Superstructure

This week Will Beaman and Maxximilian Seijo are joined by their first guest, Natalie Smith, from Santiago, Chile. Together, they consider deep analogies between the 2019 Chilean uprising against Santiago’s transit infrastructure and the current wave of US protests against the infrastructure of violent policing. Drawing inspiration from Black abolitionism’s calls to reconstruct all forms of social infrastructure, Naty, Will and Maxx reflect on the necessity of an abolition framework for a modern money imaginary.

You can follow Naty on Twitter at @orangeasm, Will at @agoingaccount and Maxx at @MaxSeijo.

Music:

“Yum”, from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting.

https://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com

Twitter: @actualflirting

Hosts Will Beaman and Maxximilian Seijo briefly address responses to “The Bellows (Part 1)”, before articulating a positive vision of a Left political praxis informed by the political economy framework of the late heterodox economist Frederic Lee and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

Following a discussion of Lee’s “heterodox social surplus” approach and how it relates to discourses in critical theory, Will and Maxx connect their framework to the recent “Uni” proposal from the Modern Money Network for unions and community organizers to demand direct credit creation by universities to fully provision themselves as critical public infrastructure.

Evocative of burgeoning calls for left-right populism in the wake of Bernie’s loss, hosts Will Beaman and Maxximilian Seijo name and critique the political vision of The Bellows, a new publication that has enjoyed recent support from prominent elements within the left wing media ecosystem. Leveraging MMT’s rejection of monetary scarcity, Will and Maxx link inclusive struggles over material production to the irrepressible realm of the symbolic in order to articulate a capacious intersectional politics.

Reviewing Michael Moore & Jeff Gibbs’ recent film Planet of the Humans, hosts Will Beaman & Maxximilian Seijo reject and historicize the film’s advocacy for population control. By connecting reductive affirmations of scarcity in both Marxist ecological thinking and the film, with reference to Malthusianism, degrowth movements, Patricia MacCormack’s Ahuman Manifesto, and the late great heterodox microeconomist Fred Lee, they ultimately affirm a non-zero-sum environmental justice framework of social reproduction that centers agency at all levels of human-environmental relation.

Linking the discussion to debates around social democracy and public money creation, hosts Will Beaman & Maxximilian Seijo reflect on the limits of a left media ecosystem that relies upon the disastrous myth of private property.

Embarking on a deep dive into intersections between the work of philosopher Giorgio Agamben and reductive Marxist discourses around capitalism and nature, hosts Will Beaman and Maxximilian Seijo trace a historical, political and economic lineage for the widely used COVID19 meme: 'Capitalism is the virus'.

Framed by a cold open from Chapo Trap House's recent Bernie retrospective, hosts Will Beaman and Maxximilian Seijo inaugurate the Superstructure podcast with a discussion of the failures of a reified left wing imagination. To chart a path forward for an MMT-informed leftist praxis, they critique reductive castigations of spectacle, damaging affirmations of scarcity and zero-sum politics as well as a burgeoning 'anti-woke' left-right coalition.