Animal Spirits and Public Promises: Phantom Beavers and the Politics of Monetary Design

By Rob Hawkes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Ontology of the Monetary Image: Référance and Reconstruction

By Will Beaman

Money is often introduced in critical theory as a problem. It appears as the medium that makes unlike things commensurable by reducing them to sameness, the abstraction that removes social life from the conditions that give it substance, or the sign that circulates by displacing the relations on which it depends. In one register, this is the Marxist account of commodity abstraction and estrangement. More specifically, it is the tendency within Marxist political economy to identify money with the value-form, and the value-form with a mystifying equivalence that becomes socially real and destructive. In another register, money becomes part of a deconstructive account of debt, mediation, and the impossibility of meanings or values ever being wholly self-identical. What these approaches share is the claim that money is bound up with failed identity: either it asserts an equivalence that does not in fact exist, or it reveals that equivalence never fully holds. Money is therefore treated either as a false identity or as a site of identity’s failure.

I want to start from a different premise. Money does not need to be understood first as the positing of identity. Commensuration is not exhausted by equivalence in the strongest sense, and credit should not be understood only as false unification or as a relation whose non-identity appears primarily as failure or guilt. Money is better understood as a practice of open public reference. At its most basic level, it stages comparison without requiring identity. By reference I do not mean only precise signification. References can also sample and remix, compare partially, cite selectively, echo playfully, or suggest likeness without exhausting what they carry forward. What matters here is a public act of relating—one that makes coordination, valuation, and obligation possible without discovering a pre-given sameness beneath them. The question, then, is not whether money imposes identity on a heterogeneous world, but what kind of reference money is.

Marxist criticism is most useful when it shows how capitalist monetary forms narrow what can count as socially intelligible. When labor appears only as wage labor, when production appears only through profitability, and when public capacity appears as fixed, money becomes a disciplinary medium. But it is not enough to say that capital captures money and thereby generates socially real abstractions. That still risks treating reification as the basic ontology of money rather than as one historically powerful monetary idiom. What appears here as private value or abstract equivalence is better understood as a genre of reference—a way of organizing relations that presents its own ratios as self-grounding while treating the conditions of issuance and receivability as if they were already settled. Even in these privational forms, money is not ontologically private. It remains a contested public utility, and the terms on which claims are issued, received, and made to count are never fully removed from political struggle.

A similar point can be made about deconstructive accounts of debt and mediation. These traditions are right to insist that identity does not close. Debt is never just a neutral balancing of accounts but is bound up with obligation, memory, punishment, and the effort to make a claim hold over time. More generally, settlement never arrives in a final and self-contained form, because any act of meaning or repayment depends on signs, conventions, and contexts that exceed it. Derrida’s term différance combines difference and deferral to name this condition: meaning is never simply present all at once in a self-identical form. A word becomes intelligible through its differences from other words, through traces of prior use, and through its repeatability across contexts. What appears self-grounding or immediately given is therefore mediated. Applied to economic life, the point is that a price does not contain the full reality of the good it prices, and a wage does not contain the full reality of the labor it measures. Monetary signs are in no objective sense equal to the world they organize. If one begins from identity or presence, non-coincidence appears as différance.

If différance clarifies the mediated conditions of signification, we might use référance to clarify the mediated conditions of reference. Derrida’s altered spelling marks a difference that is visible in writing but not audible in speech, making the temporal discontinuity of signification legible at the level of the word itself. Référance transvalues that gesture. It marks not only the non-presence of meaning, but the inscribability of claims across the spacing of currency issuance and uptake. Just as writing happens here and reading happens there, issuance happens here and receivability is negotiated there as a reversible stagecraft rather than a closed transfer. Rather than starting from identity and its failure, référance begins from relations that are non-identical from the start and do not require identity as their ground. If one begins instead from analogy and provision, from a shared problem that referential coordination across non-identity helps organize and contest, the same field appears as référance. The inadequacy of identity is the site of différance; non-identical relation is the site of référance. These do not necessarily name different empirical objects. They name different descriptions of the same mediated field. Référance names an open public reference: a way of suggesting likeness and holding claims together without discovering a final identity beneath them. Money, on this account, is not the successful representation of a prior economic reality, and it is not merely the symptom of a constitutive lack. It is a partial articulation of the social world as countable and revisable.

In monetary life, référance works through analogy: a way of holding heterogeneous things in accountable relation without making them identical. Analogy here does not mean approximation to a fixed norm. It means that likeness can be suggested and coordinated without being gathered into identity. A wage does not make labor the same thing as money. A price does not make a good identical with a number. A budget line does not make a public need identical with its accounting expression. Identity fails, but coordination still takes place.

The reparations movement offers a political example. A cash payment may form part of reparations for slavery without being identical to reparations or exhausting their meaning. Indeed, reparations are possible in part because money is not exhausted by any punctual scene of settlement. Its non-identity makes it intertemporally inscribable as a medium of repair, capable of carrying past harms, present claims, and future obligations in relation. The relation is not merely metaphorical or supplementary. It is analogical. Payment participates in a broader project of repair that can also take juridical, institutional, pedagogical, and aesthetic forms. This is part of how reparations remain durable across changing media and struggles: not because the claim is reducible to one self-identical demand, but because it can be carried forward across different scenes of reference. Reparations, in this sense, name an open historical and political problem-space rather than a single settled form.

