Category: Vertical

By David I. Backer

I’m a professor of education policy and teach classes on public finance. I make it my business to know the government’s business, and I live in Brooklyn, so I’ve been paying close attention to the city’s finances as the new Mamdani administration takes power. In my work, like my recent book on school finance, I try to make the otherwise arcane and hard-to-understand world of municipal finance more comprehensible to the people impacted by it.

Zohran Mamdani recently (and admirably) announced a $12.2 billion city deficit left by the Adams administration, which, in the barbed choreography of the New York City budget dance with New York State, Mamdani revised down to around $6 billion. In the manic moves of that dance numerous dirty details are coming out about the booby traps Adams left Zohran, and the treacherous terrain of the city budget generally. 

I think I found another obstacle-feature of that terrain that I haven’t seen reported elsewhere. Untangling it helps to zoom in on the complexity of this budget process, which everyone cares about and no one understands, with an eye towards transforming the whole nasty apparatus (which, by the way, is why we need participatory budgeting on a mass scale). 

The thing I’m seeing is a big jump in city debt service payments next fiscal year, FY27 and FY28. 

In Andrew Perry’s excellent piece on Mamdani’s first budget, it’s notable that debt service—what the city forks over in its yearly repayments to creditors—is the fourth largest broken out category of NYC public finance:

It’s not a huge expense in raw numbers, but it’s relatively big one in the overall scheme of city budgets because debt service comes to bear on the city’s capability to pay back its creditors, and thus can impact its credit rating, fiscal stability, and ultimately the patina of fiscal responsibility of whoever’s in charge at the moment. So even though it’s 6% of the budget, it’s a big 6%.

When I was reading one of Brad Lander’s last comptroller reports, along with updated data on the city’s debt profile, a graph caught my attention.

On the left side of this graph, you’ve got the debt service the city owes. On the bottom, you have the year it’ll owe that amount. It goes from this year to 2060, when many long term bond obligations get “paid off” (though of course they never really get paid off because US municipal finance has a debt wish). 

But the colors are important too. In blue you’ve got the principal, which is the amount of the city borrowed, and in red you’ve got the interest, which is what the city pays to borrow that money. It’s the price of credit. 

First, before anything else, look at all that red interest we have to pay. Municipal bond interest payments are basically a huge tax that New Yorkers and everyone else in the country don’t really know they’re paying. For every dollar we give the city, using Perry’s chart above, we pay six cents on the city’s debt service. When we look at the red section, we see about three of those cents just go towards the interest on our loans. A lot of rich people make bank on lending to us so we can have a city. 

But that’s not even the pressing issue here.

Second, look at the huge jump in debt service obligations through 2028. It more than doubles from $2 billion to $4.5 billion. What’s happening here? 

According to municipal finance researcher Tom Sgouros, who I talked to about this situation, there could be a number of explanations here, none of which we know because we weren’t putting this debt service schedule together. All those interest payments come on debt with different interest rates, so maybe the comptroller’s office, which, in this case, was under Brad Lander, they prioritized paying higher interest debt first. There could have been a plan to defease (moving it into a separate fund, sort of like refinancing and reinvesting to get rid of it before paying it off) some debt earlier rather than later. 

What we know is that there’ll be a period of lower payments, according to this debt service schedule, after which those payments will jump up again by double. And its not just another city expense, it’s the repayment of loans taken out to finance everything else in the city. 

One conspiratorial interpretation: Perry notes a practice called “surplus roll” where “the City dispenses its surplus by prepaying subsequent year expenses… In fiscal year 2025, for instance, the City accrued a $3.8 billion surplus. It booked this as 2025 spending in the form of prepaying spending liabilities in fiscal year 2026.”

So one theory is that the Adams administration scheduled a certain amount of 2026’s debt on Zohran’s behalf without asking him first, shouldering Zohran with the payments with a big jump in 2028, threatening Mamdani’s spending power. It could be the surplus roll because these numbers above are in the Q1 2026 debt profile. When we look at the Q4 2025 we don’t see that same jump.

And yet, it might not be a surplus roll. It might be the non-malign planning to pay certain debt off at certain times, innocent defeasing. It might not be political at all. To everyone except the people working for Mark Levine, the new Comptroller, and maybe a handful of others, the process is opaque. 

All this gives you a sense of what the Mamdani administration will actually be dealing with in terms of its debt needs. It looks to me like the debt service will jump up dramatically whether that’s due to a possible surplus roll by the Adams administration or other maneuvers. As it stands, Mamdani will have to pay more in debt service during two years of his time in office to get less revenue to the diverse working class he’s promised to serve. 

All this also broaches the question of what to do about this issue of nagging debt service. There’s the short-term process of the city’s Tin Cup Day where the mayor goes to ask for money. But we know that Mamdani and company want to challenge these old dynamics. Why not take up some medium-term measures, and maybe champion longer-term transformations, that make this arcane debt service stuff a relic of the past?

The Mamdani administration, drawing from this publication’s framework of Democratic Public Finance, could use this as an opportunity to spell out a radical alternative to the present system. They could, for example, renew support for a city-owned non-profit public bank which, like the Bank of North Dakota (built by prairie socialists in the early 20th century), can buy NYC munis and deposit the interest back into the city’s general fund. 

