We speak with Josefina Li, Assistant Director of the International Program Center at Bemidji State University and doctoral candidate at University of Missouri, Kansas City. Josefina’s dissertation research brings feminist and ecological economic traditions into conversation with Modern Monetary Theory. We first encountered Li’s work at the inaugural “Money on the Left” conference, which was held at University of South Florida in Spring 2018. At that conference, Li delivered a paper that explored the prospects of developing community currencies and implementing job guarantee programs in tribal nations. We were thrilled to finally speak with Li on the podcast and to learn more about her ongoing project of envisioning a jobs guarantee program for an ecofeminist future.
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Transcript
Billy Saas: Josefina Li, welcome to Money on the Left.
Josefina Li: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Scott Ferguson: Well, it’s our pleasure. We met you many moons ago in 2018 when a few of us held a conference at the University of South Florida that we titled Money on the Left, and you came and presented your work at the time on tribal nations and the prospect of starting a job guarantee on reservations, and we were very taken by this work, and we immediately turned around and started a podcast called Money on the Left, and we invited you onto this podcast, I think, within the first year, but you were more of a beginning PhD student at the time and you wanted more time to develop your ideas. Which is fair enough, and we’ve reached out to you again, and you’ve agreed to share some of your more mature thoughts on this and other issues such as eco-feminist theorizations and developments of Modern Monetary Theory and the job guarantee. But for our listeners who likely don’t know much about you, maybe you can tell them a little bit about yourself and your training, your background and some of your professional interests, yeah, well, thank
Josefina Li: Yeah, well thank you, Scott, for that background story of how I came to this podcast. I went to the University of Missouri Kansas City for my undergraduate and my graduate program. I’m a UMKC home breed. I was an undergraduate research assistant for Dr Mathew Forstater, and just stayed on with them for the PhD program. When I presented at the conference this idea of a tribal job guarantee, I was living and teaching in Minnesota. At the time, I was working at the University of Minnesota Duluth, but I lived in Bemidji. Bemidji is a city, and for listeners who might think Bemidji, the name sounds a little different than an English word, you would be correct. It is not English. It’s Ojibwe. So a language spoken by the tribal nations there. In Ojibwe, Bemidji means water flows through land. So Bemidji is also known as the first city on the Mississippi. It’s just about 45 minutes from the headwater of the Mississippi, and it’s located in the center of a triangle marked by three tribal nations and so as a PhD student studying at UMKC, I was exposed to the literature of MMT, of job guarantee, and some of the newer theoretician in the field have started to feel a little bit of frustration, given the gridlock of Washington, DC, it’s really hard to pass a federal level job guarantee. So we’re looking for grassroot ways to organize at the community level, ways to mobilize underutilized resources. So community currency, this is certainly not new. It has existed for many, many years, in response to a crisis, basically whenever a community does not have enough money, it seeks to create some more. So that community currency field is not new. However, very few people in that literature have also read MMT, so there seemed to be a bridge that needed to be made at the same time. We also know, you know, from the legal perspective that the federal government does not want competition with US dollars, so there’s a lot of restriction around who can issue currency for circulation. And these three tribal nations surrounding religion, Red Lake Tribal Nation, for example, is an entirely close tribal nation in the US, and they have sovereignty. So the thought that came to mind as well, if you are a sovereign nation, what is, what marks, what represents sovereignty better than having your currency? And that’s kind of the few reasons that led to the idea of a tribal job guarantee funded by what I call Junia, which is the Ojibwe word for money. I realize I’m supposed to be introducing myself, but I kind of went a little bit into the work presented in 2018 Yeah, and I currently work at Bemidji State University as the Assistant Director of the International Program Center. So I also work with international students and US students studying abroad. I came to the US as an extreme student when I was 17. So that work feels a little bit like a circle, coming to a full circle.
Billy Saas: Let’s talk about the Zhooniyaa, can you walk us through that project?
