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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We speak with Lauren Arrington about her forthcoming book on women artists in the Federal Arts Project. The Great Depression rendered 140,000 women and girls across the United States homeless. In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt founded the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that employed 8.5 million people over the course of eight years. Soon, the WPA instituted a landmark ruling forbidding sexual discrimination. As a result, between thirty and forty percent of newly hired artists on federal projects were women. This equity of opportunity enabled women to rise to positions of leadership and have access to resources that had a lasting effect on national institutions and on the history of art. In her book, Arrington challenges the popular memory of WPA art as a story of straight white men. Instead, she argues that the works of art that many women created under the Federal Arts Project made visible Black, immigrant, and women’s lives in a way that challenged segregationist, xenophobic, and sexist structures intrinsic in the nation’s institutions. 

During our conversation, Arrington explores the extraordinary achievements and tribulations of New Deal women artists and administrators. Among them include Alice Neel, Gwendolyn Bennett, Augusta Savage, Georgette Seabrooke, Lenore Thomas, and Pablita Velarde. Along the way, we track how these women and the Federal Art Project more broadly came under fire from local and national government officials who attempted to censor or suppress their radical work, to fire them from their jobs or force their resignations from projects, and to investigate them for “un-American” activity. We contemplate the challenges of writing histories of lost and often deliberately destroyed archives. And we consider the lessons of women’s participation in the Federal Arts Project for the future politics of public arts provisioning.

Lauren Arrington is Chair and Professor of English at University of South Florida. 

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In this episode, 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. This episode presents Part 1 of the workshop. It features an introduction by Professor Douglas and two panels. The first panel is titled “What is Public Money?” (Delman Coates, Scott Ferguson & Benjamin Wilson. The second asks: “What is the Uni Currency Proposal?” (Scott Ferguson & Benjamin Wilson). Money on the Left will release audio from Part 2 of the workshop within a few weeks’ time.

Description:

In the late 1960s, in the context of the Black Power movement and amid calls to develop Black Studies programs at many US colleges and universities, Black student activists and radical intellectuals sought to imagine a more revolutionary "Black University," an institution or network of institutions dedicated entirely to Pan-African study and research. This workshop revisits the theory and vision of the Black University. It foregrounds questions of political economy—ranging from the theoretical critiques of capitalism and empire that inspired the Black University concept to more practical questions about financial viability and the "business model" of a revolutionary Black institution. And it considers how an emerging school of heterodox economic thinking—what has come to be known as Modern Money Theory—might inform a renewal of the Black University and its commitment to Black community building.

This comes at a time of great crisis in US higher education, especially at HBCUs. Students are unsustainably indebted, encouraged to think of their education as little more than a private economic transaction or "return on investment." Schools, increasingly desperate for funding, are made to compete for private capital, often in ways that compromise their ability to serve even the nominally progressive aspects of their missions. Surrounding neighborhoods have become little more than sites of extraction, sources of low-wage labor and opportunities for land speculation, otherwise walled off from the very institutions they are made to sustain. More broadly, democratic questions about what kind of society the university is meant to serve or what kind of society we want an education for are rarely if ever addressed. Meanwhile, fascism's dramatic resurgence is renewing questions about whether Black institutions can rely on even minimal support from white society. In many ways, we appear to face some of the very same conditions that inspired the vision of the Black University more than a half century ago.

What would it mean to renew the theory of the Black University? What are the challenges involved in building the Black University from within today's HBCUs? How might we reimagine the financial architecture of the university and its commitment to surrounding communities? How might new thinking about public money and banking-heterodox ideas about credit creation, public investment, jobs programs and the mobilization of community resources inform such a reimagining? How might HBCUs experiment with the creation of complementary currencies? And does this new thinking go far enough, or does it reflect simply a recommitment to the structures of domination and exploitation imperial state projects, the logic of capital, the instruments of antiblack violence that the Black University concept was always meant to expose and challenge?

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Rohan Grey, Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University, joins Money on the Left to discuss his urgent new paper, "Digitizing the Fisc." During our conversation, we recount the events surrounding Elon Musk & the DOGE boys’ unconstitutional takeover of the Treasury's Bureau of Fiscal Service, while explicating the right-wing theory of the "unitary executive" that underwrites such actions. Next, we analyze the structural deficiencies and choke points in the current Congressional appropriation process that have made DOGE's illegal interventions possible. Turns out, the US fiscal process involves several readily exploitable weaknesses, making it somewhat akin to the almighty Death Star's unprotected thermal exhaust port in Star Wars (1997). Finally, we consider Grey's proposal for a more streamlined, distributed, and democratic digital architecture for coordinating federal expenditures. Building legal concepts and procedures into the very materiality of digital design, this alternative system not only secures Congress's constitutional spending power against authoritarian interference and impoundment. It also unbundles fiscal policy from public debt management, making clear to the world that legislative action does not redistribute extant funds, but rather creates money afresh every time Congress votes to spend. 

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Money on the Left speaks with Raúl Carrillo, assistant professor of Law at Boston College, about gaming money. 