Existing monetary forms often conceal the work of reference. We might think of this in terms similar to the continuity system in cinema. Continuity editing does not literally create seamless space-time. It produces continuity as an effect while hiding the cuts, conventions, and labor that make it possible. Some monetary forms work in the same way. They stage commensurability as a simple fact and obscure the referential work by which non-identical terms are brought into relation. What appears as neutral equivalence is often the product of historically specific conventions that present themselves as natural.

For that reason, reconstruction matters as much as critique. Reconstruction begins not from failed closure but from non-identical relation. Monetary institutions are never complete, never innocent, and never outside power. But they are not simply illusions waiting to be exposed. They are infrastructures through which claims become receivable, contestable, and revisable. To reference is also to cite: to carry something forward and make it count within a shared scene of recognition. Credit clarifies the connection. To credit is not only to finance but also to acknowledge, attribute, and extend receivability in monetary terms.

The historical period of Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War extends the reparations analogy. In that moment, the terms under which social life could count within public institutions were reorganized. New images were put forward in which labor appeared as employable beyond the plantation. Citizenship appeared as enfranchisable across race. Land appeared as redistributable rather than fixed within the slaveholding order. Credit appeared as more issuable to newly recognized participants in public life. Black participation appeared as precious and indispensable to public life. None of these predicates produced stable identities, and all were violently contested. Yet they established new relations through which claims could be made and received within a multiracial democracy. Reconstruction therefore names not only a historical period but a problem of reference: how heterogeneous lives can be sustained together within shared institutions without collapsing their differences into a single form.

The political economic question is therefore what kinds of open public references monetary forms establish, and whether they do so reflexively or under the cover of objectivity. A reconstructive critique of money asks who may issue, who may count, what may be valued, which obligations are recognized, and which forms of life are treated as worthy of support. The task is to reconstruct money as accountable relation rather than failed identity.

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Fiscal Chronotopes: #ZcavengerHunt, the Zetro Card, and the New Finance Franchise

By Will Beaman

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

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

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

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

Duck-Rabbits and Fiscal Reality

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

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

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

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

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

The #ZcavengerHunt

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Zetro Card

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

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

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

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

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

From Campaigning to Governing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Out of the Shadows: Public Banking for Municipal Finance

By Tyler Suksawat & Scott Ferguson

Editor’s Note: The following essay, originally published on March 3, 2026, offers a foundational theoretical framework for what has since been concretized as The Seattle Loop. The Seattle Loop is a fiscal strategy that utilizes municipal banking to purchase city debt, “looping” interest payments back into public provisions like social housing and green jobs. While this piece was written prior to our specific pivot toward the Seattle-based organizing effort, it articulates the core logic of public credit and municipal finance that underpins the current project.

In a recent essay, we advanced a proposal for sub-federal governments to sell municipal bonds to their own public banks. We took the city as our primary point of departure, but the same lessons are applicable to U.S. counties and states. Establishing a public bank that regularly purchases municipal debt, we argued, would not only significantly expand a city’s fiscal capacity to support its communities and environs, but also reclaim regional public finance from a parasitical and punishing bond market. 

Since the publication of our essay, some commentators have criticized the proposal for involving city finance in so-called shadow banking, precisely because it places public credit creation outside traditional private capital markets. Such concerns are rooted in a legitimate wariness toward the unregulated and often fragile credit structures that trigger financial crises. However, this criticism fails to distinguish between speculative private ventures and institutionalized provisioning by the municipal public purse. Indeed, such a critique mistakes the absence of private middlemen for a lack of financial oversight and security. Our plan, by contrast, replaces the opaque and volatile shadows of private intermediation with a transparent, public-facing mechanism anchored in the enduring fiscal authority of the city government.

Today, municipal finance remains trapped in an exploitative and convoluted cycle. When a city issues debt, it is immediately subjected to a gauntlet of private intermediaries: banks underwrite the bonds, rating agencies perform a gatekeeping function via risk assessment, and institutional investors claim interest as a form of social rent. Crucially, these investors are often not traditional depository banks, but rather volatile non-bank entities such as money market mutual funds and hedge funds, which treat municipal bonds as liquid shadow money to be leveraged for short-term gain. As it stands, then, the public purse is already precariously entangled in shadow banking, with municipal debt serving as a primary asset for the volatile and uninsured money markets that dominate the status quo. Every stage of this process, meanwhile, is governed by a “fiscal discipline” that prioritizes private profit over public need. Thus, far from a stable, above-board process, the current municipal model represents an architecture of austerity that embeds the public interest within the murky, predatory, and destabilizing mechanisms of market-based finance.

Our proposal replaces the fragility of the shadow market with an architecture of public provisioning. Before we turn to the specific mechanisms of financial stability, we must first establish the basic institutional design. We propose a publicly owned institution with chartered banking powers–including direct access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window–that allows the city to bypass the private gauntlet and recapture its own credit. Under this arrangement, the interest generated by municipal debt is no longer captured as social rent; instead, it is credited back to the issuer’s general fund. While both the private market and our public model acknowledge that credit is fundamentally elastic, the divergence lies in who controls and benefits from that elasticity. By internalizing debt service and neutralizing the power of rating agencies, our proposal transforms the financial model from an extractive regime into a regenerative one.

This formalization—grounding municipal debt finance in a chartered public bank, regulated oversight, and direct access to central bank liquidity—moves our model firmly into the light of the regulated banking system. If critics wish to argue about the risks of aggressive credit expansion or the blurring of fiscal and monetary lines, those are legitimate debates over localized monetary and credit governance. But to label a chartered, transparently regulated public utility as “shadow banking” is a category error. Our plan does not evade regulation; it institutionalizes public purpose through it.

