Episode 247 – Degrowth and MMT with Christopher Olk and Colleen Schneider

Macro N Cheese – Episode 247
Degrowth and MMT with Christopher Olk and Colleen Schneider
October 21, 2023

[00:00:00] Christopher Olk [Intro/Music]: Basically, we, in capitalist economies, try to satisfy our needs using commodities, but there’s never enough of the commodities that everyone would need to satisfy their needs. So degrowth really starts from this diagnosis and then proposes resource efficient public provisioning systems to counter that.

[00:00:27] Colleen Schneider [Intro/Music]: The issue that had for a long time been the Achilles heel of degrowth, that if you’re degrowing an economy, you’re shrinking the tax base, therefore, how are you going to pay for all these climate policies that you want? This is just not a coherent argument and it’s not something that we need to buy into.

[00:01:35] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43] Steven Grumbine: Alright This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. We are going to be going back to my old friend, degrowth and we’re going to blend it once again with my other good friend, Modern Monetary Theory. And we might even sprinkle in some ecological economics and justice throughout the mix. But I’ve got two really inspiring people that I’m going to be talking to.

They co-authored a paper called How to Pay for Saving the World: Modern Monetary Theory for a Degrowth Transition. And I know this term ‘degrowth’ bothers some people, and here’s to hoping you get over that, because I want to survive, and I think everybody wants to survive. Acknowledging what we’re up against is probably the most important, and maybe even the most challenging, because it’s scary.

Because we haven’t had a solution for how to pay for all the destruction that we’ve done, not only with our excesses in the global north, but the predation on the global south. So, these scholars that I’m bringing on today wrote this great paper. And my guests are Christopher Olk and Colleen Schneider.

Colleen Schneider is a PhD student and research assistant in the Institute for Ecological Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. She is also a lecturer at Torrens University, and she has a BA in physics from UC Berkeley and master of science and socio-ecological economics and policy from WU. Her research focuses on the political economy of monetary and fiscal policy in a social-ecological transformation.

Her recent work brings an MMT informed lens to degrowth scholarship. She teaches courses in social ecological economics and the intersection of money, society and environment. And has also worked and published in the field of environmental justice.

Also, Christopher Olk is a PhD candidate in political economy at Free University in Berlin. His current research focuses on the links between international monetary power, offshore finance, and fossil fuels. In a recently published research article co-authored with Jason Hickel, Christopher and Colleen propose a synthesis of MMT and eco-socialist degrowth. And that is the subject of our conversation.

Welcome Colleen and Christopher. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today.

[00:04:22] Christopher Olk: Thank you for inviting us, Steve. It’s great to be here.

[00:04:25] Colleen Schneider: Yeah, likewise.

[00:04:27] Grumbine: I had the opportunity to meet Colleen, I started to take a course at Torrens University. Steven Hail and the whole gang over there has done amazing work putting together an MMT school with the focus on ecological justice. I met Steven a number of years ago, back in 2017, and he’s been a supporter of ours since then. It’s really nice to see the advancements in that space.

So why don’t you tell me a little bit about what prompted you getting together, first of all, with Jason Hickel. How did you get together with him and write this paper?

[00:05:09] Olk: Well, I think I can speak for both of us when I say that we both were really into some degrowth and ecological economics ideas. So we knew who Jason was, of course, and at least myself and a lot of friends around me, we were always puzzled by the gap of thinking about public finance really, and how to finance all the stuff, how to fund the stuff that we knew we wanted and we needed from a degrowth perspective.

And then a few years ago, MMT just popped up everywhere throughout the internet and… Wait a minute, this is basically telling us we can democratically decide about the priorities of what we want to do. And apparently Jason had a very similar idea, so he published a blog post on his personal blog, which I read.

And when I started writing up some of my own thinking, I thought it would be a good idea to contact Jason and we went. The rest is history.

[00:06:09] Grumbine: Very good. Colleen, I heard a little bit of your story. How did you come to MMT and degrowth as well?

