Arcade, Topic: The Unheard-of Center: Critique after Modern Monetary Theory
Link: The Unheard-of Center: Critique after Modern Monetary Theory | Literature, the Humanities, & the World
Excerpt:
"Needless to say, the history of modern money is the history of this center’s ongoing repression. This process begins in the late seventeenth-century when the English bourgeoisie invents the legal ruse of public debt and continues today with the crushing obligations and austerity perpetuated by the Troika in the Eurozone. Still, no matter how intensely money’s political interior is neglected or disavowed, MMT reasons, government continues to condition economic relations and shape their recurrent failures and excesses.
By inverting money’s conventional topology, MMT clears the way for an unprecedented mode of critique: a practice that reads social formations through money’s political center and does so in order to make money’s answerability palpable.
Money is an infinite public reserve that has been choked off at its source. The state, on MMT’s view, maintains the money relation as a variable infrastructure of laws, ledgers, dispensations, qualifications, and cancellations. This maintenance requires constant retooling in response to extant crises and antagonisms. Unlike money’s private users, moreover, only government wields the capacity to furnish all persons with meaningful employment and sufficient access to the common store of wealth. To choke off this power, MMT insists, is not a de facto consequence of a money economy—there is no such thing as a natural rate of unemployment, for instance—but, rather, a political decision to maintain populations in conditions of poverty, violence, and despair."
Excerpt:
"Needless to say, the history of modern money is the history of this center’s ongoing repression. This process begins in the late seventeenth-century when the English bourgeoisie invents the legal ruse of public debt and continues today with the crushing obligations and austerity perpetuated by the Troika in the Eurozone. Still, no matter how intensely money’s political interior is neglected or disavowed, MMT reasons, government continues to condition economic relations and shape their recurrent failures and excesses.
By inverting money’s conventional topology, MMT clears the way for an unprecedented mode of critique: a practice that reads social formations through money’s political center and does so in order to make money’s answerability palpable.
Money is an infinite public reserve that has been choked off at its source. The state, on MMT’s view, maintains the money relation as a variable infrastructure of laws, ledgers, dispensations, qualifications, and cancellations. This maintenance requires constant retooling in response to extant crises and antagonisms. Unlike money’s private users, moreover, only government wields the capacity to furnish all persons with meaningful employment and sufficient access to the common store of wealth. To choke off this power, MMT insists, is not a de facto consequence of a money economy—there is no such thing as a natural rate of unemployment, for instance—but, rather, a political decision to maintain populations in conditions of poverty, violence, and despair."
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