Power to the People w/ Sandeep Vaheesan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Adventures in Quantumland w/ Ruth E. Kastner

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


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


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

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

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On Merger Policy and Labor

By Sanjukta Paul

What’s a merger? A merger is a specific method of expanding the scope of a particular form of economic coordination that has been authorized by law. There is nothing natural or necessary about firms as a form of economic coordination or organization. All throughout history, people have been innovating and creating and trading in all sorts of organizational forms and economic institutions—through craft guilds, through mercantile guilds. There’s nothing compulsory or natural about the specific form of the modern firm—shareholder-driven and organized in the particular way that it is, with workers largely divorced from decision-making. 

Now, I’m not suggesting that we go back to the guild system. I’m asking us to take a step back and think about what a firm is and what we’re doing when we say that the presumption should be that, in essence, firms have the right to combine into still-larger and more powerful firms.

Because I want to propose a shift in our thinking about merger policy. I suggest we think about merger policy not just from the perspective of a specific merger’s effect on market concentration and on wages. We should also think about the rules we adopt in terms of their systemic effects on labor, on labor unions, on workers. And that means thinking about antitrust rules not just in terms of how we would apply a given set of rules in a given adjudication, but also in terms of how they function prophylactically to create, or not create, the sorts of markets we want to see.

What is the effect of a permissive merger policy versus a quite stringent merger policy on the competitive and business strategies that executives and boards are looking at, and that they may even be compelled into when everyone else is also pursuing them? What competitive strategies are open to firm controllers given a particular set of legal rules? In the context of a strict merger policy, what would happen to business strategy? I’m just going to ask the question as a thought experiment: If we take mergers more or less off the table as a competitive or business strategy, if we make them the exception and not the rule, what would happen? What would be the implications for markets in general and for labor in particular? I’m not going to answer those questions exhaustively, but I’m going to suggest that we think about them.

The firm is specifically an antitrust exception. It is a suspension of competition. You can say that it’s crazy to think about not allowing firm-based coordination; how would we produce? Well, there are actually all kinds of ways. At the simplest level, if you were truly trying to maximize competition, you could take the output of a firm and divide it—you keep all the operational integration, but you could just divide control rights over that output among everyone who works for that firm and let them individually price their share of the output. That would be a more competitive outcome, potentially replicating the level of competition that the modern business firm displaced. It’s fine that we don’t do that, but I think we need to notice what is actually happening here. I’m not the first one to have this insight: Ronald Coase, most famously, talked about the firm as a suspension of competition and market exchange.

So that is what a merger is: expanding this particular way of suspending competition. We need to be very clear about what we are actually doing and how we treat that form differently from other suspensions of competition—including labor unions, cooperatives, and even looser horizontal coordination in the form of things like trade associations. 

Mergers are an expansion of the scope of what is already the biggest and strongest antitrust exemption we have: the firm. That’s one thing I want us to notice about mergers. The second point I want to make is about “efficiencies.” When we talk about efficiencies that may be realized by a given merger, we need to consider two things. Which of them, first of all, actually are efficiencies versus something else? And secondly, could any genuine efficiencies potentially be achieved through forms of coordination other than the expansion of the firm? How?

Now, taking the second point first, this idea of thinking about economic coordination broadly is not just an academic point. What could we do right now in terms of other forms of coordination that could realize some of the putative efficiencies that specific mergers may accomplish?

For instance, could some of those genuine efficiencies be achieved through industry-wide standards in various situations? Could they be achieved by a trade association? We have trade associations that do marketing for various industries. You’ve all seen the milk ads. Or maybe you remember the California Raisins. Is there coordination through those types of mechanisms that could actually preserve more independent decision-making throughout the economy? That, by the way, is one of the goals of antitrust under settled law: dispersed decision-making. So, should we be considering those alternative forms of coordination? And indeed, in any new merger guidelines, should we be considering a safe harbor for some of these alternative forms of coordination—potentially through dispersed coordination, through trade associations or industry-wide standards—that could achieve some of those genuine efficiencies without the consolidation, and specifically without the consolidation in the form of the shareholder-driven firm that mergers currently signify? 

And on the first point about efficiencies: We also have to ask, how many of these putative efficiencies are actually intensified forms of extraction versus actual efficiencies? And here, it’s important to first get conceptually clear about what we mean by “efficiency.” Do we mean allocative efficiency? I don’t find that concept terribly useful myself, but to the extent that we are adopting it, obviously a merger decreases allocative efficiency. Everyone, Robert Bork, Oliver Williamson, has actually agreed on that. Somehow, though, we sometimes seem to forget this simple point.

So, allocative efficiency certainly isn’t an efficiency that’s contributed by a merger. It has to be a production efficiency. Then the question becomes: When are there true production efficiencies that are contributed by a given merger? In some cases, what we call a productive efficiency may actually be a form of extraction. I’m not saying they all are; I think there are genuine efficiencies. But sometimes, specifically when we’re looking at price as an index of production efficiency—which is obviously a shorthand we use all the time—we mistake extraction, or just a transfer of benefits from one group to another, for efficiency. In other words, low prices are often not an indication of production efficiencies; they’re an indication of extraction. And I don’t mean that in just a moralizing, pejorative way; this has to be acknowledged regardless of your ultimate normative views.

Let me break it down. What is a production efficiency? A technical efficiency means you get more output for the same input. It is technical innovation. We have seen so much such technical innovation in history. We live in a time in which we’re benefiting from it tremendously. But consider the difference between a machine that allows two workers to produce more (at the same quality) with the same effort, versus a new institutional or organizational arrangement that pays those two workers less to produce the same amount—or has them put in more effort for the same amount. Those are not the same thing. The second thing simply is not a technical efficiency. I’m not taking a normative position on that, right now. You can, I suppose, have the position that that’s a good thing and that we should drive wages down to subsistence levels. I do not think that—I do not think many people would admit that they think that even if they do—but I want us right now to notice that, conceptually, there is a difference.

