Critiques of MMT coming out from economists based on 1) dismissals of chartalist theories of money 2) claims MMT doesn’t address power, are evidence to me of the methodological and disciplinary narrowness of the economics field as a whole /1

The biggest insights of chartist social theory and MMT’s political contribution requires interdisciplinary and methodologically heterodox frameworks to grasp /2

Economists for the most part commit to positivist frameworks and reified economic categories as independent from other social ones. This often results in reductive positions on “value” and economic determinism on things like like interest rates, banking, taxes /3

I discovered MMT through economic sociologists who argue for theories of embeddedness or critical theorists more broadly skeptical of economic laws. MMT affirms the constitutive aspect of all economic categories especially *money* with law, governence, communicative practice /4

While *some* MMTers *sometimes* focus on the formal economic descriptions of monetary systems: the research increasingly emphasizes the deeper insights. Institutions are constructed through heterogenous dimensions: law, governance, culture, etc etc /5

So the argument that chartalism is wrong because banks issue credit ignores that an entire law infrastructure and governance apparatus is required to issue banking charters, modulate payments systems, enforce law and shape social relations /6

To say MMT isn’t political is to ignore or just blindly miss the political dimensions of struggles over the design and structural logic of institution building that is consistent with and in fact inseparable from material struggles over immediate relations of production /7

I think this is reflective of a troubling trend on a portion of the left that dismisses intersectionality and the meditative dimensions of political economy. We cannot win via zerosum scarcity logic. It must be a generative and reproductive vision that reorganizes the world, fin