Money on the Left

We are joined by David I. Backer, associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University, to discuss his new book: As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Schools (The New Press, 2025).

moneyontheleft.org/2025/12/01/r...

Beyond Loans: The Public Grant-Making Bank By the Money on the Left Editorial Collective Public banking has been gaining traction for years, driven by a growing recognition that our current financial system often fails to serve the public g…

"Rather than naturalize private market prices while fetishizing liberal budget-balancing, public granting banks allow us to challenge the political composition of investment and pricing in the first place."

The Utopia of Refusal: David Graeber, Debt & the Left Monetary Imagination by Will Beaman & Scott Ferguson Note: David Graeber leaves behind a rich and complex body of work that remains influential for leftist thought and practice. Since his passing in 2020, however, …

"[Graeber's notion of] baseline communism affirms that care is constitutive, but it does so in a way that leans toward institutional unaccountability: it holds the minimal ethic of help outside the very infrastructures through which help is necessarily organized and provisioned."

I admit to not having read this yet, but I agree with the sentiment.

The Utopia of Refusal: David Graeber, Debt & the Left Monetary Imagination by Will Beaman & Scott Ferguson Note: David Graeber leaves behind a rich and complex body of work that remains influential for leftist thought and practice. Since his passing in 2020, however, …

"[We] refuse to let jubilee exhaust the imagination of change. The more basic question becomes how to build and revise public credit systems so that fewer life-sustaining activities show up as 'debts' at all."

The New Postcolonial Economics with Fadhel Kaboub (New Art & Transcript!) Money on the Left is proud to publish a remastered version of our third episode with Fadhel Kaboub, now with a new transcript and art. Kaboub is associate professor of economics at Denison and Pres…

The New Postcolonial Economics with Fadhel Kaboub (New Art & Transcript!)

Helping us to imagine a more just and equitable future, As Public as Possible proposes a specific set of financial policies aimed at providing a high-quality and truly public education for all Americans, regardless of wealth and race.

moneyontheleft.org/2025/12/01/r...

Democratic Public Finance Billy Saas and Scott Ferguson are joined by Will Beaman to discuss Money on the Left’s framework for what we call “Democratic Public Finance” (DPF). According to this paradigm, money is public cred…

"Contrary to conventional accounts of Modern Monetary Theory, we insist that money is a public, contested, and inexhaustible institution that must be politicized and redesigned *across all levels of governance*."

Analog Critique; or, Isn't Money Queer? Abstract. This essay introduces a critical theory of mediation developed by the Money on the Left Editorial Collective (MotL) and demonstrates the value of the collective's thinking for current debate...

This essay introduces a critical theory of mediation developed by the Money on the Left Editorial Collective (MotL) and demonstrates the value of the collective's thinking for current debates in media theory.

Beyond Loans: The Public Grant-Making Bank By the Money on the Left Editorial Collective Public banking has been gaining traction for years, driven by a growing recognition that our current financial system often fails to serve the public g…

"[A host of] well-established institutions prove that grant-based financing beyond profitability is already a central function of financial life in the United States."

The Utopia of Refusal: David Graeber, Debt & the Left Monetary Imagination by Will Beaman & Scott Ferguson Note: David Graeber leaves behind a rich and complex body of work that remains influential for leftist thought and practice. Since his passing in 2020, however, …

"Ethics, on [Graeber's] model, oscillates between an ideological trap and a minimal and tacitly private kindness that lives before or outside institutions."

Money on the Left shares audio from “The Black University & Community Currencies,” a public workshop convened by Professor Andrew J. Douglas at Morehouse College on April 25, 2025.
moneyontheleft.org/2025/05/01/t...

The Utopia of Refusal: David Graeber, Debt & the Left Monetary Imagination by Will Beaman & Scott Ferguson Note: David Graeber leaves behind a rich and complex body of work that remains influential for leftist thought and practice. Since his passing in 2020, however, …

"The convergence of the Debt Collective, Jacobin, and Dissent around debt, limits, and back-end jubilees can be read ... as a symptomatic recoil: an aversion to considering governance as a present-tense reality within a framework that tends to defer real politics to refusal and rupture."

New York City’s Forgotten Public Bank Plan In 1975, Wall Street declared war on New York, sending the city into a fiscal crisis. A forgotten public banking proposal in the state assembly could have stopped it — and put both the city and the co...

