Money on the Left is joined by Grant Kester, professor of Art History at University of California, San Diego. We speak with Kester about his multi-decade career, researching and teaching the history of socially engaged art. 

Kester’s scholarship underscores the limits and contradictions of the dominant modern Western tradition of aesthetics. Such aesthetics value “autonomy,” insisting that the artist, the artistic medium, or art as an institution ought to stand alone and outside of society and its corrupting influences. Paradoxically, autonomy in this tradition is supposed to secure art’s political dimension by blunting and often deferring any claims to immediate social efficacy. Kester, by contrast, affirms what is variously called dialogical aesthetics or socially engaged art, a collaborative sensuous practice in public space, which aims to transform thought and action by forging complex relationships among artists and publics.

Here, we focus on Kester’s two recent books published by Duke University Press. In The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (August 2023), Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Beyond the Sovereign Self Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art (December 2023), Kester then shows how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice. Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester demonstrates how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation. 

Throughout our conversation, we tease out affinities between Kester’s scholarship and heterodox theories of public money and provisioning. Problematizing unquestioned desires to cordon off aesthetics from political economy, we call on artists and activists to contest, reconstruct, and build anew the forms of mediation that heterogeneously shape a shared sensuous life. 

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Money on the Left speaks with Pavlina Tcherneva, Professor of Economics at Bard College and leading scholar of–-and advocate for—Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Many of our listeners will be familiar with Dr. Tcherneva's contributions to MMT, especially her book, The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity Press, 2020). She is also Director of Open Society University Network’s Economic Democracy Initiative, instrumental to the publication of a United Nations report on the job guarantee, titled “The Employment Guarantee as a Tool in the Fight Against Poverty.” We speak with Pavlina about her work, and also get her perspective on the causes and conditions of MMT’s movement from the margins of economic discourse toward the mainstream of political economic thought. 

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Scott Ferguson and Billy Saas speak with New Yorker writer Nick Romeo about his exciting new book, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy, released in January 2024 with Public Affairs. Romeo’s The Alternative rebukes Margaret Thatcher’s infamous axiom that “there is no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism. In doing so, the book inventories the most promising experiments in radical economic democracy underway across the world today. Such experiments include, but are not limited to: a publicly-owned and -run gig work platform in Long Beach, California; a True Price system in Amsterdam; a public budgeting project in Cascais, Portugal; and a public Job Guarantee in Gramatneusiedl, Austria. (See our previous episode on the Austrian Job Guarantee for a deeper dive into that topic) Taken together, these and other initiatives profiled in the book “share a vision of the economy as a place of moral action and accountability,” as Romeo puts it, while modeling the kind of radical political economic imagination that is so utterly and urgently needed to meet our dire ecological moment. For Romeo, then, it remains insufficient to simply deny Thatcher’s quip that there is no alternative. The crucial task is to actively imagine and create the alternative.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Can novels and, by extension, other works of art help us to think about money and trust in new ways? Could embracing alternative perspectives on trust and money help us to avoid climate catastrophe? Rob Hawkes shares a new version of a talk previously presented at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art as part of the One Fifteen at MIMA series of public talks. Highlighting the financial barriers often assumed to stand in the way of local, national, and global efforts to advance ecological and social justice, Rob situates the trust inherent in the act of money creation as much closer than we usually think to the trust fostered and demanded by experimental fiction. If “storytelling” is another word for “accounting,” then maybe we can learn to tell the story of money in new ways, and perhaps this can help us to save the planet.

Music: "Yum" from "This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me" EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

Money on the Left is proud to present recovered and remastered audio from our interview with Raúl Carrillo, published previously solely as a written transcript. The recording also includes a new  audio introduction in which Billy Saas reflects on the significance of our dialog with Carrillo for contemporary politics. 

In our discussion, we explore the promise of the public money framework for advancing antiracist, anti-imperialist, and democratic politics across the world. We discuss how the public money or MMT perspective shapes his work as an attorney fighting against predatory finance and for an international, rights-based approach to full employment. A significant portion of the conversation is also devoted to Raúl’s ongoing critique of the “taxpayer money” trope in U.S. political culture. In both his recent article for the UCLA Criminal Law Review and a 2017 piece (coauthored with Jesse Myerson) for Splinter, Raúl persuasively shows that the myth of “taxpayer money” is not only incorrect in operational terms, but also a significant threat to marginalized communities and a major rhetorical obstacle for progressive politics. 

Raúl Carrillo is an attorney, chair of the board of the Modern Money Network, Research Fellow with the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and member of the advisory board at Our Money.

You can read his article for the UCLA Criminal Law Review here: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7rp8g89c.

See his article on “The Dangerous Myth of Taxpayer Money” here: https://splinternews.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-taxpayer-money-1819658902. 

Theme music by Hillbilly Motobike.


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Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) is joined by Robyn Ollett (@robynollett) and Rob Hawkes (@robbhawkes) to discuss What We Do in the Shadows. Citing Robyn’s interpretations of vampirism in The New Queer Gothic: Reading Queer Girls and Women in Contemporary Fiction and Film, the cohosts situate What We Do in the Shadows within the vampire's long history as a figure for queerness and alterity. In the second half of their conversation, Will, Robyn and Rob develop figural connections between the show’s queer citational form and Money on the Left’s articulation of endogenous credit.

Order Robyn Ollett's book, The New Queer Gothic: Reading Queer Girls and Women in Contemporary Fiction and Film.

Music: "Yum" from "This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening to Anyone but Me" EP by flirting.
flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com/
Twitter: @actualflirting

Matt Seybold joins Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson to discuss the political economy of literary criticism from past to present, amateur to professional. Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature at Elmira College and Resident Scholar at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. In addition to writing and teaching in the field of literature & economics, Seybold produces and hosts The American Vandal podcast, an ever-growing collection of conversations and presentations about literature, humor, and history in America that is inspired by Mark Twain's life and legacy. 