Josefina Li: I think what prompted me to do this, other than the few things I’ve mentioned, is just the geographic location with the Native nations. Also, we were seeing socio-economic problems in Bemidji, we are keenly aware of the socio economic problems that face the Indian countries and intensifies in Indian countries. We’re keenly aware of the unemployment, poverty, lack of meaningful economic opportunities on the reservation, and all of these we know from research also contribute to other social problems. We know the Bureau of Indian Affairs, they try to track data and reports, and they do have some grants to support the Indian countries, but a story that we often heard is they would apply for some federal grants, they would set up a project, and by the time the money runs out, everything shuts down. You go back to square one. We have a Walmart located just off the highway here, and this pattern, whenever welfare checks are released, you will see a lot of people go in there shopping. And we know as economists that when you spend at a local business, a higher percent of that cash stays in the community and continues in circulation. Versus if you spend at Walmart or national chain, Big Box Company, a lot of that ends up leaving the community. Murray in 2018, using county level data, sampled five reservations, and they show that the one big reason for the decline in retail services was because earnings were flowing out of the reservation rather than coming in, to be more exact, of $6 million annually. So that’s a big, serious outflow of earning problems. At the same time, the Indian countries also face problems of lack of capital, financial capital, lack of human capital, and means to develop it. And that also goes back to my example of when the grants run out. If you don’t have the capital to maintain the infrastructure, then the operation can just come to a sudden halt. There’s also poor, mismanaged natural resources, competition from the non-native or non-Indian markets. Knowing these socio-economic problems, my thoughts are, I also feel like Indian nations have often been presented with these ideas. Like, oh, this can solve your problem. That can and to some degree, they feel or I feel a little resistance from them on, accepting sort of outsider proposals and solutions. So that goes a little bit into the political development of me trying to present and talk to some of the community members about this idea. One other practical problem with working with the Indian nations is it’s no different than working with any other governing bodies. There’s turnovers in the government. So if the current leader is interested in your project. That might go on for a little bit, but then, if there is a change at the leadership level, that idea could also come to a halt. At the time, the Zhooniyaa idea I proposed was for the tribal government to start by imposing a household civic tax. Certainly the idea came from MMT’s tax driven money idea. One of my critique to the existing community currencies, alternative currencies out there, was that if they understood that taxes were not there to finance spending, but rather to create demand for the currency, then they would understand that there needs to be some sort of, not necessarily tax per se, but some sort of universal obligation placed on the currency users so that they would continue to use the currency. And tribal government is a governing body, and they have the ability to impose a household civic tax, which would be universal within the boundaries of the tribal nations. Also, the three tribal nations could engage in some sort of internal trading. We would also target businesses with products of higher local components. And that goes again to the idea of the more money stays in the community, the more circulations, then you would put the money supply and demand would be higher. The one other component I wanted to throw in there to create even more demand for the currency was energy. So Red Lake Nation, for example, started a project of solar power production. That gets into some other complicated utility company related issues. But the thought is, everyone needs to use electricity, right? It’s a universal demand. If the tribal government could also be producing solar power, producing utility and energy, and if they would accept Junior as a currency to pay for the utility that would create additional demand and help with the circulation in the community. The funds, I kind of build on the idea of solar Commons. The funds can be generated by a solar Commons. That helps with setting up the system to promote circulation and use. I would then say, what sort of shifted my research focus away from that was a conversation actually attending another conference. This was organized at Salem State, just outside of Portland, Oregon. It was a group of MMT related people talking about or envisioning possibilities of using public banking for social provisioning. At that conference, I met a couple of people from, I think, the Osage Nation. There was also some legal experts. So we had some conversation about the legality of a tribe issuing their own currency. So the research I had found, or literature I have found at the time states that their sovereignty would include currency issuing. But they brought to my attention, and I only know a little bit about that, some treaty language which would prevent the tribal nations from marshaling resources for war. So there’s some language in the treaty regarding if you were to issue currency, then you could be raising resources that potentially engage in warfares with the states, and that’s certainly not allowed. Now, ultimately, which way or how it would go would have to be fought out in the court. As an economist, I am here to envision what our future society would like. I think of myself as a dreamer, also as a mother. We like to envision what kind of world we want our children to live in. So I’m envisioning but I also know there are some challenges regarding the legality of the currency, and that what has to be determined in the courtroom, not in the sphere of economics.
Billy Saas: In the MMT community, I think on this podcast, and more broadly, we understand our ambition to be in the service of democracy and equity and justice. So I’d be interested to know how that factored into or would factor into conversations you might have in approaching tribal nations about something like the Junia.
