Against Money is now out. It’s been spotted in a number of bookstores, including the Union Square Barnes and Noble, where it turns out to be shelved next to Marx’s Capital in the Business section.
As my friend Suresh said to me the other day, as writers we should think of books as landmarks for a larger body of thought, rather than self-contained arguments in themselves. That is certainly the case with this book. But I am glad to see this piece of the larger project out in the world.
We had two very nice launch events, one at the University of Massachusetts (where both of us went to graduate school) and one at John Jay College, my academic home now. Both events had a great turnout, and I very much appreciated the discussion with Christine Dean, Jerry Epstein and Perry Mehrling at the UMass event, and with Zach Carter at the John Jay one. For me, it was like celebrating the holidays first with your family of origin and then with your own family.
Unfortunately, we were not able to record the John Jay event; there was video of the UMass one, but I am not sure when it will be available. But there are a couple other conversations we’ve had about the book recently that I can share.
First is an episode that Arjun and I did with The Climate Pod back in April. Despite the name (and usual focus) of the podcast, host Ty Benefiel had a lot of sharp and insightful questions about the nature of money and its relationship to the social and material world.
Second is an online roundtable we did with members of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Society. This was a very nice conversation — I think philosophers and political theorists with a deep interest in money are perhaps the ideal readers for the book.
One thing I appreciated about both these conversations — and the two launch events — was the pressure our interlocutors put on us to bring out the real-world implications of our arguments, which the book itself is a bit light on. There is naturally a discussion of climate policy on The Climate Pod, but we also get into the pandemic response, democratizing the Fed, and other more real-world questions.
The book itself is primarily an attempt to get out of the flybottle of economic thinking about money, to borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein. But of course this is not just an academic critique — as Christine Desan observed at the UMass event, economics is not just another discipline, it offers a vision of the world that corresponds to the logic of life under the rule of capital. Or as she put it, “We are all in the flybottle.”
We’ve also recorded interviews with Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs, Brian Edwards-Tiekert of UpFront on KPFA, and Doug Henwood for his show Behind the News. I’ll post the links to those as they come out. As we mentioned to Doug, our original title for our book, at the very start of the project, was The Tyranny of Money. This was a nod to the closing lines of his Wall Street, which describes it as “a first draft for a project aiming to end the rule of money, whose tyranny is sometimes a little hard to see.” Like the fly in the bottle, it’s hard to escape when we can’t see the thing we are trapped in.
