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Will Beaman joins Billy Saas & Scott Ferguson to discuss the enduring influence of David Graeber’s debt-centered work in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s election to Mayor of New York City. Will and Scott unpack their jointly authored essay, “The Utopia of Refusal: David Graeber, Debt & the Left Monetary Imagination,” which is the latest in a series of pieces by the Money on the Left Editorial Collective to agitate for credit-centered experimentation through and beyond the Mamdani mayoralty.

Most crucially, Will and Scott find that the Graeberian framework on debt funnels political attention and action toward periodic acts of cancellation or refusal to the exclusion of other radical democratic alternatives, such as those outlined in “Blue Bonds: A Fiscal Strategy for Overcoming Trump 2.0” and “How the Zetro Card can Save New York City (Really).” While Graeber’s work has been indispensable to left organization and advocacy since before Occupy, what’s needed now is a framework for mobilizing, rather than refusing to engage, the considerable fiscal agency already at hand at all levels of governance.

Transcript:

Graeber’s Utopia of Refusal

Billy Saas

Yes. We’ve gathered on this auspicious occasion to discuss a piece recently published at the end of November on moneyontheleft.org and then shortly after that, Monthly Review Online that does a lot of interesting things. Those things are sort of described in the title, so I’ll just share the title and we’ll get into a discussion of it.

The piece is called “The Utopia of Refusal: David Graeber, Debt and the Left Monetary Imagination.” Let’s go broadest first and then we’ll get into the nitty gritty. Why this piece now?

William Beaman

Yeah, I think in terms of “why now?”, I think that the piece sort of describes a paradox on the left that has been sort of there in the Modern Monetary Theory movement and space for some time. But, especially now, with Trump’s second term, it’s sort of becoming rearticulated in new and, in our opinion, more urgent ways because so much of left politics in this new context is about trying to figure out what you can do when you are not just trying to persuade a social democratic or neoliberal government to be more benevolent.

Instead you’re trying to mount a protracted defense from within and alongside various institutions that are various degrees of captured or threatened by authoritarianism. The paradox that we noticed, and this is something that we at Money on the Left are interested in in general. This moment sort of brings to the fore in a renewed way a lot of Modern Monetary theory and uses David Graeber as a really emblematic fellow traveler, even though he’s, himself, an anarchist politically rather than somebody who’s interested in what you do with state power. But nevertheless, his work often informs a lot of what we do and think about and the questions that we ask in the MMT movement. David Graeber shows that money is not a neutral thing.

It’s not an expression of decentralized barter or economic relationships, that it doesn’t come from taxes or taxpayers, it is a unit of account before it’s anything else. At the same time that that insight opens up Modern Monetary Theory as a discourse and, as I said, David Graeber provides a lot of the deep anthropological work, as well as perhaps Michael Hudson, for a lot of these insights that get formalized in Modern Monetary Theory, we also argued that the way that these insights are articulated quietly sets a cap or a ceiling on how the left imagines monetary politics.

Graeber articulates this framework and as it gets re-articulated by modern monetary theorists quite often, is that money is the sort of a sovereign, arbitrary, emanation of debt that then organizes social life and does so in an unbounded way, but nonetheless is principally about power.

From Graeber’s perspective as an anarchist, money’s fictitiousness most comes through in debtors movements that seek to abolish it. Or, more specifically to have debt jubilees and wipe the slate clean, and sort of remind us that this is all a fiction and we can erase it. We argue in the piece that this has a lot in common with a lot of poststructuralist thinking following influences in Nietzsche onwards to sort of think of debt as a sort of originary act of cruelty that you can then get naively caught up in and moralize, or you can see it for what it is. But from our perspective at Money on the Left – and to tie it back to this moment that we’re in right now – a lot of what we’re trying to do is articulate new opportunities and possibilities for redesigning the way that monetary systems function, and carrying the insights of Modern Monetary Theory. This being that money is an endogenous choreography between entities that issue and entities that receive. The quote that is often said from the economist Hyman Minsky is that “anyone can create money, the challenge is to get it accepted.”

But we take the challenge of getting it accepted as a malleable and contested political problem. We want to make that the center of our politics. We notice that, in this moment, a lot of the work that Modern Monetary Theory had done to break open the taxpayer myth and the barter myth and all of these things that work so hard to suppress as far as possibilities, was actually still being mobilized and enlisted in order to suppress possibilities.

Maybe the most immediate motivation for this piece was a cluster of articles – that I guess we’ll talk about later in the episode – that all in various ways mobilized Modern Monetary Theory in its articulation as something you do when you are the sovereign at the heights of power in order to say that, “well, we are not in power, so therefore, while MMT is descriptively correct for those in power, it’s really important that we basically act as if MMT is not it doesn’t exist.” It was this kind of paradoxical thing where the very same insights that open up a lot of possibilities were being used to police and foreclose them. I think that the mobilization of David Graeber, who’s an anarchist and who’s been centrally involved with Occupy Wall Street at its origins. I think you could make the case that all kinds of movements, including electoral movements, have been influenced by Occupy Wall Street. It has many afterlives in law and political economy spaces and in Modern Monetary Theory spaces and in spaces that are principally concerned with what might be called electoralism or what you do when you’ve taken state power.