Josefina Li: I mean, full disclosure, I have not approached the tribal governments themselves, so I have talked with nonprofit that works on the tribal land with various things and just different stakeholders that have worked with them, but I have not brought the idea to the tribal leader themselves, so I don’t know exactly how they would react. I would like to get back to that idea someday just to see if there’s any possibility of implementation. But I certainly agree, and you’ve also given me a great idea on sort of the angle to pivot the idea. One of the benefits of the community currency is the participatory democracy aspect. When the currency is issued at the federal level, a lot of the decisions in the monetary system are so far removed from the everyday concern at the local level. So a lot of the proponents of community currency are citing the reason as sort of an insulation of the regional economy and also bringing the decision making process back to the community. Those two being really important to the design of the currency and the reason for using alternative currency. So I do know that the tribal nations very much value having that decision making right at the tribal level in a way that also respects their tradition and way of life and their values. So, yeah, I really appreciate that, that angle.
Billy Saas: I feel like it’s a sort of default or de facto angle for a lot of MMTers. So less like an angle, more like an assumption.
Scott Ferguson: Yeah, as opposed to just a technocratic economist who comes in and consults and advises and tells people what to do and disrupts…
Billy Saas: This isn’t micro loans, in other words. On the question of community currency and legality, I think that there’s something interesting going on here between your conversation with legal scholars and the folks from the Osage Nation and what happens in, say, Western Massachusetts with the Berkshares program. It’s my understanding that complementary currency, itself, exists in a kind of gray area, legally, broadly, something like Berkshires or other community complementary currencies. They could be taken out or subject to some kind of enforcement against them, but they’re not. They don’t tend to be. I wonder if I have some thoughts, if that same kind of leeway or flexibility would apply if it were introduced into a tribal nation context where there are treaties like that. Certainly nobody’s making the argument that the Berkshares are getting ready to militarize, or the Berkshires. It’s interesting that there is a kind of gray area, but it doesn’t stop in certain directions, but it seems like an obstacle that might present differently in the context of tribal nations. I wonder if you have any thoughts along those lines around the history of complementary currency and the kind of free pass that seems to be given for lots of those projects and experiments.
Josefina Li: Yeah. When I brought the idea up to the Osage people from legal backgrounds, I got the sense that it was dead on arrival, just no, but looking at the history is how the court has made decisions regarding what is deemed as a currency that comes in competition with the US dollar and what is not. I think that’s probably an area for further research. There also might be a forthcoming paper (in the American Review of Political Economy) by Ely Fair from Knox college, attacks the history of complementary currency and how it’s been thought out in the courtrooms, and seems like how much it resembles US dollars is used for primarily exchanges, circulations or use value, the level, the scale of acceptability, and the geographic location, distribution of the trade. These are all factors that play into whether something is legal or not. Ultimately, the judging factor is the federal government does not want currency to be replacing the US dollars and in competition with it. It’s also the emission of the currency, which also means some gray area and room for digital currency. We’re talking about new developments, the development of digital currency and a new way to keep track of the ledger. It’s definitely something communities can look into as a way around some of the constitutional restrictions on local state entities or other organizations issuing currency. This is certainly something I can circle back to and bring it back to the local nations here to see if it’s possible. Yeah, I feel like there’s still room. Again. I’m just not a legal scholar who wants to challenge that in one way or another.
Scott Ferguson: Yeah, that makes sense. I do think it’s worth stating aloud some of the tacit assumptions that structure these contests and these decisions and the precedents, right? So obviously, we’re talking about a history of racism and settler colonialism that’s structuring the language of these treaties and this legal language, right? As opposed to, I mean, let’s take a radical counter example. You know, what was it? A week or so ago, Donald Trump promised if he wins the election to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve or something like this. Bitcoin, along this logic, would be competition with the dollar. But here we have a former President of the United States saying that he would establish this at the federal level. So I recognize that what your project is to think about a more democratic economic design for peoples who are struggling and have suffered from oppression, and these legal structures are real obstacles. But I think right, obviously the broader framework and the broader historical politics are pretty glaringly racist and sort of arbitrary or hypocritical, right? What counts as a form of credit that threatens the dollar is not an objective, neutral question?