Our conservation focuses, in particular, on The American Vandal’s magisterial eighth series titled, “Criticism LTD.” With 16 episodes totaling 24-hours of listening, “Criticism LTD” marshals a diverse cast of over 50 voices to provide fresh perspectives on the origins & trajectories of literary criticism and the so-called “crisis of humanities.” Episodes take on a wide range of topics, including: the marked contrast between today’s “golden age of criticism” (Ryan Ruby) in amateur and para-academic venues and the “Ponzi Austerity” (Yanis Varoufakis) and “Ed-Tech Griftopia” (Seybold) undermining contemporary academic research and instruction; the mid-20th-century trouncing of the neo-Aristotelian Chicago School Critics by the neoliberal Chicago School Economists; how the ugly politics of race, class, gender, and colonialism have both informed and met resist in practices of close reading; and the importance of the 19th-century feud over literary criticism between Matthew Arnold and Mark Twain for imaginatively contesting imperialism, then and now. “Criticism LTD” has much to offer teachers, researchers, organizers, and creators interested in building a more humane, collaborative, and democratic education system in the shell of the old. 

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

We are joined again by Benjamin Wilson to discuss what it is like to teach Economics from a heterodox Modern Monetary Theory perspective in 2023. Wilson is associate professor and recently-minted chair of the department of Economics at SUNY, Cortland. In previous episodes, we have chatted with Wilson about his research, the Uni Currency project, and his innovative work experimenting with classroom currencies. Developing these topics further, our conversation this time explores the potentials and dangers of using neoclassical textbooks in the heterodox classroom; the utility of classroom currencies for Econ classes of all levels; the place of narrative in neoclassical and heterodox theory; and so much more. Our dialog with Wilson is shaped in several respects by our conversation with Larry Johnson in last month’s episode of Money on the Left. If you are passionate about pedagogy, then this episode is for you.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

This month, we speak with Larry Johnson, associate professor in the Social Foundations of Education Program at the University of South Florida, Saint Petersburg. In his pedagogy, Johnson focuses on the complex relationship between education, culture, and society with the goal of exploring policies and practices from historical and contemporary perspectives that address structural inequality, and transforming educational institutions into sites for social justice. Johnson is notably a long-time proponent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and variously mobilizes MMT’s insights when training our teachers-to-be. In our conversation with Johnson, we discover just how constrained the US system of public education is by wrong economic thinking and what it would mean to think otherwise. Together, we ask: How do federal interest rates shape US education policy? What do standardized tests have to tell us about neoclassical economics and the nature of money? Why is the rhetoric of education in the United States so narrowly focused on preparing students for careers? How do classist and racist myths of taxpayer financing create unequal schooling? And how could we ever reasonably hope for the political economy of education in the United States to ever be otherwise? Pondering such questions, Johnson opens a window onto his longstanding advocacy for radically rethinking US public education through the lens of endogenous public money theory.
 
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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Sandeep Vaheesan (@sandeepvaheesan) joins Scott Ferguson on the Superstructure podcast to discuss the still-undecided political significance of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Their conversation focuses on Vaheesan’s article, “The IRA is Still Being Formed: An Episode in America’s Past Contains Important Lessons for How We Move Forward in Greening the Economy,” published recently in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. 

While present left debate about the IRA tends to split over whether the legislation ultimately breaks with or confirms the tenets of neoliberal governance, Vaheesan turns our attention to the ongoing contestation over the bill’s implementation across heterogeneous domains. Vaheesan puts the current struggle into perspective by reflecting on the historical fight surrounding the construction and operation of the Boulder (a.k.a. “Hoover”) Dam. 

In the case of the federal provisioning of the Boulder Dam in the 1920’s, a strong public utility—the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power —was well positioned to control water and power as public goods, despite efforts by the conservative Hoover administration to wholly privatize the process. What is more, the success of this project laid the groundwork for later rural electrification programs under FDR’s New Deal. 

Today, Vaheesan sees similar potential for public control over the IRA’s implementation because the legislation crucially extends investment and production tax credits, which were formerly available only to for-profit entities, to community-controlled public and cooperative electric utilities. For this reason, the meaning and fate of the IRA remains up-for-grabs. Should community-controlled public and cooperative electric utilities seize hold of the IRA’s democratic potentials, Vaheesan suggests, the process stands to build significant capacities for a more expansive Green New Deal. 

Ferguson and Vaheesan close their conversation by considering the social construction of and  disputes about public money in both contemporary and historical contexts. 

Vaheesan is legal director of the Open Markets Institute and author of a forthcoming book titled, Democracy in Power (University of Chicago Press) on the history and future of cooperative and public power in the United States.  

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Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirting

We’re joined this month by William A.( “Sandy”) Darity to discuss reparations for Black Americans. Sandy Darity is Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. A founding theorist of stratification economics and foremost scholar of the racial wealth gap in the United Stats, Darity is perhaps best known for his committed public advocacy for acknowledging, redressing, and resolving histories of racist violence against enslaved black people and their descendents through a federal program of reparations for black Americans.

In April 2020–just weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic and two months before the global uprisings that followed the murder of George Floyd–Darity and co-author Kirsten Mullen published the book From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century. We speak with Professor Darity about this book–including its conception, reception, and circulation over the last few years. We also ask Darity about related projects like his proposals for “Baby Bonds” and a Federal Job Guarantee. We conclude, finally, by suggesting that the U.S. Treasury mint a $12 trillion-dollar platinum coin featuring prominent figures from the black freedom struggle for the purpose of financing reparations and educating the public about how money works. 

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com