Reflecting on Ever Given, the cargo ship stuck for six days in the Suez Canal in 2021, Young discusses the call to open a single cargo container as an Afrofuturist manifestation that moves beyond the logics of individual capitalism.

We owe others our language, our history, our art, our survival, our neighborhood, our relationships, … our ability to defy social conventions as well as support these conventions. All of this we learn from others. None of us is alone; each of us is dependent on others.

–Toni Morrison

The challenge was...

Religious reformers like Martin Luther laid the groundwork for the later emergence of Liberal political economy by purging late-medieval conceptions of the monetary instrument as a potentially boundless public utility from the collective imagination.

These 9 theses raise questions about what it means to use the signifier “capitalism” to name the economic system money conditions. When we label the totality money mediates “capitalism,” we obscure money’s status as a public utility, make its capacities to serve communal and environmental wellbeing imperceptible. 

MMT and Marxism share histories and methods but diverge at the level of ontology. Critical humanists must reckon with this cleavage in order to help forge a more just and prosperous future.