Only MMT reverses the logic of the monetary individual.

Institutionalist approaches to money have long undermined Lockean certainties. Seeing money as an institution means challenging Locke’s narrative about monetary individuals who tacitly consent to money and inequality, accept the justice of money’s verdict, and understand themselves as distinct from people they think exist “without” money. In recent years, MMT has offered critical elements for undermining the Lockean ontology in the scholarly and the broader public sphere, in the United States and beyond.

MMT presents a direct ontological challenge to monetary individualism. It begins with the relation between a governing center and its population, between money issuer and money users, not with monetary individuals who tacitly agree to using money in exchange. MMT argues that public authorities develop money to mobilize resources (for instance, to equip armed forces, or to build roads and schools). They make their money acceptable by imposing obligations on money users: they levy taxes and fines, forcing a population to acquire the currency needed to discharge them. Because of the widespread demand for money, the currency begins to circulate among the population.

If money is a governance institution, it is no longer possible to imagine society as the sum of individual decisions, the result of a contract, or a spontaneous development. MMT undermines Locke’s foundational idea that individuals’ tacit consent creates money. If money is a “governance project,” so is society as a whole, and governance is prior to productive activities.32 If money creation is a political process, there is nothing inherently just about money’s verdict. The legal historian Christine Desan proposes to call the always-changing rules and institutions that govern money creation “monetary design.”33 Any society needs to decide who can issue money to whom and according to what rules. For instance, public authorities have issued currency against gold or silver, treasuries have issued cash directly to suppliers, and today’s legislatures allow banks to create money. These institutional choices shape the distribution of power and wealth: Whoever gets to issue money, and whoever is in a privileged position to obtain it, is also in a privileged position to decide what gets produced, and under what conditions. Institutionalist perspectives challenge monetary individualism’s tenet that whatever money one has is just. Money’s verdict, instead of timeless and unchallengeable, becomes visible as a political decision. The plausibility of Lockean monetary individualism depends on erasing the political character of monetary design and laying it bare undermines Lockean assumptions.

The choices inherent in today’s money best illustrate the non-neutrality of monetary design. As part of today’s monetary design, most money issuers across the world refuse to issue money to employ those people who find themselves in a position of forced idleness. Seeing this refusal as “natural” is the effect of naturalizing current monetary design: for money issuers, whether to mobilize “resources,” including idled workers, is a political choice. If they decide to not mobilize them, it is as much a political decision as the opposite.34 From an institutionalist perspective, money’s verdict is a political decision, and it no longer makes sense to celebrate inequality. And if one wishes to do so, one must show one’s cards: people cannot hide behind the so-called obviousness of just arrangements provided by money’s verdict. Inequality, exclusion, impoverishment, and forced idleness are not the outcome of a system that is beyond reach; they become visible as political choices. MMT’s signature policy proposal, the Job Guarantee, would offer legally guaranteed, publicly funded, paid employment with benefits to every person, whatever their skill set. Instead of forcing them into idleness, the money issuer would allow them to contribute to their community, whoever and wherever they are.35

Because MMT offers a different form of monetary belonging, grounded in institutional understanding, social categories no longer need to be anchored in monetary racism. In an MMT ontology, people are not part of groups that come into existence because they accept money’s verdict and invent a fictitious pre-monetary stage for others. Instead, in this ontology, they relate to money-issuing authorities whom they know hold people together, connect their activities, and mobilize their resources.

Monetary belonging grounded in institutional understanding can replace monetary individualism and its corollary, monetary racism. If today, the money issuer is constituted through, and constitutes, monetary individuals, in an MMT future, monetary publics could constitute the issuer. Members of such publics could define what it means to be human-in-society in new and more open-ended ways. To design money democratically is to open up the question of how people organize and coordinate their lives-in-common, that is, what kinds of value they assign to this or that activity, what counts as productive, whom to collaborate with on what tasks, what places and spaces should be assembled, and so on. Monetary design opens up a sustained engagement with what gives life stability, sustenance, and sustainability. To design money democratically is the quintessential meaning-making and organizing activity of human beings living together in-the-world.