I think that Graeber’s involvement in that indirectly illustrates this paradox. You can start from this view of money as a cruel fiction that sort of ensnares people in logics of debt and guilt and sin, and that you can move through empowering insights about what money actually is and what it can do, and then close them back up again because at the end of the day, money is evil. And this is also coming at the same time – maybe Scott can add something about this – but this is coming at the same time that at Money on the Left we’ve been working on a re-articulation of our own paradigm and condensation of our insights, which we call democratic public finance.

We have a document aimed both at the Zohran Mamdani campaign and at the left more broadly with democratic public finance in the title that takes a view that really centers monetary design and contestation over monetary design as something that’s political, rather than viewing design as, “you can either build evil things or you can undo them, and the undoing them is sort of the big act of refusal or agency.”

That’s where this utopia of refusal in our title comes from. But maybe, Scott, if you want to add anything about DPF (democratic public finance) or anything else that I’ve missed. I realize I went on a lot.

Scott Ferguson

I think you did a nice opening survey in response to this question of “why now?” I’ll just paraphrase or I’ll put it the way that I’ve experienced it. I think we’ve had a long standing, genuine ambivalence in relation to Graeber’s work, especially his book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, but also some of his other work.

I’ve been threatening to write something on this for a really long time. I was even in talks with boundary 2 online for a while eight years ago about writing something, but it never happened. So there’s that. Then there’s our contemporary work, which is really trying to push the public endogenous money paradigm into what we’re calling democratic public finance, which doesn’t take doesn’t constrain money’s political constitution and contestability to a federal government that issues its own currency, like kind of MMT 101 likes to talk about.

Then the third part of this is Mamdani’s successful campaign, but also a movement that puts him into power and in the midst of the the second Trump administration and certainly coming up against all kinds of constraints and entering into all kinds of potential battles at the federal level, at the state level, maybe even at the city level.

We found that there was just this emerging genre that was coming out in the summer and into the fall and when he wins of left journalistic discourse the commentariat that suggested that “well, you know, it’s it’s all well and good that Mamdani has won but now reality is setting in and and we have to play by the rules of the neoliberal marketplace.” We were extremely frustrated that those were getting published over and over again at a lot of the same publications that wouldn’t publish our submissions that were offering an alternative. So I think all three pieces of this puzzle have come together in this particular piece. I do want to say, I want to come back to the ambivalence. I think we handle it with a minimal grace and care  in the essay itself. I think I’d like us to try to be fair in this conversation as well. But I think we do genuinely appreciate Graeber. For example, Billy, if I’m remembering correctly, Graeber’s debt book is really what sort of opened you up to this whole world of MMT and heterodox economics.

Billy Saas

Totally. So the ambivalence that we feel and have felt, I think, has been slightly different in character. My introduction to MMT, to Chartalism, to the whole world of monetary theory is through the first several chapters of Debt: The First 5000 Years, which I read around the time of Occupy Wall Street. You know, it’s useful as one particular perspective on how money works and can work and has worked over time repeatedly.

Is the problem that it presents itself as the sort of final word on what money is and how it has operated over time? Is that ultimately the complaint?

Scott Ferguson

I don’t know if that’s ultimately the complaint, but I will say that it’s a great question. It’s interesting. Maybe not “final word,” but I will say from the debt book, from its title and its framing, but also the Dawn of Everything, from its title and its framing. I do think that Graeber – I mean, look, we too are ambitious.

We too want to rewrite the history of the world. Right? I don’t want to be the pot calling the kettle black, but he does promise a kind of total horizon, you know. So that might be part of it. That might be part of it.

But it’s not just the fact that he’s saying this is the big horizon and maybe, implicitly, this is the last word. Although I’ll give him a break, like, maybe in the text he doesn’t actually say “this is the last word,” but I do think it’s possible.

Billy Saas

Let me pause you on that, because this articulates with the other ongoing critique from Money on the Left of sovereignty as this kind of locus of monetary authority. I think that where we can kind of find Graeber saying that this is the last word is when he says, you know, ultimately money gets its receiveability, its value and all these things from the threat of violence, from somebody behind The Wizard of Oz with a gun. That’s where the magic comes from and so it all kind of always devolves into that.

Scott Ferguson

It does, it does. Which is a very modern political philosophy approach. It’s followed by the MMT economists as well. Warren Moser has his famous “just so” story about passing around a bunch of worthless business cards, and they only become valuable when he threatens the group he’s talking to with violence, with guys with giant guns in the back of the room.

Right. So it’s not even like the MMTers are innocent of this, but the difference is that the MMTers at least offer possibilities beyond cancellation, beyond rejection, beyond what we call refusal. This is, in part, trying to get into why we’ve titled this piece “The Utopia of Refusal.” The ultimate political act in the name of democracy, in the name of justice in this Graeberian universe seems to be refusal – and you know, Graeber is not the only one who holds this view – because, tacitly, people have a goodness. They know what they want and they know how to organize themselves spontaneously. So you don’t need to talk about the new plan that’s going to replace the bad system now. You just critique and rail against the bad system now and then just trust that the freedom fighters are going to know what’s right on the other side, which is something we absolutely refuse in our organization.

