Money on the Left

Money on the Left is joined by Ben Tarnoff—tech worker, writer, and cofounder of Logic Magazine—about his book Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future (Verso Books, 2022). In his book, Tarnoff provides a comprehensive history and a critical topology of this thing we have come to know, love, hate, swear off, get on, and grow bored of: the Internet. Throughout our conversation, Tarnoff displaces the haphazard history of the Internet that circulates often-unquestioned in our foggy collective memories, helping us to see more clearly how the Internet came to be “so broken.” Tarnoff refuses to accept privatization or the profit motive as given or inevitable. Instead, he evaluates the history of privatization and profiteering from the perspective of public provisioning. He does so, moreover, in order to advocate for heterogeneous public alternatives and cooperative futures. Ultimately, Tarnoff fashions a vision for the future of the Internet as a de-privatized, public space for collective flourishing, which is to say, an “Internet for the People.”Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Benjamin Wilson and Scott Ferguson join guest-host Jakob Feinig to discuss their forthcoming article about Money on the Left’s “uni” project to democratize university finance. Titled “Stop Trying to Find the Money–Create It!,” the article argues that the Public Banking Act can empower universities to issue new forms of public money that serve democratic communities and repudiate austerity. The text will appear mid-October 2022 in the American Association of University Professors’ publication Academe Magazine as part of a special issue edited by Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education. In this conversation, Ben and Scott recount the evolution of the uni project from its original politicization of emergency Federal Reserve facilities early in the Covid-19 pandemic to its most recent iteration joining bottom up learning-by-doing with top-down federal legislation. Along the way, the conversation turns toward the project’s commitments to democratic pedagogy through participation, the need to recognize universities as powerful economic provisioners and anchors, and the uni’s role in challenging the current dollar system from within.  *Special thanks to Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education for inviting Money on the Left to collaborate and for inviting us to contribute to their issue for Academe Magazine. Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) is joined by Erica Robles-Anderson  (@fstflofscholars) for an examination of the Biden Administration’s public communications around student debt relief. If Trump-era communication was characterized by direct broadcasts from the Tweeter-in-Chief, this new style uses public policy to strategically hail online discussion. Erica and Will read "This You?" debtor discourse as an example of how political media forms can be suited to coalitional, democratic politics.Visit our Patreon page here: https://patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure…Music: “Lilac” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.comTwitter: @actualflirting

Frederic Heine joins Money on the Left to discuss his recent essay, “Performing Hard Money: Monetary Policy, Metaphor and Masculinity in the Making of EMU,” published this summer in the Journal of Cultural Economy. Heine is a university assistant at the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies at Johannes Kepler University, Linz. In his essay, Heine analyzes the cluster of masculine metaphors that ground  and mobilize the European Monetary Union’s hard-line opposition to soft money politics. At the time of this episode’s publishing in early September 2022, what Heine classifies as the masculine performative agency of EMU leaders can be seen all over Europe, with Macron decrying the end of abundance and the ECB signaling a coming period of sacrifice across the Eurozone. We speak with Heine about this essay as well as his broader inquiry into the intersections of gender, global finance, and political economy. See Frederic Heine’s essay here.Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

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 conversation in the Austin City Council, which was tasked by recent legislation with exploring possibilities for new public banking and payments structures by a resolution. The conversation delves into the proposal's legal design and implementation strategy, while also contextualizing its political meaning and stakes for progressive politics. Read the white paper here: https://moneyontheleft.org/2022/08/11/austin-credits-with-jonathan-wilson-white-paper-and-podcast-interview/

Money on the Left is thrilled to release English and Spanish transcripts from our Superstructure podcast with with Daniel Rojas Medellin (@DanielRMed), now Coordinator of newly inaugurated President Gustavo Petro's ’s transition team (@petrogustavo), and Mexican economist Jesús Reséndiz Silva (@Tlacuachito). In the episode, co-hosts Andrés Bernal (@andresintheory) & Naty Smith (@orangeasm) speak with Medellin and Silva about  what it means to think beyond economic orthodoxies in Latin America. Click here for the new English and Spanish transcripts. The episode was transcribed and translated by Natalie Smith. This episode was published originally in May 2021. Link to our Patreon: https://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