Regarding the safety of deposits, public ownership is no barrier to FDIC insurance. A state-chartered public bank meeting standard capital and supervisory requirements can qualify for federal backing. However, even in the absence of the FDIC, the Bank of North Dakota provides a proven roadmap: deposits can be backed by the full faith and credit of the municipal government itself. In this architecture, deposit safety is a design constraint managed through robust capital buffers and strict regulatory adherence, rather than an impossibility.

In this context, the risk of default on deposits is a feature of any bank lacking sufficient capital or insurance. Critics often raise the specter of “portfolio concentration,” but a public bank purchasing its own city’s bonds is simply internalizing fiscal risk. This shifts the concern from “depositor loss” to the broader question of municipal insolvency–a condition that, in our schema, is mitigated by the bank’s ability to coordinate with the city’s broader fiscal agenda. We address concentration not through the fickle discipline of the bond market, but through diversified asset management and the elimination of capitalist underwriting.

The most powerful engine of this model is its mandated retention and concerted utilization of public deposits, serving as a foundation for proactive public provisioning. By directing city payrolls, vendor payments, contractor accounts, and the collection of taxes, fines, fees, and even utility payments (as seen in Seattle) through the public bank, we create a massive, stable foundation of liquidity to be deployed for the common good. This capacity becomes particularly transformative when paired with a local Job Guarantee program. The bank provides the strong accounting infrastructure for such a program, ensuring that municipal payrolls for public works are settled within the public’s own credit circuit to build and sustain community wealth. Consequently, the interest payments that currently “leave” the city as social rent are instead retained, further expanding the city’s financial system and its capacity to support collective wellbeing with every cycle.

Finally, we must correct a persistent metallic-standard myth: the idea that a bank’s ability to purchase bonds is constrained 1:1 by its existing deposits. As any modern banker knows, loans create deposits. Banks expand their balance sheets first and manage reserves afterward. The true constraints on our model, then, are not “available deposits,” but rather regulatory capital ratios and liquidity coverage rules. We acknowledge these constraints and embrace them. Our goal is not to evade regulation, but to use the inherent elasticity of credit to activate municipal democracy and provision the public good.

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Democratic Finance for New York City’s Budget Dance

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. 

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Reclaiming the Public Interest: Cities Should Sell Municipal Bonds to Their Own Public Banks

By Tyler Suksawat & Scott Ferguson

Editor’s Note: The following essay, originally published on February 22, 2026, offers a foundational theoretical framework for what has since been concretized as The Seattle Loop. The Seattle Loop is a fiscal strategy that utilizes municipal banking to purchase city debt, “looping” interest payments back into public provisions like social housing and green jobs. While this piece was written prior to our specific pivot toward the Seattle-based organizing effort, it articulates the core logic of public credit and municipal finance that underpins the current project.

What chance do local governments have in fighting authoritarian austerity, especially when they are left to rely on feckless legislators at the state and federal levels who refuse to push back? Right now, we see austerity budgets appearing across every institution and major employer in the U.S. If the federal government continues to sabotage municipalities, and the state governments (even in liberal states) are proposing cuts-only budgets, then what hope do cities have? In truth, there are several meaningful alternatives to the present order, particularly if we follow the lead of what Money on the Left calls Democratic Public Finance. We only need to get creative about local monetary design. 

Extending money creation powers from the federal level directly to local governments remains an urgent political project. In the meantime, however, we propose that a powerful public option for municipal finance exists at the intersection between bond issuance and public banking. What if a city established a public bank and that public bank regularly purchased the city’s debt? Such a mechanism would liberate the city’s munis from private bond markets and punishing rating agencies, while expanding the city’s fiscal capacity beyond projected tax revenues. 

To understand why this works, we must discard a pervasive myth: banks do not lend deposits. They create credit “endogenously” through acts of authorization. Banks certainly have to meet liquidity and reserve requirements. However, meeting such requirements is a separate matter from crediting operations, which are legally enabled and protected by the Federal Reserve. A bank’s crediting operations do not recycle a limited pool of pre-existing investor funds. They actively expand the amount of total credit that is presently available. 

Therefore, when a public bank purchases its own city’s municipal debt, the result is not a closed loop in which a finite amount of money is passed back and forth. Because the public bank actively generates money to purchase the debt, the operation dramatically enlarges the city’s fiscal space. In such an arrangement, the municipal government acquires funds in the short term to meet community needs. The public bank grows its holdings by receiving interest payments from the city. The loops, then, are not redundant; they are kinetic. Far from an inert circuit, a public bank that purchases city debt is a dynamic design that defies the artificial gravity of austerity.

Most importantly, this arrangement halts the depletion of fiscal capacity by ensuring that debt service payments remain on the city’s own public ledger. Unlike with the private bond market, the public bank would be legally required to deposit earned interest into the city’s general fund. By cutting out the rentiers, the city thus transforms a parasitic financial drain into a regenerative cycle, guaranteeing that public interest is no longer just a yield for private financiers, but a shared benefit in the public interest.

We do not have to look far for a successful precedent. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) already acts as the depository for all state taxes, fines, and fees. While BND operates more conservatively than the model we propose—acting primarily as a registrar and facilitator rather than a direct purchaser of munis—it still remits its profits to the state’s general fund. In 2023 alone, the bank posted profits of $192.7 million. To put that in perspective, this figure greatly exceeds the $115 million in annual revenue projected for Washington State’s highly contested wealth tax proposal. For states like Washington, which rely heavily on regressive property tax levies to pay for almost everything, the BND model offers a wealth of untapped potential.