William Beaman

I would add to that, in the Superstructure podcast, years ago we’ve talked about abolitionism as well. We’ve talked a lot about the tension within the way that the different abolitionists talk about abolition. There’s the famous phrase, to paraphrase Ruth Wilson Gilmore, abolition is about presence. There’s a way of reading abolition as sort of Graeberian refusal, but there’s also a way of reading it as collective redesign, and as an ongoing framework, rather than the fiction of a settlement in the way that we could press for reparations too.

The idea of reparations can include cash settlements, and I think David Graeber and Friedrich Nietzsche, and many others would say that, “Well, the point is that these cash settlements are rituals that allow us to move together as a community with an implicit emphasis on the ritual as a fictitious event that then wipes the slate clean,” which in a way actually resembles the Jubilee, even though it also resembles an economic transaction, which I think is very interesting.

But, bringing this back to Graeber, the idea of what Scott was saying, that people already know how to organize themselves spontaneously, and we just need to abolish the bad stuff and that doesn’t involve taking accountability for all of the implications of abolition. It’s not abolition as an ongoing framework and then I’ll drop abolition because it’s not Graeber’s language, but its abolition as a declaration that this was all fake and let’s move on. In that book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, Graeber specifically appeals to this idea of baseline or everyday communism, which is his term for a kind of background of everyday cooperation that he relates to Marx’s phrase from “each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” as this sort of pre-institutional and pre-formal substrate of social life, which then money, debt and accounting and rules and bureaucracy, come in. Maybe they first come in as an expression of play. That’s something that he develops in some of his later work. But fundamentally, if we forget that they’re all made up and that everyday communism exists in all of us innately before them, they threaten to crowd out everyday communism and create dead zones of the imagination, to paraphrase his term from the utopia of rules.

There’s an implicit opposition that he makes between localized everyday communism, which is suggested to exist prior to institutions and prior to mediation and it’s just sort of an innate goodness. That on the one hand, and then the opposite being ongoing rules or ongoing relations. Of course, it’s not that Graeber is so naive that he’s not interested in large scale coordination and this kind of thing.

He’s very interested in it, but he wants to theorize it from a heroicized notion of refusal and the ability to walk away as the foundation of what an ethical coordinate of regime looks like.

Scott Ferguson

That’s more in the later work and in The Dawn of Everything rather than the debt book. I think that was a self-conscious move on his part. I mean, I think he realized how much of a negative gesture the debt book was. I think he and in his collaborations with others were trying to think at scale. I think that there is a micro localist tendency in his work and I think his foundations tend to be micro oriented, but that’s not to say that he’s not sophisticated enough to not see the necessity of thinking across multiple larger scales as well. So, I think that’s important to say.

William Beaman

I wanted to say, so you have the baseline and everyday communism, that is sort of a theoretical assumption that we want to challenge a little bit. One of the ways that we do that in the essay is by saying that whatever it is that you consider baseline or everyday communism has an institutional scaffold.

That’s not a positive claim about what it is and every time and place,but it is, I think, maybe a philosophical claim that the idea of it being pre-institutional is something that we’re pretty skeptical of. It is important, I think, to think about some examples that we can think of that have been roundly criticized.

In the book, we think of the sort of neighborly ideal, where it’s, maybe, a suburban neighborhood where everyone knows everyone else. Of course, I’m going to leave my doors unlocked. What if someone needs something from me? And so there’s that sort of assumption. But then, of course, you need to theorize how neighborliness is created at scale in that way.

How is the institution of the family and you need some detour through mediation in order to talk about these things. So that’s one background theoretical assumption. Then the other one – and this I think Graeber has in common with Marx, even though he himself, I think, maybe although he critiques Nietzsche, in his book.

But I think on this point we can maybe put them on the same side, which is that once you make things commensurate with each other, you are suggesting a false equivalency. Rather then I think what we would say, which is you might be openly suggesting as an analogy for the purposes of coordination, and that might be something that’s aboveboard and everyone is aware of, rather than sort of a lie that we’re telling about things being commensurate when they’re not necessarily.

Scott Ferguson

Can I add to that?

William Beaman

Yeah, please.

Scott Ferguson

I think, what I would also want to say is that nothing is not related to anything else. So the idea that you have two self-standing persons or two autonomous objects that then have no relationship to one another through language or memory or imagination or emotions or large coordinated systems, the idea that there can ever be one thing and another thing that have to be brought into relation is false.

I think we would also say that the interdependent process of allocating and designing monetary systems, and having that allocated money create production and all of the complicated relationships that come along with this, that what’s happening there is not a flat equivalence. It’s not making an equivalence between anything. It’s in fact a deeply heterogeneous system.

In certain ways, it takes certain bourgeois rhetorics at their word. If the bourgeoisie says, “look, we’re taking independent things and we’re making them equivalent, including your own labor,” we don’t have to buy it, right? We don’t have to say, “yes and that’s how you’re oppressing me.” Instead, we can say, “actually, you’re oppressing me in a different way and in that different way is actually a better way for me to contest you.” But anyway, back to you, Will.

