After Modern Monetary Theory or “MMT,” nothing looks the same: not political economy; not everyday caretaking; not paintings, pop songs, or porn sites.Arcade
Everyone knows that money makes the world go round. Yet MMT shows us that, far from being a private and finite commodity or an unwieldy network of global exchange, money operates as a centralized political architecture that is public, limitless and, above all, answerable to social needs and contestation. Thus critique after MMT assumes a singular aim, which is to make money’s answerability perceptible....
The Unheard-of Center: Critique after Modern Monetary Theory
Scott Ferguson | Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Film & New Media Studies Track in the Department of Humanities & Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida
I'm sure it's very good, but I didn't understand half the words in it.
ReplyDeleteAnother case of crazed money madness induced by a surplus of MMT in the diet.
ReplyDeleteWay too florid, but pretty darn good, I thought. Ultimately, a call to move the left away from the empty polemics of "resistance" and towards workable doctrines for the assumption of power. Better this than the trivialities of Naomi Klein.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me, in that light, that one unavoidable conclusion is the need to protect and strengthen the power of the Crown, which ultimately means moving away from Presidential Republicanism, with its facade of the separation of the powers. Parliamentary democracy with responsible government seems like the way to go, preferably with some form of mixed-member proportional representation.
Obviously there is not enough on the JG's benefits in terms of macroeconomic stabilization, which is rather strange – I mean, for a piece which refers so much to Marxist theory, it is strange not to mention directly the shift from a reserve army of the unemployed to a reserve army of the employed.
Ferguson's call for MMTers to make more and better use of Marxist theory, to broaden out MMTs description of power, is certainly an interesting point. I suppose many MMT proponents have hitherto avoided such questions because they – probably correctly – assume that the most important thing is to return economics to reality, simply by providing an accurate description of monetary and financial operations. Of course, some of this work has already been done: Fred Lee touched on the importance of Marxist thought in his lecture on his contributions to heterodox economics. Steve Keen considers and makes us of Marxist analysis and economics (I know, MMTers sometimes differ with him on his theories about the rate of growth of public debt, but, since Neil Wilson cleaned up his accounting, he must be considered a fellow traveller). I think that a promising path may be to consider the work of economic geographers such as Nicole Gombay, who, in her book Making a Living: Food, Place, and Economy in an Inuit Community, discusses how First Nations have striven to incorporate the workings of a monetized economy into their own notions of how to operate as a society.
Another, more obvious, path would be, in the context of operational realities pointed to by MMT, for Marxists to evaluate their thought in the light of left libertarianism (starting by talking with Bill Mitchell about his notions of the good society – MMT aside).
As I posted on Andy B's FB status, this author doesn't really understand functional finance, his $25/hour JG is pure fantasy. and the main obstacles we face moving forward are political and cultural.
ReplyDeleteIt's good that more people are kicking the tires on MMT, but we're spinning our wheels without a political strategy.
Good we are discussing this more broadly.
ReplyDeleteMMT-savvy activists need to start proposing policy solutions, both domestic in their respective countries and internationally.
The present order is teetering and tottering. Time to bring in Kelton's seesaw.
We still need an MMT update of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Good Society.
I am not claiming that Galbraith's work, summarized as an ideal in The Good Society, is sufficient in itself. There is a lot of criticism of it that needs to be taken into consideration.
But it presents the major issues, obstacles and challenges. Different parties would approach them in different ways, of course, and creating a practical approach that integrates all the issues is a challenge philosophically, hence influenced by ideology and morality, socially, politically, and economically.
Without a comprehensive approach such as JKG attempts, it will not be possible to fix a system that obsolescent, being based on 18th and 19th century thinking. That's not going to fly in a 21st century world that is quickly becoming globalized.
What's needed is a global approach that takes the many intersecting and often entangled interests into account based on clear vision and correct understanding.
MMT can contribute to the correct understanding.
Tom Hickey: Very much agreed. Any updating of GKG would have to begin with the ecology and society's place in it. Whether or not degrowth models are operationally consistent with MMT (I am thinking of Peter Victor's work here), our picture of the good society has to be consistent with the economy and society being considered sub-systems of the biosphere
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