open the doors for the IVL, which would establish a public, digital payments system—a “Public Venmo”—for the entire state. The IVL would function as a public utility, offering every New Yorker a digital wallet connected to a state-controlled master account. This would enable no-cost, real-time payments between individuals and businesses, as well as with state entities for things like tax payments and benefits. This system would not only provide a no-fee alternative to commercial payment companies but could also be designed to recognize and reward public-purpose work, such as caregiving or community service, by delivering IVL credits directly into New Yorkers’ digital wallets.

Crucially, implementing an IVL does not have to wait for the passage of a comprehensive state-level bill. New York City could create its own city-wide IVL with a targeted amendment to State Banking Law § 131, which currently prohibits corporations from receiving deposits. This small but powerful legal tweak would explicitly exempt a New York City-operated Inclusive Value Ledger from this prohibition, allowing the city to provide a public payments system to its residents and businesses. This tactical approach would deliver a key component of DPF immediately and serve as a powerful proof-of-concept for the broader statewide campaign, deepening the connections between progressive NYC politics and statewide efforts.

Mamdani is uniquely positioned to make the aims of the NYPB and the IVL legible to a broader public. His strength lies in his ability to listen to communities and propose solutions that meet their needs, a talent that can be leveraged to demonstrate how these acts would serve the very programs Mamdani is already championing, such as public grocery stores. By weaving these previously obscure initiatives into a narrative of community empowerment, Mamdani can show how a new banking and payments system would broaden access to financial services to the unbanked, sideline exploitative corporations, and expand the city’s fiscal capacity. This system can be integrated with other initiatives to organize a robust people-first economy where transactions support public goods rather than private profits. Most importantly, by creating these new monetary institutions, Mamdani can mobilize labor and resources in innovative ways that directly address community needs, a core tenet of democratic public finance.

Building out state-level banking and payments systems are especially critical forms of regional resilience and resistance to the current political moment defined by the second Trump presidency. The current administration’s approach to public finance can be described as a radicalized form of neoliberalism, where austerity is not merely a de facto policy framework but an authoritarian directive. This is epitomized by the assertion of a unitary executive theory of money, where the President claims the unilateral right to impound—or simply refuse to spend—funds that Congress has appropriated. This unconstitutional power grab makes the federal fiscal process, but also previously “unpolitical” institutions such as the Automated Clearing House—vulnerable to a president who uses it to target political opponents and dismantle public programs. The aim is insulation from crisis bargaining: threats of shutdown, impoundment and legislative slow-walking lose their leverage when public payments continue uninterrupted. Pursuing state-level initiatives like public banking and payments systems offers a clear path to securing economic flourishing and self-determination for New Yorkers.

These bills cannot be revived and won overnight. But integrating the goals of these acts into a broader DPF narrative, Mamdani can make them not only socially meaningful, but also vital and exciting. The language and ideas we champion today shape what becomes imaginable tomorrow. Even if this struggle meets immediate resistance in Albany, it is crucial to shape the horizon in which the future will be contested. This proactive effort ensures that the conversation around public finance shifts from one of scarcity and austerity to one of collective capacity and possibility, laying the groundwork for a truly democratic financial system down the line.

4. Challenging the Deep Structure of Neoliberal Finance in Municipal, State & Federal Law

To fully realize DPF, we must dismantle the foundational legal and ideological structures that uphold NPF. These deep-seated frameworks, often embedded in federal and state constitutions, represent the most formidable obstacles to transformative change. To leave them unchallenged in political discourse is to tacitly accept their premises of money scarcity and austerity, thereby limiting what is perceived as politically possible. While some of these deep structures were implemented during the neoliberal period, which began in the 1970s, others are rooted in the long history of the United States and owe to the anti-democratic impulses in the Enlightenment philosophy that informed the writing of the U.S. Constitution. Our goal is to expose these legal and ideological chokepoints not as unchangeable facts but as a political terrain to be contested, creating a pathway for long-term reform.

The core of NPF is a legal hierarchy that prioritizes private financial institutions over public bodies, especially at the state and municipal levels. The hierarchy consists of two basic, mutually reinforcing, structures. The first part of this structure is the legal framework that grants corporate banks the power to create credit, a privilege legal scholars Robert C. Hockett and Saule T. Omarova call the “finance franchise.” The second part constrains sub-federal public entities with balanced budget rules and limited powers of taxation and debt issuance. This system fosters a negative feedback loop where public entities, starved of democratic financing tools, are forced into a politics of austerity, while private markets are prone to credit-fueled bubbles.

