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Thanks to everyone who read & responded thoughtfully to this. It's a (very rough & condensed) summary of a chapter in a book I'm working on, so it leaves out a lot. But I'll try to address the extant responses here. https://twitter.com/pathtopraxis/status/1290693947455610880
First, it should be obvious that a critical analysis of the state does not rule out organizing and mobilizing within it. Too many on the left see a critique of statist assumptions and, like a reflex, assume it entails a renunciation of all involvement with the state.
Of course it doesn't. But it does recommend a type of organizing that would respect the location of each country, or even each bloc, within the international economic and political hierarchy, instead of fetishizing the nation state as the alpha and omega of democracy.
The idea that globalization is the source of our ills, but we can look to the state as the savior of democracy, is one of the most dangerous illusions of the current moment, in which geopolitical tensions -- fueled by anemic, zero-sum capitalism -- grow hotter by the day.
The nation state is not a "counter-power" to capitalism; it is structured by capitalism, and its languages & strategies of governance reflect this. It is no accident that chartalism is getting popular again in a period of military escalation ‒ just as it did in Knapp’s time.
The far right is certainly aware of this. They know they can easily defeat the left politically if we’re dumb enough to fight them on nationalist terrain, their home turf, in a period of looming great power conflict and a disintegrating global economy. That’s a losing bet.
This is also why they are coming around to the usefulness of MMT for rightwing politics -- in the U.S., Trumpists see great potential in it to "bring the jobs back" by merging corporate nationalism with libertarian economics. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-economist-who-believes-the-government-should-just-print-more-money
This larger geopolitical and world-economic context, and its pressure upon domestic politics, has to be taken into account when considering the political valences of MMT. But (she can correct me if I'm wrong) e.g., in @StephanieKelton's new book one finds barely a word about it.
The goal in that book, as in other primers on MMT, is a politically neutral, equilibrium state of full employment and price stability, i.e. the traditional goals of Keynesianism as a science of governance.
In its very concepts, this prioritizes national economic and political equilibrium - a chimera in any case - over transnational structures, like world money or global productivity, which define its limits, and so are analytically prior to it.
But there are some who, directly contradicting the MMT mainstream, see in MMT not a traditional Keynesian recipe, but more of an ontological argument about state money as the motive force of history. this is a much more interesting take.
A couple of people who responded take MMT as a key for seeing universal history as the history of money, as the ongoing, collective regulation of money as a juridical construct, mainly through credit & debit accounts designated by political authority.
This extends to the scale of empires. Compelling other polities to use your currency, to value their assets in it, is ‒ and, in this view, always has been ‒ the central pillar of imperial power. Empire becomes the master term, and organizing force, of history.
It is of course true that for millennia imperial powers have used sophisticated accounting & legal techniques to regulate their currency and so exert political control through it. But it doesn't follow that this is the best way to grasp the most important features of modernity.
The strength of the approach is supposed to be that it avoids a “fall” story about capitalism, in which, for some reason, it is thought that analyzing capital means seeing pre-capitalist life as some paradisical whole that was lost. It doesn't.
But it does mean taking the cyclical dynamics of modernity seriously. Why has this become a compelling way to think about history at this historical moment? Why are chartalist ideas ascending again after a period of dormancy, just as market liberalism did during neoliberalism?
And why are most countries now generally swinging toward economic nationalism and hostility after a fairly long period of economic openness and internationalism? What explains this universal oscillation?
Part of the answer is that we really do live in a totalizing, contradictory global system called capitalism, in which the dominant ideology of governance swings back and forth between state-centric and market-centric forms. This is something qualitatively different from the past.
And so I would argue that a philosophy of history based on state money can't adequately account for these dynamics, because instead of historicizing them, it simply says "this is the true view of history" by projecting current trends across all time and space.
Lastly, capitalism does not come apart peacefully. The last time it did led to 30 years of global war. Now, in a period in which the world is fragmenting into rival economic blocs, and war is again in the air, doubling down on the national principle seems a very bad idea.
If Walter Benjamin was right that the revolution will not be an acceleration of history, but more like pulling the emergency brake on a runaway locomotive, left politics should be pushing against the current trend of fragmentation & breakdown as much as possible.