[00:06:18] Schneider: Yeah. So, I’m within the field of ecological economics myself and degrowth has just seemed to me that if you understand what’s going on – not just with the climate, more broadly ecologically – then it really seems the logical place to go from that logical orientation to take with an ecological economics, or it certainly was for me. And then I at some point became a bit obsessed with, I’d say, monetary theory and monetary history and economic history in this way. And coming to money from this historical perspective and then being introduced to MMT. MMT made so much sense. This really clicked to me, having taken this historical perspective on money. And so really these were just two points of interest or passion really, that it made perfect sense to come together on.

And Chris and I were both part of a post-growth economics network and we started some group discussions in there around MMT and post-growth economics, and our work together really stemmed from that point.

[00:07:21] Grumbine: As an activist, I keep looking for people like you and you two are rare. There’s a lot of good degrowth people. There’s a lot of really good MMT people. There are not a lot of really good MMT-degrowth people. So you guys are truly in rarefied air.

It’s really amazing because in talking with people from the degrowth perspective, I spoke to a nice gentleman, Lorenz Keyszer, some time ago and Matthias Schmelzer, who is one of the people you quote in here, he’s written several great degrowth books as well, but when I talked to him he said, ‘I’m unfamiliar with MMT.’

Here you’ve got the value system that we desperately need to survive and the monetary understanding of how to enable that to happen. And to me, this is where you become a shining example of all the great things we can accomplish. Reading Jason Hickel’s work, The Divide and Less is More, suddenly I heard him with an MMT angle. Job guarantee. Universal basic services. It was extremely exciting because the wind is at the back of MMT and degrowth.

This is an up and coming thing and you guys are at the forefront of it. So kudos. Let’s just jump into your work. You start off within your abstract describing how degrowth didn’t really have a good understanding of a monetary policy and the MMTers lack the degrowth. Can you talk a little bit about that synthesis?

[00:09:04] Olk: Yeah, well, I think first of all, it’s really interesting to notice how degrowth and MMT both share this fundamental opposition to artificial scarcity, to types of scarcity that aren’t really necessary or legitimate. And in the case of MMT, of course, it’s this myth, this bizarre idea that states somehow need to pay attention to how much money they create because they might run out of it, which is ultimately what underlies a lot of mainstream economic thinking. So they’re opposed to the artificial scarcity of money, whereas degrowth – and I think this is really important for folks to understand – degrowth is in a way opposed to the artificial scarcity of resource efficient needs satisfiers. So basically we, in capitalist economies, try to satisfy our needs using commodities, but there’s never enough of the commodities that everyone would need to satisfy their needs. So degrowth really starts from this diagnosis and then proposes resource-efficient public provisioning systems to counter that. And I think this is one of the points where we start off seeing potential for overlap and synthesis, this common opposition to artificial scarcity.

[00:10:24] Grumbine: The austerity narrative has definitely got to be overcome. We spoke with Clara Mattei not too long ago. She wrote a great book called The Capital Order. How economists invented austerity, basically. We call it the Trinity of austerity with fiscal austerity, monetary austerity, and then the power of the sack, the control of labor.

And you can see how capitalist forces have twisted and perverted these relationships. Colleen, based on the understanding of false scarcity of money, how do we counter the austerity narrative?

[00:11:05] Schneider: Yeah, a bit of it on what Chris said here. What a lot of heterodox economics does is reorient our understanding of what the economy is and what the economy is for. So as opposed to the mainstream idea that it’s aiming to be an efficient allocation of inherently scarce resources, the perspective within ecological economics or in other strains of heterodox economics would look at the economy itself much differently.

We take the understanding that resources themselves are constructed, and that the economy is really systems of social provisioning with the intent to meet needs. And this includes money in the monetary system as well. So the monetary system itself – of course, your MMT listeners know this – is socially constructed.

And we can then, if we have the democratic impetus and the institutional structure, we can orient that system towards meeting needs rather than towards capital accumulation. So the possibility is there. There’s nothing inherent in money itself or in the idea of resources themselves that imply scarcity or a particular type of use.