And the same thing applies when a merger leads to greater bargaining power with respect to other firms that are input suppliers or distributors or whatever—firms in adjacent markets that you’re bargaining with. If you ultimately get lower prices—which we know we often don’t because instead those savings go up to shareholders—to what extent is it coming from superior bargaining power with respect to suppliers, distributors, and other trading partners versus true productive efficiencies? Imagine you now have more bargaining power with respect to trading partners in adjacent markets—very plausible if you’re now a bigger firm and you have a larger market share. So, again, we need to distinguish between true technical efficiency and extraction, both on the labor side and on the smaller-firm side.

And by the way, that’s not mainly because we just care about small firms and we romanticize them. Those small firms have workers themselves. So we need to look very carefully at even the supposed wage premium of large firms, because to what extent is that a wealth transfer from the workers of other firms to the workers of large firms (to the extent there even is a wage premium)? Notably, aside from current harms, you don’t even maintain that benefit if you just get rid of small firms to extract from.

These are all things we need to think about when we think about merger policy and workers. It’s more than a matter of efficiencies, too. For instance, permissive merger policy might entail a direct transfer from the productive arms of the firm to its nonproductive arms, and therefore ultimately from workers to shareholders and dealmakers. We often talk about this process as a function of the greed of individuals, like executives or the members of the board, but if we consider it systemically, we see how everyone, including those executives and boards, are actually constrained by this.

Many social scientists and researchers have been talking about share buybacks as a form of this type of transfer from workers and from production in general to the financial and household sectors. Josh Mason, an economist whom antitrust folks should pay more attention to, has a nice essay thinking about M&A itself as this same type of transfer. And he says:

[W]hen acquisitions are paid in stock, the total volume of shares doesn’t change. But when they are paid in cash, it does. In the aggregate, when publicly traded company A pays $1 billion to acquire publicly traded company B, that is just a payment from the corporate sector to the household sector of $1 billion, just as if the corporation were buying back its own stock.

Again, we are transferring from producers to savers at a systemic level. And again, you can have different views on the utility of that, but that is exactly what has been critiqued with respect to share buybacks. And whatever your opinion about it, it certainly isn’t a productive efficiency!

If you’ve taught business associations, as I have, then you’ve read all kinds of cases with your students in which the board doesn’t actually want to do the deal—even beyond the deals actually classified as hostile takeovers. No one who’s actually running the company wants it to happen. But their hands are tied by the pressure exerted by this set of rules, or at least their hands are strongly guided toward doing deals that very few people actually want. And this is especially stark when we consider that their primary job is to be stewards and managers of certain productive assets. That’s the point of the firm: making the best use of productive assets. We’ve decided, as a society, that giving this job over to managers and CEOs and boards is the way we want to do that. So if that’s the goal, we must ask, with respect to merger policy: Wouldn’t it be useful to have prophylactic rules that actually channel decision-makers’ activity toward doing precisely that, rather than impelling them toward deals that often benefit very few people?

* This is an edited transcription of a presentation delivered at the “Antitrust and Competition Conference: Beyond the Consumer Welfare Standard?” (University of Chicago, April 20-21, 2023).

Postmodern Money Theory! (Part 3)

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

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

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

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

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

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Internationalism in Name Only: The Left’s Realist Turn

By Jane Ball

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 touched a dormant but significant fault line on the left. On the one hand, much of the left was outraged by the invasion, believing it to be an illegal and genocidal land grab. On the other hand, a cadre of the left, especially in the US and the UK, took the opposing position. They blame the US for NATO’s eastward expansion for provoking Russia’s invasion to defend its “legitimate security interests.” This second group, given voice by Noam Chomsky and by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has consistently demanded Ukrainian capitulation to Putin’s demands. These voices combine an economistic definition of capitalism with the offensive realist IR theory (mainly John Mearsheimer‘s) of international relations as driven by the politics of power projection. Thus, they attribute Ukrainian unwillingness to capitulate to an American capitalist Realpolitik that perpetually threatens Russian security and not as an authentic defense of their nation. 

However, this argument suffers from a poverty of theory. It views the world as a mechanistic body driven solely by predetermined (capitalist) instincts and denies human agency to affect the world. It also suffers from acute ahistoricism. Mearsheimer’s formulation of an anarchic “security competition” is a tautology that self-consciously excludes factors that contradict his theories as outside the scope of international relations. He does not explain how this anarchy developed, what specific social property relations it expresses, or how those social relations evolved. Thus, while it is necessary to question NATO’s continued relevance in the 21st century, the critiques by Chomsky and the DSA rely on a theory of international relations that is divorced from the material realities of the actual historical process. A leftist IR theory must be firmly rooted in the specificities of history and must account for the development of the social relations buttressing the international order. If Western capitalism is to be blamed for the war, then capitalism should be defined. The theory must also understand the evolution of internationalism as a complex and sometimes contradictory ideology, which implies a complete understanding of its revolutionary origins. Finally, a left IR theory must consider how militant worker action impacts the creation of world systems and their tensions.

The Head and the Heart

The DSA position is that the US is uniformly responsible for capitalist expansion and exploitation. It is easy to dismiss this as typical left-reactionary anti-Americanism, but this proposition is critical to DSA’s analysis of capitalism. For example, its original NATO statement argues that provocation from NATO’s expansion is the sole reason for Russia’s militarization. The International Committee’s opening statement proceeds from the organization’s 2021 platform, which states “DSA operates in the heart of a global capitalist empire” and later says, “as socialists living in the heart of the American empire.” The conflation of the US with the totality of an empire of Capital suggests that they view the two as indistinguishable. It is not just a rhetorical posture; it is a philosophical disposition.

From a moral standpoint, the DSA statement is correct. As the sole remaining superpower, the US is responsible for many atrocities and horrors, disproportionately targeting people of color and developing nations. These horrors have been committed – sometimes justified – as necessary actions to spread democratic values, protect human rights, and above all, capitalist social relations. The DSA is right to call out these hypocrisies, and they stand on firm moral ground. However, as a critique of the current imperial order and an analysis of the specific social relations that comprise the existing order, they present a reductive and mechanistic theory of history that ultimately undermines their moral capital.

