I apologize for lack of content on this blog-slash-newsletter lately. Among other excuses, I’ve just been elected chair of the John Jay Economics Department. Many of you know how that goes. A chair is not a boss, they are just the department’s representative with the university, and the person to whom various administrative tasks are delegated. For example, our department will be hiring this year. I don’t decide on who we hire – every full-time faculty member gets an equal vote. But I am the one who has to make sure that all the forms are filled out.
(As an aside for another time, it is worth noting how much of what has been, at least pre-Trump, one of America’s most successful export industries, is run in practice as a bunch of little worker cooperatives.)
One thing I am still making time for is interviews and events for Against Money. I was talking about the book on a podcast just today, a business and finance one as opposed to the more political ones we have mostly been on. It was a great discussion, but at the end the host asked, “OK, though, Mamdani — this guy’s a communist, right?” There are a couple ways one could respond to that. What I said is the same thing I said to a journalist from The Guardian recently: Socialism is a word for much of what municipal governments already do. Governing as a socialist just means doing more of it and better.
That interview isn’t yet up yet. But some other Against Money content is.
First, a very thoughtful review just came out in The American Prospect, by Jeff Sklansky, with the nice headline “The Class Struggle in Your Wallet.” Money is a topic on which people, especially people who might want to review a book like this, have, quite understandably, their own deeply held views, debates they’re deeply invested in; it can be hard to step back and approach things from a different direction. So I appreciate that Sklansky so generously approached the book on its own terms. I was especially pleased that he zeroed in on the magic mirror as a master metaphor for our vision of money. (At one point “The Magic Mirror” was in the running for the book’s title.)
Sklansky’s one big criticism of the book is that we focus too much on conflicting ideas about money, and neglect more concrete political conflicts. It is a fair criticism. That said, there are reasons we wrote the book the way we did: It is a record of our own escape from the fly-bottle of orthodox thinking about money, which we hope others will be able to follow; we wanted a book that could possibly be read in 25 years, as opposed to one tightly linked to the struggles of the moment. But it remains true that there is a different set of questions, the foundational political questions of what is to be done and who is to blame and which side are you on, that the book does not really address.
Or as Sklansky puts it:
Mason and Jayadev derive a more radical social-democratic prescription from Keynes’s diagnosis of the Great Depression than he did. Against Money sparkles with critical lessons to guide progressive fiscal and monetary policy and financial reform today. But to understand why capital’s power to oppress has proven more enduring than Keynes anticipated, this extraordinarily provocative study should be coupled with a searching examination of the class structure of modern money itself.
I agree that the book could have done more of this, though I think it did some — the section on the euro crisis, for instance, is an example of how a more realistic view of money can reveal vectors of power that are hard to see otherwise. But yes, the conscious political effort to (re)establish markets and money as the governing logic of coordination, even as the actual needs of production often point the other way, is an essential part of the story and should have been foregrounded more than it was. That’s something we’ll do better in the next project, I hope.
Doug Henwood makes a somewhat similar critique towards the end of our interview on his excellent radio show/podcast Behind the News. “I’m very fond of this Antonio Negri quote, ‘Money has one face, that of the boss’,” Doug says. “You play with concepts like that, but then often turn away, and find non-monetary ways of living hidden amidst the getting and spending. Your conclusion has us stepping out of the getting and spending world, and into the sunshine. That all seems a little too easy. There’s not a lot of politics in the book, in terms of the exercise of power and challenging power. So what about the politics of money?”
One point of the book is that it may be easier than we think! Or at least, that the biggest difficulties are not where we think they are.
When we talk about “the economy” at a high level of abstraction, we often speak of a”market economy” or a “capitalist economy,” as if the whole world of production was organized on a single principle. This is the case whether we draw our abstractions from textbook economics or the Marxist tradition. But when we take a more fine-grained look at the ways production is actually organized, we see a great many areas where the pursuit of profit is not the motivator, and even more where activity is not organized through markets and prices. Public schools (and academic departments), libraries, courts, families, churches and militaries are all things that exist in the world we live in. Wherever production involves specialized expertise, professional norms and standards play an essential organizing role. And even for-profit corporations are internally planned economies — hierarchical and often despotic, yes, but not at all markets.
What has to be overcome, then, is not so much the logic of money itself, but rather the political power, the capacity for organized violence, that is exercised in the name of, and legitimized by, money and property.
Again, the lines of authority within production seldom have anything to do with property rights. You probably have a job, or at least have had one. How does your boss exercise authority over you? Almost certainly, it’s because of a position they occupy within some formal organization, not because of something they personally own. Ownership is the language in which the hierarchy is justified and understood. But it is not the organizing principle of the workplace.