These are things that are constructed one way and can be constructed another way.

[00:12:16] Grumbine: I’ve talked with a lot of individuals and my understanding comes clearly from their work. Fadhel Kaboub and Ndongo Samba Sylla talk about decolonizing Africa. We look at the global south as a whole. But a lot is changing there. Africa has been predated upon to make life a little easier for the north, especially the elite. Degrowth is here to challenge that to some extent. I think it largely puts the bullseye on that predation. I know Fadhel looks at climate reparations. You take a totally different approach. How do we look at the global north and the global south? Let’s set the stage for this paper and the concept of degrowth.

[00:13:10] Olk: Yeah. So I think just like you said, the global north really is living off a lot of resources that are transferred to it from the global south. And there’s not much in terms of resources flowing the other way. So the MMT line that what we can do is limited, not by some scarcity of money, but by the actual resources that we can mobilize towards the priorities that we set.

And our degrowth and the decolonial perspectives that really have influenced degrowth historically and continue to do so today, what that brings to the table is acknowledging that a lot of the resources that we could potentially mobilize in the global north really would be drawn from countries that would rather need them themselves.

So that’s one of the reasons besides other ecological constraints, why we really need to incorporate the actual limits, and this includes limits in terms of global justice. And that means that we have to think even harder about what priorities to devote the resources to that we have and that we can domestically realize.

[00:14:24] Grumbine: What comes first in this equation? Is it the predation on the global south or is it the climate crisis? How would you prioritize them? And do you have to, or are they one and the same?

[00:14:37] Schneider: I think very much that they’re one and the same. They both stem from this logic of othering, whether this is an othering of nature from human or an othering of people. They both stem from this logic of othering and from disconnection that allows us to both exploit nature and to exploit people. And cutting through both of those, I think it’s really two sides of the same coin.

Because as you said, Steve, capitalism is based on exploitation, it’s a system based upon colonial plunder. And these two things are wrapped up together and you can see this now. We talked about the net appropriation of resources, also money, embodied land, embodied labor that goes from the global south to the global north.

And this leaves the most ecologically damaging industries in production happening in the global south while at the same time, the populations of the global south are being exploited. These are two things that are inherently tied together and to effectively address one, you have to effectively address both.

[00:15:41] Grumbine: Your paper starts out with a research gap. We’ve touched on this, but I find it fascinating how the MMT and degrowth had not quite come together yet. I don’t see how the market, without intentional government intervention, meets any of these needs. And yet the research continues to put out market-based solutions.

We keep hearing greenwashing. If you follow the funding tree, it doesn’t take long to get to a capitalist institution that has ulterior motives. What do you make of that research gap? Is it that there’s no money in saving the planet? There’s only money in capitalism.

[00:16:23] Olk: First of all, I’d say it’s so nice that you’re so excited about Colleen and me and Jason, but there’s been people before us working on this.

[00:16:32] Grumbine: Sure.

[00:16:33] Olk: Actually, one of the most exciting things is, as you also said, that we’re becoming more and more people. So there’s really a lot of great folks who are talking about this. You mentioned Fadhel and Ndongo. But I think what accounts for the gap that there certainly is, is really that this understanding of money as actually a public good that has been privately appropriated. We’ve lived through decades of neoliberal policy, hegemony and financialization that has basically privatized the public good of money.

And so far, a lot of thinkers in degrowth and ecological economics have been within this mindset and haven’t rediscovered the public nature of money. And I think Colleen can add a lot to that from her time in the rabbit hole of monetary theory and history.

[00:17:31] Schneider: And I would add on the flip side of that, part of the reason the term degrowth is so confronting is that growth is really embedded into our psyche as what’s good, as what’s necessary. And it is what has, to a large extent, alleviated a lot of the social conflicts that are inherent in capitalism. So, from an economic perspective, the approach of degrowth is still relatively fringe and that the hegemony of mainstream economics is still quite strong.

