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, neocharta...
Jul 04, 2025•1 hr 45 min
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 Origi...
Jul 01, 2025•1 hr 34 min
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...
Jun 21, 2025•1 hr 49 min
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 Profess...
Jun 11, 2025•2 hr 6 min
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 pr...
Jun 01, 2025•58 min
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 & Benjami...
May 01, 2025•1 hr 26 min
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 appr...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 43 min
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 ca...
Mar 02, 2025•1 hr 24 min
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 intrac...
Feb 01, 2025•1 hr 10 min
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 ...
Jan 01, 2025•1 hr 28 min
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...
Dec 01, 2024•1 hr 5 min
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’ a...
Nov 14, 2024•1 hr 52 min
We speak with Tim Ridlen about his new book, Intelligent Action: A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia (Rutgers University Press, 2024). Ridlen holds a PhD in Art History from the University of California, San Diego and is currently Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Film, Animation, and New Media at the University of Tampa. In Intelligent Action, Ridlen challenges dominant readings of mid-20th Century art preoccupied with critiques of the c...
Nov 01, 2024•1 hr 22 min
This month we are re-publishing our conversation with Steven Attewell along with a new written transcript and episode graphic. Attewell is author of the incredible book, People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America from FDR to Reagan , published in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania Press. The book examines the history of job creation programs in the United States from the Great Depression to the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978. Unfortunately, Attwell passed away last spring. Yet his wo...
Oct 05, 2024•1 hr 11 min
We speak with Josefina Li, Assistant Director of the International Program Center at Bemidji State University and doctoral candidate at University of Missouri, Kansas City. Josefina’s dissertation research brings feminist and ecological economic traditions into conversation with Modern Monetary Theory. We first encountered Li's work at the inaugural “Money on the Left” conference, which was held at University of South Florida in Spring 2018. At that conference, Li delivered a paper that explored...
Sep 01, 2024•1 hr 12 min
Hosts Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) welcome Maggie Hennefeld (@magshenny) to the Superstructure podcast to discuss her essay, “ Make America Laugh Again ,” published in Minneapolis’s Star Tribune . Previously ridiculed, Kamala Harris’s signature laughter has emerged as an electrifying rallying cry for her last-minute candidacy for President of the United States. “Harris’ laughter has become a national symbol of collective healing,” Hennefeld argues, “affirming the...
Aug 13, 2024•1 hr 17 min
Rob Hawkes (@robbhawkes) and Scott Ferguson (@videotroph) kick off a new Superstructure series about money, modernism, and inflation by revisiting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s widely-read novel, The Great Gatsby (1925) . In this first episode of the series, Rob and Scott complicate orthodox notions of inflation that treat economic crises past and present as mechanical results of excess money printing. They do so by reconsidering modernist art and literature’s fraught relations with notions of austerity...
Aug 09, 2024•1 hr 46 min
We speak with Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute, about his forthcoming book, Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2024). Democracy in Power is a highly detailed work of political and institutional history that recounts the struggle over electric power generation in the United States. It is also an agile experiment in heterodox economic and legal theory, which treats both political and electric power as co...
Aug 01, 2024•1 hr 30 min
Money on the Left is joined by Dr. Chris Martin to discuss Modern Monetary Theory’s vital importance for the struggle to provide adequate housing for all. A Senior Research Fellow at the City Futures Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Martin is a long-time tenant’s rights advocate in Australia with scholarly training in law and heterodox political economy. He is closely familiar with the rhetorical machinations–or “contrivances,” as he calls them–that attenuate the effectivene...
Jul 01, 2024•1 hr 35 min
Andrew J. Douglas , political theorist and professor of political science at Morehouse College, joins Money on the Left to discuss his latest article, “ Modern Money and the Black University Concept ,” published April 19, 2024, in Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice. In the article as in the interview, Andrew stages critical encounters between the little-studied but tremendously potent concept of the Black University–an alternative vision for higher education oriented to Pan-African res...
Jun 01, 2024•1 hr 14 min
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 it...
May 03, 2024•1 hr 43 min
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 Empl...
Apr 01, 2024•1 hr 11 min
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 publ...
Mar 01, 2024•1 hr 24 min
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...
Feb 26, 2024•33 min
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 publi...
Feb 02, 2024•1 hr 23 min
Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) is joined by Robyn Ollett (@robynollett) and Rob Hawkes (@robbhawkes) to discuss What We Do in the Shadows . Citing Robyn’s interpretations of vampirism in The New Queer Gothic: Reading Queer Girls and Women in Contemporary Fiction and Film , the cohosts situate What We Do in the Shadows within the vampire's long history as a figure for queerness and alterity. In the second half of their conversation, Will, Robyn and Rob develop figural connections between the show’s...
Jan 26, 2024•1 hr 46 min
Matt Seybold joins Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson to discuss the political economy of literary criticism from past to present, amateur to professional. Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature at Elmira College and Resident Scholar at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. In addition to writing and teaching in the field of literature & economics, Seybold produces and hosts The American Vandal podcast , an ever-growing collection of conversations and presentations about literature, h...
Jan 01, 2024•1 hr 46 min
We are joined again by Benjamin Wilson to discuss what it is like to teach Economics from a heterodox Modern Monetary Theory perspective in 2023. Wilson is associate professor and recently-minted chair of the department of Economics at SUNY, Cortland. In previous episodes, we have chatted with Wilson about his research, the Uni Currency project, and his innovative work experimenting with classroom currencies. Developing these topics further, our conversation this time explores the potentials and...
Dec 01, 2023•1 hr 29 min
This month, we speak with Larry Johnson, associate professor in the Social Foundations of Education Program at the University of South Florida, Saint Petersburg. In his pedagogy, Johnson focuses on the complex relationship between education, culture, and society with the goal of exploring policies and practices from historical and contemporary perspectives that address structural inequality, and transforming educational institutions into sites for social justice. Johnson is notably a long-time p...
Nov 01, 2023•1 hr 28 min
Sandeep Vaheesan ( @sandeepvaheesan ) joins Scott Ferguson on the Superstructure podcast to discuss the still-undecided political significance of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Their conversation focuses on Vaheesan’s article, “ The IRA is Still Being Formed: An Episode in America’s Past Contains Important Lessons for How We Move Forward in Greening the Economy ,” published recently in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. While present left debate about the IRA tends to split over whether the legi...
Oct 25, 2023•1 hr 15 min