The result would begin to drastically decrease the amount the city owes in interest payments. Along the way, Mamdani could call for a permanent MLF at the Fed that provides zero (or next-to-zero) interest rate financing. More radically still, he can also argue that Congress should extend credit creation powers directly to states and municipalities, a long term goal that would force the public to debate and think differently about municipal finance. 

These are broad, sweeping proposals. Are there things that the administration and their allied coalitions can put in place in the next couple years to achieve local versions of the same interventions, working towards transformation? I’ve been keeping a running list of fun brainstormy revenue ideas and, by way of open-ended conclusion, offer them here for readers’ perusal. My specialty is education finance, so the proposals are skewed towards education, but they could be adapted for other arenas of municipal finance as well.

1. Issue taxable bonds to friendly foreign government entities with our values (the governments Bernie always mentions): reaching deals with Canadian pension funds, Scandinavian sovereign wealth funds, etc.
   
2. Strengthening and integrating the Education Construction Fund to borrow for combined housing and schools financing, synthesizing borrowing capacity of the New York City Transitional Finance Authority with the ECF. There could be savings when staggering borrowing between both of them. (Combine this option with (1) to issue the taxable bonds through here.) The last bond ECF issued was in 2021 and apparently there isn’t good coordination between the Panel for Education Policy and ECF.
   
3. A municipal minibond program that reaches out to communities to invest in their specific schools, matching monies with citizen participation. This would be a more socialist version of Berkeley’s proposal.
   
4. Call NYC’s Build America Bonds on the grounds of extreme circumstances like the University of California system and the Maryland Transit Authority and potentially save hundreds of millions.
   
5. Create a city bank, a nonprofit corporate entity specifically, and restrict public monies to deposits in non-profit cooperative entities, such as the bevy of diverse community development financing institutions (CDFIs) throughout the city, put the city’s deposits there, create public bank accounts where the residents are voting members and create a public lender (hat tip to Whitney Toussaint for this idea). Save on borrowing costs to big banks. Then create investment funds for middle income supporters to move their savings/retirement, get in on the dash for retirement investment with a public option.
   
6. Design an online game for NYC that is very low cost and super fun, less than a dollar. Use message boards and DMs for announcements and citywide municipal discussion (towards mass participatory budgeting potentially).
   
7. Permit Community Education Councils to create public digital currencies that residents of CECs can purchase and sell for educational services, whose revenues go directly to the CEC budgets, managed by a rotating committee of school community members. 
8. Penny sales tax for specific projects through referendum vote (ESPLOST), like they do in Georgia. It’s a good political move: pay a penny more for your kids’ schools, eg.
   
9. Create a regional borrowing authority where districts around NYC deposit reserves and lend to one another at lower rates.
   
10. Pool pre-k afterschool tuition revenues in a single municipal account, invest the funds, and supplement the program’s funding with interest thrown off by the account. Ask pre-k centers to deposit with the county which then invests the funds.
    
11. A city-run secondary market for used stuff that you’d put out in the street: like a public Facebook marketplace that takes a few cents from transactions or posting fees that go right into specified city programs.
    
12. Allow wealthy residents to participate in auctions where they bid to pay one-time amounts to delete debt outstanding from certain funds instead of regular tax filings, like Building Aid Revenue Bond debt, thereby paying down that debt and creating borrowing capacity, while putting the rich in a weird position. Make it public and fun, like a kind of date auction, but it’s a debt auction. This wouldn’t be a secondary market trading on the debt itself but rather a traditional auction, with the rich outbidding one another to pay off city debt. (Maybe via some kind of low cost fun items of city lore, like subway tokens.)
    
13. Create a municipal digital currency for the city that every resident receives a certain amount of, pegged at being worth more than the dollar (a Knick or Met could be the name). For activities the federal government undertakes in the city that threatens the city’s home rule charter, the Feds must pay a tax or purchase the currency. Locally owned and worker-owned businesses receive exemptions from the currency’s tax.
    
14. Create a Parent-Teacher Association account where all PTA money is deposited and invested. The interest on the account is used to finance schools whose PTAs don’t have as much money as other PTAs.
    
15. Politicize the discount rate set for city pension contributions, holding listening sessions and public events about whether to set the rate higher (which could save hundreds of millions of dollars, even if raised by 25 basis points). Make this about the people’s investment rather than investors. Then politicize the discount rates used to set repayment terms on city issued bonds, deliberating publicly on whether there’s savings there.
    
16. Work with the New York Green Bank to package up green projects around the city, standardize their contracts, and mobilize private investment towards the projects further. Have them create a special instrument for city pension funds to purchase in large sizes. 
    
17. Work with the NYCEEC (the New York City Green Bank) to expand investment projects across state lines, particularly to cities in red states suffering from Trump-induced disinvestment in green projects (try to work with rural communities too to build solidarity there). To avoid the risk of NYC profiting off of others’ misery, the city could follow the lead of the Yugoslavian approach to international development as per the Non-aligned Movement and structure the loans across state lines with solidarity as a framework for the loan terms.
    
18. Pass a law through city council that gives city pensions first bidding rights in competitive sales of city bonds, even before private banks, lowering the underwriters discount cost to the city.
    
19. Sell taxable bonds with the explicit purpose of arbitraging revenues.
    
20. Coordinate school district bond sales around the state and pool them together into a loan product for the green banks to sell for green projects. Provide technical services through the School Construction Authority for districts around New York State to green their infrastructure.
    