Consider DSA’s description of an individual’s relationship to the system of Capital. The system is a body, the US, the body’s heart. Humans living “within the heart” are individualistic cells encoded by DNA for specific functions. Cells have no agency – they can only do what they were programmed to do. A single cell cannot change the direction the body moves and does not exist apart from the body. The body is intrinsic to the cell’s identity and existence. Not only do people have agency that goes beyond the orchestrations of a univocal political “body”, but this agency is social and linked to other relations of affiliation and dependence. 

Likewise, analogizing the US as the “heart of empire” has problematic implications. The heart pumps blood, distributing blood and oxygen to the rest of the body. Without it, the body could not function. This reasonably analogizes the US’s function in the imperial system. As the prime hegemonic power, the US economy and military have an unprecedented ability to exert their influence directly and indirectly to maintain the imperial order. However, this is where the analogy breaks down. DSA presents the body—capitalism—as a totality, defined and driven entirely by a mechanistic heart. There is no agency here, let alone the heterogeneous institutions and stakeholders that actually make things move. The inevitable march of capitalism flattens everything. 

These notions of inevitability are at odds with the historical process. By imagining people as individualized cells within a mechanistic body, the DSA theory denies the working classes of the past the agency and the ability to effect positive change in the world that inspires them to organize today. It collapses the last five hundred years of human history into an inevitable, perpetual, and all-consuming system called “capitalism.” In doing so, the DSA theory merely inverts the Whig narrative of historical progress rather than changing them. It does not analyze the structure of the current imperial order, its origins, or what specific property relations they reflect. They see that the US pumps capitalism’s blood but ignores the mind controlling the body. The US acts in “service to Capital.” Still, DSA does not precisely define what capital is. Capital is everything and exists a priori and apart from the human experience. The US may be the “heart of empire,” but the heart does not direct the body’s actions. It does not create the logic through which the body engages with the world. By centering the mechanical heart and not the dynamic mind, DSA conflates the guarantor of the imperial order with the imperial order itself. This mistake renders their geopolitical posture incoherent; there’s no specificity to the social relations guiding the imperial international system. The United States’ actions are definitionally imperialistic, regardless of the actual social and political context. 

The Left’s Realist Turn

There is no better demonstration of this tautology than a portion of the left’s critique of NATO and response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. For instance, here is how Noam Chomsky summarizes the crisis

There are some simple facts that aren’t really controversial. There are two ways for a war to end: One way is for one side or the other to be basically destroyed. And the Russians are not going to be destroyed. So that means one way is for Ukraine to be destroyed. The other way is some negotiated settlement. If there’s a third way, no one’s ever figured it out. So what we should be doing is devoting all the things you mentioned, if properly shaped, but primarily moving towards a possible negotiated settlement that will save Ukrainians from further disaster. That should be the prime focus…We can, however, look at the United States, and we can see that our explicit policy — explicit — is rejection of any form of negotiations. The explicit policy goes way back, but it was given a definitive form in September 2021 in the September 1st joint policy statement that was then reiterated and expanded in the November 10th charter of agreement.

According to Chomsky, the outcome of the war is a foregone conclusion; Russia will inevitably “destroy” Ukraine, and the only way for Ukraine to avoid destruction is to negotiate with Russia, having accepted this inevitability from the start. Since this outcome is obvious, it is irrational for Ukrainian officials not to accept this reality. Therefore, the refusal to accept Russian demands must come from an external force – the U.S. Rather than Zelensky’s refusal to capitulate reflecting Ukrainian rejection of Russia’s terms, it is caused by the US not allowing him to negotiate. The US is forcing the Ukrainian military to continue to fight to weaken Russia, thus confirming that the US and NATO are actively antagonizing Russia via NATO expansion and justifying Putin’s “legitimate security concerns.” Even now, a year into the war, Chomsky downplays Putin’s responsibility for the war in favor of placing blame on the United States while continuing to hint at Ukraine’s inevitable destruction:

Let’s return to the current topic: how policy is being designed to bring about “much worse” by escalating the conflict. The official reason remains as before: to severely weaken Russia. The liberal commentariat, however, offers more humane reasons: We must ensure that Ukraine is in a stronger position for eventual negotiations. Or in a weaker position, an alternative that does not enter into consideration, though it is hardly unrealistic.

On the topic of NATO’s expansion, the Chomsky argument weds itself to the statements made by proponents of the offensive realist school of foreign policy – John Mearsheimer in particular. In a New Yorker interview in March 2022, Mearsheimer makes a similar version of this argument:

Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of course, this includes more than just NATO expansion. NATO expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes EU expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat.   

Mearsheimer, like Chomsky, depicts the United States as the prime mover in the story of NATO’s expansion. NATO’s expansion is something the US did to push a “Western bulwark” further east, closer to Russia’s borders. In both accounts, the US is the only country with agency; everyone else is just along for the ride. Both deny Putin’s imperial desires and believe Russia is only reacting rationally to the security threat the US is perpetrating. However divergent their intellectual paths to this moment may have been, Chomsky and Mearsheimer are in complete alignment in arguing that the US has stretched the limits of unipolarity and is facing the natural, inevitable, almost mechanical reaction from its adversaries. This convergence is not new; for instance, Chomsky has long argued that NATO intervention in Kosovo was an imperial act of aggression by the US against Serbia. Nor is it just a rhetorical convenience; it betrays that both Chomsky and Mearsheimer share a highly deterministic view of capitalism and empire that, at its base, rejects the importance of diverse human agencies in the historical process. Nothing is contestable.