William Beaman

Yeah. No, that’s a really helpful clarification. This idea that this sort of combines what we were saying before that there always already is some kind of an institutional background or context for anything. But rather than that necessarily being something that just works through capture  and through transforming us from free subjects to coordinated subjects. We might instead see ourselves as multiple coordinating subjects. The people who are involved in coordination in all kinds of ways, often through the same acts. There’s this idea that commenceration is a violent equation between things that is fully a fiction.

William Beaman

Whereas I think we want to say, “no, no, it’s an analogy. It’s thematizing analogical involvement in everything that everything has,” and that can be spun in ways that cover up that sort of intrinsic, open endedness of that as saying, “no, no, this is an identity that’s being posited.”

But then that sets the stage to say, “Ah ha, we’ll refuse the identity and then we’ll be free again.” So there’s commenceration as violence, but more specifically as moralizing. This is where I think Graeber might be situated among a lot of poststructuralists. So I brought up Nietzsche, but also you can think of somebody like Foucault. Where you think of valuation and Graeber has a text on value theory, where he says – and I’m, paraphrasing again here – but the subtitle is taken from a Marcel Mauss quote, which is that “every society pays itself in the false coins of its dreams.” On the one hand, there’s a lot that we would affirm there, right? Which is that you have a view of money as radically heterogeneous. One of the things that’s really strong in Graeber and MMT doesn’t thematize enough, because Graeber ties money to morality so much in this kind of Nietzsche in way, there are surpluses of heterogeneity and possibility that let you think about things that we don’t consider as money as money.

Let us think about ethical rhetoric as sort of having monetary dimensions. The problem that we have is that ethics in general for Graeber is a ruse to pay you in the false coin of a dream. That dream is going to necessarily involve some bureaucratic ideas about who you should be versus who you are.

It’s constitutively limiting and constitutively spiritually violent. The third kind of theoretical foundation of the book that we’ve been talking about already is what pairs with everyday communism, which is this idea of freedom and freedom he defines as the ability to walk away.

The ability to refuse. I think this can resonate with poststructuralist philosophy, which is full of tropes and figures of flight and fugitivity and unruly affects that are not captured by a symbolic system and sort of residually escape.

Then, one of the moves that Scott, you make in your book, is to compare that with neoliberal rhetoric about money and finance and its fugitivity. I think this is another way that this can end up being too caught up in the value systems and the false dreams or whatever that it’s trying to critique.

Is there anything you wanted to add?

Scott Ferguson

There’s a term that I’ve used – and it’s probably controversial – as I was wrestling with Graeber, as I was learning from him, but also trying to kind of sniff out where things didn’t seem right.

I’ve long suspected Graeber of being a tacit methodological individualist, which, of course, is a term that heterodox economists like to use to shame and point fingers at neoclassical economists or behavioral economists who just reduce everything to atomized individuals who have preferences and I don’t think that Graeber is a neoclassical methodological individualist by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think he tends to start with the individual.

For as much as he, in his work, will push back against imperialist European Enlightenment philosophy and goes after the deeply problematic state of nature stories that are used by everyone from Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau and beyond to justify a certain vision of the political.

As much as Graeber will disavow that and overtly say this is terrible, right? I think he shares their methodological individualism. I think he shares an ontology of the human, which is that the human is born free as an individual and then is always already social and caught up in a social world, but the individual knows best. Their freedom is number one and, what he calls, baseline communism comes from this baseline of free individuals who can do whatever they want in community. So it’s not like a totally atomized state of nature, but to be honest, those enlightenment thinkers also weren’t that cartoonish either.

I think he shares something with them. It comes out in all different kinds of ways. One of the examples that we provide in the essay that we wrote together is this stylized scenario that he brings up in the debt book, which is the scenario of somebody – you, a person, an individual – walking along and you discover that someone is drowning in a body of water nearby, and you think to yourself, “well, you know, I’m able bodied and I just came from the gym, I can muster the strength to dive into this river or this pool or whatever it is to save this person and there’s very little cost to me. Why wouldn’t I do the right thing, because I, as a free, good individual, I can use my power to participate in and enact everyday communism.” Now, as we point out, this sounds nice and it’s meant to sound just like an everyday scenario.

It could happen, you know, it happens to people. It’s never happened to me, but I could imagine it happening. But there’s a conspicuous individualism that really resonates with game theory approaches to social scenarios like in the classic trolley problem, right.

William Beaman

I think in the first draft I called it a nice trolley problem.

Scott Ferguson

A nice trolley problem where you’ve got just an individual that is contextless, and then somebody who’s drowning, who’s also contextless. We don’t know why they’re drowning. Did they grow up in a poor neighborhood where they shut down the pool and stop providing affordable swimming lessons, right?

There’s a reason why somebody is drowning. There is a reason why somebody is walking along and they have the ability to save them. It’s these scenarios that reduce things down to an individual exercising their freedom for communism, as opposed to what he calls exchange – which is a whole other contradiction that I can talk about at another juncture – or hierarchy. The original cell of sociality, like cell: c-e-l-l, is the individual and their actions. Can I bring up one more example that we didn’t talk about?