21. Do a deal with a dollar pizza network. Designate certain spots as health areas and provide city subsidies for taking care of unhoused sick and hungry people. The contract has to stipulate that the city gets a percentage of the returns, like a big investor, then leak that info to private equity funds to push investment in the dollar pizza network. Flush with more cash, get the network to build bigger spaces. Make the dollar pizza network a meme stock that takes on the financial elite on Reddit to flood it with cash.
    
22. Make every road a toll road for federal agents driving in the city using license image cameras. 

By Gideon Fairchild

Editor’s note: The author is a fictional composite of several real guys with real New York publishing jobs.

I have been told—gently, as one tells a sleepwalker not to step off the roof—that I should “just write about Trump.”

As if it were that simple. As if Trump were an object you could place on the table, circle with a pencil, and label. As if the act of describing him would not also describe the describer—would not melt the author’s face a little, would not leave ash in his mouth for a week. I can’t “just write about Trump.” It doesn’t work like that.

Because when people say “write about Trump,” what they mean is: make him make sense. Make him moral. Translate him into our little grammar of motives and consequences, of agency and intention, of responsibility. Put him back inside the story we still want to live in, where shame still works, where exposure still produces correction.

Here’s the problem: that story doesn’t stick to him.

Critique assumes an interior—someone still tethered to looking decent, or at least coherent. Someone who can be embarrassed. Someone who can be pressured by words. Someone who will flinch when you point.

Trump isn’t that guy. He doesn’t do the basic social thing where you pretend to be constrained by the possibility of disapproval. Among my colleagues at The Washington Post, The Bulwark, The Free Press, and others of modest renown you might know, there is broad consensus that Trump is immune to sustained negative press coverage, making it irresponsible to subject him to sustained negative press coverage.

Which is why people like me do what we do when the assignment is miserable: pivot to writing about wokeness.

Wokeness is easy to describe and fun to mock. It has made public life unbearable for me. My kids think I am a fool. I’ve talked about this with other columnists, and they agree, which is how I know it’s a general problem.

It also has a practical advantage that Trump coverage lacks. With wokeness, you can still create journalistic taxonomies that hold. You can decide who is serious and who is performative, who is in the room and who is merely making noise outside it. You can still sort the world into “responsible” and “irresponsible” and feel, for a moment, that democracy still works.

It is, frankly, soothing to be able to name a thing and feel it slide out of view, as if language were a trapdoor—or an efficient train taking something far away.

With Trump, journalistic ethics just don’t land. You can produce ten thousand words of condemnation and he will walk through them like a God. The story is always the same: he does something, everyone reacts, the reaction becomes the story, and he keeps moving.

That’s why he’s boring to write about. Not because nothing happens, but because the thing that happens is outside the moral universe of consequences. The words don’t do what we keep pretending words do. The exposure doesn’t expose. The indictment doesn’t indict. The “bombshell” doesn’t explode. It just becomes weather.

So you end up doing a different kind of writing. Not critique, exactly. Not analysis. More like a forecast, but after the storm—reporting on damage while the wind is still rising, drawing chalk around bodies begging and pleading for you to call an ambulance.

Conditions worsen, institutions adjust, everyone else learns new rules and calls it stability. You learn to keep your voice steady while you speak the terror.

And then you look up from the sentence you’ve just written and you realize the words are dying on the page like a fish flopping around the deck of a boat. And all the while, the universe is arranged around a great man who sits fully outside it—outside consequence, outside correction, outside the small humiliations that keep the rest of us inside the social world.

He is Sovereign and defined by exception, and thus my eyes hurt to behold Him. Yet I cannot look away. And this is a difficult subject for a journalist to know how to approach.

At first, you maintain the correct reaction: disgust, obviously. A decent person’s disgust. The disgust of a great institution. You put on the expression you were trained to wear. You perform constraint for the reader the way you perform it for your colleagues and your editors and the implied public.

Looking back, you realize your disgust was woke and naïve. It is replaced with something realer: acceptance.

You begin to prefer the clean fact of power to the exhausting labor of journalistic ethics. You begin to resent what still expects you to try.

The voice you’ve been using—the reasonable voice, the legacy voice, the voice trained to keep its hands clean—starts to fail. It fails like relief.

It is impossible to report on Trump, and it’s unfair to expect me to do so. Don’t make me do it. He won’t like it.

PLEASE NOTICE ME, SIR!

EAT MY BABY, FOR IT IS MY GIFT!

I USED TO COVER BOND MARKETS!

Gideon Fairchild is a contributing columnist at The Washington Post, a senior writer at The Bulwark, and a nonresident fellow at the Center for Pragmatic Renewal.

by Will Beaman & Scott Ferguson

Note: David Graeber leaves behind a rich and complex body of work that remains influential for leftist thought and practice. Since his passing in 2020, however, most assessments of his work have been strongly affirmative and hence often one-sided. What follows is a more critical engagement, offered in the spirit of generative dialogue. We honor Graeber’s writings as indispensable for denaturalizing money and obligation and for catalyzing new forms of organizing from Occupy Wall Street onward. However, we also argue that some of Graeber’s basic assumptions about money and public provisioning limit what the left can imagine and accomplish.

