Launching a new Superstructure series, Rob Hawkes joins Scott Ferguson to explore the ins and outs of “postmodernism.” Postmodernism is a heterogenous and disputed regime of aesthetics and theory that arose in the second half of the 20th century. Dated to midcentury, but promulgated as a discourse from the 1970’s to 1990’s,  postmodernism is known primarily for its preoccupations with multiplicity, difference, surface, language, image, constructedness, reflexivity, and the integration of art and everyday life. Decades past its heyday, postmodernism today frequently serves as a pejorative for reactionary critics of social and ecological justice and aesthetic diversity. In their conversation, Rob and Scott critique noxious voices both outside and inside of today’s Modern Monetary Theory movement, who similarly wield postmodernism as epithet to discredit and police money’s contestable public capacities to provide for all. Our co-hosts dismantle such false zero-sum invectives by weighing the historical nuances and semantic surfeits of terms including modernity, modernism, postmodernity and postmodernism. As a result, this episode prepares the groundwork for a forthcoming engagement with B.S. Johnson’s postmodern novella, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), which self-consciously weaves money and accounting into the very fabric of literary form. 

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

This month, Money on the Left is joined by Thomas Schwab who, as mayor of Gramatneusiedl in Lower Austria, oversees a promising Job Guarantee pilot program. Seeking to eliminate long-term unemployment, the program guarantees public jobs to anyone in the community who seeks them. In our conversation, we explore the philosophy and structure of Gramatneusiedl’s municipal employment service. We also discuss a key inspiration for the program: a Depression-era study of the effects of unemployment conducted in the same region as Gramatneusiedl. Titled “Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal” (or, “The Unemployed of Marienthal”), the report detailed the deleterious effects of systemic unemployment in wake of a severe economic downturn and soon became an early classic of European sociology. Decades later, Schwab wrote a master’s thesis about the report, aiming to revive its findings in defense of public employment today. The Gramatneusiedl program is presently being studied by Jörg Flecker, a sociologist at the University of Vienna, as well as Lukas Lehner and Maximilian Kasy, economists at Oxford. The pilot is set to expire in 2024. Thereafter, however, Schwab and his allies anticipate leveraging current academic studies to renew and potentially scale up Gramatneusiedl’s public employment program.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Money on the Left is joined by Andrés Arauz, recent candidate for the Ecuadorian presidency, heterodox economist, and outspoken advocate for the creation of the “Sur.” The Sur is a complementary currency for use in intra-Latin American trade and cooperation. Dismissed by New York Times blogger, Paul Krugman, as a “terrible idea,” Brazilian President Lula De Silva’s proposal for development of the Sur as a tool for encouraging economic and political integration between Latin American countries has stoked the imaginations of progressive leftists within and beyond the region. As he makes clear in our conversation, Arauz is among those who see in the Sur urgent opportunities to build plurinational solidarities among countries like Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, and Peru, as well as to diminish the hegemony of the U.S. dollar and financial institutions over Latin American economies and politics. Arauz offers an astute and defamiliarizing perspective on the Sur for anyone who may be committed to or uncertain about the political economic potentials of a SUR-driven future for the Latin American Left. 

In our dialog, we speak with Arauz about his time serving as director of the Ecuadorian Central Bank. Remaking an orthodox organization with heterodox tools, he not only oversaw the Central Bank’s transition from a neoliberal handmaiden for corporate interests to a robust public institution in Ecuador’s complex “dollarized” economy, but also empowered and secured the country’s network of local credit unions by integrating them into the Central Bank’s federal payment system. Money on the Left is proud to present transcripts of this important conversation in both English and Spanish.

Andrés Arauz on Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR): https://www.cepr.net/staff-member/andres-arauz/

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Co-hosts Naty T Smith (@orangeasm), Will Beaman (@agoingaccount), and Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) discuss the rise to power of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni near the 100th anniversary of Mussolini's March on Rome to frame the international moment and the ascendance of red-brown tendencies, the urgencies of anti- fascism, and the shape of contemporary reaction. Through the example of Meloni’s election, they explore how monetary austerity, anti migrant tactics, fascist nostalgia, and other ideologies of replacement, are at stake in this global conjuncture.

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

Will Beaman and Scott Ferguson tease out the multiplicity of voices that shape The Little Mermaid (1989) in order to problematize racist outcries against Disney’s forthcoming 2023 live-action version of the film starring singer Halle Bailey. The co-hosts answer and invert an imperative promulgated by a reactionary meme circulated on social media: “Don’t take away my history." The meme falsely imagines Disney’s 2023 reboot displacing and replacing a past white heterosexual monoculture.

This episode, by contrast, explores the genuinely heterogeneous and contestable legibilities that inform The Little Mermaid’s historical production and reception. Developing Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “dialogism,” Will and Scott trace the film’s significance across several registers: (1) gender representation in relation to Disney animation history and 1980’s Hollywood; (2) Disney’s imperialist expansions as a multinational conglomerate in the context of a zero-sum neoliberalism and expiring Cold War; (3) abstract animation aesthetics in light of an increasingly physics-oriented blockbuster cinema; and (4) queer culture’s fraught popular expressiveness in the midst of an HIV/AIDS crisis dismissed and repressed by U.S. authorities.    