While the BND focuses primarily on state and municipal operations, if a new generation of public banks were chartered to provide consumer financial services alongside municipal finance, the benefits would be exponential. Private retail banks routinely generate massive profit margins of 15% to 30% through rapacious fees and predatory lending. Crucially, a public bank would not simply transfer this rentier model to the public sector. By functioning as a true public utility, it would offer high-quality, low-cost financial services instead. Public banks should provide an affordable, non-predatory alternative for working people. Even without exorbitant fees, however, it would still generate a robust and ethical source of revenue to be invested directly back into the community—funding the very policies, programs, and budgets voted on by the people the bank serves.

To realize this vision, establishing democratically accountable public banks—whether at the municipal or state level—must become a top political and legislative priority. Chartered as public utilities rather than profit-seeking enterprises, these institutions would be governed by public appointees and remain 100% accountable to city halls, county commissions, or state legislatures. By legally mandating that all net earnings (derived from interest and fees) be deposited back into the government’s general fund, municipalities can organically grow their revenues over time without continuously hiking taxes. As an added democratic benefit, their daily operations would be entirely transparent, with balance sheets published for the public.

The practical strength of this arrangement lies in the specific mechanics of the yield. With the federal funds rate currently sitting at a target range of 3.50% to 3.75%, a municipality could intentionally set its internal bond yields just above this floor. Because the public bank holds the debt, the spread guarantees a steady stream of revenue for the public ledger. Furthermore, by indexing the yield to the rate of inflation, the city constructs a resilient financial instrument in the face of unpredictable circumstances. Should an emergency or unforeseen project cost require rapid liquidity beyond the public bank’s immediate capacity, this competitive yield would generate intense demand from the private sector to hold the city’s munis—effectively subordinating private capital to the public interest.

Unlocking a municipality’s latent ability to sell bonds directly to its own public bank reveals a startling truth: the primary limits on local finance are not economic, but political. The constraints cities currently face are mostly self-imposed regulations—arbitrary debt ceilings or rules enforced by oversight boards captured by private banking interests. While every municipality will navigate different statutory limits on bond issuance, we can begin by maxing out current legal capacities and organizing to expand those horizons later. 

Consider the political implications for building local public capacity. Lately, wealth taxes have dominated local discussions around budget expansion. While taxing the rich remains a vital tool for combating economic inequality and checking the anti-democratic power of concentrated wealth, relying on taxation as the sole lifeline for municipal survival is politically precarious. A public bank shifts this paradigm. By carefully managing the yields and maturities on internally held municipal bonds, a city can steadily expand its general fund. Wealth taxes would no longer be a desperate necessity for basic funding, but rather one tool among many. 

Instead of begging for scraps from state legislatures or private bond markets, local governments can directly create the capacity to care for their communities. Once we are willing to get creative with Democratic Public Finance, we see that the blueprint is already here. We only need the political will to use it, guaranteeing that every local dollar created is an investment in the public interest. 

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Women, Safety, and Moral Panic: From Private Protection to Public Responsibility in India

By Dr. Shikha Chandarana

For decades, women’s safety in India has been treated like a private problem with public consequences: a daughter warned to “come home early,” a student told to “stay alert,” a working woman advised to “dress carefully,” a survivor asked what she did to “invite” it. The country has learned to speak in the language of caution rather than the language of rights. What often goes unspoken is that this caution rests on a narrow idea of what it means to be a “good” woman—an idea that quietly functions as a social unit of account, against which women’s safety, respectability, and worth are constantly measured. And when outrage erupts—after a brutal assault, after a case that breaks through the wall of everyday violence—it is often followed by a familiar cycle: candlelight, slogans, a burst of enforcement, and then the slow return to normal.

But “normal” has a body count—and it has a paperwork trail. In the most recent official tallies reported to Parliament, recorded “crime against women” cases were 428,278 (2021), 445,256 (2022), and 448,211 (2023)—a scale so vast it risks becoming background noise (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2025). Within those numbers, what stands out is not the horror of public violence, but the persistence of private terror: “cruelty by husband or relatives” remains the single largest category, with 133,676 cases in 2023 (Ministry of Home Affairs, 2025). The state’s own gender compendium underlines the same truth in plainer moral terms: women’s safety is compromised first, and most often, inside the home, where “cruelty by husband and relatives” accounts for roughly one-third of major crimes against women and where a cluster of categories together make up more than 70% of recorded crime (Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation [MoSPI], 2023). These numbers represent the crimes reported to the authorities, but in a nation of silent women, a majority of cases remain silenced.

This violence that never becomes an FIR is even harder to face. Using survey data alongside police statistics, the same compendium notes that the share of ever‑married women aged 18–49 who have experienced emotional, physical, or sexual violence by a husband declined only marginally—from 33.3% (2015–16) to 31.9% (2019–21)—still roughly one in three women living with intimate‑partner violence (MoSPI, 2023). A society cannot police its way out of that. A nation cannot CCTV its way out of that. A state cannot slogan its way out of that.

Still, the numbers demand honesty. Rising recorded cases do not automatically prove rising violence; they can also reflect increased reporting (a claim made by the Ministry of Home Affairs)—driven by awareness, easier access to registration, and shifts in enforcement. A state can congratulate itself for “better reporting” while refusing to confront what the reports are actually saying: that women are not merely unsafe in public spaces—they are systematically harmed in the most intimate ones.

