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THREAD: I wanted to offer some thoughts from a more “post-MMT” perspective on this conversation. First, I’d say that while MMT definitely relies on Knapp and Mitchell-Innes, it is not reducible to them, at least from my and what I would say is the @thepublicmoney perspective. https://twitter.com/pathtopraxis/status/1290693947455610880
I definitely hear what @pathtopraxis is saying with regards to the rhetorical mobilization of MMT as a theory of monetary governance in a world with the westphalian state form. However, I don't agree with the central point as MMT goes beyond an immanent analysis of state money.
In my view, what is so novel about MMT is that at its root it is a legal theory of credit/debt money. Law here being irreducible to the historical manifestation of governance under the westphalian nation state.
This means that money is a not territorialized form alone, nor a completely homogenous global relation of international capital, but rather a more overlapping and messy form, riddled with international power dynamics that map onto the long durée of colonial and financial hegemony
There are plenty of places in MMT adjacent scholarship that reveals precisely this messy confluence of governance relations in both modernity and before (even work on charts the specific credit/debt relations of the Middle Ages, and of course also, antiquity).
Whether it’s Graeber, Christine Desan, Giocomo Todeschini, @videotroph, or others, the evidence demonstrates that money is a juridical form that changes shape across history. Money compels labor and enacts the mediation of care relations at a distance throughout time.
There is no before money, but there *is* a before the westphalian state, not in a Hobbesian or Lockean state of nature sense, but in the sense of the ongoing management and administration of social formations as credit and debt constructions.
To reify MMT into the state form (which I’ll admit some rather less careful MMT scholars sometimes do), is to reify both power and governance over social obligation into a the fall story that posits money as a purely capitalistic and modern phenomenon.
Such an assertion simply does not accord with monetary history. It is also a tendency that materialist analyses can fall into. After all, Marx himself termed the law a superstructure while deferring to the imagination of a Hobbesian/Smithean self-organizing production process.
For what it’s worth. @agoingaccount and I have a podcast called #Superstructure that actively explores what this so-called “post-MMT” vision means for historiography, political economy, materialist/symbolic analyses, and metaphysics. Do listen! https://soundcloud.com/user-250837592