The effort to challenge these deep structures must focus on two key areas: (a) sub-federal constitutional and legal constraints, and (b) federal constitutional and appropriations law.

(a) Overcoming Sub-Federal Constraints: At the state and municipal level, NPF is largely enshrined in balanced budget requirements and other fiscal rules. Such rules, often embedded in state constitutions, make it difficult for cities like New York to respond to the needs of their residents without resorting to regressive taxes or market-dependent borrowing. Mamdani must frame these constraints not as a sign of fiscal prudence but as a form of social and ecological irresponsibility, preventing the city from mobilizing its vast human and material resources to address urgent needs. Balanced-budget rules function as pre-installed political levers that can be yanked to break progressive coalitions when livelihoods and essential services hang in the balance.

While changing state constitutions is a long and arduous process, involving methods like legislatively referred amendments, citizen initiatives, or constitutional conventions, the conversation must begin now. By consistently highlighting how balanced budget amendments and other rules impede the city’s ability to serve its people, Mamdani can build public support for a future where these rules are challenged and ultimately transformed.

(b) Reforming the Federal Financial Architecture: The federal level presents its own set of constitutional chokepoints. Article I, Section 10, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits states from coining money or emitting bills of credit, is a primary legal barrier to sub-federal monetary power. Furthermore, the federal appropriations and payment authorization process itself contains anti-democratic bottlenecks that leave it vulnerable to executive overreach. A unitary executive can weaponize the government’s centralized IT infrastructure to illegally impound funds, overriding Congress’s constitutional power of the purse.

To address these issues, a transformative agenda would require:

A New Constitutional Amendment: The ultimate goal is to amend the U.S. Constitution to extend the finance franchise to states and municipalities. This would grant them the power of credit creation, moving them from being mere borrowers and taxers to being active participants in DPF. This is not a call for an unregulated free-for-all, but rather a new, regulated system where sub-federal entities are empowered to create money under strict rules to promote social inclusion, environmental sustainability, and affordable pricing. A new federal agency would be needed to coordinate this process and prevent destructive competition among states and cities.

Modernizing the Appropriations Process: Following the blueprint laid out in legal scholar Rohan Grey’s paper “Digitizing the Fisc,” the federal appropriations process must be redesigned to be more democratic and resilient. Key proposals include:

A Congressional Fiscal Record: A digital database and ledger, managed by Congress, that records all public funds and spending directives.

A “Treasury ATM”: A centralized, secure terminal for agencies to withdraw newly issued digital currency (“eCoins”) directly from Congress’s authority, bypassing the traditional Treasury and Federal Reserve intermediaries and their associated political vulnerabilities.

Public Credit Cards: Congressionally-issued digital “keys” that define the legal and operational limits of an agency’s spending authority, ensuring that funds are used in accordance with legislative intent.

A Federated Federal Ledger: A decentralized record-keeping system that synchronizes agency-level data with Congress’s central ledger, increasing transparency and accountability while protecting against a unitary executive takeover.

By advocating for these changes, Mamdani would not only challenge NPF at its deepest legal and ideological roots but also lay the groundwork for a truly democratic financial system where money is a public utility used to mobilize people and resources for the common good. This approach redefines responsibility, shifting the focus from arbitrary budget rules to the well-being of people and the environment. It is worth noting that identifying problematic legal norms, including and the constitutional level, can in and of itself have important effects: For instance, the fact that the ERA has not been adopted remains a useful reminder of widespread opposition to women’s rights. Therefore, it has pedagogical effects that are important and make it a worthwhile cause regardless of when or whether it is adopted.

Conclusion

Without a doubt, Zohran Mamdani’s vision for New York City represents the most politically savvy and fiscally robust undertaking in decades. This document argues that Mamdani’s transformative vision can be further enhanced if it directly confronts the myth of money scarcity and frames our collective capacities as the source of shared prosperity. Democratic Public Finance at once delegitimizes and bypasses neoliberal sabotage from the center, as well as authoritarian subjugation and exclusion. Mamdani can move beyond a defensive debate over funding and offer a hopeful, coherent narrative that shapes what we can achieve together in new ways. It can also, potentially, help reshape the political landscape beyond New York City by modeling a different approach to fiscal policy and assisting other municipalities. Implementing the proposed strategies–reframing the budget, mobilizing people through lower-level forms of credit, creating public financial infrastructure, and challenging the deep legal structures of austerity–is a long-term struggle. But even when immediate victory is uncertain, the very act of publicly contesting these rules is vital because it shapes what becomes politically legible and achievable for future generations. This fight will ground Mamdani’s ambitious platform in a shared sense of purpose, forging a stronger community and a powerful mandate to build a truly democratic and prosperous New York City.