Will Beaman

Absolutely.

Scott Ferguson

I’ve thought about this for years. This somehow stuck with me. It’s from the beginning-ish. It’s like page 66 in the book.

William Beaman

This really stuck with you.

Scott Ferguson

It really did. It really did.

So he writes, “my mother, who was born a Jew in Poland, once told me a joke from her childhood” and I don’t really need to say this but I just want to mention that my own mother is a Polish Jew. She’s still around. Anyway, so his mother, another Polish Jew, tells this joke. Here it is:

There was a small town located along the frontier between Russia and Poland; no one was ever quite sure to which it belonged. One day an official treaty was signed and not long after, surveyors arrived to draw a border. Some villagers approached them where they had set up their equipment on a nearby hill. “So where are we, Russia or Poland?” “According to our calculations, your village now begins exactly thirty-seven meters into Poland.” The villagers immediately began dancing for joy. “Why?” the surveyors asked. “What difference does it make?” “Don’t you know what this means?” they replied. “It means we’ll never have to endure another one of those terrible Russian winters!”

And that’s the joke. Okay, so how is this methodological individualism? It is about a community, right? But it comes from a mom, it comes from an individual. There is a real lesson here and it is minimally funny. Which is that, “you big powers with your claims to rule and your claims to carving up land. All of this is an arbitrary imposition and, look, the weather is not going to change as a result of this.”

William Beaman

The state of nature is still continuing.

Scott Ferguson

Well, yeah! That’s it, that’s it. Exactly. It frames governance as imposition. An imposition here on an individuated community that is being arbitrarily divided. The joke is that nature, weather, and our relationship to it, and our grounded particularity, comes first.

That’s why it’s supposed to be funny. Now, again, I’m not saying that., “well, he should have thought about how the Russians could do weather manipulation, they could seed clouds or whatever.” We don’t need to go that far in order to read the implications of this joke that he’s repeating, which is this is a local individuated community that is being imposed upon, but at the end of the day, nature and our everyday communism – proceeding from the ground up of the individuated, we could say –  is what matters the most and that’s our only hope of redemption.

Billy Saas

All right. So I think we’ve got a pretty good sense of the grievances, the complaints, the critiques.

Scott Ferguson

The systematic critiques, thank you very much.

Billy Saas

Systematic critique. Yeah.

William Beaman

You nailed them on the church wall very well.

Billy Saas

And I think that gets us back to the occasion of this essay, which is intervention into our immediate moment. Following the exciting election of Zohran Mamdani in New York as mayor, we have had a series of articles published by leading left thinkers and organizations that, from your perspective, seem to be a kind of capitulation based on this framework or informed by this debt framework. This idea that, because New York City is not a sovereign, it does not issue its own currency, doesn’t issue the dollar anyway, Mamdani needs and his campaign and his team have to sort of, I don’t know, be cautious.

Reel it in, reckon with some really harsh truths and realities about the fiscal situation of New York City. That’s interfering with what you all point out and want us to do instead, which is to get more imaginative than that. So maybe we could go one by one or if we want to talk more holistically, but we have a Debt Collective piece, a piece in Jacobin, and then also a piece in Dissent. The Jacobin piece by Nathan Gustaf, J.W. Mason in Dissent, and the Debt Collective piece, written collectively as a Substack post In the Read.

William Beaman

Well, maybe we can start with the Debt Collective piece, because the Debt Collective also happens to be the organization with an institutional connection to David Graeber, as well. The Debt Collective is a wonderful organization of various debtors movements and that collects activism around money and debt and much as we are very appreciative and live within the legacies of all of Graeber’s activism, this discussion, too, is in the spirit of activism and of us all being on the same team.

The title is, “Zohran won Main Street. Now he must face Wall Street.” Subheading: “Mamdani will face a looming threat to his progressive agenda debt.” This piece does what I think the other two pieces do as well. Which is to sort of say, “hold your horses.”

Yes. We won. We won this mayoral election of New York City, which is an incredibly important executive governing position that has huge economic impacts, but whatever you do, do not issue bonds and don’t issue debt. That sort of is the main crux of the piece as far as a warning is concerned.

I want to maybe just read from it directly. So, the piece goes:

“This may sound basic, but it’s worth repeating. The federal government prints its own dollars. It doesn’t need to borrow from anyone to function, despite currently not functioning. Cities, on the other hand, cannot print their own dollars. Much like you, a person that probably has some student or medical debt, a mortgage, credit card debt, or an auto loan, municipalities must borrow money they do not have if they want to spend more than they tax. So what does this mean? Cities are forced to borrow from Wall Street to do nearly everything from building parks and schools to staffing libraries and hiring bus drivers, to patching roads and strengthening bridges.

And then, scanning down just a little bit this next section is called “Wall Street’s grip on,” quote, “public money.” Sort of implying that what might be called public money is actually not even public at some more real level.

“Here’s the catch. Before any tax revenue can be spent on public programs like rent control or free transit, the city must first pay back Wall Street. That means private financiers effectively hold veto power over social policy. This means they get to decide what governments can and can’t provide to their people.