Wonderful that Jacobin is supporting the public banking movement. Know, however, that we can go further. Let's push to renew the national Public Banking Act. Let's also create legal conditions for Public Grant-Making Banks, which avoid trapping necessary social programs in loans. See below👇

Beyond Loans: The Public Grant-Making Bank By the Money on the Left Editorial Collective Public banking has been gaining traction for years, driven by a growing recognition that our current financial system often fails to serve the public g…

Here's a real mind bender.

"There was a real desire in Harlem, particularly, to get away from that legacy of the Harlem Renaissance as being the product of white patronage and a desire to advocate for black artists to be in administrative roles."

moneyontheleft.org/2025/06/01/w...

Cc: @schooldaves.bsky.social 👆

Science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling.

-Kim Stanley Robinson

moneyontheleft.org/2023/09/05/m...

How can novels help us think about money … and maybe even save the planet? (Guest Lecture) 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…

Could embracing alternative perspectives on trust and money help us to avoid climate catastrophe?

Odious Debt with Edward Jones Corredera Money on the Left speaks with Edward Jones Corredera, author of Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2024).  What are fallen ty…

Money on the Left speaks with Edward Jones Corredera, author of Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America.

Beyond Loans: The Public Grant-Making Bank By the Money on the Left Editorial Collective Public banking has been gaining traction for years, driven by a growing recognition that our current financial system often fails to serve the public g…

"Our financial regulatory system is typically conceived according to an erroneous, yet dominant 'loanable funds' model, which posits that banks act as mere intermediaries, collecting pre-existing savings from lenders and then allocating those scarce funds to borrowers."

The Paradox of Political Thrift By Will BeamanDemocratic endorsement politics around Zohran Mamdani continue to bend in ways that feel at once familiar and strange. A spokesman for House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries brushed off Senato…

Will Beaman extends Keynes's notion of the paradox of thrift to problem of political endorsement & coalition building.

Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City Summary This document elaborates an emerging economic paradigm that is already latent in Zohran Mamdani’s plans and practices. The paradigm, which we call Democratic Public Finance (DPF), reframes …

Democratic Public Finance: It's like MMT, but better.

The Case for Fiscal Insurgency by Will Beaman A common refrain keeps surfacing among prominent journalists- and commentators-in-digital-exile on BlueSky. Commenting on the emergence of yet another shadowy centrist think tank, Ne…

Nobody likes a bottleneck.

Coalition as Credit Reading the Mamdani-Lander-Warren Coalition as a Credit Event by Will Beaman How do you keep governing when opponents try to stage a fiscal loss? In New York, that will be the fight: not just what …

Coalition building is a politics of credit.

JAWS at 50: Birth of the Neoliberal Blockbuster In honor of the 50th anniversary of JAWS (1975), we are proud to publish a 2020 lecture about Steven Spielberg’s film by Scott Ferguson. Far from a simple celebration, the lecture c…

In honor of the 50th anniversary of JAWS (1975), we are proud to publish a 2020 lecture about Steven Spielberg’s film.

We are joined by David I. Backer, associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University, to discuss his new book: As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Schools (The New Press, 2025).

moneyontheleft.org/2025/12/01/r...

The Utopia of Refusal: David Graeber, Debt & the Left Monetary Imagination by Will Beaman & Scott Ferguson Note: David Graeber leaves behind a rich and complex body of work that remains influential for leftist thought and practice. Since his passing in 2020, however, …

"We honor Graeber’s writings as indispensable for denaturalizing money & obligation & for catalyzing new forms of organizing from Occupy onward. However, we also argue that some of Graeber’s basic assumptions about money and public provisioning limit what the left can imagine & accomplish."

This article was @videotroph.bsky.social and I completing our Socially Necessary Graeber Time so you don’t have to.

#Capitalism #Utopia

Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City Summary This document elaborates an emerging economic paradigm that is already latent in Zohran Mamdani’s plans and practices. The paradigm, which we call Democratic Public Finance (DPF), reframes …

This document elaborates an emerging economic paradigm that is already latent in Zohran Mamdani’s plans and practices. The paradigm, which we call Democratic Public Finance (DPF), reframes money as an inexhaustible and malleable public institution.