This is where the question becomes more than a data debate. Because women’s safety is not only about what happens to women, it is also about what a society believes women are for. And over the last decade, India’s political common sense has been increasingly shaped by Hindutva—a project that frames national belonging through a majoritarian religious identity and seeks to reorder the social world around that identity. In that worldview, women are rarely treated as full citizens first. Too often, they are cast as symbols: bearers of “culture,” vessels of “honor,” boundary-markers of the community. When women become boundaries, “safety” stops meaning freedom from violence and starts meaning containment—restrictions justified as protection.

The clearest example is the obsessive political energy poured into policing women’s intimacy, especially interfaith relationships. The “love jihad” narrative is not just propaganda; it has become a governing style. Scholars of Hindu nationalist statecraft describe how “love jihad” politics folds gender and intimacy into a conservative regime of control, where women are constituted as “subjects of protection” and the state claims authority to supervise personal choice (Nielsen & Nilsen, 2021). Legal analysis of “love jihad” ordinances makes the same point with sharp precision: the phrase operates as social and political control, limiting women’s free will by treating adult women as if they cannot decide whom to love or whether to convert (Sonkar, 2022). The problem here is the patriarchal logic beneath it: women’s agency is treated as a security threat, and “saving” women becomes an excuse to discipline them.

This discipline spills into streets and screens. Feminist scholarship on the contemporary moment describes a “vigilante” ecosystem where moral policing thrives—an atmosphere in which women who transgress prescribed roles (by protesting, speaking out, loving across boundaries, dressing visibly as themselves) are treated as fair game for public humiliation and punishment (Chigateri & Kundu, 2024). And online, a new front has opened: the production line of misogyny that trains young men to see feminism as a civilizational enemy. Research on the Indian manosphere documents how online misogyny can function as a pedagogy—socializing men into a digital subjectivity aligned with Hindutva politics, steeped in resentment and gender hierarchy. When misogyny becomes a political identity, women’s safety cannot be separated from the ideological climate that licenses contempt.

This is the central contradiction of Hindutva’s safety story: it speaks loudly about “protecting” women, but often in a way that relocates danger onto an externalized enemy—an “outsider,” a “predator,” a communal Other—while downplaying the violence that is statistically most common and socially most tolerated: violence within the private sphere (MoSPI, 2023; Ministry of Home Affairs, 2025). When safety is narrated as protection from the Other, the state can perform toughness without touching patriarchy. It can promise rescue while leaving women trapped in homes, in marriages, in bureaucracies, in courts with endless delays.

And so, “decades of women’s safety” becomes a story of misdirection. The argument is not that patriarchy began recently—it is older than any election cycle, older than any government. The argument is that a majoritarian ideology that treats women as cultural property deepens patriarchy’s grip by making control feel like patriotism. It tells families they are guardians of the nation when they are, in practice, guardians of women’s silence. It tells men they are defenders of honor when they are, too often, perpetrators protected by shame and impunity. It tells women they are safe when they are compliant.

This is also why the usual turn to jobs, opportunity, or “empowerment” can feel beside the point. That discourse assumes a “real world” that comes first—where culture is already settled, women are already legible as subjects, and rights can be exercised as if the main barrier were access. But women encounter politics upstream, long before any job offer: in warnings, reputations, sermons, news cycles, viral clips, and the everyday sense of what will be believed. When a political project succeeds in staging its own version of “Indian tradition” as common sense, economic participation becomes a downstream promise in a world where women’s credibility has already been bargained away.

Women’s safety is easier to politicize when women are not treated as people but as value—as a kind of gold standard for “culture,” a deliberately narrow measure of womanhood that must be guarded, defended, and kept from “contamination” or “theft.” In the Hindutva version of this story, that “value” is narrated as national culture itself—treated as something the ruling project owns, and therefore something women must embody and defend. Feminist theory has a name for this logic: the “traffic in women,” where women are positioned as the medium through which social bonds, status, and legitimacy are organized (Rubin, 1975). But the traffic only works because a particular idea of womanhood is treated as the standard that makes the exchange legible. “Respectable,” “pure,” “protected,” “fallen”—they are the categories that allow families, communities, and political movements to price honor and disgrace. Violence and surveillance do not merely punish women who step out of line; they stabilize what “woman” is allowed to mean, keeping it narrow enough to remain exchangeable. In this frame, violence is not only a private act; it is a kind of enforcement. It disciplines the “currency” when it is perceived as out of circulation, devalued, or circulating in the “wrong” direction. And it is precisely because the currency is symbolic that it can become brutally material: women’s bodies carry the costs of political meanings that men and institutions claim to own.

That’s why the language of “honor,” “purity,” and “protection” functions like a shadow economy: it assigns women a public value that can be accumulated as symbolic capital—something families, communities, and political movements can convert into moral authority (Bourdieu, 1986). Nationalist projects, in particular, rely on women as a kind of infrastructure for belonging: women are cast as biological reproducers of the nation, cultural transmitters, and boundary-markers that distinguish “us” from “them” (Yuval-Davis, 1997). Under that logic, the state does not only promise women safety; it claims the right to manage women’s circulation—who they marry, how they appear, what they symbolize—because controlling women’s agency becomes a way of controlling the nation’s imagined coherence.

