Taxes don’t dismantle the core ideology of the monetary subject, which dictates all facets of labor and livelihood—only MMT can solve a complete transformation.

In this article, we build on the work of Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire to develop a relational understanding of dehumanization and humanization. Mindful that political projects can become oppressive when they impose a definition of the human, Fanon and Freire conceptualize humanization as that which occurs when people reject dehumanizing practices that deny their agency, begin to grasp their world-in-common, and emerge as historical agents who remake it. In such situations, people re-organize their activities, re-institute social life, and seek to realize their definition of the human. Scholars have called this approach a “critical normative” vision of (de)humanization.

We advance this critical normative vision by identifying the dehumanizing liberal monetary ontology that remains unquestioned in Fanon and Freire. To this end, we revisit John Locke’s writings in which he imagines the liberal subject as what we call a “monetary individual”: someone who assents to money use as a means to individual enrichment and just inequality. Locke also racially constitutes those who are not “proper” monetary subjects: indigenous populations who, Locke claims, had not invented any form of economic cooperation, had not assented to money as he imagines it, and remained in a state of savagery. The figure of the monetary individual, we argue, is at the core of the racial constitution of society to this day. Finally, we propose a humanizing monetary ontology informed by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which emphasizes money’s capacity to connect and include people in productive activities and enable heterogeneous forms of belonging. We show that an MMT-informed ontology can undermine the liberal monetary ontology and inform an open-ended and inclusive way of practicing society enabled by the public institution money. An MMT-informed monetary ontology reconstitutes subjects and opens up new possibilities to rethink what it means to organize people’s activities, institute social life, and realize people’s definition of the human. But first, we turn to Valayden and Feinig: Humanization as Money 147 Fanon and Freire, who see humanization as that which occurs when the dehumanized begin to grasp their world-in-common and emerge as historical agents who remake it.