The $250 billion video game industry (the largest entertainment industry in the world) has rapidly developed an unregulated banking system. As online gaming becomes increasingly social and immersive, players build economies within games. Gamers can purchase goods and services within these environments using debit and credit cards. Companies also issue gift cards and co-branded credit cards. They store balances on digital platforms outside of the regulated banking system. Most critically, gaming companies offer players the chance to earn points inside games and convert them to other financial instruments, including bank deposits. However, these “gaming money” systems also feature exchange rate manipulation, money laundering, and financial risk for unwitting gamers and other stakeholders. 

In this episode, we explore how companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Roblox are not only harming gamers but issuing “shadow money,” evading banking regulations meant to prevent structural problems. Much like 19th-century canal, railroad, and mining companies, as well as 21st - century financial technology and cryptocurrency companies, gaming giants are engaging in private monetary governance. Although agencies hesitate to regulate “virtual” worlds of entertainment, media, and the arts, banking law does not ask if money is “real” but whether its creation infringes on the privileges of banks and the U.S. government. Carrillo proposes regulators supervise large corporations that support the conversion of gaming money to bank deposits at scale. Gaming money suggests banking law is incomplete without concern for corporate monies—even those conjured across imaginary boundaries between worlds. Moreover, the long-run stakes are high. Gaming introduces most U.S. children to money. Regulation must confront a future that is already here.

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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 tyrants owed? What makes debt illegitimate? And when is bankruptcy moral? Odious Debt shows how Latin American nations have wrestled with the morality of indebtedness and insolvency since their foundation, and outlines how Latin America’s forgotten history of contestation can shed new light on seemingly intractable contemporary dilemmas.

With a focus on the early modern Spanish Empire and modern Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, Odious Debt explores how discussions about the morality of debt and default played a structuring role in the construction and codification of national constitutions, identities, and international legal norms in Latin America. Ultimately, Corredera reveals how Latin American jurists developed a powerful global critique of economics and international law which, in rejecting the political violence promulgated in the name of unjust debt, continues to generate pressing questions about debt, bankruptcy, reparations, and the pursuit of a moral world economy.

Corredera is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law and Lecturer in History at Spain’s National Distance Education University.

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Money on the Left speaks with Dr. Jens Martignoni, lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and chief editor of the International Journal of Community Currency Research (IJCCR). Community or complementary currencies are phenomena of great interest to monetary scholars and activists. We’ve spoken often about them on this show–whether about the Benjamins classroom currency at SUNY Cortland, the DVDs currency at Denison, or our recurring work on the Uni Currency Project. During our conversation with Martignoni, the appeal of such projects becomes clear. Community currencies not only lay bare the false claims of prevailing monetary orthodoxy–and in so doing make powerful teaching tools, as Jakob Feinig has argued. They also permit and even compel us to imagine a world that is otherwise–a world figured first in terms of abundance rather than primarily or exclusively in terms of scarcity. In our dialog, we focus on Martignoni’s provocative essay for the IJCCR, titled “Money is Not a Medium of Exchange.” In doing so, we reflect upon the limits of “exchange” as a framework for understanding money, while simultaneously experimenting with more generative linguistic and conceptual tools to help us re-imagine monetary provisioning.   

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Billy Saas and guest-host Ben Wilson speak with Martha McCluskey about the ins and outs of the Law & Political Economy movement. McCluskey is Professor Emerita at the University at Buffalo School of Law and a progressive institution-builder. She has made foundational contributions to feminist research and activism in and beyond the academy, focusing on interrelations between economic and legal institutions. A long-time organizer of the Class Crits project and president of the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law (APPEAL), McCluskey has recently spearheaded the new Law & Political Economy Collective, which insists that “a better understanding of law’s role in upholding the present distribution of wealth and state power is crucial to a more just, sustainable future.” McCluskey’s expertise with construction and maintenance of durable institutions for the development and circulation of socially- and politically-attuned critical legal scholarship gives good reasons for hope in this time of great political unease. 

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Rob and Scott return to their dialog about modernism, inflation, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s celebrated 1925 novel The Great Gatsby (click here for Part 1). During their conversation, our co-hosts forge connections between the novel’s many complications of time and space and the attitudes to money and identity explored in the first part of this mini-series. For instance, they consider The Great Gatsby’s unusual manner of imagining the spatial dis/connectedness of West Egg, the ‘Valley of Ashes’ and New York City; the strange ways in which characters seem to be passively ‘borne’ between these locations; the ambiguous role that bonds of various kinds play in the text; and Nick Carraway’s blurry impressionist method of narrating (or accounting for) the events of the story. Along the way, Rob and Scott revisit one of the text’s most enduring symbols, the elusive figure of the green light, which burns bright from the end of Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s dock on Long Island Sound. Associated both with U.S. money and the marvel of electricity, the novel’s green light points to the powers of public provisioning that conduct modern life and serves as a mysterious beacon of hope in which, we’re told, Gatsby continues to believe until the end. For Rob and Scott, this green light reveals the novel’s “political unconscious,” here understood as the process by which a repressed history of public provisioning nevertheless comes to contour the modern novel’s many formal and affective constructions. Finally, our co-hosts point to the U.S. government’s mass printing of copies of The Great Gatsby for its G.I.s during WW2, an act of public provisioning that proved foundational for the subsequent widespread popularity of Fitzgerald’s book and its canonization of as a classic of American literary modernism. Novel printer go brrr…!

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