In this sense, women-as-currency is not just a metaphor but a political economy. It treats value as something already given—honor, purity, community standing—and “safety” as the policing of how that value circulates. Public claims for freedom, exit, dignity, or justice are pushed aside by a more basic question: does this woman still count as the right kind of woman? That is a form of monetary silencing—substituting the management of symbolic exchange for the provision of real social capacity.

This is also what makes Hindutva’s gender politics feel less like “safety” and more like market regulation: the state and its allied moral economies intervene most aggressively when women’s intimate choices threaten to move across the boundaries that sustain majoritarian identity. The “love jihad” narrative is legible in exactly these terms: it treats interfaith intimacy as a form of illicit transfer—women as community property being “taken”—and it authorizes governance over gender and intimacy as a protective duty (Nielsen & Nilsen, 2021; Sonkar, 2022). Meanwhile, the violence most statistically concentrated in the home becomes normalized as the internal discipline of the exchange itself—part of what Deniz Kandiyoti called the “patriarchal bargain,” where women’s constrained security is purchased through compliance within a system that reserves coercion as enforcement (Kandiyoti, 1988). In other words: when women are treated as cultural currency, the state can perform “protection” against an externalized enemy while leaving intact the ordinary, intimate violence that keeps the currency under control.

If India is serious about women’s safety, the test is simple: does “safety” expand women’s freedom, or does it shrink it? Does it strengthen survivors’ access to justice, or does it strengthen society’s power to supervise women’s choices? Does it confront the violence of the home, or does it distract us with the theater of public protection? The official data already points to where the emergency lives: in households, in marriages, in everyday coercion (MoSPI, 2023; Ministry of Home Affairs, 2025). Any politics that cannot face that reality—any ideology that prefers to police women rather than protect them—will keep India stuck in the same loop, decade after decade: grief, fury, forgetting.

A republic organized around public responsibilities would reverse this logic: it would treat women not as the units being measured but as co-authors of the measures themselves—what safety means, what harm counts, and what institutions are obligated to provide. That means treating media and political rhetoric as public responsibilities too: building institutions and norms that expand what women can say, report, and be believed about—rather than letting “tradition” be monopolized as a weapon of control. It would treat women’s freedom not as a risk to be managed, but as a public standard the state must help build and maintain. Women do not need a nation that guards them as symbols. They need a republic that recognizes them as citizens.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital (R. Nice, Trans.). In J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood Press.

Chigateri, S., & Kundu, S. (2024). Virulent Hindutva, vigilante state: Situating backlash and its implications for women’s rights in India. IDS Bulletin, 55(1), 101–116. doi:10.19088/1968-2024.109

Kandiyoti, D. (1988). Bargaining with patriarchy. Gender & Society, 2(3), 274–290. doi:10.1177/089124388002003004

Ministry of Home Affairs. (2025, December 3). Crimes against women and children (Rajya Sabha Unstarred Question No. 390) [Parliamentary question]. Government of India.

Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. (2023). Women and men in India 2023: Impediments in empowerment [Statistical publication]. National Statistical Office, Government of India.

Nielsen, K. B., & Nilsen, A. G. (2021). Love jihad and the governance of gender and intimacy in Hindu nationalist statecraft. Religions, 12(12), 1068. doi:10.3390/rel12121068

Rubin, G. (1975). The traffic in women: Notes on the “political economy” of sex. In R. R. Reiter (Ed.), Toward an anthropology of women (pp. 157–210). Monthly Review Press.

Sonkar, S. (2022). Policing interfaith marriages: Constitutional infidelity of the love jihad ordinance. Journal of Law and Religion, 37(3), 432–445. doi:10.1017/jlr.2022.37

Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender and nation. SAGE Publications.

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The Challenge of Reporting on Trump (Parody)

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.

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Touch Grass, Touchscreens, and Public Design

By Will Beaman

A small design story from May 2025 has been making the rounds on my newsfeed, about how car manufacturers are re-embracing physical buttons after years of migrating controls onto touchscreens. The given reason is practical, not nostalgic: glass-only interfaces increase cognitive load and reduce safety, and safety-rating criteria are beginning to incentivize tactile controls for core functions.

Yet I have to admit that when I read stories like this, I feel an outsized sense of relief that crosses over into something like political—or at least civic—joy. It’s the same thing I feel about any number of public backlashes to certain “inevitable” tech rollouts: growing skepticism toward forcing AI into every workplace, Gen Z consumer trends toward embracing analog technologies, and the more general sense that defaults no longer carry the same aura of inevitability. These reversals feel, to me, like a small rehearsal of democratic renewal. They hint at a shift from being treated primarily as users—actors managed through prompts, defaults, and friction—to being treated as citizens, for whom the design of coordination is a legitimate object of argument. There is no “market” that knows what we want better than we do.

Thinking this way about recent design reversals opens onto a broader question: how design itself is made to appear either inevitable or contestable, not just in technology, but in the institutions that organize its production and collective life more broadly.

Design as disappearance

In the dominant UX paradigm of the past 15 years, touchscreens did not merely replace buttons; they advanced a phenomenological claim about interaction itself. The ideal interface, we were told, is frictionless, general, infinitely adaptable, and ultimately invisible. One surface, endlessly reprogrammable, organizing every possible action.

A clear illustration of how design gains authority by disappearing itself can be found in the history of the UX language of “affordance.”

