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). The right-wing attack on education has cut deep. In response, millions of Americans have rallied to defend their cherished public schools. Backer’s incisive book asks whether choosing between our embattled status quo and the stingy privatized vision of the right is the only path forward. In As Public as Possible, Backer argues for going on the offensive by radically expanding the very notion of the “public” in our public schools.

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. He shows how we can decouple school funding from property tax revenue, evening out inequalities across districts by distributing resources according to need. He argues for direct federal grants instead of the predations of municipal debt markets. And he offers eye-opening examples spanning the past and present, from the former Yugoslavia to contemporary Philadelphia, which hastens us to envision a radically different way of financing the education of all of children.

Backer's book is thus a must-read for anyone interested in building a robust and democratic public education system today and in the future.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

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 credit, a capacious tool for mobilizing everyone’s capacities to meet our needs and build a desirable future. DPF redefines politics as the process of coordinating our abundant human and material resources within ecological limits, rather than as an austere and exploitative competition for scarce funds. With this, Money on the Left not only opens fresh horizons for left politics, but also directly challenges the fiscal sabotage routinely carried out by liberals, conservatives and the authoritarian right. 

In conceptualizing DPF, Money on the Left builds on insights from Modern Monetary Theory (MMT); but we also push beyond MMT’s delimitation of public money creation to the alleged sovereignty of the nation-state. Contrary to conventional accounts of MMT, we insist that money is a public, contested, and inexhaustible institution that must be politicized and redesigned across all levels of governance. 

During our discussion, our cohosts outline the approach to DPF presented in our recent long-form publication, “Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City.” Along the way, we tease out key insights from myriad other contemporary works, which variously leverage DPF to challenge the second Trump administration’s authoritarian radicalization of neoliberal economics. Such texts include co-authored pieces such as “Blue Bonds: A Fiscal Strategy for Overcoming Trump 2.0,” “How the Zetro Card can Save New York City (Really),” and “It’s Time for Complimentary Currencies,” as well as writings by Will Beaman like “How to New York Times Proof Mamdani’s Playbook,” “Blue Bonds: Duck or Rabbit?,” and “The Case for Fiscal Insurgency.” 

The conversation highlights the originality and urgency of Money on the Left’s core ideas for Democratic Public Finance. Since the discussion only scratches the surface of our writings, however, we encourage listeners to consult the linked publications above for a comprehensive engagement with DPF.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

In this episode of the Superstructure podcast, Scott Ferguson is joined by independent film scholar Jonathan Haynes to discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed new film, One Battle After Another. The conversation centers on the film’s contribution to popular political cinema under the authoritarian violence of the second Trump administration. Scott and Jonathan affirm One Battle’s unapologetically leftist perspective as a breath of fresh air within a current political climate of despair–a feeling emblematized by films such as Ari Aster’s Eddington. Specifically, the episode examines how One Battle, which draws loose inspiration from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, deliberately removes specific historical markers to place the story in an ambiguous present of ongoing revolution and counter-revolution. The hosts evaluate One Battle’s controversial representation of leftist violence, highlighting the film’s focus on countervailing infrastructures in addition to punctuated actions. They also speculate about the meaning of the film’s rich aesthetic choices, including the mobile telephoto lenses that transform a conventional car chase into a dizzying allegory of an American culture unclear about its driving motivations and aims. Finally, Scott and Jonathan consider the complex, racialized eroticism between the revolutionary mother and the white-supremacist commander (played by Teyana Taylor and Sean Penn), which gives rise to the central character, Willa (Chase Infinity). Willa, they argue, embodies the entangled, embattled, and yet still hopeful left politics that the film ultimately celebrates.

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

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(Princeton University Press, 2023). Building on the theory developed in her award-winning book, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Levine’s The Activist Humanist redirects the critical capacities of formalist literary study to discover and mobilize the democratic potential of political forms thought by many on the left to be irredeemably exclusive, violent, and anti-democratic. Countering scholars in the environmental humanities who embrace only “modest gestures of care”—and who seem to have moved directly to “mourning” our inevitable environmental losses—Levine argues that large-scale, practical environmental activism should be integral to humanists’ work. For Levine, humanists have the tools–and the responsibility–to mobilize political power to tackle climate change. We speak with Levine at length about this project in an effort to move beyond critical gestures of dissolution and toward an activist formalism that moves constructively between politics and aesthetics.

See the Doughnut Economics Action Lab website for more information about the upcoming screening of Finding the Money mentioned in the audio introduction.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

* Thank you to Robert Rusch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript. 

Money on the Left is proud to publish a remastered version of our third episode (ever!) with Fadhel Kaboub, now with a new transcript and art. Kaboub is associate professor of economics at Denison and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. In our conversation, Kaboub outlines a new critical approach to postcolonial political economy, arguing that re-gaining fiscal agency is a crucial next step for postcolonial nations hoping to achieve social, economic, and environmental justice. We talk specifically and at length about the CFA franc currency union, a system with violent colonial roots that continues to constrain the economic and political agency of its member states in West and Central Africa.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

We speak with Vijay Raghavan, Professor of Law at the Brooklyn Law School, about his recent article, “The Radical Potential of Consumer Financial Protection,” published in Boston College Law Review in April 2025. Raghavan builds on the work of constitutional money theorists, as well as his legal experience in the public sector. In particular, he argues that consumer financial protection is an essential and potentially radical response to the "finance franchise,” a predominantly anti-democratic process by which modern governments delegate the money creation process to private actors like banks. The consensus in contemporary left sociological and legal scholarship dismisses consumer financial protection as a rearguard effort to sustain neoliberal capitalism. Raghavan, by contrast, reconceptualizes consumer financial protection as a vital counterweight to legally structured domination in financial markets. By tracing the history of this struggle from the early 20th century to the present, Raghavan provides a powerful legal framework for today's debtor movements, including the national campaigns to cancel student and medical debt. In doing so, Raghavan offers a forward-looking vision for how to build a durable consumer financial protection regime capable of reclaiming democratic authority in the post-Trump era.