And then there’s a discussion of the 1975 fiscal crisis that New York City went through. Ultimately, this is a pitch for a few things, I think. One, with respect to Mamdani, is to unite the left and unite Mamdani’s coalition around taxing the rich, and around pressure campaigns to increase revenue from Wall Street, from the 1%, and so on.

But then also, I think – and this is sort of implied by the Debt Collectives framing, and not to be not to be too cute about this – but I think it is actually relevant that it would be called the Debt Collective rather than, say, the credit collective and that the Substack is called In the Red.

It’s trying to address readers as part of a movement of debtors, right? As part of a movement of debtors who maybe all owe debt to Wall Street in various ways and so “debtors of the world, unite.” That is sort of the vision that comes out of here and, of course, putting this into relief against Graeber’s sweeping historical work, this is a jubilee call. This is a call for something like the biblical Jubilees, which is “let’s just erase all the debts.” One thing that we point out in our article is, it’s strange to us that the idea of abolishing all the debts feels like less of a heavy lift than reclassifying the debts as assets or then repurposing debt not as something that we take literally as a thing to be used to moralize and bludgeon poor communities, but as obligations that have coordinative capacities.

We all have obligations to society and those do not have to be obligations to Wall Street necessarily.

Billy Saas

Yeah. Just pause it just to say to and to reiterate and underscore and emphasize that you’re not saying that we should be worried about or protecting the right of those Wall Street folks to be repaid for bad student debt.

William Beaman

Absolutely. It’s quite the contrary. I think that part of our critique of this sort of rhetorical approach is that it ultimately builds up Wall Street’s ability to treat credit as debt, and to force local governments into collections. What it does is it polices the left’s imagination to demand anything different.

So instead, you demand to get rid of all debt, which of course, you don’t expect Wall Street to say “yes” to, but maybe you can get every city and every individual and every person in every government on the same page as all debtors who need a jubilee. I think one of the things that we do in the Democratic Public Finance document, as well as our blue bonds project, is we argue for, what you might call the un-finalizability of debt. The fact that whether bonds or treasuries are treated as things that must be paid back, or just as a savings account, depends on politics.

If you take Wall Street at its word that all money exists in order to be paid back to Wall Street, then of course you’re going to just reject using money in any kind of democratic way with respect to money’s actual design.

Scott Ferguson

Just to bring up some examples and none of these are easy or straightforward, and they do have serious hurdles of intelligibility with the public. We’re in the business of writing about money, strategizing, and trying to expand our imagination. Working at the edges of legibility is part of that work, right? To use Jakob Feinig’s words that we use all the time, “we are in an age of “monetary silencing” and we need to un-silence.

That’s going to be part of it. So let’s just think about some things that could be done. For example, yes, there can be a giant refusal campaign and we’re all on board for a refusal. No problem. But that’s not where you stop, right? Because the system is still in place and you still have this leftist discourse that’s telling us that, “well, ultimately, Wall Street’s in charge.”

So you could have a movement. It may not be successful, but a movement in and around Mamdani’s New York. New York City is the biggest and most emblematic city in this country and one of the biggest in the world. You could have all kinds of sister cities or cousin cities or whatever familial language you want to use, that get on board and that demand that the Fed reopens a municipal liquidity facility permanently and sets the interest rate at zero.

Now, maybe this movement will be laughed out of the room. So has the Green New Deal been laughed out of the room. So has any number of leftist movements and leftist demands. So why stay silent on the possibility of a permanent lending facility at a zero interest rate from the Fed? At the very same time, New York City could threaten or even try to enact going forward, we’re no longer going to have our public debt mediated by Wall Street.

We’re going to set up a different channel. Maybe we’ll work with an existing credit union, or maybe we’ll set up our own public banking system that can mediate debt and that can issue it to public sector union workers for things like their pensions and things like that.

Now, all of these are possibilities, but there’s this binary between, “well, you know, there’s the realism, what money is and Wall Street’s the big veto, the big obstacle,” versus, “all we can do is try to cancel it from time to time.” There’s this whole middle area where imagination could run wild, but it doesn’t because of the structure of this discourse.

William Beaman

I think that through that lens we can also embrace debt jubilees and refusals and all of these things, as forms of design, as forms of shaping and contesting the architecture of our obligations, even if they are sometimes problematically pitched as complete erasure or undoing of obligation or of a blank slate, as opposed to an old slate full of ways that everyone is a sinner and everybody owes society in bad ways because  they’ve been a bad boy.

Scott Ferguson

And just to say, Graeber likes to point out that the origin of the first word for freedom means return to mother. It’s a tricky one because it’s like feminine. It’s motherhood. Motherhood is not acknowledged often in modern monetary economies. There’s something that is very nice about that, but it’s like, one is made “free” so that then one can return home to their care, to their natural caring micro unit. I think that haunts all of this discourse as well.

William Beaman

Yeah. That, to some extent, the care that one returns to is taken for granted.

Billy Saas

I would also say that Graeber points out that the Jubilee is, or was, in its origins, a design, politically

Scott Ferguson

That’s true. Yeah.

Billy Saas

It was systematic, programmatic, every seven years. I’m down with you, Will, when you say we’re redesigning the entire monetary system from the municipal level up or from whatever level up, let’s program in some every-seven-years Jubilees. Let’s see what that does to the market.