Although I do genuinely think this is shifting, but most people who are part of MMT scholarship are coming from a more post-Keynesian, often, economics background, but it’s still embedded within this growth logic. So I think this is also part of why there hasn’t been as much overlap between these two fields.

[00:18:23] Grumbine: Christopher, thank you so much for bringing up all the other shoulders that we’re standing on right now that have done great work. It’s just been so few that have synthesized the whole picture. And that’s, I think really what I’m focused on is the blending of the two. But you’re exactly right. There’s so much work. That work is still valid.

It just needs to be reconsidered and reimagined with an understanding of a public money. But one of the things that I also find interesting, because Colleen, you brought up the idea that most of them are post-Keynesian and you find a lot of resistance to understanding Marx and Engels and other socialist theorists, class-based theories, reading Lenin, and finance capital. When we see the effects of that through the IMF, as we watched BRICS come into play, providing an opportunity to maybe reimagine finance, that countervailing force. How do you see that impacting the opportunity to change the narrative?

[00:19:33] Schneider: There’s been attempts in the past, post-Bretton Woods, to shift the structure of the global monetary order. And I would say the power alignment was such that those ideas were roughly shut down. But perhaps with a more broader shift we’re seeing in the global order, more increasing power of China, that there is more of a power shift. But I think the existing institutions… I don’t know, actually, what I think the capacity for change with the existing institutional monetary structure is.

Chris, do you have thoughts on this?

[00:20:11] Olk: Yeah, I would think I have to say that I’m very skeptical of hopes that we can just change the international monetary order. And I’m not sure if I would rely on, let’s say, inter-imperialist competition for that. I think ultimately change is just a matter of organizing. And I think Lenin would agree, Steve, that change comes usually from the periphery of the world system, from those on whose shoulders all the costs of capital accumulation are imposed.

And that includes working classes in the North, but it also includes working classes and peasants in the South and maybe what we can hope for is that there’s an increasing consciousness around the importance of money and finance in progressive movements around the world.

And just to highlight one, there’s a huge international movement – or, well, it’s not huge yet, but let’s hope, but huge in the sense that it encompasses activists in a lot of countries – called Debt for Climate, really focused on the idea that international monetary debt is a key driver of extraction of fossil fuels and other environmentally damaging stuff. So countries like Nigeria and Argentina, which are two countries where the movement is very strong, really have to extract fossil fuels and minerals, and so on, just to pay back their dollar-denominated debt.

And Fadhel and Ndongo have done outstanding work on these links. But I think that’s one thing that would make me hopeful that the climate movement, the labor movement, in some parts increasingly, maybe, acknowledges the role of international monetary and financial power asymmetries as well as, of course, the completely outsized power of finance in our economies.

[00:22:09] Grumbine: The degrowth theorists have not adopted the MMT framework as of yet and hopefully will. What does MMT provide within the framework that enables and empowers a degrowth agenda? If we’re saying we can use the state to finance and fund the capacity to do public great work is there. Is it just a matter of them beginning to understand this and incorporate it?

Or is there a larger orthodoxy that is blocking that convergence? What is the role of the orthodox here in terms of allowing degrowth and MMT to come together?

[00:22:58] Olk: I think what MMT really provides is it enables us to mobilize people and actually to get people really, really angry at what they’ve been told for years, namely, we can’t have the things that we want and that we need because there’s just no money. So I think, ultimately, I see MMT as a tool in a broader struggle. You just get rid of this myth that’s constantly been in the way of organizing for change.

And you, basically, can show people we could have this if we democratically took the power to get it. And I think this is extremely useful, not only in terms of degrowth scholarship or theory, but really activism and organizing.

[00:23:55] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a non profit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:24:46] Grumbine: Let me just say, this has been my mantra: MMT is a tool for radicalizing people. For an awakening to allowing them to see the realm of possibilities is far greater than the one degree that they allow us to see the world through.

