MMT practices kill socialist momentum, can’t solve the second advantage

Rather than printing money and bureaucratically managing economic demand, socialists should be calling for economic planning. But you cannot plan what you do not control. And you cannot control what you do not own.

MMT, however, avoids this key question of economic ownership. In fact, it largely avoids the question of capitalist production and the economic laws that govern this altogether. After all, by its own admission, it is not so much an analysis of the capitalist system, but a description of the relationship between government spending, taxes, and the money supply.

In glossing over these questions, however, MMT fails to recognise the fundamental realities of our economy: that it is not just numbers on a screen or equations on a chalkboard, but living flesh and blood, with women and men people trying to live their lives and put food on the table.

Indeed, like Keynesianism, MMT’s economic analysis seems completely devoid of the issue of class and the fact that we live in a class society, composed of antagonist economic interests: those of the exploiters, and those of the exploited.

For example, when MMT talks about the state, what kind of state is being referred to? As Marx noted in the Communist Manifesto, under capitalism, “the executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”.

If we want a government that will run the economy in the interests of ordinary people, then we need a workers’ state. But where in MMT is the role of the organised working class in running and managing society?

Lenin once remarked that capitalism, far from being a democracy, represented the ‘dictatorship of the banks’. But instead of overthrowing this dictatorship, MMT’s advocates suggest replacing it with another: the dictatorship of one bank – the central bank.

In this future vision of the MMTers, who would be in charge of this omnipotent central bank – the working class or the capitalist class? Similarly with the big monopolies that dominate the economy under capitalism. Are these to remain in private hands, producing for profit?

A national bank, directing society’s resources around the economy, would certainly be a vital element of a socialist plan of production. But in this setup, such a bank would have to be under the control of the working class. Is this what MMT’s supporters envision?

 that their theory “gives us the power to imagine truly transformational politics”. But, at the end of the day, they do not propose fundamentally challenging the power of the capitalist class, nor altering the current economic relations and the failed dynamics that flow from these. Private property, for them, remains inviolable and sacrosanct. The anarchy of the market is untouched.

Rather than “the working classes seizing the means of production,” prominent MMT theorist Bill Mitchell asserts, “it’s the working classes seizing the means of production of money” (his emphasis). Richard Murphy goes further,  of MMT that its supporters have “no plans to sweep the private sector aside”.

Like their Keynesian predecessors, then, MMTers’ strategy is one that saves and patches up the capitalist system, rather than overthrowing it.