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Money on the Left8 Comments

The Case for Fiscal Insurgency

by Will Beaman

A common refrain keeps surfacing among prominent journalists- and commentators-in-digital-exile on BlueSky. Commenting on the emergence of yet another shadowy centrist think tank, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie observes: “Trump’s numbers are tanking and there is a palpable desire in the electorate for a real alternative and yet the only money in democratic politics is for doing Starmerism.” Tim Carvell, a writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, notes: “a legacy publication or a deep-pocketed investor could hire an astonishing array of talent right now and make the best newspaper in America overnight.” Ben Collins of The Onion puts it bluntly: “If you’re rich and not a coward, this is what you’d refer to as a ‘market opportunity’… to be a pop of color in a sea of beige will be easier than ever. People will flock to it. You gotta be a little brave, though.”

In every case, the structure is the same: capacity is there, but private money says no. Talented organizers, journalists, and public servants are ready. Coalitional energy is real. Democratic desire is present. But political imagination stalls at the threshold of private investment. The assumption that only billionaires or suburban taxpayers can provision democracy has become so entrenched that it is easier to imagine acquiescing to authoritarianism than bypassing this veto.

Such resignation marks the disgrace of our present moment. We live in a democracy with boundless capacity, yet it is held hostage—openly and in bad faith—by private money and the austerity habits it demands. If democracy fails, it will not be because the public’s appetite was absent, but because we accepted private money’s “no” at face value. Even when the mask has long since slipped, and the idea that “the market” demands austerity is a bad joke.

The Neoliberal Habit of Acquiescence

This is the reflex Trump has hijacked. His sabotage of institutions works not only through brute force, but through the learned helplessness that neoliberal governance has drilled into liberals and even leftists for decades. For nearly half a century, Democrats have been told to treat fiscal sabotage as an impersonal event—something to adapt to, never contest. Capital flight, credit downgrades, and market volatility were cast not as acts of power but as external shocks demanding austerity management. Globalization was pitched in these terms: a sublime, external event beyond human governance, against which the only rational stance was flexibility and humility.

Trump exploits this governing reflex and turns it into spectacle. He models himself on the old specter of the “bond vigilante”: an actor so wealthy and unaccountable that he appears as a force of nature, bending governments to his will. Trump embodies that threat in human form, turning sabotage into a performance of independence. His violations of law and democratic norms are staged not as corruption, but as confirmation that he is beholden to no one.

When Democrats treat this as just another crisis to be managed, they recycle the very habit that neoliberalism instilled: the belief that adaptability in the face of sabotage is the essence of responsible governance. To accept private money’s veto is to naturalize political sabotage. What was once presented as adaptation to markets has become collaboration with authoritarianism.

Starmerism & The Private Investment Trap

If neoliberal governance made sabotage appear natural, today’s Democratic politics takes the lesson even further: it treats Trump’s bullying as the new horizon of fiscal life. What once appeared as the sublime discipline of “the market” has been unmasked as the unbounded whims of an increasingly fascistic group of billionaires, with Trump as their avatar. Yet Democrats continue to orient themselves as if nothing essential has changed—adapting to threats as though they were impersonal shocks, rather than deliberate acts of sabotage.

This is just Starmerism: a politics defined not by vision but by compliance, where electoral ambition shrinks to whatever billionaires, suburban taxpayers, or Trump’s manufactured crises will tolerate. The result is a politics of pre-emptive surrender: leaders advertising their moderation not in contrast to authoritarianism, but in deference to the veto power of money and the theater of sabotage. Meanwhile, the public appetite for immediacy is palpable. Each time a non-Trump timetable appears, the response is instant—as when Zohran Mamdani’s proto–public works scavenger hunt drew overwhelming participation. As I argued earlier in Money on the Left, people are not waiting for Trump’s next move; they are rehearsing a desire to be met.

