Money on the Left

Will Beaman and Thomas Chaplin join Scott Ferguson on the Modern Movie Theory podcast series to discuss Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021). A musical comedy special written, directed and performed by Burnham for Netflix, Inside reckons with contemporary sociopolitical traumas and transformations through hysterical and frequently painful engagements with digital media culture. In the episode, Will, Thomas, and Scott contextualize Inside’s complex mode of address, wherein Burnham dramatizes past struggles with mental health to express present suffering felt variously by audiences during the first year and a half of the Covid-19 pandemic. Along the way, the co-hosts work through the show’s scathing indictment of today’s flattening, irresponsible, and dangerously anti-public corporate Internet. Yet at the same time, they tease out Inside’s paradoxical affirmations of mediation—and the abstract potentialities of light, in particular—in ways that resist misleading accelerationist fantasies of total destruction and disintegration.Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Fleshing out the themes of Part 1 , Part 2 of the Medium: Femme pilot develops the metaphor of the constant garden. Pondering migration, care, maintenance, and coordination at a distance, Naty & Charlotte envision a politics of constant gardening that makes space for everyone.  "Our hearts," says Mathew Forstater, "are never unemployed."

Co-hosted by Natalie Smith & Charlotte Tavan, Medium: Femme explores under-appreciated feminine and queer modes of knowing in left culture and political economy, carrying the broader project of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective into quotidian relations, meanings, and practices.

This Money on the Left/Superstructure teaser previews both our tenth and eleventh premium releases from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers.For access to the full lecture, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure.  If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please send a direct message to @moneyontheleft or @Superstruc on Twitter & we will happily provide you with membership access.  Course DescriptionThis course examines the neoliberal Blockbuster from the 1970s to the present. It focuses, in particular, on the social significance of the blockbuster's constitutive technologies: both those made visible in narratives and the off-screen tools that drive production and reception. Linking aesthetic shifts in American moving images to broader transformations in political economy, the course traces the historical transformation of screen action from the ethereal “dream factory” of pre-1960s cinema to the impact-driven “thrill ride” of the post-1970s blockbuster. In doing so, we attend to the blockbuster’s technological forms and study how they have variously contributed to social, economic, and political transformations over the past 40 years. We critically engage blockbusters as "reflexive allegories" of their own technosocial processes and pleasures. Above all, we think through the blockbuster's shifting relationship to monetary abstraction and the myriad additional abstractions monetary mediation entails.Blockbusters:2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995)Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993)The Matrix (Wachowskis, 1999)Avengers: Infinity War (Joe & Anthony Russo, 2018)

Paolo Quattrone (@PaoloQuattrone) joins Money on the Left to discuss the metaphysics of accounting and the significance of accounting’s repressed history for political economy today. Professor of Accounting, Governance & Society at The University of Manchester, Quattrone insists that, while often seen as a positivist and merely technical skill for recording extant data, accounting in truth represents a rhetorical and quite generative engagement with the “mystery of value.” This mystery, Quattrone reminds us, informs nearly all aspects of collective life. Genealogy is central to Quattrone’s work and, in our conversation, we explore how numbers, figures, and visual arrangements used in contemporary accounting trace complex and often surprising lineages that have a lot to teach us about accounting’s still untapped possibilities. Along the way, we touch upon two of Quattrone’s most important case studies. First, we delve into the Jesuit order’s rich contributions to early-modern accounting, including its development of double-entry bookkeeping. Then, we turn to the more recent history of “I.R.I.,” the Italian “Institute for Industrial Construction” which, even as it served as administrative arm of the Marshall Plan, underwrote the midcentury period of prosperity known as la dolce vita by precisely rejecting the ideology of “profit maximization” promulgated by The United States. We conclude, finally, by rethinking money’s futurity through Quattrone’s approach to accounting. If spending tomorrow is never flatly predicated upon yesterday’s inert data in the form of receipts or revenue, we suggest, then it instead derives from mobilizing accounting practices in the present to create new credit and debt relations “endogenously” in response to shifting circumstances. You can find Quattrone's publications here: https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/researchers/paolo-quattrone(4b8a4f45-fecc-422c-8991-8bfc9f1e4efd)/publications.htmlVisit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