As Marx argues so powerfully in Chapter 13 of Capital, the gains of modern industry have come through cooperation between workers on a vastly larger scale than in previous societies. The surplus that is claimed by capital comes from organized human cooperation; capital ownership is simply the way positions in this immense division of labor are assigned. Money is not organizing production, it is a badge or emblem of authority within the social bodies through which production takes place. So-called “capital markets” don’t allocate investment, and “capital flows” don’t involve movement of tools and machines; in both cases, what is involved is tradable claims to authority over production. Or as Marx puts it, management of industry is a function of capital ownership only in the same way “as in feudal times, the functions of general and judge were attributes of landed property.”
The point is that we systematically misperceive organized human cooperation, and the essentially political hierarchies that govern it, as a system of market exchanges of commodities. What we are trying to do in the book is the same thing, in my mind at least, that Marx was trying to do — to escape “the bewitched, distorted, and upside-down world haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre” and see the concrete human relationships and political choices hidden behind seemingly objective economic categories.
So one answer to Doug’s question, it seems to me, is that clarifying the limited the role of money is in the organization of production is an important preliminary step to challenging the tyranny exercised in its name. And as Marx also emphasized, a meaningful socialist politics can only be built on tendencies and forms of cooperation that already exist in the society we live in. So, again, to me, seeing those non-monetary ways of living already around us is an essential part of a project to systematically expand them.
I admit that we spend more time on the first half of this argument than the second, on clearing away the mystifications than on where we go afterward. It is clear in my mind that the argument we make about GDP, the interest rate and so on are steps toward a larger vision of social transformation, but it might not be as clear to readers of the book. And this is a limitation. But on the other hand, I also think of another quote that Doug is fond of, from Adorno, that “The demand for positive proposals is like the demand for papers from the police.” Yes, it is true, as the man said, that the goal is not just to understand the world but to change it. But one does sometimes need to first step back and think carefully about how to think about things. The demand to move on to the practical politics must sometimes be, if not refused, at least deferred.
Anyway, this exchange was just the last part of the conversation — the rest of it was a wide-ranging and enjoyable discussion of the book with someone who understands its subject matter as well as anyone. I say this about everything I share, but in this case especially, please do give it a listen. And then stick around for the stimulating conversation with Moira Weigel about the Right and theory that follows it, where you will learn that Palantir CEO Alex Karp got into the automated surveillance business only after writing a dissertation on Adorno.
We also had a good discussion of the book on the New Books Network. One nice thing about them is that they go through a book chapter by chapter, inviting you to summarize each one. I’d never heard of them before, but they seem to put up a dozen episodes a day, on a wide range of interesting-looking books. There are so many podcasts! There’s a funny bit late in the show The Good Place where the angels, since they no longer admitting anyone to heaven, turn out to be passing their time listening to podcasts. Which makes sense — who else could follow all of them?
I was also recently gave a virtual talk to a group from the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Young Scholars Initiative. This was for part of a conference on “Money as If Finance Mattered,” and features a whole bunch of very interesting scholars. (YSI consistently puts together very good events, in my experience.) My own talk was about why debates about monetary neutrality matter, and the larger, and often unrecognized, implications if we take the non-neutrality of money seriously.
Finally, Arjun and I had a great discussion of the book with the Polycrisis book club. Polycrisis is Tim Sahay’s and Kate McKenzie’s newish climate vertical at Phenomenal World. Polycrisis prints a ton of interesting stuff on the intersection of climate with broader economic and political questions; I definitely recommend reading it. (You should also be following Tim’s epic threads on Bluesky.) One nice thing about this conversation was that it gave us a chance to get into the significance of our thinking about money for climate questions, something which we initially planned to spend a chapter on in the book but ultimately had to drop.
More broadly, the growing Phenomenal World media empire is one of the most exciting things going on in leftwing media these days — it occupies a rare and vital niche of offering space for scholars to make long and rigorous but politically engaged arguments for a broad non-specialist audience. In some ways, arguably, it’s the closest US equivalent to New Left Review and its Sidecar blog — a model that a lot of other people have tried to replicate less successfully. It’s certainly the most exciting new outlet for the kind of writing I’m interested in that has come along in the past few years.
I feel obliged to mention here that Phenomenal World founding editor Jack Gross was briefly student in the economics MA program here at John Jay. Does everyone who studies economics at John Jay go on to found a major new online journal? Well no; but a remarkably high proportion end up doing something similarly impressive. Admissions, unfortunately, are closed for this year. But please do spread the word about us to people who might think about applying in the future.