Money on the Left

Reflecting on recent protests outside of Brett Kavanaugh's home as well as a recent news story where police invaded the home of a 16 year old trans twitch streamer, Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) notes ways in which conservative narratives around household and parental identity are unstable and contested.

In this special episode of Superstructure, Cohost Natalie Tabb Smith (@orangeasm) is joined by Erica Robles-Anderson (@fstflofscholars) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) to discuss common interests between the Money on the Left Editorial Collective and the Oikos working group on kinship/economy. Naty, Erica and Scott reflect on households, financial forms, and reproductive politics in our contemporary political economy through the prism of Melinda Cooper’s 2017 text, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism.

Continuing their consideration of pleasure for a world of leftist struggle, co-hosts Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) and Natalie Tabb Smith (@orangeasm) turn to a recently published Superstructure article co-authored by Erica Robles-Anderson and Scott Ferguson. Titled "The Visual Cliff: Eleanor Gibson and the Origins of Affordance," the essay critically locates the hidden history of contemporary user-experience design in a well-known psychological experiment. Conducted by Dr. Eleanor Gibson, the experiment placed babies alone atop a visual precipice in order to test their depth perception. Following the essay, Charlotte and Naty question the notion that we must remain frozen forever between false binaries, like babies staring over an impossible visual cliff. Doing so, their discussion weaves through thinkers as diverse as Lynne Segal, Adrienne Maree Brown, Lisa Duggan, Gayle Rubin, and more.

In this first episode of Projections, Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) reflects on some recent comments from US Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va) suggesting Democrats should prioritize inflation over Roe v. Wade in their campaign messaging in the midterms. Music: “Lilac” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.comTwitter: @actualflirting

Co-hosts Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) and Natalie Tabb Smith (@orangeasm) discuss conceptualizations of pleasure on the left, looking at a recent article arguing against the radicalism of polyamory in Novara for part 1 of this installment of Medium Femme.

Money on the Left speaks with Dr. Sonia Ivancic about the importance of regionally sensitive and affirmative storytelling in provisioning processes. Assistant Professor in organizational communication at University of South Florida, Dr. Ivancic is a community-engaged researcher, whose work on “place-based narrative labor” offers essential new tools for displacing prevailing scarcity logics and rhetorics of austerity with more capacious ways of thinking, arguing, and narrating. Through embedded fieldwork with non-profit, rural Appalachian food distributors, Professor Ivancic has developed astute critiques of the narrative frames used by some grant-making non-profits as they paradoxically seek to address privation and hunger in Appalachia by perpetually framing privation and hunger in Appalachia as the region’s most salient and seemingly default characteristics. In place of this “deficit-driven” characterization–which, owing to the ways that such projects depend on the grant cycle, is nearly always the dominant kind of characterization–Dr. Ivancic identifies and promotes an “asset-driven” mode of place-based narrative labor. With this asset-based approach, the provisioning process affirmatively calls attention to and works to expand the capacities and potentials of a given community, honoring the dignity of particular communities, while opening political imaginaries to include new metrics for collective flourishing and renewal. In our conversation, we extend Ivancic’s theorization of asset-driven place-based narrative labor to rethink the challenges and potentials of a Federal Job Guarantee under a future Green New Deal. We also draw rich parallels between her account of narrativity in local provisioning and conceptions of macro political economy in Modern Monetary Theory and other heterodox traditions in political economy. Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Cohosts Will Beaman (@agoingaccount), Natalie Tabb Smith (@orangeasm) and Maxximilian Seijo (@maxseijo) are back to reflect on some of the many things that have happened since their last episode. Mentioning Elon Musk’s tentative Twitter purchase, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s feud with Disney, and escalating political attacks against LGBT educators and children, the cohosts reflect on how the US Left should account for its capacity in this new moment. Critiquing a recent NYMag article by Sam Adler-Bell from the Know Your Enemy podcast for its uncritical embrace of right wing premises, the Superstructure cohosts suggests that the Left’s capacity is hiding in plain sight, on the front lines of the very infrastructures that the far right is contesting. To write off social media, the entertainment industry and critical pedagogy as non-political and nonstrategic is to abandon some of the most vulnerable people in our society.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 installment of the Modern Movie Theory series, Scott Ferguson explores how a complex aesthetics of omniscience raises important questions about dependence, care, and responsibility in the Netflix show Old Enough!. Recently repackaged by Netflix for streaming audiences across 190 countries, Old Enough! is, in fact, a long-running Japanese reality show titled, “My First Errand,” which began airing on television in Japan during the 1990’s. Each 10 – 15 -minute episode of the series follows the triumphs and tribulations of a small child (and occasionally two), as they venture out for the first time to complete a series of routine tasks without parental chaperones. A flurry of commentary about the show in Western media has worried about televisual claims to realism; the ethics of sending toddlers out into the world; the politics of cultural differences lost in translation; and the dangers of inadequate urban and suburban infrastructure. Shifting our attention to the abstract moving image forms that shape Old Enough!, Scott by contrast teases out how the series routes the collective pleasures, anxieties and responsibilities involved in creating mobile personhood through a subtle aesthetics of omnipresence, which dominant blockbusters and video games repress, and film and media theorists tend to jettison. Irreducible to all-controlling surveillance or to individual embodied action, this omniscient televisuality harbors important lessons about money, mediation, and coordination that we cannot afford to overlook.Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

In this episode, Andrés Bernal and Natalie T. Smith critique the recent mainstream econ Twitter shaming of MMT, while vibing on left heterodox anti-racist & feminist economics. The conversation then turns toward Latin American politics and Andrés' latest paper on inflation for the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.Andrés' paper: http://www.global-isp.org/working-paper-no-132/Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Engelbert Stockhammer joins Money on the Left to discuss the political and economic debates that shaped and ultimately devastated Weimar-era Germany. Professor Stockhammer is professor of political economy in the department of European and International Studies at King’s College London and has published widely on financial instability and Post-Keynesian economics. In this episode, we focus specifically on Stockhammer’s recent working paper, “Hilferding, Woytinsky, and the Fiscal Orthodoxy of Interwar Social Democracy,” published by the Post-Keynesian Economics Society in Fall 2021. In the essay, Stockhammer reconsiders the so-called “WTB Plan,” a union-backed public works program, which was tragically rejected by the Social Democratic Party (or “SPD”) on seemingly Marxist grounds. During our conversation, we explore the biographies and arguments of two key players in this historical drama: Vladmir Woytinksy, the Russian-born socialist economist responsible for drafting the WTB plan and Rudolf Hilferding, the Austrian-Marxist theorist and politician who turned the SPD against it. Along the way, we consider the stakes and fate of Weimar-era fiscal politics in light of a hegemonic gold standard that ruled across Europe and the United States, growing unemployment and suffering, and the German fascist movement that rose to answer such problems in violent and genocidal ways. Finally, we ponder how unrealized Weimar futurities in the past can help inform the struggle for public full employment today.Read Stockhammer’s paper here: http://www.postkeynesian.net/downloads/working-papers/PKWP2118.pdfVisit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructureMusic by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com