Money on the Left

We speak with Lauren Arrington about her forthcoming book on women artists in the Federal Arts Project. The Great Depression rendered 140,000 women and girls across the United States homeless. In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt founded the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that employed 8.5 million people over the course of eight years. Soon, the WPA instituted a landmark ruling forbidding sexual discrimination. As a result, between thirty and forty percent of newly hired artists on federal projects were women. This equity of opportunity enabled women to rise to positions of leadership and have access to resources that had a lasting effect on national institutions and on the history of art. In her book, Arrington challenges the popular memory of WPA art as a story of straight white men. Instead, she argues that the works of art that many women created under the Federal Arts Project made visible Black, immigrant, and women’s lives in a way that challenged segregationist, xenophobic, and sexist structures intrinsic in the nation’s institutions. During our conversation, Arrington explores the extraordinary achievements and tribulations of New Deal women artists and administrators. Among them include Alice Neel, Gwendolyn Bennett, Augusta Savage, Georgette Seabrooke, Lenore Thomas, and Pablita Velarde. Along the way, we track how these women and the Federal Art Project more broadly came under fire from local and national government officials who attempted to censor or suppress their radical work, to fire them from their jobs or force their resignations from projects, and to investigate them for “un-American” activity. We contemplate the challenges of writing histories of lost and often deliberately destroyed archives. And we consider the lessons of women’s participation in the Federal Arts Project for the future politics of public arts provisioning.Lauren Arrington is Chair and Professor of English at University of South Florida. Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

In this episode, Money on the Left shares audio from "The Black University & Community Currencies,” a public workshop convened by Professor Andrew J. Douglas at Morehouse College on April 25, 2025. This episode presents Part 1 of the workshop. It features an introduction by Professor Douglas and two panels. The first panel is titled “What is Public Money?” (Delman Coates, Scott Ferguson & Benjamin Wilson. The second asks: “What is the Uni Currency Proposal?” (Scott Ferguson & Benjamin Wilson). Money on the Left will release audio from Part 2 of the workshop within a few weeks’ time.Description:In the late 1960s, in the context of the Black Power movement and amid calls to develop Black Studies programs at many US colleges and universities, Black student activists and radical intellectuals sought to imagine a more revolutionary "Black University," an institution or network of institutions dedicated entirely to Pan-African study and research. This workshop revisits the theory and vision of the Black University. It foregrounds questions of political economy—ranging from the theoretical critiques of capitalism and empire that inspired the Black University concept to more practical questions about financial viability and the "business model" of a revolutionary Black institution. And it considers how an emerging school of heterodox economic thinking—what has come to be known as Modern Money Theory—might inform a renewal of the Black University and its commitment to Black community building.This comes at a time of great crisis in US higher education, especially at HBCUs. Students are unsustainably indebted, encouraged to think of their education as little more than a private economic transaction or "return on investment." Schools, increasingly desperate for funding, are made to compete for private capital, often in ways that compromise their ability to serve even the nominally progressive aspects of their missions. Surrounding neighborhoods have become little more than sites of extraction, sources of low-wage labor and opportunities for land speculation, otherwise walled off from the very institutions they are made to sustain. More broadly, democratic questions about what kind of society the university is meant to serve or what kind of society we want an education for are rarely if ever addressed. Meanwhile, fascism's dramatic resurgence is renewing questions about whether Black institutions can rely on even minimal support from white society. In many ways, we appear to face some of the very same conditions that inspired the vision of the Black University more than a half century ago.What would it mean to renew the theory of the Black University? What are the challenges involved in building the Black University from within today's HBCUs? How might we reimagine the financial architecture of the university and its commitment to surrounding communities? How might new thinking about public money and banking-heterodox ideas about credit creation, public investment, jobs programs and the mobilization of community resources inform such a reimagining? How might HBCUs experiment with the creation of complementary currencies? And does this new thinking go far enough, or does it reflect simply a recommitment to the structures of domination and exploitation imperial state projects, the logic of capital, the instruments of antiblack violence that the Black University concept was always meant to expose and challenge?Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Rohan Grey, Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University, joins Money on the Left to discuss his urgent new paper, "Digitizing the Fisc." During our conversation, we recount the events surrounding Elon Musk & the DOGE boys’ unconstitutional takeover of the Treasury's Bureau of Fiscal Service, while explicating the right-wing theory of the "unitary executive" that underwrites such actions. Next, we analyze the structural deficiencies and choke points in the current Congressional appropriation process that have made DOGE's illegal interventions possible. Turns out, the US fiscal process involves several readily exploitable weaknesses, making it somewhat akin to the almighty Death Star's unprotected thermal exhaust port in Star Wars (1997). Finally, we consider Grey's proposal for a more streamlined, distributed, and democratic digital architecture for coordinating federal expenditures. Building legal concepts and procedures into the very materiality of digital design, this alternative system not only secures Congress's constitutional spending power against authoritarian interference and impoundment. It also unbundles fiscal policy from public debt management, making clear to the world that legislative action does not redistribute extant funds, but rather creates money afresh every time Congress votes to spend. Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Money on the Left speaks with Raúl Carrillo, assistant professor of Law at Boston College, about gaming money. The $250 billion video game industry (the largest entertainment industry in the world) has rapidly developed an unregulated banking system. As online gaming becomes increasingly social and immersive, players build economies within games. Gamers can purchase goods and services within these environments using debit and credit cards. Companies also issue gift cards and co-branded credit cards. They store balances on digital platforms outside of the regulated banking system. Most critically, gaming companies offer players the chance to earn points inside games and convert them to other financial instruments, including bank deposits. However, these “gaming money” systems also feature exchange rate manipulation, money laundering, and financial risk for unwitting gamers and other stakeholders. In this episode, we explore how companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Roblox are not only harming gamers but issuing “shadow money,” evading banking regulations meant to prevent structural problems. Much like 19th-century canal, railroad, and mining companies, as well as 21st - century financial technology and cryptocurrency companies, gaming giants are engaging in private monetary governance. Although agencies hesitate to regulate “virtual” worlds of entertainment, media, and the arts, banking law does not ask if money is “real” but whether its creation infringes on the privileges of banks and the U.S. government. Carrillo proposes regulators supervise large corporations that support the conversion of gaming money to bank deposits at scale. Gaming money suggests banking law is incomplete without concern for corporate monies—even those conjured across imaginary boundaries between worlds. Moreover, the long-run stakes are high. Gaming introduces most U.S. children to money. Regulation must confront a future that is already here.Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Money on the Left speaks with Edward Jones Corredera, author of Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2024). What are fallen tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Odious Debt shows how Latin American nations have wrestled with the morality of indebtedness and insolvency since their foundation, and outlines how Latin America’s forgotten history of contestation can shed new light on seemingly intractable contemporary dilemmas.With a focus on the early modern Spanish Empire and modern Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, Odious Debt explores how discussions about the morality of debt and default played a structuring role in the construction and codification of national constitutions, identities, and international legal norms in Latin America. Ultimately, Corredera reveals how Latin American jurists developed a powerful global critique of economics and international law which, in rejecting the political violence promulgated in the name of unjust debt, continues to generate pressing questions about debt, bankruptcy, reparations, and the pursuit of a moral world economy.Corredera is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and Lecturer in History at Spain’s National Distance Education University.Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Money on the Left speaks with Dr. Jens Martignoni, lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and chief editor of the International Journal of Community Currency Research (IJCCR). Community or complementary currencies are phenomena of great interest to monetary scholars and activists. We’ve spoken often about them on this show–whether about the Benjamins classroom currency at SUNY Cortland, the DVDs currency at Denison, or our recurring work on the Uni Currency Project. During our conversation with Martignoni, the appeal of such projects becomes clear. Community currencies not only lay bare the false claims of prevailing monetary orthodoxy–and in so doing make powerful teaching tools, as Jakob Feinig has argued. They also permit and even compel us to imagine a world that is otherwise–a world figured first in terms of abundance rather than primarily or exclusively in terms of scarcity. In our dialog, we focus on Martignoni’s provocative essay for the IJCCR, titled “Money is Not a Medium of Exchange.” In doing so, we reflect upon the limits of “exchange” as a framework for understanding money, while simultaneously experimenting with more generative linguistic and conceptual tools to help us re-imagine monetary provisioning.   Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Billy Saas and guest-host Ben Wilson speak with Martha McCluskey about the ins and outs of the Law & Political Economy movement. McCluskey is Professor Emerita at the University at Buffalo School of Law and a progressive institution-builder. She has made foundational contributions to feminist research and activism in and beyond the academy, focusing on interrelations between economic and legal institutions. A long-time organizer of the Class Crits project and president of the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL), McCluskey has recently spearheaded the new Law & Political Economy Collective, which insists that “a better understanding of law’s role in upholding the present distribution of wealth and state power is crucial to a more just, sustainable future.” McCluskey’s expertise with construction and maintenance of durable institutions for the development and circulation of socially- and politically-attuned critical legal scholarship gives good reasons for hope in this time of great political unease. Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Rob and Scott return to their dialog about modernism, inflation, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s celebrated 1925 novel The Great Gatsby (click here for Part 1). During their conversation, our co-hosts forge connections between the novel’s many complications of time and space and the attitudes to money and identity explored in the first part of this mini-series. For instance, they consider The Great Gatsby’s unusual manner of imagining the spatial dis/connectedness of West Egg, the ‘Valley of Ashes’ and New York City; the strange ways in which characters seem to be passively ‘borne’ between these locations; the ambiguous role that bonds of various kinds play in the text; and Nick Carraway’s blurry impressionist method of narrating (or accounting for) the events of the story. Along the way, Rob and Scott revisit one of the text’s most enduring symbols, the elusive figure of the green light, which burns bright from the end of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s dock on Long Island Sound. Associated both with U.S. money and the marvel of electricity, the novel’s green light points to the powers of public provisioning that conduct modern life and serves as a mysterious beacon of hope in which, we’re told, Gatsby continues to believe until the end. For Rob and Scott, this green light reveals the novel’s “political unconscious,” here understood as the process by which a repressed history of public provisioning nevertheless comes to contour the modern novel’s many formal and affective constructions. Finally, our co-hosts point to the U.S. government’s mass printing of copies of The Great Gatsby for its G.I.s during WW2, an act of public provisioning that proved foundational for the subsequent widespread popularity of Fitzgerald’s book and its canonization of as a classic of American literary modernism. Novel printer go brrr…!Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me” EP by flirting.flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/Twitter: @actualflirting

We speak with Tim Ridlen about his new book, Intelligent Action: A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia (Rutgers University Press, 2024). Ridlen holds a PhD in Art History from the University of California, San Diego and is currently Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Film, Animation, and New Media at the University of Tampa. In Intelligent Action, Ridlen challenges dominant readings of mid-20th Century art preoccupied with critiques of the commodity form by shifting critical focus from the familiar spaces of the gallery & museum to the contested scenes of US higher education. Through archival research and analysis of artworks by Gyorgy Kepes, Allan Kaprow, Mel Bochner, and Suzanne Lacy, among others, Intelligent Action examines how these artists brought alternatives to dominant conceptions of research and knowledge production. The book is organized around specific institutional formations—artistic research centers, proposals, exhibitions on college campuses, and the establishment of new schools or pedagogic programs. Formal and social analysis demonstrate how artists responded to ideas of research, knowledge production, information, and pedagogy. Works discussed were produced between 1958 and 1975, a moment when boundaries between media were breaking down in response to technological, cultural, and generational change. In the context of academia, these artistic practices have taken up the look, feel, or language of various research and teaching practices. In some cases, artists bent to the demands of the cold war research university, while in others, artists developed new modes of practice and pedagogy. Reading these works through their institutional histories, Ridlen shows how artistic research practices and artistic subjectivity developed in the long 1960s within and alongside academia, transforming the role of artists in the process.During our discussion, we consider the significance of Ridlen’s theorization of "intelligent action" for a democratic politics centered around public money, educational provisioning, and aesthetic experimentation. Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

This month we are re-publishing our conversation with Steven Attewell along with a new written transcript and episode graphic. Attewell is author of the incredible book, People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America from FDR to Reagan, published in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania Press. The book examines the history of job creation programs in the United States from the Great Depression to the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978.Unfortunately, Attwell passed away last spring. Yet his work endures as historically robust and eminently humane approach to public policy. We dedicate this re-publication to his legacy. Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com