Josefina Li: Yeah, absolutely. And just to add on, on top of that, I think the reason we’re calling for local currency for the tribal nations or any community needing to have an alternative currency is because their needs are not met by the federal dollars. And the Berkshare is a great and relatively long lasting system, but a closer examination will reveal that the incentive for participants to engage with this dual, it’s essentially a dual currency system and to deal with the annoyance of exchanging, keeping track of that is that discount. So they, I think it’s a 90 cents on $1 or 95 cents on $1 discount for using the Berkshare. It’s used predominantly in the farmers market for produce. So the community currency, in that sense, also at a freely exchangeable or convertible to the US dollars, really limits that currency’s ability to mobilize underutilized resources. You’re not really issuing or putting more money supply into the economy, if anyone is free to exchange it back to the dollars, at a one to one ratio. Also, for those that have read the MMT literature, would know this free, convertible currency is essentially like a foreign government that has their currency pegged to US dollars. So they’re not really monopoly issuers of that currency, which means they do not have both the fiscal and monetary tools at their disposal. If they are not free to issue their currency, instead it is pegged, they’re limited by the supply of US dollars. That also means they have to import whatever monetary policy that the US is implementing, and that essentially means the community is importing whatever macro economic policy at the federal level. That, in a sense, kind of defeats the purpose of implementing a local currency, because the community has underemployment and capacity for human resources. So, legally, a local money that succeeds at becoming the term they use in the legal sentencing was, not sure if sentencing is the right word, is “ordinary”. So if the currency becomes ordinary, it becomes legal. But for a local currency to be successful at its economic goals, it needs to be ordinary. We want it to be circulating for that Keynesian multiplier effect to kick in. So a local money which succeeds at becoming ordinary may also succeed at being illegal. I think that just adds a level of kind of irony to all of this.
Billy Saas: I wonder if it’s not the emission so much or the fact of the currency existing, a complimentary or community currency, for example, again, the Berkshares. That’s not the threat, the fact that it exists, and circulates and is emitted and used in exchange, but that perhaps in the context, the very reason that you are critiquing those currencies for their ignorance of or unawareness of tax driven money. The fact that money tends to derive its value from being tax driven. In the context of tribal nations, if they were to roll out something like this currency, it would not actually rise to the level of threat or noteworthy competition until it was collected back in taxes by that local government. That may be the missing ingredient, why complementary currencies have been sort of untroubled or not very notably challenged is because of that ignorance. Because once there become two sovereigns who are collecting taxes, that’s where the threat comes from. That’s the real competition. Because otherwise, like you say, it’s a parallel currency that is always going to be sort of redeemed in dollars, but if you don’t have to redeem it in dollars, then maybe that’s the source of competition. What do you think?
Josefina Li: Yeah, I mean, if you don’t have to redeem for dollars, then it certainly is a competitive force. I would also add, when I use the word tax, many remind me that for everyday people, who do not think in the framework of tax driven money, there’s a negative connotation associated with tax. It is something to take away from the people, and in a community that is so impoverished, to think that there could be even more added on to what they’ve already been asked for, seems like a really hard starting point. I do think pivoting and highlighting the part of the participatory democracy aspect could be more appealing. We’re avoiding the use of the term tax. We know it’s not tax, it’s that obligation, it’s that debt relation. It’s knowing that you can ultimately settle some sort of obligation with this money or thing or zhooniya. That’s what makes people want to accept it. So getting past and understanding that could be a game changer.
Scott Ferguson: This is probably a good time to pivot to some of your more recent work in your dissertation project, where you’re trying to bring ideas from Ecological Economics and feminist economics into a kind of synthetic dialog with Modern Monetary Theory and adjacent heterodox thinking. Maybe you can walk us through how you came to these ideas, and why they’re so important for you.