Note to Animation and Broadway Aficionados: In this episode, the co-hosts refer to “Someday My Prince Will Come” in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) as an original example of what has come to be called an “I want” or “I wish” number in musical films and plays. Here we add a small proviso: Snow White’s “I’m Wishing” song precedes “Someday My Prince Will Come” and thus represents the original “I want” or “I wish” number in the film in a very literal sense.  

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

This month Money on the Left is joined by the folks behind the MUSICat project, an online music streaming service for public libraries designed to share heterogenous local music with local community members. We speak with Preston Austin and Kelly Hiser from Rabble, the company behind MUSICat, as well as with Racquel (“Rocky”) Mann, who coordinates the MUSICat service with Edmontonians as Digital Initiatives Librarian for Edmonton Public Library. 

Launched by the Madison Public Library in 2014, MUSICat has since been adopted by public libraries, including in Pittsburgh, Nashville, Fort Worth, New Orleans, Edmonton and elsewhere. Artists who share music via MUSICat are paid for their work with library funding and are granted other substantial forms of support through the library system. 

MUSICat serves as an inspirational model for mobilizing public institutions and forms that can provision communities in diverse and locally sensitive ways. Exploring what we at Money on the Left have called a hermeneutics of provision, we affirm public libraries’ critical function as creative stewards and producers of regional public cultures. 

Special thanks to Edmonton artist Jill van Stanton for the album art used in our episode graphic. Thanks also to the Edmonton musicians, whose work is spread liberally throughout this episode. Featured tunes include: Shout Out Out Out Out, “Never the Same Way Twice”; Souljah Fyah, “8 Days of Summer”; Farhad Khosravi, “Escape”; Denim Daddies, “Roadrunner”; and The Tsunami Brothers, “Stink Bug.”

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Mercedes Ohlen (transcription), & Emily Reynolds of The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (graphic art)

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‘The Descent of Money: Literature, Inheritance, and Trust in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property (1906)’

Rob Hawkes' paper argues that Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property (1906) foreground, interrogate and enact questions of trust, both in their engagements with and departures from literary realism/naturalism and in their preoccupations with the value and power of money. Wharton’s novel is saturated with the language of costs, payments, investments, and debts, while the first of Galsworthy’s Forsyte novels presents ‘Forsyteism’ as an inescapable set of hereditary traits. Both texts, furthermore, implicitly associate money with nature and imagine a ‘sense of property’ as inherited in more ways than one, whilst simultaneously offering glimpses of a different understanding of money altogether: one that reveals surprising connections between literature, money, and trust.

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Money on the Left is joined in conversation with curator Emily Ebba Reynolds & artist Nando Alvarez-Perez, co-founders of the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, or BICA, in Buffalo, New York.

BICA is a new and distinctly heterodox arts organization, offering physical space for artist shows and educational seminars, as well as fiscal space for provisioning micro-grants to local artists. In 2018 Emily & Nando founded BICA, in their words, in order to “reframe contemporary art around issues of regional community, create a plurality of art worlds, and reconceive art as a practical tool which can be used to reshape the world around it.” Along this journey of re-conception, reframing, and reshaping, they’ve confronted and engaged creatively with the “money” question in its numerous and challenging forms. We talk about these as well as get Nando’s and Emily’s take on why a “jobs guarantee” is something artists should fight for.

Learn more about BICA (and discover ways to support the project) at THEBICA.org. 

Special Thanks to Nando for lending his artwork titled, Primary Document 08262022a, for our monthly episode art. Scroll below the transcript for a full view of Nando’s piece. See if you can spot the reference to the Money on the Left crew! 

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Charlotte and Naty continue their discussion of abortion and reproductive justice internationally in the wake of the repeal of Roe v Wade in this much delayed second segment of three. 

Topics include : vegetables souls, the AMA, the progressive era, 70s Australia, the Bruenigs, dirtbag left media, Joe Biden, the democrats, Dorothy Roberts, New Zealand, disobedience, community and care, doulas, travel, Judge Dredd, decriminilization, insect graveyards, eugenics, American exceptionalism, Japan, Margaret Sanger, data surveillance, Guttmacher union, Catholicism, the green tide in Latin America, doctors, Roe v wade, state laws, Margaret Sanger, Clarence Thomas, the supreme court, as well as orgs to donate to.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music: “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.
http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com
Twitter: @actualflirtin

Cohosts Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) and Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) discuss the reflexive and imaginative political economy of Nathan Fielder's HBO series, The Rehearsal. The show points towards an apophatic ethics of social provisioning, presenting an ambiguous portrait of care, production, and human agency. This portrait remains irreducibly and collective, in excess of the powers and intentions that constitute social belonging.