Organizers and campaigns can mobilize small donors in unprecedented numbers, yet the infrastructure of long-term investment—media institutions, public communications, policy experimentation—remains chained to elites who are either hostile or indifferent. The most talented journalists in the country are between jobs, the most creative campaigns run on fumes, and state and city governments are left to administer austerity with nothing but temporary patches. Meanwhile, the only steady stream of cash in politics flows to projects of retrenchment: centrist think tanks, corporate-friendly candidates, and the staging grounds of sabotage.

This is not fiscal realism. It is self-inflicted austerity, the result of imagining sabotage itself as an inescapable condition of democratic life. The paradox of Starmerism is that it presents itself as pragmatic but is in fact the most utopian position of all: it assumes that billionaires and their enforcers can be persuaded to underwrite democracy, against all evidence.

The task now is to break free from this trap—not by waiting for private money to say yes, but by building circuits of democratic credit that bypass its veto altogether.

Even the migration to BlueSky, with its slower rhythms and sometimes too-earnest exchanges, is evidence to this point. Despite the notorious difficulties of platform migration in a socially embedded world, 39 million people have given BlueSky a shot. What this shows is a shockingly robust desire for a public sphere insulated from far right news cycles, where discourse as a public capacity is not dominated by reactionary slop. This is the same public desire that fiscal insurgency can meet—and much better than BlueSky does. A democratic timetable not dictated by private money’s veto or by authoritarian crackdowns, but by the courage to build and sustain public life directly.

That desire is not without precedent. At moments of democratic crisis in the past, Americans have built new circuits of credit and coordination to bypass elite vetoes.

Historical Precedents for Fiscal Insurgency

Insurgent credit has always been American democracy’s lifeblood, emerging time and again when all else fails.

The most famous example is the Greenback. During the Civil War, when private banks could not—or would not—provision the Union’s survival, the government issued its own money directly. These notes were not backed by gold or private wealth but by the promise of democratic governance. They bypassed the Jacksonian gold standard and private banking alike, and proved that fiscal capacity could be mobilized without elite consent. For a generation afterward, Greenbackers carried that lesson forward, insisting that democratic credit could fund not only war but schools, infrastructure, and social flourishing.

A similar logic returned in World War II. Faced with the need to mobilize resources on a scale without precedent, the U.S. government issued war bonds that transformed ordinary households into participants in the nation’s fiscal life. These bonds were not simply instruments of finance; they were instruments of mass coordination. Posters, rallies, and public campaigns framed bond-buying as an act of civic belonging, turning fiscal issuance into a cultural project. The war effort was provisioned not by waiting for private investment to return during the Great Depression, but by enrolling the public directly into circuits of democratic credit. 

Money on the Left’s “Blue Bonds” proposal updates this history for our own authoritarian crisis. Blue Bonds are a way for states and cities to issue credit directly in the form of a national bond drive that insulates democratic institutions from hostile federal sabotage. Their structure is the famous duck-rabbit illusion: they can appear as conventional borrowing duck within a neoliberal framework, or as a credit instrument rabbit that unlocks public capacity in a democratic framework. Either way, the effect is the same: institutions provision themselves and democracy writ large, bypassing the veto of billionaires and the sabotage of Trump.

In the same spirit, complementary currencies offer a local and coalition-based approach: unions, campaigns, and municipalities can provision one another directly, rehearsing democratic solidarity through circuits of receivability rather than dependence on hostile elites.

These experiments matter not because they are perfect or permanent, but because they reveal a principle: democracy does not have to wait on private money. At key moments, Americans have already built and lived within systems of public credit that bypassed entrenched vetoes. Today’s challenge is to remember that history and mobilize it—to see in Greenbacks, war bonds, Blue Bonds, and complementary currencies not oddities of fiscal history, but usable precedents for democratic survival.

Fiscal Insurgency as Public Endurance

Fiscal insurgency is not isolation. It is not about retreating into localism or walling off states from the national economy. It is about building protective circuits of credit that keep democratic life functioning even when sabotage is staged from above. Insulation means refusing to let billionaires or authoritarian actors dictate the terms of survival.

The Greenbacks insulated the Union from the constraints of the Jacksonian gold standard and private banking. World War II bonds insulated the war effort from failing private investment by activating public capacity directly. Blue Bonds extend this logic, creating coordinated fiscal capacity across states and cities that cannot be held hostage to federal obstruction. Complementary currencies, in turn, can provide insulation at the community level—allowing campaigns, unions, and municipalities to sustain each other when donor strikes or hostile legislatures attempt to cut them off.