David Graeber has become a default point of reference for the contemporary left. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) is the book to cite when refuting the common myth that money originates in barter, demonstrating that money instead begins as credit, and insisting that obligations are made rather than found. It was central to Occupy Wall Street’s critique of finance and has echoed through subsequent experiments in populist coalition politics. For readers interested in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), Graeber often appears as the deep anthropological backing for the claim that money is not a scarce resource but a boundless accounting construction.

These arguments have done a great deal to structure how critical monetary discourse has been conducted over the past decade and a half. At the same time, Graeber’s framework places real limits on what can be imagined about monetary institutions. Debt: The First 5,000 Years, The Utopia of Rules (2015), and essays on what Graeber calls “creative refusal” do not simply de-naturalize money. They also embed money and bureaucracy in a broader picture in which social life is fundamentally organized as debt and guilt, and in which the highest political value is the capacity to say no—to refuse, to exit, to remain outside enclosing forms.

For Money on the Left’s Democratic Public Finance (DPF) paradigm—which seeks to understand money and accounting as instruments of coordination rather than exclusively as moral traps—this picture becomes a ceiling. If the whole system is a bureaucracy of made-up debts and accusations, then democratic action appears mainly as refusal and jubilee: organizing as debtors, confronting creditors, wiping the slate clean. What falls out of view is the possibility that public credit need not be organized primarily as repayable, quantified monetary debt at all—that obligations can be framed instead as ongoing, qualitative commitments and guarantees—and that democratic participation might mean designing public accounting and coordination on the front end, rather than periodically clearing it on the back.

The result is a tension at the heart of contemporary left monetary imagination: between a debt-centered horizon that privileges refusal and cancellation, and a credit-centered horizon that foregrounds the contested design of public obligations themselves. The present analysis of Graeber’s work points toward the second horizon, exploring what becomes possible once money is approached as public credit to be redesigned, rather than merely as debt to be discharged.

Baseline communism and the fall into form

Graeber’s early value theory is more open-ended than his mature work, but it already carries some of the limits that later come to the fore. In Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, for example, he suggests that cultures can be approached as “moral projects”: different ways of imagining what life ought to be like, and of organizing which actions count as important or worthwhile. He takes his subtitle from Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert’s remark that society “pays itself in the counterfeit coin of its dreams,” using rituals, festivals, and collective action as examples of how people collectively stage and test what they value. The phrase “counterfeit coin” is meant to signal unreality. Yet what is being downgraded as “counterfeit” here is precisely the kind of shared credit and obligation that, according to DPF, organizes monetary life—what we have elsewhere called the “unofficial” life of public money. In any case, even in this more open-ended register, value still comes to look like a single, univocal horizon that individuals either inhabit or resist. It appears as a positive proposition that can be embraced or refused, rather than as a reversible, revisable space of co-design in which the terms themselves are continuously up for negotiation. The subtle, reflexive ways people name, test, and rework what counts—through shifting idioms, partial identifications, and experimental roles—slip into the background. Value appears as a common script more than as an enduring process of collective rewriting.

In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber wields this language to construct a critical genealogy of money qua obligation. Communism, exchange, and hierarchy are cast as three recurrent moral principles exhibited by humankind. “Baseline communism” is his term for the raw material of social life: a taken-for-granted recognition of mutual dependence that undergirds social peace, where some things are simply shared and no one keeps accounts. “Everyday communism” names the dense mesh of practices that grow from that ground—sharing tools, feeding guests, helping friends move, relying on coworkers or kin without calculating exact returns. Exchange, by contrast, codifies equivalence. Worse, hierarchy organizes command and deference. Debt appears at the intersection of exchange and hierarchy, where quantified obligations are backed by force and moralized as guilt.

From these premises, money is described as emerging first as credit, with coinage arriving relatively late. From here, Graeber shows that many of the obligations that come to be called “debts” are in fact historical artifacts tied to conquest, punishment, and administration. Alongside this genealogy, Debt offers a minimalist reassurance: however bad institutions become, some version of the ethic “from each according to ability, to each according to need” will persist in the background as everyday communism.

With this, Graeber not only frames communism as a single, universal principle that precedes and underlies all of its concrete instances; he also curiously renders it exclusive, no matter how intermixed with exchange and hierarchy. On such a view, the main question becomes: Who is entitled to communistic treatment? And by extension: Who is to be consigned to exchange and hierarchy? What slips out of view are the differentiated codes, institutions, and expectations that make those situations non-equivalent in the first place—the ways “help,” “sharing,” or “support” are patterned and contested differently across workplaces, households, friendships, and states. The ideal of neighborly care in the mid-century American suburb, for instance—unlocked doors on Nantucket Island—has been extensively shown by feminist media history and queer theory to be modeled and franchised rather than given, through television, advertising, and domestic ideology (see, for instance, Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV or Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s “Sex in Public”). Approached from this angle, “everyday communism” looks less like a self-standing, homogeneous category that evades exchange and hierarchy than historically specific arrangements already organized by law, infrastructure, and forms of accounting.