Colleen, what is your perspective in terms of being able to leverage the MMT lens within degrowth. How would that be presented from an academic perspective to other scholars? Is there an openness to it or is there skepticism or rejection?

[00:25:23] Schneider: It’s all there. I would actually mention that, strategically, part of the reason we chose to publish this paper in the Journal of Ecological Economics was to bring this idea to those interested in degrowth and ecological economics. To say, ‘look, MMT is here, this is a legitimate monetary theory that really has this beautiful natural synthesis with degrowth.’

And to the point you both made, it has the capacity to radicalize or to motivate people that what we’re trying to do here, we can do. There aren’t financial constraints to this. The issue that had for a long time been the Achilles heel of degrowth, that if you’re degrowing an economy, you’re shrinking the tax base. Therefore, how are you going to pay for all these climate policies that you want? This is just not a coherent argument, and it’s not something that we need to buy into. And I think both as degrowth is growing and MMT itself has grown massively in the last years, there will continue to be more overlap here.

And we’re just hoping to be a part of showcasing the beautiful synthesis between these two.

[00:26:27] Grumbine: That’s very powerful. I appreciate you adding that texture there. When discussing this stuff, even from people that understand, they say, it’s ridiculous. What are you talking about? Degrowth? That means you’re going to cut GDP.’

MMT is all about showing people that we can spend more. But yet it’s really about how that spending is done and then about constraining the nonessentials.

Can you give me your best explanation of how a steady state economy can survive with this degrowth, knowing the trappings of capitalism that growth allows to obscure. Those contradictions come loud and clear. How do you make it so that prices don’t go up. We don’t have elite capture. How do we structure a degrowth economy in a way that allows for everyone to have this good life?

[00:27:23] Schneider: First, I would say that a degrowth transition is necessarily a post-capitalist transition.

[00:27:28] Grumbine: Yes.

[00:27:29] Schneider: It’s really this framework of ecosocialism that fits perfectly here. And then degrowth is a way to look at moving towards that, towards ecosocialism. So part of what’s inherent in the policies that we’re arguing for in this paper is a broad shifting of the power base and a strengthening of democratic structures really.

But some of the key policies here are the building out of universal basic services so that people have non-commodified access to strategies to meet their basic needs. This is quite important, and the Job Guarantee is a natural complement here as well, because there’s often the critique if you have a degrowth transition, you’re not going to get union support for reducing the size of the economy.

People need jobs. If we have a Job Guarantee and we structure this in line with the degrowth transition so that you’re also over time reducing the working week as, over time, less is produced in total. Then you still have access to wage labor while at the same time wage labor becomes progressively less necessary because you’re de-commodifying key parts of the economy.

[00:28:40] Olk: One way to really explain the basic mechanism is that we would be wise to acknowledge certain limits to the resources that we can use and to the time that we have to transition. And Steve, if I may suggest, I think we’re quite some way off until we’ve reached some kind of steady state because unfortunately the ecological situation we’re in is not going to make for any steady state anytime soon.

I think we’re looking at a long and turbulent ecological situation and our goal or our task is to make sure that everyone has what they need to live through this era of ecological turbulence that we’re inevitably facing. So, really, I think the key problem is how can we allocate the limited resources and time and labor that we have to our priorities. And universal public services really are the best way to do that.

And there are so many studies that show that public transport, public housing, public health and education systems make so much more efficient use of energy and resources than private commodity-based systems. So they’re just an excellent way to make sure that everyone has access to what they need for the good life while reducing our resource throughput. And then just to add, the Job Guarantee on the one hand is a very efficient and easy way to mobilize labor for those purposes that we democratically decide should be priorities while also abolishing the artificial scarcity of jobs and the threat of the sack as a disciplining factor.

But shifting all those resources to our priorities will involve keeping those who usually make investment decisions from using them up, frankly, for bullshit. We can’t really afford to build more highways or airports or luxury housing or whatnot in the middle of this ecological crisis. We should make sure that we can mobilize the resources to our priorities.