The left should be wary of aligning itself with offensive realists like Mearsheimer and, more recently, Henry Kissinger. In the first place, Mearsheimer’s worldview is highly simplistic and self-reinforcing. He defines his worldview on his website: “I believe that the great powers dominate the international system, and they constantly engage in security competition with each other, which sometimes leads to war.” This statement reveals that Mearsheimer believes that competition is every state’s historical default security posture and that international relations can only be defined as the sum of this competition, with the most powerful states monopolizing this competition. Only the Great Powers can express agency; minor nations are along for the ride, and the heterogeneous agencies of a state’s populace receive no consideration in his analysis. The reification of the nation-state and the naturalization of competition as a universal law of politics is antithetical to any leftist project that believes that collective action by the working classes can positively transform society. 

Second, leftists who would invoke realist foreign policy should know why Mearsheimer is so critical of the US’s focus on Russia. He is not advocating for dismantling American imperialism; he believes the US is distracted by a weakened Russia and is not doing enough to engage in Great Power politics with China, which he views as the true global rival. In his words: 

We do face a serious threat in the international system. We face a peer competitor. And that’s China. Our policy in Eastern Europe is undermining our ability to deal with the most dangerous threat that we face today.

Contrary to the left’s goal of preventing a new Cold War between the US and China, Mearsheimer is advocating for such a Cold War. 

Finally, neorealism self-consciously lacks historical explanations for international relations and state behavior variations. The theory declares a universal and transhistorical motivation for state behavior – specifically “security competition” – and only concerns itself with factors affirming the view. Aspects that contradict the theory are externalized; these are forces outside the narrowly delineated sphere of international relations beyond the scope of consideration. Mearsheimer presents another mechanistic world where complex social relations are relegated to a series of If/Then loops with narrowly defined parameters. Outcomes are predetermined, and reactions are instinctual and predictable. 

Ignoring the social complexity of history’s unfolding, Mearsheimer reduces inter-state politics to competition for security dominated by the most powerful states. Each state, like each individual “under capitalism,” has objective “interests” that are defined a priori: a zero-sum game of security flatly mediated by the invisible hand of power. Chomsky’s theory of international relations is nearly identical to Mearsheimer’s, with the difference that Chomsky incorporates a vulgar Marxist specter of Capital to position the US as the invisible hand moving all international relations. It assumes that if a Russia-Ukraine war were against the US’s interests, the US would prevent or stop it. Therefore, the conflict continues because the US wants it to continue. The US is one “actor”; the heart beats, the body responds. 

Internationalism in Name Only

DSA claims its anti-NATO position is principled internationalism. However, carefully reading their statements undercuts both claims of internationalism and the arguments made to justify the DSA stance. In the preamble of the June 11th, 2021, “No to NATO” statement, DSA calls for an immediate and unilateral withdrawal from the alliance. Regardless of NATO’s continued relevance in the 21st century, such a unilateral move by the US would be viewed – rightly – as an act of betrayal by our allies and would seriously hinder possibilities for future international cooperation. Further, immediate withdrawal would create a defense vacuum, as the defense umbrella European countries have planned their entire economies around for decades will suddenly evaporate. The vacuum would cause a rapid intensification of defense spending, well beyond the 2% of GDP requirement, leading to increased instability domestically and internationally. Domestically, intensifying defense spending would divert essential resources from the civilian sectors. Internationally, unilateral withdrawal makes the concept of “common defense” across Europe moot. The sudden vacuum of the American defense umbrella would spur a flurry of regional defense pacts among factions with diverging – and sometimes competing – security interests. Instability on both fronts is likely to be exacerbated by the fact that many of the NATO countries are also part of the Eurozone, whose monetary policy is effectively controlled by the German central bank. Far from undoing American imperialism, a unilateral withdrawal of the US from NATO is a continuation of Bush-era foreign policy and displays utter contempt for international institutions. 

Additionally, the language of the first bullet point in the “No to NATO” statement is inherently nationalist, not internationalist. The bullet point reads: 

Article 5 of the founding document that binds NATO members stipulates that “an attack on one is an attack on all.” A hypothetical attack on small Baltic nations that border Russia, although all the way across the Atlantic from the US, would force Americans to fight on European soil.

This statement is explicitly isolationist, arguing that the Baltics are too distant and insignificant for Americans’ concern. The phrasing of “European soil” also naturalizes the arbitrarily delineated borders of the nation-state.

Likewise, the fifth bullet point in the No to NATO statement is ostensibly a critique of the hypocrisies of liberal internationalist humanitarianism. However, in practice, it does more to cast doubt on the legitimacy of humanitarian concerns rather than the methods used to affect humanitarianism. The statement doesn’t argue for a better way to address humanitarian concerns; it dismisses any humanitarian justification as a pretext used to manufacture consent. Strikingly, though, the most potent example of the US using humanitarianism as a pretext for naked American aggression – Iraq – receives the least attention. Most of the critique is directed at the NATO intervention in Serbia, where the humanitarian situation was unambiguous. This position is consistent with Noam Chomsky’s overt denial of Serbian ethnic cleansing and genocide of Bosniaks and Kosovars as part of his criticism of the intervention., The Chomsky-DSA foreign policy may be anti-imperialist, but it is not internationalist. An approach that calls for the unilateral withdrawal of the US from its defense commitments combines all the arrogance of Bush unilateralism with all the fatalistic bleakness of Kissingerism. The denial of the genocides that precipitated NATO’s interventions in the Balkans and, more recently, the dismissal of Ukrainian sovereignty perpetuates fascist propaganda propagated throughout Europe and Russia. The defense vacuum created by the abrupt withdrawal advocated for by DSA would further destabilize Europe during its second refugee crisis in a decade. The lack of an American presence will drive European military spending, not decrease it. DSA’s No to NATO statement demonstrates this fact. 

On the one hand, to support its claims that NATO encourages European militarization, the statement points to an increase in France’s defense spending in 2018. On the other hand, it notes that the US and France’s chief executives have recently questioned the relevancy of NATO, with Trump nearly withdrawing the US from the alliance. The specter of a NATO without the US increased French military spending. Realizing such a withdrawal will encourage more militarization across the entire continent. With decades of austerity policies and multiple refugee crises, widespread militarization increases the threat of reactionary and fascist movements. The Chomsky/DSA position is reactionary anti-imperialism and is a dead end as a leftist vision of international relations. 