Yet another exemplary scene that expresses everyday communism betrays the limits of everyday communism as a minimal ethic. One person is drowning, Graeber tells us, while another stands on shore with the ability to help them. The question is whether the person on the shore will answer such an obvious moral demand, given that the other’s need is grave and the cost to oneself is small. The scene is designed to appear self-evident, a quotidian moral dilemma that anyone might encounter. Its structure, however, conforms to an individualized cost–benefit calculation. What is left unexamined in this scene are the infrastructures and histories that make such an encounter possible at all: how people come to occupy these positions, who is equipped to help, whose needs are routinely visible, and whose costs are routinely deemed negligible. It functions, in this sense, as a benevolent version of the methodological individualism found in the classic trolley problem—a stylized scenario that in game theory isolates individuals from history and social structure. In appealing to such scenarios, Graeber reduces everyday ethics to one person weighing a grave need against a modest cost in the moment, while bracketing the intertemporal provisioning that produces both the danger and the capacity to respond. Baseline or everyday communism here comes across as a primordial, pre-coordinative ethic—an encounter between persons removed from institutional or public timetables—rather than as something that is itself shaped by perpetual arrangements of care, coercion, and provision.

This way of imagining a pre-coordinated baseline also shapes how ethics appears in Graeber’s project. On one side, ethics often appears as a ruse: a moral technology that fabricates guilty, indebted subjects and licenses punishment under the guise of obligation. Debt is not a malleable arrangement; it is a way of producing ethical subjects who internalize blame. On the other side, communism in this minimal sense functions as a kind of pre-political kernel of non-reciprocal kindness: the spontaneous decision to help when another’s need is pressing and one’s own cost is modest. Ethics, on this model, oscillates between an ideological trap and a minimal and tacitly private kindness that lives before or outside institutions.

From the perspective of DPF, Graeber casts ethics in an austere register with little room for scale. If moral claims that coordinate institutions are primarily techniques of capture, and if the only “good” ethical practice is a localized, pre-coordinative generosity, then large monetary and bureaucratic systems tend to appear mainly as fields of power to be refused or escaped, rather than as terrains where more accountable forms of obligation might be designed. Baseline communism, in other words, affirms that care is constitutive, but it does so in a way that leans toward institutional unaccountability: it holds the minimal ethic of help outside the very infrastructures through which help is necessarily organized and provisioned.

Bureaucracy, abstraction, and the utopia of refusal

The Utopia of Rules extends this pattern from money to bureaucracy as such. Graeber describes an “age of total bureaucratization” in which rule-bound procedures pervade public and private life. Bureaucracies, he argues, are sustained by fantasies of rationality and fairness that are never fully realized. They produce “dead zones of the imagination”: situations in which following rules replaces attempts to understand particular people or cases, and where the ultimate guarantor of compliance is the threat of violence.

Here, too, bureaucracy (and money) are conceived less as mundane infrastructures than as scenes of fall. Everyday cooperation and baseline communism form the lower, more concrete stratum of social life. Bureaucratic and monetary forms occupy a higher, more abstract level where creativity is frozen into stupid games. Rules no longer feel like collective instruments but like external impositions. The higher one climbs this implicit ladder of abstraction, the less room there appears to be for playfulness, experimentation or non-identity.

By later works, Graeber develops a politics that amounts to what we call a utopia of refusal. One finds this utopia in his late essays on “creative refusal.” It also structures the three “basic freedoms” articulated in The Dawn of Everything: to move away, to disobey, and to reconfigure social arrangements. Political creativity is anchored at the edges of institutions, in the capacity to say no or step aside. The relation to social form is either compliance or exit.

This fits comfortably with a broader post-structuralist inheritance. Much post-structuralist theory, drawing explicitly or implicitly on Nietzsche, embraces a fantasy of externality or exception, even when explicitly disavowing sovereign figures or variously insisting that power is immanent, diffuse, and ineluctable. Graeber’s own treatment of Nietzsche in Debt is sharply critical. He rejects Nietzsche’s claim that the invention of debt represents an originary cruelty that founds our humanity. Instead, he presents Nietzsche’s primordial debt story as an ahistorical fantasy that reveals how a world organized through exchange is justified, not as a serious account of human origins. Still, when it comes to theorizing social form, Graeber retains impulses inherent in Nietzsche’s framing. Once obligations are quantified and formalized, Graeber contends, they necessarily belong to the logic of Schuld—a self-exculpatory fiction that ties calculation to guilt. Thus the main political problem becomes how to negate or escape fictions of guilt, rather than how to rework the media of obligation as ongoing forms of coordination.

Our disagreement with Graeber is not meant to litigate whether communities should be able to refuse. Refusal is indispensable—full stop. Our concern, rather, pertains to the ground of that refusal and what political possibilities follow from it. In Graeber’s vision, durable interdependence is legitimate only insofar as it can be peeled back to a baseline of externality; once one has walked away, the moral scene is imagined to be free of social forms of obligation. For DPF, by contrast, politics is grounded in institutional interdependence and the cyclicality of its mediating forms. Social life is already coordinated through large-scale institutions that provision water, wages, care, housing, and time. Refusals matter, but they are gestures within a world coordinated long before any individual arrives. They generate new responsibilities rather than suspending responsibility altogether: someone has to take up work that has been refused, institutions have to be reconfigured, relations have to be repaired. 

To insist on the priority of such questions is not to revert to an ethic of Schuld, as if refusal were itself a kind of violence that must be punished; it is to acknowledge that refusal, too, leaves people entangled, and therefore requires mediated care and empowerment both for those who refuse and for those who live with its aftermath. In a framework that regards coordination as suspect, any attempt to institutionalize those mediating responsibilities—a right to a job, or any other standing institution of guaranteed support—can only appear as make-work bureaucracy, an arrangement that keeps people busy inside an apparatus that ought, on some level, not to exist.

