Money on the Left

Mitch Green, a heterodox economist, joins the hosts to discuss the problems with inflation as a catch-all term for price changes. They explore the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and different measures of inflation. They also delve into the narratives and perspectives surrounding inflation, including the left's perspective and the politicization of the issue. Additionally, they discuss the pricing strategies of fast food pizza chains and share anecdotes about Fred Lee. The podcast ends with random conversations and disconnected phrases.

In this third installment of our Introduction to Theory series, Maxximilian Seijo explores the economic theory of Karl Marx. Specifically, Maxx investigates Marx's 1865 speech and posthumously published book Value, Price and Profit. This episode, drawn from Maxx's pedagogy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, interrogates the relationship between Marx's labour theory of value and the capitalist mode of production. Through close attention to Marx's theory of price, Maxx teases out (and ultimately contrasts) Marx's classical formulations from the Money on the Left Editorial Collective's heterodox economic foundations.Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Co-hosts Charlotte Tavan and Natalie Smith marinate in the complexity of the concept of femme:inheritance politics,  fascist food, slaveholders, bell hooks, MMT & the household, oikos,labor discipline, gender play, analogical funReal Housewives, dinner party politicswomen in Stem, radical craft, reply guys

In this second installment of our Introduction to Theory series, Scott Ferguson presents an introduction to psychoanalytic theory by exploring key theoretical writings by Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams (1899); Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905);& Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). 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 Freud’s complex contributions to modern thought and society. Framed as an advanced introduction that is hardly exhaustive, Ferguson’s lecture strives to orient students to Freud’s contested historical significance and to model forms of situated close reading that resist reductionism. See the post on  https://moneyontheleft.org/ for reference materials you might find useful.Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Money on the Left discusses "vulnerability theory" with Martha Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University. Going beyond the politics of non-discrimination and formal equality that animate liberal politics and policies, Fineman underscores the human being’s embodied vulnerability throughout the life cycle in order to politicize, rather than pathologize prevailing structures of social dependence. Working primarily in the context of constitutional jurisprudence in The United States, Fineman argues for forms of government, economic institutions, and social organizations that variously take responsibility for the vulnerable subject’s ongoing resilience in a contingent world. In doing so, she controversially re-conceives universality through, rather than against difference, expanding the language of feminist and intersectional politics in capacious ways. In our conversation with Fineman, we plumb the depths of vulnerability theory and ponder its significance for left politics oriented toward public money and provisioning.Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Cohosts Natalie Smith and Will Beaman venture into Tucker Carlson's reactionary mediascape, connecting the neo-fascist rhetoric of his nightly Fox News show with the past iterations of American conservatism that preceded it. Natalie and Will trace the various rhetorical logics of the far right and offer a critique of left wing attacks on Tucker's populist bona fides that deny the possibility of reactionary populism.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

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)