In design discourse, “affordances” are often treated as a neutral vocabulary for what objects and environments allow us to do, as if interaction simply presents itself to perception. But in their feminist historiography of the concept, Erica Robles-Anderson and Scott Ferguson show that this apparent common sense has a history—and that the history is not only conceptual, but institutional and gendered. They return to Eleanor Gibson, a central figure in the perceptual psychology from which affordance theory emerges, and show how her work and position were constitutively obscured in the way “affordance” later gets cited, simplified, and naturalized. Part of the story is explicitly institutional: in the mid-century university setting that shaped the Gibsons’ careers, rules and norms governing married women’s employment and professional legitimacy made it easier for a shared intellectual project to be remembered as the achievement of a single author-function. The result is not only an injustice in credit. It is a mechanism by which the concept itself comes to feel self-grounding.

The canonization of “affordance” required a specific kind of disappearance: the erasure of Eleanor Gibson’s institutional exclusion and intellectual labor helped “affordance” travel as common sense—stripped of the institutional conditions under which it was produced, and therefore easier to treat as a neutral description of how interaction simply presents itself. Neoliberal design aesthetics rely on the same operation. Interfaces and institutions present themselves as natural, frictionless, or inevitable by concealing the work that sustains them—maintenance, care, calibration, enforcement, repair, and the slow labor of keeping systems usable. Because these categories of work have been historically feminized, the disappearance of design is also the disappearance of feminized labor. What reads as neutrality or inevitability is produced through a systematic refusal to see its conditions of possibility.

The same logic governs the turn toward “smart” systems and generalized AI: intelligence as background condition rather than public instrument; decision-making as automation rather than judgment; design presented as destiny rather than choice. Survey research suggests the public’s stance is not simply enthusiasm or fear, but a demand for boundaries and control over where AI is inserted into daily life.

A key political effect of all this is not that interfaces disappear, but that the location of discretion is obscured. Complexity is absorbed elsewhere—into software updates, platform governance, subscription tiers, data extraction, and opaque model behavior—while users are trained to treat adaptation as the only mature posture. That same aesthetic reappears in institutional life, where “constraints” do similar work.

Design as “there is no alternative”

Neoliberal institutions follow the same design logic as dominant UX paradigms: they treat political choices as constraints and make the site of discretion difficult to see. In the United States, the clearest example is the ubiquitous appeal to “balancing the budget” as the baseline of responsibility. This is not simply an economic preference; it is a design principle. For most people, the phrase arrives preloaded with a household analogy: if a family must live within its means, then public authorities must do the same. That analogy quietly determines how public problems are allowed to appear. Needs must be translated into costs; proposals must arrive already paired with offsets; public programs must be justified as deviations from an assumed condition of scarcity.

This logic is not confined to rhetoric. At the state and local level, it is built directly into governance through balanced-budget requirements and administrative routines that treat public capacity as suspect until it is proven “affordable” within a given accounting schema of costs and assets. When public authorities are required to behave as if they were revenue-constrained in the same way as households—raising taxes, cutting services, or borrowing on terms dictated elsewhere—the design does its work. Discretion does not disappear, but it becomes harder to locate. Decisions come to appear as outputs of “the budget,” “the bond market,” or “technical constraints,” rather than as judgments about whose participation will be supported, deferred, or denied.

Central bank independence belongs to this same family of design choices. Whatever one thinks of its merits (we at Money on the Left are not fans), “independence” functions rhetorically as an insulation of monetary decision-making from contestation. It reinforces a familiar division of labor: monetary authorities act, while fiscal authorities are told to justify themselves. In practice, this trains the public to imagine that major questions about inflation, employment, and investment are handled by a separate apparatus not meaningfully available to democratic argument. Objectivity is promised through withdrawn legibility.

In both domains, design does not eliminate coordination; it obscures it. Responsibility is displaced upward and outward, while publics are trained to adapt.

It is worth noting that this withdrawal of legibility is often reinforced by a reflex on the left: treating design itself as synonymous with technocracy, as if naming design were already a concession to managerial rule.

Decoupling technocracy from design

One reason institutional design is so difficult to contest is that, for many people on the left, design talk already sounds like a technocratic trap. The worry is familiar: once politics is framed in terms of institutions, procedures, and constraints, democratic deliberation seems displaced by expertise, and movements risk becoming recruitment projects for a better class of managers.

This anxiety is playing out in real time within UK Green Party politics, where questions of monetary and fiscal capacity have become unusually explicit. In late 2025, the party’s leader, Zack Polanski, called for a more expansive economic vision, opening a live debate about whether Modern Monetary Theory should have a place in Green Party thinking. In this context, MMT matters less as a set of slogans than as a way of forcing institutional questions into the open: who is authorized to issue public credit, under what conditions, toward which ends, and with what forms of accountability? In that sense, it functions as a discourse about institutional design.

Grace Blakeley’s critique of MMT articulates the opposing reflex clearly. While she grants that MMT largely describes the operations of fiscal and monetary policy correctly, she frames the case for MMT as essentially technocratic—an argument about improving performance within existing constraints rather than altering the distribution of power that determines what the state does with its capacities. On this view, institutional argument itself risks narrowing politics into technique.

The problem is that treating design as necessarily technocratic quietly accepts one of neoliberalism’s central achievements: the identification of institutional architecture with a domain that is not publicly negotiable. If design names what experts do elsewhere, democratic politics can only appear as refusal, protest, or redistribution within fixed forms. Design becomes something to ignore or endure, but not to argue about.

