Medieval ink on a medieval budget
By Sara Charles Originally published at Teaching Manuscripts, a site that hopes to inform and educate about making medieval manuscripts. Explore the site to learn about the different processes of manuscript production. As autumn is the season for collecting oak galls, now seems a good time to consider how to make ink without access to…
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…
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…
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…
Rising Tides Sink All Boats
The Fed’s aggressive monetary austerity is pushing rival currencies lower
Austin Credits with Jonathan Wilson (White Paper and Podcast Interview)
For this special episode of Superstructure, cohosts Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) and Andrés Bernal (@andresintheory) are joined by Jonathan Wilson (@DeficitOwl24601) to discuss his new white paper, “Proposal for a Local Currency Issued by the City of Austin,” which proposes a complementary currency for the city of Austin called Austin Credits. Jonathan’s proposal contributes to a developing…
Monetary Austerity as Social Conflict
By David M. Fields Monetary austerity, like fiscal austerity, is a top-down offensive. A monetary assault on working people is being waged in the name of fighting inflation. In similar fashion to the demagoguery that surrounds government expenditure cuts that lead to significant losses in social provisioning, a political climate of inflation hysteria has engulfed the US…
On the political force of MMT
From a non-sovereign perspective By Andris ŠuvajevsA couple of days ago, the British economics commentator, Grace Blakeley, called people who advocate Modern Monetary Theory “naïve.” This was following a public radio appearance earlier that same day, in which she described tax breaks for the wealthy as taking money directly from those who claim public benefits.…
The Visual Cliff: Eleanor Gibson & the Origins of Affordance
By Erica Robles Anderson & Scott Ferguson Originally presented at Hidden Histories: Gender in Design, Design History Society Seminar, April 14, 2022. Part I: TED Talks and Teapots In a 2003 TED Talk titled “Three Ways Design Makes You Happy,” Donald Norman announced that “The new me is beauty.” Norman – a professor, design firm…
The Unfathomable Cruelty of Biden’s Latest Afghanistan Executive Order
By Mitch Green Originally published to Substack Biden has decided to steal raid $7 billion of Da Afghanistan Bank reserves currently frozen by US financial institutions. The motivation for this guileless heist is two fold: Set aside $3.5 billion for humanitarian aid in Afghanistan Make available $3.5 billion for claimants in ongoing 9/11 survivor’s lawsuits The grotesqueness…
On ‘Thin Air’: Money, Metaphoricity & Metatheatre (Essay)
By Rob Hawkes Last year, I gave a talk on literature, money, and trust in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) which the MotL Editorial Collective kindly shared as a podcast. Gissing’s novel tells the story of a group of writers struggling to survive in the harsh literary marketplace of the 1880s, one in which…
Response to People’s Policy Project on Alaska’s Oil Fund (Parody)
[This is a Guest Post from the Neoclassical Marxism Think Tank] I apologize for the lateness of this post. I would have finished it sooner, but since taking my kids out of school to learn directly from market experiences, I’ve had to figure out ways to get them to leave me alone. This is a response to…
Don’t Look Up MMT (Essay)
By Michael Brennan Adam McKay and David Sirota’s new film Don’t Look Up is an exercise in what Mark Fisher has called “capitalist realism,” literalizing the provocation that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” In the film, McKay and Sirota imagine the discovery of an approaching…
Automating Eden (Essay)
by Geoff Coventry [Note for readers: This article contains spoilers] Shawn Levy’s Free Guy is the latest cinematic attempt to manage social problems through self-conscious artificial intelligence (AI). In doing so, it tumbles right back into fanciful utopian imagery while wishing away the complexities of human care. As this virtual redemption story reaches its climax,…
Crowdfunding Christmas (Essay)
by Scott Ferguson It’s a Wonderful Life has long been a holiday classic. A 1946 Christmas fantasy by director Frank Capra, the film is a sentimental portrait of communal altruism in the face of economic crisis and existential despair. Every Christmas, millions of viewers ritually revisit the movie to reflect upon the season’s spirit of giving.…
Chaplin’s Modern Times: Pretty Pro-Communist (Essay)
How awful the thought of oneness… One merging into all and all merging into one. Just think of merging into Herbert Hoover. -Charlie Chaplin In 1952, facing harassment from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Charlie Chaplin left the United States and moved to Switzerland. Chaplin shared personal tragedy with thousands of suspected communists across American society,…
