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Since money is a veil that hides the urge to truck and barter, removing it would not affect production except for some efficiency costs due to the “double coincidence of wants” problem.  Therefore, money is a neutral veil that only obscures the market relationships behind it.  Economists thus ought to conduct a “real”, as opposed to “monetary,” analysis.

What is important for the paper is that the above analysis shows how intrinsically connected are the ideas of barter, money neutrality, “real” economic analysis, “exogenous money,” inflation, money scarcity, and “loanable funds theory.”  These theoretical tools then allow the orthodox economists to conduct “correct” monetary and fiscal policies.  To recapitulate, monetary policy determines price levels while fiscal policy negatively affects private investment.  Hence, the solution is to target a stable money supply and to run balanced government budget as long as possible.  It is therefore that the myth of barter is crucial in the orthodox theorizing. 

First, these research shows that money existed prior to market.  

Second, the nature of money is a credit-debt relationship that can only be understood in institutional and social contexts.

The liability of the central authority becomes the standard unit of account because the central authority has the sufficient power to impose liabilities on its population in the forms of fines and taxes.  This is the essence of Chartalism, “Modern Money,” “Tax-Driven Money,” and “Money as a Creature of the State” (Lerner 1947, Knapp 1973, Keynes 1930, Goodhart 1998, Wray 2001, Forstater 2006).

Third, the role of money was initially an abstract unit of account and means of final payment and later as medium of exchange.  This means that money as unit of account precedes its roles as medium of exchange and store of value. 

Therefore, money originated as a byproduct of social relations based on debt and realized its standard form through the need of the central authority, as opposed to private individuals, to establish a standard unit of account to measure debt obligations or production surplus.  Our analysis also implies a hierarchy of money (debt pyramid), with the liability of the state sits on the top and the liability of individuals sits on the bottom (Bell, 2001).  It should be clear that the entire debt pyramid is effectively money/IOUs.

In short, the endogenous money approach reverses two causalities proposed by orthodoxy: 1) reserve creates deposits; and 2) deposits create loan.  On the contrary, the endogenous money holds that loans create deposits that then create the need for the central bank to accommodate with reserve.  In other words, banks first make loans, and then seek reserves to meet central bank regulations. 

Such debt obligation is ultimately reflected at the central bank’s balance sheet as the private bank enables Henry’s IOUs to be denominated in the state money of account.  Therefore, the central bank is simply a scorekeeper of the economy (Mosler, 2010).  The reserves at the central bank, created by keystrokes, simply serve an accounting purpose for the economy. 

It is important to note that bond sales do not finance government spending.  Reserves and bonds are both the liability of the state.  The only difference is that bonds earn interests while reserves do not.  This also means that the myth of the national debt indebting our future generation should be abolished.  Government liabilities, including reserves and government bonds, are effectively private wealth by accounting identity. 

But the paper argues that before reaching full employment, it is unlikely that deficit spending would necessarily be inflationary.  In essence, involuntary unemployment indicates a permanent loss in production since the federal government could always have hired the unemployed to achieve public purposes.  Hence, the right to employment ought to become a basic human right guaranteed by any sovereign government.

Even with the quantitative easing, the central bank is merely performing asset management as opposed to money creation.  Indeed, the heterodox theory of the nature of money implies that money creation has to be endogenous, which gives support for conducting expansionary fiscal policy till full employment.

Where only transactions for money are recognised as belonging to "the economy", the vast amount of unpaid labour – as conducted for instance in families and local areas – goes uncounted and unvalued. We need to question that familiar categorisation of the economy as a space into which people enter in order to reluctantly undertake unwelcome and unpleasing "work", in return for material rewards which they can use for consuming.

Above all, we need to bring economic vocabulary back into political contention, and to question the very way we think about the economy in the first place. For something new to be imagined, let alone to be born, our current economic "common sense" needs to be challenged root and branch.

How do you think protestors in today’s society can more effectively disrupt urban economies? Harvey: Hurricane Sandy really disrupted the lives of those living in New York City. So, I don’t see why organized social movements couldn’t disrupt life as usual in big cities and therefore cause damage to ruling-class interests. We have seen many historical examples of this. For example, in the 1960s, the disruptions that occurred in many cities in the United States caused massive disruptions to business. The political and business classes were quick to respond because of the level of disruption and destruction. I mention in the book the immigrant workers demonstrations in the spring of 2006. The demonstrations were in response to Congress attempting to criminalize illegal immigrants. Subsequently, people mobilized in places like Los Angeles and Chicago, and significantly disrupted city business.