What Must Be Done

DSA’s adoption of neorealism comes at the most inopportune time. Now is a time for questioning the continued relevance and future of NATO. If the left is to have a voice in this conversation, it must be able to speak coherently with other political factions in this country. A left critique of the current state of IR cannot resort to polemics and sloganeering. It is not enough to say, “the US acts in service of capital.” This statement has no explanatory value. A critique of American foreign policy cannot assume that historical “forces” – capitalism, imperialism, or liberalism – are self-motivating, nor can it be guided by purely economistic theories of history that adopt conservative premises and assumptions of international relations. 

Missing from both left and right neorealism is any social content. Both ascribe the movement of history to large and impersonal forces impervious to human input, a riderless locomotive charging through a desolate landscape. “The US is the heart of the imperial project and acts in service to capital.” This is a description, not an explanation. It treats imperialism and capitalism as interchangeable words rather than distinct phenomena that interact with each other. For example, while NATO’s intervention in Kosovo certainly qualifies as an imperial projection of power, it’s unclear how such an intervention served the interests of capital. These words need grounding to a materiality that clearly defines them as social relations and is tied to the specificities of history. Capitalism isn’t a thing. It is the name used for a set of social relations defined by market dependency to meet basic needs. These social relations are not a transhistorical force; they developed in a particular place under specific circumstances. Moreover, the constitutive relations of “capitalism” are not constant over time. They are contestable across and within classes and often adapted ad hoc to crises and changing circumstances.  

Likewise, there must be an explanation of the origins of the imperial state system, from the seniority rankings of European monarchs below the Papacy to its evolution into today’s liberal internationalist rules-based system. Much of the imperial system’s history predates the global dominance of capitalist relations; the political and social character of early modern imperial disputes must be understood on their terms, not as subordinate parts of capitalism. Imperial competition in the 17th and 18th centuries was motivated by dynastic rivalries and the secularization of the Reformation into disputes over political rights and legal jurisdiction. It was not until after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 that capitalist relations became integral to imperial power competition. What precipitated these reconfigurations, what social tensions did they mediate, and how did states respond? 

Additionally, we must make distinctions among different iterations of the imperial system and the purpose of each. Differences must be enumerated. For example, the Congress of Berlin system is qualitatively different from the post-war liberal internationalist system. The Congress of Berlin self-consciously triggered an imperial competition for resources as the European powers rushed to industrialize to catch up to Britain. On the other hand, the post-war liberal international system saw itself as the ultimate triumph of the ideals of the French Revolution; the Declaration of the Rights of Man heavily influenced the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the very least, a Left IR theory should use these principles as our comparison point; how has the US, the other western powers, and the international institutions they created undermined these goals? It should then attempt to answer how to articulate better and realize the UDHR’s principles. We should not, as realists do, reject their importance as superfluous or merely as a cynical excuse. 

Finally, a Left IR theory must recognize heterogeneous working-class agencies and their ability to affect the trajectory of history, including in international relations, for both better and worse. Mass movements over the past two centuries have profoundly impacted the foreign policies of imperial nations. For instance, during the negotiations for the Treaty of Paris in 1814, the British government considered recognizing Haiti as a French possession to increase the legitimacy of the newly restored Bourbon monarchy. However, the British public, building off over two decades of grassroots agitation against the slave trade, vocally rejected this concession. A massive protest campaign organized by the African Institute sent 800 petitions with 750,000 signatures to Parliament. The outrage forced the British government to back away from the proposal and ultimately to insist the Congress of Vienna include an international repudiation of the slave trade. Returning Haiti to France was essential to the British government’s geopolitical interests- it would have provided the Bourbon monarchy financial self-sufficiency while still leaving them beholden to British sea power to protect French trade, neutralizing them as a threat on the continent. Public agitation intervened to change the treaty’s terms decisively, forced the British government into an anti-slavery position, and committed the resources of the British Navy to enforce the ban on the slave trade. 

However, just as these mass movements forced human rights concessions from the ruling class, they have also been co-opted by the ruling class to further the imperial mission. As anti-slavery sentiment grew in mainstream society in the middle of the 19th century, it coalesced in the “Free Soil, free Labour” ideology. Historian Eric Foner argues that the Republican Party formed as a coalition among certain aspects of the Capital class, artisans, professionals, and radical worker elements espousing this ideology to counter the political influence of the Slave Power. By the end of the century, the abolition of slavery was a primary justification for colonial intervention in Africa; Germany, France, the UK, and King Leopold of Belgium used the suppression of the slave trade to justify carving Africa amongst themselves at the Berlin Conference in 1884-1885. On the one hand, this represented the ultimate success of abolition over the planter classes. On the other hand, it represented the ultimate betrayal of the radical ideals of the abolitionist movement. 

Similarly, the international institutions and world order created by the United States and the Soviet Union represented the ultimate success of many revolutionary ideals espoused since the English Civil War. In his 1941 State of the Union address, FDR outlined four universal freedoms that became the justification for the Allied war effort: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Roosevelt later expanded on these four freedoms in his 1944 State of the Union speech when he argued for a Second Bill of Rights that guaranteed economic and social rights such as guaranteed employment, a basic income, decent housing, adequate healthcare, and education. In many ways, the Second Bill of Rights echoes some of the most radical revolutionary demands from the 1800s; the Soviet Constitution of 1936 likewise contains similar provisions. The four freedoms became the basis of the Allied war goals and formed the ideological underpinning for the United Nations. Though there were deep ideological divides between the Allies, each manifested a society shaped by similar revolutionary ideals. The post-war international institutions were designed to extend these ideals worldwide. 

