Money on the Left Money on the Left

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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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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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.
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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