And in addition to the policies that Colleen already mentioned. In the paper we propose a range of tools to do that, and one of course is taxation. But there are others, including credit regulation, for instance. We can limit the money that private capitalists can access from banks and other financial institutions so that they basically don’t have the capacity to buy up and use up the resources that we might need to roll out universal public services.

[00:31:21] Schneider: And I would add here, degrowth, I think people aren’t so familiar with it, often just think of it as across the board, less of everything, whereas really it’s more of what’s genuinely socially necessary, more systems of care and education, and not just more, but also different, as Chris made the point about universal public services being clearly more resource efficient and energy efficient.

So it’s more of certain sectors and then less of socially and environmentally harmful sectors. And again, to the point Chris made, in aggregate, the total resource and energy use of economies in the global north needs to come down and it needs to come down quite some bit. So again, we are a ways away from operating at a level of a steady state economy that is within ecological limits.

[00:32:16] Grumbine: One of the hardest things that I had to get through, and I think this is worth discussing as part of this conversation. When we talk about Medicare for All in the United States, Medicare for All, quite frankly, is a garbage solution but it’s better than what we have. And Medicare for all eliminates jobs meant to stop you from getting health care.

And then all the media and the advertising with these insurance and pharmaceutical companies. A lot of that money is calculated in GDP. And so eliminating these things with degrowth, that program would get rid of existing jobs. When you think about degrowth and you start providing public service, there’s no need for all this advertising dollars and benefit denial specialists.

So this is a deflationary event. So when you think about what would happen on a global scale, it’s easy to see how degrowth could be done with non-essentials in that way. I’m curious as to your thoughts on that.

[00:33:28] Olk: Yeah, Steve, I think I really like how you framed this as a deflationary aspect and an inflationary, or potentially deflationary and potentially inflationary aspect to those policies. And the challenge really is to balance those two to achieve macroeconomic stability throughout the transition. And I think the key to that is democratic management and planning of some kind.

But as you said, we can get rid of a whole bunch of stuff and that will greatly improve a lot of people’s lives. On the other hand, it’s not like we’re going to run out of useful tasks that we need to take on, but a lot of those aren’t done, or a lot of them are actually done, but not paid, or at least not paid adequately, including most of the care work that’s being done.

So we could start paying for a lot of jobs. Basically, we could organize a lot of healing on the part of the natural world that we’ve destroyed, and that will be a big part of what we need to do in the future. And that will give us potentially great and very fulfilling jobs. But at the same time, we can get rid of a lot of bullshit jobs, especially in economies like the US or Germany or Austria, probably wherever you as a listener are right now.

[00:34:48] Schneider: And in general, these shifts in the labor market that we’re talking about are shifts towards work that is more labor intensive, and less energy and resource intensive. This is also part of what we discuss in the paper when we talk about a job guarantee and then beyond that degrowth job guarantee. It’s really this discussion we’ve been having these last minutes around prioritizing types of work that are community care based, that are ecological restoration. That are really necessary and that are more labor intensive, that are actually, really in this way, a nice fit for a job guarantee program.

[00:35:24] Grumbine: People are less afraid of cataclysmic climate crisis than they are of losing some of these non-essentials, and losing their place in society. They’ve worked so hard. They’ve gone to school. They’ve achieved certain things in life. They assume that things will be taken from them. And one of the things that I enjoy about the job guarantee, Fadhel [Kaboub] calls it a layer cake. The layer cake of solving some of these problems is the ‘just transition.’

And people that would be moved out of socially non-beneficial work – work that is causing the crisis – into socially beneficial work. It appears that that is another opportunity.

[00:36:15] Olk: Yeah. I just wanted to add on what you said. People are damn right to be afraid and distrustful. A lot has been taken from them and they have generally been lied to a lot. So, I think we shouldn’t underestimate the challenge of gaining people’s trust and organizing people around this.