William Beaman

Yeah. We’re not just looking at every kind of debt and saying, “let’s use this for coordination instead.” I don’t want to use my student debt to collateralize a Green New Deal or something.

Billy Saas

Like, I think that that would be – as an edit from an editorial perspective – those obligations are and should be, in most, if not every case, canceled. There’s no use for them other than control and moralizing.

Scott Ferguson

Right. We do make the point of that in the piece. But I will say that the reason we don’t harp on it is because we do feel like that is actually largely legible. Right? That’s part of the contemporary leftist framework.

Billy Saas

For me, it’s more like just so nobody gets it twisted or confused.

Scott Ferguson

Absolutely, right.

William Beaman

Yeah. Not nothing is “either or.”We just want to enfold things into a vision of democratic design as a coauthored problem rather than a top down problem that one escapes from.

Billy Saas

That’s ultimately what this boils down to. At the same time as MMT’s gains have been, at the popular level, dispelling the myth of the zero sum game from the sort of federal perspective, a new zero sum assumption has sort of taken its place in left circles.

What y’all are after here is getting that dispelled on its own and simultaneously calling for a mass brainstorm and imagination session across the left where we don’t take these things for granted and we see what’s possible rather than capitulate in advance.

William Beaman

Thinking about what, from an MMT perspective, becomes important about something like taxation or something like bond issuance or something like that, when we take away the assumption that it’s all about acquiring finite funds from wherever they’ve been dispersed or borrowing them from the future or something like that is that these have distributional effects.

It’s good to tax billionaires out of existence because billionaires are bad for democracy. It’s good to not have people hold debt because they went to college and got a public education because that’s bad for democracy. I think that we can read into that a different register of ethics and morality as collective considerations that the idea of refusal on its own doesn’t really get us to.

In the article, we also put it in terms of, “if you do a heroic refusal, what are the distributional effects of labor in the context that you just refused and left?” This isn’t to say nobody should ever be able to refuse or leave a situation because then you’re letting people down by doing so,

but just to say that there’s no outside of ethics, not as a top down fiction imposed upon people who’ve been made to feel guilty, but as a collective problem of interdependence that we inhabit and that our relative refusals need to contend with their implications for architecture and design and distribution and all of these things.

When we talk about the distributive qualities or effects of taxation as a public good, we’re also speaking in a register of ethics and morality here, and of democracy and of the public good. But I would argue that what we’re not doing is insisting on the false coin of our dreams, necessarily, in some kind of mutually exclusive way, because I think that what we’re really after is a democratic and interdependent world that always already has multiple systems of valuation that aren’t even necessarily mutually exclusive with each other.

We want to thematize the ways that there’s malleability across scales and across registers rather than sort of flattening all of it into top down bureaucracy that should just be lifted.

Billy Saas

So that the Debt Collective piece is one of three that y’all look closely at and find to be diagnostic of what I think ya’ll would characterize like a sort of genre of left rhetoric at the moment around specifically the Mamdani campaign. But, if it’s around the Mamdani campaign, it is probably symbolic of a direction or a trajectory of left thinking at the moment.

Yeah. So we don’t want that. We want to stop and redirect that thinking. What else are we after with this piece? Is there anything that we’ve left on the table in terms of the sort of goals of this thing?

Scott Ferguson

Yeah. One thing is that, on the one hand, it feels like MMT is not having a moment. Then that’s more complicated. So we’ve got Zach Polanski having a moment with MMT rising to the head of the Green Party in the UK right now. That’s exciting and there’s all kinds of intra and inter party politics that are going on around that. But what’s so fascinating about this little micro genre of the present that we’re pointing to is this double move where people who might have been resistant or, let’s say, communities of leftist activists and organizers and publishers and writers where they might have not been fully on board in the past or they just kind of pick and choose when to be on board, one of the moves that keeps being made, whether explicitly or implicitly, is like, “yeah, yeah, yeah, MMT is right. But because it’s right, that means that Mamdani has to play by zero sum rules.” It makes the MMT 101 project, both a winner and dead on arrival at the very same time.

There’s this convergence of the success of MMT 101 and its limits – of that articulation around sovereignty – coming together with an excited left that is so excited about governing. Not just, fighting to win but actually governing. But now that we’re here, this genre says “no, no, no, no, no. We can only follow the rules of the game or total rejection,” and that vacuum is what’s so heartbreaking and needs to be rejected.

William Beaman

Yeah, I would also maybe up the ante on what you just said, in a way, by tying it to another effect of how Modern Monetary Theory has been presented and explained and treated in a lot of the leftist independent press. Because it’s a design, because it’s a discourse about monetary design and it’s a discourse maybe about law and maybe about plumbing or all of these terms that have very technocratic connotations, there is a limited application of Modern Monetary Theory to democratic political movements. What most offends us from democratic public finance perspective and from a perspective concerned with monetary silencing, which is the pairing of design with unaccountable technocracy in order to disavow design as something that is a valid terrain of technocratic discourse.

