Brett Scott joins Money on the Left to discuss his recently published book Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for our Wallets (Harper-Collins 2022). A committed advocate for financial heterodoxy, Scott grounds his perspicuous critique of “cloudmoney”--the conjoined efforts and outcomes of Big Finance and Big Tech’s drive to go “cashless”-- in his anthropological training and work as financial derivatives trader in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. Through our conversation we expl...
Aug 01, 2022•1 hr 22 min
In this special episode, Billy Saas, Maxximilian Seijo and Scott Ferguson announce the launch of the collective's new scholarly journal: Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice. Click here for the journal's inaugural publication, “Food, Money, and Democracy: Cultivating Collective Provisioning for Resilient and Equitable Communities of Work,” co-authored by Benjamin C. Wilson, Taylor Reid, and Max Sussman. As Billy, Maxx and Scott explain in their conversation, Money on the Left: History, T...
Jul 31, 2022•15 min
In the first of a three part series following the overturning of Roe v Wade, cohosts Naty (@orangeasm) and Charlotte (@moltopopulare) discuss the ongoing fight for abortion access and rights taking place in both the US and the rest of the world. Using the framework of reproductive justice, they contextualize abortion rights within a broader struggle for reproductive autonomy, touching on histories of reproductive control ranging from abortion restrictions to forced sterilisation, colonialism and...
Jul 28, 2022•1 hr 1 min
In this special episode of Money on the Left, the MotL Collective shares an audio recording from a conference panel titled, “Monetary Modernism.” Featuring papers by Scott Ferguson (University of South Florida), Rob Hawkes (Teesside University), and Maxximilian Seijo (University of California, Santa Barbara), the panel was presented at the Hopeful Modernisms conference organized by the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) at University of Bristol, June 22 - 25, 2022. The conference s...
Jul 20, 2022•1 hr 8 min
Analyzing recent events at The Washington Post, Will Beaman (@agoingaccount), Natalie Tabb (@orangeasm), and Maxximilian Seijo (@maxseijo) develop a theory of media accountability in which heterogeneous institutions and social infrastructures are variously implicated as political participants. 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 Twi...
Jul 18, 2022•1 hr 24 min
Ricardo Valencia joins co-hosts Andrés Bernal and Scott Ferguson to discuss recent protests against Bitcoin in El Salvador. Adopted as legal tender by the authoritarian President Nayib Bukele in September 2021, Bitcoin has become an emblem in El Salvador for U.S. corporate imperialism, public mismanagement, and anti-democratic rule. Whereas mainstream accounts of cryptocurrency tend to flatten stories in Latin America to matters of success and failure, Ricardo draws upon rich critical approaches...
Jul 16, 2022•1 hr 12 min
Historian and philologist Brendan Cook joins Scott Ferguson for the final installment of their 3-part mini-series devoted to Plato’s Republic . (See Part 1 and Part 2 , if you are new to the series.) In Part 3, Brendan and Scott take up the vexed and largely maligned role of money in Republic . Weighing the fact that there is no linguistic equivalent for the modern English term “money” in Attic Greek, Brendan and Scott nevertheless align the text’s negative treatment of money-related activities ...
Jul 08, 2022•1 hr 35 min
Scott Ferguson joins Varn Vlog to discuss his approach to critical theory, aesthetics and politics. Special thanks to C. Derick Varn for permitting Money on the Left to re-publish the interview here. You can find more Varn Vlog interviews here: https://www.youtube.com/c/CDerickVarnVlog You can support Varn Vlog by becoming a patron: https://www.patreon.com/varnvlog You can support the Money on the Left Editorial Collective by becoming a patron: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure...
Jul 04, 2022•1 hr 50 min
Benjamin C. Wilson, Taylor Reid, and Max Sussman join the podcast to discuss their forthcoming co-written essay, “Food, Money, and Democracy: Cultivating Collective Provisioning for Resilient and Equitable Communities of Work.” Inaugurating our new journal, Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice , the article politicizes what Sanjukta Paul and Nathan Tankus term “coordination rights” across monetary and production sectors and focuses on the coordination of food systems, in particular. Coor...
Jul 01, 2022•1 hr 38 min
In episode 5 of Projections, Will reflects on how recent editorial decisions at The Washington Post and New York Magazine have opened both institutions to public pressure and contestation during a period of right wing media campaigns against feminism and so-called "wokeness." Visit our Patreon page here: https://patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure… Music: “Lilac” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting. http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com Twitter: @actualflirti...