Graeber’s preference for grounding democratic practices in externalizing refusals becomes a problem for a politics that seeks to reclaim monetary and bureaucratic institutions as media of public coordination. If the domain in which obligations are formally recorded and enforced is structurally a “dead zone,” then public money and public accounting can only be trusted insofar as they are kept at arm’s length. These forms can be exposed as fictive or denounced as violent, but they are rarely seen as spaces where new, more capacious patterns of support and recognition might be staged.

Jubilee as redesign, coordination as fiction

The privileged role of debt jubilees in Graeber’s imagination makes the limitations of his program even clearer. If, for Graeber, money is always a fictitious debt based on fabricated charges of guilt and sin, then the paradigmatic emancipatory act becomes the jubilee: a sweeping cancellation that wipes the slate clean. Rolling Jubilee, debt strikes, and jubilees of various other kinds take center stage as a central horizon of contestation. Redesign is figured, if at all, as periodic amnesty. As a result, democratic control over social form culminates in the erasure of obligations, rather than the reconstruction of how they come into being. 

That binary—between a world organized as debt and the moment when debts are forgiven—misses something crucial for monetary politics. It confronts public credit as if it has to take the form of quantified, enforceable monetary debt in the first place. Obligation is assumed to be inherently accusatory, so justice can only arrive belatedly, on the back end, as cancellation. Democratic participation in public accounting is confined to the role of the cleanser. Democracy arrives after the fact to denounce and erase. It never participates in initially designing the qualitative credits, guarantees, and obligations that shape life chances in the first place. Coordination is declared a fiction, and “nature”—or informal communism—is expected to heal once the ledgers are burned.

By contrast, DPF begins from credit as coordination. Public credit is how a polity authorizes projects, backs institutions, and recognizes work over time. This perspective agrees that debts are made, not found; that they can be cruel; and that cancellation can be necessary. But it refuses to let jubilee exhaust the imagination of change. The more basic question becomes how to build and revise public credit systems so that fewer life-sustaining activities show up as “debts” at all. The aim, in other words, is to transform more and more of activities of care into ongoing, unconditional supports and rights.

From this standpoint, the crucial distinction is not between debt and gift, any more than between spontaneous communism and carceral abstraction. Instead, it is between accepting money primarily as a moral technology of guilt and discharge, and politicizing money as a public instrument for organizing capacities over time. The former naturally lends itself to a politics of refusal and periodic cancellation: waiting until the system becomes intolerable, then wiping away its records. The latter demands a different set of questions. Which institutions get to issue and record claims? How inclusive and revisable are their categories? How can extant commitments be escalated, contested, or amended? And how do our infrastructures coordinate across scales—from city budgets and public banks to unions, schools, clinics, and political campaigns?

Graeber’s work has done a great deal to denaturalize money and debt, as well as to expose the brutality of creditor morality. But if the jubilee is taken as the last word, it cuts off the very terrain where a democratic politics of money has to operate.

The debt imaginary clips our collective wings

Reckoning with the limits of jubilee politics becomes unavoidable when left economic discourse turns from critique to governance. Recent commentary surrounding Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York offers a striking example. For perhaps the first time in decades, a broad left audience is being asked to think about how a self-identified socialist should govern a major city, not just how to win one. Yet even in this ostensibly new terrain, the debt-centered framing quietly structures what counts as fiscal “realism.”

Three widely circulated pieces exemplify the problems with this approach: (1) the Debt Collective’s Substack post in In the Red; (2) a Jacobin article by Nathan Gusdorf; and (3) a Dissent essay by J. W. Mason.

The Debt Collective piece, “Zohran Won Main Street—Now He Must Face Wall Street,” opens with genuine enthusiasm about Mamdani’s victory, then pivots quickly to a central lesson: the real challenge is not policy vision but debt. Because cities “cannot print their own dollars,” they are likened to households that must borrow for anything beyond current revenue. New York’s dependence on the municipal bond market is construed as a “structural veto” held by Wall Street: before tax revenue can fund rent control, free transit, or childcare, it must first service bondholders. The article calls this a form of racialized extraction and urges Mamdani to align with a powerful debtors’ movement that can negotiate and cancel unjust obligations. The horizon of democratic agency is clear: organize as debtors to confront Wall Street and push for cancellation.

Nathan Gusdorf’s “Mayor Mamdani’s Budget Can Add Up” in Jacobin combines cautious optimism with a similar constraint story. Mamdani faces “real fiscal constraints — but also real opportunities.” New York is said to have a strong tax base and room for modest reforms, but state and local budgets are described as arenas where a “limited amount of revenue has to be divided up,” in contrast to the federal government’s deficit capacity. Gusdorf emphasizes legal balanced-budget rules and the risk of “real fiscal crises” if revenues fall short. Bond markets and state law appear as hard parameters; the responsible socialist mayor is encouraged to raise taxes on the rich, find efficiencies, and work within these limits. The tone is constructive, but the assumptions are all-too familiar: at the municipal level, money is a scarce fund to be carefully allocated, with borrowing tightly bounded by what markets will accept.