Josefina Li: I’ve been sort of stewed and raised out of the job guarantee and MMT tradition, having had key people like Stephanie Kelton, Randy Wray and Mathew Forstater as my teachers. Dr Forstater pointed me in the right direction. The names are Donatella Alessandrini. I became aware of this political Italian feminist group and their writing, including Sylvia Federici and others. I have learned some ecofeminism in grad school. I have come to another, in an earlier chapter of my dissertation, outline this fundamental incompatibility between the capitalist mode of production and sustainability and ecofeminism is kind of shared this, this fundamental principle that capitalism is built or necessarily requires the exploitation of nature and women and slavery, the colonial. All of that is how capitalism came to be. Federici’s work in Caliban and the Witch should kind of track the historical transition from feudalism to capitalism to show this exploitation and situating an ecofeminism is double exploitation of the environment and of women. Having been a woman who has engaged in the role of social reproduction, the more I engage with their literature, the more I could relate and appreciate the way that the care economy is theorized in their framework. Because oftentimes when we think of the feminist movement, we think of increasing female labor force participation rates. We think of incorporating females into the market economy. Even, you know, in the context of the care work, how can we do so much? How can we do that? It just tracks the last 100 years. It’s this massive market type of commodification of work that is produced in the home front. You know, as the family grows to a dual income family, a lot of time, we become time poor. The concept of time poverty is real, and so therefore you have to make up the time lost by saving it somewhere else. And so that’s when packaged food, frozen meals, you know, childcare, all of these become available and commodified. The industrialized food production system is at the backbone of modern dual income family households. As I’m living through this myself, I’m constantly struggling between, do I save the time and whip a meal together with something that’s easily off the pulled off the shelf from a store, but the same time I value so much of getting down on my knees and gardening, picking off the excess tomato leaves, growing a garden, and then preparing the meal that is from the land and table. This constant pull of how the time is spent between production in the market economy and reproduction in the household front. When I engaged with the Italian political feminist work, it all made sense. This divide between the sphere of social reproduction and production was not so much of a divide before the Industrial Revolution. In my work, I started with a little bit of history of economic thought. So I thought it was important to trace back to the classical political writers and see how wage is seen in the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and even Marx himself. So I write a little bit on wages as a social reproduction, because when you’re writing in the context of classes, you have labor, capital, and a landlord. You have these classes that are essentially competing for the outputs, each making a claim of the output based on their property ownership. Do you own labor power? You earn a wage? Do you own land? You earn rents. You are a property owner, then you earn profits or claim. Everyone can make a claim. Even though we know from the writings of mainly classical political writers with a labor theory of value, they would say that labor is the primary creation or source of profit and economic output. But because of the framework of this class struggle, wage is a result of this power dynamic and struggle amongst the classes and Smith was very clear that the Capitalists have the upper hand in this struggle. They are more likely to hold out for much longer than the labor and I mean, also a plug. This is why we need to have a labor union. Even though the capitalist class would try to squeeze Labor Wages as low as possible, they understand that, at the very minimum, there needs to be a level to allow the social reproduction of the laboring population. Which is also why I have situated my research and my thinking in the concept of social provisioning. So economics is not a study of scarce resources among competing ends, but rather a study of social provisioning, that is how society organized themselves for social provision, and that includes social reproduction. For so many women, and through the division of labor and market economy, the work that used to be done and still needs to be done, the social reproduction still needs to be done, became something outside of the market. If economists are only studying market activities or market production, we’re overlooking an entire sector, so huge, such a sector in the economy. So the more I engage with the feminist literature, the more I’m thinking how can the job guarantee and MMT literature also serve some of these concerns in the feminist writing? Some of the feminist including Alessandrini, as also they were aware of the job guarantee proposal. Their one critique was the job guarantee is saying, everyone who’s willing and able to work shows up and gets paid a going wage. But we all know that wage as an institution post the classical political writers, it became a prize that is set in the labor market through competitive forces. So wages are part of this capitalist market production system. It comes with everything else that comes with commodification of work, of female or women’s work. So they have that critique of wage institutions as the backbone of job guarantee. So I am thinking to myself, job guarantee has so many other benefits, including it being, if it’s implemented at the government level, which has non capitalist social objectives, they do not have to be profit driven. Does that create space for recognizing the alternative livelihood, recognizing, not valuation, using the word valorization of women’s work and where, how does community currency fit in? How does community production fit in? That’s kind of how it all started, because they do fit together.
Billy Saas: What have you discovered, and what do you make of the prospects of this project in this liminal moment?