And I think we should be very careful also not to fall into a kind of, perhaps, technocratic optimism that simply… ‘we have now this great policy toolbox, and if we somehow magically get power, we could do it.’

But we’ve talked about this earlier. It’s really just a tool for organizing and then will come the big challenge of gaining people’s trust, and actually doing this. And I think, thinking about a job guarantee, really, one of the most interesting aspects is thinking about how to organize it locally and democratically. So people can make sure that they don’t do bullshit jobs, and can decide themselves what kind of jobs should be prioritized and should be rewarded and all of that.

[00:37:19] Schneider: Absolutely. I’m really glad you bring this in Chris. What we’re doing in this paper is really talking about national macroeconomic policy, but so much of what is core to degrowth is also this local element. And I think the job guarantee bridges this really well.

And that it being something that is locally administered, and it’s for the people that are part of the program to decide what work is valuable and what they’re capable of doing. And this element of autonomy in your day to day life is so crucial to not feeling like you’re doing bullshit work and that what you’re doing matters and that you’re part of a broader social community, and this is really quite important.

[00:38:00] Grumbine: I call the job guarantee a ‘democracy enhancer’ because I envision people discussing what they are going to prioritize as guaranteed jobs. What do they want to see happen in the local community? It becomes an issue of participation. You’re actually contributing to having that democratic control that you talked about.

And one of the things that you brought up that I think it’s really important, people are distrustful because they have had their trust abused. They’ve been abused by systems, by lies, by propaganda. We’ve manufactured consent on so many things that if you think about it, you would never consent to.

And as people get radicalized, understanding the monetary system, it’s going to take a lot to allow them to have faith that, in fact, things are going to happen well for them. That they don’t have to hoard everything because they’re afraid someone’s going to take something from them.

[00:39:02] Olk: Yeah

[00:39:03] Grumbine: Your thoughts?

[00:39:05] Olk: I wanted to point out the beauty in what we actually can do, because we can engage in a lot of small struggles that could be subsumed on a broader umbrella of MMT informed degrowth or eco-socialism or whatever you want to call it.

If the rise of fascism, historically, has always occurred in times when people were basically left alone and the state was unwilling to organize the economy around what was needed at that time, then there’s thousands of small ways in which to struggle for policies that would provide that.

You can struggle for, be it the socialization of housing in one context, or be it a locally administered job guarantee in another context. And each of these small steps would be feasible, they would together contribute to a revolutionary change. And this is the concept of non-reformist reforms. So, I think in the end, it’s a thousand little struggles that might well lead to some kind of revolution.

[00:40:14] Schneider: And these are all happening. Here in Berlin there was a referendum for the socialization of private housing in Berlin. And a small town just outside of Vienna, there was a job guarantee running until very recently. Part of what both MMT and degrowth do, is to open up our imagination, our political imagination, to open up our ideas of what is possible, of what our world can be like, and I think that’s a really powerful thing.

[00:40:45] Grumbine: In the US the Democratic Party fought successfully in federal court that they don’t have to run a primary and respect the results of a primary. And there is no such thing as a ‘Democrat’ because they’re a private corporation. We live in a duopoly and there’s two parties that are both private companies.

So the concept of direct democracy or allowing people to really have a say, is undermined in the US. One of the challenging things is staring that in the eye and not pretending that it wasn’t real, that it didn’t really happen, and addressing it and fixing it so that you can have the impact that you’re talking about.

[00:41:27] Olk: Yeah, and if you think about why we as a democratic sovereign tolerate this, then ultimately it often boils down simply to the idea that, ‘well, we might not like the private investor class, but in the end, they’re the only ones who can organize investment.’ And this is exactly where we come in and say, ‘actually, no, we don’t have to tolerate this outsized power of financial capitalists, we can simply organize it on our own.’ And I think it’s quite powerful.

[00:41:59] Grumbine: I love that. I really do. Colleen, what are your thoughts?