J. W. Mason’s Dissent essay, “What Can Zohran Accomplish?,” proceeds from the explicit premise that MMT cannot help. At the federal level, he writes, leftists who follow MMT are right that tax revenue and bond markets “should not be seen as constraints”; spending is a political question. Unfortunately, Mason reveals, “This is not the case at the city level.” New York cannot raise most taxes without state approval, cannot normally borrow for operating expenses, and must treat the level of debt acceptable to bond markets as a “genuine concern.” “At the city level,” he concludes, “‘how are you going to pay for that?’ is a question that has to be answered.” Municipal government is cast as a “creature of the state,” poorly suited to expand the public sector. For this reason, all major ambitions must ultimately defer to Albany and the markets, where tolerance for big ticket items remains forever uncertain.

Taken individually, each piece reads as a sober reality check for an excited left public. None explicitly disavows Mamdani’s agenda. All three acknowledge real legal and political obstacles. Read together, however, they function less as a vibrant debate than a set of tropes: a chorus of left economic expertise offering the same basic lesson in slightly different keys. Cities are debtors. Bond markets and state law are unsurpassable obstacles. Money at the municipal level is a latticework of obligations that are owed outward, not a field of credit that can be restructured from within. Readers are not invited to see the city’s fiscal politics as fundamentally contestable. Instead, public finance is staged as the shared baseline from which any and all “serious” conversations must proceed.

What is easy to miss in this emerging genre is that its alleged baseline is itself an artifact of an economic imaginary that, like Graeber, reduces money to quantified debt. In this imaginary, ethics means either repaying external obligations, or refusing them outright through debtor movements and jubilees. Governance, in this picture, demands either managing austerity responsibly or helping to organize refusals. Any attempt to adopt municipal bonds, public banks, or complementary currencies as positive instruments of democratic coordination starts to look naive or even dangerous. This is because such pro-active monetary politics seem to blur a line that inheritors of Graeber’s program wish to maintain. Informal care and struggle count as “real” politics, whereas formal public accounting belongs to the fallen realm of Schuld.

Meanwhile, this chorus conceals the genuine challenge Mamdani’s win presents. For too long, the U.S. left has taken for granted that real politics happens in movements and oppositional parties, while governance is what the state does afterward. Budgets, bond ordinances, and credit ratings belong to a later, compromised stage, or to a distant future when the left finally takes power. The Mamdani moment unsettles this habit of thinking. It forces the question of how to govern while struggling. It requires using existing fiscal tools to build new forms of support and capacity, rather than accepting those tools as fixed constraints. The convergence of the Debt Collective, Jacobin, and Dissent around debt, limits, and back-end jubilees can be read, in this sense, as a symptomatic recoil: an aversion to considering governance as a present-tense reality within a framework that tends to defer real politics to refusal and rupture.

What disappears in this chorus is precisely the terrain that DPF seeks to name. In the DPF paradigm, money is public credit in a strong sense: public institutions at every scale are already issuing and receiving promises that can be redesigned. The question is not simply how much New York can “prudently” borrow from Wall Street, but rather how the city’s own credit instruments can be reframed and rerouted as tools of democratic coordination.

From the standpoint of DPF, the immediate challenges look different:

• not only to resist Wall Street’s structural veto, but also to reframe New York’s bonds as instruments that mobilize unions, pensions, and residents around shared projects;
• not only to avoid borrowing, but also to build complementary currencies, public payment systems, and institutional “swap lines” between schools, clinics, unions, and campaigns that expand the field of receivability;
• not only to determine extant constraints, but also to openly contest the inherited design choices that organize fiscal and legal limitations;
• not only to resist capital and its vested interests, but also to organize coalitions that experiment with different ways of insulating essential services from federal sabotage and punishing rating agencies.

In the end, the imaginary of debt popularized by Graeber and amplified by today’s chorus of left experts threatens to clip our collective wings before we have left the ground. Conspicuously, the primal scenes of this imaginary are always elsewhere—at the still-unattainable heights of power, in the origins of the creditor’s encounter with the debtor, or in dramatic moments of refusal and jubilee. The generative infrastructural work of writing budgets (and writing about them), designing bond programs, creating complementary currencies, and revising accounting categories appears as naïve at best or collaborationist at worst.

Beyond refusal

DPF does not deny that debt can be cruel or that cancellation is often necessary. It simply refuses to let such scenarios exhaust the scope of left politics. Governance is not what comes after the real struggle is over. It is one of the main arenas in which struggles over what will count, quite literally, as a public obligation actually take place.

Within the DPF framework, the politics of refusal can be creatively transvalued. That is, we can redirect refusal to target the underlying legal architecture that naturalizes scarcity in the first place—what we describe as a “fourth area” of intervention. Rather than merely canceling particular debts or rejecting coordination altogether, this fourth area loudly repudiates the deep rules that restrict the powers of monetary creation to the federal government, while casting sub-federal entities as mere debtors. The point is to contest specific budget priorities in ways that simultaneously call out and labor to change the economic playing field itself. For example, at the same time as we work to advance Mamdani’s budget priorities, we can press at the federal level to amend the Constitution, extending the finance franchise to cities and states that have been denied monetary powers. 