Josefina Li: Yeah, that’s a great question. I really appreciate that question. I feel really optimistic with this synthesizing work of job guarantee, MMT, feminist economics, the sustainability aspect. I do think that a community powered job guarantee can be a vehicle to achieve social justice and sustainability. I think we can start from, starting from the basics. For the listeners who are maybe not as familiar with the job guarantee idea, I’m going to reiterate its non capitalist mode of production that came from Abba Lerner’s functional finance tradition. In functional financing, the key being the functional, it opens up a whole space of thinking about financing, thinking about money. Because if we’re allowed to pursue other social and environmental objectives, and we also know from a variety of writers, including Jakob Feinig, who presented on the same panel as me back at the conference, glad to see that his book is out, had demonstrated to readers that money as a social institution is shaped by social and political forces. It represents power relations and also gender hierarchy, but it’s also malleable. It is a social technology that can be redesigned and produced, and I’m glad to hear, Billy, that you have your students engaging in that exact exercise in the classroom. Understanding. MMT means that we have a new way of thinking of money and to design it in a way to accomplish the things we want to accomplish. A job guarantee in the same long train of thoughts. In designing the program, there’s space to reinvent the meaning of work and employment. Jobs could be created to address justice and sustainability. Going back to the tribal proposal, there’s a lot of gap of community needs that could be fulfilled by a community currency powered job guarantee. There’s a lot of trails that could be updated. We know there are a lot of community needs which are not fulfilled by private markets. Because there’s no profits to be generated. It does not mean they do not function. They do not provide important social functioning or environmental sustainability. Tying it back to the feminist perspective, I think I’m being really optimistic, because just the simple fact that we are bringing to light this whole sphere of social reproduction, and that it creates value, and not just to think of it as non market activities, or think of it as the care economy or the Love economy that women engage with because they love. Let’s do the right thing, to valorize the work so that we could finally rediscover what love means. If anything we learned from the global pandemic is when there is a gap in the social reproduction, someone needs to step in and fill that gap. And oftentimes we see it’s women, where migrant workers, or intersectionality is real. It’s migrant women, immigrant women, women of color doing, performing those jobs. It also means the traditional idea of incorporating women into the capitalist market production will somehow solve all the problems. Well, no, it would just follow this path of least resistance, if you will, right? So, yes, you incorporate the white women into the market economy, but then all the social reproduction just gets pushed onto the women of color, black women. So that was some of the other critiques that black feminist writers had early on to feminist writing in general. Not to mention, the traditional benefits that come with job guarantee, which I’m sure many of your audience are familiar with: it being a buffer stock that sets the floor of pricing for labor skills, maintenance and being complementary to the private sector. Perhaps we need to address the feminist issue, their critique of wage being in what they call the wage institution. So maybe calling it a social provisioning gift. But it’s not just what we call it. The work that we’re doing at home, I’m just going to give food production as an example. Food production is such a window that allows us to just look at all of the non-market activities, how it’s been overlooked, from growing food from the garden or preparing a meal, meal prepping, freezing, or foraging food. There’s so much that goes into food production that shows love, but also it is the bedrock of the neighboring population being able to perform their productive work in the market economy. So essentially, the rest of the economy, the capitalist system, rests on the work of social reproduction that is not recognized. We’re not just paying them a wage, but also recognizing their contribution to our social provision. Yeah, so if a woman wants to be a girl power and as a CEO of a company, that’s great. But if they just want to provide healthy meals to their family, that work also needs to be recognized. I think a community currency powered job guarantee would allow for this alternative valorization of a different livelihood. One of the sociologists used the term “radical homemaking”. I love that idea of radicalizing just in the kitchen.
