Those reading the "Marxism vs. MMT" state theory threads should study the Uni proposal to really understand the MMT intervention here. 1/
Briefly, the Uni is a proposal for universities to self finance as necessary during the COVID crisis by issuing credits called Unis, which the universities would accept as payment for tuitions, rents, etc., thus giving the Uni a degree of money-ness within its "local" sphere. 2/
The Uni is a complementary currency, BOTH in the sense that it's used alongside US dollars, and because the Federal Reserve could formally accommodate the Uni by offering 1:1 swaps between Unis and USD, in line with its recent experimentation accepting municipal bonds for USD. 3/
But what does this say about MMT and state theory?
Contrary to the common characterization of MMT's insights about money as only relevant to "currency issuing governments", the Uni demonstrates that MMT does not trace money solely to the modern nation-state. It goes deeper. 4/
Contrary to the common characterization of MMT's insights about money as only relevant to "currency issuing governments", the Uni demonstrates that MMT does not trace money solely to the modern nation-state. It goes deeper. 4/
In the case of the Uni, the ability to issue money comes from the university's location within a broader economic infrastructure, in which every site of employment and production is indirectly implication in the reproduction of every other site. 5/
If the Fed were to accommodate Unis the way that it accommodates municipal bonds, this would very clearly not be funding universities by siphoning money from somewhere else.
The logic actually goes the other direction. If universities can self finance, why not hospitals? 6/
The logic actually goes the other direction. If universities can self finance, why not hospitals? 6/
And this is where the MMT analysis outstrips the reified Westphalian nation-state. Any entity, at any nodal location within the global economic infrastructure that is deprived of the liquidity it needs to provision itself could issue its own credit and demand recognition. 7/
As @NathanTankus has written, the Fed COULD give provisioning authorities around the world, especially in postcolonial contexts, access to dollar swap lines via the IMF to meet their dollar-denominated obligations. nathantankus.substack.com/p/listen-fed-t… 8/
All this is to say that although the nation-state does directly provision a lot of money, it is not where money's political answerability begins and ends, as Westphalian sovereignty would imply. Money is a creature of law, but law is a creature of interdependence. #UnisForAll
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