Technocratic disenfranchisement works by hiding institutional coordination and public design and presenting money as a finished thing. By contrast, complementary currencies and credit forms should make people question what the dollar is, making it LOOK designed. That is a feature, not a bug.

10/10

Then public utility notes or bills become the idiom through which those debates get hashed out. The monetary form is first legible because it is limited to a specific expense or settlement, then opens onto a broader struggle over what society should treat as basic, public, and guaranteed.

9/

“Public utilities” as the use case for a municipal currency or credit form does double and triple work. It is concrete and limited, yet it opens the category of "public utilities" to be expanded: not just water or power, but groceries, childcare, broadband, transit, care, housing support.

8/

A good move is to predicate new public credit forms on public utilities, or something similarly concrete. People already use specialized monetary forms tied to particular expenditures: Transit balances, tax credits, gift cards.

7/

Famous "duck rabbit" optical illusion

This opens a strategic horizon @moneyontheleft.bsky.social has often called “duck-rabbit.” Even if it is complementary currencies all the way down, a left monetary politics can introduce new instruments through familiar institutional idioms and concrete public purposes.

6/

Once bonds are made exchangeable for dollars, they stop looking only like loans and start looking more like another dollar asset category—closer to the difference between checking and savings than between “real money” and “debt.”

5/

Bonds belong in this picture too. We inherit a liberal economic imaginary that makes them look like loans, full stop. But from a design point of view, bonds are an asset form whose functions can be organized differently.

4/

The dollar is not one self-identical thing. Bank deposits, bonds, tax credits, prepaid balances, and other claims all move differently, settle different obligations, and come into being through different procedures.

3/

This matters strategically. If “complementary” names the ordinary condition of money rather than edge cases, then left politics can introduce new credit forms and job creation structures in the register of public design and institutional revision—rather than as something alien to daily life.

2/

Depression-era municipal scrip issued by the city of Detroit

The phrase “complementary currency” suggests a binary with official currency that is descriptively wrong. The dollar is already a hybrid of credit forms, created and retired through different institutions, tied to different obligations, and coordinated through public design.

1/

✨ New transcript! ✨

You can now *read* as well as listen to our April 2026 episode, featuring heterodox economist Ely Fair.

moneyontheleft.org/2026/04/01/p...

Please share!

It's silly and wrong to act like Trump was gonna be committed to pacifist foreign policy before the Israelis blackmailed him. And, yes, it is in fact anti-Semitic. For one thing, there's evidently a section of the American military establishment who have been gagging for war with Iran for decades.

Yes–ironically it is itself a niche grievance rhetoric they picked up from their own media environment

and like frankly if you think advocates are sooOooo annoying I would love to know who you are turning to for expertise on the issues you want to campaign on. Or is the problem that you don't want expertise or to have to commit to real positions?

^^^^THIS

It really is a lot of projection from a group of politicians, commentators, etc. who only use specialized language to cynically appease donors. If I’m bending over backwards to be sensitive to AIPAC despite knowing they’re full of shit, that must be what all advocates do.

Then I got really lucky hehe.

We can turn the screw again to think about how the historiographer/author/eye is an infrastructural achievement with its own history rather than an outside or purely immanent position as it is often romanticized

And I will say that, though there are no strategic guarantees, to reject this Darwinian view of human history is also to reject fascist storytelling and forced amnesia, which the left so often turns on itself without realizing.

Yes. And by the same token, those who died resisting the Nazis in all kinds of ways still matter. A genocide can never erase a people or a resistance.

My impetus for writing this was @mollycrabapple.bsky.social’s wonderful recent interviews on the Jewish Labour Bund.

💜💜💜

history is unfixed; reactivating the archive - even from absence, or destruction, or silence (so many archives are hollows/negative spaces/chiaroscuro to begin with) - is always possible: the animating force is the speaking/compositing eye of the historiographer, i.e. narrative (or apophenia).

It’s more like history’s backstage

There is no dustbin of history. For better and for worse, archives can always be reactivated in new combinations

Wife is Indian, that’s the only reason I know 😅 but he’s apparently now bringing up retirement to save face for BJP in the next election

I haven’t seen anyone here talk about it, but Modi suffered a possibly career ending defeat the other day not unlike Orbán, at the hands of a democratic coalition. He may not run again now.

What this underscores IMO is that this is someone who doesn't believe that his opponents are fascists and that fascism is the threat. Because if you did, then this is not how you come out swinging. You punch the fascists repeatedly, not some staffer at a nonprofit.

There will be in 2028 candidates using antisemitism as the binding glue for left/right coalitions. You see the beginnings of it with Platner and his appeals to right wing antisemites. Fear of Trump is kind of holding it off for now but it will be open season come 2028.

Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez: “Here in Spain, we are approving and advancing a process to regularise half a million immigrants.

“And I want to say to the Right and the Far Right who oppose this: Spain is the daughter of migration and will not become the mother of xenophobia.”

Why would you trust orthodox economists? None predicted the GFC and there explanations for economic activity are rooted in Newtonian physics. So much so money is not even defined or indexed in their textbooks. It is conservative pseudo science with historical links to fascism & white supremacy

Thanks for reading!! The other motive here is displacing the profit and tax revenue financing mechanisms in the first place, to enable direct money creation rooted in real capacities. It’s a “non-reformist reform” in that other sense too!