What unites these experiments is their orientation toward endurance. They do not dissolve political conflict, though they do reveal markets to be corrupt betting institutions with often very little relation to our collective needs and capacities. Insulation means treating fiscal capacity as a public utility, not a private concession. It means provisioning schools, universities, media, and public works on terms that cannot be vetoed by billionaires or broken by Trump’s shakedowns.

To demand insulation, then, is not to run from political economy but to govern it—to make sure that democratic credit flows even when elites attempt to dam it. In this sense, fiscal insurgency is not only possible but necessary: it is how democracy is renewed.

Democracy or Acquiescence

The stakes are not a simple fork between two univocal paths. What is at issue are competing habits of orientation that press on institutions, coalitions, and publics all at once. Acquiescence registers sabotage as shock and awe and then mistakes that registration for reality—treating crises as external facts, measuring competence by austerity management, and advertising moderation in deference to oligarchs and dictators. These habits make collaborators out of people and institutions that imagine themselves merely adapting to circumstance.

Progressives are not exempt. Too often, they defer fiscal action to manufactured chokepoints: until national electoral victories return power to Democrats, until taxpayers can be persuaded to recycle their salaries into the state, until enlightened billionaires decide to bankroll media or infrastructure. Each deferral helps normalize acquiescence as realism, training institutions to accept sabotage as governance.

Yet when people crown an insurgent political campaign with star-power and charisma, participate in a playful scavenger hunt, or even migrate to slower platforms like BlueSky, they rehearse another orientation: one that insists capacity is abundant, desire is real, and democracy does not have to wait. These moments do not resolve into a single coherent path; they are plural rehearsals of another public life. Fiscal insurgency is how these scattered desires are enacted at a meaningful scale—how democratic improvisations become durable circuits of public credit.

The disgrace is not that Trump is strong, but that so many continue to bow before private money’s veto even as it is unmasked as blackmail and collusion. The task is to cultivate and extend the democratic reflex wherever it appears, multiplying its legibility, and provisioning the health of our democracy rather than allowing sabotage to dictate the terms of survival.

Say Yes

Bouie, Carvell, and Collins are right: the talent, energy, and capacity are already here. The organizers are ready, the journalists are waiting, the public appetite is palpable. What blocks the way is not imagination, but private money’s refusal—backed by a political culture that treats that refusal as final.

Fiscal insurgency is the way to break that habit. It is how we turn capacity into action without waiting for billionaire patronage or taxpayer permission slips. It is how we refuse the manufactured chokepoints that fracture coalitions and empower Trump. It is how we insulate democracy from sabotage long enough to renew it. That is all that endogenous money really is: the courage to issue it, met by a public capacity that has already rehearsed its legitimacy.

The refrain of our moment—capacity is there, but money says no—should no longer be a lament. It must become a call. Private money’s “no” is not natural, it is not inevitable, and it is not the last word. We have the precedents, we have the tools, and we have the urgency. What remains is to build the circuits of public credit that can say yes to democracy when private power will not.

Money on the Left4 Comments

It’s Time for Complementary Currencies

By the Money on the Left Editorial Collective

Introduction

Zohran Mamdani’s landslide win was not just a local upset—it was a turning point. It proved that member-led, volunteer-powered campaigns can defeat political dynasties even under conditions of national authoritarian drift. And now, others are lining up behind him. MN state Sen. Omar Fateh—another Democratic Socialist—won the local Democratic Party’s endorsement for Mayor of Minneapolis against three-term Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey. Kat Abughazaleh, a progressive digital commentator formerly affiliated with Media Matters, is winning major party endorsements for her congressional campaign in Illinois’s 9th District. More campaigns are getting ready. 

But the window is narrow, and the threat is clear. Donald Trump is terrified of an insurgent movement rising out of the cities he cannot control. His plan is to withhold federal funds, punish sanctuary cities, and weaponize austerity against local governments that refuse to comply. He wants mayors and city councils too scared to fund anything beyond police. And the Democratic establishment will go along with nearly all of it. The economic establishment will cheer it on in the name of fiscal moderation and pragmatism.

To meet this moment, we need new tactical registers–new tools for organizing local capacities and coordinating them at scale.

What follows is not a singular proposal. It is a framework for coordinating, scaling and financing the work that so many organizers do for free. A shared practice of issuing and receiving credit in solidarity—between campaigns, between cities, between institutions willing to govern together. We do not need to wait for reactionary statehouses or federal financing to tell us what’s possible. We can build systems of solidarity and accountability that scale without sovereignty.