Jun 13, 2022•20 min
Historian and philologist Brendan Cook joins Scott Ferguson for the second installment of their 3-part mini-series devoted to Plato’s Republic . (See Part 1 , if you are new to the series.) In Part 2, Brendan and Scott turn their attention to the education of the guardian class that occupies Republic’s middle books in an effort to examine how the text’s zero-sum or “univocal” metaphysics of mediation variously undermine its commitments to abundant provisioning. Along the way, our co-hosts invest...
Jun 11, 2022•1 hr 20 min
Mike Siegel and Mike Lewis join Money on the Left to discuss municipal currency politics. The conversation focuses, in particular, on our guests’ recent success in Austin, Texas, where they helped critically rewrite anti-public and anti-environmental crypto legislation to open fresh possibilities for public banking and payments that support local communities and ecologies. A former public school teacher, Mike Siegel is a civil rights attorney, a co-founder of the progressive non-profit Ground Ga...
Jun 01, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Catch up on the May 2022 episodes of Projections , a new series from the Money on the Left Editorial Collective hosted by Will Beaman ( @agoingaccount ). Projections offers short readings of current events that destabilize and contest mainstream conservative narratives on behalf of an inclusive progressive politics. Tracklist: 1. Up for Grabs 2. The Calls Are From Inside the House 3. Grab-bags & Constellations 4. Cops Don’t Care Visit our Patreon page here: https://patreon.com/MoLsuperstruct...
Jun 01, 2022•53 min
Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) draws out the ideological stakes of recent comparisons between teachers and police in the wake of the recent school shooting in Uvalde, TX.
May 29, 2022•13 min
Historian and philologist Brendan Cook joins Scott Ferguson for this special 3-part Superstructure in which they examine a keystone of the Western philosophical tradition: Plato’s Republic . In Part 1 of their discussion, Brendan and Scott set up a critical consideration of the influential text’s fraught metaphysical commitments and political implications by situating The Republic within Fourth-Century (BCE) Athenian Democracy and teasing out its complex dialogical approach to the question of ju...
May 26, 2022•1 hr 42 min
This week, Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) offers critical reflection on recent statements by Jacobin Magazine's Matt Karp, in which he dismissed recent Democratic Party primary victories against establishment candidates as moving backwards to a "pre-Bernie era" of "vague constellations of grab-bag progressives."
May 22, 2022•16 min
Reflecting on recent protests outside of Brett Kavanaugh's home as well as a recent news story where police invaded the home of a 16 year old trans twitch streamer, Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) notes ways in which conservative narratives around household and parental identity are unstable and contested.
May 15, 2022•17 min
In this special episode of Superstructure, Cohost Natalie Tabb Smith ( @orangeasm ) is joined by Erica Robles-Anderson ( @fstflofscholars ) and Scott Ferguson ( @videotroph ) to discuss common interests between the Money on the Left Editorial Collective and the Oikos working group on kinship/economy. Naty, Erica and Scott reflect on households, financial forms, and reproductive politics in our contemporary political economy through the prism of Melinda Cooper’s 2017 text, Family Values: Between ...
May 13, 2022•1 hr 19 min
Continuing their consideration of pleasure for a world of leftist struggle, co-hosts Charlotte Tavan ( @moltopopulare ) and Natalie Tabb Smith ( @orangeasm ) turn to a recently published Superstructure article co-authored by Erica Robles-Anderson and Scott Ferguson. Titled "The Visual Cliff: Eleanor Gibson and the Origins of Affordance," the essay critically locates the hidden history of contemporary user-experience design in a well-known psychological experiment. Conducted by Dr. Eleanor Gibson...
May 11, 2022•1 hr 32 min
In this first episode of Projections, Will Beaman (@agoingaccount) reflects on some recent comments from US Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va) suggesting Democrats should prioritize inflation over Roe v. Wade in their campaign messaging in the midterms. Music: “Lilac” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting. http://flirtingfullstop.bandcamp.com Twitter: @actualflirting
May 08, 2022•13 min
Co-hosts Charlotte Tavan (@moltopopulare) and Natalie Tabb Smith (@orangeasm) discuss conceptualizations of pleasure on the left, looking at a recent article arguing against the radicalism of polyamory in Novara for part 1 of this installment of Medium Femme.