The emergence of the Verdant think tank, positioned to keep MMT out of Green Party politics in the name of “credibility,” sharpens this dilemma. Whatever its stated intentions, the effect is to situate class politics within a flat design frame where the architecture itself—its authorization rules and monetary arrangements—cannot be challenged, only managed.

Rob Hawkes’ argument for Democratic Public Finance clarifies what is at stake. The point is not to replace democratic struggle with institutional fine-tuning, but to recognize that monetary and fiscal arrangements are already designed and continuously redesigned—typically in ways insulated from scrutiny. As Hawkes puts it, orthodoxy places money beyond the reach of democratic design, even though “the books” belong to a system we have designed and can design differently. The wager is that institutional design must be treated as a site of democratic struggle rather than as the technocrats’ backstage.

Beyond analog romance

It is crucial not to misread this moment as a simple return to the analog. Part of what makes the present shift tempting to narrate is that a familiar press story is already waiting: Gen Z is “bringing back the analog,” and analog media become a refuge from screens, algorithms, and AI saturation. In this telling, the appeal of older formats is not just practical; it is moral. Analog stands for authenticity, presence, and a reclaiming of agency from a digital world that has become too smooth to trust.

At the same time, not all contemporary interest in print or “analog” media takes this form. Some of the most compelling arguments for returning to bounded formats are explicitly political rather than nostalgic. Matt Seybold’s provocation that print functions as a kind of rent strike, and Cory Doctorow’s sustained critique of platform enshittification, both frame form as a site of contestation—an object of refusal and redesign rather than a refuge from mediation. In these accounts, the point is not that analog media are more real, but that digital infrastructures have been deliberately designed to extract rents, degrade public capacity, and foreclose alternatives. Amy Rust’s account of “analog nostalgia” helps clarify what is at stake in the contrast: the yearning for props, practical effects, and vintage objects is not a simple return to pre-digital life so much as a way of contracting distinctly digital demands into tactile forms that promise reassurance, even when the underlying media ecology remains thoroughly hybrid.

There is also a deeper theoretical inheritance shaping the more romantic version of this story. In a strand of post-structuralist thought associated with figures like Brian Massumi and Alexander Galloway, the analog is often affirmed as a privileged site of process, flux, or embodied immediacy beneath the rigidity of digital representation. Read critically, this move treats “the analog” as what might be called an exculpatory medium: a substrate that secures difference or vitality in advance, prior to institutional design or public negotiation.

What is striking, though, is that this romance of analogicity often ends up affirming many of the same design ideals that neoliberal tech has spent the past two decades promoting. The overlap is easy to miss because it operates through a denial of design rather than explicit design language. Analog media are rarely praised as immersive or seamless; they are praised as real, as life itself rather than as media at all—go outside, touch grass, be present.

But the qualities being affirmed are still familiar ones: touch, immediacy, continuity, flow, the sense that experience unfolds without interruption or formal mediation. These are also the values that organize dominant UX paradigms. Where digital systems promise to disappear into responsiveness and background automation, analog romance promises to disappear design altogether, recoding it as nature.

In both cases, the ideal is not a form open to debate, but an experience that presents itself as simply how things are. 

Coordination without sameness

What makes these disputes intelligible across domains is that coordination does not depend on identity—perfect equivalence, balanced books, or one-to-one representation—but on analogical alignment: the capacity to relate heterogeneous claims, contributions, and obligations through shared but non-identical reference. Accounting works not because everything is the same, but because unlike things can be held together without being collapsed.

Seen this way, abstractions are democratic tools: a way of organizing shared reference at scale. The question is whether that tool is treated as an open design space, governed and revised in public, or as a background condition that can only be endured.

Money offers a clear case. Its horizon is not failed representation or commodification, but coordination through shared reference. It works because it can relate unlike claims without forcing them into identity or abandoning them to isolation. When money is treated analogically, it becomes legible as infrastructure rather than destiny.

The same is true of interfaces and institutions. The political task is not to eliminate design or abstraction, but to insist that the forms coordinating collective life can accommodate difference without erasing it, and remain open to contestation.

The return of public design

The current return of analog form—buttons, print, bounded interfaces, explicit commitments—is not mere nostalgia. It reflects a weakening of inevitability narratives that have long aligned technical sophistication with political foreclosure.

The examples that open this essay are not incidental. They signal that inevitability narratives are becoming harder to sustain. When people push back on touchscreen-only controls, compulsory AI integration, or the endless revision of the terms of competence, they are not rejecting technology. They are contesting the premise that the terms of coordination should be redesigned over their heads and then received as simply how things are.

That contestability does not guarantee democratic outcomes. Public backlash can lead to reaction as easily as collective experimentation. But once defaults are perceived as designed—once they are heard as choices—argument becomes possible again.

That weakening is not confined to one country or one sector. Across very different political contexts, the same question is now being argued about in public: whether the rules of the game are fixed background conditions that politics must accept, or whether they are themselves part of democratic life and therefore open to redesign.

Once design is revealed as design—as choice rather than destiny—democracy becomes possible again.

In the United States, even the most conventional political vocabularies are saturated with design language: constitutions, checks and balances, amendments, jurisdiction, representation, rights. The question is never simply whether the framers were wise technicians. It is whether constitutionalism is treated as a closed inheritance administered by guardians, or as a democratic design space that can be renewed in response to new demands for participation. In a moment of tenuous authoritarianism and the possibility of democratic renewal, the stakes of institutional design are not secondary to politics. They are one of its most publicly legible forms.

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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.

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