In the context of Zach Polanski, and his dabbling with some kind of very standard MMT rhetoric, we don’t tax in order to spend, we spend so that we can tax – that sort of thing – some prominent people such as Grace Blakeley from the kind of Jeremy Corbyn political formation, have said “while this may be well and true about the truth about money, it’s such a high truth that it’s irrelevant to a mass politics. It’s irrelevant to class antagonism and in fact, it might even, from this Marxist perspective, undermine our ability to sharpen contradictions along class lines because rather than focusing on taxing the rich and expropriating their tax dollars, we are instead widening the horizon, which is terrible for a mass movement and mass movement should never have a wide horizon. It should sharpen the contradictions so that everything is focused on one commonsensical target.” It’s interesting also thinking about that against the Debt Collective piece we just read which described Wall Street as having a veto. Well, this is the construction of that veto, right? This is literally saying there’s no politics except taxing the rich at this one place.

“Oh my god, how did the rich get this veto?” And it’s like, well, because you’re not being capacious. I think that a lot of what you’re describing about Modern Monetary Theory’s applicability at the federal level or when you have power being used sort of paradoxically to make it dead on arrival, has a lot of corollaries with a lot of leftist movement discourses. In the Superstructure podcast, we have tried in various ways to tease out and apprehend through leftist discursive controversies about the professional managerial class and: “are people who think for a living really working class or are they too proximate to technocracy, that they play a sort of middle manager role rather than a properly working class role?”

All of these pieces also just share a silencing effect on our monetary imaginations. But I think a big part of that is that they associate design with technocracy rather than with democracy.

Billy Saas

Yeah. So it seems to me like that’s not an argument against MMT on the grounds that it’s too technocratic. It’s an argument against MMT on the grounds that it’s possibly more democratic than we have the capacity to accommodate at this moment. If the condition of it or the aim of MMT is to have a sort of democratic monetary design, then yeah, we could have a conversation about how well equipped the demos are at the moment for that conversation, for that kind of design work.

But, that’s different than just saying, “Let’s not do that. That’s sort of out of the orbit of what we’re capable of doing at the moment.” It reminded me of the Paul Samuelson quote from that Keynes documentary.

Scott Ferguson

It also reminds me of something that cuts a little bit closer to the bone, it’s a little bit of like lore, that moment that has been reported and written about between Abba Lerner and John Maynard Keynes, when Abba Lerner apparently comes up to Keynes at some kind of meeting of bankers or something and says, “come on, John, let’s just call a spade a spade and let’s bring out the printing presses.” The point is like, “Come on. Like we all know it’s coming from the government anyway. We all know it’s just endogenously created. We know it’s not borrowing etc., etc. Let’s just do it.” Keynes is like, “no,” like he didn’t reject it. He didn’t say, “no, no, it’s really borrowing,” he didn’t say any of that.

I don’t have the quote right at my fingertips.

William Beaman

I think it was “elementary, my dear Watson.”

Scott Ferguson

It was something like, you know, “people tell lies, but they have to be plausible lies,” something one of these years.

William Beaman

That the art of statecraft is to tell lies, but they have to be…

Scott Ferguson

Be plausible. Yeah.

William Beaman

Yeah.

Scott Ferguson

Right.

Billy Saas

Do we have any final thoughts? That seems like a good place to start wrapping up.

Scott Ferguson

Yeah. I think it could be helpful to conclude by reading some of the text that this kind of “both and” language that we’re offering. The traditional targets and aims and procedures of the left and the contemporary left are good. Refusal? Yes – and also:

“From the standpoint of DPF, the immediate challenges look different:

• not only to resist Wall Street’s structural veto, but also to reframe New York’s bonds as instruments that mobilize unions, pensions, and residents around shared projects;
• not only to avoid borrowing, but also to build complementary currencies, public payment systems, and institutional “swap lines” between schools, clinics, unions, and campaigns that expand the field of receivability;
• not only to determine extant constraints, but also to openly contest the inherited design choices that organize fiscal and legal limitations;
• not only to resist capital and its vested interests, but also to organize coalitions that experiment with different ways of insulating essential services from federal sabotage and punishing rating agencies.”

This is it, right? Another expression we have elsewhere in the piece is, we need to govern while struggling or struggle while governing. Sure, the movement around Mamdani coming into 2026, they’re not likely to be able to force a federal vote that is going to rewrite the Constitution in such a way that allows for New York City and every other municipality to create credit and to create granting mechanisms in radically democratic ways.

That’s not very likely for that to happen. But my god, let’s start talking about it. Why won’t we talk about it? If we don’t want to talk about it, let’s talk about why we might not want to talk about it. Let’s at least have the conversation rather than just essentially give over the key tools of our society to our enemies and what our enemies are doing with them and what our enemies say they are for and what our enemies say they can do.

Billy Saas

Nicely said. Will, are you going to top that?

William Beaman

Oh my gosh, I don’t know if I can. That sounded like the end of the episode to me.

Billy Saas

That sounded like the episode to me, let’s go ahead and call it. Scott, Will: awesome to talk. Great piece, very provocative. I’m still a Graeber guy, but I love you anyway.

William Beaman

That’s okay. We all did our socially necessary Graeber time.