May 07, 2022•1 hr 4 min
Money on the Left speaks with Dr. Sonia Ivancic about the importance of regionally sensitive and affirmative storytelling in provisioning processes. Assistant Professor in organizational communication at University of South Florida, Dr. Ivancic is a community-engaged researcher, whose work on “place-based narrative labor” offers essential new tools for displacing prevailing scarcity logics and rhetorics of austerity with more capacious ways of thinking, arguing, and narrating. Through embedded f...
May 01, 2022•1 hr 16 min
Cohosts Will Beaman ( @agoingaccount ), Natalie Tabb Smith ( @orangeasm ) and Maxximilian Seijo ( @maxseijo ) are back to reflect on some of the many things that have happened since their last episode. Mentioning Elon Musk’s tentative Twitter purchase, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s feud with Disney, and escalating political attacks against LGBT educators and children, the cohosts reflect on how the US Left should account for its capacity in this new moment. Critiq...
Apr 28, 2022•1 hr 15 min
In this installment of the Modern Movie Theory series, Scott Ferguson explores how a complex aesthetics of omniscience raises important questions about dependence, care, and responsibility in the Netflix show Old Enough! . Recently repackaged by Netflix for streaming audiences across 190 countries, Old Enough! is, in fact, a long-running Japanese reality show titled, “My First Errand,” which began airing on television in Japan during the 1990’s. Each 10 – 15 -minute episode of the series follows...
Apr 27, 2022•1 hr 26 min
In this episode, Andrés Bernal and Natalie T. Smith critique the recent mainstream econ Twitter shaming of MMT, while vibing on left heterodox anti-racist & feminist economics. The conversation then turns toward Latin American politics and Andrés' latest paper on inflation for the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. Andrés' paper: http://www.global-isp.org/working-paper-no-132/ Link to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure
Apr 08, 2022•1 hr 47 min
Engelbert Stockhammer joins Money on the Left to discuss the political and economic debates that shaped and ultimately devastated Weimar-era Germany. Professor Stockhammer is professor of political economy in the department of European and International Studies at King’s College London and has published widely on financial instability and Post-Keynesian economics. In this episode, we focus specifically on Stockhammer’s recent working paper, “Hilferding, Woytinsky, and the Fiscal Orthodoxy of Int...
Apr 01, 2022•1 hr 43 min
In this special episode, Rohan Grey (@rohangrey) joins Billy Saas (@billysaas) and Maxximilian Seijo (@MaxSeijo) to discuss the "ECASH" or "Electronic Currency and Secure Hardware" Act. Introduced by Rep. Stephen Lynch (MA-08), Chair of the House Committee on Financial Services' Task Force on Financial Technology, and based on Grey's research on electronic currency, the ECASH Act directs the Secretary of the Treasury to develop and pilot digital dollar technologies that replicate the privacy-res...
Mar 28, 2022•47 min
Hosts Charlotte Tavan ( @moltopopulare ) and Naty T. Smith ( @orangeasm ) talk food with chef Max Sussman ( @maxsussman ) in episode 4 of Medium Femme, from the Money on the Left Editorial Collective ( @moneyontheleft ). The discussion touches on the political openings and challenges in the pandemic food industry, ranging from labor to small business politics to federal aid to restaurants and the public, mutual aid, the GND and more. Hosts and guest explore food as narrative in cookbooks, litera...
Mar 25, 2022•1 hr 12 min
Beatrice Adler-Bolton (@realLandsEnd) of the Death Panel podcast joins cohosts Will Beaman (@agoingaccount), Natalie Smith (@orangeasm) & Maxximilian Seijo (@MaxSeijo) to discuss a recent article about pandemic politics published by Adler-Bolton and her cohost Artie Vierkant in The New Inquiry . Titled "The Beyblade Strategy" or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Focused Protection," the essay uncovers eugenic ideas and assumptions embedded in mainstream liberal responses to COVID-19....
Mar 18, 2022•1 hr 30 min
Modern Movie Theory (MMT) continues with cohosts Will Beaman and Maxximilian Seijo giving a sustained reading of the HBO series Euphoria , situating its congregational themes within wider histories of subversive queer media and scholarship. Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure Music: "Amore Mio Aiutami (Main Theme)" by Piero Piccioni from the EUPHORIA Season 2 Episode 7 Soundtrack “Yum” from “This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me” EP by flirting. http://flir...
Mar 05, 2022•2 hr 22 min
