The logic of the monetary individual is fundamentally incompatible with the logic of MMT.

Monetary individualism and its corollary, monetary racism, are at the core of liberalism’s paradoxical ontology. In this logic, monetary individuals leave a state of nature to form society through a “tacit agreement” to money. They accept money’s verdict—inevitable inequality. Because accepting money’s verdict constitutes them as monetary individuals, they leave untouched the always-political processes of money creation, and oppose anyone who politicizes money creation. If it remains unchallenged, Locke’s monetary theory of racism will continue to inform dehumanization and obscure emancipatory possibilities that are at arm’s reach.

An MMT ontology, in contrast, emphasizes the money issuer’s capacity to connect and include people in productive activities and enables heterogeneous forms of belonging. This ontology makes the liberal monetary ontology visible as dehumanizing and enables people to relate to the money issuer as that which anchors their belonging and connectedness. Therefore, we propose to adapt the Fanonian/Freirian definition of humanization: humanization is that which occurs when people reject the Lockean monetary ontology that fixes their identities and forms of agency, when they begin to understand money as the anchor of collective life and emerge as political beings who participate in the monetary making of society.

A political ontology informed by MMT deconstructs and reconstructs. On the one hand, it enables a critique of the constitutive categories of monetary individualism that perpetuate dehumanization. On the other hand, by emphasizing the deep monetary relationality that underpins the social world, it offers a reconstructive and emancipatory approach to the social that prevents the naturalizing of human relations. The MMT ontology is an ontology of the social without an outside. If there is a money issuer that can encompass everyone, no one can be outside: the MMT ontology emphasizes everyone’s right to be productive, compensated, and valued. If there is a money issuer that can always mobilize and connect people and resources, then surplus people cannot exist. From this new ontological starting point, people can pursue humanizing antiracist and otherwise emancipatory projects that accommodate people-in-situations. It offers the possibility of recognizing and overcoming dehumanizing processes as part of a single, malleable, and adaptable social ontology that connects to an existing but underused institutional framework: the monetary systems that shape planetary life.