‘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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The Descent of Money

Money on the Left is a monthly, interdisciplinary podcast that reclaims money’s public powers for intersectional politics. Staging critical conversations with leading historians, theorists, organizers, and activists, the show draws upon Modern Monetary Theory and constitutional approaches to money to advance new forms of left critique and practice. It is hosted by William Saas and Scott Ferguson and presented in partnership with Monthly Review magazine.  Check out our website: https://moneyontheleft.org Follow us on Twitter & Facebook at @moneyontheleft

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Money on the Left is joined by Grant Kester, professor of Art History at University of California, San Diego. We speak with Kester about his multi-decade career, researching and teaching the history of socially engaged art.  Kester’s scholarship underscores the limits and contradictions of the dominant modern Western tradition of aesthetics. Such aesthetics value “autonomy,” insisting that the artist, the artistic medium, or art as an institution ought to stand alone and outside of society and its corrupting influences. Paradoxically, autonomy in this tradition is supposed to secure art’s political dimension by blunting and often deferring any claims to immediate social efficacy. Kester, by contrast, affirms what is variously called dialogical aesthetics or socially engaged art, a collaborative sensuous practice in public space, which aims to transform thought and action by forging complex relationships among artists and publics. 

 Here, we focus on Kester’s two recent books published by Duke University Press. In The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (August 2023), Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Beyond the Sovereign Self Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art (December 2023), Kester then shows how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice. Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester demonstrates how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation. 

 Throughout our conversation, we tease out affinities between Kester’s scholarship and heterodox theories of public money and provisioning. Problematizing unquestioned desires to cordon off aesthetics from political economy, we call on artists and activists to contest, reconstruct, and build anew the forms of mediation that heterogeneously shape a shared sensuous life.  

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Aesthetics after Autonomy with Grant Kester

Money on the Left speaks with Pavlina Tcherneva, Professor of Economics at Bard College and leading scholar of–-and advocate for—Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Many of our listeners will be familiar with Dr. Tcherneva's contributions to MMT, especially her book, The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity Press, 2020). She is also Director of Open Society University Network’s Economic Democracy Initiative, instrumental to the publication of a United Nations report on the job guarantee, titled “The Employment Guarantee as a Tool in the Fight Against Poverty.” We speak with Pavlina about her work, and also get her perspective on the causes and conditions of MMT’s movement from the margins of economic discourse toward the mainstream of political economic thought.  Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Economic Democracy with Pavlina Tcherneva

Scott Ferguson and Billy Saas speak with New Yorker writer Nick Romeo about his exciting new book, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy, released in January 2024 with Public Affairs. Romeo’s The Alternative rebukes Margaret Thatcher’s infamous axiom that “there is no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism. In doing so, the book inventories the most promising experiments in radical economic democracy underway across the world today. Such experiments include, but are not limited to: a publicly-owned and -run gig work platform in Long Beach, California; a True Price system in Amsterdam; a public budgeting project in Cascais, Portugal; and a public Job Guarantee in Gramatneusiedl, Austria. (See our previous episode on the Austrian Job Guarantee for a deeper dive into that topic) Taken together, these and other initiatives profiled in the book “share a vision of the economy as a place of moral action and accountability,” as Romeo puts it, while modeling the kind of radical political economic imagination that is so utterly and urgently needed to meet our dire ecological moment. For Romeo, then, it remains insufficient to simply deny Thatcher’s quip that there is no alternative. The crucial task is to actively imagine and create the alternative.

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The Alternative with Nick Romeo

Can novels and, by extension, other works of art help us to think about money and trust in new ways? Could embracing alternative perspectives on trust and money help us to avoid climate catastrophe? Rob Hawkes shares a new version of a talk previously presented at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art as part of the One Fifteen at MIMA series of public talks. Highlighting the financial barriers often assumed to stand in the way of local, national, and global efforts to advance ecological and social justice, Rob situates the trust inherent in the act of money creation as much closer than we usually think to the trust fostered and demanded by experimental fiction. If “storytelling” is another word for “accounting,” then maybe we can learn to tell the story of money in new ways, and perhaps this can help us to save the planet.

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

How can novels help us think about money ... and maybe even save the planet? (Guest Lecture)

Money on the Left is proud to present recovered and remastered audio from our interview with Raúl Carrillo, published previously solely as a written transcript. The recording also includes a new  audio introduction in which Billy Saas reflects on the significance of our dialog with Carrillo for contemporary politics.  

In our discussion, we explore the promise of the public money framework for advancing antiracist, anti-imperialist, and democratic politics across the world. We discuss how the public money or MMT perspective shapes his work as an attorney fighting against predatory finance and for an international, rights-based approach to full employment. A significant portion of the conversation is also devoted to Raúl’s ongoing critique of the “taxpayer money” trope in U.S. political culture. In both his recent article for the UCLA Criminal Law Review and a 2017 piece (coauthored with Jesse Myerson) for Splinter, Raúl persuasively shows that the myth of “taxpayer money” is not only incorrect in operational terms, but also a significant threat to marginalized communities and a major rhetorical obstacle for progressive politics.  Raúl Carrillo is an attorney, chair of the board of the Modern Money Network, Research Fellow with the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity, and member of the advisory board at Our Money. 

You can read his article for the UCLA Criminal Law Review here: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7rp8g89c. 

See his article on “The Dangerous Myth of Taxpayer Money” here: https://splinternews.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-taxpayer-money-1819658902.  Theme music by Hillbilly Motobike.


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The Descent of Money

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