Scott Ferguson: This is one of the first things that became clear to me and the most exciting to me when I first came to Modern Monetary Theory and heterodox understandings of money and credit. Once I unlearned the idea that money was simply just an expression of a private market economy and simply an expression of the capitalist mode of production, it precisely opened up alternative frameworks, like what you’re calling the social provisioning framework, and allowed us to think that we can do lots of different things with money that isn’t just about exploitative wage labor. I also was very compelled of what this meant for feminist causes and impulses, intersectional feminist impulses, precisely for socializing care work. So I really, really appreciate this work that you’re doing. I think I have a comment and then a question. One comment is, I think one of the many reasons we like to invite people like you onto our podcast to discuss your work is because, I think in the larger culture, MMT has some recognition, but it’s often treated as sort of one technocratic explanation for how things work and what we can do, as against another one. I don’t blame the MMT messaging for that, I think that’s the context that we’re in. I think somebody like Stephanie Kelton has to bring a certain kind of technical expertise to the table and fight toe to toe with people like Jason Furman or Larry Summers, and there’s a gendered element there as well. But I think so often MMT ends up needing to defend itself on technocratic grounds that what gets lost in the broader public is all the sort of rich not just potential of of the framework, but all the rich work that’s going on pedagogically in institutions like UMKC and people asking more and more questions, right? It’s not over. MMT isn’t done. It’s an ongoing project. So I just really like talking to and platforming you and your work and others just to honor that kind of creativity and problem solving that keeps going on. So that’s my comment. My question is, do you have thoughts in your work about specific programs, right? So you know one option is just to offer wages for housework, and that could come in the form of welfare benefits or care benefits. It could be a kind of laissez faire approach which just says here is access to money, to credit, in thanks for the work that you do in your home. And there’s probably a place for that. But what about socializing and restructuring feminized and racialized care work? What kinds of programs, public programs, whether it’s at the community level or at larger scales. Do you find yourself thinking about, meditating on, maybe developing ideas about?
Josefina Li: In my free time, what very little I have, that’s what I meditate on and focus on. I mean, I love the concept of sociological imagination. I think we all need a little imagination. And so also, I was just at Dr Forstater’s recent workshop where he had shared some alternative methodology, and Adolf Lowe being the one of the people he had cited his instrumentalism, which essentially says, you start with the vision, your goal, where do you want to get to? Then you work backwards. So that’s a little bit kind of how I’m thinking this through. I know the end result is we want to have some sort of post capitalist society that’s socially just and environmentally sustainable. We know that the current capitalist mode of production is destroying that. So what do we need to have in between, to work backwards so we can get to that, to that goal? I certainly think there is still a place for the work that Kelton is doing at the federal level. We’re still going to be pushing for a Green New Deal, job guarantee. But there’s also so much power in the idea of Commoning, and I think we can accomplish that Commoning idea at The community level. In my survey of different community complementary currencies that existed, Bristol pounds being one that is linked to a municipal tax. So there has been a kind of a renewed, maybe a resurgence, of the thinking of designing community currency with a tax component, so working with municipal or county level governments for the implementation of this community currency, because their tax base is also really wide and the services they provide are all community based. My kids pay the cities for their swimming lessons. We use the State Park and the city skate park extensively. They also provide a lot of youth program campaigns. So these are all services that could be settled in the currency. So, calling it wages or not, recognizing the work that’s done in the social reproduction sphere would mean that for women who are growing a garden or a foraging mushrooms to put on the table that are never sold in the market economy, that work can now be recognized, and I don’t know if compensated is the right…or enumerated, recognized for their contribution in this currency. The currency has an emphasis on a really strong local emphasis. If it’s local, borrowing some of the lessons from community currencies that are “LETS” which stands for Local Exchange Trade System to boost more local exchanges so that the production here where the money is to value. Let me organize my thoughts here.
Scott Ferguson: No problem.
Josefina Li: Money is circulated, issued, produced to recognize the use value rather than the exchange value, so much as the dollars. To quote someone, I can’t remember who recently I read, we’re using improved means to achieve unimproved ends. If we’re realizing the end is a just, sustainable society where I know the name of the farmers that raised the cow that’s sitting on my table, and I know those kinds of production, local production, also has a much lower ecological footprints. By valuing and encouraging these local production, social production, in providing the currency to facilitate that exchange, it has the benefit of both ecological sustainability as well as the gender conscientiousness, recognizing the value of the work in caring and loving. I don’t know if I’m answering your question on designing this currency. I know there has to be a tax component, and the more additional sort of add on demand there is, the stronger this currency will be. So again, I would revisit two things, food and energy. That is, two things that we cannot live without. As I also mentioned, Local production of food and energy also have much lower, again, ecological footprints. So if energy could be locally sourced with solar production, and if food can be locally produced and purchased, exchanged, if you consider those as you know the debt relation when you use or buy or consume those things. If that debt can be settled with the community currency, that also broadens the base of the demand. Yeah, I certainly invite everyone to join me in a little re-envisioning, or envisioning.