Despite these lofty goals, and although much of the world’s population did see a significant overall increase in living standards, the reality of the post-war consensus was a betrayal of many revolutionary ideals. The post-war “peace” was predicated on preventing another land war in Europe and domestic politics hostile to labor militancy in Europe and the US. The transition from coal to oil as the primary energy source after WWII allowed for the extension of middle-class prosperity to more people spatially dispersed across a wider area. Replacing coal with oil also altered the social relations of energy production and consumption. Coal mining was labor intensive, required high concentrations of largely autonomous workers to extract and transport to sites of consumption, and was done by workers within Europe and the United States. By comparison, oil requires far less labor to extract and transport, and reserves were primarily in formerly colonized countries. This change in production requirements and locations further cemented the control of capitalists over energy planning, undercutting worker movements in industrialized nations by shifting the nature of work while reinforcing the economic power of former colonial states in the newly independent states of the Middle East and North Africa. With coal, labor could exert significant control over energy production and, thus, the entire economy, whereas, with oil, workers were too few and spatially dispersed to exercise political power similarly. The change in geographic location outsourced the violence and instability necessary to maintain worker discipline from urban centers in both the NATO and Warsaw Pact countries to newly independent nations in the MENA. The post-war attempt at securing political, economic, and social rights for the middle classes of the industrialized nations came at the cost of undermining those same rights for people living in oil-rich countries. 

One year into the conflict and contrary to Chomsky’s prediction, Russia has not destroyed Ukraine. While it is undoubtedly true that NATO’s military and financial support has been invaluable to the Ukrainian war effort, the failure of the Russian invasion is a testament to the Ukrainian people’s will to maintain their independence from Moscow. Despite ongoing resistance from Ukrainians, the Chomsky Left continues to view the war through a lens of brute economistic offensive realism. They rely on vague assertions that NATO’s goal is to destroy Russia and “expand capital.” However, their arguments lack specificity and are unmoored from the historical process. They adopt a mechanistic view of history that assumes that capitalism is natural and inevitable. They claim the mantle of internationalism while utilizing isolationist rhetoric to advocate for unilateral treaty withdrawals. Further, by aligning with offensive realists, they dismiss the possibility of cooperative institutions at the international level, rejecting the left’s first attempt at ending imperialism during the first world war. Finally, by characterizing capitalism as a totality, they deny working class agencies in affecting history, including international affairs. 

If the Left is to articulate a coherent anti-imperialism for the 21st century, it cannot adopt conservative theories about the construction of the international system. The historical specificities around the development of capitalist social relations and the imperial order must ground our critiques. Likewise, it cannot hold itself hostage to the ideological battles of the Cold War nor be guided by a rote opposition to anything the United States supports. The Chomsky-DSA reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine failed on all accounts. As a result, they’ve squandered an opportunity to offer a coherent alternative to the current international order that deals with the challenges of the 21st century – particularly climate change and the rise of authoritarianism both at home and abroad. By joining with neorealists such as Mearsheimer, they eschew a material analysis of the imperial system for one that treats the system as constant and inevitable – a mechanistic progression of history – rather than constitutively polyvalent and contested. More than strange bedfellows, such a marriage is a death knell for international solidarity in the 21st century.

Bank of the People: History for Money’s Future

By Dan Rohde

Who would’ve guessed that the sudden failure of a state-chartered, regional bank would’ve inspired fundamental reckonings with the nature of money and banking? Yet, this is exactly what we see today. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank (“SVB”) and its $200 billion of mostly-uninsured deposits has spurred renewed debates about not only whether and when banks should be allowed to fail, but what role they play, or ought to play, in modern society.

The ongoing SVB episode has laid bare two fundamentally opposed views of banks. First, there are those who regard banks primarily as private businesses. This orthodox camp largely (though not entirely) opposes the present rescue efforts, insisting that the market be allowed to discipline banking enterprises. Poorly run banks, they argue, should generally be allowed to fail, unless their size and systemic importance dictate otherwise. This business approach to banking lies behind the current design of deposit insurance, which only insures deposits up to $250,000 per account on the presumption that only small account holders should be protected; holders of larger accounts are presumed capable of monitoring their bank and moving money to a safer institution if necessary. The market should thereby privilege safer banking institutions. Such thinking similarly underpins much of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which attempts to isolate banks that are “too big to fail,” while leaving smaller institutions more to the discipline of so-called “market forces.”

But, as the events of this weekend underline, this is an increasingly strained perspective. SVB’s largest depositors plainly did not adequately supervise its practices, and this is not particularly surprising. And, in spite of being a regional, state-chartered bank not identified as systemically important under Dodd-Frank, within 72 hours of the panic beginning, Treasury, the Fed and the FDIC, through some creative and surprising legislative maneuvering, pooled their resources to engineer a rescue of all SVB’s deposits – both insured and uninsured.

Such apparent failures and exceptions from the orthodox perspective are much less surprising to those who understand banks to be public institutions. As laid out in a recent editorial by Morgan Ricks and Lev Menand calling to remove the cap on deposit insurance altogether, this position holds that banks are best understood as privately-owned entities charged with a fundamental public function: issuing the vast majority of the deposits we use as money. Eliciting language from Saule Omarova and Robert Hockett, they describe a bank charter as “an outsourcing arrangement, a franchise, to issue money on behalf of the government.” Eliminating the cap on deposit insurance “would underscore the fact that banks exist to serve the public interest, not to privatize gains and socialize losses.”

To gain greater perspective on the present debate, it’s useful to consider the historical foundations of modern banking – both in the US and elsewhere. My forthcoming paper in the Osgoode Hall Law Journal offers one example. There, I explore the introduction of banks into Canada – a period when, even if privately owned, banks were openly and explicitly conceived as public institutions. (Accordingly, they also marked a central site of political contestation.) Elite monetary engineering on behalf of one partisan camp was met with opposition from another, followed by direct, democratic contestation. Returning to this past can help us in at least two ways. First, it helps clarify the role that banks were meant to serve and still serve today in our monetary system, foregrounding the actions of the state in creating and backing them. Second, narratives like this can help us conceptually to imagine and work toward creating a more democratic monetary architecture, both today and in the future. 