Participatory budgeting is currently happening in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the Workers Party developed a system through which local populations and assemblies decide what their tax money should be spent on. Thus, they hold popular assemblies, and so forth, which decide how to utilize public funds and services. Again, here’s a democratic reform that initially took place in Porto Alegre, but has since been passed along to European cities.

In Chapter Five, you write, “In the Marxist tradition, urban struggles are often ignored or dismissed as being devoid of revolutionary potential or significance.

I take it as symbolic importance that the first two acts of the Paris Commune were to abolish night work in the bakeries, a labor question, and to impose a moratorium on rent, an urban question.” Can you talk about the privileging of industrial workers in Marxist ideology? 

This idea of a vanguard struggle leading to a new society has been around for some time. However, what’s fascinating is the lack of alternatives to this vision, or at least variants of its intent and purpose. Of course, a lot of this comes from Marx’s Vol. I of Capital — emphasizing the factory worker. This idea that the vanguard workers party is going to take us to the new promise land of anti-capitalist, let’s call it ‘communist’ society has been persistent for over one hundred years. I’ve always felt that this is too limited a conception of who is the proletariat and who’s in the ‘vanguard.’ Also, I’ve always been interested in class-struggle dynamics and their relationships with urban social movements.

When you look at the wide range of urban social movements, you’ll find some are anti-capitalist and others are the opposite. But I would make the same remark about some forms of traditional union organizing. For example, there are some unions who look at organizing as a way to privilege the privileged workers of society. Of course I don’t like this idea. Then, there are others who are creating a more just and equitable world.

That way, in Gramsci’s thinking, they could get a better picture of what the entire working-class looks like, not just those who are organized in factories and so forth. Including people like the unemployed, temporary workers and all of the people you previously mentioned who were not in traditional industrial sector jobs. So, Gramsci proposed that these two kinds of political organizing methods should be intertwined in order to truly represent the proletariat. In essence, my thinking reflects Gramsci’s in this regard. How do we begin to care for all of the working people within a city? Who does this? Traditional unions tend not to do this.

an you talk about some of those cities, such as Al Alto, Bolivia? Also, I was in Madison, Wisconsin in 2011 during the labor protests, and I must say, it’s been interesting and utterly frustrating to experience the internal dynamics of the labor movement, and how it interacts with non- unionized workers and citizens. Unfortunately,  the union movement stifles serious dissent and resistance.

The reason I mentioned Trumka was because I think Trumka and many of those within the organized union movement understand that they can no longer go it alone; they require the help of the entire workforce, unionized or otherwise. This is always the challenge when organizing: How much support do we want from these large entities? And how much of what they’re doing is out of a true sense of solidarity? How much of it is for personal gain? My own experience in Baltimore, surrounding living wage campaigns, mirrors your experience to some extent. The unions were generally hostile to these campaigns and didn’t help, generally speaking. However, we did receive a lot of help from local unions.

There’s a moment in the film that’s somewhat funny: The guys can’t picket anymore because of the Taft-Hartley legislation, so the women take over the picketing because there’s nothing banning them from joining the protests. Then, the men have to take over the household jobs. Interestingly, the men quickly begin to understand why the women were asking for running water, and other things from their employer that would make daily life much easier.

Many academics support open access as the creation of a commons, but it is to be a commons open to private appropriation. The costs of investment in library and other curriculum resources are immediately reduced for new entrants. The playing field, then, is not levelled, but is heavily tilted towards for-profit providers.

But here we confront a paradox. Where the argument about students involves the notion that there should not be a direct public subsidy of a private beneficiary, the situation with regard to the impact agenda is reversed. Here it seems that the Government’s view is that there should not be public funding, unless there is a private beneficiary and that beneficiary should not pay.

It is publicly-funded ‘blue-skies’ research that has generated the innovations that have been most significant for subsequent product developments. It is the public (through funding) which bears the risk while private interests accrue the rewards. However, the effectiveness of blue-skies research is put under pressure by attempts to shorten the product cycle.

Of course, subsumption to the market requires a strong state and this provides a role for knowledge, but it is a knowledge of a very specific kind. Since neo-liberal public reason is based upon a ‘fiction’ of market rationality, various kinds of social actions (especially, collective ones and those based upon weakness of will) appear as distortions that are the obstacle to the rational dispositions that markets facilitate. Thus, the social as ‘residuum’ becomes the object of various kinds of behavioural, ‘anti-social’, sciences (primarily organized through a combination of economics, psychology and cognitive neuro-science), in contrast to the ‘structural’ social sciences.