@moneyontheleft.bsky.social
Editorial Collective advancing #LeftMMT, critical theory & intersectional praxis. In association with Monthly Review. https://moneyontheleft.org/; https://linktr.ee/Moneyontheleft
Money does not bring atomized individuals into a dyadic, horizontal relation to "exchange" one thing for another. It is, instead, a collective, public means of payment that is structured as a marco-economic organization.
"[I]n a very literal sense, the word *sovereignty* is created to imagine a new kind of super or hyper power meant to rule over and above all others."
"[T]he focus on money, as a medium of exchange, results in a categoric error in which specific forms of money are mistaken for the generic quality of ‘moneyness’.”
We speak with Caroline Levine, Ryan Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, about her important book The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis.
"The same administration can operate in more than one chronotopic tense at once because it inherits institutions and media habits that keep staging money as if it originates in private pockets and enters public life only through reluctant concession."
"In monetary life, référance works through analogy: a way of holding heterogeneous things in accountable relation without making them identical."
Moody work-arounds conceived by @moneyontheleft.bsky.social
@greenbackbetter.bsky.social
“Money is better understood as a practice of open public reference.”
#DemocraticPublicFinance
CCing former math teacher @jabaribrisport.bsky.social
& rep
@aoc.bsky.social
& satirist
@waltermasterson.bsky.social
Know your class enemies by name: for those who don't know, Moody's is one of Wall Street's main credit-rating firms.
When Moody's downgrades a city, it's Wall St's way of trying to discipline the mayor into submission by making the city's bonds less valuable.
www.cityandstateny.com/politics/202...
"[W]e propose that universities circumvent negligent state and federal legislatures and self-finance future expenditures by issuing their own credits called 'Unis.'"
"What appears [in Marxism] as private value or abstract equivalence is better understood as a genre of reference—a way of organizing relations that presents its own ratios as self-grounding while treating the conditions of issuance and receivability as if they were already settled."
From the “Save MGNREGA” nationwide agitations to defiant resolutions passed in thousands of Gram Sabhas, the people of India are actively fighting to reclaim their right to work.
moneyontheleft.org/2026/03/01/c...
"At stake throughout is how public money is imagined and how public obligation is organized."
"Money is better understood as a practice of open public reference. At its most basic level, it stages comparison without requiring identity."
I’m all for public banks.
@moneyontheleft.bsky.social has a recent interesting thing on states issuing bonds & having their own state public banks (yet to be created) buy the bonds. Because it’s unconstitutional for states to create their own currency
Although cities can & sometimes do.
We do.
Political economy for post-structuralists
"In monetary life, référance works through analogy: a way of holding heterogeneous things in accountable relation without making them identical."
Women, Safety, and Moral Panic: From Private Protection to Public Responsibility in India
It's not Marxism. It's not post-structuralism. It's a secret third thing. 🥸
The Ontology of the Monetary Image (Wonkish)
✨ New essay! ✨
In his latest piece, @greenbackbetter.bsky.social complicates both Marxist & deconstructive critiques of money-as-failed-identity to affirm what he terms "référance"—a practice of open public reference, analogy & reconstructive coordination.
Please read & share! 👩💻 🙌
"The paradigm, which we call Democratic Public Finance (DPF), reframes money as an inexhaustible and malleable public institution. According to DPF, money is public credit, a capacious tool for mobilizing everyone’s capacities to meet our needs and build a desirable future."
Zack Polanski’s Bold Politics Requires an Even Bolder Economic Vision: The Case for Democratic Public Finance
