Money on the Left

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...

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...

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 Prote...

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...

Josh Shepperd joins Money on the Left to discuss the research and activism that hastened the rise of public media in the United States. Assistant Professor of media studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Shepperd shows how public-interest broadcasting platforms like NPR and PBS exist in the U.S. today in large part as a consequence of hard-fought battles by committed scholars and advocates...

Maxximilian Seijo and Scott Ferguson join Naty Smith to flesh out a controversial proposition: capitalism does not exist. First broached by Scott in a short piece for Arcade and in the conclusion to his 2018 book , the claim is meant to de-naturalize the underlying logics and casual structures that mediate modern money economies and to resist defeatist leftist analyses that concede the horizon of...

Co-hosts Charlotte Tavan and Natalie Smith discuss: Melinda Cooper, the Kardashians Che Guevara at central banks technical mastery and politics Alan Partridge and his secretary the labor politics of flower shops budgets as spells Robin DG Kelley and the surreal Link to our Patreon: www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Andrew Elrod joins Money on the Left to discuss the political economy of inflation and price controls, past and present. Elrod holds a Ph. D. in History from the University of California, Santa Barbara and is presently Research Specialist at United Teachers Los Angeles, a 36,000-member labor union. In our conversation, Elrod overturns one of the most common understandings of a central plot point i...

Cohosts Will Beaman, Natalie Smith and Maxximilian Seijo are joined by Mitch Green (@drmitchpdx) to discuss the problems with “inflation” as a catch-all term for price changes. A heterodox economist by training who studied with the late Fred Lee, Mitch takes a disaggregated view of prices that opens up price-setting as a publicly allocated administrative power with no necessary relationship to pro...

In this third installment of our Introduction to Theory series, Maxximilian Seijo explores the economic theory of Karl Marx. Specifically, Maxx investigates Marx's 1865 speech and posthumously published book Value, Price and Profit . This episode, drawn from Maxx's pedagogy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, interrogates the relationship between Marx's labour theory of...

Co-hosts Charlotte Tavan and Natalie Smith marinate in the complexity of the concept of femme: inheritance politics,  fascist food,  slaveholders, bell hooks, MMT & the household, oikos, labor discipline, gender play, analogical fun Real Housewives, dinner party politics women in Stem, radical craft, reply guys

In this second installment of our Introduction to Theory series, Scott Ferguson presents an introduction to psychoanalytic theory by exploring key theoretical writings by Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams (1899); Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905);& Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Drawn from a semester-long university course titled “Theory for Film & Media Studi...

Money on the Left discusses "vulnerability theory" with Martha Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University. Going beyond the politics of non-discrimination and formal equality that animate liberal politics and policies, Fineman underscores the human being’s embodied vulnerability throughout the life cycle in order to politicize, rather than pathologize prevailing str...

Cohosts Natalie Smith and Will Beaman venture into Tucker Carlson's reactionary mediascape, connecting the neo-fascist rhetoric of his nightly Fox News show with the past iterations of American conservatism that preceded it. Natalie and Will trace the various rhetorical logics of the far right and offer a critique of left wing attacks on Tucker's populist bona fides that deny the possibi...

Will Beaman and Thomas Chaplin join Scott Ferguson on the Modern Movie Theory podcast series to discuss Bo Burnham’s Inside (2021). A musical comedy special written, directed and performed by Burnham for Netflix, Inside reckons with contemporary sociopolitical traumas and transformations through hysterical and frequently painful engagements with digital media culture. In the episode, Will, Thomas,...

Fleshing out the themes of Part 1 , Part 2 of the Medium: Femme pilot develops the metaphor of the constant garden. Pondering migration, care, maintenance, and coordination at a distance, Naty & Charlotte envision a politics of constant gardening that makes space for everyone.  "Our hearts," says Mathew Forstater, "are never unemployed."

Co-hosted by Natalie Smith & Charlotte Tavan, Medium: Femme explores under-appreciated feminine and queer modes of knowing in left culture and political economy, carrying the broader project of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective into quotidian relations, meanings, and practices.

This Money on the Left/Superstructure teaser previews both our tenth and eleventh premium releases from Scott Ferguson's "Neoliberal Blockbuster" course for Patreon subscribers. For access to the full lecture, subscribe to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure .   If you are interested in premium offerings but presently unable to afford a subscription, please s...

Paolo Quattrone (@PaoloQuattrone) joins Money on the Left to discuss the metaphysics of accounting and the significance of accounting’s repressed history for political economy today. Professor of Accounting, Governance & Society at The University of Manchester, Quattrone insists that, while often seen as a positivist and merely technical skill for recording extant data, accounting in truth rep...

In this podcast, Scott Ferguson presents an introduction to key theoretical writings by Karl Marx: Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 ; Manifesto of the Communist Party ; and Capital, Volume 1 . Drawn from a semester-long university course titled “Theory for Film & Media Studies,” the recorded lecture takes up three distinct texts in order explore continuities and divergences in...

Mat Forstater joins Money on the Left to discuss the origins of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the vicissitudes of heterodox economics, and the challenges of building alternative institutions in and beyond the academy. As one of the principal architects of MMT, as well as teacher and advisor to many of the more recognized MMT scholars and advocates today, Forstater is perhaps the best equipped hete...

A guided meditation you can do with your Tungsten Cube.

In this episode, co-hosts Natalie Smith and Maxximilian Seijo argue that the pandemic not only killed neoliberalism as a tacit ideological formation; it also revealed how neoliberal truisms have never captured the actual causal mechanisms and potentials that defined the past 50 years. Fleshing out these claims, Naty and Maxx journey through the work of rockstar economic historian Adam Tooze, focus...

In this bonus episode, Rohan Grey speaks with Philip Diehl about #MintTheCoin in the wake of this season’s debt limit showdown. Director of the United States Mint under President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000, Diehl is best known today as the person most responsible for 31 U.S. Code 5112(k). The law permits the Treasury Secretary to “mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coins...

We are thrilled to present the very first Superstructure episode rereleased with a brand new transcript, brought to you by the generous effort of friend-of-the-show, Mike Lewis.  Framed by a cold open from Chapo Trap House’s recent Bernie retrospective, hosts Will Beaman and Maxximilian Seijo inaugurate the Superstructure podcast with a discussion of the failures of a reified left wing imagination...