Mamdani’s campaign did not simply win—it ran a logistical operation, coordinated policy development, and cared for people. Fifty thousand volunteers who didn’t beg for permission got organized.

To understand how we can scale up that infrastructure, we need to first understand the tool: complementary currencies.

What Are Complementary Currencies?

Complementary currencies are locally issued forms of credit that supplement and expand the currencies we think of as “official”. When imagined alongside the dollar rather than in opposition to it, complementary currencies do not merely reveal new possibilities. They help us see the dollar differently, too.

Imagine this: a canvasser in Brooklyn earns credits for a weekend of turnout work. Those credits are then accepted by another chapter to help fund a print run. A local labor union recognizes those credits as dues. A food co-op accepts them for groceries. A pilot municipal grocery store, created by a city council aligned with the movement, honors the credits for fresh produce. A sanctuary city program uses them for transit access. Under pressure from organizers, the local government agrees to accept those credits for partial tax payments, fines, or fees. This isn’t “exchange”; it’s organizing. 

Instead of treating money as a scarce resource to be unlocked from the top down, complementary currencies reveal money to be a flexible and inscribable record of solidarity and coordination. They allow communities and coalitions to express their own priorities, provision their own infrastructures, and deliberate what kinds of labor and care should be receivable across shared space. 

There are many historical precedents for complementary currencies in U.S. history—from colonial-era land bank notes and settler-issued paper money to Depression-era scrip, mutual aid societies, time banks, and local exchange trading systems—each reflecting periods when ordinary people experimented with monetary design in the absence of sufficient national currency or in response to systemic exclusion from formal credit systems. Even Lincoln’s greenbacks and FDR’s war bonds grounded new money issuance in real economic capacities rather than abstract pools of tax dollars. Money on the Left proposals like Blue Bonds and the Uni draw on these traditions to reimagine democratic finance as a practice of coordination, not austerity.

From Command to Coordination

We do not need a movement that controls everything. We need movements that can coordinate across what is already happening, provisioning at scale without turning participation into tactical bottlenecks and zero-sum debates over which “theory of change” is correct. That is already the lesson of the campaigns and organizations that are winning: field ops that trust volunteers to become leaders; member-led organizations that practice deliberative democracy; housing and mutual aid coalitions that prototype new forms of care without waiting for policy permission.

These campaigns are not spontaneous. They are deeply organized. But they are also strategically diverse. What links them is not control or discipline—it is solidarity. We need forms of coordination that let us hold many strategic priorities as valid without collapsing them into a single strategic hierarchy. That is what complementary credit experiments can offer: not a command center or vanguard, but flexible infrastructures of coordination and provision. Built from below, from diverse middles, and even daring city halls that refuse to wait for Albany’s approval.

Money as Credit, Not Scarcity

We are used to thinking of money as something we need to get—from donors, from state budgets, from foundations that never quite agree with our politics. At the heart of a complementary currency strategy is a different understanding of what money is. Money is not a scarce thing to be hoarded or unlocked. Nor is it a capitalist medium of exchange. Money is a flexible infrastructure of recognition, designed through politics. 

Because the truth is, we already can do the things that we supposedly need billionaires and middle class taxpayers to fund. Indeed, we already do extend care, time, labor, risk, translation, food, design, coordination, and protection across every campaign, community org, and institution that we build.

Complementary currencies do not introduce a new kind of value. They enlarge the democratic value systems that already exist—and allow wider scales of recognition and inclusion in the infrastructures we need to live.

In an insurgent democratic politics, no single node of issuance or receivability calls all the shots—but each one takes responsibility to extend trust and good faith as part of a shared infrastructure of democratic provisioning.

Swap Lines as Democratic Pedagogy

The left does not need central discipline from a vanguard of strategists or an idealized mass organization imagined as external to the broader public. We need infrastructures that enact the same solidarity and flexibility we already extend to each other, honoring diverse valuations of what work is important, and agreeing to receive what others provision—even when it comes in unfamiliar forms.

That is the logic of a swap line.

In high finance, a swap line is a mutual agreement to recognize credit across systems without collapsing them into one. Central banks use them to stabilize currencies, but the principle of connecting different currencies to facilitate economic coordination shows up everywhere. It is how bank deposits, paper money, coins, reserve—all forms of money with different institutional histories—come together to make the US dollar feel singular and continuous. What appears as the dollar or imagined as a gold standard has always been an invisible choreography between institutions.