The Chaos of Canadian Colonial Money

Money in colonial British North America was a mess. And the colonies were in a tight spot trying to fix it. The law generally forbid colonies from issuing their own money, either through establishing their own mints or issuing bills of credit. Further, as of the 1820s, the British government required that all colonial accounts be denominated in sterling. All the while, continuous growth and a trade balance favoring England constantly tapped the money supply, leading to near constant calls for more liquidity.

The colonies responded to this with legislative ingenuity. With jurisdiction over their own revenue and courts, they would declare coinage of various nations “current” within their borders, meaning that such designated coins would both satisfy debts to the colony and count as legal tender. They would then “rate” those varieties of coin under their own unit of account – granting each a domestic value that differed from (and typically exceeded) either its face value or what value it would acquire in foreign markets. While the official unit of account was English, many goods were priced in dollars, and most actual coins in people’s pockets were Spanish. This process, known as “overrating” coinage, fomented a currency mélange throughout the colonies that immensely complicated even basic everyday transactions.

Still, the colonies enjoyed a brief reprieve from this complexity during the war of 1812. To fund that conflict, the British forces issued legal-tender “Army Bills” directly to soldiers and suppliers.

These bills not only serviced the war effort but also were widely adopted and appreciated by the settler population at large. Typically denominated in both dollars and pounds, they greatly simplified everyday exchange, offering settlers a paper currency that was, more or less, worth the value listed on its face. Significantly, the bills were issued in good supply, reaching a peak of £1.5 million in 1814. The result granted the colonies a level of liquidity they would not know again until for decades. Exposed to their first paper money in good supply, the colonists thus experienced previously unparalleled liquidity through public money–even if a money, of course, issued for military conflict.

Enter the Banks 

In spite of such achievements, the British fully redeemed the Army Bills after the war. Retiring the bills led to a deep and profound monetary contraction. And it was this specific moment that directly inspired the chartering of Canada’s earliest banks. First was the Bank of Montreal in 1817, followed by the Bank of Quebec in 1818, the Bank of Upper Canada at Kingston in 1819, the Bank of New Brunswick in 1820, and, as will be discussed below, the Bank of Upper Canada founded in the town of York (later incorporated as Toronto) in 1821.

The first Canadian banks were universally run by wealthy, politically connected and conservative individuals, often with direct ties to England. And they were chartered to offer a public service. They could store varieties of legal tender coinage and issue notes that, like the Army Bills, listed their value on their face. While not legal tender, these banknotes could thereby replace legal tender coin for much everyday exchange. Banks could additionally issue more notes than the amount of coin they kept in reserve, thereby directly increasing the money supply for the still liquidity-starved colonies. Thus while certainly commercial enterprises driven by private profits and interests, the early Canadian banks (as with many chartered corporations at that time) were not merely commercial institutions, but expressly political ones. They were individually chartered and empowered by statute, run by politically-connected colonial elites, and specifically charged with a public service in simplifying and augmenting the money supply.

Crucially, such elite banks “of issue, discount and deposit” were not primarily held out as savings institutions or mere intermediaries, but money issuers. Generally, they built their reserve of specie by selling shares rather than attracting depositors, and their primary purpose was to clean up the colonial money supply and expand monetary circulation. Banknotes almost immediately became the predominant currency for everyday use in the colonies.

Where government had receded, government-supported for-profit enterprises were called in. But private bank money came with very new terms. Whereas Army Bills offered payment to individuals, banknotes were issued through loans, meaning that they came at a cost and with a commitment. To many, this new money felt less a monetary expansion, than a shift of obligations – away from the state and towards these new, undemocratic corporations.

The Bank and the Government

In Toronto and much of Upper Canada, nearly all banknotes were issued by one especially partisan institution, the Bank of Upper Canada. The first chartered bank in the Canadian colonies, the Bank of Upper Canada was founded by Anglican archdeacon John Strachan and his followers in the “Family Compact” – a close-knit conservative political faction that wielded an outsized influence in the colony. Indeed, the bank inscribed its ruling position directly on its notes. The notes proudly announced that the bank was “chartered by parliament.” They bore images of St. George and Britannia, unabashedly mimicking iconography from the Bank of England.

While it never took on exactly the role that ‘The Old Lady’ played in England, the Bank of Upper Canada was explicitly established to represent elite interests and, for a considerable period, it was the only bank chartered in the region. During that period, anyone who needed money would have to either borrow from that bank (in which case they owed it a debt) or work for someone who had previously borrowed from that institution. In either case, money was issued in Upper Canada with lines of obligation running directly to a single, unapologetically anti-egalitarian institution.

This bank’s anti-egalitarian activities were particularly egregious to Upper Canada’s “Reformers”  – a political movement directly opposed to the Family Compact that advocated to make the colonial government more responsive to the electorate. To Reformers, banking institutions like the Bank of Upper Canada benefitted from public legitimacy and support, but lacked democratic accountability. If banks were in a fundamental sense government agents, then their control was a political cause. The interest on their loans, furthermore, was akin to taxation, only not paid into public coffers. With this, banking reform became a central plank in the Reform movement.

The Reformers began by attempting to make the Bank of Upper Canada more accountable, and then by proposing alternate public monetary bodies. Failing in this, a group of Reformers then established their own (unchartered) institution in 1835 named the “Bank of the People.” As with the Bank of Upper Canada, the Bank of the People was erected overtly as a political institution. Its board was made up exclusively of established Reformers, and the bank issued money largely to communities excluded by the Bank of Upper Canada. (Indeed, one of its first loans was to future leader of the Upper Canada Rebellion, William Lyon Mackenzie, to establish his newspaper, the Constitution.) In house, too, the bank joined the politics of credit issuance to the politics of publicity by hosting a newsroom on its premises featuring “the leading liberal Journals.”

Bank of the People notes differed starkly from the Bank of Upper Canada’s, reflecting the different political community to which the bank spoke and the alternative values it sought to express. In the place of British monarchial imagery, its notes feature bustling cityscapes and ports, alongside generic symbols of industry, such as Vulcan and Demeter.