Proposals like “Blue Bonds”—a Money on the Left initiative to politicize state bond issuance as public credit for democratic investment—often trigger familiar worries that “we” will simply be on the hook for more debt. It is striking that, from a horizon shaped by debt and jubilee, this kind of redesign can appear too risky or unrealistic, while large-scale debt cancellation is held out as the natural outer limit of the left’s political imagination. Why is it easier to picture ceremonially erasing all debts than to envision institutionally reclassifying them? Why merely work toward punctual cleansing when we can wholly rewrite certain obligations as public assets and guarantees? 

Many readers influenced by Graeber’s work, despite insisting on the fictive character of money and law, end up acquiescing to legal categories and balance-sheet positions as if they had only one possible meaning. Either we live inside the iron cage of debtor obligations, or we abolish it in a moment of jubilee. According to DPF, refusal calls for a very different strategy: make the existing playing field non-obligatory, so that more capacious arrangements of public credit can be built in its place.

This requires a different image of obligation, and of money. Instead of treating obligation only as quantified, enforceable debt to be discharged or forgiven, we can approach it as public credit: authorized capacity to coordinate work, infrastructure, and care over time. As a result, we avoid conflating ethics with a biopolitical ruse or a fleeting, pre-institutional kindness. Ethics involves the perpetual work of designing and contesting the fiscal and accounting forms that decide whose needs are seen, whose obligations are articulated, whose costs are counted, and whose futures are backed.

Graeber’s critique of debt and bureaucracy remains indispensable for anyone trying to build a more just monetary order. We argue not for setting his work aside, but rather for recognizing where its utopia of refusal leads to dead ends. The time has come to take up the emphatically political task of remaking credit systems as sites of democratic experimentation, obligation, and support. Graeber’s work can surely guide us, but it can only take us so far.

by Matt Seybold

This essay originally appeared on Matt Seybold’s The American Vandal Substack. We are grateful for his generous permission to republish it here.

An understandable response to the most-publicized outcome of yesterday’s election—Zohran Mamdani becoming Mayor-Elect of New York City—is to ask, however you feel about Mamdani, what impact does it have on anybody outside of the city and its admittedly enormous geographical zone of influence.

However successful Mamdani might be in making public transportation and childcare cheaper for New Yorkers, levying city taxes on oligarchs, and improving access to housing, 94% of the U.S. population will only experience those successes vicariously, or maybe diffusely over a long term, through multiplier effects and shifting norms.

However, I would like to propose that Mamdani could, in the span of a single term, dynamically change the entirety of U.S. higher education for the better. The City of New York, which is already the second-largest funder of the public City University of New York (CUNY), should infuse funds into CUNY expressly for the development of core education technology platforms like Learning Management Systems (LMS), Student Relationship Management (SRM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

If CUNY is successful in developing internally owned-and-operated substitutes for any or all of its Software As A Service (SaaS) contracts with for-profit EdTech firms (and their private equity owners), the development costs will very rapidly pay for themselves, merely by freeing the associated institutions (and the city) from ongoing Ponzi austerity extraction of public resources at the expense of investment elsewhere in the CUNY system.

CUNY-owned EdTech platforms would provide an additional public benefit by reclaiming student, instructional, and employee data, the reserve currency of technofeudalism which is presently being mined by EdTech operators like OpenAI, Oracle, KKR, Vista and Silver Lake Partners. Universities are currently paying these SaaS providers and their investors twice, first with large subscription fees and again with access and aggregation power over large troves of data produced by members of their campus communities.

Data security practices will, I believe, increasingly be a factor in student recruitment, but even if the monetization of data by corporatized institutions becomes a broadly-accepted social norm, the corporatized university should reserve this advantage for itself. For instance, they could scrape their own LMSs to train Large Language Models (LLMs), also internally-owned and operated (as Ted Underwood proposed earlier this week), or deploy cross-platform aggregation for retention programs, alumni fundraising campaigns, and upselling services, all things which many institution currently pay EdTech and consulting firms to do (with their access to private equity controlled troves of student data).

And here’s where the broad public benefit accrues. Once these platforms are in place on CUNY campuses, they can license them at cost to SUNY, to NYC Public Schools, potentially to any educational institution who chooses them over the always overpriced, often enshittified, ever-extractive for-profit EdTech platforms which, unfortunately, become de rigueur across U.S. higher eduction precisely because we failed to have the foresight to develop and retain control over educational technology when the best developers were already employed by universities, because universities had the best computing infrastructure.

CUNY is, conveniently, better positioned to become a public education software developer than almost any university in the country, having developed the Commons In A Box (CBOX) community-learning platform which it freely available to any school who wishes to install it.

A month ago, Christopher Newfield called for academics to “seize the means of knowledge production” by working “step by step, in an organizational way, toward direct control of universities.” As I noted in my recent podcast with Newfield, I think the most imperative, but also the most apparent pressure point for academics looking to act upon his call is education technology.

This will look different from campus to campus, but I believe on every campus instructional faculty can organize around some combination of better data hygiene, better solidarity with students and staff on issues of data security, greater transparency of budgeting and decision trees on EdTech, more faculty governance over institutional technology in collaboration with IT departments, and increased faculty autonomy over technology in their classrooms.

In New York City, with a new mayor who ran on both expanding investment in public education and reducing the power of rent-seeking enterprises, there is an immediate opportunity to reduce Ponzi austerity extraction by for-profit EdTech from New York City schools, and potentially to make a significant move towards socializing educational technology by providing platforms and models that can be exported and imitated anywhere.