"Trump will just defy court orders, what's even the point of litigating" This, this a point

James Meadway--a progressive but still neoclassical & deficit-skittish economist--is helping to found a new think tank adjacent to the rising UK Green Party, in part to delegitimize the growing influence of MMT in the party. Here's hoping @zackpolanski.bsky.social holds onto the MMT paradigm.

We have a system in which the public good (morals) can only be measured in prosperity (money). If instead our goals *were* the moral imperitives, we could use money solely as a tool to serve them. Thus budgets would not be investments that demand returns, but capacities which creates said returns.

Thrilled to welcome the endorsement of my friend (and NYC Mayor-elect) @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social as we continue to fight for the city that we love.

The Tim Walz effect

When this "AI" bubble pops, the men pretending they weren't pushing the hype, like "critics" whose position is "AGI is real but LLMs aren't the way," who were in eugenicist and "AI existential risk"🙄 circles, will get specials discussing what they saw coming, when its the women who told you so.

"Baseline or everyday communism comes across as a primordial, pre-coordinative ethic—an encounter between persons removed from institutional or public timetables—rather than as something that is itself shaped by perpetual arrangements of care, coercion, and provision."

"[For Graeber] the main political problem becomes how to negate or escape fictions of guilt, rather than how to rework the media of obligation as ongoing forms of coordination."

Another Democrat win in a special election in Miami, Florida Mayor race. youtu.be/ioeAbbB5we8?...

Waste is an accounting construct, exhibit A

Everyone knows what Harris had to do to prevent this outcome. The people who write and enjoy these articles know it too.

Lines of flight necessarily involve architectures of travel and reception. Refusal is always relative—its ontology is not exteriority, but an unfinished and infinitely layered problem of accountability.

"While the credit theory explains the mechanics of how all banks create money, current law is designed to punish institutions that act on this reality for the public good; therefore, we must redesign the legal framework to make public grant-making possible." moneyontheleft.org/2025/11/11/b...

Post-MAGA is going great

Everyone participates in society, but only some participation is counted as contribution. It’s tempting for post-work traditions to say the problem is formalizing obligation, but really what is absent is a job guarantee framework that takes responsibility for whether all participation is dignified.

Many thanks! There’s more here if these ideas are of interest: linktr.ee/robhawkesMotL My MotL contributions include discussions of Gissing, Wharton, Galsworthy, Larsen, Fitzgerald, & B. S. Johnson. I’m now working on an article on Ripley (and one day I’ll finish the book I’m writing on all this).

I need imaginative incentives in order to be drawn into modern discussions of money. Glimpses of what Rob Hawkes is thinking about in relation to novels - The Good Soldier, Patricia Highsmith and, surprise entry, Jeanette Winterson - are helpful as a way in to this thinking.

Exciting stuff. Makes me think about the shared investments of the organizer and the historian, who both believe in this essay’s argument that the world is ours to build. Even the financial world.

An incredibly long thread that simply asserts again and again that MMT is not respectable and we have to be respectable if voters are to believe we are sound. Otherwise how will they find us respectable

For more postmodern money theory from @moneyontheleft.bsky.social check out our 3-part podcast series from a few years back: moneyontheleft.org/2023/03/16/p...

The problem with center-left and even leftist parties touting that their platforms are “fully costed” in money terms is it frames every public expenditure as a cost to some other public expenditure. 1/

The appearance of economic gravity is achieved through austerity—not the other way around.

Thought-provoking critique

Wonderful that Jacobin is supporting the public banking movement. Know, however, that we can go further. Let's push to renew the national Public Banking Act. Let's also create legal conditions for Public Grant-Making Banks, which avoid trapping necessary social programs in loans. See below👇

Never believe the fuckers who say "why bother, they already won"

"The convergence of the Debt Collective, Jacobin, and Dissent around debt, limits, and back-end jubilees can be read, in this sense, as a symptomatic recoil: an aversion to considering governance as a present-tense reality within a framework that tends to defer real politics to refusal and rupture."

"The Public Grant-Making Bank establishes a powerful counterweight to capital markets, where the price of credit and the required rate of return are set by private risk and profit motives."

This document elaborates an emerging economic paradigm that is already latent in Zohran Mamdani’s plans and practices. The paradigm, which we call Democratic Public Finance (DPF), reframes money as an inexhaustible and malleable public institution.

This article was @videotroph.bsky.social and I completing our Socially Necessary Graeber Time so you don’t have to. #Capitalism #Utopia

As @videotroph.bsky.social and I observed earlier this year: “The fact that the asphyxiation of British higher education does not instantly count as a national scandal underlines the extent to which the austerity mindset continues to constrain our political imagination”. Sending solidarity.

One thing I always want to ask these masculinity entrepreneurs is why men can’t look to women as role models, and can’t see in women models of human virtue and thriving that are worth emulating. After all, women look to men for these all the time.

This is an ethnic cleansing campaign

Wife knows me so well it’s embarrassing

So do the people in Jeffries’ district just never hear about things like this? That must be what’s happening

Thanks to my Morehouse Labor Studies comrades for gifting me a few pages in the November special issue of their journal on cooperatives and worker ownership. Glad to share a little write-up of the "CREDO Project," our fledgling campus and community currency initiative. Cooperative money? What?

"Our goal is to expose ... legal and ideological chokepoints not as unchangeable facts but as a political terrain to be contested, creating a pathway for long-term reform."

“The National AIDS Memorial, through a partnership with the AIDS Quilt Touch team, presents all 50,000 panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in an interactive experience so people around the world can experience the beauty of the Quilt and witness the love and stories stitched into each panel.”

Periodic reminder that @moneyontheleft.bsky.social has been pushing MMT lightyears past this “here’s what a benevolent government can do” shit for many years. It would be nice for the left commentariat to acknowledge that this work exists and engage with it. moneyontheleft.org/2025/09/18/t...

The underlying capitalist ideology that is pressing ATL to say the public grocery store should become profitable and self subsistent in three years needs to be dislodged. moneyontheleft.org/2025/10/10/d...

Strong floor oligarchy

"The Mamdani moment unsettles this habit of thinking. It forces the question of how to govern while struggling. It requires using existing fiscal tools to build new forms of support and capacity, rather than accepting those tools as fixed constraints."

“Why is it easier to picture ceremonially erasing all debts than to envision institutionally reclassifying them?”

“At a conference in Algiers, diplomats and leaders convened to advance an African Union resolution passed at a meeting earlier this year calling for justice and reparations for victims of colonialism.” Colonialism still shapes our present. Colonial states need to make reparations for their harms.

Partial forms of accountability are better than settlement because they are concrete wins of different sizes and they refuse the discursive silencing that would come with declaring the harms “resolved.”

Great thread. Accountability will be an ongoing infrastructure that keeps Trump’s abuses legible and actionable for a reconstructed democratic society. Not a final settlement.

A critique of David Graeber’s theoretical project, written with respect from within the world that it shaped. TL;DR in conflating all formalized obligations with the accusatory logics of debt and Schuld, Graeber prevents any serious thinking about institutional design except for periodic amnesty.