But that invisibility is part of the problem. As Jakob Feinig argues, monetary systems are kept deliberately opaque, a process he calls monetary silencing. The more our systems rely on coordination, the more that coordination is hidden, treated as technical or natural rather than political and participatory.

Complementary currencies make the logic of the swap line public. They give us ways to politicize the agreements we already depend on, to deliberate openly about what kinds of work and care we’re willing to receive—and from whom. They turn financial interoperability into a practice of democratic solidarity.

Monetary Silencing and the Battle for Legibility

This political moment isn’t emerging in a vacuum. For decades, our fiscal and monetary institutions have rehearsed a worldview in which credit is something earned—a borrowing right extended only to the deserving. But “deserving” has never been neutral. Creditworthiness has long stood in for segregation, racism, and exclusion—baked into zoning laws, lending practices, public education funding, and municipal bond markets. Home loans, student debt, and city budgets were more than neutral financial instruments. They rehearsed the ideologies of American racism: who belongs, who can be trusted, who is safe to invest in, and who must be controlled or abandoned?

That regime fractured in 2008. Some responses moved in a hopeful direction: mutual aid networks, debt resistance campaigns, diverse anti-carceral movements from Black Lives Matter to the mainstreaming of abolition and defund, and resurgent interest in public banking and economic democracy. But the collapse also made room for something else. If the 20th century home loan once staged middle-class exceptionalism, Trumpism offered a permission structure for outlaw cruelty. A way to break rules without consequence, to treat others’ suffering as proof of one’s own sovereignty.

But that is not the only story. Mutual aid networks, abolitionist coalitions, and movements like Mamdani’s have rehearsed alternative credit infrastructures—ones grounded not in discipline, but in coordination, care, and lived solidarity. These movements did not necessarily name their practices as monetary, but they began to build the legibilities we need to overcome monetary silence. They have not been able to fully elaborate these unconscious participatory impulses. Still, they have created the conditions to make such impulses visible–and to politicize them.

Complementary credit systems offer a trajectory for elaboration. They do not moralize worthiness. They do not reward obedience. They do not ask who deserves a loan. They rewrite the script, treating credit not as exception, but as infrastructure: a shared capacity to issue and receive trust without hierarchy or purity tests. 

The issue is not whether labor is paid or unpaid—credited or uncredited. Nominally “volunteer” labor builds good faith and trust within a community, but that kind of credit is not usable at a grocery store. What is relevant is where credit is receivable. Today, as campaigns like Mamdani’s promote pilots of municipal grocery stores and other public institutions, we have the opportunity to publicly deliberate receivability itself. We no longer need to maintain the fiction that political labor and public provisioning belong to separate spheres. We can develop new forms of credit—and new institutions that receive them—to bridge the false binary between activism and public works, and to reveal that distinction as something far more messy, lived-in, and democratic than we’ve been taught.

Insurgent campaigns like Mamdani’s are not pausing for Albany’s blessing. They are already rehearsing a creative, coalitional politics—one that provisions capacity across communities, builds trust across organizations, and coordinates across difference. Complementary credit systems do not replace that work. They extend it.

Conclusion: Coordinating What We Already Know How to Do

There is no shortage of capacity on the left. We have organizers, campaigns, coalitions, and institutions already doing the work of governance: feeding people, housing people, translating policy into action, building coalitions across lines of difference. What we lack is the infrastructure to recognize that work as connected.

Complementary credit systems can help us coordinate what we already know how to do. Not by replacing the dollar or disavowing the state, but by recognizing that public trust is not something we must win permission to issue. It is something we are already extending to each other, every time we organize a shift, open our homes, cook a meal, or build a spreadsheet.

This is not a project of exit. It’s a project of refusing to defer. We need not delay unlocking capacity for a future administration. We can name what we are already provisioning—and build systems that make that provisioning visible, receivable, and durable across space and time.

What we’re describing is not a singular plan. It’s a tactical register—one that can help insurgent movements reimagine good government not as control, but as coordination. This is not bureaucracy; it is collective trust. In the face of austerity threats and coercive attacks, we need cities and campaigns willing to issue and receive public credit in solidarity. Not someday, but now.

An insurgent movement of good government connected by local currencies can spread courage and coordination faster than Trump’s tenuous coalition of the fearful and battered ever could.

Money on the Left9 Comments