Despite its judicious management, the Bank of the People did not last long. We know it was well run, because it managed to be both profitable and to be the only bank in British North America to not suspend payments during the banking panic of 1837. Still, the Bank lost many of its supporters after the failed Upper Canada Rebellion, and competition with the Bank of Upper Canada led its founders to sell to the Bank of Montreal in 1840.

From the Bank of the People to Banks Today

Obviously, the Bank of the People was established in a very different era from the present moment. There were few banks then, and they carried their association with government on the face of their notes. But much is also the same, as the discourse around SVB’s collapse makes evident. Privately-owned, for-profit banks are still tasked with issuing the vast majority of our money, and this remains, in many regards, a very public mandate.

Banks today are critical public infrastructure, which stand upon a massive edifice of government infrastructure and support. Because we use bank credits as money, when they fail, the consequences can lead to massive economic fallout with a very real, human cost. They also act as a primary vector through which government intervenes in a crisis. (This includes even our recent global health crisis that did not originate in the financial sector.) No wonder they are among the quickest institutions to receive government support when under threat. No wonder also that, in the wake of SVB’s collapse, explicit government support has been offered not only to “too big to fail” banks, but to smaller banks as well – an experience Canada also went through in 1985.

The monetary system that the Bank of the People actively contested is now the norm, but, all the while, its public nature has become less visible to us. Revisiting such democratizing efforts reminds us of the indelibly public role that banks play, and that they were intended to play, since their very introduction into North America. The Reformers movement equally reminds us that monetary systems that appear resistant to change, may yet be subject to contestation. Faced with the legal inability to make the existing monetary order more accountable, the Reformers turned to establishing their own institution. While short-lived and little-known today, the Bank’s example and influence lived on through its participants to influence Canada’s future monetary order. Similarly, today, current public banking efforts (in, for example, CaliforniaNew YorkMassachusetts, & Pennsylvania) remind us that, regardless of how hard it might be to see at times, there is always the possibility of alternatives to elite, private, and for-profit means of issuing money. Times like this, looking to the past may help us to more clearly see our present, and to imagine our future.

Postmodern Money Theory! (Part 2)

In Part 2 of Superstructure’s “Postmodern Money Theory!” series, Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson explore B.S. Johnson’s postmodern novella, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), which self-consciously weaves money and accounting into the very fabric of literary form. Regarded as brokering a broader transition between modernism and postmodernism, Johnson paradoxically conceded that “to tell stories is to tell lies,” while remaining committed to the revelatory “truthfulness” of literary form. In Christy Malry’s Own Double-Entry, Johnson tells the metafictional story of a disaffected young man, Christie Malry. Throughout the book, Malry applies the principles of double-entry bookkeeping in response to injustices in his life, “crediting” himself against society in an increasingly violent manner for perceived “debits.” 

Our co-hosts trace Christy Malry’s multifaceted approach to accounting, which cuts across questions of money, narrativity, enumeration, and reckoning in economic, ethical, historical, and even biblical senses. Affirming the text’s defamiliarizing insights, Rob and Scott unpack how Johnson’s satirical and estranging use of language unsettles dominant visions of money as a merely finite and located particular. At the same time, however, they also weigh the book’s problems and limits, flagging Johnson’s unquestioned white masculine framing of accounting, for example, despite his socialistic aspirations and attentiveness to form’s social restrictions. Stay tuned for the third installment of “Postmodern Monetary Theory!,” in which Rob and Scott further plumb Christy Malry’s Own Double-Entry for its postmodern lessons about the aesthetics and politics of credit and debt.

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Mikhail Bakhtin Pt. 1 – Carnival Laughter & Grotesque Realism

Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) inaugurates the first of a lecture series on the work and ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin. Drawing parallels with right wing attacks on contemporary drag performance and ballroom traditions, Will discusses Bakhtin’s analysis of the Medieval carnival humor, its manifestation in Renaissance literature, and its unique aesthetics of what he terms “grotesque realism.” Quotations are drawn from the Introduction and first chapter of Bakhtin’s text, Rabelais and His World (1965), with additional references made to Siegfried Kracauer’s 1927 essay “The Mass Ornament” and Marx’s Capital


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Postmodern Money Theory! (Part 1)

Launching a new Superstructure series, Rob Hawkes joins Scott Ferguson to explore the ins and outs of “postmodernism.” Postmodernism is a heterogenous and disputed regime of aesthetics and theory that arose in the second half of the 20th century. Dated to midcentury, but promulgated as a discourse from the 1970’s to 1990’s,  postmodernism is known primarily for its preoccupations with multiplicity, difference, surface, language, image, constructedness, reflexivity, and the integration of art and everyday life. Decades past its heyday, postmodernism today frequently serves as a pejorative for reactionary critics of social and ecological justice and aesthetic diversity. In their conversation, Rob and Scott critique noxious voices both outside and inside of today’s Modern Monetary Theory movement, who similarly wield postmodernism as epithet to discredit and police money’s contestable public capacities to provide for all. Our co-hosts dismantle such false zero-sum invectives by weighing the historical nuances and semantic surfeits of terms including modernity, modernism, postmodernity and postmodernism. As a result, this episode prepares the groundwork for a forthcoming engagement with B.S. Johnson’s postmodern novella, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), which self-consciously weaves money and accounting into the very fabric of literary form. Check out the second installment of this series here.


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Superstructure 34 – Italy and International Fascism

Co-hosts Naty T Smith (@orangeasm), Will Beaman (@agoingaccount), and Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) discuss the rise to power of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni near the 100th anniversary of Mussolini’s March on Rome to frame the international moment and the ascendance of red-brown tendencies, the urgencies of anti- fascism, and the shape of contemporary reaction. Through the example of Meloni’s election, they explore how monetary austerity, anti migrant tactics, fascist nostalgia, and other ideologies of replacement, are at stake in this global conjuncture.

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