Brett Scott joins Money on the Left to discuss his recently published book Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for our Wallets (Harper-Collins 2022). A committed advocate for financial heterodoxy, Scott grounds his perspicuous critique of “cloudmoney”--the conjoined efforts and outcomes of Big Finance and Big Tech’s drive to go “cashless”-- in his anthropological training and work as financial derivatives trader in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis.Through our conversation we explore the possibilities and limitations of different metaphoric frameworks for understanding money, paying special attention to the pitfalls of figuring money as blood-like fluidity. Scott’s own comparison of financial operations with the functioning of the central nervous system prompts further discussion of the temporal and physical realities of modern money. We also discuss how awareness of the principles of monetary design clarifies the need for physical cash and the perils of privatized and surveilled forms of digital money.Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

In this special episode, Billy Saas, Maxximilian Seijo and Scott Ferguson announce the launch of the collective's new scholarly journal: Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice.Click here for the journal's inaugural publication, “Food, Money, and Democracy: Cultivating Collective Provisioning for Resilient and Equitable Communities of Work,” co-authored by Benjamin C. Wilson, Taylor Reid, and Max Sussman. As Billy, Maxx and Scott explain in their conversation, Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice is a peer-reviewed, open access journal of scholarship in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. The journal places money’s public origins and capacities at the center of left inquiry and action. It cultivates interdisciplinary approaches to past and present, aesthetics and politics. And it advances intersectional forms of research and practice in service of a just transition from social and ecological devastation. During their dialog, Billy, Maxx and Scott discuss the journal's key aims and publication schedule, while offering advice for prospective authors.See our Instructions for Authors page on our website, if you are interested in submitting or pitching an essay to the journal. Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

In the first of a three part series following the overturning of Roe v Wade, cohosts Naty (@orangeasm) and Charlotte (@moltopopulare) discuss the ongoing fight for abortion access and rights taking place in both the US and the rest of the world. Using the framework of reproductive justice, they contextualize abortion rights within a broader struggle for reproductive autonomy, touching on histories of reproductive control ranging from abortion restrictions to forced sterilisation, colonialism and incarceration. In doing so, they also highlight interconnections with concurrent right wing assaults on trans people, gay parents, drug users, refugees, and others marginalized groups.Touching on  histories and movements from Australia to Chile, Ireland, Brazil, and the border of Ukraine and Poland, Naty and Charlotte defend the right to free safe and legal abortion without apology, drawing out various trends and intersections to make a positive case for reproductive justice and autonomy.Visit our Patreon page here: https://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 special episode of Money on the Left, the MotL Collective shares an audio recording from a conference panel titled, “Monetary Modernism.” Featuring papers by Scott Ferguson (University of South Florida), Rob Hawkes (Teesside University), and Maxximilian Seijo (University of California, Santa Barbara), the panel was presented at the Hopeful Modernisms conference organized by the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) at University of Bristol, June 22 - 25, 2022. The conference sought to revive hopeful and more generative impulses in modernist art and literature, challenging a persistent view of modernism as relentlessly bleak and angst-ridden. It did so, moreover, for a present moment similarly burdened by dead-end accelerationist and pessimist imaginaries. The panel begins with Rob Hawkes. He introduces the BAMS audience to the wide-ranging contributions of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective. He also makes the case for reading Georg Friedrich Knapp’s early twentieth-century chartalist approach to money as a modernist project deeply entwined with myriad other aesthetic modernisms. In the first presentation, Scott Ferguson explores how Len Lye’s Rainbow Dance (1936), a short experimental promotional film for British public postal banking,embraces the abstractness, publicness, and heterogeneous plentitude of both money mediation and avant-garde cinema. In the second talk, Rob Hawkes uncovers how tensions between fixed and fluid understandings of identity formation and history inform John Maynard Keynes’ chartalist-inspired writings on money as much as Nella Larsen’s 1929 novella Passing and Ford Madox Ford’s 1933 novel The Rash Act. Lastly, Maximilian Seijo’s presentation carefully works through metaphors for money in Virginia Woolf’s book-length feminist essay, A Room of One’s Own (1929), complicating the text’s appeals to monetary substances and fluids by teasing out its experimental approach to imagining non-patriarchal infrastructures for provisioning aesthetic work. If you are interested in the texts and images that accompany some of the presentations, see here for Rob Hawkes’ slides and here for Scott Ferguson’s PowerPoint deck.