In this podcast, Scott Ferguson presents an introduction to key theoretical writings by Karl Marx: Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844; Manifesto of the Communist Party; and Capital, Volume 1. Drawn from a semester-long university course titled “Theory for Film & Media Studies,” the recorded lecture takes up three distinct texts in order explore continuities and divergences in Marx’s complex contributions to modern thought and politics. Framed as an advanced introduction that is hardly exhaustive, Ferguson’s lecture strives to orient students to Marx’s contested historical significance and to model forms of situated close reading that resist reductionism.Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Mat Forstater joins Money on the Left to discuss the origins of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the vicissitudes of heterodox economics, and the challenges of building alternative institutions in and beyond the academy. As one of the principal architects of MMT, as well as teacher and advisor to many of the more recognized MMT scholars and advocates today, Forstater is perhaps the best equipped heterodox economist to give us the details on the innovative assumptions and arguments that created the firmament for what we now know as Modern Monetary Theory. More importantly, how Forstater came to shape the project greatly defamiliarizes popular assumptions about MMT, which tend to reduce what is in truth a rich intellectual and political movement to a narrow and technocratic set of truisms and just-so stories. From experimental poetry and Black political economy to the problems of futurity and invention, Forstater’s circuitous path reveals MMT’s origins to be far more interdisciplinary and heterogeneous than it is often understood to be by opponents and advocates alike.Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.comTranscriptThe following was transcribed by Richard Farrell and has been lightly edited for clarity.

A guided meditation you can do with your Tungsten Cube.

In this episode, co-hosts Natalie Smith and Maxximilian Seijo argue that the pandemic not only killed neoliberalism as a tacit ideological formation; it also revealed how neoliberal truisms have never captured the actual causal mechanisms and potentials that defined the past 50 years. Fleshing out these claims, Naty and Maxx journey through the work of rockstar economic historian Adam Tooze, focusing in particular on his widely-hailed recent book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy (2021). Naty and Maxx affirm Tooze’s characteristically thorough demonstration of the myriad ways that the world-wide response to the pandemic, however inadequate, dismantled the pillars of neoliberal governance. Yet they also critique the elitist complicity of Tooze’s methodological commitment to historical immanence and inevitability, tracing such impulses to back to John Maynard Keynes’ fatal dismissal of Abba Lerner’s proposal to do away with balanced budgets and revenue-constraints. For the Superstructure crew, by contrast, proceeding “in medias res,” as Tooze puts it, requires an abolitionist attunement to genuine conditions of injustice and possibility, from #Defund and ongoing labor strikes to contests over #MintTheCoin and the Green New Deal. During the conversation, wisecracks and burns abound, per usual. This one, too, is packed with citations, including loving shoutouts to David Stein, Jakob Feinig, Mariame Kaba, Dan Berger, Emily Hobson, Alex Yablon, Nathan Tankus, and Rohan Grey.Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.comTwitter: @actualflirting

In this bonus episode, Rohan Grey speaks with Philip Diehl about #MintTheCoin in the wake of this season’s debt limit showdown. Director of the United States Mint under President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000, Diehl is best known today as the person most responsible for 31 U.S. Code 5112(k). The law permits the Treasury Secretary to “mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary’s discretion, may prescribe from time to time.” This clause charts a completely constitutional path to avert recurrent debt crises and furnishes a ready framework for a new kind of radical financial literacy. No wonder why much ink has been spilled and many hands have been wrung trying to explain away or dismiss its radical implications. Grey’s conversation with Diehl explores the history of the platinum coin, offering a fascinating and unprecedented behind-the-scenes glimpse of life in the U.S. Mint.Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com