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In this special episode, Rob Hawkes joins Scott Ferguson and Will Beaman to discuss his new article “(Un)conditional Openness: Towards a Neochartalist Theory of Money and Trust,” which was recently published in Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice. The conversation traces the development of Rob’s long-standing interest in theories of trust from his doctoral research in literary studies towards an increasing fascination with the topic of money which eventually led him to MMT, neochartalism and the Money on the Left project. Rob recalls a jarring moment when, having become excited by the possibility of bringing MMT into his research on literature and trust, he realised that some neochartalists reject the idea that money is trust-based. Determined to think this relationship through in greater depth, Rob’s article reaches the conclusion that neochartalism demands a re-theorisation of the concept of trust itself. In this wide-ranging conversation, Rob, Scott, and Will work through some of the key moves the article makes, including the problematisation of barter-like theories of “calculative trust,” its consideration of the connection between trust and vulnerability, and the way trusting blurs the distinction between conditionality and unconditionality (as alluded to in the article’s title). Finally, the discussion addresses links between trust, the university (as an institution), and the uni currency proposal, and situates Rob’s work within the heterodox and heterogeneous interdisciplinary academic, para-academic, and extra-academic field that is contemporary neochartalism.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Heterodox economist Jamee K. Moudud returns to Money on the Left to discuss his new book, Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez-Faire? (Routledge, 2025).

The phrase “institutions matter” is a common refrain among economists, including many who have proposed progressive alternatives to free market fundamentalism. For Moudud, however, this proposition doesn't go far enough, leaving a host of problematic assumptions unquestioned. To remedy this, Moudud draws on the Original Institutional Economics and American Legal Realist traditions to propose a robust theory of legal institutionalism or institutional political economy.

At its core, Moudud argues, society is a political community founded on property rights, money, credit, constitutional law, and legally-endowed corporations. From this premise, he concludes that laissez-faire has never truly existed and that seemingly natural dichotomies between “state intervention” and “deregulation” or “free markets” and “market failures” are as baseless as they are false. Moudud’s book, by contrast, urges us to engage with legal-economic theory and history to understand what institutions are and what economic regulation truly means. He asks: How does law order the economy? How does money shape power relations?

Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism should be of interest to readers of economics, law, and public policy, as well as those in international and development studies or anyone seeking to explore progressive alternatives in this period of multiple crises.

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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 critically situates JAWS as the first genuine New Hollywood blockbuster and the originator of a distinctly neoliberal aesthetic that would come to dominate Hollywood for the next five decades. Ferguson explores the film's influence on Hollywood, its innovative use of television advertising, and its role in establishing the high-concept blockbuster. The majority of the lecture, however, teases out the film's profound aesthetic reorganization of Hollywood cinema. 

JAWS, Ferguson shows, employs a wide range of techniques, such as the "Spielberg face," "God lights," and what he calls the "quasi-diegetic" camera, which work together to create a sublime, immersive experience grounded in immediate physical relations. In this new aesthetic regime, abstraction is repressed, physics reigns supreme, and cinematic movement is reduced to zero-sum displacements of material forces and entities. Ferguson connects this immersive aesthetic to JAWS's narrative treatment of money as an essentially private, scarce, and politically unanswerable thing. Through this analysis, the lecture demonstrates how JAWS both expresses and contributes to a broader turn toward neoliberalism in 1970s America, revealing cinema's role in shaping the economic and political imagination of an era.

In this episode, we share Part 2 of our coverage of The Black University & Community Currencies workshop (Click here for Part 1). Held April 25, 2025 on the campus of Morehouse College, the workshop fostered dialogue between students, faculty, and activists about the radical possibilities of public money for higher education, broadly, and for communities at and around Morehouse, specifically. The occasion for the workshop was the conclusion of a semester in which students enrolled in Professor Andrew Douglas’s advanced political theory course at Morehouse implemented a classroom currency called the CREDO for use by Morehouse students. 

In practice the CREDO bears close resemblance to complementary currencies like the Benjamins at SUNY Cortland, the DVDs at Denison University, and the Buckaroos at University of Missouri, Kansas City. One significant aspect that sets the CREDO apart is that it is the first we know of to have been implemented at an Historically Black College or University. Another unique attribute of the experiment is that students were invited--and very capably answered the call--by their professor to reflect publicly on their experience as users, advocates, and critics of the currency at an HBCU. 

In the first half of this two-part episode, we hear directly from Isaac Dia, Elijah Qualls, John Greene, and Bruce Malveaux--students at Morehouse College and participants in Professor Douglas’s advanced political theory course--about their experiences with the CREDO and its implications for the Black University concept. In the second half, we hear audio of the panel itself as it took place on April 25, 2025. Both halves of the episode reward close attention. Together they document a moment of substantial conceptual and political advance for public money theory and for the hermeneutics of provision.

A very special thank you to Isaac, Elijah, John, Bruce, and all others who participated in the panel discussion and interview. 

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