Scott Ferguson: All of that makes a lot of sense to me, and all that is very exciting. I was also imagining, rather than individual homemakers foraging by themselves, there could be a foraging cooperative and a foraging bank and a seed bank. Not that these things don’t exist. They do exist, but not everywhere. I guess I was just interested in some ideas for organizations, groups, facilitations that would do the work of more than just offering a basic income, right? Say, you’re doing this work at home. We know it’s hard. Here’s some welfare benefits for it. And for some people that might be what they need. But I also think we all share a desire to not just remunerate the work that is done in the home, but rather transform it and make it less of a burden, socialize it, transform it, make it more joyous.
Josefina Li: Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s really the million dollar question here. I don’t pretend to have the answer. I think the entity, and there’s also a lot of legal questions and how to set this up with the city or the county trustee to a bank that then issues and monitors and tracks the digital ledger of the currency that could be one way. Keep in mind, this is a job guarantee, so it’s not just providing an income to stay at home moms for foraging and cooking. But also anyone who is unemployed and has skills and ways to contribute or wants to do, I know local nonprofits are under a lot of pressure to provide a lot of resources to much needed community, and they’re also kind of in competition with one another on a limited pool of volunteers in the community.
Scott Ferguson: And grants.
Josefina Li: Right? So the currency could also, I’m just now again, adding another demand employee were essentially as a bonus wage to people who are performing volunteer or civic duties in the community. Again, there has been much literature written on the different green jobs, maybe perhaps more labor intensive but environmentally sustainable jobs that could be performed by the job guarantee population. There is one idea by Ely Fair. In this proposal, they said the city would impose this Civic tax. It has to also be readily available for people to get a hold of this currency. So if you’re not participating in this job guarantee program, you’re not working for the city, or you’re not foraging right, or preparing a meal, you can also buy it from the city at $20 US dollars. That, again, sets a floor of wage offering, effectively driving up the real wages in the private sector. So there’s a lot of different ideas we’re getting into the practical nitty gritties, details of designing the currency. Again, I don’t have all of the answers. I hope my contribution is really for us to, first of all, a community currency, redesigning it, we have to add a tax driven component to it, and broaden the base to bring in food and energy production. The higher the acceptability. It should not be designed as a system of free convertibility to the US dollars. That, we do know. I don’t have the answer for you. I’m sorry.
Billy Saas: You’ve got the vision, though, and we’re very much into the visioning. On that note, you mentioned a couple times part of that vision being post capitalist, but I think for some listeners and for some readers of MMT and adjacent literatures, you say post capitalist, they might presume or often, in Marxist literature particularly, post capitalist means post money. Or it implicates or implies post money. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Money will continue to play. In fact, we’ll have a central role in this post capitalist imaginary that we that you’re providing us with.
Josefina Li: Yeah, I really appreciate that comment. Absolutely. You know, as we all know, in the understanding of money as a debt relation, it’s a set of relationships. In fact, one other benefit I don’t know if I’ve mentioned with community or local currency, is through this network of trading, you’re also strengthening community networks and these community local relationships. For someone who is cooking a meal at home, or someone else might have the skills of growing just the best tomatoes in their garden, we have a lot of forests here, so lots of woodworkers. They can make nice cabinetry. I might know a handful of people that I trade with, but without the local currency, that trade will be very limited to a very small circle. The idea of a local currency is –and recognizing money as, again, the debt relation–will facilitate and encourage reciprocity exchanging the community so that someone maybe I’ve never met, I could purchase a meal at her home and try some authentic frying taco and someone else could do you know, my driveway in exchange for this doesn’t have to be trading, right? It’s not bartering anymore thanks to the existence of a digital, modernized local currency. So post capitalist definitely does not mean post money. In fact, money as a debt relation has long existed before. It probably has existed as long as written language or any writing system.
Scott Ferguson: Jo Li, thanks so much for joining us on Money on the Left. We really appreciated your visit with us.
Josefina Li: Thank you so much for having me. I’ve also learned a lot, and you’ve also given me some great insights and ideas for further studies.
* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Mike Lewis (transcription), & Robert Rusch (graphic art)