[00:42:03] Schneider: I think this is one of the most powerful insights that comes from MMT. This understanding that the monetary system is the public good, and that therefore there’s, exactly as Chris said, we’re not beholden to the financial class to be so gracious as to finance the necessary climate transition.

Or it’s not that we have to make investments attractive to private finance. That’s absolutely not an approach that we need to take. And MMT makes that very clear.

[00:42:34] Grumbine: I think that’s a very powerful statement too. Beardsley Ruml in 1946 said in a paper, taxes for revenue are obsolete. 1946 we knew these things, but here we are in the year 2023 and we’re staring down all these horrible situations, but we do have tools to fix it.

We have the capacity to alter the way the world goes.

Your last thoughts Christopher… and we’ll end with Colleen.

[00:43:13] Olk: My last thought… I think if I ask readers to just take one little mantra away from this conversation, it would probably be something that Colleen and I talked about a lot recently. Which is, why do we think that we can do with nature, with the living world, as we please, but the economy is subject to unchanging laws and we can’t change the rules of how the economy works.

Whereas in fact, it’s the exact opposite. We are part of the living world and we can’t change that. I guess we shouldn’t, but the economy is something that we constantly reinvent and we could try something different. There’s no need to be afraid of that.

[00:43:57] Grumbine: Very good, Colleen…

[00:43:59] Schneider: That actually, very much like what Chris just said, that it reminds me of one of the points that I took away from David Graeber and David Wengro’s book, The Dawn of Everything, which is this playfulness that we’ve had and how we relate to one another, how we create our societies, how we create our economies.

And I think we’ve come to a place now where capitalism is fully hegemonic, growthism is fully hegemonic, and it’s really narrowed our view of what we think is possible. To where we come to where, ‘okay, austerity is somehow a logical and necessary reaction’, which is a crazy place to be. So, to come back to this place of playfulness and keep that spirit in our approach and on whatever scale that is. I think it’s really valid and worthwhile to work, on a very local level for the changes that you can.

The idea that the economy and the way we relate to each other is something that we create. And there’s so much openness and playfulness and what that can be.

[00:44:55] Grumbine: Very positive, uplifting way of viewing the future.

I interviewed Pavlina Tcherneva, and she said, “MMT is hope.” To her, that’s what she sees. MMT is hope. And the use of public money and the public space, the opportunity here to not just hope and talk about it, but to realize what you can do. I think it’s just really powerful.

And you did great work with this paper. It really does fill the soul with hope. Let’s start with you Christopher, where can we find more of your work?

[00:45:33] Olk: Ooh, I think you probably have to wait a few years til you can read my dissertation, that might, hopefully, turn out to be a book. You can follow me on Twitter or Bluesky, if you like. And then maybe watch out for the usual suspects, if they let me write there, I’ll write there.

[00:45:54] Grumbine: Alright. Colleen, how about you?

[00:45:57] Schneider: Chris and I are both relatively young in our academic careers, but I think we both have quite some interesting things in the works, both together and on our own. Someone wants to follow my general musings, I guess Twitter @ ColleenFights is one place to do that. And I’ll always link to any writings or things like that there.

[00:46:15] Grumbine: Fantastic. Alright. This was a great conversation. I learned so much. I enjoy just hearing the different ways of saying things, and I really appreciate you two bringing in your sensibilities. And it’s quite clear, this isn’t just a job. You guys really believe in this, it’s in your core, it’s in your soul. And I really appreciate that.

That’s the kind of thing to me, that builds trust. And that’s how people start saying, ‘maybe what they’re saying is real, maybe there is something to this, let me look into it.’

So thank you so much. This is Steve Grumbine. I am the host of Macro N Cheese. We are a nonprofit under the name Real Progressives Incorporated.

Please, by all means, if you can contribute, we can be found on patreon.com/realprogressives. You can also go to our website, real progressives.org, go to the ‘donate’ link and please donate. My name’s Steve Grumbine and my guests Chris Olk and Colleen Schneider. Macro N Cheese, we are out of here.

[00:47:25] End Credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.